Mutation

by Michael McBride

  She shined her light from one side to the other and back again.

  Her heart pounded in her chest.

  This couldn’t be right.

  Evans and Jade caught up with her and added their lights to the search, which only confirmed the grim reality of the situation.

  There was no way out.

  25

  TESS

  The Hangar

  Tess was so frustrated she could have screamed. She’d looked at countless Mesoamerican maps, both pre- and post-Columbian, but couldn’t seem to match the third crop circle, CS3, to any of them. The problem was that unlike the Fertile Crescent, where one civilization had been built on top of another, the indigenous peoples of Mexico had largely colonized different parts of the country, even though few of their cultures had existed at the same time. The Olmec civilization had lasted clear up until the Zapotec appeared in the Valley of Oaxaca to the south, which they’d ultimately ceded to the Mixtec. The Maya had risen from the Yucatán Peninsula around the same time the Teotihuacan had staked their claim to the Valley of Mexico, only to give way to the Toltec. They were eventually succeeded by the Aztec, who, for all their might and ferocity, had been no match for the Spanish.

  One civilization didn’t suddenly become extinct at the same time that another spontaneously materialized from thin air, though. There had to be a certain amount of spillover from one to the next, whether as a result of conquest, integration, or migration, which meant there had to have been a time when the maps of the various cultures overlapped, at least to some degree.

  The Olmec had been the first, so she started there. They’d inhabited the modern-day state of Veracruz, along the Gulf coast, around the same time the Assyrian Empire ruled Mesopotamia. No one knew why their civilization failed, but archeologists speculated that some form of catastrophic natural disaster, be it drought or the fallout from a major volcanic eruption, altered the climate to such an extent that an agricultural society like theirs was no longer able to sustain itself and was forced to either relocate or perish. Some went south and joined the Zapotec, with whom they already had a fruitful trade relationship, while others headed to the east to seed the Maya population or to the west to found the Teotihuacan civilization. It was this last group she followed, since she had to believe that the bull’s-eye representing Saturn on CS3 fell squarely upon the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, where they’d discovered the mummified remains entombed at the center of the maze, just as it had marked the location of the body in nearly identical condition in Mosul on CS1 and CS2. When she placed it on Teotihuacan, however, none of the remaining planets aligned with any ancient sites. The planets stretched across the mountains and desert to reach the Pacific Ocean and a part of the country that didn’t see many permanent settlements until the nineteenth century.

  Either they were wrong about the map coinciding with Mexico or she was missing something crucial.

  The third map was the anomaly among the three, the one with only a single ring surrounding Saturn, while the others featured twin rings to identify Nineveh. It stood to reason that the distinction would serve to differentiate this crop circle from the others, but not so much as to obscure the overall relationship between them. Did that necessarily imply that she needed to look on the other side of the world, though?

  If Roche was right about the prongs on the planets functioning like the hands of a clock, then that was exactly what it meant. The majority of Mexico was within the Central Time Zone, which was eight hours earlier than the Turkish Time Zone, so she was definitely in the right place, she just had to be—

  “Looking at it wrong,” she said out loud.

  She stared at the map on the monitor above her desk and nibbled on her lip as she followed that line of thought. The design that had led them to Göbekli Tepe had started with Saturn to the east and used Earth to indicate the destination to the west. The same held true of the map to Giza, except that it was the second instance of Saturn, Sat2, on CS2 that coincided with the ringed planet of CS1. Now she was dealing with a different variation of the same element, only this time on the opposite side of the world.

  “Opposite, opposite, opposite,” she said as she spun around in her chair.

  Mesoamerica and Mesopotamia weren’t technically on opposite sides of the globe; they were more like a quarter turn apart. They were metaphorical opposites, though. The Old World and the New World. The East and the West. A matter of perspective.

  Tess abruptly stopped spinning, stood, and looked at the map.

  “Could it really be that simple?”

  She grabbed the printout of CS3 and held it up against the resized map of Mexico on the screen. She scooted Saturn until it was directly on top of Teotihuacan, held it there with her finger, and twirled the paper 180 degrees so that Saturn was now to the west and the planets stretched away from it to the east. They weren’t in reverse order, but rather in the order in which they’d be viewed on the opposite side of their orbit, or perhaps merely from the perspective of the other side of the sun. It still wasn’t right, though. Several planets fell upon the Gulf of Mexico. She dialed the design clockwise, slowly, until she was roughly thirty degrees south of horizontal, and suddenly she recognized the pattern.

  Her idea about tracing the migration patterns had been spot-on. The new alignment of planets ran straight from the heart of the Toltec Empire, through the Olmec, and into the Mayan.

  She taped the paper in place, overlaid the maps of all three civilizations on the monitor, and stepped back to appraise her work. They weren’t discrete cultures, but rather one in the process of evolving into three, its progeny sprouting across the countryside like aspen saplings from the colonial roots of a dying parent tree, its centers of influence separated more by distance than by time.

  Neptune corresponded with Tula, the capital of the Toltec Empire after the fall of Teotihuacan, diagonally to the southeast. Jupiter aligned with Hueyatlaco, while Mars matched La Mesa. The moon fell upon the last great Olmec city, Tres Zapotes, and Earth aligned with its seat of power, La Venta, from which people had migrated eastward to Comalcalco and Palenque, respectively, where the Mayan influence became readily apparent.

  She’d done it. She’d cracked the third code.

  Tess brought up the map of the state of Tabasco and pinpointed the location from which Barnett had contacted her. La Venta was just about twenty-five miles to the north-northwest. She compared that route to the lines of magnetic susceptibility she’d downloaded from Kelly’s system and confirmed that it ran straight through the Mexico-Yucatán suture zone. All that was left now was to match the coordinates to the extraneous data points from the ceiling of Subject Z’s cage in Antarctica, which had already given them the constellations Cygnus and Orion at the previous sites.

  The scattering of dots was easy enough to find along the curvature of the Gulf of Mexico. She magnified them until she had a clear image of a total of fifteen stars, fewer than either of the previous constellations. There was no readily identifiable pattern, like she’d seen with the Northern Cross and Orion’s belt, which had practically jumped off the screen and bit her. The stars were clustered to the left side in what almost looked like three distinct downturned arches: one above the other two, which were aligned nose to tail. The dots to the right formed a half-circle, from six to twelve on the face of a clock. Since she didn’t recognize the pattern, she was going to have to backtrack and subtract the smaller stars, which were rarely bright enough to contribute to the formation of the namesake constellation. She adjusted the tolerances until roughly half of the stars disappeared, leaving behind what almost looked like a vertically oriented trapezoid or a—

  “Rhombus,” she whispered. “Oh, no.”

  Tess hurriedly brought up an aerial image of La Venta. The majority of the site was covered with jungle so thick that the camera couldn’t penetrate it. There was a vaguely triangular-shaped clearing to the left with a conical mound overgrown with foliage near its apex. Without being able to visualize
the primitive structures, the blasted image was useless. She closed it and searched until she found a map of the buildings she hadn’t been able to see from the air. Like the constellation, they formed an elongated diamond shape, inside of which were complexes lettered A through H, a necropolis, a central plaza, an acropolis, and the buried pyramid she’d seen in the clearing.

  She quickly compared the layout to the constellation, with its four main and eleven lesser stars, which were named using the Bayer convention, a process by which each was assigned a Greek letter followed by a genitive form of the parent constellation, which, in this case, had been originally named Rhombus upon its discovery in the seventeenth century, before being renamed Reticulum a hundred years later. The brightest star corresponded with alpha, followed by beta, which formed two corners of the trapezoid, but this time it was two of the lesser stars she was looking for, two tiny dots that sat nearly right on top of each other in the night sky and somewhere beneath the jungle on the ground, two stars that actually formed the basis of a binary star system nearly forty light-years away. Together they carried the name Zeta Reticuli, and they were where the alien species known as Grays supposedly originated.

  Tess knew exactly where Subject Z was heading.

  “It’s going home,” she whispered.

  26

  EVANS

  Göbekli Tepe

  “There has to be a way out,” Evans said.

  He rushed past Anya and Jade, weaved through the maze of speleothemic columns, and scoured the rear wall for any sign of an exit. Water had to have been able to find a way in and out of here to create this cavern in the first place. They just had to find the source.

  The footsteps behind them grew louder, the voices more distinct.

  He swept his light across the ceiling. Nothing but stalactites, the shadows from which made the limestone appear to writhe. He was just about to move on to the floor when his beam disappeared into the ceiling. It only lasted a split second, but he’d definitely seen it. Somewhere up there, hidden amid the jagged protrusions, was a way out.

  It took him several seconds to locate the hole. A ring of stalactites had formed around the man-made chute, concealing it from just about every angle. He got as close to it as he could and shined his beam diagonally through a gap between stalactites. It looked almost like a well, with a toe trail leading up into the underground city, far beyond the reach of his light. Air moved through it with a faint whistle that suggested it terminated somewhere near the surface opening. He thought of the pitfall near the first staircase and wondered why the inhabitants would have sunken a hole straight down into this cavern.

  “They’re coming,” Anya whispered.

  “I hear at least three distinct voices,” Jade said. “How many bullets are left in that pistol?”

  Evans didn’t have the slightest idea and couldn’t afford to waste any time checking. He hoped to God they didn’t have to find out.

  The formation of the stalactites meant that some amount of water had been leaking down the chute for millennia, carrying with it the minerals that had accreted to form the earthen spikes, which glistened in his light. He watched a droplet swell from the tip. It shivered momentarily before falling onto a stalagmite formation that looked like a miniature mountain of termite mounds.

  “. . . dort gefangen.”

  They all turned toward the tunnel behind them and the source of the disembodied voice. While still distant, the sound of footsteps had slowed. The men were approaching more cautiously now. They knew there was nowhere left to run.

  The ceiling was easily ten feet high. Maybe if he was somehow able to balance on top of the stalagmites, he’d be able to boost the others up far enough to reach the lowest rungs, but there was no way of knowing how deep the toeholds were. The water that helped form the stalactites had undoubtedly filled them with some amount of flowstone on its way down.

  Something about the toe trail bothered him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  Evans climbed up onto the formation, wrapped his arm around the thickest stalagmite, and leaned around the other side so he could shine his light straight up into the hole. He retraced his mental steps until his conscious mind finally caught up with his unconscious. No one would have built a toe trail where they couldn’t reach it, especially when there was a tunnel leading directly to the destination, one that eliminated the risk of falling and breaking open his skull. The trail had been laid for the people who created the well, which was exactly what it was. Where else could they have gotten potable water when the entire world above them was frozen?

  The presence of a karst formation like this one meant there was an aquifer somewhere beneath their feet, some body of water where the fluid leaching through the limestone accumulated.

  He readjusted his grip on the damp stalagmite and shined his light straight down. The stalagmites had partially grown over the matching hole in the floor, leaving a crescent-shaped opening through which he could see only darkness.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  The voice spoke with a thick German accent and seemed to originate from all around them at once, cruel and taunting.

  “Hurry!” Evans whispered, waving the others toward them.

  He offered his hand to Jade, who climbed past him and onto the other side of the stalagmites. She was practically straddling the hole in the ground when she realized what he wanted her to do. Her eyes widened when she looked up at him.

  “There’s nowhere else to go,” he whispered.

  “How far down . . . ?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  Jade visibly swallowed and slid down the slope of the speleothem. Lowered her rear end to the rock and slid her legs down through the crescent.

  “I’m going to give you to the count of three,” the voice boomed, “and then we’re coming in after you.”

  “Kill your lights,” Evans whispered.

  He switched off his beam and jammed his phone into his pocket. Anya whimpered when she did the same. Her hand was trembling when she gripped his shoulder.

  Jade shined her light down between her knees one final time before killing her light and abandoning them to darkness marred only by the faint golden aura coming from the tunnel.

  “There’s a toe trail,” she whispered. “On the opposite side of the stalagmite.”

  Evans wished he could have gone first to make sure it was safe, but they were out of time and someone needed to cover their escape. Jade was as tough as they came, though, and it still remained to be seen if he could even fit through the opening.

  He heard a scrabbling sound, followed by the tap of Jade’s shoe striking one of the tiny ledges.

  “One!” the man shouted.

  “Go,” Evans whispered.

  He guided Anya over the stalagmites and did his best to help her balance on the damp surface. She clung to his forearm so hard that his fingers started to tingle.

  “They’re too slick,” Jade said. “I can’t get any kind of trac—”

  She gasped and slapped the limestone.

  Evans heard a rush of air, then only silence.

  “Jade?” He scrambled over the rock formation. Slid down to the edge beside Anya. “Jade!”

  A soft splash. Distant.

  If anything had happened to her, he’d never be able to forgive—

  Coughing and sputtering from what sounded like fifty feet down.

  “I’m okay,” she croaked.

  “Two!”

  Evans glanced toward the tunnel leading into the room. The light had brightened and taken on a crimson hue from what he could only assume were the laser sights of the men’s rifles.

  “You can do this, Anya,” he whispered.

  She released his wrist. He felt her inching away from him in the darkness. Scooting out over—

  A squeal and she was gone.

  He held his breath until he heard the splash, then rolled over onto his chest, stuffed the pistol under his
waistband, and squirmed backward through the orifice. It was going to be one hell of a tight squeeze.

  “Three!”

  Evans wiggled his hips. The ledge scraped his pelvis, bit into his stomach. The pistol pressed into the small of his back. He wasn’t going to make it, but maybe there was still a chance he could hold them off. He pushed himself high enough to grab the gun, draw it, and—

  His hips passed through the hole. The limestone lip scraped straight up his belly and chest. It caught his pectoral muscles and felt like it nearly ripped them off, but they bought him just enough time to turn his head and raise his arms—

  A sensation of weightlessness.

  He instinctively braced for impact, but only succeeded in banging his knees against one side of the stone chute and smacking the back of his head against the other.

  The pressure abruptly released and the walls fell away.

  Evans was still taking a deep breath when he hit the aquifer and went under. The frigid water caused every muscle in his body to clench. His heels grazed the slick bottom and swung back over his head. He pushed off and swam in what he hoped was the right direction, the urge to cough more than he could bear. He was already retching when he breached the surface.

  The crackle of automatic gunfire was deafening. Discharge flickered from the tube overhead.

  He half-coughed, half-vomited until he expelled the aspirated fluid and paddled away from the light, which abruptly darkened when the shooting stopped.

  Brass casings tinkled to the limestone, followed by a palpable silence.

  “Ziehe heraus, was von ihnen übrig ist.” The strange acoustics made the man’s voice sound as though it came from miles away. “Sie werden eine visuelle Bestätigung wünschen.”

  Evans treaded water as quietly as he could, every subtle splash amplified tenfold by the acoustics of the cavern into which they’d fallen. A faint current pushed past him beneath the surface, carrying him ever so slowly with it.