Jade scooted around a blind corner and was halfway up a series of stair-like ledges by the time the others caught up. When she reached the top, she peeked out across the rock formation, then slowly climbed out of sight. Evans followed, with Anya right behind him, the desire to feel solid ground beneath her overwhelming. Her arms and legs were trembling so badly that she collapsed onto her chest the moment she was away from the deep crevice.
They were on top of a plateau overlooking a vast expanse of desert spotted with a handful of trees, patches of wild grasses, and, at the very edge of sight, an arrow-straight canal where the underground aquifer had been tapped for irrigation. She had no idea which direction she was facing, let alone what they were supposed to do next. Their only means of transportation was back at Göbekli Tepe, and they’d be visible for miles from every direction walking across the open terrain.
“Over here,” Evans whispered in a tone that made the hairs rise on the backs of her arms.
She crawled away from the precipice and toward a white limestone formation that looked like it was made of chalk. Evans leaned around the side, his attention focused on the valley on the opposite side, beyond which she could see the megalithic ruins of Göbekli Tepe carved from the hillside and the adjacent plateau concealing the subterranean caverns. A narrow dirt road cutting through the desert had served as a landing strip for an olive-green cargo plane. It reminded her of the kind the Army used in Vietnam, with twin propellers set close to the fuselage and a ramp that opened from the rear, under the tail fin. There was a cluster of tan Jeeps behind it, surrounded by a gathering of men dressed in all black.
“What are they doing?” Anya asked.
“Accelerating their timetable,” Evans said. “You think the virus is on that plane?”
“I can’t think of anything else so important they’d need to get it out of here in such a big hurry.”
“You don’t need a plane that size to transport a virus,” Jade said. “They plan on taking everything of value, which means they have no intention of ever coming back.”
“If that plane gets off the ground, we’ll never find it again.”
They all knew exactly what that meant. This was their only chance to prevent the release of the virus.
“There have to be at least a dozen men down there,” Anya said.
“I count thirteen,” Jade said. “Wait . . .”
The men in black parted to make way for someone to descend the ramp from the plane. The person was considerably shorter than all of the others and undeniably female. She wore her long blond hair in a ponytail and a golden mask that glimmered in the sparse sunlight permeating the cloud cover. Even from a distance, the black Celtic cross design was unmistakable. There was no doubt in Anya’s mind that this was the same woman who’d escaped from Teotihuacan with the body that had been entombed at the center of the maze, the mummified remains wearing the mask of the feathered serpent—
She instinctively gasped when another figure started down the ramp.
“It can’t be,” Evans whispered.
It wore a long black cloak that trailed behind it on the ground and a hood that concealed everything but the crocodilian face jutting from the inside. It was so tall it had to duck its head to step out from underneath the plane, where it stood, towering over the assembled men, who gave it a wide berth.
The woman strode into the heart of the gathering. Her body language left no doubt as to who was in charge. She pointed to the Jeeps and made a sweeping gesture toward the hillside. Her voice carried across the plains, but not well enough that Anya could make out her words. The drivers returned to their vehicles, turned around in the open desert, and disappeared beneath a cloud of dust as they headed back toward the ruins, leaving behind a half-dozen men to guard the plane.
“That can’t possibly be the same man from the sarcophagus,” Jade said. “He’d been dead for five thousand years.”
The woman turned in their direction, almost as if she’d heard them, and shielded her eyes from the glare.
Anya ducked behind the rock formation and found her face inches from those of the others.
“You saw the tracks Barnett’s team found in Chile,” Evans whispered. “It can’t be a coincidence that Zeta escaped Antarctica with the mummified body of a giant, only to reappear with a traveling companion whose footprints suggested he had to be nearly seven feet tall.”
“There’s no possible way it survived thousands of years of entombment,” Jade said.
“The feathered serpents sealed inside the maze with it did.”
“That was a dinosaur capable of cryobiosis; we’re talking about a hominin species.”
Anya risked a glance around the side of the rock formation. The woman had turned away, but the giant behind her continued to stare in their direction. Parrot feathers bloomed from inside the hood, to either side of the crocodilian snout. She felt the weight of the man’s stare from behind the hollow reptilian eyes, where before there had been only empty sockets, and sensed a dark sentience that positively terrified her. If ever she’d doubted the willingness of their adversaries to release the virus, its desire to exterminate the human race, she no longer did. This was a being without mercy or conscience, an entity that needed to be more than entombed within a stone sarcophagus. It needed to be wiped from the face of the earth.
She remembered what the creature that had once been Hollis Richards had said to Jade with its dying breath.
You must . . . stop . . . the end . . . of the . . . world.
“We can’t let that plane take off,” Anya said, “or all is lost.”
33
BARNETT
5 miles southeast of La Venta,
Tabasco, Mexico
The old F-150 Ranger bounded down a dirt road that looked like it hadn’t seen use in decades. A stripe of waist-high weeds separated the tire ruts, which were considerably narrower than the vehicle. They frequently vanished altogether where stormwaters had eroded through them, exposing massive stones that made the vehicle rock on its creaky suspension. The strain showed on Morgan’s face as he tried to navigate them without the benefit of power steering, although he wouldn’t have to worry about it for very much longer. They’d torn out a solid chunk of the truck’s undercarriage during the escape from the creatures and watched helplessly as the engine temperature rose and the fuel gauge fell.
They were at the mercy of the jungle, which dictated their course through fallow fields and dry irrigation ditches as they struggled to keep heading north. If they strayed too far from their course, they risked sacrificing whatever lead they’d opened. At a guess, they were maybe ten miles ahead of the army of drones, but with their destination in sight, there was no longer any need for discretion, which meant the creatures would be coming, and they’d be coming fast.
“How many did you see?” Barnett asked.
“Four for sure,” Morgan said. “I hesitate to speculate beyond that. There was a lot of movement in the forest.”
“Same on the other side of the road, so we have to assume we’re dealing with a minimum of eight.”
“Then I guess we’re just going to have to hope the jungle slows them down.”
Barnett said nothing. There was no point. They both knew the odds of surviving a direct confrontation. Their only option was to reach the ancient Olmec site first and find whatever the creature had traveled all this way to get before it did. And considering neither of them had definitively identified Subject Z among the creatures at the homestead, they could only assume that the drones had been deliberately left behind to spring a trap like the one with the monkeys and vultures back in the Amazon Basin, while Subject Z and UNSUB X had pressed onward toward their goal. Surely they were several miles behind by now, too, but neither of the men could afford to take anything for granted.
Something under the hood made a loud clunking sound, followed by a metallic rattle. Faint fingers of smoke reached up from the grille and traced the length of the hood.
T
he surrounding trees drew contrast from the impending dawn, little more than shadows against the transition zone where the stars slowly faded out of being.
Barnett returned his attention to his tablet and studied the map. They were roughly five miles southeast of La Venta, with the Tonalá River basin and a seamless stretch of rainforest standing in their way. There was no way they were getting through there with the truck, even if it did manage to last that long, and the only way around would take them at least ten miles out of their way. They were rapidly approaching the point where they would be forced to make a decision.
He returned the tablet to his backpack and tried to call the Hangar on the sat phone. Again, he was unable to raise anyone on the other end. They were nearly to the southern rim of the Gulf of Mexico, so uplinking with a satellite shouldn’t have been so difficult, assuming that was even the problem.
The rattling sound metamorphosed into a vibration that shook the entire cab. Smoke gushed from beneath the hood.
Barnett glanced at the temperature gauge. The needle was well into the red.
It appeared as though they might not have to make that decision after all.
A loud thud, then the scream of metal tearing through the undercarriage.
The steering wheel locked up. Morgan fought against it, but ultimately failed to keep the truck on the road. Its momentum carried it off into the high weeds and toward a stand of ceibas. The bumper hit the trees going fifteen miles an hour. Their seatbelts bit into their chests and hips. The impact split the trunks horizontally and dropped the upper halves down onto the hood. Cracks spread across the windshield, through which they could see only leaves.
“I guess this is where we get out,” Morgan said.
Barnett unfastened his seatbelt and tried the handle, but the warped door didn’t open. He had to put his shoulder into it several times before it finally swung outward.
He stepped down onto the damp detritus and seated his rifle against his shoulder. Listened for any sign that they weren’t alone, but couldn’t hear a blasted thing over the hissing of fluids under the crumpled hood.
Morgan rounded the back of the truck and walked backward toward him, sighting the field behind them down his barrel.
“We cut through the jungle,” Barnett whispered. “It’s a footrace from here.”
“That’s not very reassuring.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
Barnett led Morgan into the darkness beneath the lower canopy and set the fastest pace he dared. They remained in tight formation as they traversed the dense rainforest, drawing reassurance from the cawing of birds, the chittering of monkeys, and the rustling of lizards scampering through the underbrush. The jungle had no fear of them. It was when those sounds suddenly ceased, they knew, that they would be in serious trouble. That didn’t mean that either of them was going to lower his rifle for a second, though. There were more animals out here that wanted to kill them than not, and they were the only ones standing between Subject Z and whatever awaited them beneath the ruins, something so important that the creature had crossed thousands of miles, and at considerable risk, to find, something related to the impending lunar eclipse and its unknown significance to beings not of this world.
Barnett signaled for Morgan to stop and cover him while he looked to see if Dr. Clarke’s program had updated the satellite imagery of La Venta. When last he’d checked, the subterranean features had been only marginally better defined, with faint structures just beginning to materialize from beneath the trees. If he understood the way the combined GPR and magnetometer imagery worked, those buildings were buried under several feet of soil and thousands of years of tangled root growth. Even if they were able to identify what they were searching for, he had to wonder if they’d be able to reach it without earthmovers and with as little time as they had left before the onslaught commenced.
He was surprised to find considerably more data this time. The rhomboid pattern of the constellation was even clearer, with the peripheral dots representing Zeta Reticuli drawing increased definition from the jungle. There were two buried structures, square in shape and aligned almost like a figure eight made of straight lines and ninety-degree angles. They overlapped just enough to intimate a physical connection between them. Other darkened sections hinted at the presence of subterranean constructs, only hazier and less distinct, which presumably meant they were even deeper underground.
“What do you suppose is in there?” Morgan asked.
Barnett could only shake his head. He speculated it had to be a weapon of some kind, either one capable of destroying the creature, like the virus that had killed its brethren in Mosul, or one designed to eradicate those who stood in its way. Then again, he’d seen the machine that had created Subject Z inside the pyramid in Antarctica and realized there were potentially far worse things than disease waiting for them.
He used the opportunity to try contacting the Hangar again, but there was still no answer. His device was obviously linking up with the satellite just fine. The problem had to be on the other end, although he didn’t know if that made him feel better or worse.
“Still nothing?” Morgan asked.
“We should pick up the pace while we can. We’re going to need all the time we can get.”
Barnett consulted the GPS one final time before returning the tablet to his pack and setting off at a jog. The ruckus of their passage silenced the animals in their direct vicinity, robbing them of their early-warning system. Trees blew past to either side as they weaved between trunks, ducked underneath branches, brushed saplings out of their way, and swatted mosquitoes from their faces.
He’d learned in the military how to set his mind to run like a computer program in the background so his subconscious could work through his situation while ignoring the protests of his tiring body. There was something about Dr. Clarke’s map crying out to be recognized, but every time he came close to identifying it, his mind conjured images of dozens of creatures like Subject Z descending from the trees in a flurry of snapping teeth and slashing claws. They had neither the men nor the firepower to survive a full-frontal assault. They’d barely survived a bunch of monkeys and vultures a fraction of their size.
The rising sun pierced the canopy in slanted columns of red light and he realized, with a start, that this would likely be the last sunrise that either of them saw.
34
TESS
The Hangar
Tess awakened to throbbing in her forehead. She tried to reach for the source of the pain, but couldn’t seem to make her arms move. The muscles in the back of her neck ached from the way her chin rested against her chest. She tasted blood and, for the briefest of seconds, wondered why.
The memories assaulted her. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Only a trickle of blood that dribbled onto her thighs and pattered the floor between her feet.
Maddox.
She remembered the live satellite feed from Göbekli Tepe and the men in black fatigues swarming the ruins where Evans’s team had fallen out of contact. Remembered him cornering her in the stairwell. Trying to escape. Pain in the back of her head as he caught her by the hair, then in the front when he slammed her face into the ground.
Then, only darkness.
She moaned. The noise sounded small and pitiful. Like a wounded animal, which, she supposed, was exactly what she was.
“Tell me about Aldebaran,” a disembodied voice said.
Tess tried to raise her head to see who was talking but couldn’t seem to coax her body into following even that simple command.
A fist knotted in her hair. Jerked her head back. Blood flooded the back of her mouth, her throat, forcing her to sputter.
The warmth of breath on her ear. A voice.
“Aldebaran.”
She gagged and gasped for air.
The hand released her hair and let her head fall.
She coughed the blood onto her lap. Struggled to keep her eyes open. Focused on the floor,
where the Rorschach pattern of blood stood apart from the white tiles like a rosebush in a snowstorm. She needed to concentrate on her situation if she was going to figure out a way to survive it. If she didn’t clear the fog in her head—and in a hurry—this was where she would die.
Maddox walked around in front of her. She watched his shadow pass across the floor, followed by his boots. He planted his feet to either side of the crimson spatter, crouched, and tipped up her chin so she could look directly into his eyes, which were a dramatically different shade than they’d been previously. He’d obviously removed the contacts he used to alter their color, revealing irises an intense shade of blue unlike any she’d seen on another human being.
“I’m going to ask you nicely one last time,” he said. “I suggest you tell me what I want to know or you’ll leave me no choice but to ask in a less-friendly manner.”
While his eyes were unsettling, what she saw behind them terrified her. She broke his stare and tried to gauge her surroundings over his shoulder. Despite her eyes focusing in and out with a will of their own, she could tell she was in the command center. She identified the various locations on the screens right away. The ruins of Göbekli Tepe no longer crawled with men in black fatigues, while another angle showed what looked like a military transport plane shrouded by a cloud of dust. The central column featured aerial views of Giza. The pyramids. The Sphinx. Unrecognizable ruins protruding from the eternal white sand. And, beside it, La Venta, with its buried pyramid, massive stone altars, and the encroaching jungle.
She only recognized one of the men manning the stations beneath the monitors. O’Reilly. The other two wore black fatigues and worked on consoles still spattered with blood from the information specialists whose bodies had been dragged to the side of the bridge, heaped into a pile, and draped with a tarp. A man’s hand poked out from underneath, the outermost fingers amputated at the first knuckle.
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