Roche commandeered the weapon and crouched behind a stack of crates at the edge of the clearing surrounding the craterous ruin of the elevator, from which thick black smoke gushed.
It took every last ounce of his strength to focus on the situation at hand, and not the death of the woman he loved. He’d have the rest of his life to beat himself up over the role he’d played in her incineration, but he fully intended to make sure that those responsible paid for what they’d done first.
The saboteur had undoubtedly either taken up position outside the elevator to prevent anyone from getting inside or headed down the shaft to join the rest of his crew. Unless there was a way out of the Hangar that no one else knew about, neither option held the slightest chance of survival. This man knew he was going to die, which made him infinitely more dangerous.
Roche had to believe that reinforcements were already on their way, but he simply couldn’t afford to wait. He crept out into the open, sweeping the barrel of the rifle through the smoke. Flames still licked at the scorched maw in the opposite wall, through which he could see little more than a roiling mass of cinders and soot. There was another body to his left, sprawled on the bare concrete in a wash of blood, facing away from him. He was halfway to the elevator when he saw another soldier off to his right. On his chest, a trail of smeared blood leading away from him, as though he had survived the initial attack only long enough to drag himself off to die.
But if there were four dead soldiers, then he must have been wrong about the betrayal. He couldn’t have been, though. He’d been so certain. And the drone hadn’t detected any thermal signatures inside the hangar.
He followed the trail of blood across the ground, past the elevator, toward where the third man—
“Drop your weapon,” a voice said from directly behind him.
—had been lying only a few seconds prior.
The smoldering barrel of a rifle pressed against the base of his skull. If he ducked and turned around in one quick motion, he just might be fast enough to—
Crack.
A blow to the back of his head and Roche collapsed to his knees. Fell forward onto his hands. The world tilted underneath him. He felt the warmth of blood on his neck, soaking into his collar. The pain of a laceration behind his left ear, followed by the pressure of the hot barrel once more.
“It’s too bad you won’t live long enough to see the end of your species,” the man said.
The rattle of automatic gunfire.
Roche ducked and covered his head. Bullets ricocheted from the ground all around him. Blood spattered his hand and cheek.
The man fell on him from behind, driving him to the ground.
Roche rolled out from underneath the man, whose blood was still hot on his face, and looked up—
Kelly stood in the swirling smoke, the rifle he’d bypassed seated against her shoulder. She had dark smudges on her cheeks and the knees of her jeans were torn, but otherwise she looked none the worse for wear.
“I said I was coming with you,” she said.
Roche pushed himself up from the ground, walked unsteadily toward her, and wrapped his arms around her.
“I thought,” he started. “I thought you . . .”
“You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
“But how . . . ?”
“I got out of the helicopter right before it took off. If you’d looked back while you were running into the building, you would have seen me trying to catch up with you. I wasn’t even halfway there when the bomb went off right above my head and the force of the explosion threw me across the tarmac.”
“Kelly, I—”
“Shh.” She placed her hand on the back of his neck and drew him down to her. This time, she kissed him. When she finally withdrew, there was a smile on her face, at least until she realized her hand was covered with blood. “We need to get you to a hospital.”
“There’s no time.” He took her by the hand and pulled her toward the elevator. He wasn’t about to let her out of his sight again, not for anything in the world. “We can’t let them have whatever they think is down there.”
They stood at the edge of the shaft and looked down into the impenetrable darkness and smoke. “How well can you climb?” he asked.
BOOK III
Darkness of slumber and death, forever sinking and sinking.
—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
41
BARNETT
La Venta
Spiderwebs cast bizarre shadows ahead of Barnett into the darkness. They crackled as he pushed through them, falling aside against walls that at first appeared spattered with blood, but upon closer inspection revealed that the mortared stones had once been concealed behind red plaster, which had crumbled to dust upon the bare earth. Chunks of stone had broken loose from the low ceiling and now formed a rugged path deeper into the structure.
A narrow opening led into the adjacent structure, which was roughly the same size, although that was the only thing the two had in common. A section of the roof had collapsed, leaving a massive mound in the center and barely enough space to crawl around it. The walls featured elaborate stone reliefs that appeared to have been carved from single granite slabs. The deities depicted were in the traditional, blocky Mesoamerican style and featured faces that were half-human and half-animal. A man with large square earrings and his tongue sticking out from below a nose like the beak of an eagle, which meshed with the eyes and feathered headdress. Another with only his nose and mouth visible inside of what appeared to be the open mouth of a dragon, from the sides of which feathers flared. There was a woman with a narrow face and a rack of antlers, a man with the head of a jaguar, and another woman with some sort of skeletal construct that appeared almost canine. Barnett glanced at Dr. Clarke’s hybrid map one last time and committed it to memory. While his tablet was nowhere near finished uploading the satellite data and creating its digital elevation model, he didn’t have anything resembling a signal down here to access further updates. At least what he had showed a general pattern of buildings aligned to both sides of a central plaza, with the pyramid lording over them to the north.
“You remember what they used to guard the other sites, right?” Morgan whispered.
Barnett didn’t need the reminder. He wouldn’t soon forget the feathered serpents he and his team had encountered in Antarctica and the others had found within the maze mere miles from where they stood now.
There were three rectangular doorways, only one of which remained passable, if only barely. They climbed over the rubble and entered a plaza framed by ornate pillars. The roof had fallen in sections, and the dirt the Olmec had used to bury the city had formed giant dunes, one of which partially concealed the great stone megalith set right in the very center. Like the heads on the surface, this one was easily nine feet tall, only there was no mistaking the species it was designed to represent. Its facial architecture was deformed, its eyes too large, its mouth and nose too small, and its cranium decidedly conical in shape.
It looked just like Subject Z.
He suddenly realized that this temple had been built to venerate the creature.
It was coming home.
And with the genetic memory passed down through the hive mind of the alien organisms, it probably already knew every inch of this place. Whatever advantage they might have held was now lost. There was something here that it wanted, though, and their only hope was to find it first. And if, as he suspected, what they were looking for was a canister containing a deadly virus, the only thing capable of stopping it, he’d be damned if he wouldn’t seal this place with all of them inside and release it himself.
The ground was paved with rectangular stones as green as emeralds, only dulled by the accumulation of dust and dirt. They formed elaborate patterns and designs, which led them to the end of the colonnade and out from beneath the roof. A narrow corridor remained between the fallen pillars, just large enough to crawl through. Roots dangled from the earthen ceiling. This wasn�
�t a natural space, he knew. Something had invested considerable effort into digging it after the entire city was buried, something that had been sealed in here while it was still alive.
Morgan obviously recognized the same thing. He turned around and scooted backward into the opening, swiveling both his light and his rifle behind him to make sure that nothing was able to sneak up on them.
The tunnel grew steeper, revealing just the hint of the stone blocks that formed a short staircase, at the top of which was a dark orifice positively riddled with spider webs. The ground leveled off in front of what Barnett now recognized as a man-made doorway. The stones that had once sealed it had toppled forward to form a mound of granite and crumbled mortar the consistency of gravel. The stone lining the threshold was the same green serpentine as the walkway. The packed dirt beside it had fallen away to reveal the carvings of skulls, one on top of the other, all of which showed the same facial mutations and cranial deformities as the megalith, only these were significantly more detailed. Almost lifelike. It wasn’t until he touched one that he understood that they were actual skulls set into the stone, discolored by the soil and hardened to the density of rocks by the centuries.
“We’re heading in the wrong direction to reach the pyramid,” Barnett whispered.
“Then where do you think we’re going?” Morgan asked.
Barnett tore straight down through the web and shined his light into the narrow corridor.
“Only one way to find out,” he said and ducked inside.
The passage wasn’t tall enough for him to stand fully upright, so he walked in a crouch, tracing the walls and floor with the beam of his flashlight. The ground was composed of utilitarian granite slabs. They were scored with deep gouges, and a shallow trench had been worn into them from centuries of use. The walls were painted in arches and random patterns with some sort of ocher that turned to powder when he touched it. Blood. The discolorations were from ancient arterial spatters.
The Olmec had barricaded this tunnel before burying their entire civilization. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why.
He’d been so focused on the walls that he nearly stepped right over a ledge in the middle of the walkway. There was a square hole that spanned the width of the passage. He shined his light down at least thirty feet into what almost looked like a well, only the area at the bottom was larger than the shaft. The water was black and reflected his beam, which made it impossible to estimate its depth, or how many skeletons were concealed beneath it. The ends of long bones and ribs protruded from below the surface, which only added to the chill radiating from the depths. There were humans and animals alike, with the antlers of deer and the skulls of crocodiles jumbled with the claws and horns of beasts he didn’t immediately recognize. The mortar and stones lining the chute were positively riddled with scratch marks.
Barnett took a few steps backward so he could get a running start and jumped across the pit. The tunnel ahead of him continued far beyond the reach of his light.
“Jesus,” Morgan whispered, then followed him across the gap.
Barnett tightened his grip on his rifle. It had taken a flamethrower to awaken the feathered serpents from where they were frozen in solid ice beneath the South Pole and an influx of water to revive them inside the tomb in Teotihuacan. In both cases, they’d been coiled inside the carcasses of the animals that had been trapped with them, presumably to serve as a source of food. They needed to steer clear of any remotely intact remains and pray the creatures hadn’t somehow entered a state of cryobiosis out in the open.
By the time they neared the end of the corridor, the temperature had dropped a good twenty degrees. Their footsteps echoed from the vast space ahead of them. Barnett slowed and scrutinized the end of the tunnel, where the walls abruptly gave way to darkness. Only the floor continued onward and formed a ledge barely wide enough to accommodate his feet. The roof overhead was flat and featureless, supported by columns that emerged from the flooded darkness below. A slope of rubble that had once been a staircase extended all the way down to the bottom, at the center of which was a square two-story building made of the green stones. Even from this height, he could tell they’d been carved with elaborate designs, if not what they were.
It was a giant tomb.
“The necropolis,” Barnett whispered.
He scooted along the wall, turned the sharp corner, and headed for what was left of the stairs. Rocks clattered down into the water as he carefully descended, pausing every few vertical feet to inspect his surroundings along the sightline of his rifle. There was no sign that they weren’t alone, let alone that anyone had been here in thousands of years, but he’d learned the hard way not to take anything for granted.
When he reached the bottom, he waited for Morgan to catch up with him before wading out into the frigid water. The stones underfoot were slick with sludge that produced a wretched stench with every step. A greenish film had formed upon the stagnant water, which swirled and eddied around their waists as they approached the structure. The lower tier was framed on all four sides by columns, each of which had been carved to resemble an anthropomorphic figure wearing a loincloth and holding its belly. There was nothing remotely human about their heads, which were entirely animalian and projected from the flat roof, above which they could see the second tier, which featured an ornate cornice, but not a single exterior entrance.
They found a narrow orifice, nearly concealed by the shadows of the columns, which led into a small enclosure. There was a single pillar, right in the middle, striped with rust. The reliefs carved into the stone walls surrounding them depicted the gods they’d encountered upon entering the underground city and told stories they had neither the time nor the patience to decipher. A single opening granted access to the inner sanctum, which was barely large enough to accommodate the staircase that led up one wall, across another, and finally to a square hole in the ceiling above the third.
Barnett ascended from the cold water onto the narrow steps, ducking a little more with each step until he was forced to crawl from the top stair into a short chimney of sorts, which turned out to be little more than a two-foot-tall frame around the orifice. He climbed up into a chamber that smelled like a tomb. In the center was a great stone cube with petrified wooden posts protruding from both sides. The mural on the front of it was nearly identical to the one that led them here in the first place. It showed a man holding a container and a feathered serpent wrapped around him, its reptilian head raised above his, its jaws open as though preparing to strike.
His stomach sank with the realization that it was more than a decoration.
It was a warning.
Barnett leaned back and shined his light straight up. Enormous, teardrop-shaped casings reminiscent of the egg sacs of praying mantises hung from the ceiling. There had to be at least twenty of them, all crammed together like a bunch of balloons. The desiccated appendages of men and animals protruded from the gaps between the fibrous strands. They were the same nests he’d encountered back in Antarctica, after the feathered serpents had overrun FOB Atlantis.
He knew exactly what was inside of them.
And what would happen if he inadvertently woke them up.
42
ANYA
Giza, Egypt
Anya had never been so terrified in her life. Not even being stalked through the Antarctic research station or being hunted by men and creatures alike inside the flooded maze in Teotihuacan could compare, largely because, as horrifying as both experiences had been, she’d always maintained some small amount of control, infinitesimal though it had been. There had always been choices—which way she could turn, where she could hide—none of which applied to her current predicament. She was trapped inside the cargo hold of a panel truck, surrounded by men who would kill her without a second thought, in the belly of the plane thousands of feet above what they believed to be Egypt. And somehow even worse was the fact that Evans and Jade had found comfort in each other’s arms, while she�
�d never felt so alone.
A gust of wind buffeted the plane. Her entire world bucked up and down. She felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. They were definitely descending in altitude. She wanted nothing more than to be on the ground, where at least she had a remote chance of escaping, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that the worst was yet to come.
She sensed movement all around her. Indistinct shadows passed across the canvas siding. A car door opened with a squeal. She heard voices, although not clearly enough to make out their words. More doors opening. One closed with a sound like a gunshot, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming. She glanced back at the others, but could barely see their silhouettes. Jade gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze, but her trembling hand betrayed her. If even the normally unflappable forensic anthropologist was scared—
The truck’s engine roared to life, ready to drive down the ramp the moment they touched down. Exhaust filtered through the gaps around the bed.
Anya felt the pressure change, the rumble of the landing gear lowering. She closed her eyes and prayed for them to survive whatever nightmare awaited them, but realized that it didn’t matter. If they failed to prevent the release of the virus, then they were dead anyway. And not just them, but everyone they’d ever known—their families and friends—would suffer a violent and painful end. Everyone on the planet. It would be an extinction-level event, a cataclysm beyond anything the world had ever known. She’d devoted her life to studying the evolution of the human species—from its auspicious descent from the trees to its first tenuous steps on two legs to entire branches of the hominin tree that withered and died so that a single branch could survive—and its seemingly eternal quest to eradicate itself. There was no way on this planet she was going to let that happen on her watch.
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