Mutation

by Michael McBride

  Kelly reached for him. Felt herself slipping. She grabbed onto the cable once more, even tighter this time.

  “I won’t let you fall,” he whispered. “I promise.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Summoned every last ounce of courage. Blew out a long breath. Reached for him once more. Her eyes met his. Focused on nothing else. He clasped his hand around her wrist, while she, in turn, gripped his.

  “One big step is all you need. You’ve got this.”

  She nodded, swung her right leg out over the nothingness, and pushed off from the cable. Her toes grazed the edge and she started to fall. Roche pulled her with such force that they stumbled backward down the hallway. He lost his balance and dragged her down on top of him.

  Their eyes lingered for several seconds before she finally climbed to her feet and unslung the rifle from her back. It was a similar model to the one she’d used in FOB Atlantis, so she was at least familiar with its basic operation. While she didn’t have the skill to use it at long range, up close she could do some serious damage. She just hoped she didn’t run out of ammo since she didn’t have the slightest clue how to do anything more than disengage the safety, pull the charging handle, and squeeze the trigger.

  They advanced, side by side, into the dimly lit hallway. The emergency lights cast an eerie red glow over everything. Roche signaled for her to stay where she was while he quickly confirmed that Barnett’s anteroom and office were empty. They turned the other way and passed the office she shared with Tess. There was a broken chair and what looked like blood on the floor. The monitor behind Tess’s desk displayed an aerial view readily recognizable as Giza, only the pyramids were off-center, near the bottom right, while the focus of the image was a dot labeled Rigel, the foot of Orion the Hunter, which fell squarely upon an amoeboid white shape she interpreted as a low-lying mesa surrounded by miles of open desert.

  The other two monitors showed a map of Göbekli Tepe with the overlay of the constellation Cygnus and what appeared to be ancient ruins just south of the Gulf of Mexico, which was barely visible at the top of the screen. A constellation labeled Reticulum had been placed over the top of the overgrown site.

  “She deciphered the locations from the crop circles,” Kelly whispered.

  “Can you access the GPS log to see if you can locate our field teams?”

  “I’ve never tried, but assuming that function hasn’t been disabled, I should be able to figure it out.”

  Roche stood sentry in the doorway while she accessed her terminal. It took her several minutes to find what she was looking for. Coordinates and times appeared on the screen beside encrypted identification tags. She transferred them to a different monitor with a mapping function, but there wasn’t a single active beacon.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Try running their last known locations.”

  Kelly clicked on each of the data sets individually.

  “Two signals within the ruins in Mexico,” she said. “Although they disappeared about forty-five minutes ago.”

  They had to belong to Barnett and his team, or at least what was left of it. Either they were no longer within broadcast range of the satellite, or their tracking beacons had been disabled.

  “What about the others?” Roche asked.

  The most recent coordinates corresponded with Göbekli Tepe, but the last logged time was within hours of their arrival. Nothing since. Something was definitely wrong. It wasn’t like—

  “Wait,” she said. “I have a single point of geolocation on Jade’s phone. It looks like . . . that can’t be right.”

  Kelly transferred the data to the screen and a dot surrounded by pulsating, concentric rings appeared over the Mediterranean Sea.

  “How did she get all the way out there?” Roche asked.

  “It’s just a blip, little more than a single piece of data, but if you extrapolate a line through the beacon and her last known location, it leads straight to—”

  “Giza,” he finished for her.

  A buzzing sound arose from the elevator shaft, long and sustained.

  “We need to keep moving,” Roche said and started down the hallway.

  Kelly hurried to catch up with him. The open elevator doors behind her made her nervous, especially with that constant grinding noise emanating from it. She turned around every few feet to make sure no one was able to sneak up on them.

  They passed offices that didn’t appear to have been disturbed in the slightest, save for one in which an engineer sat in his desk chair, his head leaned back, a starburst of blood and brain matter on the wall behind him. She had to stifle a whimper at the thought of what would likely have happened to Roche and her had Friden not called them to his lab.

  She prayed that Tess was still alive, wherever she was now.

  Roche cleared the stairwell and guided her down, around the bend, and into the second sublevel. The doors to the Arcade and the Teleportation Room remained open. A quick glance inside confirmed there was no one inside, although judging by the bullet holes and blood spatters on the drone consoles, the pilots hadn’t so much as sensed the danger.

  A shifting light source beckoned them down the hallway toward the command center. A shadow passed across the floor, stretching nearly out into the corridor. There was definitely someone inside.

  Roche pantomimed for her to duck to the side and into the nearest doorway. He shouldered the opposite wall. Lowered to a crouch. Cleared the computer lab through the window before passing low across it. He pressed his back against the wall beside the doorway of the command center.

  Kelly heard a voice in the distance. It utilized the same kind of cadence Roche employed when he was coordinating the footage on the monitors, only she couldn’t quite make out the words. He waved her closer. Her heart thundered in her ears as she sprinted along the near wall and took up position on the opposite side of the doorway. He spoke in a voice so soft she had to read his lips to understand what he was saying.

  “I’m going in. You stay here. Anyone gets past me? You shoot them. No hesitation. If anything happens to me—”

  “It won’t.”

  “Listen to me, Kelly. If anything does, I want you to hide, okay? Somewhere no one can find you.”

  Kelly had no intention of hiding, but she nodded for his benefit.

  He took a sharp breath and went into the command center, low and fast.

  A shout of recognition. The rattle of gunfire. Bullets pounded the wall of the interior corridor.

  Before she even realized what she intended to do, Kelly was running into the room, the rifle bouncing unsteadily against her shoulder. She stepped out onto the bridge and took everything in at a glance.

  A uniformed man was sprawled on his chest in front of her in an expanding puddle of his own blood. There was a pile of what looked like bodies under a tarp to her left. Roche dove behind one of the workstations to her right and popped back up in time to nearly take a fusillade of bullets to the face. They tore through everything on the desktop. The computer monitors, stacks of books, and electrical components. Ricocheted from the steel front.

  The two men manning the stations at the front of the room ducked back down behind the ledge that hid their recessed posts. She caught a glimpse of the back of one of their heads as the man made a break to the right. A chair toppled to her left.

  They were moving to outflank Roche, who crawled cautiously around to the far side of the desk. From that angle, he wouldn’t be able to see the second man working back toward him from the left, where he peeked around the landing at the top of the short staircase, raised his rifle, braced his forearm on the ground, and aligned his sights with the point where Roche would be emerging from behind the desk at any moment.

  The man on the right came up fast, his weapon sighted squarely at—

  Roche’s shot hit him high in the chest. The impact lifted him from his feet and tossed him backward onto the console. Roche swiveled to his left as though in slow motion. Tried to get a bead on
the man leaning over the top of the staircase, whose face cracked into a smile of victory.

  Kelly fired blindly. Bullets ricocheted from the ground all around him. He jerked back his rifle, ducked down—

  A stray bullet punched through his shoulder. He grabbed for it and looked up at Kelly.

  She gasped in recognition. Lucas O’Reilly. She’d worked with him every day over the past six months, traded stories with him, shared coffee with him. He smirked and raised his weapon toward her.

  Kelly pulled the trigger and his face crumpled into a crater of blood and bone fragments. He hovered momentarily before toppling backward.

  Roche ran to her. Grabbed her by the arm. Dragged her toward the door.

  She glanced up at the screens, where she saw the satellite image of Giza, the white mesa surrounded by men disgorging from a small fleet of panel trucks. The image of the Mexican jungle featured a Black Hawk chopper landing in the middle of an open field, near a giant peaked knoll, its rotor wash beating back the jungle.

  Both of their field teams were walking into a trap.

  “We have to warn the others,” she said.

  “We have to clear this place first,” Roche said. “Maddox is still down here somewhere.”

  The grinding sound from the elevator shaft was louder now. There was a thumping sound, like a sheet of metal buckling.

  There was a single entryway to the third sublevel, invisible unless you knew exactly what you were looking for. Roche found the hidden retina scanner through the gaps in the overhead vent, spoke his name out loud, and held perfectly still as the red laser shined straight down into his eye.

  “How did you know—?”

  “Now’s not the time,” Roche interrupted and pulled her toward the terminus of the dead-end corridor.

  The outer panel slid back into the wall, followed by the pressurized stainless-steel door, which closed behind them the moment they passed through. Kelly barely recognized they were inside a pass-through chamber like the one at USAMRIID before the interior door opened and she was buffeted in the face with air that smelled almost like the intensive care ward in a hospital.

  “We have to hurry,” Roche said.

  He preceded her down a narrow staircase that wound back upon itself and let off onto a landing overlooking a vast display reminiscent of a museum gallery. Even from this height, she could tell it was a collection of artifacts like those Hollis Richards had taken with him to AREA 51. She even recognized several that had been collected inside the Antarctic pyramid.

  They descended another set of stairs to the main floor, where Roche guided her through the exhibits. It was an homage of sorts to the man who had spent his entire life accruing the strange and inexplicable anomalies. There were fragments of meteorites under Lucite. Inca stones from Peru. Photographs of the Nazca Lines and jars containing samples of the sand that formed them. Carvings of flying saucers and spaceman. The silver Betz sphere, which even now produced a faint humming sound. It reminded her of a sideshow exhibit in many ways, a collection of curiosities of no real scientific or anthropological value, mere trinkets a lonely old man had picked up along his way to finding the trail of mutated skulls that led him to the discovery of alien life at the bottom of the world.

  It struck her that this was a sentimental place, not unlike a scrapbook full of memories, its exhibits designed to be relived anytime Hollis Richards had wanted. This was his level, but certainly not one of more than personal value. The real treasures must have been housed somewhere else.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” Kelly asked

  “If that bunker’s still down there,” Roche said, “then I have a hunch that’s where everything else is stored.”

  “Then that’s where we need to go.”

  The elevator doors were all the way across the display floor to her left. She strode straight toward them before she lost her nerve. She’d barely been able to hang on to the cable long enough to descend a single story; the prospect of sliding some unknown distance down into the waiting arms of the enemy terrified her, and yet she could think of no way around it.

  She reached the doors first, squeezed her fingertips into the seam, and tried to pry them apart. They didn’t budge in the slightest, at least not until Roche caught up with her and used a length of metal he’d broken from one of the display stands to lever them open.

  They stood together at the precipice and stared down at the crumpled elevator. The hydraulic pistons of the electromagnetic flaps continued to drive and release, drive and release, in their vain attempt to close. The roof of the car had buckled and mechanical components spit scalding oil in every direction. There was no telling how long the car would hold, let alone what would happen when it finally lost its battle.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Roche said.

  “No,” Kelly said, “but what choice do we have?”

  45

  BARNETT

  La Venta

  Barnett studied the nests above him for the slightest sign of movement, listened for the crinkling sound of something squirming around inside, but everything was perfectly silent and still. He had to believe that as long as they didn’t do anything to cause a change in the environment, there was no risk of rousing the feathered serpents from their state of cryobiosis, and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was preparing to spring a trap.

  “What do you think?” Morgan whispered.

  “I say we get what we came for and get the hell out of here. Zeta has to be getting close by now.”

  “And what do we do when it arrives with all of those drones?”

  “One problem at a time,” Barnett said. “Let’s get this thing open and hope to God we’re right about what’s inside, because if we’re not, we’re in a world of hurt.”

  Barnett stared at the design on the side of the stone case for several seconds, searching for any indication that something other than the canister was inside, but there was only one way to know for sure. He gripped the wooden handles on the near side and waited for Morgan to assume his position on the opposite side. Their eyes met across the top of the stone slab. Barnett gave the go-ahead with a nod and together they raised the slab. It was far heavier than either of them had expected, but they managed to slide it several feet to the side, revealing the dark interior.

  They stepped around to the side and shined their beams inside. The circular canister rested at the bottom of a hollow in the stone block. It was roughly eight inches tall and six inches in diameter, with a handle affixed to either side of a lid with an inset grip. It looked like it was made of silver, although there was no sign of tarnishing, even after all these years. There were faint markings on the sides, like laser engravings. Symbols of some kind, only he didn’t recognize any of them.

  Barnett reached inside and took it by the handle. Lifted it, but it didn’t budge in the slightest. He let go, leaned into the stone cube, and shined his light around the base. There was no ring of rust, as he’d anticipated. In fact, there was no indication of corrosion at all. He couldn’t see a single reason why it wouldn’t come out—

  And then he saw it.

  The canister wasn’t sitting on the bottom; it was fitted into it. A circular hole had been carved into the bottom, the exact same size as the container itself. It could have easily rusted down there, or perhaps thousands of years of humidity, temperature, and pressure changes had simply caused the metal to expand just far enough for it to become stuck.

  “Let me try,” Morgan said.

  Barnett made room for his partner, who set his feet, gripped the handle, and pulled as hard as he could. He growled through his bared teeth with the exertion. The tendons stood out in his neck. Veins bulged in his arms. And yet it didn’t move even a single millimeter.

  “It’s more than just stuck,” Morgan said. “Something’s physically holding it in there.”

  Barnett glanced up at the nest overhead filled with the bodies of the dead and the creatures curled up inside their remains. He
didn’t like this. Applying such significant mechanical force had to be the means of springing the trap, a fail-safe designed by the ancient Olmec to eliminate whoever tried to steal the artifact.

  He looked down again, scooted into position, and gripped the handle. The construction of the vessel was beyond anything even the most advanced society of the time could have manufactured. The lid itself appeared to have a pressurized seal, one that could only be broken by gripping the inset handle, pushing down, and turning . . .

  That was it.

  He tried to turn the handle, but it still didn’t budge. He tried again, this time putting his shoulders into it.

  Crack.

  Barnett froze. Looked straight up. Nothing.

  He tried turning again. This time it moved without nearly as much effort. He could see now that the bottom of the canister was threaded, like a screw. Such a simple concept, and yet one that would have confounded everyone on the planet so long ago. Several more turns and he could see the seal of rust he’d broken. The outer ring must have been made from a different kind of metal than the canister, one more susceptible to oxidation and humidity. Two more twists and he felt it start to give—

  Pressure from underneath.

  He wasn’t fast enough.

  Water fired straight up out of the hole. It struck the underside of the lid and flipped it over the side, where it shattered on the ground with a thunderous crash. The flume struck the ceiling, knocking the nests in every direction, tearing them apart, and releasing the dead bodies trapped inside. Water rained back down on them with such force they could barely keep their eyes open. It accumulated so quickly around them that it already nearly covered their feet.

  The nature of the trap hit him.

  The cavern had been deliberately flooded to create the necessary pressure to fill the hollow column in the room below them, the one with the rust stains. They’d used the canister to seal it and the geyser to revive the hibernating creatures, hidden inside the corpses that were already nearly invisible beneath the water, which had risen to the lip around the lone egress in the floor.