He shouldered his rifle and advanced slowly toward the door, which whispered open when he triggered the unseen sensor. A quick glance confirmed there was no one hiding inside the chamber.
His pulse thumped in his ears.
Once the inner door opened, there’d be nowhere for them to hide. They’d be completely and utterly exposed. If anyone was waiting for them on the other side, they wouldn’t stand a chance.
The outer door shushed closed behind them. He held his breath. Tightened his finger on the trigger. Mentally prepared himself. The inner door receded into the wall, revealing an empty hallway.
Roche released his breath. He glanced back at Kelly, gestured for her to keep her eyes open, and started down the hallway beneath overhead lights that reflected from the polished concrete. He placed each foot cautiously, silently, rolling from heel to toe. He slowly moved his barrel from one side of the hallway to the other as they passed between artifacts contained in climate-controlled cases, the faint hiss and rumble of their inner workings masking the subtle sounds he desperately needed to hear.
He studied them in his peripheral vision, but couldn’t afford to be distracted. Gunmen could be posted to either side of the central corridor at the branch ahead, just waiting for them to walk through their crossfire.
“Stay here,” he whispered.
He pressed his shoulder against the display case to his left, lowered to a crouch, and approached the juncture slowly. Listened for the sound of breathing, the click of a disengaging safety, any sound to betray the presence of the men waiting for them ahead. If he looked past the corner to his right, he could see a reflection from the cases on the other side. While it wasn’t perfect, it at least confirmed there was no one lying in wait. He dashed across the hall, pressed his back flat against the opposite side, and similarly used the glass cases diagonally across the intersecting aisle to confirm there was no one on that side either.
Where were they? Had they found another way out? A single man with little more than average ability with a rifle could have prevented them from penetrating the sublevel beyond the door from the pass-through chamber.
Roche went low around the corner. Sighted his weapon first down the corridor to his left, then to his right. Both sides terminated at T-junctures, but there was no sign of anyone stationed in between.
He advanced into the continuation of the main aisle, his own reflection stalking him from the glass cases to either side, inside of which were figurines that seemed to watch him as he passed, but not nearly as closely as the skulls in the case ahead of him.
A crunching sound.
Roche froze and surveyed the deserted hallway. The sound had originated from deeper in the substructure. There was something on the floor, near where the corridor met with a display case. Broken Plexiglas. Maddox and his men must have found what they were searching for, and based upon the progression of the artifacts, he had a pretty good idea of what it was.
Damn Barnett for bringing it back here.
Another crunch.
There was definitely someone back there, somewhere out of sight, near the terminus. If he and Kelly continued walking straight ahead, they risked a direct confrontation, one that would come down to who could fire their weapons first. It was a chance they didn’t have to take.
Roche glanced to his right, at a monitor displaying the 3-D reconstruction of the mummified remains partially contained within the discolored funereal bundle in the case. The digital representation of the body rotated on an invisible horizontal axis, then turned and spun on the vertical, but it wasn’t the imagery, specifically, that caught his eye.
He stepped up onto the armature that supported the monitor and used it to climb on top of the display case. The gap beneath the ceiling was barely high enough for him to squirm inside, forcing him to remain on his chest. Grates vented recycled air and heat from the light sources against his belly. Cords and tubes snaked away from him, toward the recesses that housed the electrical components.
From up here, he could see all the way across the substructure in every direction. It was far vaster than he ever would have guessed. Undoubtedly, Barnett and Richards had expanded upon the original bunker, which meant there was a good chance they’d installed another egress in the process. And if that were the case, then it was possible that Maddox was already long gone.
A soft sucking sound, like a subtle release of pressure.
He crawled forward, mere inches at a time. It almost looked like there was an enclosed area ahead, a cul-de-sac of sorts.
Footsteps. Nearby. Faint. Little more than a shifting of weight.
He contorted his body so he could look behind him. Kelly was right at his heels, her rifle similarly resting on her forearms as she pulled with her palms and pushed with her toes. She nodded to let him know that she’d heard it, too.
Another ten feet and he’d be close enough to look down upon whoever was there.
Motion from the corner of his eye. By the time he looked, it was gone. Something had moved across the reflection on the glass case. Something black and human-shaped.
“Das dauert zu lange.”
The speaker was practically right below him. And while he didn’t understand the words, he definitely recognized the voice.
Maddox.
“Was soll ich tun?”
A second voice, farther to the right.
There were at least two of them, likely more. Roche had to believe they wouldn’t be deliberately giving away their locations by talking if they had the slightest clue that they weren’t alone, which gave Kelly and him a slight advantage. Even if Maddox’s men were prepared to defend their position, they wouldn’t expect the attack to come from above.
Roche maneuvered his rifle into the closest thing to a natural shooting position he could manage and used his elbows to drag himself toward the edge.
Just a little farther.
A shadow passed across the Plexiglas shards covering the floor below him. The footsteps sounded strange. Sticky. Like the person had stepped in spilled soda.
He pushed with his toes and craned his neck. Maddox stood below him and slightly off to his left. While Roche couldn’t see his former friend’s face, he could read his body language. Maddox was nervous, more so than Roche had ever seen him.
The man beside Maddox had blond hair and an urban camouflage tactical mask. He paced restlessly, glancing every few seconds into the corner of the open space, to Roche’s right. A third man passed behind Maddox, but Roche couldn’t see any details beyond his black fatigues and featureless tactical mask.
A crunching sound, from slightly to his right and straight down.
All three men looked toward the source in unison.
A shadow moved on the floor directly underneath Roche, a hunched shape, rising and falling, and then it was gone.
Kelly scooted up beside him. With the lights above the walkways being so bright, the two of them would be invisible in the shadows to anyone who looked up from below.
Roche needed to know what the men were watching in the back corner. He and Kelly could easily hit all three of the men below them before they could raise their weapons in their defense, but a fourth man outside of the range of sight provided a variable for which they couldn’t account. If he had an automatic weapon, he could strafe the top of the display case before either of them could get a bead on him. And while Roche didn’t like the man’s odds of hitting them from that angle, he wasn’t about to gamble with Kelly’s life.
He scooted just a little bit farther, tried to lean over the edge without his face emerging from the darkness. He saw the shadow on the floor again, rising and falling almost rhythmically across a mess of broken glass and smeared footprints. Crimson and wet. Blood. No doubt about it. He took a chance and leaned out over the edge, saw the reflection of the overhead lights from a puddle of blood, beside which were handprints and smudges leading toward the shape crouching in the corner. It was a man. His back was bare, the knobs of his spine tenting gray,
scabrous skin that appeared far too tight. He was emaciated, skeletal. He lowered his shoulders between his flexed knees and made a slurping sound. His entire body was covered with open lacerations. Not a single drop of blood flowed from within the puckered edges.
All at once, it dawned on Roche what he was looking at.
The eagle mask lay on the floor beside Tess’s body. Her clothing was torn, her pale flesh cut clear to the bone in places, her lifeless eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. Her blood was positively everywhere.
“No,” Kelly whispered.
The naked man ceased his rhythmic movements and abruptly looked up, his eyes inhuman, his face a mask of shimmering blood.
48
BARNETT
La Venta
While Morgan had given his life so that Barnett might escape, it would only buy him so much time. He refused to let his old friend’s sacrifice be in vain.
He piled the last of the rocks in the entrance, shoved a stone block up against the barricade, and took aim at the earthen roof directly above it. A few well-placed shots brought down piles of dirt and debris, but not nearly as much as he’d hoped. Considering the tunnel leading here from the buried colonnade had undoubtedly been carved by these same creatures eons ago while they were starving and in search of food, he knew it wouldn’t take them long to get through. He couldn’t afford to waste any more bullets or time, especially not with the army of drones that could be converging upon the ruins at that very moment.
There was no way on this planet he was leaving here alive.
He looked down at the canister in his grasp.
“This had better be worth it,” he whispered.
Barnett struck off into the tunnel, heading back toward the surface. He ducked under the low ceiling, swatted away the roots, and navigated the uneven terrain until he reached a narrowing so small he was forced to crawl. He emerged from a crevice between a pair of fallen pillars, entered the colonnade, and blew past the giant megalithic head that resembled Subject Z’s. Climbed through the doorway and into the chamber with the collapsed roof. Squeezed around the rubble, beneath the watchful eyes of the hybridized gods carved into the walls. Scurried through the slender opening into the room with the spiderwebs. A slanted column of light shined down onto the dirt floor.
He didn’t even slow down. He hit the wall at a sprint, braced his foot against the crumbling plaster, and propelled himself upward. Caught the edge of the stone slab, covertly evaluated his surroundings, and pulled himself out into the world he’d been certain he would never see again.
The sun had already set, leaving behind a red stain to the west that made the jungle appear to burn. Scattered stars had materialized from the gloaming, against which the branches rustled ever so gently on the breeze. If he turned his head just right, he could see the moon, the Earth’s shadow only now taking its first tentative bite from the edge.
He scrambled up the slope and threw himself into the thicket. He heard the trickling sound of loose dirt sliding down through the hole in the roof of the structure and alighting on the ground, but nothing else. No birds chirped or monkeys shrieked. Nothing scampered across the moldering leaves or flitted through the dense canopy.
Barnett knew exactly what that meant.
He remained perfectly silent while he surveilled the ancient site, or at least what he could see of it. Surely if the creatures were out there, he would have seen at least some sign of their presence, or if they had already arrived, then undoubtedly they would have made short work of him.
Something wasn’t right.
He crept through the jungle, conscious of every crunch of the detritus and crackle of twigs underfoot. Even the gentle scraping of the wet leaves across his jacket made a sound he was certain would betray him, assuming the whining of the gathering mosquitoes didn’t do so first. He slowed his heartbeat, felt the trickle of sweat rolling down his cheek, squeezed the trigger of his rifle into the sweet spot, where even the slightest addition of pressure would release a triple burst. Every one of his senses, every aspect of his being, was attuned to the world around him.
A scraping sound. Distant. Coming from somewhere to the northwest.
The sky grew darker by the second, storm clouds advancing from the horizon snuffing out the stars one by one. A faint flicker of lightning announced a soft grumble of thunder.
When he reached the edge of the forest, he lowered himself to the ground, smeared handfuls of mud onto his face, and squirmed into the underbrush until he could see into the clearing.
The wet grass shimmered in the moonlight, which seemed to diminish with each passing second. He drew his satellite phone from his pack, turned down the volume, and pressed the button to transmit.
“If anyone can hear me,” he whispered, “this is Cameron Barnett, I have secured the package and—”
Something caught his eye.
There was a pattern in the grass ahead of him, a massive circular design where the blades were flattened into the ground, at the center of which were several deep impressions. He looked up to find bowed and broken branches. Tattered and torn leaves.
The forest hadn’t gone silent because Subject Z’s armada had arrived, but rather because someone else had.
He merged back into the jungle and advanced through the densest cover he could find, pausing every few feet to listen for the men who’d arrived on the helicopter while he was underground.
Again, he heard the scraping sound. Louder now. And, perhaps, if he held his breath, the faint whisper of voices.
Unless he’d completely lost his bearings, he was approximately a hundred feet due east of what archeologists considered the main plaza, roughly even with the Stirling acropolis and the grove of palm trees that divided the site, which placed the pyramid a quarter-mile diagonally to the northwest, on the other side of the flooded necropolis he’d narrowly escaped. He turned in that direction and closed his eyes to better concentrate on his sense of hearing. The scraping sounds were definitely coming from somewhere over there.
The forest thinned incrementally, forcing him to take a circuitous approach toward the pyramid, the very top of which he occasionally glimpsed through the canopy. It was strangely well lit, despite the diminishing moon. Another fifty feet and he was able to see the banks of portable lights directed at the base of the mound and the source of the scraping sounds.
Half a dozen men wearing black fatigues and tactical masks attacked the ground with pickaxes and shovels. They’d already created a pit large enough to reveal the discolored stones buried underneath, which formed what almost looked like the trapezoidal frame of a doorway. Like the entrance to the necropolis, it had been sealed, only in a much more permanent manner. The barricade was perfectly fitted and mortared in place. There was no way they were getting through it with anything shy of a—
As if on cue, a man wearing a tactical mask with a flaming skull removed bricks of C-4 from a satchel and commenced attaching them to the barricade.
A crashing sound. Only this time from back to his left.
Barnett glanced back in the direction from which he came but couldn’t see anything through the trees.
The men in the clearing must have heard it, too. A pair of them struck off in that direction, their assault rifles seated against their shoulders.
Surely, they hadn’t solved the riddle of La Venta by themselves, which meant they’d gained control of the Hangar and had access to Dr. Clarke’s program. That would explain how they knew precisely where to dig to find the entrance to the pyramid, if not why they were intent on breaking in.
The remaining men ducked behind the banks of lights.
“Feuer im loch!” one of them shouted.
The explosion shook the ground.
Barnett seized the opportunity to sprint through the jungle to the north in hopes of getting a better view.
Smoke billowed from the orifice and rolled over the men. Rocks rained down onto the leaves overhead with a sound like hail.
Barnett
saw a massive kapok tree to his left and made a split-second decision. He kicked off the trunk, grabbed the lowest bough, and hauled himself up into the canopy. He was nearly twenty feet off the ground when the smoke finally cleared. From where he crouched with his back against the trunk, he had a perfect view of the clearing through the branches.
The pair who’d broken away from the others were nearly to the palm grove. Several of the trees still swayed from the explosion.
Spotlights illuminated the mouth of a dark tunnel, in front of which the man with the flaming skull mask crouched, shining the beam affixed to the barrel of his rifle inside.
A crashing sound from the south.
The men in the field slowed and advanced more cautiously.
Straight ahead, the other three masked men joined their leader at the entrance, prepared to crawl into the darkness.
Barnett seated his rifle against his shoulder, watched them down the barrel. If any of them so much as turned in his direction—
Gunfire to his left. He whirled in time to see shadows streaking across the plaza toward the two men, who managed to get off a few more shots before the feathered serpents swarmed over them, tails thrashing and long necks striking, tearing them apart with their teeth. Their feathers shimmered with a strange iridescence in the moonlight as their prey bled the field red.
A high-pitched whine and a streak of light.
The projectile struck in their midst. The explosion tore through the creatures, swallowing them in a swirling mass of smoke, flames, and charred appendages. He turned in time to see the men near the pyramid reload the rocket launcher and take aim again.
A whoosh and the rocket screamed across the clearing, striking the edge of the forest and throwing dirt and debris into the air. Several trees toppled forward into the smoke and hit the ground hard enough to make it tremble.
The four men formed a line and advanced toward the conflagration, their rifles raised, discharge spitting from the barrels.
Barnett glanced at the entrance to the pyramid.
Mutation Page 30