by Jeff Long
Ali reached a clearing. A group of scientists was resting at a stone bench. She got out of her pack and joined them. Farther on, the trail dropped in a deep, winding staircase. The masonry seemed old, fused with accretions. Ali looked around for carved inscriptions or other signs of hadal culture, but there was none.
“That’s got to be the last of our people coming down,” a trekker said.
Ali followed his pointing finger. Like tiny comets, three points of light slowly descended in the darkness with silvery filaments for tails. Ali was surprised. For all the walking they’d done, the platforms were not so far away, maybe just a mile. Higher, at the edge of the rim, the town of Esperanza was visible against the black night, a dim bulb indeed. For a moment she saw the boomtown’s painted cliffs. The bright blue color twinkled in the toxic mist like a wishing star, and so she made a wish.
After their rest, the trail changed. The swamp receded. The reek of death fell away. The trail rose at a pleasant incline. They came to a ledge overlooking a flat plateau.
“More animals,” someone said.
“They’re not animals.”
Once upon a time, in Palestine, people had made human sacrifices in the valley of Hinnon, later using the valley as a dumping ground for dead animals and executed prisoners. Cremation fires could be seen burning there night and day. With time Hinnon became Gehenna, which became the Hebrew name for the land of the dead. Ali had become something of a student of the literature of hell, and could not help wondering if they had stumbled upon some modern equivalent of Hinnon.
As they trekked onto the plateau, the image resolved itself. The bodies were simply men lying in an open-air camp. “They must be our porters,” Ali said. She estimated a hundred or more men gathered here. Cigarette smoke mixed with their pungent body odor. Dozens of blue plastic drums shaped on one side to fit the human spine gave her a clue.
They had reached the rendezvous point. From here the expedition would truly launch. Like uninvited guests, the scientists waited at the edge of the encampment, not quite sure what came next. The porters did nothing to accommodate them. They went on lying about, sharing cigarettes and cups of hot drinks or sleeping on the bare ground. “They look … tell me they didn’t hire hadals,” a woman said.
“How could they hire hadals?” someone asked. “We’re not even sure they exist anymore.”
The porters’ incipient horns and beetling brows and their body art, almost defective in its jailhouse shabbiness, had a certain pathos to it. Not that anyone would have pitied these men to their faces. They had the bricklike stare and keloid scars of a street gang. Their clothing was a mishmash of L.A. ghetto and the jungle. Some wore Patagonia shorts and Raiders caps, others wore loincloths with hip-hop jackets. Most carried knives. Ali saw machetes—but no vines. The blades were for protection, from the animals she’d been passing for the last hour, and possibly from any stray hostiles, but above all from one another.
They had fresh white plastic collars around their necks. She’d heard of convict labor and chain gangs in the subplanet, and maybe the collars were some sort of electronic shackles. But these men looked too physically similar, too familial, to be a collection of prisoners. They must have come from the same tribe, the front end of a migration. They were indios, though Ali could not say from which region. Possibly Andean. Their cheekbones were broad and monumental, their black eyes almost Oriental.
A huge young black soldier appeared at their side. “If you’ll come this way,” he said, “the colonel has hot coffee prepared. We just received a radio update. The rest of your group has touched down. They’ll be here soon.”
Attached to his dogtag chain was a small steel Maltese cross, the official emblem of the Knights Templar. Recently revived through the largesse of a sports shoe manufacturer, the military religious order had become famous for employing former high school and college athletes with little other future. The recruitment had started at Promise Keepers and Million Man March rallies, and snowballed into a well-trained, tightly disciplined mercenary army for hire to corporations and governments.
In passing a knot of the indios, she saw a head rise; it was Ike. His glance at her lasted barely a second. She still owed him thanks for that orange in the Nazca elevator. But he returned his attention to the circle of porters, hunkering among them like Marco Polo.
Ali saw lines and arcs drawn on the stone in their midst, and Ike was shifting pebbles and bits of bone from one place to another. She thought they must be playing a game, then realized he was querying the indios, getting directions or gathering information. One other thing she saw, too. Near one foot, Ike had a small pile of carefully stacked leaves, clearly a last-minute purchase. She recognized them. He was a chewer of coca leaves.
Ali moved on to the soldiers’ part of the camp. All was in motion here, men in camouflage uniforms bustling around, checking weapons. There were at least thirty of them, even quieter than the indios, and she decided the legend must be true about the mercenaries’ vows of silence. Except for prayer or essential communication, speech was considered an extravagance among themselves.
Drawn by coffee fumes, the scientists found a stove perched on rocks and helped themselves, then started poking through the neatly arranged crates and plastic drums, looking for their equipment.
“You don’t belong here,” the black soldier said. “Please vacate the depot.” He moved to block them. They went around him and rooted deeper.
“It’s okay,” someone told him, “it’s our stuff.”
The hunt turned unruly. “My spectroscope!” someone announced triumphantly.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice requested.
Ali barely heard him over the shouting and jostle of equipment.
A single gunshot cracked the air. The bullet had been aimed out from camp, angled toward the ground. Where it struck the bare bedrock fifty feet out, the round blossomed into a shower of splintered light.
Everyone stopped.
“What was that?” a scientist said.
“That,” announced the shooter, “was a Remington Lucifer.” He was a tall man, clean-shaven, slim in the fashion of field officers. He wore a chest rig with a shoulder holster for his modest-sized pistol. He had black and charcoal-gray camouflaged SWAT pants bloused into lightweight boots. His black T-shirt looked clean. A pair of night glasses dangled at his throat.
“It is an ammunition specially developed for use in the subplanet. It is a .25-caliber round, made of hardened plastic with a uranium tip. Different levels of heat and sonic vibration shape its functional capabilities. It can create a devastating wound, break up into multiple fléchettes, or simply create a blinding distraction. This expedition marks the official debut for the Lucifer and other technologies.” The accent was Tennessee aristocracy.
Spurrier approached the soldier, muttonchops fluffed, hand outstretched. He had delegated himself the scientists’ spokesman. “You must be Colonel Walker.”
Walker bypassed Spurrier’s outstretched hand. “We have two problems, people. First, those loads you have looted were packed by weight and balanced for carrying. Their contents have been carefully inventoried. I have a list of every item in every load. Every load is numbered. You have now set our departure back by a half hour while the loads are repacked.
“Problem two, one of my men made a request. You ignored it.” He met their eyes. “In the future, you will please treat such requests as direct orders. From me.” He shut his holster case with a snap.
“Looting?” a scientist protested. “It’s our equipment. How can we loot ourselves? Just who’s in charge here?”
Still wearing his pack, Shoat arrived. “I see you’ve met,” he said, and turned to the group. “As you know, Colonel Walker will be our chief of security. From here on out, he’ll be in charge of our defense and logistics.”
“We have to ask him for permission to do science?” a man objected.
“This is an expedition, not your personal office,” said Shoat. “The
answer is yes. From now on, you’ll need to coordinate your needs with the colonel’s man, who will direct you to the proper shipment.”
“We’re a group,” said Walker. With his uniform and trappings and his lean height, he had undeniable presence. In one hand he carried a Bible bound in matching camouflage. “The group takes priority. You simply need to anticipate your individual requirements, and my quartermaster will assist you. For the sake of order, you’ll have to speak with him at the end of each day. Not in the morning while we are packing, not in the middle of the day while we are on the trail.”
“I have to ask permission to get my own equipment?”
“We’ll sort it out.” Shoat sighed. “Colonel, is there anything else you’d like to add?”
Walker sat on the edge of a rock with one boot planted. “My job is hired gun,” he said. “Helios brought me on to provide preservation for this enterprise.” He unfolded a sheaf of pages and held it up. “My contract,” he said, skimming the clauses. “It’s got some rather unique features.”
“Colonel,” Shoat warned. Walker ignored him.
“Here, for instance, is a list of bonus payments that I get for each one of you who survives the journey.”
The colonel had their fullest attention. Shoat didn’t dare interrupt.
“It reminds me a lot of a bounty,” said Walker. “According to this, I get so much for every hand, foot, limb, ear, and/or eye that I deliver intact and healthy. That’s your hands, your feet, your eyes.” He found the part. “Let’s see, at three hundred dollars per eye, that’s six hundred per pair. But they’re only offering five hundred per mind. Go figure.”
The outcry went up. “This is outrageous.”
Walker waved the contract like a white flag. “You need to know something else,” he boomed out. They stilled, somewhat. “I’ve put my time in down here, and it’s time to smell the roses, if you will. Dabble in politics, maybe. Do some consulting work. Spend some downtime with my wife and kids. And that’s where you come in.”
They drew quiet.
“You see,” said Walker, “my aim is to get filthy rich off you people. I mean to collect every penny of this entire schedule of bonuses. Every eyeball, every testicle, every toe. Do you ever ask yourselves who you can really trust?”
Walker folded his contract and closed it in his daybook. “Let me submit that the one thing in this world you can always trust is self-interest. And now you know mine.”
Shoat was paying painful attention. The colonel had just threatened the expedition’s union—and saved it. But why? wondered Ali. What was Walker’s game?
He clapped the King James against his thigh. “We are beginning a great journey into the unknown. From now on, this expedition will operate within guidelines and the protection of my judgment. Our best protection will be a common set of ideas. A law. That law, people, is mine. From here on, we will observe tenets of military jurisprudence. In return, I will restore you to your families.”
Shoat’s neck made a slow extension, turtle-like. His soldier of fortune had just declared himself the ultimate legal authority over the Helios expedition for the next year. It was the most audacious thing Ali had ever seen. She waited for the scientists to raise the roof with their protests.
But there was silence. Not one objection. Then Ali understood.
The mercenary had just promised them their lives.
Like any expedition, they settled into themselves by inches.
A pace developed.
Camp broke at 0800. Walker would read a prayer to his troops—usually something grim from Revelation or Job or his favorite, Paul to the Corinthians—The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light—before sending a half-dozen ahead to audit the risks. The scientists would follow. The porters brought up the rear, protected—driven, it was becoming evident—by the silent soldiers. The division of labor was succinct, the lines uncrossable.
The porters spoke Quechua, once the language of the Incas. None of the Americans spoke it, and their attempts to use Spanish were rebuffed. Ali tried her hand at it, but the indios were not disposed to fraternizing. At night the mercenaries patrolled their perimeter in three shifts, guarding less against hadal adversaries than against the flight of their own porters.
In those first weeks they rarely saw their scout. Ike had vaulted into the night of tunneling, and kept himself a day or two ahead of them. His absence created an odd yearning among the scientists. When they asked about his welfare, Walker was dismissive. The man knows his duty, he would say.
Ali had presumed the scout was part of Walker’s paramilitary, but learned otherwise. He was not exactly a free agent, if that was the term. Apparently Shoat had purchased him from the U.S. Army. He was essentially chattel, little different from his hadal days. Ike’s mystery mounted, in part, Ali suspected, because people were able to attach their fantasies to him. She limited her own desires to eventually interviewing him about hadal ethnography, and possibly assembling a root glossary, though she could not get that orange out of her mind.
For the time being, Ike did what Walker termed his duty. He found them the path. He led them into the darkness. They all knew his blaze mark, a one-foot-high cross spray-painted on the walls in bright blue.
Shoat informed them the paint would begin degrading after a week. Again, it was an issue of his trade secrets. Helios was determined to throw any competitors off their scent. As one scientist pointed out, the disappearing paint would also throw them off their own scent. They would have no way of retracing their own footsteps.
To reassure them, Shoat held up a small capsule he described as a miniature radio transmitter. It was one of many he would be planting along the way, and would lie dormant until he triggered it to life with his remote control. He compared it to Hansel and Gretel’s trail of crumbs, then someone pointed out that the crumbs Hansel dropped had all been eaten by birds. “Always negative,” he griped at them.
In twelve-hour cycles, the team moved, then rested, then moved again. The men sprouted whiskers. Among the women, roots began to grow out, eyeliner and lipstick fell from daily fashion. Dr. Scholl’s adhesive pads for blisters became the currency of choice, even more valuable than M&M’s.
Ali had never been part of an expedition, but felt herself immersed in the tradition of what they were doing. They could have been whalers setting sail, or a wagon train moving west. She felt as if she knew it all by heart.
For the first ten days their joints and muscles were in shock. Even those hardy athletes among them groaned in their sleep and struggled with leg cramps. A small cult built around ibuprofen, the anti-inflammatory pain tablet. But each day their packs got a little lighter as they ate food or discarded books that no longer seemed so essential. One morning, Ali woke up with her head on a rock and actually felt refreshed.
Their farewell tans faded. Their feet hardened. More and more, they could see in quarter-light and less. Ali liked the smell of herself at night, her honest sweat.
Helios chemists had infused their protein bars with extra vitamin D to substitute for lost sunshine. The bars were dense with other additives, too, boosters Ali had never heard of. Among other things, her night vision grew richer by the hour. She felt stronger. Someone wondered if the food bars might not contain steroids, too, eliciting a playful round of science nerds flexing their imaginary new musculatures for one another.
Ali liked the scientists. She understood them in a way Shoat and Walker never could. They were here because they had answered their hearts. They felt compelled by reasons outside themselves, for knowledge, for reductionism, for simplicity, in a sense for God.
Inevitably, someone came up with a nickname for their expedition. It turned out to be Jules Verne who most appealed to this bunch, and so they became the Jules Verne Society, soon shortened to the JV. The name stuck. It helped that for his Journey to the Center of the Earth, Verne had chosen two scientists for his heroes, ra
ther than epic warriors or poets. Above all, the JV liked the fact that Verne’s small party of scientists had emerged miraculously intact.
The tunnels were ample. Their path looked groomed. Someone—apparently long ago—had cleared loose stones and chiseled corners to form walls and benches alongside the trail. It was hypothesized that the stonecutting might have been accomplished centuries ago by Andean slaves, for the joints and massive blocks were identical to masonry at Machu Picchu and in Cuzco. At any rate, their porters seemed to know exactly what the benches were for as they backed their heavy loads onto the old shelves.
Ali couldn’t get over it. Miles went by, as flat as a sidewalk, looping right and left in easy bends, a pedestrian’s delight. The geologists, especially, were astounded. The lithosphere was supposed to be solid basalt at these depths. Unbearably hot. A dead zone. But here was a virtual subway tunnel. You could sell tickets to this, one remarked. Don’t worry, said his pal, Helios will.
One night they camped next to a translucent quartz forest. Ali heard tiny underworld creatures rustling, and the sound of water trickling through deep fissures. This was their first good encounter with indigenous animals. The expedition’s lights kept the animals in hiding. But one of the biologists set out a recording device, and in the morning he played for them the rhythm of two- and three-chambered hearts: subterranean fish and amphibians and reptiles.
The nocturnal sounds were unsettling for some, raising the specter of hadal predators or of bugs or snakes with deadly venoms. For Ali, the nearness of life was a balm. It was life she had come in search of, hadal life. Lying on her back in the blackness, she couldn’t wait to actually see the animals.
For the most part, their fields were sufficiently diverse to forestall professional competition. That meant they shared more than they bickered. They listened to one another’s hypotheses with saintly patience. They put on skits at night. A harmonica player performed John Mayall songs. Three geologists started a barbershop routine, calling themselves the Tectonics. Hell was turning out to be fun.