by Jeff Long
Where the cache was supposed to be towered a waterfall. Walker and his mercenaries had beached near its base and were searching the lower walls with the powerful spotlights mounted on their boats. The waterfall rifled down a shield of olive stone from heights too high to see, beating up a mist that threw rainbows in their lights. The scientists ran their rafts onto shore and disembarked. Some quirk in the cul-de-sac’s acoustics rendered the roar into a wall of white noise.
Walker came over. “The rangefinder reads zero,” he reported. “That means the cylinders are here somewhere. But all we’ve got is this waterfall.”
Ali could taste sea salt in the mist, and looked up into the great throat of the sinkhole rising into darkness. They were by now two-thirds of the way across the Pacific Ocean system, at a depth of 5,866 fathoms, over six miles beneath sea level. There was nothing but water overhead, and it was leaking through the ocean floor.
“They’ve got to be here,” said Shoat.
“You’ve been carrying your own rangefinder around,” Walker said. “Let’s see if that works any better.”
Shoat backed away and grasped at the flat leather pouch strung around his neck. “It won’t work for this kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a homing device, specially made for the transistor beacons I’m planting along the way. For an emergency only.”
“Maybe the cylinders hung up on a shelf,” someone suggested.
“We’re looking,” said Walker. “But these rangefinders are calibrated precisely. The cylinders should be within two hundred feet. We haven’t seen a sign of them. No cables. No drill scars. Nothing.”
“One thing’s certain,” said Spurrier. “We’re not going anywhere until those supplies are found.”
Ike took his kayak downriver to investigate smaller strands. “If you find them, leave them. Don’t touch them. Come back and tell us,” Walker instructed him. “Somebody’s got you in their crosshairs, and I don’t want you close to our cargo when they pull the trigger.”
The expedition broke into search parties, but found nothing. Frustrated, Walker put some of his mercenaries to work shoveling at the coarse sand in case the cylinders had burrowed under. Nothing. Tempers began to fray, and few wanted to hear one fellow’s calculations about how to ration what little food remained until they reached the next cache, five weeks farther on.
They suspended the search to have their meal and rejuvenate their perspective. Ali sat with a line of people, their backs against the rafts, facing the waterfall. Suddenly Troy said, “What about there?” He was pointing at the waterfall.
“Inside the water?” asked Ali.
“It’s the one place we haven’t looked.”
They left their food and walked across to the edge of the tributary feeding from the waterfall’s base, trying to see through the mist and plunging water. Troy’s hunch spread, and others joined them.
“Someone has to go in,” Spurrier said.
“I’ll do it,” said Troy.
By now Walker had come over. “We’ll take it from here,” he said.
It took another quarter-hour to prepare Walker’s “volunteer,” a huge, sullen teenager from San Antonio’s West Side who’d lately started branding himself with hadal glyphs. Ali had heard the colonel tongue-lashing him for godlessness, and this scout duty was obviously a punishment. The kid was scared as they tied him to the end of a rope. “I don’t do waterfalls,” he kept saying. “Let El Cap do it.”
“Crockett’s gone,” Walker shouted into the noise. “Just keep to the wall.”
Hooded in his survival suit, wearing his night-vision glasses more as diving goggles than for the low lux boost, the boy started in, slowly atomizing in the mist. They kept feeding rope into the waterfall, but after a few minutes there was no more tow on the line. It went slack.
They tugged at the rope and ended pulling the whole fifty meters back out. Walker held the end up. “He untied himself,” Walker shouted to a second “volunteer.”
“That means there’s a hollow inside. This time, don’t untie. Give three tugs when you reach the chamber, then attach it to a rock or something. The idea is to make a handline, got it?”
The second soldier set off more confidently. The rope wormed in, deeper than the first time. “Where’s he going in there?” Walker said.
The line came taut, then seized harder. The belayer started to complain, but the rope suddenly yanked from his hands and its tail whipped off into the mist.
“This isn’t tug-of-war,” Walker lectured his third scout. “Just anchor your end. A few moderate pulls will signal us.” In the background, several mercenaries were amused. Their comrades in the mist were having some fun at the colonel’s expense. The tension relaxed.
Walker’s third man stepped through the curtain of spray and they started to lose sight of him. Abruptly he returned. Still on his feet, he came hurtling from the mist, backpedaling in a frenzy.
It happened quickly. His arms flailed, beating at some unseen weight on his front, suggesting a seizure. Backward momentum drove him into the crowd. People spilled to the sand. He landed deep in their midst, among their legs, and he spun spine up and arched, heaving away from the ground. Ali couldn’t see what happened next.
The soldier let loose a deep bellow. It came from his core, a visceral discharge. “Move away, move away,” Walker yelled, pistol in hand, wading through the crowd.
The soldier sagged, facedown, but kept twitching. “Tommy?” called a troop.
Brutally, Tommy came erect, what was left of him, and they saw that his face and torso had been ripped to scraps. The body keeled over backward.
That was when they caught sight of the hadal.
She was squatting in the sand where Tommy had carried her, mouth and hands and dugs brilliant with blood and their lights, blinded, as white as the abyssal fish they had seen. Ali’s view lasted just a fraction of a second. A thousand years old, that creature. How could such a withered thing accomplish the butchery they had just seen?
With a cry, the crowd fell away from the apparition. Ali was knocked to the ground and pummeled by the stampede. Above her, soldiers fumbled at their weapons. A boot glanced off her head. Overhead, Walker came crashing through the frantic herd, more shadow than man among the wheeling lights, his handgun blazing.
The hadal leaped—impossibly—twenty feet onto the shield of olive stone. In the strobing patchwork of lights, she was ghastly white and rimed, it seemed, with scales or filth. This was the repository for the mother tongue? Ali was confused. Over the past months they had humanized the hadals in their discussions, but the reality was more like a wild animal. Her skin was practically reptilian. Then Ali realized it was skin cancer, and the hadal’s flesh was ulcerated and checkered with scabs.
Walker was fearless, running alongside the wall and firing at the scampering hadal. She was making for the waterfall, and Ali guessed it was the sound that was her compass. But the stone grew slick with spray or the holds were polished off or Walker’s bullets were striking the mark. She fell. Walker and his men closed in around her, and all Ali could see were eruptions of light from muzzle flash.
Dazed from the kick, Ali crawled to her feet and started over to the cluster of excited soldiers. She understood from their jubilation that this was the first live hadal any of them had ever seen, much less fought. Walker’s crack team of mercenaries were no more familiar with the enemy than she was.
“Back to the boats,” Walker told her.
“What are you going to do?”
“They’ve taken our cylinders,” he said.
“You’re going in there?”
“Not until we’ve pacified the waterfall.”
She saw soldiers prepping the bigger miniguns mounted to their rafts. They were eager and grim, and she dreaded their enthusiasm. From her passages through African civil wars, Ali knew firsthand that once the juggernaut got loose, it was irrevocable. This was happening too quickly. She wanted Ike here, someone who knew the territory and could mea
sure the colonel’s hot backlash. “But those two boys are still inside.”
“Madam,” Walker answered, “this is a military affair.” He motioned, and one of the mercenaries escorted her by the arm to where the last of the scientists were entering their boats. Ali clambered aboard and they pushed off from shore and watched the show at a distance.
Walker trained all their spotlights on the waterfall, illuminating the tall column so that it looked like a vast glass dragon clinging to the rock, respirating. He directed them to open fire into the water itself.
Ali was reminded of the king who tried to order the ocean’s waves to stop. The water swallowed their bullets. The white noise devoured their gunfire, turning it into strings of snapping firecrackers. They laid on with their gunfire, and the water tore open in liquid gouts, only to heal instantly. Some of the special uranium-tipped Lucifer rounds struck the surrounding walls, clawing divots in the stone. A soldier fired a rocket into the bowels of the fall, and the trunk belched outward, revealing a nebulous gap inside. Moments later the gap sealed shut as more water poured down.
Then the waterfall began to bleed.
Under potent spotlight beams, the waters hemorrhaged. The tributary bloomed red, and the color fanned unevenly to midriver and carried downstream. Ali thought that if the gunfire didn’t draw Ike, surely the blood trail would. She was frightened by the magnitude of what Walker had done. Gunning down the murderous hadal was one thing. But he had, seemingly, just opened the veins of a force of nature. He had unleashed something here, she could feel it.
“What in God’s name was inside there?” someone gasped.
Walker deployed his soldiers with hand signals. Sleek in their survival suits, they flanked the waterfall, scurrying like insects. The rifles in their hands were remarkably still and steady, and each soldier was little more than the moving parts of his weapon. Half of Walker’s contingent entered the mist from each side of the tributary. While the scientists watched from bobbing rafts, the other half zeroed in on the waterfall, ready to pump more rounds into it.
Several minutes passed. A man reappeared, glistening in his amphibian neoprene. He shouted, “All clear!”
“What about the cylinders?” Walker yelled to him.
The soldier said, “In here,” and Walker and the rest of his men got off their bellies and went into the waterfall without a word to their charges.
At last the scientists paddled back to shore. Some were terrified that more hadals might come leaping at them, or shied from the blood they’d seen and stayed in the rafts. A handful went to the dead hadal for a closer look, Ali included. Little remained. The bullets had all but turned the creature inside out.
Ali went with five others inside the waterfall. Since the spray had already soaked her hair, she didn’t bother pulling her hood up. There was the slightest of trails hugging the wall, and as they squeezed along it above the pool of water, the waterfall became a veil backlit by the spotlights. Deeper, the spotlights turned to liquid orbs, and finally the waterfall was too thick to allow any light. Its noise muffled all sounds from the outside. Ali turned on her headlamp and kept edging between the water and rock. They reached a globular grotto inside.
All three of their missing cylinders lay by the entrance, heaped with hundreds of yards of thick cable. Fully loaded, each of the cylinders weighed over four tons; it must have taken enormous effort to drag them into this hiding place. Two of the cables, Ali saw, ran upward into the waterfall. That suggested their communications lines might be intact.
Under the badly abraded black stencil declaring HELIOS, the name NASA surfaced in ghostly letters along one cylinder’s side. The outer sheathing was pitted and gashed with bullet and shrapnel tracks, but was unruptured. A soldier kept clearing his eyes of water spray as he worked on opening its hatch door. The hadals had tried to force entry with boulders and iron rods, but had only managed to break off many of the thick bolts. The hatches were all in place. Ali climbed around the mass of cables and saw that the first body she came across was Walker’s volunteer, the big teenager from San Antonio. They had torn his throat out by hand. She braced herself for more carnage.
Deeper in, Walker’s men had laid chemical lights on ledges and stuck them into niches in the wall, casting a green pall through the entire chamber. Smoke from explosions hung like wet fog. The soldiers were circulating among the dead. Ali blinked quickly at the dense piles of bone and flesh, and raised her eyes to quell her sickness. There were many bodies in here. In the green light, the walls appeared to be sweating with humidity, but the sheen was blood. It was everywhere.
“Watch the broken bone ends,” one of the physicians warned her. “Poke yourself on one of those, you could get a nasty infection.”
Ali forced herself to look down, if only to place her feet. Limbs lay scattered. The worst of it were the hands, beseeching.
Several soldiers glanced over at Ali with great hollows for eyes. Not a trace of their earlier zeal remained. She was drawn to their contrition, thinking they were appalled by their deed. But it was more awful than that.
“They’re all females,” muttered a soldier.
“And kids.”
Ali had to look closer than she wanted to, past the painted flesh and the beetle-browed faces. Only minutes before, they had been a roomful of people outwaiting the humans outside. She had to look for their sex and their fragility, and what the soldiers said was true.
“Bitches and spawn,” one jived, trying to vitiate the shame. But there were no takers. They didn’t like this: no weapons, not a single male. A slaughter of innocents.
Above them, a soldier appeared at the mouth of a secondary chamber and began waving his arm and shouting. It was impossible to hear him with the waterfall behind them, but Ali overheard a nearby walkie-talkie. “Sierra Victor, this is Fox One. Colonel,” an excited voice reported, “we got live ones. What you want us to do?”
Ali saw Walker straighten from among the dead and reach for his own walkie-talkie, and she guessed what his command would be. He had already lost three men. For the sake of conservation, he would simply order the soldiers to finish the job. Walker lifted the walkie-talkie to his mouth. “Wait!” she yelled, and rushed down to him.
She could tell he knew her intent. “Sister,” he greeted.
“Don’t do it,” she said.
“You should go outside with the others,” he told her.
“No.”
Their impasse might have escalated. But at that moment a man bellowed from the entrance and everyone turned. It was Ike, standing on top of the cylinders, the water sheeting from him. “What have you done?”
Hands lifted in disbelief, he descended from the cylinders. They watched him come to a body, and kneel. He set his shotgun to one side. Grasping the shoulders, he lifted her partway from the ground and the head lolled, white hair kinky around the horns, teeth bared. The teeth had been filed to sharp points.
Ike was gentle. He brought the head upright and looked at the face and smelled behind her ear, then laid her flat again.
Next to her lay a hadal infant, and he carefully cradled it in his arms as if it were still alive. “You have no idea what you’ve done,” he groaned to the mercenaries.
“This is Sierra Victor, Fox One,” Walker murmured into the walkie-talkie. His hand was cupped to it, but Ali heard him. “Open fire.”
“What are you doing?” she cried, and grabbed the radio from the colonel. Ali fumbled with the transmit button. “You hold your fire,” she said, and added, “damn you.”
She let go of the transmit button and they heard a small confused voice saying, “Colonel, repeat. Colonel?” Walker made no effort to wrestle back the walkie-talkie.
“We didn’t know,” one boy said to Ike.
“You weren’t here, man,” said another. “You didn’t see what they done to Tommy. And look at A-Z. Tore his throat out.”
“What did you expect?” Ike roared at them. They grew subdued. Ali had never seen him ferocious
before. And where did this voice come from?
“Their babies?” Ike thundered.
They backed away from him.
“They were hadals,” said Walker.
“Yes,” Ike said. He held the shattered child at arm’s length and searched the small face, then laid the body against his heart. He picked up his shotgun and stood.
“They’re beasts, Crockett.” Walker spoke loudly for everyone to hear. “They cost us three men. They stole our cylinders and would have opened them. If we hadn’t attacked, they would have looted our supplies and that would have been our death.”
“This,” Ike said, clutching the dead child, “this is your death.”
“We are deep beyond—” Walker started.
“You’ve killed yourselves,” Ike said more quietly.
“Enough, Crockett. Join the human race. Or go back to them.”
The walkie-talkie in Ali’s hand spoke up again, and she held it up for Ike to hear as well. “They’re starting to move around. Say again. Should we open fire or not?”
Walker snatched the walkie-talkie from her, but Ike was equally fast. Without hesitation, he pointed his sawed-off gun at the colonel’s face. Walker’s mouth twisted in his beard.
“Give me that baby,” she said to Ike, and took the little body. “We have other things to do. Don’t we, Colonel?”
Walker looked at her, eyes huge with rage. He made up his mind. “Hold your fire,” he snarled into the walkie-talkie. “We’re coming for a look.”
The stone floor buckled underfoot, and she had to skirt deep plunge holes. They climbed a slick incline to the higher, smaller chamber. The deadly hail of gunfire had not reached this far except as ricochets, which had done damage enough. They passed several more bodies before gaining the high floor.
The survivors were huddled in a pocket, and they seemed able to feel the light beams against their skin. Ali counted seven of them, two very young. They were mute, moving only when someone trained a headlamp on them for too long. “No more?” Ike asked the soldiers guarding them.