The Descent

by Jeff Long

  “Them. They tried to get away.” The man indicated another eleven or twelve, sprawled near a duct.

  The hadals kept their faces away from the light, and the mothers sheltered their young. Their flesh gleamed. The markings and scars undulated as their muscles shifted.

  “Are they fatties, or what?” a mercenary said to Walker.

  Several of the females were indeed obese. More correctly, they were steatopygic, with enormous surpluses of fat in their buttocks and breasts. To Ali’s eye, they were identical to Neolithic Venuses carved from stone or painted on walls. They were magnificent in their size and decoration, and their greased and plaited hair. Here and there, Ali caught sight of the apelike brows and low foreheads, and again it was hard to reconcile them as quite human.

  “These are sacred,” Ike said. “They’re consecrated.”

  “You make them sound like vestal virgins,” Walker scoffed.

  “It’s just the opposite. These are their breeders. The pregnant and new mothers. Their infants and children. They know their species is going extinct. These are their racial treasure. Once the women conceive, they’re brought into communal coveys like this. It’s like living in a harem.” He added, “Or a nunnery. They’re cared for and watched over and honored.”

  “Is there a point to this?”

  “Hadals are nomadic. They make seasonal rounds. When they move, each tribe keeps its women in the center of the line for protection.”

  “Some protection,” a soldier spoke up. “We just turned their next generation into hamburger.”

  Ike didn’t reply.

  “Wait,” said Walker. “You’re saying we intersected the middle of their line?” Ike nodded.

  “Which means the males are off to either end?”

  “Luck,” Ike said. “Bad luck. I don’t think we want to be here when they catch up.”

  “All right,” Walker said. “You’ve had your look. Let’s get this over with.”

  Instead, Ike walked into the midst of the hadals.

  Ali couldn’t hear Ike’s words distinctly, but heard the rise and fall of his tone and occasional tongue clicks. The females responded with surprise, and so did the soldiers aiming their rifles at them. Walker cut a glance at Ali, and suddenly she feared for Ike’s life. “If even one tries to run,” Walker told his men, “you are to open fire on the whole pack.”

  “But the Cap’s in there,” a boy said.

  “Full auto,” Walker warned grimly.

  Ali left Walker’s side and went out to Ike, placing herself in the line of fire. “Go back,” Ike whispered.

  “I’m not doing this for you,” she lied. “It’s for them.”

  Hands reached up to touch Ike and her. The palms were rough, the nails broken and encrusted. Ike hunkered among them, and Ali let different ones grab her hands and smell her. His claim mark was of special interest. One wall-eyed ancient held on to his arm. She stroked the scarified nodes and questioned him. When Ike answered her, she drew away with revulsion, it seemed. She whispered to the others, who grew agitated and scrambled to get distance from him. Still perched on his toes, Ike hung his head. He tried another few phrases, and their fright only increased.

  “What are you doing?” Ali asked. “What did you tell them?”

  “My hadal name,” said Ike.

  “But you said it was forbidden to speak it out loud.”

  “It was, until I left the People. I wanted to find out how bad things really are with me.”

  “They know you?”

  “They know about me.”

  From the hadals’ loathing, it was clear his reputation was odious. Even the children were afraid of him. “This isn’t good,” Ike said, eyeing the soldiers. “We can’t stay here. And if we leave—”

  The walkie-talkie announced that two of the cylinders had been opened and Shoat had a communications line in operation. Ali could see by his face that Walker wanted to be shed of this business. “Enough,” Walker said.

  “Just leave them,” Ali said to him.

  “I’m a man who lives by his word,” Walker replied. “It was your friend Crockett who declared the policy. No live catches.”

  “Colonel,” Ike said, “killing the hadal is one thing. But I’ve got a human in this bunch. Shoot her down, and that would be murder, wouldn’t it?”

  Ali thought he was bluffing to buy time, or else talking about her. But he reached among the hadals and grabbed the arm of a creature who had been hiding behind the others. She gave a shriek and bit him, but Ike dragged her out, pinning her arms and hoisting her free. Ali had no chance to see her. The others clutched at her legs, and Ike kicked at them and backed away. “Move,” he grunted to Ali. “Run while we can.”

  The hadals set up a piercing wail. Ali was certain they were about to rush after Ike and whatever it was he’d just kidnapped from them. “Move,” shouted Ike, and she ran to the soldiers, who opened a way for her and Ike and his catch. She tripped and fell. Ike stumbled across her.

  “In the name of the Father,” Walker intoned. “Light ’em up.”

  The soldiers opened fire on the survivors. The noise was deafening in the small chamber, and Ali closed her ears with both palms. The killing lasted less than twelve seconds. There were a few mop-up shots, then the gunfire was over and the room stank with gas vented from their guns. Ali heard a woman still screaming, and thought they’d wounded one or were torturing her.

  “This way.” A soldier grabbed her. He was taking care of her. She knew him from his confessions, Calvino, an Italian stallion. His sins had been a pregnant girlfriend, a theft, little more.

  “But Ike—”

  “The colonel said now,” he said, and Ali saw a brawl in progress against the back wall, with Ike near the bottom of the pile. In the corner lay their little massacre. All for nothing, she thought, and let the soldier lead her away, back to the grotto floor, out through the waterfall.

  For the next few hours, Ali waited by the mist. Each time a soldier came out, she questioned him about Ike. They avoided her eyes and gave no answer.

  At last Walker emerged. Behind him—guarded by mercenaries—came Ike’s save.

  They had bound the female’s arms with rope and taped her mouth shut. Her hands were covered with duct tape, and she had wire wrapped around her neck as a leash. Her legs were shackled with comm-line cable. She’d been cut and was smeared with gore.

  For all that, she walked like a queen, as naked as blue sky.

  She was not a hadal, Ali realized.

  Below the neck, most Homos of the last hundred thousand years were virtually the same, Ali knew. She focused on the cranial shape. It was modern and sapiens. Except for that, there was little else to pronounce the girl’s humanness.

  Every eye watched the girl. She didn’t care. They could look. They could touch. They could do anything. Every glance, every insult made her more superior to them.

  Her tattoos put Ike’s to shame. They were blinding, literally. You could barely see her body for the details. The pigment that had been worked into her skin all but obliterated its natural brown color. Her belly was round, and her breasts were fat, and she shook them at one soldier, who pumped his head in and out with a downtown rhythm. There was no indication she spoke English or any other human language.

  From head to toe, she had been embellished and engraved and bejeweled and painted. Every toe was circled with a thin iron ring. Her feet were flat from a lifetime of walking barefoot. Ali guessed she was no more than fourteen.

  “We have been advised by our scout,” Walker said, “that this child may know what lies ahead. We leave. Immediately.”

  Excluding the loss of Walker’s three mercenaries, it seemed they had escaped without consequence from Cache III. They had acquired another six weeks of food and batteries, and had made a hasty uplink with the surface to let Helios know they were still in motion.

  There was no sign of pursuit, despite which Ike pushed them thirty hours without a camp. He scared them on. “
We’re being hunted,” he warned.

  Several of the scientists who wanted to resign and return the way they’d come, chief among them Gitner, accused Ike of collaborating with Shoat to force them deeper.

  Ike shrugged and told them to do whatever they wanted.

  No one dared cross that line.

  On October 2, a pair of mercenaries bringing up the rear vanished. Their absence was not noticed for twelve hours. Convinced the men had stolen a raft and were making a renegade bid to return home, Walker ordered five soldiers to track and capture them. Ike argued with him. What caused the colonel to reverse his order was not Ike, but a message over the walkie-talkie. The camp stilled, thinking the missing pair might be reporting in.

  “Maybe they just got lost,” one of the scientists suggested.

  Layers of rock garbled the transmission, but it was a British voice coming over the radio. “Someone made a mistake,” he told them. “You took my daughter.” The wild child made a noise in her throat.

  “Who is this?” Walker demanded.

  Ali knew. It was Molly’s midnight lover.

  Ike knew. It was the one who had led him into darkness once upon a time. Isaac had returned.

  The radio went silent.

  They cast downriver and did not make camp for a week.

  Every lion comes from its den,

  All the serpents bite;

  Darkness hovers, earth is silent,

  As their maker rests in lightland.

  —“The GREAT HYMN TO ATEN,” 1350 B.C.

  20

  DEAD SOULS

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  Headfirst, the hadal drew himself from the honeycomb of cave mouths. He panted feebly, starved, dizzy, rejecting his weakness. Rime coated the perfect round openings of concrete pipes. The fog was so cold.

  He could hear the sick and dying in the pyramided tunnels. The illness was as lethal as a sweep of plague or a poisoned stream or the venting of some rare gas through their arterial habitat.

  His eyes streamed pus. This air. This awful light. And the emptiness of these voices. The sounds were too far away and yet too close. There was too much space. Your thoughts had no resonance here. You imagined something and the idea vanished into nothingness.

  Like a leper, he draped hides over his head. Hunched inside the tattered skin curtains, he felt better, more able to see. The tribe needed him. The other adult males had been killed off. It was up to him. Weapons. Food. Water. Their search for the messiah would have to wait.

  Even given the strength to escape, he would not have tried, not while children and women still remained here alive. All together they would live. Or all together they would die. That was the way. It was up to him. Eighteen years old, and he was now their elder.

  Who was left? Only one of his wives was still breathing. Three of his children. An image of his infant son rose up—as cold as a pebble. Aiya. He made the heartbreak into rage.

  The bodies of his people lay where they had pitched or reeled or staggered. Their corruption was strange to see. It had to be something in this thin, strangling air. Or the light itself, like an acid. He had seen many corpses in his day, but none so quickly gone to rot this way. A single day had passed here, and not one could be salvaged for meat.

  Every few steps, he rested his hands on his knees to gasp for breath. He was a warrior and hunter. The ground was as flat as a pond top. Yet he could scarcely stand on his feet! What a terrible place this was. He moved on, stepping over a set of bones.

  He came to a ghostly white line and lifted his drape of rags, squinting into the fog. The line was too straight to be a game trail. The suggestion of a path raised his spirits. Maybe it led to water.

  He followed the line, pausing to rest, not daring to sit down. Sit and he would lie, lie and he would sleep and never wake again. He tried sniffing the currents of air, but it was too fouled with stench and odors to detect animals or water. And you couldn’t trust your ears for all the voices. It seemed like a legion of voices pouring down upon him. Not one word made sense. Dead souls, he decided.

  At its end, the line hit another line that ran right and left into the fog. Left, he chose, the sacred way. It had to lead somewhere. He came to more lines. He made more turns, some right, some left … in violation of the Way.

  At each turn he pissed his musk onto the ground. Just the same, he grew lost. How could this be? A labyrinth without walls? He berated himself. If only he had gone left at every turn as he had been taught, he would have inevitably circled to the source, or at least been able to retrace his path by backtracking right at every nexus. But now he had jumbled his directions. And in his weakened condition. And with the tribe’s welfare dependent on him alone. It was precisely times like these that the teachings were for.

  Still hopeful of finding water or meat or his own scents in the bizarre vegetation, he went on. His head throbbed. Nausea racked him. He tried licking the frost from the spiky vegetation, but the taste of salts and nitrogen overruled his thirst. The ground vibrated with constant movement.

  He did everything in his power to focus on the moment, to pace his advance and curtail distracting thoughts. But the luminous white line repeated itself so relentlessly, and the altitude was so severe, that his attention naturally meandered. In that way, he failed to see the broken bottle until it was halfway through the meat of his bare foot.

  He cut his shriek before it began. Not a sound came out. They’d schooled him well. He took the pain in. He accepted its presence like a gracious host. Pain could be his friend or it could be his enemy, depending on his self-control.

  Glass! He had prayed for a weapon, and here it was. Lowering his foot, he held the slippery bottle in his palms and examined it.

  It was an inferior grade, intended for commerce, not warfare. It didn’t have the sharpness of black obsidian, which splintered into razor shards, or the durability of glass crafted by hadal artisans. But it would do.

  Scarcely believing his good fortune, the young hadal threw back his rag-headdress and willed himself to see in the light. He opened to it, braced by the pain in his foot, marrying to the agony. Somehow he had to return to his tribe while there was still time. With his other senses scrambled by the foulness and tremors and voices in this place, he had to make himself see.

  Something happened, something profound. In casting off the rags covering his misshapen head, it was as if he broke the fog. All illusion fell away and he was left with this. On the fifty-yard line of Candlestick Park, the hadal found himself in a dark chalice at the pit of a universe of stars.

  The sight was a horror, even for one so brave. Sky! Stars!

  The legendary moon!

  He grunted, piglike, and twisted in circles. There were his caves in the near distance, and in them his people. There lay the skeletons of his kin. He started across the field, crippled, limping, eyes pinned to the ground, desperate. The vastness all around him sucked at his imagination and it seemed he must tumble upward into that vast cup spread overhead.

  It got worse. Floating above his head he saw himself. He was gigantic. He raised his right hand to ward off the colossal image, and the image raised its right hand to ward him off.

  In mortal terror, he howled. And the image howled.

  Vertigo toppled him.

  He writhed upon the cleated grass like a salted leech.

  “For the love of Christ,” General Sandwell said, turning from the stadium screen. “Now he’s dying. We’re going to end up with no males.”

  It was three in the morning and the air was rich with sea, even indoors. The creature’s howl lingered in the room, piped in over an expensive set of stereo speakers.

  Thomas and January and Foley, the industrialist, peered through night-vision binoculars at the sight. They looked like three captains as they stood at the broad plate-glass window of a skybox perched on the rim of Candlestick Park. The poor creature went on flopping about in the center of the arena far below them. De l’Orme politely sat to one side of
Vera’s wheelchair, gathering what he could from their conversation.

  For the last ten minutes they’d been following the hadal’s infrared image in the cold fog as he stole along the grid lines, left and right at ninety-degree angles, seduced by the linearity or chasing some primitive instinct or maybe gone mad. And then the fog had lifted and suddenly this. His actions made as little sense magnified on the live-action video screen as in the miniature reality below.

  “Is this their normal behavior?” January asked the general.

  “No. He’s bold. The rest have stuck close to the sewer pipes. This buck’s pushed the limit. All the way to the fifty.”

  “I’ve never seen one live.”

  “Look quick. Once the sun hits, he’s history.” The general was dressed tonight in a pair of pressed corduroys and a multi-blue flannel shirt. His Hush Puppies padded silently on the thick Berber. The Bulova was platinum. Retirement suited him, especially with Helios to land in.

  “You say they surrendered to you?”

  “First time we’ve seen anything like it. We had a patrol out at twenty-five hundred feet below the Sandias. Routine. Nothing ever comes up that high anymore. Then out of nowhere this bunch shows up. Several hundred of them.”

  “You told us there are only a couple dozen here.”

  “Correct. Like I said, we’ve never seen a mass surrender before. The troops reacted.”

  “Overreacted, wouldn’t you say?” said Vera.

  The general gave her his gallows dimple. “We had fifty-two when they first arrived. Less than twenty-nine at last count yesterday. Probably fewer by now.”

  “Twenty-five hundred feet?” said January. “But that’s practically the surface. Was it an invasion party?”

  “Nope. More like a herd movement. Females and young, mostly.”

  “But what were they doing up here?”

  “Not a clue. There’s no communicating with them. We’ve got the linguists and supercomputers working full speed, but it might not even be a real language they speak. For our purposes tonight, it’s just glorified gibberish. Emotional signing. Nothing informational. But the patrol leader did say the group was definitely heading for the surface. They were barely armed. It was almost like they were looking for something. Or someone.”