The Descent

by Jeff Long

  “That’s not an option,” de l’Orme said. “Or it won’t be soon.”

  They all turned to him.

  “Unless he brings up a sample population of hadals, there won’t be any hadals to sample soon. Isn’t that the idea, Mr. Cooper?”

  “No idea what you’re talking about,” Cooper said.

  “Perhaps you could tell us about the contagion,” de l’Orme said. “Prion-9.”

  Cooper appraised the little archaeologist. “I know what you know. We’ve learned that prion capsules are being planted along the expedition’s route. But Helios has nothing to do with it. I won’t ask you to believe me. I don’t care if you do or not. It’s my people who are at risk down there. My expedition. Except for your spy,” he added, “the von Schade woman.”

  January’s expression hardened.

  “What’s this about a contagion?” Eva demanded.

  “I didn’t want to worry you any more,” Cooper said to his wife. “A deranged ex-soldier has attached himself to the expedition. He’s lacing the route with a synthetic virus.”

  “My God,” his wife whispered.

  “Despicable,” hissed de l’Orme.

  “What was that?” Cooper said.

  De l’Orme smiled. “The individual planting this contagion is named Shoat. Your son, madam.”

  “My son?”

  “He’s being used to deliver a synthetic plague. And your husband sent him.”

  The assembly gawked at the archaeologist. Even Thomas was dismayed.

  “Absurd,” Cooper blustered.

  De l’Orme pointed in the direction of Cooper’s son. “He told me.”

  “I’ve never seen you in my life,” Hamilton replied.

  “True as it goes, no more than I’ve seen you.” De l’Orme grinned. “But you told me.”

  “Lunatic,” Hamilton said under his breath.

  “Ach,” chided de l’Orme. “We’ve talked about that sharp tongue before. No more humiliating the wife at cocktail parties. And no more fists with her. We agreed. You were to work on governing your anger, yes? Containing your tide.”

  The young man drained gray beneath his Aspen tan.

  De l’Orme addressed them all. “Over the years, I’ve noticed that the birth of a son sometimes tempers a wild young man. It can even mark his return to the faith. So when I heard of the baptism of Hamilton’s son, your grandson, Mr. Cooper, I had an idea. Sure enough, it seems fatherhood changed our spoiled young sinner. He has thrown himself onto the Rock with that special fervor of a lost man found. For over a year now, Hamilton’s kept away from his heroin chic and his expensive call girls and he has cleansed himself weekly.”

  “What are you talking about?” Cooper demanded.

  “Young Cooper has developed a taste for the holy wafer,” said de l’Orme. “And you know the rules. No Eucharist before confession.”

  Cooper turned to his son with horror. “You spoke to the Church?”

  Hamilton looked afflicted. “I was speaking to God.”

  De l’Orme tipped his head with mock acknowledgment.

  “But what about the confidence between penitent and confessor?” marveled Vera.

  “I left the cloth long ago,” de l’Orme explained. “But I kept my friendships and personal connections. It was simply a matter of anticipating this venal man’s mea culpa, and then installing myself in a small booth on certain occasions. Oh, we’ve talked for hours, Hamilton and I. I’ve learned much about the House of Cooper. Much.”

  The elder Cooper sat back. He stared out the skybox window into the night, or at his own image in the glass.

  De l’Orme continued. “The Helios strategy is this: for disease to rage through the interior in one vast hurricane of death. The corporate entity can then occupy a world conveniently sterilized of all its nasty life-forms. Including hadals. That’s why Helios is preserving a population up here. Because they’re about to kill everything that breathes down below.”

  “But why?” Thomas asked.

  De l’Orme gave the answer. “History,” he said. “Mr. Cooper has read his history. Conquest is always the same. It’s much easier to occupy an empty paradise.”

  Cooper gave a sulfurous glance at his foolish son.

  De l’Orme continued. “Helios obtained the Prion-9 from a laboratory under contract to the Army. Who obtained it for Helios is blatantly obvious. General Sandwell, it was also you who recruited the soldier Dwight Crockett. That’s how Montgomery Shoat could be immunized under a scapegoat’s name.”

  “Monty’s been immunized?” his mother said.

  “Your son is safe,” said de l’Orme. “At least from the disease.”

  “Who controls the release of the contagion?” Vera asked Cooper. “You?”

  Cooper snorted.

  “Montgomery Shoat,” guessed Thomas. “But how? Are the capsules programmed to release automatically? Is there a remote control? A code? How does it happen?”

  “You mean how can you stop it?”

  “For God’s sake, tell them,” Eva said to her husband.

  “It can’t be stopped,” Cooper said. “That’s the whole truth. Montgomery coded the trigger device himself. He’s the only one who knows what the electronic sequence is. It’s a mutual safeguard. This way his mission can’t be compromised by anyone. Not you,” he said to Thomas, then added bitterly, “and not an indiscreet son. And we, in our haste, can’t trigger the virus before he determines the time is ripe.”

  “Then we have to find him,” said Vera. “Give us your map. Show us where the cylinders have been placed.”

  “This?” Cooper slapped at the map. “It’s merely a projection. Only the people on the expedition know where they’ve been. Even if you could find him, I doubt Montgomery remembers where he placed the capsules along a ten-thousand-mile path.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Several hundred. We mean to be thorough.”

  “And trigger devices?”

  “Just the one.”

  Thomas studied Cooper’s face.

  “What is your calendar for genocide? When does Shoat mean to start the plague?”

  “I told you. When he decides the time is ripe. Naturally, he’ll need the expedition’s services for as long as possible. They provide him transportation, food, company, protection. He’s not suicidal. He’s not a kamikaze. He insisted on being vaccinated. He has a strong sense of survival. And ambition. I’m sure, when the time comes, he won’t hesitate to finish the job.”

  “Even if it means killing off the expedition. Your people. And every human colonist and miner and soldier down there.”

  Cooper did not answer.

  “What have you made our son into?” Eva said.

  Cooper looked at her. “Your son,” he said.

  “Monster,” she whispered back.

  Just then, Vera said, “Look.”

  She was staring at the video screen. The hadal had reached the piled sewer pipes. He was pulling himself upright before the dark, round openings. The video screen showed him forty feet tall. His bare rib cage, scored with old wounds and ritual markings, bucked in quick, pumping waves. The creature was vocalizing, that much was evident.

  Sandwell went over and rotated the round button on the wall. The audio feed came over the speakers. It sounded like the hooting and huffing of a captured ape.

  A face had appeared at the mouth of one sewer pipe. Then other faces surfaced at other openings. Crusted and wet with their own filth, they came out from their cement burrows and fell upon the ground at the hadal’s feet. There were only nine or ten of them left.

  The hadal’s voice changed. He was singing now, or praying. Beseeching or offering. To his own image, of all things. To the video screen. The others, women and their young, began to ululate.

  “What’s he doing?”

  Still singing, the hadal took a child from one of the females and cradled it in his arms. He made a sacramental motion, as if tracing ashes on its head or throat, it was hard
to see. Then he set the child aside and took another that was held up to him and repeated his gesture. “He’s cutting their throats,” January realized.

  “What!”

  “Is that a knife?”

  “Glass,” said Foley.

  “Where did he get glass?” Cooper roared at the general.

  An emaciated female stood before the butcher hadal. She cast her head back and opened her arms wide and it took her killer a minute to find the artery and saw her throat open. A second female stood.

  Voice by voice, their song was dying.

  “Stop him,” Cooper shouted at Sandwell. “The bastard’s killing off my pack.”

  But it was too late.

  Love is duty. He took in the crook of his arm his own son, as cold as a pebble. He cried out the name of the messiah. Weeping, he made the cut and held his final child while it bled down his breast. At last he was free to join his own blood with theirs.

  BOOK THREE

  GRACE

  Inter Babiloniam et

  Jerusalem nulla pax est sed

  guerra continua.…

  Between Babylon and

  Jerusalem there is no peace,

  but continual war.…

  —ST. BERNARD, The Sermons

  21

  MAROONED

  THE SEA, 6,000 FATHOMS

  No one had ever dreamed such a place.

  The geologists had spoken about ancient paleo-oceans buried beneath the continents, but only as hypothetical explanations for the earth’s wandering poles and gravity anomalies. The paleo-oceans were mathematical fancies. This was real.

  Abruptly—on October 22—it was there, motionless, calm. Men and women who had been racing downriver for their lives stopped. They climbed from their rafts and joined comrades standing agape upon the pewter-colored sand. The water spread before them, an enormous flat crescent. The slightest of waves licked at the shore. The surface was smooth. Their lights skimmed from it.

  They had no idea the shape or size of the water body. They sent their laser beams pulsing upward, searching for a ceiling that finally measured a half-mile overhead. As for the length of the sea, the surface bent. All they could say with certainty was that the horizon lay twenty miles distant, with no obstructions in between and no end in sight.

  The path split right and left around the sea. No one knew which led where. “There’s Walker’s footprints,” someone said, and they followed them.

  Farther down the beach, they found their fourth cache. Side by side, the three cylinders lay as neat as merchandise. Walker’s men had reached the site hours earlier and stockpiled the contents within a makeshift firebase. Sand had been heaped into a circular berm with entrenching shovels. Machine guns were trained on fields of fire.

  The scientists approached on foot. One of the mercenaries came out and put a hand up. “That’s close enough,” he said.

  “But it’s us,” a woman said.

  Walker appeared. “The depot is off limits,” he informed them.

  “You can’t do that,” someone shouted.

  “We’re in a state of high alert,” Walker said. “Our highest priority is the protection of food and supplies. If we were attacked and you were inside our perimeter, there would be chaos. This is the wisest course. We’ve located a campsite for you on the opposite side of that rock fall over there. The quartermaster has issued your rations and mail.”

  “I need to see the girl,” Ali said.

  “Off limits, I’m afraid,” Walker said. “She’s been classified a military asset.”

  The way he said it was odd, even for Walker. “Who’s classified her?” Ali asked.

  “Classified.” Walker blinked. “She has valuable information about the terrain.”

  “But she speaks hadal dialect.”

  “I plan to teach her English.”

  “That will take too long. We can help, Ike and me. I’ve assembled glossaries before.” This was her chance to dig into the raw language. “Thank you for your enthusiasm, Sister.”

  Walker pointed at twenty bubble-wrapped bottles lying in the sand. “Helios sent whiskey. Drink it or pour it out. Either way, it stays here. We’re not taking liquid weight with us.”

  Only afterward would the scientists realize the whiskey was part of Walker’s plan. That night they sulked and drank. Their estrangement from the mercenaries had been building for months. The massacre had made the divide even wider. Now they were two camps. The bottles passed freely.

  “We’re ninety-eight-pound weaklings down here,” someone complained.

  “How much more can we take?” a woman asked. “By God, I’m ready to go home,” Gitner announced.

  Ali saw the mood and decided to stay clear of it. The group was pungent with fear and grief and confusion. She went looking for Ike to share thoughts, only to find him propped among the rocks with his own bottle. Walker had turned him loose, though without his guns. She was mildly disappointed in Ike. Stripped of his weapons, he seemed impotent, more dependent on his ability to commit mayhem than was right. “What are you drinking for?” she demanded. “Tonight of all nights.”

  “What’s wrong with tonight?” he said.

  “We’re coming apart. Look around.”

  In the distance, Walker’s militia had set up strobe lights to defend their walls. In the foreground, in staccato silhouette, drunken dancers were doing dance moves and shedding their clothes. But there was no music. You could hear arguing and despair and lovers grinding each other into the hard sand. It sounded like August in a ghetto.

  “We were too big to start with,” Ike commented.

  Ali stared at him. “You’re not concerned?”

  He tipped the bottle, wiped his mouth.

  “Sometimes you just have to go with it,” he said.

  “Don’t give up on us, Ike.”

  He looked away.

  Ali wandered to an isolated spot midway between the two camps and went to sleep.

  In the middle of the night, she was awakened by a hand clamped across her mouth.

  “Sister,” a man whispered.

  She felt a heavy bundle thrust into her hands.

  “Hide it.”

  He left before Ali could say a word.

  Ali laid the bundle beside her and unfolded it. She felt through the contents with her hands: a rifle and pistol, three knives, a sawed-off shotgun that could only belong to Ike, and boxes of ammunition. Forbidden fruit. Her visitor could only have been a soldier, and she felt certain it was one of the burned ones Ike had brought to safety. But why the guns?

  Fearful that Walker was putting her through some kind of test, Ali almost returned the bundle of weapons to the fire base. She went to ask Ike’s opinion, but he had passed out. Finally she buried the shadowy inheritance beneath a cliff wall.

  Early in the morning, Ali woke to a phosphorescent sea fog blanketing the beach. In the quiet, she felt, rather than heard, footsteps padding through the sand. She stood and made out figures stealing through the fog, specters hauling treasure. As one came close, she saw it was a soldier, who gestured for her to be quiet and sit down. She knew him slightly, and for him had copied a short verse from Saint Teresa of Avila, her favorite mystic. This morning he didn’t meet her eyes.

  She sat down and stayed mute as the last of them filed past. They were headed toward the water, but even then she didn’t guess. It was only after a few minutes, when no one else appeared, that she got up and walked to the shoreline and saw their lights dwindling smoothly across the still black sea.

  She thought Walker must have sent out a dawn reconnaissance of some kind. But there were no rafts left on the sand. Ali walked back and forth, looking for their boats, sure she had misplaced their location. The pontoon tracks were clear, though. The rafts had all been taken.

  “Wait,” she called after the lights. “Hello.”

  It was an absurd mistake. They had forgotten her.

  But if it was a mistake, why had that soldier motioned her to sit down a
gain? It was part of a plan, she realized. They had meant to leave her.

  The shock emptied her.

  She’d been left.

  Marooned.

  Ali’s sense of loss was immediate and overpowering, similar to that time, long ago, when a sheriff’s deputy had come to her house to break the news of her parents’ accident.

  The sound of coughing reached through the fog, and the full truth came to her. She had not been abandoned alone. Walker had forsaken everyone not under his immediate command.

  Tripping in the sand, she rushed across the beach and found the scientists scattered where their debauch had dropped them, still asleep. They woke reluctantly, and refused to believe her. Five minutes later, as they stood on the edge of the sea, where their rafts had been lying, the awful fact seeped in.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” roared Gitner.

  “They’ve stranded us? Where’s Shoat? He’d better have an explanation.” But Shoat was gone, too. And the feral girl.

  “This can’t be happening.”

  Ali watched their reactions as extensions of herself. She felt numb. Enraged. Paralyzed. Like her friends and comrades, she wanted to shout and kick at the sand and fall on her back. The treachery was beyond belief.

  “Why have they done this?” someone cried. “They must have left a note. An explanation.”

  “Listen to you,” Gitner jeered. “You sound like teenagers who just got jilted. This is business, people. A race for survival. Walker just jettisoned a bunch of empty stomachs. I’m surprised he didn’t do it sooner.”

  Ike came over from the cache site with a piece of paper in one hand, and Ali saw a row of numbers on it. “Walker left a portion of the food and medicine. But the communications line is destroyed. And they took all their weapons.”

  “They’ve left us here like a speed bump,” someone cried. “A sacrificial offering to the hadals.”

  Ali grabbed Ike’s arm, and her expression made them pause. Suddenly her visitor in the middle of the night made sense. “Do you believe in karma?” she asked Ike, and they followed her to the buried blanket of guns and knives. It took less than a minute to dig it out. Then it took an hour to argue about who got which of the weapons.