by Jeff Long
O’Ryan: “What about the missing children?”
Von Schade: “I don’t understand.”
O’Ryan: “It’s not a difficult question. The children. What about them?”
Von Schade: “I would do anything to help get them back.”
O’Ryan: “Anything, you say?”
Von Schade: “That’s what I said.”
O’Ryan and the general trade a look. They seem to share some deep secret. Then O’Ryan faces the camera with the bulldog scowl that is his trademark.
O’Ryan: “Thank you for taking the time to join us, Dr. Von Schade. Now my next guest is…”
ARTIFACTS
THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS TO THE NATION—NOVEMBER 1
“I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat. I ask you to live your lives and hug your children.
“We’ll go back to our lives and routines, and that is good. Even grief recedes with time and grace. But our resolve must not pass. Each of us will remember what happened and to whom it happened. We will remember the moment the news came, where we were and what we were doing.
“Some speak of an age of terror. I know there are struggles ahead and dangers to face. But this country will define our times, not be defined by them. Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war.
“Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.
“Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm Twenty-three: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.’
“Thank you. Good night, and God bless America.”
9
NAVAL AIR STATION, WHIDBEY ISLAND, WASHINGTON, FIVE HOURS LATER
Ali hustled through the corridors behind her escort. Her hair was wet. A helicopter had delivered her here through a raging storm. Even deep inside this underground facility, she could hear the wind howling. They came to another security check and more guards with rifles. The doors opened upon more doors.
General Lancing was waiting for her, the same uniformed bully she’d just sparred with on television. He stuck out a big paw. “Thank you for coming, Dr. Von Schade.”
She shook hands warily. He seemed different from the fire-breathing warhorse who had race-baited her on The Rob O’Ryan True News Hour. The trademark cigar was nowhere in sight. He looked intelligent and full of good cheer.
“I have to tell you, General, I had misgivings when you called for my help.”
“You’re talking about O’Ryan’s circus for the masses,” he said. “No hard feelings, I hope. His viewers like red meat, I went along and gave them red meat. I thought that was very sporting of you to volunteer to be his daily goat.”
“You make it sound like a game.”
“More like Kabuki theater,” the general said. “Lots of ritual. O’Ryan’s no dummy. He plays it for all it’s worth, red versus blue, sage patriots versus spineless liberals, whatever it takes to stay on the air. We need his supernationalism at times. Just like we need your insights now.”
“So I’m not here to be burned at the stake?”
“Christ no. We need you. This is for the children.”
It wasn’t hard to guess. Her strength was linguistics. They would have some hadal artifact for her to translate. Or to try and translate. It would have been easier if they had flown it down to her archives. Her glossary was not exactly enormous, but she had a foothold with the words and symbols. Someday a Rosetta stone might turn up to bridge the gap between the writings left by the hadal empire and the modern languages of man. Until then, she was it.
“I’ll do what I can,” she said.
The general paused at the door. “For the children,” he said again, and opened the door. The smell hit her. Feces, urine, and Lysol. And hadal. Live hadal.
Inside was a darkened room with a table and chairs and a one-way mirror window. Immediately she understood. This was not about documents or artifacts.
The window looked upon a white room. A monster lay strapped to a hospital bed. A human, she told herself. Homo hadalis. But deeper instincts prevailed: monster.
The creature looked all the more grotesque lying on top of the white sheets. It was like a wild animal that has broken into your house and can’t find its way out again. He, not it, Ali corrected herself. He was rotting from the hands and feet inward, as if the surface world were a cancer upon him.
“We captured it along the coast south of Portland last night,” the general told her.
She had seen hadals in all shapes and sizes during her year with the Helios expedition. Some had vestigial wings or gills. Some had the long, climbing arms of ape ancestors, perfect for the vertical shafts of the Subterrain. Some were half the size of humans, possibly the result of long isolation and poor diet. Some nested in pockets in the ceilings of caves.
Biologists and geneticists were at their wits’ ends trying to explain the outrageous variation. Mutation and genetic drift fell inside the scientific norm. Wings and gills did not. The evangelical crowd gleefully proclaimed that the hadal bestiary proved evolutionary theory was a false doctrine. According to them, the hadals were the living progeny of rebel angels, and their deformed bodies were God’s punishment.
His rib cage was barely moving. He cast a curious red shadow on the sheets.
“What’s the bandage for?” It ran across his abdomen. Wires and tubes snaked out from the bandage.
“A pair of fishermen spotted him in the rocks. They thought he was a sea lion, which you’re not supposed to shoot. But the sea lions eat the lobsters from their traps, so they opened up on him. He’s lucky they were drunk and terrible shots. We collected fifty brass shells from the boat floor, but only one round hit him.”
“Were any of the children with him?”
“No. But we backtracked and found a storm drain with a tunnel bored from below. And this.” He held up a clear plastic bag with a child’s muddy pajama bottoms. They were decorated with Pooh bear.
Ali had bought the whole series for Maggie. Time ran out before they’d managed to finish the first book.
Ali had a pretty fair idea what came next.
The general placed the pajamas next to a book. It was the only other thing on the table. Army Field Manual 34-52.3, Revised Edition, it said, Interrogation Procedures.
“Why me?” she said. “You must have people who can do this.”
“Ten years ago, yes. But after the plague, we dropped it from the language school. We thought they were all dead. That leaves you as the expert. I don’t know where else to turn. We need your talents.”
In normal times, she would have walked away. In normal times, they wouldn’t have asked her to come in the first place. These weren’t normal times.
She could have put on airs and made him at least court her participation. But they were in a hurry, and she was old enough to know her heart and mind. Ali made her decision on the spot. “For the children,” she said.
“We need to know where he came from, how he and his bunch managed to escape the plague, how many of them are down there, their organization, the nature of their leadership, their route of passage, their weaponry, their grand strategy. Is this the beginning of a larger campaign? What do they want? Where are they going with the children?”
The interrogation manual sat there like a family Bible, prominent and austere. “Why is this here?”
“To show you that we are civilized. We understand limits. We have rules. But none apply to him today.”
“What if I say no?”
“Frankly, I’ll be surprised if you say yes. I know how ugly this must be to you.”
“I could go straight to the press. I could expose this whole operation.”
“After last night, do you think anyone would care?”
He was right. For eons these creatures had been boiling up from the depths and dragging poor souls deep and doing unspeakable things to them. And, yes, people would cheer every terrible thing the military might do today or tomorrow, in this building or down below. None of which meant she had to participate in torture.
“I care.”
“That is precisely why you’re here. You know them. You’ve studied them. You lived with them.”
She looked for bruises or burn marks on the hadal’s body, but there were none, only the corruption of disease and his scars and the pale arabesques inking his skin. And the wires coming from the bandage. “What have you been doing to him?” she asked.
“Training him. He needs to understand this is not under his control. That’s the key to any successful interview.”
“Interview?”
“We ask the questions. He answers them.”
“Those look like electric wires.”
“To monitor his vital signs.”
“How are you training him?”
“He was injected with a paralytic agent. His muscles quit working. He stopped breathing. He was fully conscious, he just couldn’t move. Not for the life of him. We had to breathe for him. It’s an old Mossad technique. After a few minutes, we restarted his body with a counteragent. It’s harmless, but horrifying. People will do anything not to go through it twice.”
“They’re human, General.”
“I don’t care if he’s my long-lost kid brother. He has struck at the heart of our country, kidnapped our children, and murdered our neighbors. The nation is under siege.” The general tossed another plastic Baggie on the table. It held a strip of meat. “We found that on him. Beef jerky. Except it’s not beef. We’re doing a DNA analysis to try and identify who it came from.”
They were wrong if they thought she shocked so easily. “I know what it is,” she said. “That was my food for twenty days straight. High in protein. Depending on the cut, we taste a little like chicken or pork.”
He nodded. He got it. She wasn’t a weak sister. Her objections weren’t squeamish or prissy. “I need your answer,” he said. “The clock is ticking. We’ve got teams down there looking for the children right now, but there’s not a trace. The hadals collapsed the tunnels behind them. We’re digging as fast as we can, and it’s not fast enough. The children are sinking farther and farther away. The trail is getting colder by the minute.”
“I thought the Chinese ambassador came out with a warning this morning. Didn’t he tell us not to send in troops?”
“He did. And the Great Game goes on. They want the Interior. We want it. The stakes are high, and everything gets politicized. We understand that. But these are our children who were stolen, not theirs. We’ve got operators sniffing everywhere down there. The problem is, the Chinese know we’re breaching the accords. In our shoes, they’d be doing the same thing. So their guys are looking for our guys, and if they bump into each other, the shit will hit the fan. The longer the search goes on, the deeper we go, the more we risk hot contact with the People’s Republic. That’s why we need to pinpoint exactly where to go so we can make the recovery and get the hell out before it turns into a shooting war.”
Ali looked through the glass at the prisoner. Some people thought she’d created her institute because of the Stockholm syndrome, a victim identifying with her hadal captors. Or as penance for having been part of the same Helios expedition that, unknown to her, had carried the plague into the hadals’ midst. Or for mystical, New Age, lost Atlantis reasons. In fact, part of her devotion to their dead civilization was a gut reaction to the lunacy of nations and armies and wars, the very lunacy now dragging America and China to the brink of cataclysm.
At its height nine thousand years ago, the hadal empire had been a sort of dark paradise. The glyphs and stone carvings suggested a reign of peace spanning more than three millennia. Ali eyed the monstrous creature strapped in the hospital bed. The hadals had become her Martians, in a sense. Their absence had let her imagination run free. She could make of them a tranquil, if misshapen, race. Even now, in their decline, for all their bloody ways and hideous appearance, the hadals’ violence paled next to what mankind did to itself day in, day out.
“You can save him,” said the general.
“You’ll let him go?”
“His pain can stop. He can die in peace.”
She had her own nightmares to deal with, nightmares of her captivity, not unlike this hadal’s captivity, or the children’s, far from home and bound and being driven lower into their maze.
“All right,” she said.
For much of her life, well before she’d gone into the earth and come back out, she had been searching for the Word, that ancient moment that marked the birth of humanness. How ironic that her hunt for humanity was now leading her into a torture chamber. She had escaped the workers of hell, only to become one herself.
“For the children,” she whispered.
They wanted to outfit her like a surgeon, with paper clothes and a mask and latex gloves, but she refused. “He has leprosy,” the general said. “Don’t let the restraints and his missing fingers fool you. He spits. He bites. Nobody can get close without him acting up.”
“Do they wear masks and gowns?”
“Always.” Then he saw her point. “Very well. Do it your way.”
“Do you have a pen? A small ink marker would be best. And a mirror. And some food and water.”
The general spoke into an intercom. Ali bound her hair back. A minute later a Sharpie and a signal mirror appeared at the door. She went to the light from the window and began sketching tattoos onto her face.
She drew a virtual book around her eyes and mouth, picking and choosing her symbols. The hadal would be illiterate. They hadn’t been able to read their own language for centuries, if not eons. But the shape of the glyphs might comfort him.
On her forehead, she drew the back-to-back reversed symbols for day and night, and above that a snaking line for river. Each cheek got a spiral. If she was right, the spirals would mark her as a shaman, or a witch. The thin sideways diamond down the bridge of her nose implied distance or time. She chose an animal spirit for her chin, a subterranean fish. The priestess who has swum through time. On a whim, remembering the tunnel symbols on Saint Matthew Island last summer, she drew an aleph on her hand.
The general said nothing when she turned around. He had seen enough camouflage in his life not to react. That, or he expected weirdness from his academics. Or New Age from San Franciscans.
“I’ll go in alone,” she said.
“Not a chance.”
“He’s frightened enough.”
The general stared at her. “Your call then.”
An aide brought in an earbud so that the general could communicate with her. She felt like a G-man. “Testing, testing,” he said.
“Loud and clear,” she said.
“The room is miked. We’ll be able to hear every word you say. Talk to us. I’ll talk to you.” The general went to a small refrigerator in the corner. “Does it matter what kind of food it is?” The general held up someone’s lunch. It had a Quiznos sandwich, a cookie, and a little carton of milk.
“Meat,” she said, reaching for the sandwich and milk. On second thought, she gave back the sandwich and took the plastic Baggie with the strip of dried human jerky. The general opened his mouth to object, then closed it without a word. This was her show now.
They walked around to the cell’s door. The two MPs did a double take at her Maori-like ink job. “I’ll be watching through the window. If you need help…”
She left her shoes at the threshold and entered barefoot and alone. There was a familiar tan
g of hadal in the air, like buckskin dug up from dry soil. Stronger still was the stench of festering flesh. In medieval times, people compared leprosy to the smell of a male goat.
The prisoner turned his head slowly. His eyelid muscles had frozen open from nerve damage. His pink eyes focused as he rose up from their sedation, or from the mental hibernation she’d seen Ike use. Ike had learned the trick from his years as a captive, and she had seen for herself how the catnaps or meditation allowed him to go for days without sleep and still be fresh at the end.
Ali came to a halt and politely lowered her eyes, letting the hadal decide about her. Ike had taught her bits of their behavior and nature. Eye contact could be dangerous, unless invited. Silence was ideal. She waited. At last he made a small clicking noise with his tongue, signifying approval, at least for the moment. She looked up.
He was exhausted. They had been working him hard. The stomach wound was a death sentence. Now she saw that the red shadow of his body on the sheets came from sweat. He was sweating blood.
But his eyes brightened at the sight of her facial markings. Abruptly he stuck out his tongue, like in a doctor’s office. Ali returned the greeting.
Much of his monstrosity was due to maladies that would have been perfectly ordinary in the Dark Ages. His hands and feet were mere paddles, the digits eaten away. His nasal cavity was exposed. His scalp pulsed with a complex of blue veins. Polio had twisted his legs so badly that Ali wondered how he’d ever managed to reach the surface.
His skull had the flattened triangular shape—wide cheeks tapering up to the blunt crest—that distinguished descendants of H. erectus. The heavy, beetling brow, like a pair of binoculars fixed to his face, was also characteristic. But just as H. sapiens had developed beyond the primal template, H. hadalis carried his own look, one customized to the extremes of eternal night and the stone labyrinth.
It was easy to see why the fishermen had mistaken him for a sea lion. His skin was hairless and fishy pale, and the leprosy had trimmed away his ears, leaving a doglike profile with a long neck and little chin.