“Connor, light the rubber and give it to me. In fact all of you light up, we can try and build a cloud of thick rubber fumes around us as we go deeper in. Who knows how thick a mist we’re going to need to interfere with the imperative of the pheromones.”
They did as he told them, dousing the strips of rubber in the gasoline, while leaving a long enough piece to hold, and lit them. The air around them quickly turned noxious, the cloying stink of burning rubber obliterating every other scent. Cutter nodded.
“Good, come on,” He set off toward the heart room, the centre of the temple where the rituals and worship would have taken place.
They could taste the old blood on the dead air. It was more than merely stale, it was tainted.
The passageways divided into two very different paths; the path of the righteous, and the path of the sinister. On the left the walls were set with death masks and hideous effigies meant to frighten any intruder. The flames flickered across the masks, bringing them to vile life. Cramped as they were in the dank passage, their ragged breathing was amplified by the weird acoustics, and he could have forgiven any of them for thinking some unnatural life lurked still behind those blindly staring faces.
The right-hand passage was no less disturbing for the sounds that drifted up. There was the unmistakeable sound of snakes.
“Supay was the death god, no?” Cutter asked.
“Indeed,” Nando said.
“And not only death, he commanded a demon army,” Genaro offered.
“Sounds like a right little charmer,” Connor said. “Wouldn’t want to get on his bad side.”
“I think we already have,” Cutter observed. Then he held up a hand to shush the others. There was a peculiar high-pitched chittering sound that seemed to swell up around them. It set his flesh to creeping.
“Many of our temples were dedicated to more than one god; they would have chambers within the main body of the temple given over to Cocomama to ensure the health of the devotees, or to Ekkeko to ensure wealth and prosperity for those the temple served, and Inti, for his warming love without which all would fail. It was only on the solstices that this place opened into our ancestor’s Hell.”
“Well, that’s something, at least,” Connor said.
They edged slowly down the left-hand passage, deeper into the swallowing darkness. Cutter felt something crunch under his feet, and lowered the burning rubber to better light it. The dirt floor of the temple swarmed with the seething shapes of cockroaches and beetles.
“Oh, God,” Abby said, behind him.
He felt the insects swarming over his boots now that he stood still, then the ticklish creep of them against his calves as they began to climb. Instinctively, he reached down with the hand that was holding the burning rubber to brush them off; the heat of the flame singed the hairs to which the insects clung, as well as their thickened carapaces.
Connor muttered a curse under his breath.
“Come on,” Cutter said, walking through the heaving mass of bugs toward the arch that led to the next chamber.
As he crossed the threshold Cutter was surprised to find that the ground was clear of cockroaches and the other bugs that had infested the passage they had just left. It was almost as though something kept them from crossing over into the next room.
“It’s clear,” he called, urging the others to follow as quickly as possible. As he looked back, the flickering light revealed black writhing masses of centipedes and millipedes, army ants, black-carapaced beetles, beetles with mottled shells, larvae, enormous crickets and so many other insects it made his skin crawl. This was the most intensely claustrophobic place he had been in his life — and it was alive.
This new chamber was circular, an antechamber perhaps for the heart of the temple. The walls were marked with deeply scored en-gravings of phalluses and other signs of fertility. It seemed a curious juxtaposition to the other engravings he had noted alongside the death masks. But then, death and life, it was all cyclical. Why shouldn’t the bringer of death also be revered as one capable of providing life. The turn of the calendar was the death of one year and the birth of the new.
The others gathered in the chamber, the lights of the burning rubber conjuring those demons Genaro had talked of back on the surface.
The walls, he saw, as he reached out to touch them, were flaked with a fine layer that might have been gold; such was the state of decay it was impossible to tell. There were three archways that led out of this prayer chamber. Two led into a bigger room lined with vegetable fibre and clay tower-shaped sarcophagi, while the third opened into the vast central chamber that was the heart of the ruined temple; the one room dedicated solely to death. Uca Pacha.
Cutter crossed the threshold.
A peculiar chill prickled his bare skin. By some trick of the geology this one room was considerably colder than those around it, as though they insulated it from the heat of the outside world, completely and utterly.
Ahead of him, in the oily flickering light, he saw dark shapes lined up on either side of what must once have been the sacrificial stone of the altar of Supay. Yellow eyes stared back at him. In the centre, as though bound to the altar itself, glittered the diamonds in the sky that Cam had promised.
The anomaly was failing.
A bluish tinge marred the imperfections of light as they hung frozen in the air. It was breathtaking in its geometry, every angle reflecting and refracting the flickering lights they bore, as well as carrying fractured daylight from the other side, across millennia.
“I really hope you’ve got a plan,” Connor said, almost stumbling into the back of him as he saw the muscular silhouettes of the five Thylacosmilus facing him.
“I was planning on playing it by ear,” Cutter said.
“Now you tell us,” Connor said. “One of these days you’ll give me a gun, and we’ll all be so much happier.”
“But not today,” Cutter said, his laconic Scottish accent accentuating his amusement.
“So what’s your ear telling you to do, Professor?” Lucas said. He’d shouldered the high-velocity tranquilliser and was drawing a bead on the central pouch-blade. If needs be, Cutter had no doubt the SAS man could take it between the eyes in a heartbeat. It wasn’t just training. Lucas, like Stark, and like Blaine, was a different beast. He was an explosive violence pent up in human form, just waiting to be unleashed.
“Can you smell anything?”
“Only rubber.”
“Good.”
“They don’t seem to be doing anything — it’s like they’re waiting for the word to attack.”
“That’s exactly what’s happening,” Cutter said. “Only it’s not a word, it’s a trigger pheromone. Abby, Stephen, on my word I want you and Lucas to take your shot. Abby, you left, Stephen you right. Lucas take the one in the middle.”
“Right between the eyes,” the SAS man promised. There was a sharp hiss of compressed gas as he chambered the ketamine dart.
“That still leaves two of them. Nando and Genaro, ready?” They nodded. “One shot, take them down and drag their bodies through the anomaly before it fails.”
“Got you,” Nando replied.
Cutter tossed the shrivelled strip of rubber into the centre of the heart chamber, throwing shadows up against the far walls. “Build a pyre,” he said. One by one the others tossed their scraps of rubber onto the fire until it was a small blaze reeking of toxic fumes that clogged up the dank air and brought tears to their eyes. The eyes of the creatures smouldered through the flames and the fumes, fixed on them.
“What’s to say we’ll be immune to the pheromones?” Lucas asked.
“Nothing,” Cutter said. “So we better make sure these inhibitors work.”
“Jesus, you could have mentioned this before.”
“Would it have helped?”
“No,” the SAS man admitted.
“I didn’t think so.”
“But maybe we could have stripped more than one tyre?”
&nb
sp; “And walked back a hundred miles or more through the rainforest, with no food or water? Not the best idea.”
“Where’s the smell, Daddy?” Connor asked, voicing what had been on Cutter’s mind ever since they had stepped into the heart chamber.
Then Cutter wasn’t wondering anymore.
Out of the darkness came the embodiment of the hook-beaked god, Pacha Kamaq the Earth-Maker.
And then the Thylacosmilus sprang forward, sabre teeth bared, guttural roars tearing from their throats as they answered the unheard command to kill.
Lucas fired first, the yellow dart driving home deep inside the open mouth of the pouch-blade as it lunged toward him.
Two more darts launched simultaneously, one just missing its intended victim, the other flying high and wide, clattering off the stones of the temple wall.
A huge Thylacosmilus powered across the fire, the fumes rafting up over its face and into its lungs.
Lucas didn’t need asking; he took a second shot, landing the ketamine tranquilliser two inches above the marsupial’s heart. It went down over the smouldering rubber, extinguishing what was left of its flames, plunging them into darkness.
The remaining beasts sprang straight toward Connor and Abby, those eight-inch teeth bared to rend flesh from bone as they impacted. Lucas hurled the tranq gun aside and dropped to one knee, pulling his service SIG-Sauer from the holster strapped to his ankle, and squeezed off six shots in a split second. The muzzle flare lit the chamber. He didn’t have time to worry about the niceties of evolution. The bullets clustered in the side of the first Thylacosmilus’ skull in a tight grouping that shattered through blood and bone into the primitive part of the animal’s brain. It was dead before it finished skidding across the hard-packed dirt of the temple floor.
Lights began to flash as members of the group located their torches.
He didn’t see the hook-beaked beast until it was too late.
The beak opened, and a bloated red thing came squirming out of it; a worm. The oleaginous worm-tongue coiled out and fastened on the side of Lucas’ face. The millions of tiny teeth that formed the end of the proboscis dug into his skin, burrowing quickly beneath the surface. Blood leaked across the back of his eyes as pain exploded through his skull.
His finger clenched reflexively around the trigger of his gun, discharging the remaining nine rounds blindly as the worm ate.
Bullets ricocheted off the stone as Lucas went down. The SAS man was dead, but that didn’t stop the beast from feeding. The bullets dug into the soft stone, causing the frame to shift as the weight pressing from above redistributed across the broken stones.
Cutter cast about frantically for something to stop it. He was reduced to trying to follow the wildly roving beams of the Maglites as the fight became a slaughter. Screams filled the darkness. More shots. One of the torch beams fell, rolling away across the floor.
Cutter stood in the centre of it, frozen.
The isoprenoids had failed; the beast had retained control of his hunting dogs. But it should have worked. It should have. Yet there were so many different constructions of the carbon chains, so many different ways the building blocks of life could be assembled. There was no way he could know what combination would block out the pheromones the beast used to command the Thylacosmilus. It was random.
Chance.
“Cutter!” Abby screamed. She was unarmed now, the dart gun knocked from her hand by the charge of one of the pouch-blades. Stephen was at her side, trying desperately to fend off the raging predator with the butt of his empty rifle.
We’re going to die, Cutter thought sickly.
Nando and Genaro ran together, side by side, straight at the creature that had Abby and Stephen pinned down. Their screams became a war cry as they charged, their torches swooping and slashing through the thick dark. Nando struck the back of the Thylacosmilus, causing the great beast to rear violently and turn on him, huge fangs bared.
Connor brandished his torch as though he believed he could stove the creature’s skull in with it. He was backed up against the wall — Back to back with the sarcophagi in the other room, Cutter thought, trying to banish the death and dying from his mind.
He needed to think.
It was all there. He shook his head, trying to think straight.
No it isn’t, Cutter realised, it isn’t random at all. It isn’t chance. It’s the building blocks of life! And the thought revolted him. He struggled to rationalise what he had to do, to tell himself that it was the only way. Lucas had already given his life for them; he was a soldier, he would willingly give his flesh as well, if it meant they might survive.
One of the creatures was dead, two were fighting the hallucinatory effects of the tranquillisers, while the last two fought with fury, snarling and snapping as they drove the team back.
As the Thylacosmilus reared up before him, Nando fired a dart, missing the mark by some distance.
It was all happening with such horrifying speed around him. Cutter could barely think or react before the patterns of death changed again, but there was no indecision this time.
These were his friends, his responsibility.
He would not fail them. Not now, not ever again.
“Abby!” he yelled, knowing it had to be done. Dear God, forgive me, he thought. She turned to look at him.
“The flare gun!” he yelled, holding his hand out. She threw it to him. He caught it and turned on the hook-beaked creature that was feasting on Lucas. He aimed the flare gun, but not at the creature.
He wanted to. He wanted to launch a blazing flare right into the middle of its face, but he didn’t.
He aimed the muzzle down at the corpse, praying to God he remembered which pocket Lucas had put the small petrol phial in. Right, Cutter reasoned. Lucas was right handed, he’d put it in his right pocket. That was his dominant side.
Before he could change his mind, he fired the phosphorescent flare at the dead man’s side.
For a moment the heart chamber filled with a deathly silence that stretched on too long for Cutter to think it was going to work — and then he heard the soft crump of the flare’s heat, melting through the casing and releasing the petrol. As the flammable liquid seeped out across his clothes, it caught and went up in a brilliant blazing flame.
Within seconds Lucas’ body was a beacon.
The fire drove the Thylacosmilus back, but more — the fire broke down the carbons in Lucas’ body, the roaring flames carrying the isoprenoids locked within the dead man’s mortal remains, releasing them into the air, thickening and clotting in the lungs of everyone trapped within the chamber.
The intensity of the flames coupled with the sheer volume of the chemicals being released effectively isolated every last shred of control the hook-beaked creature had over the prehistoric animals.
It meant that the iron hand with which the creature had ruled them was broken. Natural instinct, a fear of fire and burning, took over. The beasts turned tail, looking for somewhere to flee.
The only option was the opening that existed within the glittering shards of the anomaly, and another time.
Hook-beak didn’t wait. The vile creature reeled in his worm-like feeder and scurried toward the collapsing portal.
Cutter watched it flee, hands on his knees, stinging tears flowing from his eyes.
All he could think was that they had faced a god, the hook-beaked god of the Incas: Pacha Kamaq the Earth-Maker.
“Was that...?” Connor said, obviously thinking the same thing.
“I don’t understand what happened,” Abby said. She avoided looking down at the burning man, Cutter noticed. The shock would catch up with all of the other griefs she had been trying to swallow down, though. After all she had been forced to witness that day, after so much death had surrounded them, it had to catch up.
But later.
“Isoprenoids,” Connor said. “I was listening, even if you weren’t. Saturated carbon chain. What are we if we aren’t carbon?”
>
She nodded, still looking unsure.
“Come on, give me a hand with these before the anomaly collapses,” Cutter said, struggling with his ruined shoulder to drag the first of the huge black marsupials toward the glittering prize.
“Do you think there are any more of them out there?”
He shook his head.
“No. Hook-beak had dominated them and was using them like hounds to do his bidding. They were all here, to protect him.”
“And now they’re gone.”
“And so is he.”
“But where did he come from? I mean? What was it?”
Cutter shrugged, and his shoulder reminded him not to do it again. He didn’t have the answer.
“The future of evolution? Maybe he was a bird, using pheromones to control weak-willed animals. Who knows? It isn’t where it came from that’s important, it’s where it went.”
“But we know that. He went into the past. Didn’t he?”
Cutter didn’t answer. Instead he asked another question.
“What did it look like to you, Nando? Genaro?”
The two men stared at each other, each badly shaken by what had just happened.
“Pacha Kamaq,” Nando said. “But it couldn’t have been, could it? I mean, those old stories... they’re just stories. The gods never really walked the Earth.”
“But perhaps they will one day,” Cutter said.
It was the only answer he had.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Lester sat in the closest thing to darkness his office allowed. Even with the lighting subdued it was still almost day-bright, thanks to the intense spots illuminating the loading bay area and all along the ramp.
He closed his eyes, pinching at the bridge of his nose. Life was never, ever, as simple or straightforward as he tried to make it. Just this once it would be nice to say, “Keep it low key,” and for Cutter and his crew to manage to do just that.
The man was a maverick, unpredictable and so annoyingly self-righteous when he thought he was in the right. ‘Bone-headed’ was the phrase that sprung to mind. Still, he did have a habit of getting things done.
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