Upworld

by Ian Woodhead

  “How could you possibly know they wouldn’t eat us?”

  “They’ve been engineered, Nelson. Just like the spiders,”

  “And the birds,” added Bradley.

  “Come on, they’re coming back already. We need to get out of here.” Dane shivered once, remembering how it felt to have all those horrible little things crawling all over him before he started to climb. Within seconds, Dane was almost at the peak. He looked down and moaned when he saw the giants were now right at the base. The evil bastard had simply sacrificed two of their men to appease the bugs. The insects had already gone to ground. Marlon, Branch, as well as two of the giants, began to climb the pyramid. Marlon saw him looking down. He stopped, raised his gun again, and fired.

  This time, he didn’t miss. Dane ground his teeth as the round slammed through his upper arm and ricocheted off the stone behind him. It didn’t matter though as they had already reached the top. He watched Nelson stand and raise his hands. His fists touched the ceiling, changing the azure to a flicker of over a dozen rainbow colours.

  “We’ve done it!”

  “Good job, fellas!” shouted Branch. “You’ve got the door, but you still need a key to open it.” He laughed. “Oh, that was fun. Now it’s over, and you’re basically burger meat.”

  Marlon pointed the pistol at Dane’s forehead. “Look, I’ve got nothing against you, or any of you for that matter. Let’s all go back down, and we’ll see if there a deal we can make?”

  Dane sighed heavily before he stepped down the stones. He stopped opposite Marlon. “You want a deal, fat boy?” He clenched his fist tight and swung it straight into Marlon’s shocked mouth. His gun went flying, and Marlon rolled all the way down the stone structure, screaming.

  “You vicious, nasty human,” snarled Branch. He reached over and wrapped both his huge hands around Dane’s neck and started to squeeze. There was nothing he could do; Dane kicked and bucked but nothing took away the constant pressure. His world went to monochrome. He was going to die. Dane shut his eyes, not wanting that grinning monster’s face to be his last ever image.

  The roaring in his ears vanished at the same time as the pressure on his throat. Dane began to cough. He managed to open his eyes. Both Nelson and Bradley held his arms. He tried to speak, but all that left his burning throat was a single croak.

  “Look down there,” suggested Bradley.

  He did as the man said and saw that Branch sat on the floor with the rocking Marlon next to him. There were a large amount of giants surrounding them, but these all wore feathered cloaks. He saw one of the giants walk to the front and wave.

  The female had returned. Bradley lifted him to his feet. “Can you talk yet?”

  “A little,” he managed to say.

  “Go thank her for all of us.” Bradley reached behind and pulled out something very familiar.

  “The artefact!”

  Bradley grinned. “Yeah, I lifted it from Branch ages ago. I reckoned it would come in useful.”

  Dane made his way down the steps, towards the smiling female.

  “I’m sorry that we could not arrive much sooner. It appeared that my new mate had other ideas.” She gently stroked his head. “Take care of yourself, Dane. Please, do not give away our presence. Can you do that?”

  He nodded. “Don’t worry, nobody is going to find out. I’ll make sure of that.”

  “Thank you. We shall keep these two here.” She pulled her large mate over. “These people need my guidance. The evil which once lingered here died out many years ago. What we saw in that church was just a watered-down remnant of some half-forgotten ritual. They will now have enlightenment, Dane. I will help to purify the bloodline.” She bent down and kissed him on the forehead. “Now go. Go back to your people.”

  He thanked her then climbed the stones, towards his waiting friends. They had cut a hole into the roof of the cavern. He would make sure that his part of the bargain was kept. Would he see her or their kind again? Somehow, he doubted it. The giants went through their extinction event and only just clung onto existence. The daily TV news reports continued to show that the two superpowers were at each other’s throats. Somehow, Dane didn’t think that once the nuclear missiles started flying, their species would not live through their extinction event.

  The End

  Read on for a free sample of Intulo: The Lost World

  1

  December 21, 2012 Van Gotts Ngomo Mine, South Africa –

  Frederick Means studied the crumbling rock in his hand for a moment through his magnifying lens, quietly muttering to himself. He replaced the lens in his shirt pocket and tossed the rock to the floor to join the many others that littered the mineshaft. Too many, he thought. He examined the walls and pried loose a stone with his fingers. It took little effort. The rock face was rotten, ready to collapse.

  A bead of sweat rolled into his eye. He took his handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the sheen of perspiration from his forehead. A rivulet of sweat immediately ran from beneath his hardhat to replace it. He removed his hardhat, swiped the handkerchief across his thinning hair, and shoved it back down on his head, sighing in frustration when another drop stung his eye. It was a losing battle fighting sweat in the hot, humid tunnel deep beneath the ground.

  “Damn hot,” he complained to his companion, Paul Mbussa, a Zulu driller. The driller’s ebony skin glistened with sweat, but his broad smile revealed ivory teeth.

  “43 degrees Centigrade, baas,” he said.

  Frederick flinched at Mbussa’s use of the Afrikaans word for boss, a term he despised as being too reminiscent of the old days of apartheid. “Nothing ever bothers you, does it Paul?”

  The driller dropped his smile and glanced uneasily at the tunnel roof half a meter above his head. Tiny fractures were already visible in the freshly drilled roof. “Thirty-nine-hundred meters of bad rock like this does.”

  Frederick flinched, remembering why they were so deep in the new adit, a short side tunnel drilled perpendicular to the main ore-bearing rock. “Yes, it is much too friable. I can easily crumble it in my hand. I don’t need a pick to scale loose rock from the walls. It sloughs away on its own. I see lots of kimberlite, some limestone, and greenstone, but hardly any harder dolomitic rock. I told Verkhoen it would be too dangerous to tunnel here, but he ignored me. Even if the gold vein continues this deep, I doubt it would be profitable to extract it.”

  Using his iPad, he snapped several photos of the rock face as proof with which he could confront Klaus Verkhoen. The often-captious Van Gotts Mining Corporation CEO resented any challenge to his authority, treating them as personal attacks. He had a long memory and no qualms about using his considerable power for petty and often brutal reprisals.

  Mbussa hesitated, looked around to see no one was within earshot, and spoke quietly. “The younger Verkhoen is much like the father, Heinrich. He is ruthless and determined. More people will die here.”

  Frederick thought of the hundreds of miners, mostly poor blacks, who died each year from cave-ins, falls, lung disease, and machinery accidents, all for a shiny yellow substance for which men had fought and died for centuries. There had to be a point at which a human life was worth more than a few flakes of gold per ton of ore.

  “Not if I have anything to do with it,” he said. “I informed Verkhoen this morning that I would go directly to the Board if I must.” A surge of determination swept over him, like a righteous cause. He could do something about it.

  Mbussa frowned and shook his head slowly. “Verkhoen will not like that. He is a dangerous man. Not good to cross him, baas, or Duchamps.”

  Frederick thought of Henri Duchamps, Verkhoen’s Chief of Security, a cold, calculating, vile man willing to do anything to further his career – Verkhoen’s watchdog. Inside he cringed, but he laughed aloud to assure Mbussa he was not afraid. “All he can do is sack me. Eve has been begging me to quit and take a job back home in England.” He shook his head at the idea. “No. Engineering some gru
bby coal mine in Wales does not interest me in the slightest. South Africa is where the real geology begins.” He pointed to the walls of the shaft. “Why, some of this rock around us is as old as the Earth. The Kaapvaal Craton is a piece of the original continental crust 3.6 billion years old. There is some speculation the gold field itself was brought about by a meteorite impact.”

  Mbussa looked unconvinced. “Gold from the sky, baas?”

  Frederick nodded. “Possibly.”

  “Our village sangoma says our god, Unkulunkulu, fell from the sky into a great swamp. I believe the gold is a lure to entice men into his underground lair where his demon, Intulo, devours their souls.”

  Frederick blustered. “Superstitious claptrap. You should know better than to listen to a witchdoctor, Paul. You are an educated man. ”

  Mbussa looked chagrined. “Yes, I went to the white-taught schools, but inside I am still Zulu. The old legends are in my blood. Sometimes, when the earth moans and the rock speaks to me, I hear strange voices.”

  “It’s just the rock strata groaning under pressure, especially this rock.” As if punctuating his words, a chunk of rock fell from the roof and landed at their feet. “I think you had better gather the men. We should leave. The shaft will need additional shoring if Verkhoen insists on digging here.”

  He glanced at the stacks of fifty-meter-long nylon bags filled with viscous slurry of liquefied mine tailings lining both sides of the tunnel to support the roof. They were easier to use than hydraulic chocks and longer lasting than wooden pillars and beams; nevertheless, the bags were subject to the same laws of physics and gravity. Already, dewdrops of grey slurry coated the surface of several of the bags as the enormous pressure forced it through the tightly woven material.

  He shook his head sadly and sighed. “I don’t see how I can stop him.”

  Mbussa smiled and changed the subject. “Have you told your wife yet?”

  Frederick replaced his iPad in its carrying case slung from his waist, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small black box. Opening it, he produced a gold ring and showed it to Mbussa. “Not yet.” Mbussa examined the ring, admiring its perfection. “Gold from this mine,” Frederick said. “I had it made in Johannesburg. There’s an inscription inside.”

  “What does it say?”

  He dropped the ring back in the box, pocketed it, and smiled. “That’s for her eyes only. It should make a nice Christmas gift.”

  Mbussa laughed. “She will love you forever.

  Frederick hoped so. Eve Means was his wife, a biologist working for the South African Department of Education, a menial job for someone with her credentials. She hated South Africa with its politics and lingering racial prejudices. He had hoped she would come to love the country as much as he did, but to no avail. For him, a mining engineer with degrees in both geology and engineering, South Africa was paradise, albeit lately paradise at a price.

  She was six years younger and much too beautiful for a man like him. When he had first met her vacationing in Brighton, he instantly fell in love. He courted her relentlessly like a teenage suitor, and in the end, she had accepted his proposal. She was his life.

  The ground jerked sharply beneath his feet, and the walls shuddered and groaned. A loud wail repeated farther down the tunnel. Frederick knew the sound had not issued from a human throat.

  “Intulo!” Mbussa cried out. His face was a mask of fear, as his eyes studied the tunnel.

  The ground began to tremble more violently. The walls crackled as shards of rock became stony shotgun pellets peppering the frightened miners. Dust motes caught in the beams of the lights careened through the air like glowing charged particles shot from a cyclotron. The lights strung along the wall did an epileptic jig; then, flickered and failed. Frederick switched on his helmet lamp, as a blinding cloud of dust swept down the tunnel. Rocks cascaded from the roof, bouncing off his hardhat. Rock slurry sprayed from the crushed bags, drenching him in thick mud. He felt Mbussa’s strong arms shielding him from falling rock as he and the burly driller crouched together. After a minute, the trembling stopped, but the choking dust remained.

  “Cave-in,” Frederick said, coughing savagely. “Probably from a small tremor. According to the seismograph, there have been clusters of small quakes over the past few days.”

  Mbussa looked at him in the lamp’s diffuse glow, nostrils flaring as he sniffed the air. Slurry covered all but one of the reflector patches on his jumper. His helmet lamp played along the walls and down the narrow tunnel, now filled with rock and debris, blocking their escape. He shook his head. “I smell cordite. It was a blast.”

  Frederick looked at him in incredulous horror. “An explosion? Don’t be ridiculous. Who would …?” His legs weakened as realization hit him. “Verkhoen,” he groaned as the answer became obvious to him. “He wants to silence me, keep me from going to the Board. He can pretend to dig us out, wait until we’re dead, and start all over again. Bastard!” He worried about Eve. What hell would she go through, worrying about him?

  One of the miners who had been farther down the tunnel ran up to them, his lamp bobbing in the dark like a cork on the water. His mud-covered face was a mask of fear.

  “It was an explosion. The whole shaft has collapsed,” he exclaimed before coughing violently from the rock dust. Frederick waited impatiently for him to stop. “The tunnel is filled for fifty meters or more with rock. They will never get through.”

  The man was near panic. Frederick knew he could not let the man’s fear infect them all. It was up to him to quell his own fear and take charge.

  “Quiet!” he shouted and waited for their muttering to die out. “Listen. They will dig us out, but we must conserve our air.” The shaft was short and held little air in reserve. Rescue would come too late. He dredged his mind to recall blueprints of the area. “There is a second tunnel crossing directly beneath this one on 137 Level. The company sealed it because of water seepage. We must drill a small hole into the shaft to test the air for methane and carbon dioxide. If the air is good, it will help keep us breathing for several more days, more than sufficient time for a Proto-Team to reach us.”

  The rescue teams were trained and equipped to deal with emergencies, but Frederick knew it took time to organize a team and transport them through the kilometers of mineshafts. More time would be lost while they determined a course of action. Every cave-in was different. Proto-Teams had been lost by moving too quickly.

  He didn’t need to tell them that if the lower shaft was completely flooded, as it had been when the engineers had sealed it, they risked flooding their own shaft as well. They would drown as had the two miners caught in the flood two years earlier. Even considering the risks, it was their only chance for survival. A Proto-Team couldn’t rescue them until they first removed the tons of debris sealing them in.

  The portable generator powering the air compressor for the jackleg drills was distant enough from the collapse to avoid damage. Its small gasoline engine would foul their air quickly, but in addition to running the compressor, the light stand it powered would beat back the solid wall of darkness, providing a degree of comfort to the frightened miners.

  Mbussa insisted on manning the drill himself. Frederick prayed he had picked the correct spot for Mbussa to drill. He had nothing to go by but his memory. Drilling a few centimeters either direction, they would miss it. The broad-shouldered driller handled the heavy pneumatic drill with ease, keeping the bit driving into the floor as it chewed through the rock. The other miners stood in a semicircle around Mbussa, watching the drill bit slowly disappear into the rock and the pool of slurry accumulating on the floor. Without the flow of cooler air from the ventilator fans, the tunnel was heating rapidly. The heat could kill them before the lack of air.

  Frederick’s heart skipped a beat, as the drill broke through the ceiling of the shaft below twenty minutes later. The ankle-deep slurry drained through the hole. He pulled out his portable sniffer to check the air quality. Every eye was g
lued to the three LED readouts on the device as they flickered; then, steadied on the percentages for oxygen, carbon dioxide, and methane. The air was stale but breathable – no methane.

  “The air is good,” he told them. The relief on their faces told him the effort was worth it.

  The entire time they drilled, the tunnel had moaned and groaned, and rocks had continued to shower them periodically. The explosion had weakened the already delicate rock stratum. Frederick was greatly concerned the entire shaft might collapse at any moment.

  Sensing Frederick’s concern, Mbussa grabbed a pick. “The rock below us is less than a meter thick. I say we break through in case this ceiling lets go.”

  Frederick nodded and stood back, as Mbussa and another miner with bulging biceps the size of Frederick’s thighs took turns pounding the rock floor with their heavy picks. When they tired, the other two miners took over. Less than an hour later, a large slab of rock broke away and fell into the shaft below. Frederick heard no splash, which was more good news.

  Mbussa looked up and smiled. “We’re through.” He leaned over and shined his light in the hole. “Funny smell, but dry. I’ll go down first.” He sat on the edge of the hole and allowed two other miners to hold his arms and lower him through the hole. A few minutes later, he looked back up through the hole, shining his light upwards. “It’s not flooded.”

  Frederick welcomed the good news. “Good. We’ll …”

  With a sound like a dying woman’s scream, the entire wall beside the generator collapsed, crushing the generator and sending half-ton boulders bouncing across the floor. The lights went out, leaving them with only their battery-operated helmet lamps. The roof began to shake, ready to collapse at any moment.

  “Down there,” Frederick called out over the rumbling. “Quickly!”

  Hands lowered him until his feet touched rock below. The others followed close behind him.