by C. J. Waller
“If you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting…?”
“Yeah. I know. But it might be our only chance. Apart from climbing across the ceiling, we’ve tried everything else.”
“But that means freeing it,” Brendan can’t disguise the horror in his voice at that. My stomach tightens and convulses. I know how he feels.
“Freeing it?” Marcus chips in. “Why the fuck would we want to do that?”
“So it can get into the water and – hopefully – devour the pliosaur.”
Janos speaks in such a matter-of-fact way, you’d think he was making suggestions for a shopping list. But he’s right. That’s about the gist of it.
“And what then?” Brendan asks.
“We use the time to escape.” I say, as if it’s the simplest thing in the world. “The distance to the opposite shore isn’t that far – like Fi said, we could get across in five, ten minutes, tops.”
“And if it doesn’t work?” Brendan continues to needle me. Since when did he decide to grow some sanity?
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But I don’t see any of you making any other suggestions.”
“We’re not making them because we’re trying to think of something that doesn’t come with a 99% certainty of death!” Marcus says.
“Oh, so what? We stay here? Do that and we’ve got a 100% chance of death, Marcus.”
“There could be a rescue group on their way as we speak.”
“There could be,” I admit. “You could be right. There could be a rescue group currently navigating the flattener right now. Then what would they do? Stand on the shoreline and wave at us? Because unless they’re packing some heavy-duty explosives – which they won’t, considering we’re in a fucking cave environment – how the bloody hell are they going to get past the pliosaur? Remember, we were supposedly a rescue group, and look at the stand-up job we did.” I shake my head, almost unable to believe this is me talking. “No. If we’re going to get out of this alive, we have to be the ones who get ourselves past that monster and off this island. And the only way I can think of stopping that thing is to throw something bigger and more dangerous at it.”
Marcus shakes his head and blows out a furious sigh. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you. You, of all people! And what happens to this thing once you’ve let it out and it’s done its job? Say it does work. Say we do manage to convince it to indulge in a monster dinner rather than a human one. What’s to stop it following us? What’s to stop it from reaching the surface? Can you imagine what it could do?”
That stops me short. I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought about that. And Marcus is, of course, right. Bringing that thing back with us would be disastrous. Who knows what terror it could unleash? My shoulders slump forward, and tears ignite the back of my throat. So much for that.
“Don’t be disheartened,” Brendan says. He goes to touch my shoulder, but I throw off his hand with a violent shrug. Disheartened? Fucking understatement. I want to scream, but I can’t trust my voice, can’t trust myself; I know no words would come out of my mouth, just huge sobs, and for some reason, that really bothers me. I don’t like crying in front of others at the best of times, and I’m not going to start now. So, rather than stay there and risk it, I whirl around and run. I don’t know where I’m going. I just let me feet take me wherever.
No one follows me.
Chapter Twelve
With a bit of hindsight, maybe my idea was a bit flawed, but the fact that no one else had anything else to suggest means it still stands.
I’ve calmed down a bit now. The others have kept their distance, which is good, I think.
I’m near the tower. It’s not much of a dash to get from here to the shore. I’m sure we could make it. My main problem is I’m not sure how we would coax the damn thing out without it engulfing one of us, if that’s what it does.
I wonder if it only looks like what it mimics, or whether it has a rudimentary sentience. Being able to bargain with it would be the easiest way out of this, but that’s not going to happen. Even if it is intelligent, who’s to say that intelligence is anything like ours? For all we know, that… stuff is what was behind this place. Maybe it… they… oh, I don’t know. Whatever. Stick to the singular. It’s easier that way. So… did ‘it’ build this place? Is ‘it’ responsible for Yuri’s state of mind?
I wish we had a load of explosives. Then we could just set a charge under the viewing window and ‘kaboom’ - instant access to the sea. Except that wouldn't work, not really. For all we know, we wouldn't make it to the viewing window in the first place. Anyway, if we had access to explosives, we would have blown that motherfucker out there in the water up the moment we realised it was there. Boom bang baby – you ain’t trappin’ me on no island.
I’m gibbering again, aren’t I? I can’t help it. The darkness out there is finally seeping in here. I can feel it. It’s like damp. It rises. Rises through you until there’s no light left.
Oh, sweet Jesus – ouch. I’ve been gnawing on my nails again, and I just caught one on the nap of my suit. That’s definitely seen better days. We’ve only been down here… how long? A day? Two? A week? I don’t know. There’s no way to mark the passage of time, no sun to rely on, no passage of day and night to count. I remember when someone – was it Marcus? I can’t remember – speculated that two weeks was too short a time to go completely doolally, but I’m not so sure now. We haven’t been down here that long, and I’m already beginning to feel the cracks in my mind split and widen.
Is that all it takes?
How long before one of us finally cracks completely?
A soft tap on my shoulder jump starts my heart and sends me skyward. I would have cried out if my throat were capable of screaming that high a note.
“Come. Come. Come with me.”
It’s Yuri again. Now my shock plummets and crystallises in my stomach as pure, primal fear. There’s something about the way he is looking at me that makes my skin want to slough off my body and crawl away. I shrink back.
“What?”
His eyes are wide and staring, unblinking, inhuman.
“Come. Come and see.” He tugs at my arm like a small, demented child.
“See what?” I manage to ask.
“To see what he knows. I told you. He knows more than he lets on. Come.”
He gives my arm one last tug, and then he scampers off into the darkness. I have no idea how he can see. He doesn’t have a lamp, but that doesn’t seem to hamper him any more. Maybe his… experience in that chair has fundamentally messed with not only his mind, but his body too.
“Come,” I can hear him whisper from the darkness ahead of me.
I have my belt knife. I draw it as surreptitiously as I can whilst I stand up and palm the blade so Yuri won’t see it. I creep forwards, following his voice, using the light from my headlamp to stop myself from tripping over any stray rocks. He’s there, waiting for me, crouching by a large boulder. He shakes his head at my approach.
“No, no, no, no, no… turn it off. No lights. He’ll spot us if you wear a light. Off. Off. Off.”
Off? What? I go to ask him if he’s totally gone insane, but I stop myself. Stupid question. When I get close enough, he reaches up and before I can stop him, he snaps my headlamp off.
My little world is plunged into blackness. The crystal of fear in my belly shatters, and sprouts thorny tendrils of panic that seed throughout my system. One false move from Yuri is all it will take. Just one ill-judged touch and I know I will plunge this knife into whatever I can find. Then I shall go completely and quite emphatically mad.
I don’t know if Yuri senses this, or if he’s just giving my eyes time to adjust to the total absence of artificial light, but gradually, as they do so, the panic ebbs. It doesn’t go away completely, but it ducks just far enough below the surface to allow me to operate on a kind of rational level. I don’t put my knife away, though. Oh no. One false move from Yuri, and he’s dead. Simple as that.
The faint phosphorescent glow of the bacteria-covered rocks only really gives the shadows an edge, so walking is difficult. I twist my ankle on one particularly evil stone, and let out a bark of pain. Yuri turns around, fingers to his lips, shushing me, his eyes pleading. I test my weight on my foot. Pain flares, but it’s not enough to stop me. Thank goodness.
Yuri slows and places a hand on my forearm. He crouches, pulling me down with him. My hand tightens around the hilt of my knife, but it’s okay – he only wants me to follow him again, but this time, I have to do it as slowly and as stealthily as I can.
It isn’t long before I spy a beam of blessed light up ahead. Every now and again, it moves, side to side, up and down, sometimes slowly, sometimes fast. It’s a headlamp, and whoever is wearing it is quite agitated.
Yuri stops behind a boulder and gestures for me to peek over the top. Before I do, he gives me one, last, desperate look and raises a finger to his lips in the universal gesture for keep quiet.
I inch up over the cold damp stone and squint ahead of me. Janos is standing in a small clearing, surrounded by a litter of stones. He is talking quietly, but judging by the way he keeps throwing up his arms and shaking his head, he’s upset about something.
I watch, the growing sense of unease in my belly coming to a simmering point. This isn’t normal, talking to yourself stuff. I don’t need to understand what he is saying – the pauses in his tirade tells me this is a two-way conversation.
But a two-way conversation with whom? Himself? If it is, then he’s more far-gone than I ever thought. The way he hisses and splutters when he talks speaks of a fury only another person could provoke, which can only mean one thing.
He is talking to someone else.
Someone else.
Someone not here.
Someone who could save us.
The unease boils over and solidifies into pure, white-hot rage. We’ve spent the last God-knows how long down here, trying to survive, trying to think of a way out… Fi’s death… unleashing that… that thing in the tower – all of it purposeless. All of it stupidity. All of it worthless.
Because Janos has a radio.
How the fuck did he manage it? My fists curl even tighter, but now my knife is not for Yuri, it is for Janos, the man I trusted, the man I desired, the man I thought was on our, on my, side.
It was all a lie.
“I told you,” Yuri breathes directly into my ear, and then backs away and melts into the darkness beyond.
I slide back down the boulder. There are no butterflies of doubt in my stomach, no jitters to unsteady my hand. Fury has galvanised me, like steel. I am solid. I sneak closer, keeping low to the ground, all my attention on the traitor amongst us whilst Fi waves at me before diving into the frigid depths within the confines of my head.
He did nothing to stop her. All this time, he had the means for our rescue, and he kept it to himself.
Bastard.
I cut towards his light. I could just sneak up to him in the dark and stick a knife between his shoulder blades, but I don’t want to do that. I want answers.
I pause, just so I can hear what he is saying. To my surprise, he is now speaking English, so I can understand every word. Such is his arrogance.
“No!” he is saying. The light wavers again as he shakes his head. “You cannot. It is not fair, not right, not…”
“What isn’t right, Janos?” I ask from the sanctuary of the shadows.
Janos’s head jerks up and his hand snaps down from his ear. So that’s it. A microtranceiver. He must have had one on him the whole time, but our radio array is on the other side of the strait, which means he has an independent frequency.
So this was all planned.
“Megan!” he all but barks. His mouth flaps open and shut, like a land-bound goldfish. “M-Megan…”
“I asked you a question, Janos. What isn’t right?”
He pauses and shifts uncomfortably. Then his expression hardens to display a rock-hard determination. I have seen that look before, and for a fleeting moment, the steel within me trembles. Over the last few days, I had softened towards him, almost forgetting that he was a man with whom you did not trifle. The simple fact that he was the one in the wrong was the only thing that stopped me crumbling completely under that stare. He was wrong. Simple as that.
“You do not need to worry about that,” he all but snaps.
I take a step towards him, my knife clutched in a way that means it wouldn’t be immediately noticeable from his perspective.
“Oh, I think I do,” I say. I’m surprised my voice sounds so even. “Talking to yourself. I can’t believe I fell for that one. How long have you been in contact with them, Janos?”
He swallows and his eyes flicker to one side. It’s only a small crack in his granite façade, but it’s enough for me to work with.
“We trusted you,” I continue. “I trusted you. Out of everyone on this team, you were the one I thought was the most dependable…the most solid. But no. It’s just a lie, isn’t it? You were never one of us.”
“Megan,” he begins, but by now my fury is up again and I want to hurt him, hurt him badly, as much as he has hurt me, hurt all of us with his lies. I stride over to him, forgetting that he has extensive military training and pull the knife forward, just under his chin. For all of you out there wondering if you could do it, actually take a blade and plunge it into another human being, let me tell you this. Yes. Yes, you would. If you’re as furious, as broken, as disappointed as me, you could.
The moment the knife’s tip grazed his neck, I thought Janos would bat it away and put me into some kind of headlock – or worse, snap my neck to keep me quiet. But he doesn’t. Instead, he keeps staring at me, looking curiously defeated.
“I did not want it to be this way,” he whispers.
“You didn’t want… what? What the fuck does that mean?” I hiss, too angry to shout. “You’ve got a radio! You’ve been feeding back! Fi didn’t need to die! We didn’t need to sit in desperation, wondering how the hell we’d get out of this alive. She didn’t need to sacrifice herself, because you…” I jab the knife up. It nicks the soft skin under his chin, and a little bead of blood forms there, “had a radio all the time, but you never stopped her. You never once said no…”
“And you think that is because I am some kind of cold-hearted bastard?” he says, sounding remarkably calm for a man with a knife held to his throat. “Megan… have you ever once stopped to ask yourself why they sent an unknown geologist, a washed-up biologist with a shaky history of mental illness and a bunch of adrenaline junkies down here, when they could have sent a crack military team?”
I allow my knife to drop a fraction of an inch. What? What did he mean?
“Yes, I can see it. You’re beginning to question it. Killing me gets you nowhere. We are no rescue team. We are here for one purpose and one purpose only.”
“And what’s that?” I manage to whisper.
“They needed… guinea pigs.”
“Guinea pigs? For what?”
He sighs and closes his eyes in resignation.
“Ask yourself – are you really the best person out there to be involved in the rescue of an experienced team of cavers? Come on. Before this, your experience of caving was restricted to pottering around in safe environments – Karst limestone complexes that already had their insides mapped and routes secured. Then, you’re approached about this. Sure, you’re already on the team, but only as a scientific adviser. Why send you down? Really, I am asking. Why did they send you down?”
“Because… because I’m a geologist. A sedimentologist – Karst limestone is my speciality, but I’ve been working on shale beds for some time now, looking for shale gas. That’s where the money is. That’s what they pay me for. To find gas.”
“Ah yes, to find gas. Much gas down here?”
“Well, yeah… until we broke through and discovered this environment. Look – I asked to be involved. Any geologist would. This is t
he closest thing we’d ever come to a true prehistoric environment, short of inventing a time machine. I had to be involved…”
I trail off. The disbelieving, almost pitying, look on his face says ‘nice try, kid – wanna know the truth now?’ I drop my hand containing the knife completely. What’s the point?
“You had to be involved. For science. Indeed. And, for the main part, what you think is the truth, is the truth. Things changed once they starting probing this new environment. Discovering the space… that was easy enough. What they didn’t expect was the signal.”
“The… signal?”
“Yes. A strange, pulsing signal, too regular to be anything natural. They wanted to find out what it was, so they sent Alpha team. All military. I was supposed to be with them, but a minor injury kept me out of it. As it happens, it was a rather fortuitous sequence of events for the company. You see… the footage did not just stop. Alpha team did not disappear without a trace. They knew what had happened to them. They saw it all, including the creature in the tank. That is their true interest.”
“Their…true…what?” My world suddenly feels very heavy. My head swims, and for a moment, it feels like the floor is made of blancmange.
“Think of the money they could make if they could figure out what that substance could really do. Each and any militarised country in the world would pay literally anything to have something like that at its disposal.”
“But why us? Why send another team, under false pretences? If they knew all along what happened to Alpha team…why send us? Why?”
“Why, indeed. Think about it. Why send faceless people, people the world may not miss too much, into certain danger, and almost certain death?”
My stomach flips over. I swallow hard to keep the bile from rising.
“Test subjects,” I say. “They wanted us to see what that thing could do.”
“Exactly. They have footage of the discovery of the substance, and the subsequent deaths of their crack-team… but that wasn’t enough. They needed to know that wasn’t a fluke. This complex is largely unexplored. Rather than send in anyone important, why not ask if people want to go? Or better yet, get them to volunteer, or in your case, demand.”