Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  19

  RICHARDS

  “We found something,” Friden said.

  “The entrance to the pyramid?” Richards asked.

  “Better.”

  Richards found that hard to believe. Ever since the discovery of the pyramid, he’d been unable to think of anything else. It was the whole reason he and Connor had tracked down their new arrivals. It was a historical and cultural anomaly, and one that perfectly meshed with his own theories. Many ancient cultures believed that there were certain points on the surface of the Earth where they could tap into the planet’s energy. It was in these places that they erected their most sacred structures. The pyramid of Giza in Egypt, the Nazca lines and Machu Picchu in Peru, Stonehenge in England, The Persepolis in Iran, Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan, the Moai statues of Easter Island. If one drew lines from all of these places to one another and extended them around the globe, even more significant sites fell upon these so-called “ley lines.” The Newgrange Tomb in Ireland, Petra in Jordan, The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, and the El Castillo Pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico, and countless others. Not only did these lines mirror the planet’s magnetic grid, their points of convergence marked the sites of the greatest discharge of electromagnetic energy, where unrelated primitive cultures separated by insurmountable distances decided independently to build megalithic structures that still stood today.

  Ninety percent of UFO sightings occurred along these lines, a fact that Richards believed was in no way coincidental. Even his own childhood sighting fell upon a minor line that any number of maps confirmed passed through his family’s land. And all of those ley lines converged right beneath his feet at this very moment, under the ice at the very bottom of the world.

  It was here where the Nazis believed they would find the entrance to the lost city of Agartha in the center of the Hollow Earth, and here where it was rumored they built a fortress for the remnants of the dying Reich and a base where they could conduct their rumored flying saucer experiments. There were even those who believed that somewhere beneath the seemingly impenetrable ice cap were the remains of the mythical city of Atlantis, a theory Richards would have found laughable were it not for the megalithic ruins that couldn’t have been more than ten to fifteen thousand years old hiding under what scientists speculated to be the accumulation of millions of years’ worth of ice.

  The stairs connecting the station to the subterranean levels passed through the eastern residential module. The discovery of the network of caverns had been entirely accidental. The anchors used to bolt the station to the mountain were twenty feet long. They’d already mounted the central unit and were in the process of setting the anchors for the lab unit when the third anchor fractured the surrounding rock. Subsequent sounding had shown the surprisingly stable formations some twenty feet deeper into the mountain and an external egress on the opposite side of the mountain. Utilizing them as a part of the station was his architect’s stroke of genius. Not only did it spare him the cost of a full structural module and its installation, it gave them a natural conduit through which to vent their mechanical byproducts. Even that small amount of heat passing through the ductwork helped maintain a constant temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, based on the combined weight of the equipment for the various laboratories, using the natural formation was actually far safer in the long run. All they’d needed to do was build the framework inside of it, run the electricity and ductwork, and they’d effectively increased the overall dimensions of the station by a full fifty percent. There was even potentially room for expansion with all of the various side caverns and tunnels he hoped to explore when things finally settled down.

  The only real alteration they’d been forced to make was in mounting the eastern residential wing lower on the mountain, which meant connecting the lower level of the main structure to the upper levels of the residential modules to either side, creating a staggered appearance and a whole lot more stair climbing than he’d intended.

  Friden’s lab was closer to the end of the corridor inside the mountain, but he guided Richards into the nearest lab, which belonged to Ron Dreger. Richards had lured the lead driller from Advanced Mining Solutions to help create and maintain the elevator shaft. It had been his stroke of genius to utilize a rectangular configuration that could be heated on two sides by hot water running through the hollow mast rigs and the electrical wiring that powered the elevator on the other two. The failure of any one element would cause worse than the advance of the ice; it could totally destabilize the entire shaft and cause the collapse of the machine room perched on the ice high above it.

  Truth be told, Richards suspected the engineer had a little something going on with Dr. Peters, who whirled to face them when they entered the room as though she’d been caught with her hand in the metaphorical cookie jar.

  “It’s about time,” she said. “The suspense is killing me.”

  She was sitting on the corner of Dreger’s desk, which was easily six feet long and covered with oily mechanical components in various stages of assembly. His keyboard was covered with dark smudges from his greasy hands, as was the joystick beside it, which he used for a whole lot more than video games.

  “Did you tell him?” she asked Friden.

  “I was getting to it,” Friden said.

  “We think we found a way into one of the structures,” she said.

  “Not the pyramid,” Richards said.

  “It’s possible they’re all connected.”

  “You said they weren’t.”

  “I said sonar is unreliable beneath that much solid stone.”

  “So what are we dealing with?”

  “We plotted all of the locations where we found remains onto the topographical map of the lake bed,” she said. “From every little toe bone and finger to the skull washed up in the shallows and the one you found during the initial coring. We then compared them with the direction of the current and estimates of time and various geological forces. That gave us several predictive models of dispersal, all of which followed fairly standard alluvial—”

  “We think we found the tomb,” Friden said.

  “The source from which the remains originated, anyway.”

  “Where else would they keep bodies?”

  “We don’t know anything about this civilization or the nature of its abandonment,” Mariah said. “If it was abandoned at all. For all we know, the people froze in their tracks during the continental shift like all of the mammoths in the northern hemisphere.”

  “In fact, there’s really only one thing we do know—” Richards said.

  “That they’re not human,” Friden said. “Not entirely, anyway.”

  “I was going to say that the only thing we know with any sort of authority is that we don’t know anything at all. At least not yet.”

  “So do you want to do this or what?” Dreger said.

  “Do what, exactly?” Richards asked.

  “I rigged a submersible drone like Mariah’s with several different video cameras, one of them in the thermal range. We detected a stream of slightly warmer water coming from the ground near the northernmost rectangular structure.”

  “One-B?” Richards asked.

  “Right. Closer inspection revealed the origin to be a crevice between two stones we believe were once structural components, so I hooked a fiber-optic borescope to the drone and have it all primed and ready to feed the camera into the hole to see what we find.”

  Richards looked up at the row of monitors. They were all dark, except for the one in the center, where he could discern a subtle circular outline framing the live feed.

  “No time like the present,” Richards said.

  Dreger rolled back to his station and took the helm. A few keystrokes in his three-fingered way and a light blossomed in the center of the screen. It took several seconds for the aperture to rectify the focus, revealing murky greenish water swirling with microorganisms and air bubbles and the algae-covered edges of the fractur
ed rocks. He used the joystick to control the camera, which slithered deeper into the hole with halting, disorienting movements.

  “You have to remember that the camera’s only an inch wide, so while it looks like a giant opening, at its widest point it’s only eighteen inches.”

  “How deep can it go?” Richards asked.

  “Don’t worry. We have a full hundred and twenty feet to work with. We have a better chance of the battery dying first.”

  “Is that a legitimate concern?”

  “Relax. I have everything totally under control.”

  Richards perched on the desk on the other side of Dreger and leaned closer so he could better see. The edges of the field of view were slightly distorted by the configuration of the camera, causing them to bow outward like the edges of a bubble. The ground underneath the camera was jagged with chunks of rock and what looked like broken bones, although it was hard to be entirely certain beneath the wavering sludge. The sides passed in a blur as Richards focused on the advancing light. The rocks fell away to either side, and the camera inched into a dark space of indeterminate size. Dreger halted the camera and used its articulated neck to turn the lens nearly 180 degrees.

  Richards realized he was holding his breath and forced himself to breathe.

  The structure appeared to have collapsed upon itself, completely sealing off the right half. Sections of the ceiling were braced on the rubble, leaving a space barely large enough for a man to squeeze through on his chest.

  Dreger fed the camera deeper and through another narrow orifice into a chamber that appeared largely preserved. Portions of petroglyphs showed through the algae on the walls, although not well enough to get a true idea of what they depicted. Not that Richards cared at the moment. He was too focused on the sheer quantity of hominin remains protruding from the sludge.

  20

  EVANS

  Evans tossed his bag onto the bed and collapsed beside it. He’d already lost all concept of time and couldn’t remember when he last slept or how long ago it had been. All he knew was that he was starving, but at least there was a plan in place to take care of that. If he could find the willpower to climb out of bed, anyway.

  His personal quarters fell somewhere in size between a prison cell and his freshman dorm room, but they were more than adequate for his purposes. He had a bed and a desk and a wardrobe for his clothes. A private bathroom would have been nice, but the communal restroom was only a dozen feet down the hall, and there were only six of them on this level to share it. The same held true for the floor upstairs, where Anya had dropped off Jade and Kelly before guiding Roche and him down to what she called “the dungeon.” He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know why and he was too tired to ask.

  The scientists and engineering staff were housed on opposite wings, primarily because of the schedules they kept, and the ease of access to the labs on one side and the Skyway to the power station on the other.

  Anya had told him he had half an hour to change and shower or do whatever he wanted to make himself at home before meeting them all back in the cafeteria for a meal and a presentation. He was debating whether to unpack or shower when he fell asleep.

  He awakened fuzzy and disoriented after an inestimable length of time. He staggered down the hallway and stumbled up the stairs. The others were already seated at the long tables, positioned in such a way as to see the flat-screen TV on the wall opposite the island where steaming trays of what smelled like spaghetti and a vegetable medley beckoned him.

  “I’m so glad you were able to join us,” Richards said without a hint of sarcasm. He stood beside the television with a whiteboard behind him. “Please. Help yourself to some food and coffee and join us. We had only just started.”

  “Started what?”

  “My dear boy, surely you’re wondering why you’re here.”

  “Why spoil a good mystery?”

  “The mystery, as you generously called it, was regrettable, however necessary. As you’ll soon understand.”

  Evans gestured for Richards to proceed and served his dinner onto a plain white plastic plate. Now that he had his food, he didn’t feel particularly hungry.

  “Where was I?” Richards said. “Oh, yes. Feel free to judge me however you will. It’s been a long time since such things mattered to me. All I ask is that you hear me out, because I believe it’s important to understand how we all came to be here in the first place.”

  Evans sat at the back table beside Jade and near the coffee. He poured himself a cup and took a slurp from the marvelously warm drink.

  “I was nine years old when I saw a UFO above my family’s wheat field. Just three red lights in a triangular configuration—what supposed experts have since named a ‘black triangle’—hovering overhead for what felt like a full minute before streaking off across the sky without making the slightest sound. No rumble of helicopter blades. Not so much as the whisper of an engine. I spent the next ten years of my life examining that memory, pulling it apart from every conceivable angle in hopes of finding some rational explanation for what I saw, yet the more I scrutinized it, the more I became convinced that what I’d seen was the genuine article.

  “Now I know what you’re thinking. Trust me. I’ve heard it all before. But I ask you to consider the fact that two hundred years ago most people believed that man was created by God and woman from one of his ribs. The mere idea of evolution would have been blasphemous. Think about this, though . . . every single one of the major religions has a similar creation myth. Even lesser and dead religions theorized we were placed on this planet by some divine force, some omniscient intelligence. My question to you is this: What if they were right?”

  Evans sighed louder than he’d intended and found himself pinned by Richards’s gaze.

  “Sorry,” Evans said. “My bad. Go on.”

  Richards’s expression softened once more and his eyes grew distant.

  “It was with that working assumption that I set off for college without two nickels to rub together or the support of my father, who had always planned on me one day taking over the day-to-day operations of the farm, just like he did. The rest, as they say, is history. I majored in finance and went on to become one of the most successful venture capitalists during the economic boom of the eighties, but that wasn’t the only thing I studied. I have always forced an extreme amount of pragmatism upon myself and deliberation upon my actions, so I essentially created two different lives: one of respect and financial means, the other private and supported by those means. I started by absorbing everything I could about religion, which led me to the historical sciences, where faith was forsaken in favor of fact. The reality, I learned, fell somewhere in between.”

  Richards removed a remote control from his pocket, pressed a button, and a series of pictures appeared on the screen. He clicked through them as he spoke, not lingering on any one image. They showed ancient petroglyphs, cave paintings, and geoglyphs from various cultures, although each and every one of them featured a similar subject with wide eyes, a broad cranium, and a tapered chin, features ascribed to what were often referred to as Grays.

  “From this ancient parietal art in Utah and Australia to these Sumerian and Egyptian petroglyphs and these Celtic and Mayan statues . . . nearly every primitive culture from every location around the globe created images of these same creatures, for lack of a better term. These same faces are still prevalent in our popular culture more than seven thousand years later. Name a single religion—or any other prevailing belief—that has endured over a longer period of time. Christianity, Judaism, Islam. Even Hinduism is barely more than five thousand years old, and its earliest Vedas and Sanskrit texts describe beings descending from the sky and the relationship between the stars and planets.”

  “The first thing you learn in archeology,” Evans said, “is that you can’t ascribe thought processes to ancient populations because you can only view their lives through modern eyes, not those of the time period. It would be like a future
civilization digging up our culture and thinking that Star Wars was a religious doctrine and we worship the Force.”

  “Like I said, I approach everything with a healthy measure of skepticism. I consider nothing to be fact without irrefutable proof, and even then I remain open to evidence to the contrary, much as those who discovered dinosaurs were convinced they were reptilian before further findings suggested that not only were they warm-blooded, they were the ancestors of modern birds. I hope you will evaluate everything I present to you as evidence with an open mind, because that’s exactly what you will need if we are to unlock the secrets sealed beneath the ice.”

  “What secrets?” Kelly asked. “And what does any of this have to do with seismology?”

  “You’ll see soon enough,” Anya said. She was perched on top of the pool table on the other side of the coffee stand, drinking from a plain white mug. “This is all part of the process. Trust me when I say I was sitting right where you are now not so long ago.”

  “Thank you, my dear,” Richards said, and clicked to a familiar image of the English countryside.

  Anya raised her mug to him.

  “So, as I was saying, the study of ancient cultures invariably leads to questions that simply can’t be answered. Consider Stonehenge, a fairly simplistic monument as far as such things go. The stones weigh anywhere between four and twenty-five tons and were transported from quarries more than a hundred miles away. Think about the logistics involved with hauling such massive slabs across the countryside and then standing them on end. Imagine how these primitive people were able to raise other megaliths a full six feet into the air to place them on top of the upright sections without the use of pulleys, which weren’t invented until more than three thousand years later.”

  A picture of the three Pyramids of Giza appeared on the screen.