Intulo: The Lost World

by JE Gurley

  Mbussa at first looked embarrassed; then he smiled. “Intulo is a demon who lives in the earth. He heralds death.”

  Frederick nodded. “You believe in Intulo, and yet you make your living in a gold mine.”

  “I work below the earth because I must to feed my family. My belief in the ancient tales is much like some Christians’ belief in God. I have doubts, but I believe just in case I am wrong.”

  “A very wise choice,” Frederick conceded. He checked his watch. “I think it’s been long enough.” He stood and stretched his legs, stiff from sitting so long. “Grab the picks in case the steel door is sealed. Then …”

  His voice trailed off as a strange sound drifted down the tunnel, louder and nearer than the rescue drills, a loud clicking, like the electric starter of a gas range. It came from the dead end of the shaft. He hoped the sound didn’t presage another cave-in or a flood.

  “What can that be?” he asked aloud.

  “I’ll check,” Mbussa offered, as he stood and switched on his lamp.

  Frederick followed Mbussa’s progress down the dark tunnel until the darkness swallowed him. A few minutes later, Mbussa’s blood-curdling scream echoed down the tunnel, ricocheting from the rock walls until it faded in the distance. The ghastly moan continued for only a few more seconds before ending abruptly.

  “What the bloody hell?” Frederick exclaimed. His skin began to tingle, and his mouth went dry. He tried to swallow, but the lump in his throat was a fist crammed down it. Fear reached its icy hand into his chest, squeezing his pounding heart until his courage ran as cold as his blood. He wanted to run, but the eerie sound riveted him in place like spikes driven through his feet into the solid rock.

  The clicking grew louder, as did the horrendous scratching of a thousand metal chisels on stone. Now, all the helmet lamps were on and pointed down the tunnel toward the sound. Beams of light danced along the walls, floor, and roof, searching for its source. Large, indistinguishable shapes moved in the shadows, making it difficult to judge their size. They moved rapidly and resolutely toward the fearful group of transfixed men.

  One of the shadows separated from the wall and fell upon one of men. He screamed in agony, as sprays of blood splattered the stunned miners. The creature dragged him to the ground and savagely attacked him. Long, pointed sticks jabbed into the man’s chest. Blood ran from his open mouth. No, Frederick realized. Not sticks, legs. It was a giant insect, an enormous black beetle twice the size of a miner’s helmet.

  More insects appeared, swarming as scores skittered from the darkness in an insect flood. The lights reflected dully from their shiny carapaces as if absorbed by the ebony chitinous material. Now, everyone was screaming; burly miners who considered themselves above fear blubbering like frightened children. Their cries roused Frederick from his own terror trance. He grabbed a pick, and with a mighty swing drove the tip into one of the creatures’ back. It was like chipping stone. The pick’s tip skidded across the rigid chitinous shell doing no damage. The insect tumbled away, but quickly regained its feet and attacked him. Stunned, he dropped the useless pick and raced down the tunnel toward the exit, praying the steel door at the end was not locked.

  After fewer than a dozen steps, a searing pain brought him to the ground. Fire lanced through his leg, shooting up his back and stabbing his brain. He glanced in horror at his right leg dangling by a flap of skin. Two of the creatures had nearly amputated the leg with their razor-sharp mandibles. A spray of blood arced through the air, splashing the floor of the tunnel and drenching the creatures. They tugged the leg free and fought over their prize. The absurdity of two nightmarish creatures skirmishing over his unattached leg struck him as hilarious. He barked out a short, clipped laugh. The creatures, engrossed in their feast, ignored him. He dragged himself down the tunnel toward the steel door, leaving a bloody trail behind him.

  He knew escape was useless. His life’s blood was spilling from him at an alarming rate. The smell of blood and fear permeated the tunnel, driving the creatures insane. The hellish beetles were everywhere. His stump, rather than in excruciating agony, was numb. He realized his body was in shock and that unconsciousness was not far away. He wanted to document what was happening, a record of his death. He fumbled for his iPad and snapped two quick photos of the creatures, realizing too late that the flash attracted them. He rolled onto his stomach and tried to crawl away, but they surrounded him, relentlessly nipping and pinching at his extremities. As they scurried over him, their pointed legs were daggers stabbing into his flesh.

  Eventually, their weight pressed his face into the ground. He didn’t see the mandibles ripping into the soft flesh of his back, but he felt the intense pain as the creatures tore muscles and severed bone to reach his internal organs. Screaming obscenities, he slapped uselessly at the creatures with his left hand until one of the beetles snapped it off at the wrist.

  As he stared dumfounded at the bloody stump, his helmet light went out, instantly plunging the tunnel into abysmal darkness. The darkness was a godsend. It saved him the horror of watching the creatures rip him apart. Strangely, he no longer felt pain, just an odd sense of separation, as if he was no longer in his body. He tried to laugh. He knew he must look a mess. What would Eve think? She had always said he looked so distinguished.

  He pushed the box containing Eve’s ring deeper into his pocket with his remaining hand to protect it. He wanted to look at it one last time, but it was too late. A chill came over him as he lay dying. He sensed something farther away, deeper down the tunnel from which the creatures had come. It was a malevolent presence, eager to feed. Even the ravenous insects feared it, pausing for a moment from their meal. They stopped their incessant clicking and turned toward the presence; then, life fled his body.

  The sounds of drilling continued above as the insects feasted. Two-hundred-million years of evolution had made of them efficient predators and voracious scavengers, leaving nothing behind but dismembered skeletons. When they finished their meal, they lingered in the tunnel for a while, searching for a way out. Later, when hunger forced them, they returned through the crack in the wall to their lair.

  2

  June 10, 2016 Tosca, South Africa –

  Alan Hoffman now knew what a side of barbecuing beef felt like. He was basting in his own juices as he squinted to take readings from the Cerberus AT10 burrowing furiously into the hard granite of the hillside. Blasts of broiling air swept past him, so intense the ground shimmered. He stood just meters away from a whirlwind of super-heated gases reaching temperatures upwards of 11000C. One misstep and he would be toast.

  Alan checked his figures – .12 meters per minute. That worked out to 7.2 meters per hour. Not good enough. He cursed and slammed his clipboard onto his thigh hard enough to bruise flesh. “Son of a bitch!”

  “Alan, are you okay?”

  Damn. He had forgotten his headset microphone was live. His father’s voice was barely audible over the radio headset above the high-pitched screaming of the turbine. Even so, he noted the concern in his father’s voice. He pushed the earplug firmly into his ear before answering.

  “Yeah, Dad, sorry. I’m returning now. Shut it down.”

  He removed his L.A. Dodgers baseball cap and wiped his face with a towel before beginning the long walk back to the control room trailer they referred to as the Shack. Behind him, the deafening sound Doppler shifted from a shrill whine to a dull roar, as the Honeywell AGT1500 jet-turbine engine, stripped from a surplus M1 Abrams tank, and adapted for the Cerberus, gradually slowed. As the lasers shut down, the temperature plummeted from hot enough to melt stone to warm enough to scorch his skin. As he trudged to the control room, he avoided the inquisitive eyes of the workers operating the waste discharge lines. Even in their air-conditioned, heat-resistant suits, he was sure they were sweating as badly as he was.

  It was difficult to wrap his mind around the fact that it was nearly the same temperature in the middle of South Africa’s winter as it was in Carson Cit
y, Nevada, where it was the middle of summer. The reversed seasons south of the equator was disconcerting. At least it’s a dry heat in Nevada. He shook his head at the old joke, but to some degree, it was true. Here, in spite of the fact he was in a desert, the humidity was killing him.

  He had chosen Tosca as a test site because South Africa was where he hoped to sell the automated mining machines. The geology was similar to the Witwatersrand, the largest gold producing region in the world, and the Van Gotts Mining Corporation operated one of the largest mines in the Witwatersrand. Their tempting offer to test the Cerberus under actual working conditions could put Hoffman Industries back on its financial feet. Since Tosca was a privately owned town, it hadn’t been difficult to negotiate a short-term lease deal, avoiding the tedious entrenched layers South African government bureaucracy. Located only a few kilometers from the border with Botswana, the Kalahari Desert locale was perfect for the test, sparsely populated with little agriculture. After weeks of failure, he was ready to pack it up and go home.

  The others were waiting at the trailer for the good news. He hated to be the one to break their hearts. His father had leveraged everything he owned to finance the Cerberus AT10 project. The crew had invested three years hard work in the project. If he couldn’t make it perform up to the required specifications, he would lose everything his father had worked nearly sixty years to build.

  Cerberus was his idea and his responsibility. An automated, laser-powered, boring machine capable of burning through solid rock at a speed of ten-meters-per hour would revolutionize gold and silver mining. A byproduct of the process was a reinforced tunnel liner spun from the molten rock. His machine could save hundreds of lives. Nearly four thousand miners had died in the last decade in South Africa alone. With his machine, mines could reach levels far below the depths men could now tolerate, opening up vast new mineral deposits. The reduction in the cost of mining would reinvigorate the declining mining industry.

  But if he couldn’t produce a speed of at least ten-meters-per hour, thirty-three feet, it wouldn’t be cost effective, and more lives would be lost, as well as his father’s company. His father had worked hard over the years building Hoffman Industries from a small, family-owned business supplying pumps and drill bits to Nevada miners into one of the largest mining supply companies in the world. He feared he could single-handedly tear it down within the next few weeks.

  Opening the door of the trailer, Alan took a moment to savor the cool air washing over him. Trace Morgan, one of the young engineers, glanced up at him with a questioning look. Instead of the utilitarian jumpsuits everyone else wore, Trace wore his usual attire of a pair of ragged jeans and a heavy metal t-shirt. Today’s selection bore the image of a skeletal clown holding a sniper rifle. Alan recognized it from one of Trace’s CD covers as the band Scelerata. He shook his head in answer to Trace’s unspoken question.

  His father stood beside the monitor console wearing his ubiquitous green coveralls with its multitude of pockets, tapping his large, black frame glasses against the console’s side, running his hand through his disheveled, thinning gray hair. Alan suspected his hair would look like his father’s soon. He was ready to pull it out by the roots in his frustration.

  “Well, how did we do this time?” his father asked.

  Though he tried to hide it, Alan suspected his father knew the results weren’t good. He couldn’t meet his father’s sympathetic green eyes. Instead, he stared at his dusty boots as he replied, “Just over seven meters, twenty-three lousy feet.” He slammed his clipboard down on one of the desks, startling William Bakerman, one of the engineers. Bill sensed Alan’s foul mood and ignored the interruption. “I can’t seem to increase the power output without building up too much heat in the GPS unit. When it heats up, we lose positioning integrity.”

  The elder Hoffman nodded. “That is a concern.”

  Alan winced at his father’s polite assessment of the situation. Without the Global Positioning System working accurately, the Cerberus could be off by meters after a day’s tunneling, making it useless as a precision mining tool.

  “I’ve tried more insulation, but it doesn’t seem to help.” He threw down his clipboard on the console in disgust. It skidded across the surface and fell off the other side. He let it lie. “I don’t know what else to do, Dad.”

  His father walked over and patted him on the back as he had often done when Alan was facing a childhood disappointment. “There, there, son. We’ll get it worked out soon.”

  Alan flinched and pulled away, feeling sorry for himself and undeserving of his father’s benevolent understanding. “I’m letting the family down. This whole thing sucks. I wish I had never started it.” He turned and stormed out of the room, feeling foolish for his unprofessional behavior and doubly foolish for talking his father into what was proving to be a hopeless venture.

  Outside, he almost ran into Vince McGill leaning against a wall of the trailer smoking a cigarette. “Still overheating the GPS, huh?” Vince asked casually. He pulled a second cigarette from the pack and offered it to Alan.

  Alan nodded and automatically accepted the cigarette Vince handed him. Although he had stopped smoking three years earlier, the urge had been a rampaging water buffalo dancing on his spine all week. He needed something to take his mind off the fiasco the Cerberus Project had become. He pulled the battered Zippo lighter he kept as a reminder not to smoke from his pocket and lit up, relishing the cigarette’s strong taste as he pulled the smoke deep into his lungs. He held it there for several seconds, allowing the nicotine to absorb into his lungs and into his bloodstream to relax him. He slowly exhaled a large blue cloud of smoke. The breeze whipped it around his face.

  “Too bad we can’t pack it in dry ice or something,” Vince suggested while exhaling his own cloud of smoke. “Maybe hit it with the liquid nitrogen.”

  Alan shook his head. “That wouldn’t work. The liquid nitrogen would freeze the delicate components, and the dry ice wouldn’t last thirty minutes in that kind of heat.” He took another deep drag off the cigarette before tossing it to the ground in disgust and grinding it into the dirt with his boot heel. He had enough problems without becoming hooked on cigarettes again. It had been difficult enough giving them up the first few times.

  “Too bad the new insulation didn’t work.”

  Alan had been optimistic for the new multi-layered foil thermal insulation developed by NASA for rocket engines, but it, too, had fallen short of their needs. “Yes, it sucked just like this whole project is beginning to suck.”

  “Don’t worry, Alan,” Vince said, grinning from ear to ear. “They don’t call you ‘the best geo-engineer in the field’ for nothing.”

  Alan laughed. The praise had come from a magazine article in Popular Science two years earlier when the Cerberus Project was just beginning to attract attention in the mining industry. He believed the young, blonde writer had been more infatuated with him than with the story.

  “Maybe if I hadn’t believed the hype myself, we wouldn’t be in this mess. You and Trace both said I was moving too fast.”

  Vince plucked his cigarette from his mouth and laughed. It was a sarcastic laugh. “If Trace or I were in charge, we would still be tweaking the drawings. I’m good at following blueprints, but I don’t have what it takes, up here.” He pointed to his sandy-haired head.

  Alan accepted Vince’s self-deprecating statement as a gesture to bolster his sagging confidence. Vince was a mechanical genius who had been instrumental in many of the Cerberus’ design changes. Alan brushed the annoying wind-blown sand from his face. The breeze was beginning to pick up, and the flat land around them did nothing to block its fury. Only the low hill caused by an anticline in the local rock stratum they were using as a test site broke the stark monotony of the landscape. Its remoteness was the reason they had chosen the area for their tests.

  “This sucks,” Vince yelled at the landscape, as he lit up another cigarette. “There was none of this dust for Doctor
Perry or David Innes.”

  Alan sighed and hung his head. “Not Abner Perry again.”

  “Well, aren’t we just like David Innes and Doctor Abner Perry in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core? Cerberus is our Iron Mole.”

  Vince’s infatuation with the Pellucidar novel series by Burroughs sometimes became tiresome, especially with his constantly drawing parallels between Burroughs’s heroes and themselves.

  “The Earth’s not hollow, Vince,” Alan reminded him. “It’s hard as a rock. That’s the problem.”

  “Yeah, just you wait. We’ll find Pellucidar yet. But just the same, I want to get back to my room and take a hot shower.” He lifted one leg and wiggled his butt, frowning. “I’ll probably have to vacuum this sand out of my ass crack.”

  Alan chuckled at Vince’s lurid description and tried to dismiss the somewhat disgusting image it conjured as he considered their problem. He watched Vince take another deep puff of his cigarette and smiled. As solutions sometimes do, this one came to him full blown, floating like a 3-D diagram in his mind. Vince’s off-hand witty comment had provided the catalyst. He swung around and confronted Vince.

  “Vince, is it possible to run a secondary vacuum line into the GPS assembly and attach it to the main heat transfer vacuum pump without the heat back-flowing into the GPS unit?”

  He watched as Vince ran the idea in his mind. His eyes lit up as he found a solution. “If we install an insulated, one-way vacuum switch, I don’t see a problem. That new NASA foil should be able to handle that much heat.” He furrowed his brow. “But what good would that do. Why do we need a vacuum? Dirt hasn’t been a problem, has it?”

  Alan smiled. “No, don’t you see? We place the entire GPS assembly in an airtight compartment and…”

  “Vacuum out all the air,” Vince finished for him. “In a vacuum, the GPS shouldn’t heat up as quickly.”