by JE Gurley
“We fought the British for the right to be left alone,” Bekker countered. “We left Cape Colony to settle new, open lands in the Transvaal. We tamed this country.”
“You stole it from the Zulu and the Bantu.”
“Savages,” Bekker growled. “They ran around half naked and fought each other over cattle.”
He stalked away from Khosa past the boring machine, careful not to stray beyond the range of its lights. Khosa’s remarks had only intensified his unease. He patted the R4 rifle cradled in his arms. He was an excellent shot and didn’t fear anything he could see, but like Khosa, he felt that something in the darkness watching them, something inimical and hungry.
“How long have they been gone?”
Khosa checked his watch. “Thirty minutes. Do you miss Duchamps?”
Bekker exploded. He marched up to Khosa and shoved his face up to his. “To hell with Duchamps and to hell with you!”
Khosa sneered. “Do not try to intimidate me, Bekker. I can smell your fear. If you do not wish to be here, you may go join the others.”
He pointed downslope into the darkness. Bekker’s gaze followed Khosa’s pointing finger. He flinched at the thought of walking into the darkness alone. He licked his lips.
“No, I’ll remain here. We must guard the machine.”
Another half hour passed; then Khosa looked downslope and asked, “Did you hear that?”
Bekker was still irritated at Khosa for calling him out as a coward. He heard nothing and suspected Khosa was trying to goad him into another argument. “Hear what?” he snapped.
“It sounded like gunfire.”
Bekker listened more closely. After a minute, he heard a muffled sound that could have been gunfire. It could just as easily have been falling rock. Pieces of the roof had been dropping since they had arrived. He considered himself lucky one hadn’t landed on his head and crushed his skull, hardhat notwithstanding.
“It’s nothing,” he replied.
“It was gunfire,” Khosa insisted. “I am certain.”
“Then let’s go check it out, anything to shut you up.”
“No, we have our own problem,” Khosa answered.
“What do you mean?”
“Can you not feel it?” He touched the Star of David suspended from a chain around his neck. “It is something evil whispering from the darkness.” He turned to stare at Bekker.
Bekker noticed the look of terror in Khosa’s eyes and felt some of the man’s panic. He raised his rifle and stared into the shadows, waiting for whatever was out there. There was no sound, no breeze, but the air around them grew colder. He stiffened when something brushed the edges of his mind. It felt like a soft whisper, but he knew it came from nothing human. He sensed hunger and longing. He sensed evil, the complete absence of kinship with any living creature. It was a strange feeling. Even the most dangerous predator interacted with its own kind, felt some affinity with them. This … thing radiated a deep loathing and contempt of everything lesser than itself.
He glanced at Khosa, who had his eyes closed, mumbling the words of the hashkiveinu, the Hebrew prayer of protection from dark things, while clasping his Star of David to his chest.
“Open your eyes,” Bekker snapped at him. “Pull out your pistol.”
Khosa stared at Bekker, his eyes displaying his resignation. “It will do no good.”
“Damn you, kaffir,” Bekker shot at him.
Khosa ignored the racial slur. His eyes remained fixed on the shadows. Bekker expected some animal to charge out of the darkness. The rest of it, the strange feeling, was just Khosa messing with his head. He prepared himself, rifle to his shoulder set on full auto. Instead of an animal, the shadows of the tunnel grew darker, thicker, becoming a living, inky, undulating blackness that surged down the lava tube, flowing toward him like liquid tar. Just as the writhing shadow reached his feet, it broke apart, becoming dozens of giant black insects.
“Shongololo,” Khosa said.
The creatures looked ancient, like distant primitive cousins of millipedes with which he was familiar, except these were twice as long as he was, and he could feel their ravenous hunger.
The shadowy creatures billowed upward, enveloping both him and Khosa. Bekker did not have time to scream as the creatures ripped into his flesh.
9
July 5, 2016, 7:00 a.m. Ngomo Mine, 138 Level –
Duchamps waved his hand in the air, and his men formed a line across the width of the tube. They moved out with the tracker Claude in the lead. Alan and Eve marched at the rear. Occasionally, she took photos with her cell phone. She surprised him by snapping a photo of him.
“What was that for?” he asked.
“For me,” she replied, smiling.
A few minutes later, Claude called them to a halt. He bent over and picked up a broken beaded necklace.
“What is that?” Alan asked.
“It is an ibheqe, a lover’s charm. It must be Masowe’s. He would never leave it.”
Eve moved closer to Alan and whispered, “I’m frightened.”
As much as he wanted to reassure her, he couldn’t. His state of uneasiness increased, just as when he knew a support beam was going to give way in an old mine, a kind of sixth sense he had developed over the years that had saved his life more than once. Goosebumps sprouted on his arms. “So am I,” he confessed to her.
They passed the diamonds with only a brief glance by Duchamps; however, Eve became excited, oohing and aahing as she spotted each large deposit. She snapped several photos before Duchamps warned her to stop. Alan supposed it was in a woman’s nature to appreciate a jewel’s beauty more than its worth. Duchamps merely saw dollar signs, something someone might steal, and he was doing his job to protect it. Alan’s mind was busy trying to devise a way to tunnel through such pockets without damaging them. Perhaps a sensor that lowered the laser temperature at the first sign of diamonds would work, and then extract them by hand.
His mental calculations so intrigued him, that he failed to hear Duchamps’ call to halt. He bumped into Eve.
“Sorry,” he said. He looked around. “What’s up?”
“The tracker found something up ahead,” she replied.
He remembered the camera on his hardhat. “Trace, can you pan ahead and see what they found?”
“Affirmative.”
He heard the whine of the camera as it moved on his hardhat. After a few seconds, Trace said, “It looks like a side tunnel of some kind. I can’t tell from here if it’s another lava tube, merely a pocket, or a deep fault.” Trace paused. “Wait a minute. Infrared indicates it’s cooler than the tube, but there’s a lot of that bioluminescent stuff.”
“We’ll check it out,” he told Trace. He walked over to Duchamps. “Trace says it’s cooler in the cleft. Can we rest out of this heat?” The lava tube was cooler than the mine, but the high humidity drained him. His energy level was bottoming out. The others appeared to be handling the humidity with no problem, but he was a Nevada boy used to a drier climate. He needed a break.
Duchamps nodded. “Claude says the opening is clear.”
The group entered the vertical crevasse and dropped their heavy packs, relishing the cooler air. Alan noticed it was fifteen degrees cooler than in the lava tube, about 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Everyone please extinguish your flashlights,” Eve asked.
Duchamps looked at her for a moment before nodding to the others to comply. As soon as the lights went out, the entire grotto lit up like the inside of a Christmas tree. The grotto was a narrow chasm in the side of the lava tube, as high as it was deep. It had formed from a fractured fault line sometime after the lava tube became inactive. White, blue, and yellow lines radiated throughout the walls and roof of the crevice, often merging to form large splotches of color. As his eyes adjusted to the lower light level, Alan found he could see everything and everyone perfectly well. He could even read the names on the uniforms by the glowing cave light.
“We
could save our batteries if we use only the cave light when we can,” he suggested to Duchamps. “That would allow us to search longer.”
Amazingly, Duchamps agreed with him. “It is a good idea, but keep your flashlight nearby at all times,” he cautioned.
The light spectacle around them delighted Eve. She moved around the crevice, using her cell phone as a video camera, oblivious of the leering stares of some of the guards as they drank water from canteens they passed among themselves. Alan couldn’t understand their jokes, but he was sure they were much like the jokes of men in any country and at Eve’s expense. He chewed on a protein bar to raise his sugar level, but he couldn’t get the image of Vince lying dead somewhere out of his mind. He had promised his father to find him.
“Alan?”
Alan keyed his mic to answer Bill. “What is it, Bill?”
“I’ve been replaying the Cerberus video. Most of it is dark after Vince shut down the lights, except for the glow of a lantern. They turn it off after a while.”
“So?”
“Just a few seconds before Vince turns the Cerberus’ lights back on, there’s a quick, bright flash. It overpowers the camera’s sensors, but I ran a spectrum analysis on it. I could be wrong. I mean, it’s a video not a direct observation, but …”
Alan rolled his eyes and sighed, wondering where Bill was going with his report. His need to be precise was great for engineering but could be a pain in the ass in a discussion.
“Get on with it, Bill,” he urged.
“It looks like a methane explosion.” The words burst from him so quickly Alan thought he had misheard. The sniffer indicated no high concentrations of methane.
“A methane explosion?”
“I’m ninety percent sure.”
In Bill’s mind, ninety percent was a certainty. Alan considered the possibilities. There was very little methane present now, but the air from the mines and the air in the lava tube had mixed for several hours. With the slightly higher oxygen content, even low levels of methane could have combusted. There was only on problem with that scenario.
“But we found no bodies. The heat from a methane explosion wouldn’t be enough to totally cremate a human body.”
Bill was apologetic. “I know. I just thought you might want a heads up.”
“Thanks, Bill. The air checks out fine now, but I’ll continue testing it just in case.”
Sooner than Alan hoped, Duchamps ended the break by standing and picking up his pack.
“Leave nothing behind,” Eve told everyone. “We don't want to contaminate the grotto any more than we have too.”
This produced several chuckles from the men who had already left their own little spots of liquid contamination in the form of urine on the rocks.
Duchamps switched on his flashlight, erasing the iridescent graffiti of the lichen. He glanced at Eve, as she continued to photograph the crevice. “Doctor Means, we don’t have all—”
Gunshots from down the tube erased his last words. Alan glanced around and quickly counted heads. Who was missing? Claude, the tracker. He must have gone ahead. More resembling a posse after an outlaw than a search and rescue team, the entire group grabbed their weapons and poured from the grotto. A high-pitched wail from the same direction as the gunshot elicited such visions of terror and pain it sent spasms surging through Alan’s bowels. He managed to quell the disquieting rumblings before soiling his pants, but just barely.
They found Claude’s weapon beside a pool of blood twenty meters downslope. Of the tracker, only a piece of cloth ripped from his shirt remained. The only sign of his attacker was a series of small droplets of blood leading from the pool of blood and across the rocks, but they disappeared as mysteriously as the tracker.
Eve began sobbing. One of the guards dropped to his knees and covered his face with his hands, mumbling something about Intulo. The other guards looked around nervously, searching for a target on which they could vent their fear and anger. Duchamps stood staring into the dark depths of the lava tube. After a few moments had passed, he pulled his pistol from his holster and told the guard, “Get up off your knees. We have company.”
Alan couldn’t see anything, but he trusted the security chief’s judgment. “Trace, pan the tube again on Infrared,” he said.
Again, he heard the camera whine.
“I see movement some sixty or sixty-five meters away,” Trace reported. “Whatever they are, they’re cooler than human bodies, barely warmer than the ambient temperature. They’re merging and breaking apart, so it’s difficult to get an accurate count, but they look to be two feet tall and about twice as long.”
Alan relayed the information to Duchamps as Trace continued commenting in his ear. “They’re headed your way,” Trace yelled. “Watch out, they’re moving fast.”
The guards readied their weapons. Duchamps motioned his men to scatter among the rocks and hold their fire. “When they get close, switch on your flashlights. Maybe it will blind them.”
“I doubt it,” Eve warned. Rather than showing fear, she appeared anxious to see what life forms the tube had to offer. “Living in this weak light, it is likely they rely on a heightened sense of smell for hunting.”
Duchamps paid her little heed, barking orders to his men.
“Here they come,” Trace warned over Alan’s earpiece.
“Now!” Duchamps shouted.
The lava tube lit up as all the flashlights came on at once. The shadows of the rocks made it difficult, but Alan could just make out the creatures coming at them. They appeared almost as dark as the shadows. Shots rang out all around him. The sharp report of pistols and the earsplitting blasts of single shots and short bursts from the R4 rifles filled the air with thunder and shrill screams. Duchamps jumped down from a pile of rocks and landed beside Alan, frightening him half to death.
“Here.” He handed Alan his pistol; then leaped back over the rocks, firing his rifle as he went.
Alan stood and took careful aim at the nearest creature scrambling over the rocks, a nightmare with a segmented carapace and eight, multi-jointed legs. It was as large as a kitchen sink, a bastard cross between a giant black scorpion on steroids and a scarab beetle. Its nimble, long legs helped it leap over boulders, and the sharp claws on the forward pair of appendages made formidable weapons. A long tail tipped by a sharp barb dripping venom whipped the air around it. If that wasn’t enough, the monster’s wicked-looking mandible snapped open and shut with a loud click.
Alan emptied his pistol into the first creature. Just as he began to fear the bullets were having no effect, it fell dead at his feet, twitching and flopping on the ground with a thick liquid oozing from the bullet holes in its carapace. He stepped back to avoid its still-snapping mandibles and tripped over Eve, kneeling on the ground behind him calmly shooting more video. He collapsed on top of her as a second creature appeared above them on a boulder. He knew he could never reload his revolver in time. He pushed Eve farther beneath him to protect her.
The creature’s head exploded into mush, as Duchamps fired at it pointblank with his rifle. He reached down, pulled Alan to his feet, and handed him a handful of cartridges.
“Reload,” he said; then disappeared into the melee.
His trembling hands hampered him, but Alan managed to reload the gun. He searched for a target but noticed it had gone quiet. He searched for Duchamps and saw him standing with his back to the wall of the lava tube. Satisfied the fighting was over; Duchamps calmly replaced his pistol in its holster and began to check on his men.
“Call out,” he yelled; then listened as they began to call out their names. Three men answered out of the six remaining.
Alan helped Eve to her feet.
“Thank you for protecting me,” she said, “but you knocked my cell phone out of my hand. I missed most of the action.”
“I’ll write a paper for you describing every little detail, including the three dead men,” he replied. His answer was brusque. He admired her coolness in t
he face of danger, but her one-track mind annoyed him.
She frowned at him, and then began to examine the fallen creature. He went to join Duchamps. He passed the mutilated remains of the three guards, now barely recognizable as human. The claws, stingers, and mandibles of the creatures were as deadly as swords and as sharp enough to slice through bone. A dozen of the creatures lay scattered around the area. Only the continuous fire of the rifles and pistols had prevented a slaughter.
“Well, we know now what happened to the others,” Duchamps said. “They were killed and their bodies dragged off.” He showed no remorse at the loss of his men. “We have to get out of here now, before they regroup. Doctor Means was correct. When we hit the lights, their eyes went golden, but they didn’t even slow down. What the hell were those things?”
“They seem to be some type of mandibulate,” Eve answered, having completed her cursory examination of one of the dead creatures. Its yellow blood stained her hands. She wiped them on her jumpsuit.
“A what?” Duchamps asked.
“A mandibulate is an insect with mandibles, or moving mouth parts, thought extinct since the end of the Carboniferous Period over 300 million years ago. They were the ancestor to modern insects. It has a venomous sting like a scorpion, but the tail, the telsun, seems too short for a primary defense weapon, more an extension of the metasomal segment. However, the sting itself, the aculeus, is quite long and barbed.”
“Those claws are pretty lethal,” Alan noted, “as well as the mandibles.”
“Yes, the pedipalps are quite enormous. They might also serve in a courtship ritual. The mandible, or more specifically the chelicerae as this creature is an arthropod, acts as a tool for grasping its prey as it devours it. Science had thought them solitary hunters, but these mandibulates hunt in swarms and are evidently quite adaptive. They show a remarkable degree of communicative ability.”
“A smart, deadly bug?” Alan asked.
“Not smart, but organized. Perhaps some creatures sought shelter in deep caverns during the late Carboniferous Period and adapted to the environment. The gold lids are light filters. They can see in complete darkness or in full daylight, which is remarkable for creatures living in absolute darkness. Their sense of smell is extraordinary. These creatures’ sinus cavities are twice that of known fossil remains. This is an entirely new species, a great find. We must bring one back for study.”