Subterrestrial

by McBride, Michael

  “For what?”

  “For saving your life.”

  “What makes you think I needed saving? You think I can’t take care of myself?”

  “I have no doubt you’re more than capable of taking care of yourself. When you’re conscious and not actively drowning, anyway.”

  “What do you want? A reward?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to say thanks. You know, so things don’t get awkward between us.”

  “Too late for that.”

  “Listen—”

  “Shh!”

  Calder stopped and closed her eyes. She’d heard something. A clattering sound, barely audible beneath Mitchell’s incessant yammering.

  Clack.

  A clicking sound from the distance, like a stone striking flint.

  She glanced at Mitchell, who swept his light across the walls. It barely illuminated a small fissure at the top of a flowstone formation before he shut off his light and they were again thrust into complete darkness.

  Another clicking sound.

  A handful of pebbles struck the ground maybe thirty feet to their left and scattered across the limestone.

  “It’s coming,” he whispered directly into her ear. A chill traced her spine. “We need to move quickly and quietly.”

  She nodded, even though he couldn’t see the gesture. His hand closed over hers and he gently pulled her toward where she’d seen the crevice.

  Clack.

  Clack-clack.

  The wounds on her legs sang in pain. She stifled a gasp and somehow managed to keep moving. There was fluid inside her boots that she prayed was just water. It was all she could do to minimize the squelching sounds as she staggered across the room. The racing of her pulse in her ears was too loud for her to hear anything else.

  Mitchell stopped without warning. She raised her hand and found the wall, closer than she’d expected. His soles squeaked as he scurried up the flowstone, urging her to follow. She had to release his hand to find the leverage she needed to climb after him. The crown of her head struck the rock lip. She ducked inside and crawled as fast as she could.

  Clack . . . clack.

  The sound was louder now.

  Closer.

  The crevice narrowed as she crawled. She had to lower herself to her elbows, and even then her backpack scraped against the rock. She couldn’t raise her head, not that she could see a thing anyway.

  Clack.

  The sound originated from right behind her. She instinctively crawled faster and ran into Mitchell’s feet. He was flat on his belly and using his toes to propel himself deeper into the tunnel. He made a rustling sound and she realized he’d taken off his backpack. It scraped as he shoved it ahead of him. The tunnel constricted even more and she was forced to do the same.

  From behind her, a wet noise . . . faint, almost like a cat licking its paw.

  She froze.

  Her breath echoed in the confines.

  Again, the slathering noise. It sounded so close, and yet simultaneously some distance away. She couldn’t divine its location with the strange acoustics.

  Clack.

  Whatever it was knew they were in there. Assuming it couldn’t see them in the darkness any better than they could see it, it had to be hunting them using one of its other senses, but which one?

  She held perfectly still and willed her heartbeat to slow. Each inhalation came shallower and quieter than the last.

  Mitchell remained motionless ahead of her. She hoped it was because he’d heard it, too, and not that he’d run out of room to crawl or, heaven forbid, gotten himself stuck.

  The wet sound again, followed by an expulsion of air.

  She felt the warmth suffusing the bandages on her legs. She tried to silently gain traction with her toes, but slipped on her own blood.

  The resultant squeak echoed through the tunnel.

  The noises behind her ceased. She closed her eyes as tightly as she could and held her breath. Maybe it hadn’t heard. Or perhaps she’d startled it and it was even now retreating—

  Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.

  The sounds grew frenzied. Something struck the sole of her boot and jerked her backward.

  Calder screamed and yanked her foot. Another tug in reverse. She pulled with everything she had, freed herself from what felt like a hook through the rubber sole, and scurried deeper into the earth.

  Snapping sounds behind her. Frantic scratching. She felt the movement of air. Smelled carrion.

  Clackclackclackclackclack.

  She smacked the top of her head. Over and over. Ran into Mitchell and shoved. Tore the skin on her knuckles and fingertips in an effort to find traction. She barely registered the changing intonation of her screams before the ground fell away from beneath her and she tumbled headfirst onto something marginally more forgiving than the stone.

  Mitchell grunted and rolled out from beneath her. His flashlight beam streaked from his hand, blinding after so long in the pitch black. It raced across the stone walls and settled upon the mouth of the tunnel above them. Her blood glistened on the edge.

  Calder scooted backward and pushed herself to her feet. The light wasn’t powerful enough to illuminate the tunnel’s full length. She could see maybe twenty feet of blood-smeared stone and fresh scratches in the limestone.

  Mitchell closed his hand over her mouth and drew her to him.

  “Shh,” he whispered into her ear. “You’re all right now.”

  She hadn’t realized she was still screaming and quieted herself through sheer force of will. They watched the far end of the beam for any sign of movement.

  The only sound was the distant clack . . . clack . . . clack . . . clack from the other end of the tunnel, where the predator paced from one side of the adjoining cavern to the other.

  II

  Nabahe had known something was wrong the moment he smelled it. The scent was one he would never forget, no matter how long he lived. He’d smelled it before, half a lifetime ago and half a world away.

  He’d been driving through the desert in the middle of the night, back when his eyesight had only begun to fail him. He’d caught just a flash of eyeshine when the coyote stepped out into the road from behind the creosotes. He hadn’t even had time to brake. There’d been a thud and the animal had bounced up over the hood of his Wrangler and into the cloud of dust trailing him.

  He remembered sitting there, staring down the empty road as droplets of blood congealed with the settling dust on his windshield, until he summoned the courage to open the door and walk into the red glare of his taillights. The coyote was a sacred spirit in nearly all Native American cultures, whether as a teacher, a trickster, or even a god. To leave one lying there bleeding, whimpering as it tried to drag itself the remainder of the way across the road, would be a sacrilege, if not an outright act of cruelty. So he’d wrapped it in a blanket from his trunk and loaded it into the back seat, its insides barely contained by the fabric. By the time he reached the nearest medical facility, a tribal clinic on the Tohono O’odham Reservation, its jaws were locked on its protruding tongue and its eyes had lost their luster.

  The emergency room staffer, a nurse practitioner with a sun-blistered face, had known there was nothing they could do for the animal and had asked him kindly to help her lift it out of his car. During the process, the blanket had fallen open and the animal’s viscera, partially contained within the silver sheath of the peritoneum, had fallen from its belly.

  It was that stench he recalled now, one of immediacy and transiency, one that heralded the arrival of Másaw, the Hopi caretaker of the spirit, and the black flies, the scourges of flesh.

  Nabahe didn’t need to see the man to know he was dead, yet his feet propelled him forward, seemingly with a will of their own. He stepped around Thyssen, who tore the fibrous material from the stone as he continued to shout into a communication device in his palm and advance into the earthen corridor. There were recesses on both sides, just as there had been where they ex
amined the primate’s skeleton. The one on his right contained a man folded into a fetal position, his forehead pressed to his knees, his arm hanging at his side. His blood dripped from between his fingers with a slowing plip . . . plip . . .

  The man’s wetsuit was torn in dozens of places. The flesh beneath it was macerated and thick with clotting blood. The profile of the man’s face was unfamiliar. It felt like a posthumous insult to be unable to mourn this unknown man, unlike the corpse stuffed into the wall to his left. He recognized Butler immediately, even with the lacerations on his cheek and the crimson mask on his face. A flap of hair and scalp hung over his ear.

  “What in the name of God happened to them?” Payton asked from behind him.

  Nabahe could only shake his head. These men looked as though wild animals had attacked them, but how had they been carried down to this awful place so quickly? And what kind of animal was capable of doing something like . . . this?

  He looked up and shined his light from one side of the tunnel to the other. Stone walls that had at first appeared seamless were actually anything but. There were discolored patches roughly the size and shape of the holes inside of which the bodies had been unceremoniously interred. They were a subtle shade of brown apart from the surrounding limestone, although upon closer inspection, it was the variation in texture that delineated them. Where the rock appeared waxy and soft, the discolorations had an almost papery feel to them, like a wasp’s nest. They billowed outward ever so subtly as he walked between them.

  Plip . . . plip . . .

  His beam penetrated the thin coverings, just far enough to reveal the dark shapes encased within. He was reminded of his grandfather, who once held a rattlesnake’s egg up to a candle to show him the developing embryo inside. This was different, though; the shapes inside appeared fully formed.

  Thyssen shouted at the top of his lungs.

  Nabahe whirled and watched the man close his eyes, shoot the cuffs of his wetsuit, and visibly compose himself. When he opened them again, there was something alien about his face, as though it were a mask at emotional odds with his eyes.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to try to raise the base again from a different location, presumably one closer to the surface.”

  He strode forward with his customary confidence and appraised both bodies.

  “Allen Butler was a world-class engineer and friend. Desmond Martin was one of the finest men with whom I’ve had the privilege of serving. The world is a poorer place for their loss.”

  “Serving?” Payton said. “I was under the impression this was a private corporate venture.”

  “It is. And it isn’t. There’s more at stake here than I’m prepared to divulge at this juncture.”

  “Prepared to . . . ?” Payton said. “These men are dead! Look at them! For Christ’s sake! Look at what’s been done to them!”

  “There are no small sacrifices in the name of progress,” Thyssen said.

  Nabahe detected movement from the corner of his eye and heard a soft crinkling sound. He turned and shined his light onto the semitranslucent covering, which, now that he really scrutinized it, reminded him more of the secretions cave swallows used to make their nests and affix them high up on cavern walls. The strands were fibrous and distinct, like a potato sack. A shadow shifted behind them.

  “Is that what we are? Sacrifices?” Payton said. “You didn’t feel the need to mention any of this when you showed up in Vietnam?”

  “You were all too willing to believe anything I told you, Thyssen said. “Besides, we didn’t know about any potential threats at the time. Until this very moment, we all believed that the greatest danger was the inherent geological instability.”

  “You knew about the sea lions.”

  “Which can be found throughout the arctic in similar conditions. We had no reason to believe—”

  “But you suspected.”

  “Guys,” Nabahe whispered.

  The shadow shifted again, and there was a distinct crackling sound. The smell intensified, which had hardly seemed possible a second prior.

  “All evidence pointed to the recent extinction of an unclassified species of primate, one potentially from the hominin tree,” Thyssen said. “Perhaps even a remote chance of its survival. And if that were the case, it would have been naive to think that a single species could live in isolation without others doing the same.”

  “Guys,” Nabahe said. There was definitely something in there. Something living.

  “You realize that as recently as twenty thousand years ago,” Payton said, “this entire area was above sea level and served as a land bridge for any number of species migrating from Africa and Asia into the Americas?”

  “Our working theory is that as the seas rose, your theorized bridge was gradually replaced by the discovery of a network of subterranean passageways,” Thyssen said. “We’ve found stone flakes that match those of proto-human tools found in caves from Alaska to Argentina.”

  “But think about all of the other species that could have survived down here. There’s fossilized evidence in both China and America of the same species of dinosaurs, for the love of God. Everything from saber-toothed tigers to the mother-loving Tyrannosaurus Rex! Did you ever stop to think—?”

  “Guys!” Nabahe shouted.

  They turned as one to look at him. While Thyssen remained composed, Payton’s face had reddened and his fists were clenched at his sides.

  “There’s something in there.”

  Their lights converged upon the filamentous sheath. The crackling sound became increasingly insistent. The covering bowed outward. What looked like a pointed instrument traced a line down the center. From the opposite side.

  Payton leaned closer and extended his hand toward it. Hesitated. It retracted when he finally touched it.

  “Jesus.”

  A rustling sound from behind them.

  Nabahe whirled and looked for movement.

  Plip-plip. Plat.

  Martin’s hand. He thought he saw the middle finger twitch, but it couldn’t have. The man was dead, wasn’t he?

  All of the fingers curled slowly inward, whether from the contractures of rigor or conscious movement, he could only guess.

  Nabahe stood and took an uneasy step toward where the hand dangled.

  Plip-plat. Plap.

  A light whipped from side to side behind him, throwing his shadow wildly down the tunnel as though in an attempt to take flight.

  “Where’s Emily?” Payton said.

  “Dr. Hart?” Thyssen called.

  Nabahe attempted to shush them. When that failed, he could only tune them out. Something was definitely wrong here. He could feel it in the air, an electrical sensation that caused the muscles in his neck to clench and his heart rate to accelerate.

  “She was right behind me a second ago,” Payton said.

  “She couldn’t have gone far,” Thyssen said. “Not without any of us seeing or hearing—”

  A tearing sound.

  Nabahe spun around in time to see the sheath split and a dark shape tumble through the seam and spatter onto the ground. He caught a glimpse of the gun in Thyssen’s hand as he brought it to bear on the shape.

  A flash of discharge.

  A deafening clap of thunder.

  Nabahe threw himself to the ground and covered his head with his hands. The beam from his headlamp swept across the limestone and onto a spatter of blood.

  III

  Hart froze. Pebbles rained down on her, forcing her to tuck her chin to her chest. The loud cracking sound. Was it the shifting of the strata or something else? She held her breath and waited for countless tons of rock to crush her.

  The ground remained still beneath her. She risked a glance up. If it hadn’t been the sound of settling rock, then what could have made such a loud noise? It had sounded almost like a gunshot.

  Hart cautiously resumed crawling.

  She hadn’t come this far to be dissuaded by noises or to follow a group of str
angers blindly through these warrens. She’d seen what she had come here to see and she didn’t care what anyone else thought, she was going to find it, even if it killed her. This was the culmination of all of the years in school and research in the field. This was her chance to go where no one had gone before her and to see what no one else had ever seen. This was her chance to potentially make first contact with an unclassified hominin that evolved down here in the darkness, in, for all intents and purposes, an evolutionary vacuum. This was her Jane Goodall moment, the one that would change the course of her life.

  Breaking away from the others was terrifying, but they’d be able to find her with their tracker. Or at least she hoped they’d be able to. She didn’t want to think about how furious they’d be when they did or about the thousands of horrible things that could happen to her on her own, not least of which was the prospect of the entire mantle slamming down on her and compressing her to atoms.

  Her breath echoed around her and every scrape of the toes of her boots was amplified tenfold. She didn’t know how far she’d crawled, only that she could no longer hear the hollow intonation of the larger cavern behind her, and the tracks she now followed were no longer damp but rather flaked under the pressure of her hands.

  She regretted abandoning all of her supplies, but there had simply been no other way to reach the mouth of the tunnel. The idea had hit her while the others walked down yet another stone corridor in yet another stretch on the godforsaken maze. She had just emerged from the sulfurous water and was standing there, dripping in the darkness, when she realized that she didn’t owe these people anything. They’d come to her for her expertise and experience. If they wanted either, they were going to have to let her off her leash.

  Before she even made a conscious decision to do so, she was swimming back through the channel toward where she’d watched the simian shape crawl into the hole in the cavern roof. Her pack had given her just enough of a boost that she’d been able to leap up against the wall, push off with her right foot, and grasp the lip inside the orifice, almost as though it had been placed there for that exact purpose. It had taken a feat of strength and desire to pull herself the rest of the way, but here she was now, closing the distance between her and all of her professional hopes and dreams.