Subterrestrial

by McBride, Michael

  Hart realized she was holding her breath and released it with an audible gasp that echoed away from her into the darkness. Even her pulse seemed to echo. The tunnel felt as though it were constricting her, squeezing the air from her lungs, the very life from her breast. She scraped her shoulders and her elbows, raked the top of her head, abraded her chin. Her heart beat faster and faster. Her breathing accelerated to the point that she realized with a start that she was no longer able to exert any conscious control over it. The urge to turn around, to return to the others, overwhelmed her, while the prospect of wriggling backward, unable to see where she was going, scared the living hell out of her. What if the others weren’t where she’d last seen them? What if they’d gone looking for her in the wrong direction? She had no means of tracking them and no prayer of finding her way back to the surface.

  This had been a terrible idea, just like so many others. She’d rushed to judgment without thinking things all the way through and in doing so had damned herself. She was going to die down here and no one would ever find her body.

  She closed her eyes and lowered her head. Panicking would only make things worse. She focused on her breathing, on counting between each inhalation and exhalation. She imagined herself back in Kokolopori, with columns of sunlight arcing through the lush canopy from the seemingly infinite blue sky. She could almost smell the dew dripping from the tips of the leaves and the guava ripening in the trees. Almost see Tamu trying to sneak up on her through the bushes, feel his clumsy hand close over hers, hear his playful cries—

  Her eyes snapped open.

  She’d definitely heard something. A high-pitched shriek from a great distance that almost sounded like . . .

  A smile spread across her face. There on the ground, spotlighted in the beam from her headlamp, was a sight that erased all of her doubts and fears. There, in a patch of silt, was a handprint. It was a partial at best, but it was enough to see the imprint of the first two knuckles and the curvature of the base of a short, blunt thumb. She would have recognized it anywhere. It was almost exactly like that of a bonobo.

  She looked for another print, but the impressions became less distinct as the sand grew deeper. It must have washed into the tunnel with the flooding. It was fine and silty and almost reminded her of a tropical beach, although the nearest one was thousands of miles away.

  The ceiling receded until she was once more able to crawl, which allowed her to increase her speed. Her exertions no longer echoed and she trembled with excitement, not fear.

  Another shrill cry. Closer this time.

  It was an alarm call. She was certain of it.

  The tunnel abruptly opened into a cavern. The ceiling was vaulted and spiked with stalactites, lending the overall impression of a gothic cathedral. Ahead, the ground was steep and buried beneath an avalanche of boulders. The cave had collapsed so long ago that flowstone had trickled between the rocks and absorbed them into its mass. The trail following the strange topography was clearly evident.

  Hart stood and ran her fingers across the smooth stone composite. It was worn through eons of use and reminded her of soap the way it had molded to the shape of the hands and feet that had crawled over it through the eons. She recalled the prints captured in the flowstone near where they first exited the River Styx and could only imagine how many more individuals it must have taken to wear a path like this into solid stone.

  “What are you waiting for?” she said.

  She bounded up the slope, all the while attempting to gauge the gait of the animals that had forged the trail. They were considerably smaller than she was and seemed to move in a lurching motion that favored their front appendages. All of the handholds felt the same, as though they were used for both hands and feet. Their feet must utilize a hallux first digit capable of grasping like a thumb.

  The ground fell away behind her, while the stalactites drew ever closer to her head. They were worn by hands, worried into a variety of geometric designs that would have been invisible were it not for the shadows cast by her light. She had to view them indirectly, from the corner of her eye, as they vanished completely when she shined her beam directly at them, much like the faces of The Watchers.

  The escarpment grew steeper, forcing her to balance on a narrow ledge and rise to her full height. Her legs shook as she negotiated the shallow handholds. Once she reached a flat surface large enough to accommodate her body, she hauled herself up and clung to the ground while she caught her breath. She wondered if she hadn’t just passed the point of no return, from which there was no physical means of going back.

  She raised her head in an effort to see—

  Something grazed her cheek.

  Hart pulled her face away so quickly she nearly slid right back over the edge. She shined her beam onto it and released an audible sigh of relief.

  In her mind, she’d pictured the stinger of a cave scorpion, but it was just a little question mark–shaped plant, unfurling like a fern. She’d already started climbing again when it hit her.

  She looked back at the plant. It was brown and crisp and on the verge of death, yet still there was no way it should have been able to take root down here at all. Not unless . . .

  Hart craned her neck in an effort to see the top. Even when she stood, she couldn’t see high enough to tell if there was a passage up there in the darkness. Her only choice was to find a secure grip and do the last thing in the world she wanted to do.

  She turned off her headlamp and waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. An ethereal purple glow slowly drew contrast from the shadows, illuminating the smooth stone and giving form to the rocks above her. It was barely enough light by which to negotiate the slope. She tested each grip several times before trusting her weight to it. The light was mesmerizing. It was such a deep shade of violet that there were moments when she wondered if she were actually seeing it at all. What could cause a phenomenon like that? Was there access to the surface? Some shaft deep enough to allow light to pass through a vein of amethyst?

  A scratching sound.

  Hart looked up and what felt like sand struck her face. Her eyes filled with tears. She tried to rub them on her shoulders.

  Another scratching sound.

  She tucked her chin. This time the grains clattered from her helmet.

  Something was definitely up there.

  She risked a glance up. A shadow passed across the purple glare.

  Her heart raced at the prospect that the primate she was following might be up there, just out of—

  A scream from directly above her.

  Hart looked up into the stalactites.

  Movement.

  A flash of teeth.

  She stepped back onto open air.

  And then she was falling.

  IV

  “What the hell is that thing?” Payton whispered.

  Thyssen knelt over the remains and shined his light onto what was left of the creature. He’d been so surprised by the sudden movement that he’d drawn his pistol and fired instinctively, without getting anything resembling a good look at what he was shooting. Now he could only stare at the mess of blood, tissue, and feathers and imagine what it must have looked like in life.

  The bloody feathers at first appeared white, but closer inspection revealed the coloration to be a cumulative effect. They were actually translucent, like a jellyfish, with a coarse texture and barbs near the vanes. The abdomen was ruined and bloomed with viscera. Its legs were bare and scaly, and reminded him of those of an ostrich or a roadrunner, with long articulated toes and tiny talons. One leg slowly scraped the ground, drawing an arch through the blood.

  Thyssen nudged it with the barrel of his pistol and its head flopped sideways onto the limestone.

  He closed his eyes and saw the house in Diomede Village, the bloodstained mattress and the riot of footprints. When he opened them again, all he could see were the sealed recesses that lined the walls well beyond the reach of his light.

  “Are those te
eth?” Nabahe said. “What kind of birds have teeth?”

  Thyssen stood. He knew exactly what kind of birds had teeth.

  He shined his light through the tear in the covering and onto the corpse inside. The man had been dead for some time. The blood had drained from his face, leaving it pallid and waxy. His eyes were gone, as were the tip of his nose and his earlobes. Where his abdomen had been was an indistinguishable mess of macerated flesh and what looked like a giant brown raisin.

  “It’s reptilian,” Payton said. “Those scales on its breast are tubercular. It has a nuchal crest with dorsal spines along its neck. An external eardrum with a subtympanic shield, like an iguana. And feel the feathers. They aren’t keratinized. Feel how soft they are? They’re made of collagen. See? They aren’t feathers at all. They’re protofeathers. Do you know what this means? Feathers aren’t just adornments; they’re integumentary organs. Extensions of the skin itself. Skin capable of producing both scales and feathers.”

  “It’s a goddamn dinosaur,” Nabahe said.

  “It’s so much more than that. Protofeathers aren’t capable of sustained flight. And see the way the blood beads on them? They serve as a water barrier and, more importantly, help to preserve its internal body temperature. This is an endothermic reptile. What you’re looking at is proof positive that dinosaurs evolved into modern day birds.”

  “I don’t think the guy in there is too impressed. In case you didn’t notice, there’s not a whole lot left of him.”

  Thyssen had noticed, and it wasn’t even the most remarkable thing about the dead man. If he was one of the victims taken from Diomede, then he couldn’t have been dead for more than forty-eight hours, which meant the remains had somehow been transported down here and sealed inside the wall to be utilized as a food source. It was almost as though the creature had emerged from the confines like a bird from an egg. Or maybe . . .

  “We need to find Dr. Hart,” he whispered.

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

  Thyssen tuned out everything around him and listened for a repeat occurrence. There was a subtle change in the air, a sense of displacement. Alarms went off inside his head in a desperate attempt by his subconscious mind to issue a warning he couldn’t interpret, a tip-of-the-tongue sensation. Was it something he’d heard? Something he’d seen?

  He was only peripherally aware of Payton heading back toward the underground passageway calling for Dr. Hart, of Nabahe complaining about being misled, of the fact that an extant species of dinosaur could potentially validate every one of the theories Thyssen’s family had spent three generations attempting to prove.

  His eyes settled upon Martin’s hand. He recalled how the fingers had twitched. They were now curled inward like claws.

  Clack.

  Clack.

  Contractures—involuntary tightening of the muscles—occurs during the early stages of rigor mortis, roughly three to six hours after death and following the primary stage of flaccidity. They are the result of muscular fibers burning through the body’s remaining reserves of adenosine triphosphate, ATP, the use of which causes them to flex, bending joints and seemingly animating the body of the deceased. It starts with the muscles in the face and spreads outward through the body, from the shoulders and hips to the elbows and knees. The fingers and the toes are the last, and their contractures signal the end of rigor and the onset of secondary flaccidity. Martin’s muscles would soon relax, and the process of decomposition would begin in earnest, commencing with a rapid drop in body temperature.

  Suddenly, everything made sense. The bodies weren’t walled inside there just to feed them.

  He grabbed Martin by the wrist and pulled him out of the recess. He crumpled to the ground on his side, his knees drawn acutely to his chest.

  Clack.

  Clack-clack.

  “Did you guys hear that?” Nabahe whispered.

  The bodies of the dead provided the heat necessary to incubate them.

  Thyssen kicked Martin’s thighs out of the way and aimed his pistol at the man’s abdomen. His wetsuit was ripped and crisp with congealed blood. His belly had been opened right up the middle, parting his abdominal muscles. Thyssen saw what looked like a bubble of the peritoneum between them, but he knew exactly what it was. It squirmed deeper inside as though fleeing the light. He pulled the trigger and Martin once more folded forward. Again and again he fired, until he couldn’t hear the spent casings tinkling to the ground over the ringing in his ears.

  He jacked the empty magazine, snapped another home, and turned toward Butler’s body. He was already reaching for the engineer’s shoulder when his brain caught up with his eyes.

  A glimpse of Nabahe’s face as he blew past, his eyes wide, his mouth framing a shout Thyssen couldn’t hear. And behind him, a dark shape charging straight toward him.

  Thyssen turned to fire and took the impact squarely to his chest. He left his feet. His head bounced from the ground. He saw stars and tasted blood. His helmet cracked and his light died. He instinctively raised his arms in front of his face. Implements as sharp as razors sliced through his forearms. He felt the warmth of blood, then agony as every nerve ending clear down to the bone came to life.

  Something clawed at his thighs. Snapped at his face. He smelled death on the creature’s breath as it flung strands of blood and saliva onto his face.

  He tried to fire the pistol, but couldn’t seem to make his hands work.

  A flash of discharge.

  He caught a glimpse of a row of teeth like those of a shark, ribbons of blood unspooling from their tips, and then they were gone.

  The report had been right next to his ear and had hit him so hard he was certain it ruptured his eardrum. He grabbed for his ear and felt the dampness of blood. The conch stung from the tattoo of discharged particles.

  Someone grabbed him by the collar of his suit and dragged him backward. He could barely make out the contours of the walls in the dim light, which shifted wildly with the exertions of whoever wielded it.

  He felt heat on the back of his head. Smelled sulfur.

  A voice shouted directly into his ear, but he couldn’t decipher the words. They sounded as though they came from miles away.

  He had just enough presence of mind to take a deep breath before a sharp tug pulled him over the edge and he was immersed in hot water, which brought with it a whole new level of pain.

  V

  Mitchell had spent more time down in these warrens than anyone else, yet he was beginning to feel as though he’d only explored the smallest fraction of what was actually down here. For all he knew, these tunnels were infinite and ran from one magnetic pole to the other, filling the entire mantle like an enormous ant farm. All he knew for sure was that the two primary laws of aquatic physics still applied. Even in the absence of running water, he could use those rules to predict the course it had taken long ago. These tunnels might have been the result of arbitrary flow and chemical interactions with the acidic limestone, but they still demonstrated an element of predictability.

  He’d learned that for flowstone to form there had to be an orifice through which some quantity of fluid passed. Mere drops of condensation and the eternal patience of nature formed stalactites, stalagmites, and all of the various other speleothemic projections. Duan undoubtedly would have been able to lend deeper insight that would have saved Mitchell a number of false starts and wrong turns, but he tried not to think about the geologist’s fate for fear of losing his resolve, which was about the only thing keeping him going. Given enough time, he firmly believed he could find the others and lead them back to the surface, but with whatever killed Duan hunting them and millions of gallons of water speeding their way, time was their greatest enemy.

  He’d ripped the sleeves off of his wetsuit and used them to replace the torn Thermoprene on Calder’s lower legs. The makeshift bandages did a better job of holding in her blood, yet still the occasional rivulet flowed along the top of her foot and
between her toes. She was walking better, though, and that was all that mattered. She’d paled considerably and hadn’t spoken in some time, which was something of a mixed blessing.

  They hadn’t heard whatever sliced through the sole of Calder’s boot since they left it pacing behind them. Mitchell wouldn’t soon forget the clicking sounds it made and placed each footstep as softly as possible in hopes that when it did catch up with them, he’d be able to hear it with enough warning to react. If he did, the plan was simple.

  Run.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but until he came up with something better, it would have to do. He carried the flare gun from the emergency kit. It wasn’t especially accurate and even a direct hit wouldn’t do a whole lot of damage. He could only hope that it would buy them some time, and as they’d already learned, even a few steps could mean the difference between life and death.

  Plip.

  Plink.

  The dripping water echoed all around them at once. It streaked through his peripheral vision and glistened on the damp walls, where primitive artwork was etched into the limestone. The subjects ranged from stick figures to more stylized triangular, rectangular, and more anatomically correct forms. They hunted with arrows, spears, and axes and felled animals both small and large. He recognized deer, bears, and mammoths, while other animals appeared to be random combinations of others or outright imaginary beasts. There were sections where the walls were scored black with carbon near fire pits so old the ashes had been sealed beneath several inches of flowstone.

  Calder spoke in a whisper, and even then her voice carried throughout the cavern.

  “If whoever made these could find their way in here, then we can find our way out.”

  Mitchell nodded. He drew a measure of comfort from her observation, at least until they reached the end of the cavern and found the bones. They were brown with age and accreted minerals and staked to the walls by lengths of petrified wood. Disarticulated bones littered the ground beneath their suspended feet. They were shorter and broader than modern humans, their skulls markedly apelike. Bony decomposition had been arrested by their absorption into the limestone. Speleothems hung from their prominent brows and chins. There had to be a dozen of them on both sides of an opening in the wall, above which someone had carved eyes. Stalactites hung from the mouth of the orifice like fangs.