The Extinction Code

by Dean Crawford

  Table of Contents

  THE EXTINCTION CODE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  XLI

  XLII

  XLIII

  XLIV

  THE EXTINCTION CODE

  © 2016 Dean Crawford

  Published: 29th April 2016

  ASIN: B01EWSGU72

  Publisher: Fictum Ltd

  The right of Dean Crawford to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  Dean Crawford Books

  I

  Varginha, Brazil

  1996

  ‘Move, and tell nobody where you’re going!’

  Corporal Rodrigo Martinez almost fell over himself as he dashed toward the truck parked nearby in the compound, one of several normally only used by engineers, not junior infantry soldiers. The Colonel had been precise in his instructions, adamant in fact, that Rodrigo should follow his orders to the letter, and there had been no mistaking in his cold tones the consequences of his failure to do so. Be there on time, or you’ll never see your family again.

  Rodrigo clambered into the truck and started the engine, the cab sweltering after a day spent stationary beneath a summer sun beating down from the hard blue sky above. Now, the sky was almost dark but for the last glow of sunset behind the hills, and the town to the south was a flickering constellation of lights against the darkness. The diesel engine belched a cloud of brown smoke as he crunched the vehicle into gear, the compound gates already opening as he accelerated forward and drove out of the Tres Coracoes Army base.

  Rodrigo followed the road south as instructed, heading toward town and allowing nothing to block his route. The battered old truck rattled and thumped as Rodrigo drove, his rifle alongside him in the passenger seat. His police uniform was hot and uncomfortable but he was glad of the fresh breeze billowing in through the open cab windows. The smell of the wilderness gusted around him from the depths of the night, and it was then that he noticed the lights appearing in the sky.

  Across the valley he could see a stream of lights descending the main road toward the outskirts of the city, heading it seemed toward the same location as he was. For a moment he thought that they were illuminated objects flying through the air until he recognized them as headlights, the occasional flare of a brake light visible as the vehicles braked while descending the steep hillside. Moments later, the radio was alive with chatter.

  ‘Lo has visto? Have you seen it?’

  ‘No, donde esta? Where is it?’

  ‘En la ciudad la gente tiene miedo. In the city, the people are afraid.’

  Rodrigo glanced at the radio, uncertain of what to make of the chatter as he descended the hillside and turned onto the beltway road that bypassed the city center and headed for the edge of the wild ground to the north–west. Ahead, he saw the other vehicles turn away from him, all heading in the same direction. Military Police, he identified their plates, streaming toward a location identical to his own.

  Another voice on the radio channel.

  ‘De donde viene desde? Where did it come from?’

  The reply sent a cold chill down Rodrigo’s spine.

  ‘Se bajo del cielo. It came down from the sky.’

  Suddenly the radio channel was cut off and Rodrigo could hear nothing but static. He twiddled the controls but nothing came through, the static hissing through the cab but the vehicles ahead of him still forging toward their target.

  Rodrigo kept driving, pursued by the sense that something very odd was happening further up the road. He realized that he was gripping the wheel tightly, his knuckles showing white through his skin, and he chuckled at himself as he let his tension go and forced himself to relax as he drove. There was nothing to worry about, and whatever was driving the military police up the wall would likely turn out to be nothing more than a crashed airplane.

  The thought that there could be injured survivors of an aircraft crash galvanized Rodrigo and he prepared himself for the worst. The region’s harsh terrain and violent weather were often precursors to aviation accidents, and the horrific aftermath of such incidents haunted even the hardest of minds.

  The convoy ahead of Rodrigo began to slow down, and he eased into line behind a four–ton truck loaded with soldiers. They peered out at him, faces hard, no smiles, no waves. Rodrigo kept his anxiety at bay, tried to ignore a clairvoyant concern nipping at the heels of his awareness as he saw the trucks being waved through a military cordon just ahead.

  The armed guards at the makeshift cordon glanced at Rodrigo’s identity card as he eased alongside them, and he saw one of the soldiers tick off his name against a list that he held in his hand. Rodrigo wondered how on earth he had been selected for what seemed like quite a major assignment as he was waved through the cordon and he followed the line of trucks down between ranks of trees toward an area that he knew to be mostly wasteland, scattered copses of trees around a lethargic stream that ran down from the hills.

  The convoy suddenly split up before Rodrigo and formed a loose semi–circle of vehicles as the troops spilled out, their rifles held at the ready. They fanned out and away from their trucks, forming an imposing ring of soldiers as Rodrigo pulled up and killed the truck’s engine. He climbed out of the cab and looked at the soldiers’ faces; all of them were young, minor ranks and recruits. All of them were staring out toward him, their backs to whatever was in the center of the ring of trucks, apparently too cowed by their superiors into doing anything other than precisely what they were told.

  ‘Maintain position!’ a voice echoed faintly, the only officer that Rodrigo could see emerging from the ring of vehicles. ‘Face outward and don’t you dare look behind you or you’ll spend the rest of your lives behind bars!’

  The soldiers all yelled their compliance back at their Captain, and Rodrigo almost obeyed himself before he recalled that the Army man had no authority over him unless direct orders from the government said that he did. A tall man with a thick moustache and a back so straight it seemed he was on the verge of toppling over, directed his stern glare at Rodrigo.

  ‘Martinez?’

  It sounded more like an accusation than a request, and Rodrigo nodded. ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘With me,’ the captain said.

  Rodrigo noticed that although the officer wore the shoulder insignia of a captain, he could see no identification patches on his uniform. He hurried to keep pace as the officer directed him past the vehicles.

  ‘Over there,’ he ordered. ‘You’re on watch on the hillside. I’ve been advised that you’re a model soldier, you were recommended. Ensure that you continue in that vein and stop anybody who tries to enter this area. Complete your duties and forget that you were ever here, understood?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Rodrigo replied.

  The captain turned away toward the nearby forest, and Rod
rigo clambered up the hillside. As he climbed, so he saw a glow coming from within the forest nearby. It shimmered and flickered, one moment green, the next red, then blue and white, as though a kaleidoscope were passing across beams of light that pierced the misty forest gloom. Rodrigo flinched as a harsh whisper cut the silence.

  ‘Don’t look at it!’

  Rodrigo turned to see a policeman standing on the hillside, beckoning him urgently over. ‘They’ve already arrested two men for looking!’

  Rodrigo hurried across to the young policeman, whose uniform bore the name Marco Eli Chereze.

  ‘What’s over there?’ he asked.

  ‘It came down an hour ago and I was close to the scene in my patrol car. That’s why they kept me here on guard, because I’d already seen it.’

  ‘Seen what?’ Rodrigo asked in exasperation.

  ‘The machine,’ Marco replied, struggling for his words. ‘That’s all that I can call it.’

  Rodrigo frowned in confusion and then a sharp crack echoed through the forest nearby and he flinched as he turned, one hand moving to the butt of the pistol in its holster at his side. Marco also turned, raised his rifle.

  The faint glow from within the forest cast enough light through the foliage for Rodrigo to detect a hint of movement, as though something were huddling among the ferns and bushes nearby.

  ‘You see that?’ Rodrigo asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Marco replied, edging closer to it. ‘It’s probably a dog or something.’

  Rodrigo followed him, one hand still on his pistol as they approached the bushes. Rodrigo was about to say something when Marco coughed and turned his head to one side in disgust, and then the smell hit Rodrigo too. An overpowering stench of ammonia soaked the air, sufficient that Rodrigo coughed also and his eyes blurred as he winced and turned away.

  Marco covered his mouth with one forearm, the rifle held in one hand as he advanced. Rodrigo sensed danger and cried out, his voice taut.

  ‘Don’t go near it!’

  The bushes shivered as whatever was within tried to escape as Marco came within a yard of the foliage.

  ‘Come out whoever you are! We’re police, and we’re armed with…’

  Marco’s sentence was cut short by an inhuman screech, a terrifying, wretched cry that soared from the bushes across the hillside. Rodrigo felt his guts convulse as something leaped from the bushes, a thin yet muscular form with sinewy skin that shone in the faint light as it rushed at Marco, its small mouth agape and its huge eyes wide with rage.

  Marco’s rifle fired, the shot deafeningly loud in the darkness, and the creature’s enraged cry was twisted sharply with agony as it swung for Marco. A long–fingered hand smashed across the young policeman’s chest and hurled him backwards into the bushes as the creature rushed past them and vanished into the darkness.

  Rodrigo stood in horror, paralyzed by what he had seen, his hand frozen in place on his pistol still lodged in its holster. His brain seemed to have gone into slow motion, processing and re–processing the terrible sight of that awful creature leaping from the darkness like a demon from his nightmares to…

  Shouts alerted him and he heard men swarming up the hillside toward their position, search lights sweeping the forest as they rushed into the woods and saw Rodrigo standing rooted to the spot.

  ‘Where is Chereze?!’ the captain demanded as he stormed in among his men.

  Rodrigo tried to reply but his voice would not work. Instead he simply pointed to the foliage nearby where Marco had fallen. The captain hurried across to see Marco hauling himself to his feet.

  ‘Did you see it?!’ the captain roared. ‘Did it touch you?!’

  Marco nodded. ‘Here, it hit me, but it only knocked me over and…’

  The captain turned away from Marco and spoke into his radio. Within minutes, the soldiers had surrounded them and doctors marched onto the hillside bearing a stretcher and a large tent of translucent plastic. Rodrigo stood and watched as they erected the tent and ordered Marco inside.

  ‘But I’m fine,’ Marco protested. ‘Shouldn’t we go after the…’

  ‘Silence!’ the captain roared. ‘Put him in!’

  Before Marco could react a doctor plunged a needle into his arm. Marco yelped in pain and staggered away from the medical team, but within moments his legs gave way beneath him and he collapsed onto the forest floor. Rodrigo watched as Marco was lifted onto a stretcher and into the tent, which was sealed behind him.

  The captain turned and stalked toward Rodrigo.

  ‘Did it touch you?’ he demanded.

  Rodrigo found that he could still not speak, so he shook his head slowly instead, his eyes fixed upon the tent into which Marco had vanished.

  ‘Did you see it?’

  Rodrigo swallowed, gathered his composure. ‘No, it was just a shape, a figure in the darkness. What was it?’

  The captain raised his chin and spoke clearly.

  ‘It was a homeless man, a local, whom we believe to be armed and dangerous.’

  Rodrigo’s gaze moved across to the glowing lights in the forest. There, far away through the trees, he could just about discern the shape of something that was anything but an aircraft. He opened his mouth to speak, but the captain shifted position and blocked his view.

  ‘You’re dismissed, corporal,’ he growled. ‘You were not here. None of you were here. You have a sister, two brothers and a family of your own, yes?’

  Rodrigo’s attention snapped back to the captain, shocked that he would have such knowledge of his family. ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you love them, never speak of this again, understood?’

  Rodrigo’s eyes narrowed. ‘Who are you, what regiment are you from?’

  The captain took a pace closer to Rodrigo. ‘Understood?’

  Rodrigo glanced at the soldiers surrounding them, and nodded once. ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Escort this man away from the scene and ensure that he never, ever returns.’

  Moments later Rodrigo was dragged down the mountainside by four men, a black sack over his head and sickening fear pulsing through his veins.

  ***

  II

  Hell Creek, Montana Badlands

  2002

  ‘It’s out here somewhere.’

  Doctor Aubrey Channing knew that he was in the right spot, if for nothing else than the sweltering heat of the sun hammering down into the barren valleys stretching before them. The brutal landscape had been carved by erosion through the ages, the tens of millions of years separating the upper mesas from the furnaces of the valley floors clearly visible as lines of horizontal strata etched by the endless procession of time into the living rock.

  Channing crouched down onto one knee as he slid his rucksack from his back, and from within it he retrieved a hand written letter that he read again for the fiftieth time, the hairs on the back of his neck tingling as he did so. Individual lines leaped out at him, firing his determination as much now as when he had first read them a week before:

  I can’t bring myself to publicize what I have found…

  Nobody will believe me…

  It’s located north–west of Jordan, Hell Creek.

  Do with it what you will…

  I want nothing to do with any of this.

  Channing checked a compass he had brought with him, set it down beside him on the rocks as he pinpointed their current location on the edge of Hell Creek’s fearsome beauty using a map.

  ‘You think that it’s out here?’

  The voice of Channing’s companion, Rory Weisler, intruded upon the deep thoughts coursing through his mind. He nodded absent–mindedly. Weisler was a newspaper man instructed to bring the letter to Channing; enthusiastic, talented and intelligent, he lacked the discipline of silence that was the hallmark of the true scientist. Interrupting a thought process was the academic equivalent of pointing a gun at your own mother.

  ‘It’s here,’ Channing said as he plotted a course down into the shimmering waves of heat trembling o
ut of a valley to their west that twisted like a wounded serpent through the bare rock. ‘It’s close.’

  Channing stood, slung his rucksack across his shoulder and marched down the slope toward the valley floor. Weisler followed, never more than a few footsteps behind as they carefully negotiated the rock–strewn paths into the depths of Hell Creek.

  The formation was one of the most intensively studied anywhere on earth and stretched between Montana, North and South Dakota and Wyoming, overlying the Fox Hills formation where they now trod. Channing had spent his entire career out here, sweating on his knees beneath the ferocious sun rummaging through ancient rocks that had once been brackish clays and sandstones deposited along river channels and deltas at the end of the Cretaceous Period, some sixty five million years before. An interior seaway surrounded by sub–tropical forest had once occupied this area, a stark difference from the arid sun–baked rocks crunching beneath their boots as they descended.

  Channing had been approached by Weisler after the reporter had received an anonymous letter from somebody who could only have been an academic working in the same field of science as Channing: paleontology. The precise nature of the script, the naturally flowing choice of words, the carefully placed and equally carefully concealed hints and tips to the location of the subject of the letter suggested a superior intelligence. Channing figured by the postmark that the correspondence had come from out east, maybe one of the prestigious halls of academia in New York City, but he hadn’t had the time to investigate and track down his mysterious benefactor due to a single line in the letter:

  It’s exposed, and will not survive long the harsh elements of Hell Creek…

  The crumbling rock faces gave way to slopes, where scattered clumps of hardy grass clung to life amid the scorching rock faces. Channing surveyed the strata around him, colorful stripes across the hills that denoted the passing of history before their very eyes.

  ‘Why are there lines all across the hills?’

  Weisler’s voice sounded stark in the silence, louder and perhaps a touch more irritating than Channing would have liked. Why the author of the letter, having wanted nothing to do with whatever he had found out here, would then request a media man to assist Channing in his search made no sense whatsoever. The newspapers rarely managed to record anything accurate, their methods diametrically opposed to the careful accumulation of data used by science to ascertain truth before revealing it to the world.