He collected all four of the men and wrapped them individually in plastic tarps. The whole lot of rabbits fit into a fifth bundle, which he loaded into the back of a Jeep and drove out to where Benjamin’s team had been mere hours earlier. The well was sealed beneath a temporary iron hatch that was easily enough leveraged open to reveal a great black orifice from which chemical fumes rose with such intensity that they made his eyes burn.
Randall recognized the enormity of what he was about to do, but couldn’t afford to dwell on it for fear he might talk himself out of it. His plan was wrong on so many levels, and yet the consequences of doing the right thing could prove catastrophic. Thompson had recognized the dangers prior to his death and had planted the seeds of doubt in Randall, who believed in their mission to rid the world of the enemies of freedom and liberty, but not at the expense of all humanity.
The time had come to end this experiment once and for all.
He dragged the wrapped bodies from the Jeep and forced them through the orifice, which was barely wide enough to accommodate their shoulders. Used a metal post from the demolished mast to tamp them deeper, until he was certain they’d fallen into the depths, where the brass would never think to look for them, let alone be able to recover them.
By the time he returned to the main building, dawn was a pink stain on the horizon. With the interior drenched by the fire sprinklers, it was going to take more than a tank of petrol to do what needed to be done. Fortunately, there was a gas line in the lab and thousands of gallons of combustible precursor chemicals, more than enough to turn the entire facility into an inferno that would burn so hot and fast that there would be nothing left of it by the time the fire department arrived.
RANDALL FELT THE heat of the blaze on the back of his isolation suit as he walked down the dirt road toward the security gate. He hoped he’d made it look good enough that the powers that be would believe the bodies of the missing men had been incinerated inside. Maybe he should have just dropped a match into the well and blown the whole base to hell, but he still had faith in what they were trying to do, despite the fact that they’d created an abomination of nature in the process. At least he could count on the toxic chemicals two miles down to destroy the evidence of what they’d accomplished.
TODAY
Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, Commerce City, Colorado
THE PAIN IS more than Rana can bear. She cries out and registers surprise at the sound of her voice echoing away from her into darkness so complete she can’t tell if her eyes are open or closed. She tastes blood on her lips, in her mouth. The intense pressure in her head is worse than any migraine she’s ever experienced and it feels as though someone’s sitting on her chest, making it difficult for her to breathe. Her arms and legs are sluggish and heavy. It has to be well over a hundred degrees. Her clothes are already soaked with sweat. She realizes where she is with a start and screams once more into the bowels of the earth.
A muffled moan from somewhere nearby. The acoustics make it impossible to pinpoint its origin.
She pushes herself to her hands and knees and crawls in what she hopes is the right direction, sweeping her palms across the uneven ground in front of her. Each inhalation brings with it chemical fumes that burn all the way down her trachea and into her lungs. The intense heat is worst near her left breast, where her suit must have torn during the attack, the memories of which come flooding back to her.
The creatures had come out of the ground with such speed that she hadn’t gotten a clear look at any of them. Mere silhouettes bristling with sharp, quill-like protrusions all over their bodies. She remembers Sydney turning around and sprinting toward her as the monsters washed over her. Hitting the ground on her chest and clawing at the packed dirt as she was dragged backward toward the hole. People shouting and running in every direction. Rana had barely managed two strides before she was struck from behind. Her mask cracked a heartbeat before her face slammed into the ground. Then, only darkness.
“Help me!” she screams, her voice reverberating into a space far vaster than the readings had led her to believe.
Silence.
She’s about to call out again when she realizes that the creatures that dragged her down here are likely still lurking somewhere nearby.
A faint scratching sound betrays the presence of something moving through the darkness.
Her right hand meets with a soft, somewhat rounded object. She pats it down until she recognizes it as a shoulder. The body is much larger than Sydney’s, meaning it belongs either to Tim or a member of the HAZMAT team. She works inward until she finds the helmet. The shield is broken, fully exposing the man’s face. She traces it with her gloved hands, but can’t feel the contours well enough to identify who it is.
Another scratch, closer this time.
The Tyvek fabric of his suit is torn. She reaches underneath it and feels his chest, but can’t tell if he’s still breathing. His button-down shirt is warm and wet with what she hopes is sweat. A quick search of the pockets of his jeans produces a wad of bills in a money clip and a set of keys with—
She nearly sobs out loud at the discovery of the mini flashlight on his keychain.
Once she turns it on, whatever’s down there with her will know exactly where she is, but if she’s to have any chance of getting out of here, she’s going to have to be able to see her surroundings.
There are tears streaming down her cheeks when she finally musters the courage to switch on the flashlight.
And immediately wishes she hadn’t.
Her screams reverberate seemingly all the way to the center of the Earth.
THE OLD MAN hobbles past the cordon, stands at the edge of the hole, and leans heavily on his cane. All of his life he’s feared this day would eventually come and has spent the intervening years preparing for it. The soldiers under his command have fought in some of the tightest quarters known to man, from the caves of Afghanistan to the apocalyptic cityscapes of Syria. They might not know what was waiting for them at the bottom of the well, but he had no doubt they knew how to kill it.
The blood on the hardpan is congealed into the dirt and there are obvious signs of a struggle near the lip, leaving little doubt as to what happened to the USGS survey team and the HAZMAT crew, whose vehicles still sit in the lot several miles away, a trek the old man had no desire to make at his advanced age. Fortunately, a colonel didn’t have to walk if he didn’t feel like it, so instead he rode in the expanded mobility tactical cargo truck, which had been specially equipped with a motorized winch and more than two miles of steel cable. His team was already unraveling it so they could attach their harnesses in sequence. They’d spent years preparing for this kind of penetration, if not the unknown that awaited them two miles down. Even the old man couldn’t predict what kind of changes might have occurred underground during the last five-plus decades.
He’d been watching the news closely since the first earthquake in the swarm, but it wasn’t until after the USGS failed to raise its chief seismologist on her transceiver that he was alerted through formal channels to the rapidly unraveling situation at the site of his greatest failure. While he’d never actually uttered the truth of what transpired here all those years ago, his commanding officers had recognized that something was amiss and kept him on a short leash throughout his career, which served him well since he couldn’t bring himself to leave the mess he’d made behind. If ever anything unusual was reported in the vicinity of that well, he’d be damned if he wouldn’t be in a position to handle it.
He looks at the pictures of the men and women who’d been dispatched to investigate the cause of the earthquakes one last time before passing the digital tablet along to the rest of his unit. He’d hoped to arrive to find the response teams in perfect health, despite the satellite imagery upon which he could clearly see there wasn’t anyone within two miles of the well. If anything has happened to them, their fates will weigh heavily upon his conscience.
“We’re bu
rning daylight,” he says, and stares down into the darkness.
He thinks about all the things he could have done differently, knowing full well that if he had the opportunity to do it all over again, he wouldn’t change a thing. This was how events had always been destined to play out. It was why he’d persevered through the damage his tenure at the arsenal had done to his career and spent the balance of it working his way through the ranks until he was in position to command a team as loyal to him as they were to their country, a team that would follow his orders without hesitation. He’d survived two bouts with cancer, a triple bypass, and the Army’s best attempts to force him into retirement, all so he could be here at this precise moment in time.
Colonel Jack Randall raises his face to the sky and feels the heat of the sun on his face. He couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day to die.
RANA’S CRIES FADE into the unfathomable darkness beyond the range of the tiny light. It’s all she can do not to scream again as something moves through her peripheral vision. The walls and ceiling are positively covered with fungal growths reminiscent of briar patches, which can’t quite conceal the dark forms scurrying through them. One of the men from the HAZMAT team has been hauled up onto them. The sharp protrusions pass through his protective suit, summoning the rivulets of blood that trickle down the branches and eventually begin to drip to the ground with a soft plat...plat...plat.
She sees Sydney from the corner of her eye and rushes to help her. Kneels and rolls her onto her back. Her protective suit has been torn nearly all the way around and the clothes underneath are ripped. Her skin is bloody and raw and covered with pale white fuzz that almost appears to originate from within the wounds themselves. Worst of all are her eyes, which remain open and stare blankly into space. The vessels in her sclera have ruptured, turning the whites to red.
Rana stifles a sob.
Movement to her right. She whirls and shines her flashlight at a man in a suit matching hers. He tries to rise from the ground, only to collapse onto his chest again. Tries once more. When he looks into the light, she catches a glimpse of Tim’s face behind the reflection on his mask. His features are awash with blood. He makes a high-pitched keening sound and manages to crawl several feet closer before his arms give out.
“Oh, God,” she gasps, and runs to his aid.
The back of his suit is punctured in countless places. She struggles to roll him over. The inside of his mask is freckled with expiratory spatter, through which she can barely see his pallid features, contorted into an expression of sheer terror.
“Please...” he sputters. “Help...me.”
His eyes lock onto hers a split-second before the tiny veins burst and they flood with blood.
He screams and his face vanishes behind the expulsion of crimson that strikes his visor from the inside. His chest deflates and his body becomes still.
She shakes him.
“Tim?”
Shakes him hard enough to rattle his teeth, but his body remains limp.
Rana scuttles backward, swings the light in a wide arc. Sees another man from the HAZMAT team, sprawled on his side with his facemask shattered and blood dripping from the corner of his mouth.
The pain in her head intensifies and her stomach clenches. If the heat doesn’t kill her, the pressure at this depth eventually will. Assuming the chemical fumes didn’t finish her off first. Maybe if she closes her eyes and tries to reserve what little strength she has left, she’ll be able to last—
“Oh, no you don’t.”
Someone grabs her by the back of her suit and jerks her upright. She glances over her shoulder to see Stephens towering over her. While his suit appears largely intact, his left arm hangs at his side and he’s bleeding heavily from a laceration along his hairline.
“Get up,” he whispers. “Right now.”
He offers his hand and pulls her to her feet.
“The others—” she starts to say.
“Listen to me. There’s only one way out of here and we’d better find it before they come back.”
“Before who—?”
“Shh! Keep your voice down!”
She knows there’s no way in hell they’re climbing two miles straight up, but if even a small amount of fresh air—
The shadows shift ahead of them. Just beyond the farthest reaches of the flashlight beam.
“This way,” Stephens whispers.
“I saw something. Right over...”
Her words trail off as her light limns what looks like another bramble of fungal growth.
Until it moves.
RANDALL CLOSES HIS eyes as tightly as he can and tries to imagine himself somewhere else. Anywhere else. Unlike his men, he’s unaccustomed to being wedged into such tight confines. He thought he’d be better able to deal with the psychological effects of claustrophobia, from the crippling feeling of suffocation to the complete and utter inability to move.
He risks opening his eyes. Sees the eroded concrete passing mere inches in front of him, spotlighted by the narrow beam from the light mounted on his tactical helmet. And quickly closes them again. He concentrates on the sensation of descent, picturing himself inside an elevator, one moving much too slowly for his tastes, and cradles the specially designed, pneumatic-pressure powered assault rifle against his chest. While less powerful than its traditional counterparts and largely untested in battle, it still has enough force to punch a .45-caliber hole through a car door, should the need arise. More importantly, its discharge won’t ignite the combustible chemicals. Each of his men carries one, but only he carries the coup de gras, the incendiary grenade he wishes to God he’d used all those years ago.
“Passing the ten-thousand-foot mark,” Omega says through his in-helmet speaker. Each of his men has assumed a Greek letter based on position rather than rank, with Alpha serving as the tip of the spear and Omega manning the vehicle on the surface. “Not much farther now.”
Randall nods to himself. The airflow from the slender tank designed to attach to his thigh has done an amazing job of staving off the worst of the effects of the pressure change, although his forehead still throbs as though the vessels have swollen nearly to the point of aneurysm.
“I can see the opening underneath me,” Alpha says.
The point man is a good thirty feet below Randall and separated from him by three other men. Two more are harnessed above him, although he can’t tilt his head far enough back to see the boots hanging above the crown of his head.
“Slow descent by half,” Randall says.
“Slowing descent by half, sir,” Omega says.
“Tell me what you see, Alpha.”
“The chemicals have eroded through the rock, creating a vast cavernous space of indeterminate size.”
“Activate LiDAR.”
A faint reddish glow blossoms below Randall as a pulsed laser shoots out of the remote sensing device, which will create a three-dimensional digital elevation model of the cavern. It’s just bright enough to see through his closed eyelids.
The cable snags and Omega is forced to retract the line just far enough for the man who became stuck to work himself through the narrowing, before resuming once more.
“It’s roughly circular in shape,” Alpha says. “Just over a quarter mile in diameter with a domed roof approximately twenty feet high at its apex.”
Randall silently curses himself. The scientists had been wrong about the reaction of the chemical waste and metamorphic rock. They’d been wrong about so much...
“There are formations on the ceiling and floor reminiscent of helictites,” Alpha says. “Only they don’t appear to be speleothemic in origin.”
“What else could they be?” Beta asks.
“They appear to be biological.”
“Fungal,” Randall says.
A pause.
“What aren’t you telling us, Colonel?”
“Just keep your eyes open, Alpha.”
The sinking sensation slows, and then ceases altoget
her. A hint of slack ripples through the cable.
“I’m on the ground,” Alpha says. “It’s riddled with fissures, but feels stable enough. Just be careful where you—”
A sharp intake of breath and a gurgle of fluid.
The cable whips to the side, causing Randall to strike his head against the concrete chute. It jerks the other way and they all drop several feet.
“What’s going on down there?” Omega asks from the surface.
“We’re fish in a barrel inside this tube, Colonel,” Gamma says.
“Damn it,” Randall says. “Omega, release the brake.”
“Sir?”
“That’s an ord—” The line suddenly goes slack and they plummet into the depths. Randall presses outward with his upper arms to slow his momentum. Waits as long as he dares. “Reengage!”
He abruptly halts right after he passes through the ceiling of the cavern. His headlamp spins wildly as he twirls in his harness.
“Jesus Christ!” Beta shouts. “What the hell happened to—?”
The cable jerks again. The men below Randall disengage their harnesses and drop into the darkness, where twin beams of light lying on the ground highlight swatches of bare stone and rapidly expanding pools of blood.
Two more headlamps take up position between them. Gamma and Delta stand back-to-back, pivoting to examine their surroundings down the barrels of their rifles.
While all around them, the darkness begins to writhe.
THE CREATURE STEPS from the shadows into Rana’s light and she realizes that it’s at least partly human. It’s skeletal, as though little more than a being of desiccated skin mummified to a framework of bones. Its veins are like serpents trapped beneath translucent tissue, its muscles braided wires. Tatters of clothing remain, befouled by bodily functions and dissolution. Its ribcage stands apart from its breast and its head juts forward on a neck bowed like a vulture’s, a consequence of the long protuberances reminiscent of wires growing from its back.
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