by David Wood
Jen flicked her a wan smile. “I’m just so damned weak!” She leaned in, one arm over Slater’s shoulders, the other over Sol’s. Thankfully Slater was tall enough that the imbalance didn’t make her more hindrance than help. “But I’m getting stronger,” Jan said. “I can feel my strength returning with every bit of food and drink.”
“We’ll pause again soon, have another quick bite,” Sol said. “Lots of small feeds is best for you right now.”
They pushed on, silence but for their footsteps descending again after their few words. Everyone concentrated on walking carefully, making sure not to slip, trying not to make noise, to be alert like Reid had said. The passage echoed as their boots scuffed, occasional drips surprisingly loud, echoing back. The cold scent of rock and damp chilled their nostrils, despite the temperate warmth, and gave a slight cool hit to each breath. Headlamps strobed across each other like lazy swordplay as each person looked cautiously around.
Slater, breathing harder under the effort of helping Jen, glanced up from her feet just in time to avoid running into the back of Syed, who’d stopped dead. As she opened her mouth to speak, she saw past the biologist to Aston, backing up with his hand raised to halt them. He glanced back and his face betrayed a sudden fear. Adrenaline fell like a wave into Slater’s gut at the same moment as Tate, up front, raised her weapon and released a deafening burst of fire. The noise wrecked their ears, muzzle-flash like orange lightning made them all blink. In seconds everyone was screaming and scrambling back.
“Go, go, go!” Tate yelled, and fired again.
Gates stumbled through, adding his gunfire to Tate’s as Aston yelled, “Mantics!” He gestured frantically for them all to hurry back, then Terry Reid’s weapon began to bark short bursts of ear-splitting fire in the other direction.
Slater turned on the spot. “We’re trapped!” she shouted over the noise of the gunfire. “They’re coming from both directions!”
The passage turned into a strobing chaos of noise and light, and Slater caught glimpses in the crazy crisscrossing beams of headlamps and flashlights, and the intermittent flashes of gunfire. Creatures, as tall as the biggest man among them, like giant black termites with shining exoskeletons like armor. Kaleidoscope eyes glittered in the light bursts, powerful mandibles like an ant’s, only as long as her arms, snapped and clacked.
Sol pulled pistols from his jacket, one in each hand, and stood beside Reid, firing expertly from both simultaneously. Reid kept his fire in short controlled bursts, as did Gates and Tate at the other end. Slater felt like the meat in a very ugly sandwich and thought she would surely die here. How many of the things were there? It was hard to believe that all the stories and legends they had heard were real. It was disturbing enough to think of them in journals, but now proof positive skittered left and right before her eyes, getting closer every second despite the assault rifle fire.
Bullets pinged off the rocks of the walls and ceiling as the creatures zigzagged their way down the narrow passageways. Showers of green sparks like tiny fireworks erupted as bullets ricocheted off the mantics’ heavily plated exteriors. But they didn’t slow. The bullets seemed to cause no real damage.
Slater stared, horrified, and couldn’t help wondering if they really were aliens wearing some strange armor, but she dismissed the thought before following it too far. Unrecorded creatures were bad enough. She didn’t want to consider anything even less likely.
A burst from Ronda Tate found a gap between a mantic’s body and head and neon green sprayed out. The creature let out shrieks so high pitched they were almost beyond hearing.
“Aim for the joints! They’re vulnerable there!” Tate yelled, and the others took up their defense anew.
Slater huddled with the rest of the team between the two fights, hands pressed over her ears against the deafening reports. Unable to doing nothing any longer, she ran to Gates’s side and pulled the sidearm from his hip holster. He made room for her and she flipped off the safety and began emptying that clip, aiming for the thin joints in the articulated limbs. It gave her pleasure to score a couple of good hits, watch legs fly apart and the giant insects fall. But others simply swarmed over them.
The creatures were almost on them, chittering and glistening in the bursts of light and noise. Slater took a step to one side and her headlamp beam struck a mantic full in one of its multi-faceted eyes. It hesitated, flinched even, and seemed to stagger back a couple of steps. Slater pumped four bullets right into that illuminated orb which burst in a spray of bright green. The mantic shrieked and fell.
“Their eyes are sensitive to the light!” she shouted. “Blind them!”
The others took her lead, aiming their headlamps for the creatures’ eyes. Sol, Syed, Aston, even Jen, all pushed forward with flashlights, stunning the creatures with bright beams. A couple more mantics froze, turned their heads, but then charged again regardless, bullets pinging off of them with green flashes of sparks.
“Everybody fall back!” Reid yelled. “The way back is clearer!”
He continued to shoot behind Slater as she tried to flash her lights forward and run backward. Sol’s guns still fired, too. The lead mantic in the charge toward her fell, another stooped as if to snap a bite from it, but more surged on, clambering over their fallen kin without regard. Slater’s pistol clicked empty. Gates, perhaps still woozy, was left ahead of the retreating group. He fired rapidly, going from short bursts to full auto in a panic. Tate screamed something unintelligible, bullets glanced off the crown of the lead mantic’s skull, but the creature moved side to side with surprising agility.
Gates was too slow to react, suddenly an island of one man as the others hurried back, and the dodging creature snatched him around the middle in its huge mandibles. He howled, trying to raise his rifle to pump rounds into the thing, but it reversed its course and dragged him away in the dark. His rifle clattered to the ground.
Aston dove forward to grab it. “Turn around!” he yelled. “Run back to the green cavern! Maybe the light there will keep them at bay!”
Claws seemed to crawl up Slater’s spine as she turned away from the mantics still chasing them and ran at full speed, towards the flashes of gunfire from Reid and Sol. With Syed’s help, she almost dragged Jen along, but the exhausted woman found some reserves of energy and stumbled with more strength than she had shown before. Adrenaline, Slater thought, was a hell of a drug. As they stumbled on, Slater used the hand not holding Jen to keep firing rounds blindly behind her from her pistol. Then it clicked empty and she concentrated only on flight.
Ronda Tate stopped, still facing the horde coming the other way. “Go, go, go!” she hollered, bracing into rapid bursts of fire to hold them back.
Reid and Sol moved to support Tate as the others all ran back for the green cavern they had so recently left. The three still firing moved back as the team gained a lead and soon they were all bolting for the green glow in the distance. As she ran, Slater was sickeningly aware that they were once again moving farther from surface, back deeper underground with every step.
24
Digby O’Donnell stood staring in mesmerized wonder. Galicia had not been lying about the shrine. It stood in a small cavern, gently lit by more of the glowing vines and deposits of greenium. The cavern floor was concave, gently falling to a low center, and in the middle of that space stood an arch of rock. It seemed to have been carved from the very stuff of the cavern itself. No, Dig corrected himself. Not carved. Grown. As if two stalagmites, thicker at their base than a grown man’s waist, had formed straight up like normal, but had then slowly curved over to meet each other and form the arch some eight or nine feet above the ground. Was that even possible? It didn’t matter, here it was. Standing under the high bow of strange rock was a pile of stones, each perfectly flat, every next one smaller than the one below, like a stack of ever-reducing pancakes. A complicated sigil of many intersecting lines was carved into the top surface of the uppermost, smallest flat stone, about the size of a din
ner plate. Dig reached out one trembling hand and gently ran his fingers over the lines, felt an electric thrill that seemed more than mere excitement.
But more interesting than all of this were the pictographs carved around the arch itself, covering both back and front, a high curve of text from the ground on one side right over to the ground on the other, on both sides. He imagined the front as one long passage, then the back of the arch as another. And more than that, behind the strange monument, the entire rear wall of the cave was flattened and bore a huge body of text, hundreds of small pictographs in a square at least six feet on each side. So much information.
Was pictographs the right word, he wondered, or should he say hieroglyphics? That term was usually reserved for ancient Egyptian script, but could he be certain this wasn’t from a concurrent culture? The symbology was incredibly similar, though subtly different in key ways. Might this be a dialect of ancient Egyptian? A precursor? It thrilled him to consider it might be something older. Too many questions, he simply wanted to read it. He desperately ached to glean whatever knowledge it offered. But that would normally take many hours of conscientious study.
And still that whispering voice cajoled him, sibilant in his ears, tickling his hindbrain. Visions flickered in his mind’s eye, snatches of the caverns, of tunnels and caves. Some he knew, some he had never seen, and he thought perhaps he was seeing what others before him had seen down here. Or perhaps, what others were seeing now. But none of it helped him understand the knowledge written all around him. “Tell me!” Dig demanded of it. “These words, they must be the key to understanding. To understanding everything! Explain them to me!”
But no revelation came. Just the ongoing soft whispering of his name and a strange, dragging sensation exhorting him to go deeper, to keep moving. With a hiss of frustration, he pulled a small digital camera from his jacket and carefully snapped photographs. First from afar, capturing the whole arch front and back, the wall of text as a whole, then close-ups of all the pictographs, of the pancake stack of stones, of the strange design atop them.
“I’ll study these,” he muttered to himself. “When there’s more time. I can work them out, I can learn their secrets. Time. I just need time.” He giggled, tucked his camera away. For now, he could no longer resist the pull drawing him on.
He moved around the arch one more time, intending to return along the narrow passage that had led to the shrine and this time take the right fork, deeper into the caves, when he spotted something else. A small cairn stood between himself and the pictograph-covered arch, dozens of small stones piled into a fake stalagmite about two feet tall. As he leaned down for a closer look, he sensed power in there, a buzz almost like a live electricity source. He shoved at the pile with one palm and a flash of pain nearly blinded him.
He staggered back, letting out a cry of surprise and shock. He blinked, shook his head, but the light didn’t go away, shining bright green. He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and looked at the mess of stones he had scattered. An idol of some kind, seemingly carved from pure, unblemished greenium, lay on its side, revealed by his push. He crouched, his eyes slowly becoming accustomed to the new brightness.
The idol was of a figure, weirdly proportioned, head too large, eyes too big. It had thin arms raised in supplication and around its body looped many coils of... something. Vines? Ropes? Dig stared in wonder, trying to understand. The figure gave the impression it was ecstatic to be so bound, not scared or restricted, like it reveled in the embrace of whatever held it. And it was beautiful, the execution of the carving exquisite. Who would bury this treasure and why? Why not display it?
Dig reached out, picked the idol up and gasped as energy rushed through him. At the same time, the skin of his hands burned like the thing was hot, but the sensation was distant, like the memory of someone else burning. His thoughts dissolved at the pure ecstasy that surged into the rest of his body and mind as he held it. He imagined the purest cocaine and thought it would not hold a candle to this rush of pure joy. And yet, below the pleasure, entwined with it like whatever arms entwined the figure of greenium, was a sensation of joyous malice, of desperate need. His own need, certainly, but also the avarice of something else. Something whose wishes he simply had to fulfill. Blurred, inconsistent visions flickered before his eyes, a rapid, detailed slide show of tunnels and caverns he had seen already and others he didn’t recognize. He saw more arches, more carved doorways, more pictographs. He saw a dark place with flashes of fire and his friends screaming and running. He saw a large pool, crystal clear, and something caused the surface to boil and thrash. He saw hints of chittering mantics and slowly walking hominids with ash-gray flesh, watching, seeking, hunting.
With a sob of ecstatic need, Dig held the idol close to his chest and staggered back down the dark passage, his way lit by the glowing treasure. When he reached the fork, he turned, almost running to get deeper into the caves as quickly as he could.
25
Anders Larsen led Jasper Olsen and his heavily armed squad into the caverns. Nerves clutched Larsen’s muscles tight, but he felt excitement, too. Exhilaration that he had fulfilled his role as requested. That the whole thing, or at least his part of it, was almost at an end. The eight men at their back had the grim determination of experienced mercenaries. The scientists and their three security guards didn’t stand a chance.
Well, Larsen corrected himself, perhaps those three—Reid, Gates, and Tate—they might put up some genuine resistance. He had told Olsen to target them and Sol Griffin first. Take them out and the rest of the team would quickly fall into line without the need for more bloodshed. Although they probably ought to kill Sam Aston, too. That man looked like he could be trouble.
He tapped Olsen and shared his musings and the big mercenary leader grinned. “We’ll massacre them all if necessary. But don’t you worry about it. We’ve got it in hand now.”
Larsen nodded, smiled. He was certainly glad to be on this side of the forthcoming encounter. These guys were cold-blooded killers. He thought that maybe, once the shooting started and the engagement was underway, he might quickly run back in the other direction and wait for everyone topside. The less time he spent down here the better. He’d be happy if he never saw another cave for the rest of his life.
At the back of the marching squad, Adamsen and Jansen walked side by side. At first they had talked, pleased to finally be doing something pro-active. The long journey to the base had been boring, Jansen thought, and taking the base turned out to be nothing more than waiting outside a locked door until the local mole came and let them in. Now, finally, some action.
The scrape and scuff of their boots echoed off the curved walls of the passage, their flashlights striping the dark rock, the uneven ground. They made no effort to conceal their progress. After all, what resistance could a bunch of scientists and a couple of hired guns really offer? Jansen realized that maybe putting this expedition team under control might be as boring as taking the base and his excitement waned. He turned to Adamsen to run the thought by his friend, but the tall, blond man wasn’t there.
Jansen frowned. He looked forward into the group, but everyone he expected was clear to see, except Adamsen. He glanced back, shined his light into the darkness, and no one was there either. He opened his mouth to call out his concerns when something dark flashed across his flashlight beam. Dark but shiny, the size of a large man. He had the bizarre sensation that it was a VW bug car, zooming along on its back wheels like Herbie in those crazy old films. But it had seemed to have waving limbs and glistening fangs of some kind. Surely not. He swallowed, nerves twanging taut. The squad marched on while he stood motionless, panning his light left and right. Surely he had imagined it. But where the hell was Adamsen?
“Commander!” he called out, and heard the marching boots slow, then stop. He didn’t turn to see them, but imagined them all looking back, brows furrowed.
“What is it, soldier?” Olsen’s voice seemed more distant then he had ex
pected.
He opened his mouth to reply but the darkness right beside him came alive and something ice cold and frighteningly hard closed around his neck. He tried to scream but no sound came and then there was only pain and darkness.
Larsen’s guts turned to water as he, along with the rest of the squad, watched the soldier’s head detach from his body. His headlamp waved hectically as the head rolled across the passage floor, repeatedly shining on bright black carapaces and multi-faceted eyes. Long, curved mandibles snapped and clicked and the passage was suddenly full of giant, swarming creatures. It was like they had stumbled into a scene out of a bad B movie.
The squad erupted into action, firing into the darkness, green flashes and sparks bursting off the creatures as they advanced.
“Fall back!” Olsen ordered, and the squad backed along the passageway, deeper into the caves, firing in controlled bursts.
Larsen hurried behind them, made sure the weapons were facing away from him and all the soldiers were between him and whatever the hell those things were. He realized, as they rushed deeper into the caverns, holding the monsters back with gunfire, that they hadn’t taken the fork towards the cavern with the vines and the stream running across it. They were in uncharted territory, the snapping, glistening creatures between them and escape back to the surface, and they were being forced still deeper. He couldn’t help wondering if that’s exactly what these things, whatever the hell they were, desired.
26
Aston tried his best to swallow down anger and frustration. And, he had to admit, no little dose of fear. Everything had turned bad so quickly, it was hard to credit, but this argument was getting them nowhere. They were back in what had become casually called the green cavern, where the greenium was brightest. Where the pool with the strange door at bottom sat placid and calm on the far side from where they stood.