For a moment, I think he’s betrayed us, but then he sighs and lowers the weapon.
“Hurry up,” he says, shivering more from fright than the cold.
Inola stumbles in the snow, falling to her knees. I can’t imagine how tired she must be. As I wrap my arm around her waist and hoist her back up, Flores arrives and supports her on the other side. Together, we hustle the remaining ten feet to the open hatch.
“Go in first,” I say to Flores. “Support her weight while I lower her down.”
“I can do it,” Inola says, her defiant strength showing even while her eyes start to close.
As Flores lowers himself into the hatch, a howl rolls through the forest, and it’s definitely not the saber-toothed cat. Tsul’Kalu has won the brawl of giants, but he must be injured. Those teeth through his arm should be enough to slow him down, never mind the lacerations on his sides. If he doesn’t bleed out and die right now, infection will get him.
He wouldn’t be the first god to die in battle with a great beast. Of course, we’re early enough in human history that he might now be one of the first.
Flores climbs halfway down the ladder and then reaches up. I brace myself on either side of the hatch and lower Inola down. My muscles twitch from the effort, but not because she’s heavy. The cold is seeping through my jacketless clothing, constricting my muscles and skin. The promise of warmth rises up from the tunnel below. The subterranean air isn’t exactly warm, but the ground’s natural insulation keeps the tunnels at a relatively balmy 55 degrees.
“I have her,” Flores says. I slowly release Inola and watch her slide down, guided by Flores and received by my father.
“We heard howling,” Owen says from below.
“Nothing to worry about,” I say, feeling just a little bad for lying to myself.
Owen looks relieved, but Cassie is unconvinced. Her jaw is clenched tight, and she’s doing a tension-filled, impatient jig. If not for her serious eyes and the gun in her hand, I’d think she had to pee.
I step back and nod my head to Future Kuzneski. “After you, princess.”
He manages a smile. “Only way I’m going to gain everyone’s trust is to not be a dick, right?”
He’s right, but the question remains: why is he trying to gain our trust? Is he one of the good guys, or will he betray us?
“Besides,” he says, “if I don’t let you go first, I’m pretty sure Cassie will nut punch—look out!”
He shoves me into the snow. I don’t see what happens next, but I hear it. A wet smack is followed by a wheezy groan.
One of the saber-toothed cat’s teeth, root and all, protrudes from his chest. It’s a kill shot, right over his heart. He’s still standing. Still conscious, but with his heart no longer pumping blood, he’s got just seconds left to live.
And he uses them to save me.
“Go!” he shouts, raising the AA12 downhill and holding down the trigger. The weapon thunders as it cycles through shotgun shells at nearly two cartridges per second.
Tsul’Kalu howls as the screaming horde of metal pellets chews through his skin. Flowers of purple blood burst across his body. For a moment, I’m stunned. Purple blood? What I once saw as a giant aberration, I now know isn’t remotely human.
The way he charges through the gunfire without flinching, without losing his demented smile, chills me more than the Ice Age air.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Kuzneski. For not trusting him. For leaving him to die. For the scars on his body. For his sacrifice…regardless of whether or not he intended to betray us. Then I dive beneath the shotgun, slide into the hatch, and fall to the floor below.
The impact knocks the air from my lungs, leaving me a breathless, heaving mess, but it doesn’t stop me from looking back up.
The AA12 shotgun clicks empty. Thirty-two cartridges fired into the core of what looks like a man, but is not.
With his dying breath, Future Kuzneski screams, but the sound is muffled when a giant hand wraps around his head.
Holding him up in the air, Tsul’Kalu steps into view above the hole, looking down, still smiling. “Alatisdi tsisdu.”
“Everyone in the carts!” I say, using my first real breath to issue the order. Flores yanks on me to follow my own command, but I remain rooted in place, locked onto Tsul’Kalu’s eyes.
With a quick squeeze, Future Kuzneski’s life comes to an end with a pop. Blood and gore ooze out between the giant’s fingers.
My resolve falters and Flores pulls me away. I all but collapse into the cart, propped up by the still living, younger Kuzneski, who looks as disturbed by what he’s seen as I am. Perhaps even more so. He now knows what his own death might look like. Especially if Tsul’Kalu finds us again. At close range, the AA12 hit harder than our handguns and the Winchester combined. I’m not sure we’ll be able to kill it.
“Go, go, go!” Flores says, and both carts speed away, heading downhill through the tunnel, no destination in mind other than getting the hell away. We’re chased by a deafening howl, reverberating through the tunnel.
With distance and time, I collect myself. A minute into our flight, I recover enough to sit up. I lean forward to check on Inola. She’s huddled in the front beside my father, who is behind the wheel, and she’s held by my younger self in a valiant effort to warm her up.
Her eyes crack open and she whispers. “Thank you.”
I acknowledge her with a nod, and say, “‘Alatisdi tsisdu.’ Do you know what it means?”
She frowns, sags a bit, and then recovers enough strength to say, “Run, rabbit,” before falling asleep.
39
After ten minutes of aimless driving through a maze of tunnels, Flores slows the lead cart to a stop, the danger well behind us. Protected by an endless, barren steel tube, I feel relatively safe from immediate danger. But the past, and what lives in it, is far more volatile than I would have guessed.
I suppose whoever was in charge of the Smithsonian Institute’s efforts to hide the giants commingling with humanity’s past would have guessed, but did any of them know that Tsul’Kalu was a psychopath with purple blood?
Or maybe they did? Maybe someone decided that people weren’t ready to hear that monsters were real, particularly ones whose origins are Biblical? But would a scientific organization really hide the truth, even if it wasn’t explainable?
Langdon is proof of that. Of course, maybe the Smithsonian is a puppet for a secret cabal or a conspiratorial group? History is full of them. I’m not sure what could be gained by hiding the existence of giants, or Nephilim. I don’t know enough about them. At the same time, it could all just be a conspiracy theory. Maybe the giant remains were lost? Maybe the Smithsonian is simply sitting on the finds until they’ve made sense of them? I feel like there’s a novel in there somewhere, but that’s a riddle for someone else to sort through. Right now, I need to figure out how to survive a living giant with a hard-on for carnage, and shut down the particle collider.
But not yet, I think.
I’m not thrilled about the idea of jumping further back in time. But we’re not prepared for life in the Ice Age. The people of Black Creek are a resourceful lot, and those from earlier generations will be accustomed to adapting to harsh conditions, but surviving in the Ice Age, long term, won’t be possible. We need to jump again, but that’s where this needs to end. And that can’t happen if we’re stuck in a maze, hiding from a giant…like rabbits.
“Any idea where we are?” Flores asks, sliding out of the lead cart.
I shake my head. We traveled in a steady downward slope, but we made a lot of turns along the way. All I really know is that we haven’t reached the mountain’s bottom. “We need to head downhill until the ground levels out. Then I can take a look. If the topography is similar enough, I’ll be able to point us in the right direction. But we’re going to stop several times to keep our bearings in this maze.”
“So you’re saying we’ll have to go for it,” Kuzneski says.
He bar
ely sounds like himself, and his faux positive statement feels wrong. Seeing himself die has left him shaken.
“What?” he says, noting my worried expression. “Ohh, I see what happened. You thought I said, ‘go for it,” like, ‘Yeah! Let’s do this!’ Like I’m fucking Richard Simmons or some shit. I said gopher it. Like the fuzzy little animal.” He pokes his index finger up through his clenched hand, mimicking the small rodent’s head popping up and down in the ground. “Gopher, not go for.”
He sighs. “This fucking day…” Then he sits back and looks at the empty, curved ceiling.
I share his exasperation. How long has it been since the day began? Seven hours, and thousands of years? I look at my watch. Eight hours, thirteen minutes. We’ve got a few hours of daylight left…depending on the season. Facing Tsul’Kalu in the dark is not my idea of a fun party. Best if we finish this up, ASAP.
“How is she?” Cassie asks, stepping up beside the unconscious Inola.
My father slips his hand under her coat, holding it against her arm. “Warming up, but…” He motions to her closed eyes. “She’ll live, though. She’s tough.”
“Tough might not be enough,” Flores says, and then to me, “ride up front?”
My father nods his approval.
“You’re not leaving us?” Owen asks.
“Just switching carts,” I tell him. He’s still using his body heat to insulate Inola. “Just keep on taking care of her, okay?”
I join Flores and Cassie in the front vehicle, riding shotgun.
“Where to?” Flores asks.
“Down,” I say.
“All roads lead to Black Creek,” Cassie says, with an attempt at a smile. “Because, you know, Rome hasn’t been built yet.”
The carts hum downhill. Much of the path is straight, but there are occasional side passages and, when the mountain gets steep, switchbacks. The carts handle the journey down with ease. I’m not sure how they’d fare going back up. Or how much power they have.
Thinking of power, I notice that some tunnels have little to no cabling, while others are thick with the stuff, lining both walls. I direct Flores to follow them, and I find our path downhill is steady. The cabled tunnels are also warmer, suggesting a lot of power is flowing through them.
It’s another ten minutes of monotonous tunnel before the decline fades and then goes level. When I spot a ladder up ahead, I tap Flores on the shoulder. “Stop there.”
The ladder leads to another hatch, but unlike the first, this one doesn’t have a locking mechanism. Instead, it’s an actual manhole cover with the letters BC – KY embossed in it. I climb the ladder and put my shoulder into it, shoving the heavy metal up. Once it clears the lip, I push it to the side, embedding it in a wall of white. The snow atop it falls down through the hole—and all over me. Again. My skin bristles at the cold, but I push past my discomfort and scramble up.
You’d think I’d be prepared for anything at this point, but I was really hoping to find an uninteresting view with which to orient myself. Instead, I’m greeted by a fresh scene of horror.
A dozen men and women litter an open clearing, some are face down in the snow. Some are huddled together against the elements. One of them is still standing.
But they are all frozen solid.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, they’re not alone. A herd of mammoths stands just a hundred feet away. I suspect they were staring down the frozen figures, trying to make sense of them, when I gophered out of the ground and startled them.
The largest of them, the matriarch, takes a step forward, huffing.
“Easy girl,” I say, holding out my hands, like anything I say or do will soothe her frayed nerves.
Several of the elephants start stomping on the ground.
Below me, I hear Kuzneski say, “Geez, what the hell is up there?”
When I look down to answer, I’m aware of a smile growing on my face. Of all the things I’ve experienced since the flux began, these ancient and formerly extinct elephant ancestors are the most amazing. I wouldn’t say I was obsessed with dinosaurs and Ice Age creatures as a kid, but I had my fair share of books on the subjects and spent hours turning through those pages. Mostly looking at the pictures, but I developed enough wonder about these creatures to really enjoy seeing them in the flesh. In retrospect, the saber-toothed cat was spectacular as well, but it’s hard to appreciate something that would eat you alive if given the chance.
That said, I think the mammoths are about to attempt squashing me. I take a quick look around and immediately recognize the landscape. I’m home.
The house is still there, I’m guessing because of its proximity to the network of tunnels, but it’s taken a beating. I’m about to duck back down, when I realize that this house did not belong to me. It belonged to my future self.
That’s when I notice the damage.
A side wall has been destroyed, the insides filling with snow drifts. Parts of the outer wall look scorched, and bullet holes riddle the front. A battle was fought here. While I’m not sure whether my future self won that fight, he survived it.
There’s nothing for me here.
Either Synergy, the authorities, or I would have taken any weapons I might have had squirreled away. And anything they left behind would have been fair game for the folks in town who don’t have much. Anything of value would have been scavenged long ago. As for my personal belongings…I glance down at my father and Owen…I have everything I need.
From my house, I look left toward Black Creek. I can’t see the town from my place in any year, but there’s no mistaking the columns of smoke rising into the sky for anything else. Black Creek is still there, and it’s still populated.
The matriarch trumpets and stomps her foot. The volume of her blast makes me cringe, not just because it hurts my ears, but because anything within a few miles will have heard the sound.
I hold my breath in the moments that follow, listening to the cold wind, the sound of mammoth lungs breathing, and then the haunting howl of Tsul’Kalu. The call is distant, but it spooks the mammoths as much as it does me. The matriarch reels around and flees, the rest of the pack following on her heels.
They’ve heard that sound before, I think, watching the terrified creatures charge away. They know what it is. What it means. How long have the giants lived here? How long before man arrived?
Knowing there is no one alive who might possibly have the answers to those questions, I follow the matriarch’s lead and retreat.
Back inside, I make no mention of the giant’s howl, but it doesn’t take an empath to know I’ve been shaken. When I get back into the cart, Flores gives me a sideways glance. “We good?”
“For now,” I say.
We head out again, this time with a general sense of where we should be heading. We make a few turns along the way, and after a short drive, we come to a stop beneath another Black Creek manhole.
Once again, I take the lead, scaling the ladder and shoving away the manhole, groaning as I’m covered in another pile of snow. I scale the ladder and find myself smack dab in the center of town, the courthouse in front of me, the small library behind. I draw my pistol and scan the area.
Aside from smoke rising from the chimneys of the buildings that have them, including the court house, it’s a ghost town. But there is evidence of occupation, mostly in the form of footprints.
The question is, whose footprints? What time are they from? And will they be friendly?
“’Bout far enough, I reckon,” a man says from behind me. His voice is followed by the click of a rifle’s hammer being locked into place. “And in case you’re thinking of retreat’n back down yer hole, I’ve got good enough aim to drop yah, and have no qualms about putting a hole or two in someone who works for Synergy.”
The man’s threat tells me a few things. First, he knows who I am. And who I work for. He also knows who’s responsible for this mess.
Last, and worst, I believe his threat is genuine.
40
I raise my hands, letting the pistol hang limp from my index finger. “I’m not looking for trouble.”
“Reckon it found you, then,” the man says.
“More than once,” I say trying to lighten the mood.
Cassie’s voice slips out of the manhole. “What’s going on up there?”
“Seems we’re not welcome in our own town,” I tell her, looking down to find her already scaling the ladder.
“Ain’t your town, Synergy,” the old man says.
“I’m not with them,” I tell him, starting to turn around.
“Don’t do it,” the man says, and I think I recognize his voice now. Phil Hardy. Owns the only gas station and repair shop in town. Salty old man, but honest…even if he doesn’t like you, or who you work for. “I ain’t interested in hearing—”
“Mr. Hardy!” Cassie has poked her head above the snowline. Her voice is scolding. “Put that down before you go and shoot the only chance you all have of surviving this mess.”
Hardy is silent for a moment, but then says, “You work for ’em, too, Cass.”
“You’ve been kind to me my whole life,” Cassie says. “But I won’t stand for—”
“You won’t stand…? Girl, have you seen what’s become of our home? Are you aware of the kind of hell we all’ve been through? The people you both work for did this. Can you deny it?”
Cassie climbs out of the hole, standing beside me. Her gun is tucked into the small of her back, but I’m not sure she could shoot Hardy, even if he gives her a reason to. I’m not sure I could, either. He’s been a fixture in Black Creek since I was a kid.
I turn around and find a hunting rifle leveled at my chest. Hardy is in the second-floor window of the yellow brick courthouse. Despite his thick, camouflaged, winter coat and red trapper hat, he’s shivering. But I don’t think it has anything to do with the cold, or out of fear for his own life. Like Cassie, he doesn’t want to shoot, but that doesn’t mean he won’t.
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