Bones Omnibus (52 page)

Sgt. Celek shrugged. “I thought you guys got up in the morning looking for some noble mission to sacrifice yourselves on. Well, this is it, and here you are.”

A couple of the Rangers chuckled but then – to a man – nodded at Celek and gathered their gear to head down into the pit.

“All right, then,” said Sgt. Celek.

Bones had been inching closer to what appeared to be a narrow service/emergency trail cut down the side of the pit accessible only by workers, no trucks, and Celek moved over alongside him. Bones looked up at him and Celek nodded, giving Bones permission to start down the cliff-face trail, pausing only a couple of times on the way to let the soldiers catch up.

When they got to the base of the pit, the soldiers eyed the dark shafts nervously, but after nothing emerged for the first few minutes, they relaxed a little and double-timed it over to the explosives shed. The mine had been running when whatever Stage had descended laid waste to their workers, made evident by blood spatter on the tools and machinery that hadn’t been visible from the cliff face, so the blast shed was unlocked and open, as if just waiting to be drained of its dynamite. Celek, Holt, and a couple of the Rangers began walking crates of the stuff out into the pit as Romeo pored over the track controls to determine how to send flat-bed carts down the various shafts remote but found most of the control board in pieces.

While this was happening, Bones and Thor, followed by Sgt. Moore, walked the pit’s perimeter. Whenever Bones stopped cold and his nose rose from the ground and began sniffing the air, Moore couldn’t help but tense his trigger fingers around the trigger guard of his machine gun. Inevitably, Bones would sink his nose back down, and Sgt. Moore could once again relax.

“You keep doing that, you’re going to give me a heart attack, dog,” Moore said, shaking his head.

But moments later, Bones did it again, stopping and sniffing the air but not so much of the pit, more a nearby mine shaft. Thor moved in next to Bones and started doing the same, both dogs becoming increasingly alarmed as they inhaled whatever was coming from deep within the mine.

“Thor, what is it?” asked Moore, hurrying over to join the dogs. As he stood in the mouth of the mine shaft, the sunlight only afforded the sergeant a view a couple dozen feet inside. But it hardly mattered as, even with the pervading darkness, Sgt. Moore could suddenly
hear
what the dogs were getting so anxious about.

Back at the explosives shed, Romeo was shaking his head over the track controls.

“What is it?” asked Sgt. Celek.

“All the electrical’s been shorted or torn out,” Romeo complained. “We’re not going to get a one of these down into those shafts from up here.”

Celek stared back at Romeo, realizing what was implicit about this statement. Romeo returned the grim stare and was about to continue when he was interrupted by a frantic cry.

“Guys!!
Guys!!!
” Celek and the others turned as Sgt. Moore, Bones, and Thor came galloping back over to them, completely out of breath. “Something’s down there, maybe people! You can hear them from that shaft in the northwest corner.”

“Why people?” Sgt. Celek asked, surprised.

“You can hear machinery,” Sgt. Moore replied. “Whatever’s making that noise is a hell of a lot bigger than any of those multipedes or multi-worms or whatever. The ground’s getting chewed up down there – rocks, boulders, you name it. Maybe some people survived underground and just didn’t get the memo about what’s been going on topside.”

Nobody thought this sounded all that plausible, but no other answer made itself readily available.

“Well, it might not matter,” Sgt. Celek began. “Corporal Romeo was just explaining to me that the flat cars can’t be sent down there remotely, so we’re going to have to split up into two-man teams and escort them down into the shafts ourselves anyway.”

This was met with incredulity. Celek continued.

“If there
is
somebody down there, we’d have to at least try to get word to them before the whole place goes up anyway,” he suggested. “Since this was my idea, I’ll lead the car that’s going down that shaft.”

Though a couple of Rangers suggested this had even less of an exit strategy than the first plan, acceptance of the inevitable came relatively quickly, and the soldiers moved to finish loading the flat cars with the last remaining explosives, now enough to blow the top of nearby Blue Knob Mountain if need be. Romeo then gave everyone a quick lesson in the application of blasting caps and the use of civilian trigger detonators as the six mobile bombs were lined up and readied for departure in front of their respective shafts.

“I’m coming with you, if that’s all right.” Sgt. Holt nodded at Sgt. Celek. “You and Bones are still a package deal, right?”

“I’m game if he is,” replied Celek, glancing over at Bones.

The shepherd didn’t look back, if he had even heard his name. Ever since he’d returned from the northwest mine shaft with Thor and Sgt. Moore, he’d stared at its black maw, as if hypnotized by the scent of the dark machinery that lay below.

I
t was established that each team would trigger their explosives precisely ten minutes after their descent into the mines, as it was felt that communication would be impossible once they were “under.” After a grim round of “good lucks” and a synchronizing of watches, the six teams of two descended into their assigned mine shafts, Thor riding shotgun with Sgt. Moore and Cpl. Romeo, Holt with Celek and Bones, and the other four platforms divided up amongst the surviving Rangers.

By now, Bones was tired but more importantly, thirsty and a little hungry. Sgt. Celek had given him some water, but his canteen had been practically dry when he poured what little liquid remained into the cap to offer it to the shepherd. Once they were in the mine, Bones located a few rivulets of water snaking down the inner walls of the shaft and lapped at them in passing, but had to keep breaking away to keep up with his two human companions and the flat car they were manually wheeling down the long iron track. Celek’s hand stayed firmly on the brake as he and Holt pushed from behind, though gravity did much of the work. They were illuminated only by a dim tinted light at the tip of a metal pole attached to the side of the car, which cast everything in the shaft in an eerie green glow.

Bones’s nose was beginning to recover from the cordite, and he inhaled the scent of cool rocks, the sweat of workmen, the oiled wheels of the mine cars, and coal dust, which didn’t so much have a smell as it did work its way into Bones’s nostrils and lungs, making it increasingly difficult to breathe. Bones was able to continue drawing in new smells, however, and kept his nose ahead, constantly on the hunt for the now-familiar scent of the multipedes.

Confirming Sgt. Moore’s claim, as soon as the trio had gone five steps into the shaft, they could hear the distant sound of breaking rocks and moving earth. The only thing was, as they got even a little closer to the source, it was obvious to both Celek and Holt that the noise wasn’t coming from anything remotely man-made.

“Way too big to be a machine,” whispered Sgt. Holt as they descended deeper and deeper into the mine shaft, a sign they passed reporting that they were passing the point of 200 Feet. “But no way those are multipedes.”

Sgt. Celek silently agreed.

Though he was still sniffing around for water sources, Bones’s ears were also picking up the sound from below as it increased in volume. It wasn’t long before all kinds of new smells began reaching his nose, and he moved ahead of the two MPs.

“Look at Bones,” Sgt. Holt whispered, hand reaching for the manual brake.

In the green haze of the flat-car light, Sgt. Celek looked at the German shepherd, whose ears were now straight up and down like radar antennae, his eyes peering ahead and his nose squarely facing front. He held that pose for a moment but then crept forward, head still held high but the rest of his body a little lower to the ground. Sgt. Holt set the car’s parking brake, and she and Sgt. Celek quietly followed after Bones from just a few yards behind.

As Bones moved forward, the air grew decidedly cooler, the ground wetter. A breeze blew past the shepherd as he neared the source of the great sound up ahead. As his eyes peered into the darkness, Bones could see that the floor, walls, and ceiling of the mine shaft he was padding down were quickly coming to an end, replaced by a wide open black space that seemed to go on forever. The source of the great sound was somewhere in that hollowed-out space.

Two more steps, and the mine track ended along with the rest of the shaft, the iron ends bent down as if snapped by some great force that had crashed through the tunnel from above, smashing everything in its path like a giant cannonball crashing through the earth.

Which is precisely what had happened.

“Oh, my God.”

Sgt. Holt’s words were almost lost in the wind as she and Celek joined Bones at the edge of the cliff created by the destruction of the mine shaft. The cacophony, tremendous and foreboding, was coming from directly in front of them in the darkness, though they had no idea how far away it might be. The distant sound of rocks crumbling out of the walls and crashing to a rocky base far, far below could be heard, but any sense of size or scale was absent.

With a trembling hand, Celek reached into his belt and extracted a flare and a flare gun that he’d taken from the explosives shed. Sgt. Holt’s heart skipped a beat, knowing that as soon as he lit it, they would not only see whatever great monstrosity was making the sound, but it would also – assuredly – see them. She still had the remote detonator in her hand and, without alerting Celek, armed it with the flick of a thumb switch. Just in case. No light came on, no sound emerged from the flat car a few yards back, but Holt had felt the quick vibration within the trigger that announced an electrical current now on the move and ready to send a signal back to the network of blasting caps on the dynamite if she so much as flinched. She turned to Celek and nodded.

Celek jammed the flare into the flare gun, twisting the cap to arm it, and aimed it skyward. He hesitated one last second before firing it into the darkness, sparks belching out of the muzzle. The flare arced high into what was obviously a truly massive space, dribbling white phosphorescence behind it as it went before it finally exploded in a hail of stars.

At first they could see nothing, as their eyes needed a moment to adjust to the light. But then the flare began to halo out its illumination, revealing a great, cylindrical cavern literally a few miles across in diameter and easily twice that in depth, a space large enough to hold all the skyscrapers of Manhattan like French fries in a cardboard cone. But the trio on the cliff’s edge were hardly interested in the dimensions of the newly created cave, no matter how impressive. No, their eyes were fixed squarely on the thing in its center that had obviously created the cavern and was continuing to expand it straight down.

From one glance, it was clear to the two soldiers that what they were looking at was a giant sea anemone. The fact that it was the size and even somewhat the shape of the Astrodome didn’t sink in immediately, so entranced were they by how the light from the flare played through the translucent blue and white skin of the anemone’s body and attendant segmented tentacles, of which there were easily a hundred, each the length of a football field. Within the tentacles were much thicker finger-like creatures that appeared to be a different species altogether, though it was grafted on to the anemone. These wormy protrusions were of a different color (off-white with thick red bands around its body, giving it the appearance of a necktie or candy cane), but instead of coming to a finger-like tip at the end like the tentacles, these each had great mouths that were currently being plunged into the rocks below the anemone, where they used row upon row of teeth to drill.

As the flare began to fade, its arcing descent bringing it closer and closer to the area being tunneled, Sgt. Celek felt Sgt. Holt reach over and take his hand.

“I can’t believe what I’m looking at,” she whispered.

Sgt. Celek couldn’t, either. It didn’t look monstrous in the slightest, not like anything they’d seen throughout the day at all. In fact, it was quite beautiful, just simply out of scale, like seeing a sugar ant poised to fight a giant tarantula. It was also absurd, like coming around the corner of a zoo to find the woolly mammoth enclosure (
Mammuthus primigenius
). It just didn’t compute. Celek didn’t understand how it had gotten there or what it was trying to accomplish, much less why it existed in the first place.

Just as the flare faded away for good, he caught sight of one of the anemone’s tentacles and managed to get a good look at just how they were segmented, much the same way as the multipedes. That’s when it hit him, the sheer enormity of the events of the past thirty-six hours or so. This creature was made out of the combined flesh of literally tens of thousands of human beings fused together by an out-of-control, multi-stage mutation that had created a whole new organism. There had never been anything like it in the history of the planet, but as with anything else, it had always been a possibility lying dormant.

This was when Bones started barking.

At first, the two MPs didn’t compute what they were hearing, but then Bones’s thunderous alarm started echoing across the vast cavern inhabited by the anemone, and they blanched.

“Bones –
quiet
,” Sgt. Celek bellowed, and the shepherd quickly silenced himself and turned to the two MPs. The two humans held their breath.

“Do you think they…
it
heard?” asked Sgt. Holt, scanning the darkness.

“I don’t know,” Celek replied, his breathing accelerating as adrenaline raced through his body. The pair waited in silence, Celek’s hand firmly on Bones’s collar. The sergeants’ eyes peered out into the cavern in hopes of detecting any kind of movement but got nothing except a cool breeze.

“It didn’t seem to see the light, so maybe it can’t hear, either,” suggested Sgt. Holt, allowing a modicum of optimism to infiltrate her voice.