Brood XIX (18 page)

Another gust of wind brought the stench back
to Les. The breeze made a whistling sound as it passed through the
stacked stones of the cairn.

He crept closer and the smell intensified.
The source of the vile reek was definitely somewhere under the
cairn. He leaned right up against it and tried to peer through the
tiny gaps between the stones. At first, he saw only shadows, so he
crouched and inspected the lower portion, nearer the ground. He
gagged and covered his mouth and nose with his dirty hand.

There was a dark recess behind the stacked
rocks. He could barely discern a smooth section of something the
color of rust. A rounded segment of bone through which thin sutures
coursed. Just the barest glimpse and he knew exactly what was
entombed within those stones.  

"We've reached the artifact," Breck called.
"What do you want us to do?"

Les couldn't find the voice to answer. He
craned his neck to see through another gap below the last. An eye
socket in profile, the sharp stub of the nasal bones, crusted with
a coating of dirt and blood.

A spider scurried over the cheekbone and
disappeared into a small fissure in the ridged maxilla above a row
of tiny teeth.

There was no doubt it was human. And it
definitely wasn't thousands of years old.

His legs gave out and deposited him on his
rear end in the dirt. He scanned the forest, expecting to find
whoever had done this watching him from the shadows.

"Dr. Grant? What you want us to do with
this?"

He whirled in her direction. These kids were
his responsibility. He needed to get them out of here this very
second.

Breck raised her eyebrows to reiterate the
question. She and Lane knelt over the square hole in the earth,
mounds of dirt to either side by the screens they had used to sift
through them. They must have recognized something in his
expression, for both of them backed slowly away from him.

"Gather your belongings," Les snapped.

"What about the magnetometer?" Jeremy
asked.

"Leave it!"

Les crawled away from the cairn and shoved
to his feet. He grabbed his backpack and strode toward where Breck
and Lane cringed. Fear shimmered in their eyes.

"Get your backpacks. Hurry up!"

"But Dr. Grant---" Lane started.

"We don't have time for this!"

The graduate students scurried away from
their excavation. Les heard a shuffling sound as they donned their
gear. He knelt by the hole and stared into its depths.

A tin with rounded edges peeked out of the
ground. He brushed away the loose dirt to reveal three rows of
numbers and letters that had been crudely scratched into the
metal.

19

3-20

V.E.

He pulled one of the tent pegs from the
cordon and pried at the corner of the object.

The top portion of the tin popped open to
reveal its contents.

A DVD-R in an ordinary plastic jewel case.
The same series of numbers and letters had been scrawled on the
disk in black marker.

There was blood smeared all over the
case.

PREDATORY
INSTINCT

The fossilized remains of a
previously unclassified hominin species are discovered in the Altai
Mountains, prompting teams of scientists from around the globe to
converge upon this isolated region of Siberia in search of further
evidence to corroborate the revolutionary theory that a third
proto-human ancestor coexisted with Neanderthals and
primitive
Homo sapiens
.
What awaits them is anything but extinct.
FBI Special Agent Grey Porter leads the investigation into the
mysterious circumstances surrounding the appearance of a factory
trawler of Russian origin off of the Washington Coast. He finds
twelve bodies; all of them exsanguinated through ferocious bite
wounds on their necks. According to the manifest, there should have
only been eleven.
Whatever killed them is no longer on board.
Elena Sturm of the Seattle PD is assigned to patrol the waterfront
renovation project on Salmon Bay. While rousting the homeless from
the underground warrens of the massive construction site, she
stumbles upon the corpse of a man whose wounds are identical to
those of the victims aboard the ghost ship.
Something has cut a bloody swath across the Pacific.
And it's already here.

(An excerpt from the new novel from Delirium
Books.)

June 10, 12:35 PM EDT

Fossil skull DNA identifies new human
ancestor

By RADLEY DUNHILL

Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- Scientists have identified a
previously unknown ancient human through the analysis of
mitochondrial DNA from fragments of skull bones unearthed in a
Siberian cave.

A team of archaeologists investigating the
Seima-Turbino Phenomenon, a spontaneous rapid and massive exodus of
the indigenous peoples of the Altai Mountains into distant parts of
Europe and Asia during the second millennium BCE, exhumed the
fossilized remains from one of twenty-two distinct layers of
strata. Thermoluminescent and radiocarbon dating of the surrounding
sediment suggest that this unclassified hominin (human-like
creature) existed a mere 35,000 years ago at a time when both
primitive humans (
Homo sapiens
) and Neanderthals (
Homo
neanderthalensis
) cohabited this isolated region of Central
Asia, raising the possibility that these three distinctive forms of
human could have met and interacted.

Researchers at the Douglas Caldwell
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in New York extracted the
mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only through the maternal
line, from the bones and compared the genetic sequence with those
of modern humans and Neanderthals. The analysis revealed that the
three last shared a common ancestor more than one million years
ago, proving that the Altai individual, referred to publicly as the
"Siberian Hominin" and as "Enigman" by the scientists in internal
emails, represents a previously unrecognized African migration.

"Whoever carried this genome out of Africa
is some new creature we never even suspected might exist," said Dr.
Geoffrey Melton of the Caldwell Institute. "The evidence is
convincing. We are dealing with a hitherto unclassified hominin,
and quite possibly a new species entirely."

Without a more complete fossil record,
scientists can only speculate as to what the Siberian Hominin may
have looked like or how it may have behaved or intermingled with
early modern humans. However, based on the size of the skull
fragments, it more closely resembles its larger and more heavily
muscled Neanderthal cousins than its human contemporaries.

"Paleontologists are scouring the northern
region of the Altai Mountains for further evidence of the Siberian
Hominin," Melton said. "While the cold weather helps preserve
ancient DNA, the constant presence of so much snow at the higher
elevations makes it like looking for a needle in a haystack the
size of Texas. We're dealing with thousands of acres of the most
inhospitable terrain in the world, and it's blanketed by snow and
ice year-round. We may never find any sign of this miraculous new
species again."

While archaeologists remain hopeful that
their diligence will be rewarded, for now they can only look down
from the sheer icy peaks like their ancestors must have done tens
of thousands of years ago, and imagine a time when creatures
simultaneously familiar and alien moved through the
blizzarding‪‪snow.

What but the wolf's tooth whittled so
fine

The fleet limbs of the antelope?

What but fear winged the birds, and
hunger

Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk's
head?

---
Robinson Jeffers

Altai Mountain Range

Siberia

Friday, October 5
^th

3:02 p.m. NOVST

(2:02 a.m. PST)

The wind screamed across the sheer granite
face of Mt. Belukha. Its peak hid behind a white shark's fin of
blowing snow, still five hundred meters above them. There was no
sky, only the blizzard that assaulted them from all directions at
once and threatened to sweep them from the ice-coated escarpment,
upon which the new flakes accumulated in a layer as slick as
greased glass. Progress was maddeningly slow as even their crampons
and ice axes hardly secured tenuous purchase. They had passed the
point of no return hours ago. There was no choice but to continue
higher and pray that their ice screws held in the fractured ice.
With the ferocity of the sudden storm, a descent under darkness
would be suicide.

Four days ago, a chunk of ice the size of an
office building had calved from the mountain with the sound of
cannon fire and thundered down the northwestern slope. From their
base camp in the upper Katun Valley to the south, they had watched
in horror as fragments the size of semi trucks lay siege to the
timberline, exploding through the wall of evergreens as though it
were no more substantial than tissue paper. Two kilometers to the
north, and they would have been pulverized to such a degree that
their bodies would have been unrecognizable, if they were even
found at all. But fear metamorphosed into excitement when the
binoculars revealed the mouth of a cave roughly one hundred and
fifty meters below the nearer of the twin summits. Lord only knew
how long it had been sealed behind the ice.

It had taken several days to plot their
ascent to coincide with the ideal weather forecast, which hadn't
predicted the freak storm that swept up the valley three hours ago
like a tsunami of blowing flakes.

Dr. Ramsey Ladd, Director of the Center for
the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology, had to pause to summon
the last of his failing strength. His arms and legs trembled as he
clung to his axe handle and rope, balanced on his toes. The ledge
beneath him couldn't have been more than four inches wide, but it
was the largest he had encountered in quite some time. The wind
whipped the fur fringe of his parka hood into his face, which felt
as though it had frozen solid even with the full neoprene balaclava
facemask. Ice accumulated in the corners of his goggles, narrowing
his already constricted field of view. It was hard to imagine
feeling claustrophobic so exposed on the mountain, and yet his
chest tightened to the point that he had to concentrate to keep
from hyperventilating the already thin air. He didn't dare risk
shifting his weight to glance over his shoulder to confirm that the
others were still behind him.

Just fifty more meters, he assured himself,
and again forced his trembling body upward.

He nearly sobbed when he hooked his axe over
the precipice and hauled himself up into the cave. Every muscle in
his body ached. His throat was stripped raw. Ice knotted his lashes
and beard, and clung to his chapped nostrils. He crawled deeper
into the darkness, away from the blizzard shrieking past the
orifice. When he could crawl no more, he collapsed to the granite
floor, rolled out of his rucksack, and desperately drank the water
from his thermal hydration bladder. His breathing eventually
slowed, and he listened from the darkness as the others clambered
up with the clamor of axes and crampons and performed the same
exhausted ritual.

Saved from the elements, the cave had to be
at least twenty degrees warmer. The echo of their slowing
exhalations gave some indication of its size, which was far larger
than he would have guessed from the valley below. He removed his
flashlight from his pack and clicked it on. The beam shoved back
the shadows and limned the granite walls.

"My God," Ladd whispered. He stood and
turned a complete circle, watching in awe as the beam spotlighted
ancient pictographs distorted by a layer of glimmering ice. There
were angular lines and abstract representations of stick men and
beasts he couldn't immediately identify. "Can you guys see
this?"

He heard the clatter of spiked cleats behind
him, but couldn't tear his eyes from the wall. The state of
preservation was miraculous. He couldn't begin to fathom how old
these finger-painted images were.

"Judy?" he whispered.

"The designs are different than any I've
seen at the other proto-human sites we've discovered," Dr. Judith
Rivale, Professor of Anthropology at The George Washington
University, said. She shed her goggles and her mask to more clearly
see. Her chestnut bangs were crisp with ice and hung in front of
her brown eyes and wind-chafed brow. "I hesitate to even speculate
until we're able to accurately date the strata. The level of
preservation is so staggering, thanks to the ice, that this could
just as easily be a hundred thousand years old as twenty."

She glanced back at the man behind her,
whose parka was lined with so much fur he appeared more animal than
man.

"Don't look at me," Dr. Carlos Pascual said.
As Head of Paleoarchaeology at the Smithsonian National Museum of
Natural History, he had been called upon to authenticate and
evaluate discoveries predating the Upper Pleistocene Era on every
continent. Were it possible to be an expert on the inexplicable, he
was as close as one could get. "This is all positively modern to
me. Whoever painted these did so long after all of the other
hominin branches died off."  

"Wait a second," Rivale said. She stepped
closer to one of the walls and carefully chiseled away a section of
the ice with her axe blade. "This can't be right. These markings
almost look Sumerian, like an early form of cuneiform."