Callsign: King II- Underworld (9 page)

The camp was a scene of absolute chaos. Dozen of soldiers tried to fight the intruders, and while they surely outnumbered their foes, the creatures were everywhere. Pierce felt foolish for having been so dismissive of them when King had showed him the picture; these things sure as hell weren’t Wookies. In fact, they weren’t like anything he’d ever seen before.

Primatology, like archaeology was a discipline of anthropology, and while his professional career had taken him down a much different section of that field, he remembered enough of his introductory studies to recognize that these animals weren’t behaving like any kind of ape species, or
any
other animal species for that matter. They seemed more like rioting hooligans, in the grip of mass hysteria, smashing everything in sight. The soldiers’ bullets were almost certainly injuring them, but the collective madness of the creatures, to say nothing of their imposing physical size, enabled them to shrug off all but the most lethal of wounds. Worse still, the creatures seemed to be everywhere.

“Jack—”

He caught himself immediately as he locked stares with a pair of eyes, gazing at him from across the collapsed tent. The eyes were bright red—
reflective
, Pierce realized,
adapted for low light
. While the creature looked at him, and he at it, he managed to remain perfectly still—paralyzed with fear, or intentionally trying not to provoke it, he couldn’t say—but when it tilted its head back and let out a banshee wail, Pierce had only one thought:
Run
!

He could hear the pounding of the creature’s footsteps as it trampled across the canvas, but he didn’t dare look back. The view ahead wasn’t much better, but he angled toward a gap in the mayhem. Running with his hands cuffed behind his back was awkward enough, but he felt compelled to duck his head to reduce the chances of catching a stray bullet, if only a little. When he reached the perimeter of the camp, he at last spared a glance over his shoulder and saw no sign of pursuit. That did little to cheer him; it seemed just a matter of time before he was noticed again.

The triple-strand of razor wire coils had been smashed flat in several places along the perimeter. It looked like a bulldozer had run over the barricade, but there were strings of bloody flesh and tangles of oddly fine hair clinging to barbs, indicating the creatures of flesh and bone had wrought this devastation.  
At least there aren’t any more of them coming in
, Pierce thought.

The silver mist hid the ground beneath his feet, but revealed a good deal more about the setting. The military camp had been situated about five hundred yards from a rocky hillside, and in the foreground, there were several large boulders that appeared to have broken off and tumbled down over the eons of history. Pierce fixed his attention on one of the rocks that looked big enough to hide him. Tentatively at first, but then driven by a primal instinct to get as far away from the carnage as possible, the archaeologist picked his way through one of the gaps and ventured out across the mist-shrouded ground.

He was halfway to his goal, when the earth fell away beneath his feet and he plunged headlong into darkness.

16.

Nina gaped at the motionless form on the ground, not so much unable to believe what she was witnessing, as unable to decide which part of the surreal experience was most unbelievable. Investigating paranormal phenomena was a little like buying a lottery ticket; she had often imagined what it would feel like to actually find some kind of real proof, but deep down she had never really believed it would happen. And certainly not like this.

That’s a Mogollon Monster
, she thought. She felt the man—King, he’d called himself—tugging at her hand, urging her to flee, and realized that she was reaching out to it with her free hand, as if touching the corpse might make it more real. “You killed it?”

Even as the words came out, she regretted the tone. She hadn’t meant to make it sound like an accusation, as if his act of self-preservation was some kind of crime against humanity.

“Yeah,” he replied, evenly. “And there’s not much chance of them showing up on the endangered species list.”

When Nina’s hand reached the creature’s hair, it felt softer than she expected. In fact, up close, the hair looked strange. Like a carpet created from the skins of different animals. She took hold of the hair and gave a tug. She gasped as a sheet of hair slid away from the body. “Oh my god, it’s clothing, not hair.”

King quickly inspected her discovery. The shifted cloak of hair revealed the creature’s true skin. It was maroon, like congealed blood and covered in what looked like large goose bumps. He ran his hand across the skin. The bumps were hard, but almost slick, like wax.

As Nina lifted the hair up, he got a better look at the backside and immediately knew where the skins had come from. “We need to get out of here,” he said. “That’s human hair.”

Nina’s eyes went wide as she dropped the hairy cloak. King yanked her up. “Move!”

Nina tore her eyes from the dead creature and let herself be led away from the collapsed tent and toward an area where several Humvees had been parked in an orderly row…‘had’ being the operative word. All but two of them had been overturned, ripped apart or otherwise demolished.

As if sensing that her ability to think rationally was severely impaired, Nina’s savior guided her to the passenger side of one of the surviving vehicles and opened the door for her. Like an automaton, she climbed in and then just sat there, staring through the windshield at the surreal landscape beyond. Just beyond the carnage, not too many miles in the distance, spears of lightning kept stabbing down out of the sky. A few seconds later, King got in on the opposite side and started the engine.

“Better buckle up,” he said, even as he shifted the truck into gear.

The Humvee lurched forward and picked up speed, swerving around only the largest obstacles that lay along the path to escape. Nina resisted the impulse to curl up on the seat with her hands over her eyes, and instead tried to lend whatever help she could to the effort by keeping an eye out for threats emerging from her side.

In a few seconds, the Humvee reached the edge of the camp and rolled like a juggernaut over the already crushed concertina wire barrier. The transition from mayhem to relative calm was striking. The shrieks of the creatures and the sounds of sporadic gunfire were drowned out by the throaty roar of the Humvee’s diesel engine and the crunch of rocks beneath its heavy-duty tires. They might simply have been on a drive through the desert, if not for the eerie glimmering fog and the near constant flashes of lightning. The ride however, didn’t last long. To Nina’s dismay, when they had gone only a few hundred yards from the military camp, King cut a tight U-turn, and pulled the truck to a stop facing back the way they had come.

“What are you doing?” she said, her voice strident, on the verge of hysteria.

In the silver glow, she could see the grim determination in his eyes. “I left a friend back there.”

“How are you going to help him? Those things are all over the place.”

“Yeah? Well, those things are part of the reason I’m here in the first place, so it’ll be like killing two birds with one stone.” Then, inexplicably, he smiled and patted her on the arm. “I’m not going to let a little thing like an army of crazed Bigfoots stand in my way.”

“Mogollon Monsters,” she corrected, unthinkingly.

That stopped him. “Muggy…what?”

“Bigfoot is from the Northwest. Here in Arizona, our legendary cryptid is called the ‘Mogollon Monster.’” She spelled the word, which didn’t look at all like the way it was pronounced:
muggy-un
. “There are obvious similarities, which have led a lot of people in the crypto-community to believe that they’re the same…” She trailed off, realizing even as she spoke how ridiculous she sounded. None of it was academic anymore. All her knowledge about the Mogollon Monster was based on a patchwork of native legends and unverifiable anecdotes; all of that had just gone out the window.

King’s earlier urgency now seemed more subdued. “Well that explains a lot. You’re a monster hunter, right? That’s what you were doing out here in the desert?”

“I’m…no.” Nina struggled to find an explanation that didn’t make her out to be a kook. She flashed back to Magnuson’s accusation. “I’m a journalist and I do write about…folklore. But I wasn’t looking for the monster; I didn’t think there was such a thing.”

A tight smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “I wish you had been right about that.”

Pieces clicked together in Nina’s head. “Hang on. You said you were here because of them, too. What did you mean by that?”

King stared at her for a moment then his eyes drifted to something behind her. “That storm isn’t moving. The lightning keeps coming down in the same place.”

“Don’t change the—” She dropped her protest as the impulse to turn and look proved overpowering. Sure enough, the constant flashes of electricity and falling ball lightning appeared to be striking in the same area. Stranger still, barely visible against the strobing flashes, the night sky was unobscured by storm clouds.

Then, as if the purpose of the storm had merely been nature’s way of getting their attention, the frequency of the flashes began to diminish, and about a minute later, the lightning ceased altogether. As the last report of thunder echoed away into the darkness, Nina saw that the silvery mist was also dissipating rapidly. A few moments later, a blanket of darkness and quiet settled over them.

“Okay, that was a little weird,” King said, breaking the silence. He switched on a flashlight, but kept it covered with one hand so that it only produced a soft glow, enough for them to see each other, without being seen by anyone nearby. “The lightning and that mist…are those things that are usually associated with this Muggy Monster?”

His avoidance of her earlier questions did not escape Nina’s notice. King might have come looking for the creature, but he obviously knew nothing about it. “Yes and no. Lightning…well, we get a lot of that in the desert. But that mist…I’ve heard stories about that as well, although not in connection with the monster.

“There are all kinds of reports of strange phenomena occurring in the Superstitions—like that mist. A lot of people believe that there are magnetic vortices, caused by all the iron ore in the ground, and that the mountains amplify the earth’s natural energy. Others claim there are inter-dimensional doorways here. There are reports of people levitating, being transported miles away in the blink of an eye, or just vanishing completely.” She forced a laugh. “If you ask me, you have to be crazy to want to live in the desert, and crazy people are apt to see a lot of crazy things.”

“You sound skeptical.”

“I am. I mean, I was. Until…” Her attempt at evincing confidence fizzled. “What about you? You say that you were here because of the Mogollon Monster. What did you mean by that?”

“It doesn’t matter. You should be safe here for now.” He picked up a soldier’s helmet, presumably something he had taken from the camp during their flight, and settled it on his head, lowering the attached night-vision device into place.

“It does matter,” she protested. “You clearly don’t know anything about the Mogollon Monster or the Superstitions. And if you think I’m just going to sit here while the answers I’m looking for are right out there,
you’re
crazy.”

He swiveled the night-vision monocular out the way and stared at her appraisingly. “I’ll admit having someone who knows about this stuff would be helpful. But I can’t guarantee your safety.”

“I didn’t ask for your guarantee. I came out here on my own, and if necessary, I’ll finish this the same way.”

He smiled. “I seem to recall something about a rattlesnake.”

Before she could protest, he lowered the monocular again, and then switched off the flashlight, plunging her once more into darkness. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out his silhouette as he peered through the windshield, looking across the desert to the ruins of the army camp.

“They’re gone,” he said finally, but something about his tone caused Nina’s heart to start racing again.

“The Mogollon Monsters?”

He shook his head in the darkness. “Everyone.”

17.

The scrape of something against his heels startled Pierce into wakefulness; someone was dragging him. He reflexively struggled against the grip, his hands searching the darkness for his captor.

“Easy, pardner.” The voice was low, intentionally hushed, but most assuredly human. “I’m tryin’ to help.”

Pierce felt himself lowered to the ground, then the hand shifted position to help him to his feet. “Who are you?”

“Keep it down.” The voice was calm, delivered with a thick southern drawl that Pierce couldn’t quite place. “I saw you take a tumble and thought you might need a hand. Good thing too, because those…well, whatever they are…they started coming down a few minutes later.”

The words unlocked Pierce’s short-term memory…the attack on the military camp…his flight out into the desert. He didn’t remember the fall, but his body did. He could feel fresh abrasions on his cheek and forehead, and his body ached. As he probed his injuries, he realized that his hands were free. “You cut me loose,” he said, remembering to whisper. “Thanks.”

“Didn’t make a lick of sense to keep you trussed up like that. Come on. I think I see a place where we can hole up and let them pass by.”

Pierce strained to hear anything other than the crunch of their footsteps, but the air was as still as it was dark. He intuited that the man with him had to be one of the soldiers from the camp, navigating the tunnel with night vision goggles. Resignedly, Pierce allowed himself to be led forward into the wall of blackness.

“Here. Hunker down. They’re right behind us.” The man was insistent, but strangely calm, as if fleeing from hulking humanoid monsters was an everyday occurrence.