Domain (33 page)

This is going to be tough
…

Keeping his back and feet pressed firmly against the interior, he crab-walks his way up the wall of the shaft, inch by painful inch, like a mountain climber ascending a sheer, vertical crawl space. For every five feet he rises, he slips back a foot, falling and groaning until the sweat is wiped clear from his palms and his scorched flesh can reestablish a grip on the slippery, metallic surface.

It takes him twenty minutes to ascend eighty-five feet to the top. Awaiting him at the pitch-dark summit—a dead end.

Mick slams his head back against the wall and groans through his regulator in desperation. His leg muscles, weary from the climb, begin shaking, threatening to send him plunging from his perch. Feeling himself slip, he lunges outward with both hands, dropping the flashlight in the process.

Shit
…

Surrounded by darkness, he listens to it clatter down the shaft, cracking open as it strikes the surface below.

You’re next if you’re not careful
.

With excruciatingly slow movements, he removes the butane lighter and one of the flares tucked inside his wet suit. Dripping with sweat, he wastes the next five minutes futilely attempting to light the flare.

Mick stares at the butane lighter, which is full of fuel but refuses to ignite.
Dummy, you can’t start a fire without oxygen
.

Taking a deep breath, he removes the regulator from his mouth and presses the purge button, releasing a gust of air toward the lighter. An orange flame ignites, allowing him to light the flare.

The sizzling pink light reveals what appears to be two small hoses connected to a hydraulic hinge. Using his knife, he severs both hoses, which leak a hot, dark blue fluid onto his wetsuit. He returns the regulator to his mouth, then presses the crown of his head against the lid.

The hatch yields a half inch.

Maneuvering as close to the lid as he dares, Mick pushes open the alien manhole a crack and shoves his fingers in the gap. In one motion he rolls, dangling in the darkness before managing to pull himself out of the shaft onto what appears to be a metallic grid. He collapses on all fours, his body shaking from exhaustion, as the searing heat from his new surroundings causes his face mask to fog up and blind him.

Mick removes the mask, but finds his mouth too dry to spit. He wipes the tears from his red-hot face and looks up.

Oh, sweet Jesus
…

He sits up, bedazzled, his quivering limbs no longer his to control. His eyes widen, his mind racing so fast that he cannot form a single cohesive thought. Sweat pours off his face and body from the furnacelike heat, causing pools to form in his wet suit. His heart is pounding so hard that it feels like it is weighing him down, pressing him to the scorching metal grating beneath his wet suit.

I’m in hell
…

He has entered a mammoth, darkened, ovoid chamber, its dimensions rivaling the New Orleans Superdome if the arena were gutted. Licking the surface of the surrounding walls is an inundating layer of searing-hot, crimson red flames which rise in ripples like an inverted waterfall along the sizzling perimeter, disappearing into an oblivion of darkness above.

But not darkness! Swirling hundreds of feet above his head, illuminating the very center of the gargantuan abyss is a brilliant, emerald green vortex of swirling energy—a miniature spiral galaxy rotating in a slow, omnipotent, counterclockwise sweeping motion like a cosmic ceiling fan, pulsating with power.

Mick stares at the galaxy’s unearthly radiance, transfixed by its beauty, humbled by its magnificence, and absolutely terrified by its implications. He forces his eyelids to close over his burning pupils, trying desperately to clear his head.

Dominique
…

Struggling to his feet, he reopens his eyes and takes in the rest of his ethereal surroundings.

He is standing on a perch, a metallic grating supporting the hatch that had sealed the cylindrical shaft. Four feet below, filling the entire chamber like a lake in a mountainous crater, is a billowing, silvery, mercury-like liquid, its glistening, mirror surface reflecting the dancing vermilion flames. Ebony whiffs of smoke drift above the undulating sea of molten metal like steam escaping from a boiling cauldron.

Mick turns to face the glowing wall of red-hot embers. Situated just below the flames is a grillelike façade that rings the entire interior of the chamber. Distortion reveals invisible gases gushing out from tiny pores along the facing like heat rising along a desert tarmac road.

The intake burrow … a ventilation shaft
?

Mick stares at the surreal wall of flame, which neither burns nor consumes, but flows straight up the vertical enclosure like a raging river of blood. Feverish thoughts swirl through his mind.
Am I dead
?
Maybe I died in the minisub
?
Maybe I’m in hell
?

He collapses onto his buttocks, half-sitting, half-lying along the edge of the platform, too weak and dizzy to move. He manages to spit into his face mask and reposition it, then remembers the smaller tank. Unfastening it, he sucks in several breaths of pure oxygen, managing to clear his head.

That’s when he notices the tear in his wetsuit. The skin of his right knee is exposed, the wound bleeding profusely. Baffled, he touches the hot blood, scrutinizing it as if it is some kind of alien broth.

His blood is bleeding blue.

Where am I
?
What’s happening to me
?

As if in response, a violet surge of energy ignites like a bolt of lightning from somewhere across the lake. He leans forward, struggling to see through his mask, which has fogged again despite the fresh coating of saliva.

And then another bizarre thing happens. As he removes the mask, a powerful wave of invisible energy rises like a gust of air from the surface of the lake and strikes his arm. The face mask is levitated straight into the air, where it remains hovering, three feet above his head.

Mick stands. As he reaches out to retrieve it, he registers an intense field of electromagnetic energy, which resonates through his brain like a reverberating tuning fork.

Disoriented, he reaches blindly for the oxygen tank as the cardinal fires dance in his blurry vision. Giving up, he falls backward against the metal and sucks in more oxygen, closing his eyes to the vertigo.

Michael
…

Mick opens his eyes, stifling his breath.

Michael
…

He stares out at the lake.
Am I hallucinating
?

Come to me, my son
.

The oxygen mask falls from his mouth. “Who’s out there?”

I’ve missed you
.

“Who are you? Where am I? What is this place?”

We used to call Nazca our own private little purgatory, do you remember, Michael
?
Or has that brilliant mind of yours finally failed you after so many lonely years in the asylum
?

Mick feels his heart flutter. Scorching tears stream down his beet red cheeks. “Pop? Pop, is that really you? Am I dead? Pop, where are you? I can’t see you. How can you be here? Where
is
here?”

Come to me, Michael, and I’ll show you
.

In a dreamlike state, he steps off the grating and drops to the lake.

“Oh, shit, oh, God!”

Mick looks down, his mind overwhelmed by what his senses are reporting. He is weightless, defying gravity, floating above the silvery surface on an emerald green cushion of energy that courses through every fiber of his being, intoxicating him. Exhilarating sensations rise up through his bones and exit his scalp, causing every strand of hair on his head to stand on end. Adrenaline and fear battle for control of his bladder. Feeling the air tank levitate away from his back, he hurriedly tightens the Velcro strap around his waist, then returns the regulator to his mouth.

Come to me, Michael.

A single step forward propels him along the energy field like an unbound Baryshnikov. Emboldened, he executes a half dozen more strides, then finds himself soaring across the lake’s mirrorlike expanse, a wingless angel guided by an invisible force.

“Pop?”

A little farther …

“Pop, where are you?”

As he approaches the far side of the chamber he sees an immense, charred-black platform looming thirty feet above the glistening surface like a barge from hell. A ripple of terror grips his soul as he realizes that he cannot stop, that his momentum through this weightless world is guiding him to the object against his will.

I have you.

Panicking, Mick turns to flee, only to find his legs churning in place as he is drawn upward and away from the lake’s surface. He dives onto his belly in midair, clawing helplessly at the energy field as his body is wrenched backward and onto the platform by an overpowering, icy-cold, malevolent presence.

Mick lands hard on his knees, falling forward as if thrust into worship. Hyperventilating, his mind gripped in fear, he looks up to gaze upon his keeper.

It is a pod, as high and wide as a locomotive, as long as a football field. A myriad of scorched tentaclelike conduits originating from beneath the platform feed into the enclosed, smoked-glass object like a thousand alien intravenous tubes.

Why do you fear me, Michael
?

A violet surge of energy ignites within the interior of the cylinder, the flash momentarily exposing the shadowy presence of an immense being.

Mick is paralyzed, his face a frozen mask of terror, his limbs no longer able to support his weight.

Look at me, Michael. Gaze upon the face of your flesh and blood
!

Mick’s thoughts shatter as he is shoved headfirst against the glasslike surface by an invisible force. He can
feel
the presence within the smoke-filled chamber—a presence of pure evil that causes a sulfuric bile to rise from his throat and gag him. He squeezes his eyes shut, his mind unable to grasp what terror may lie before him.

A wave of energy jolts his eyelids open, pinning them back.

He sees a face appear through a yellow haze within the pod. Mick’s heart pounds through his chest.

No
—

It is Julius, his father’s snow-white hair tousled about like Einstein’s, the tan, wrinkled face appearing like worn leather. The soft, familiar brown eyes stare back at him.

Michael, how can you fear your own father
?

You’re not my father
—

But of course I am. Think back, Michael. Don’t you remember how your mother died
?
You were so angry at me. You hated me for what I had done. You looked into my eyes just as you do now—AND YOU CONDEMNED ME TO HELL
!

The monstrous voice deepens as it echoes in his ears. Mick screams through the regulator, feeling his mind snap as Julius’s face dissolves into a pair of bloodred, demonic headlight-sized reptilian eyes—the pupils—golden, diabolical slits that burn into his soul and scorch the very fabric of his sanity.

Mick lets out a bloodcurdling scream as his tormented mind is fondled by icy-cold fingers of death. In one adrenaline-enhanced motion, he leaps off the platform, only to be snatched in midair and held.

You are my flesh, you are my blood. I’ve been watching you, waiting for this day to come. I know you’ve felt my presence. We’ll be together soon. United … father and son
.

Through his delirium, he looks up to see the spiraling galaxy above his head rotating faster. As its speed increases, an immense, hollow cylinder of emerald energy forms from within the center of the molten lake, rising toward the ceiling like a luminescent green tornado. The funnel of energy merges with the vortex, the two whirling in unison, faster and faster.

Mick’s mind is screaming, his eyes bulging from his head. Through the madness he sees a solitary ripple form at the center of the lake, the disturbance created by something rising just below the molten surface.

And now he can see it—rising up through the emerald funnel of energy—a being—black as night, a predatory life-form with a thirty-foot reptilelike wingspan. A pair of three-pronged talons dangle from below its torso. A faceless, anvil-shaped skull tapers back to a curved, hornlike protrusion, the beak-shaped tail half the size of the wings. An incandescent, amber-colored orb glows brightly along the neckline like a pupilless eye.

Mick watches, spellbound, as the ceiling above the spiraling galaxy of energy seems to disappear, revealing a vertical shaft of rock cut within the seafloor. The water within the shaft is also swirling, forming the base of a monstrous whirlpool.

Mick grasps the small tank of oxygen tightly to his chest. He tears away the mask, aiming the sealed valve away from his body.

With a resounding
whoosh
, the center of the ceiling retracts, causing a tremendous roar to fill the chamber. Mick feels his ears pop as the sea rushes in, the torrent of water channeled along either side of the cylindrical, vertical force field like Niagara Falls.

Desperate, Mick scans the perimeter of the chamber, his eyes focusing upon the twenty-three identical shafts, all but one of which pop open to inhale the rising tide.

The sound of rising thunder as the alien vessel’s giant turbines begin reversing gears in order to expel the seawater.

Mick grips the butane lighter, then opens the valve on the smaller air tank, touching the flame to an invisible, combustible stream of pure oxygen. The pressurized gas ignites like a rocket, slamming the base of the tank into his gut as it propels him backward through the air and away from the pod.