Subterrestrial (15 page)

“What’s wrong?” Payton asked.

“Nothing. I . . . I just fell behind is all.”

“Don’t worry.” He placed his hand on her forearm and drew her eyes to his. “We’re not losing anyone down here.”

“Else,” Nabahe said. “We’re not losing anyone else down here, you mean.”

“We haven’t lost them,” Thyssen said. “We have to be getting close.”

“And you say that with such authority because your tracking device has picked up their signals?”

“Its range is limited to a hundred yards in any direction, but you saw every bit as clearly as I did that their beacons were moving.”

“Before we lost them.”

“We didn’t lose them. They just moved out of range.” The anger in Thyssen’s voice was palpable.

Hart recognized that Nabahe was baiting him, although she couldn’t fathom to what end. Their bickering only amplified her growing claustrophobia and made it impossible to catch her breath.

“Shut up!” she screamed. “Would you both . . . just . . . shut—”

There it was again. The high-pitched sound.

“Up?” Nabahe said.

“Shh!”

The silence was interrupted only by the plinking sound of condensation dripping in the distance.

“What—?” Payton started, but she silenced him with a squeeze of his hand.

Hart closed her eyes and scrutinized the silence, although she could hardly hear anything over the hammering of her pulse. She had heard it, though. She was certain of it.

A sharp, shrill cry echoed in the distance. There was no mistaking it this time.

“Was that a bird?” Payton said.

“No,” Hart said through a smile so wide there was nothing she could do to contain it. “That was an alarm call. I’d recognize it anywhere.”

“An alarm call of what?” Thyssen said.

“That’s what I intend to find out.”

She struck off deeper into the cave, leaving the others to stare blankly at her back. She had to force herself to breathe. The anticipation was more than she could bear. She felt the same way each time she entered the territory of a new simian species. While no two primates made the same sounds, they all had a similar assortment of vocalizations. Alarm calls served as early warning to the larger population. They were the first response to detecting danger in their vicinity and were generally followed either by a threat bark, a declaration of aggression, or the travel calls and whistles they made as they retreated through the trees.

An alarm call indicated two very important things. First, it meant there had to be more than one individual and second, it meant Hart had to be getting close.

She focused on quieting her breathing and minimizing the sounds of her heavy footfalls, but the acoustics of the infernal cavern amplified every minuscule sound a hundredfold.

Another screech. Louder.

It was holding its ground. A sentinel of sorts, issuing a warning of impending danger.

Her light reflected off the water a heartbeat before she splashed down into it. There was no current. The warmth rose to her knees. She smelled the rotten egg-stench of sulfur and caught multicolored blurs through the steam rising from the surface. The cavern walls were covered with some sort of slimy fungal or bacterial growth. And all through it were long parallel scrape marks where something had used it fingers to scoop up handfuls of the sludge.

She splashed through the hydrothermal spring and deeper into a round cavern from which there appeared to be no outlet. The ceiling lowered with every step.

Another screech echoed all around her, as though it originated from inside her head or from somewhere—she looked up at the ceiling—above her. Smeared partial handprints led up the uneven wall to a ledge maybe fifteen feet—

A blur of motion. And then it was gone, with a scream that preceded it into the depths of the earth.

Martin wasn’t sure whether his eyes were open or closed. There was only silence and darkness, which in another life had been his greatest allies. Now they promised only suffering. He managed the pain as he’d been trained—as he’d trained himself—to do. He focused on remaining mentally sharp instead of dwelling on the searing pain in his leg, and the metronomic plinking of congealing blood spattering on the stone, or the fact that he couldn’t seem to make his appendages do his conscious bidding. It was as though he merely inhabited this physical shell, and even then his being seemed only loosely bound to it.

He recalled scaling the ice cliffs on Great White Island, descending into the darkness, and wading into the stagnant water.

A flash of clarity.

Renton disappearing into the depths. Sullivan firing as he was overcome from below.

He remembered feeling the warmth of their blood diffusing around him, moving in maddeningly slow increments to avoid generating ripples, placing the fail-safes.

The pain brought him back to the here and now with a grunt that reverberated in the confines. He understood where he was, what had happened to him.

What was about to happen to him.

His large frame was packed so tightly into the stone recess that even if he managed to get the blood flowing in his limbs and somehow regained control over them, he seriously doubted he’d have enough room to wiggle his toes. He couldn’t even raise his chin far enough from his chest to open his mouth.

He gagged on the residual water his lungs forced into his trachea, huffed it into his sinuses, and blew it out his nose before it compromised his breathing. The salty taste made him retch. It reminded him of blood, which returned his thoughts to the pain in his leg and the fear that the lower half might not even be there anymore.

Something pressed against his lower belly, moved ever so slowly across his abdominal muscles. It felt like a finger, only he was certain it wasn’t his and he couldn’t imagine how anything could have found its way through the narrow sliver between his quads and his forearms.

It must have been a phantom sensation, the kind of inexplicable feeling caused by a disruption of the nerve passageways. He waited for a recurrence and wasn’t surprised when he felt nothing.

His primary mission had to be extricating himself from his predicament. He had to think about this logically if he intended to form an actionable plan. He was in an enclosed space with no appreciable airflow, which meant there was a finite volume of oxygen that he was rapidly exchanging for carbon dioxide. The way he saw it there were four possible outcomes. One: he would asphyxiate, just fall asleep and never wake up. Two: if the fail-safes were detonated or the pumps outright ceased functioning, he would surely drown with everything else. Three: the creature that entombed him would come back and finish the job it started. Four: he could escape.

Martin wouldn’t be as easily overcome as the people who’d foolishly remained on Little Diomede. He knew what to expect now and how best to handle it. There wasn’t an animal on the planet that could survive in his crosshairs. He’d picked off a camel spider scuttling across the open desert at thirty miles an hour from three hundred yards away every bit as easily as he had the driver in the lead truck of a Taliban motorcade through the four-inch gap in the
Mad Max
–like shell over the windshield.

He just needed to get himself—

“Mmph!”

Something sharp lanced his abdomen. It felt like a scorpion’s stinger, only rather than quickly retracting, it sliced deeper into his flesh.

He screamed through his nose. Shook his body in an effort to move, to get whatever the hell had crawled in there with him—

More movement.

In his mind, he envisioned a crab trying to crawl out from where it was pinned, each razor-sharp leg piercing the skin and—

“Mmph! Grrn!”

It peeled back the skin and slid inside of him. He felt it squeeze past the muscles and inch its way below them. He thrashed and hurled himself from side to side, which only served to drive it deeper.

The movement suddenly stopped, and for a fleeting moment he allowed himself to hope that it had either died in there or had somehow crawled back out without him feeling it.

He tried to slow his breathing. He couldn’t afford to burn through the oxygen prematurely, not if he had any chance of surviving.

Err-err-err-err-err-err-uhh-uhh-uhh-err
.

The sound originated from mere inches to his left.

Something pressed against the fibrous membrane from the other side. It traced the contours of his shoulder, then his thigh.

He held his breath and prayed for it to pass. Maybe if it thought he was dead it would—

The pain in his gut increased exponentially as the creature tore at his viscera.

Martin’s screams echoed from increasingly farther away as his consciousness fled his vessel on a rush of crimson.

He’d seen it. No matter how many times Payton replayed the memory in his mind, there was no denying it. What he’d seen was a living, breathing organism. While he hadn’t gotten a good enough look at it to be able to identify it, the truth was impossible to ignore.

They weren’t alone down here.

Sure, he’d seen the remains holed in the wall, but there’d been something almost clinical about their presentation, as though they’d been deliberately displayed on that stone shelf. Their astounding level of preservation made them appear more like museum exhibits than the decomposed remnants of a once-living being. There’d even been a surreal quality to the sea lion carcasses, as though their slaughter were a part of a story only tangentially related to his. This, though . . . this was something else entirely.

It was impossible to describe what he’d seen. A flash of white. A form of indeterminate size and height. Its movements had been fluid, as though it were made of milk. Or had that been an illusion caused by long hair? It had cast a shadow. He remembered that clearly. Beyond that, however, it was all a blur.

“Help me up there!” Hart shouted.

She splashed across the pool and tried to climb up the wall. She lost her grip on the slick surface and fell back into the water.

Payton waded deeper and felt the warmth wrap around his ankles. It was definitely a geothermal spring. The sulfurous smell all but confirmed it, only either it wasn’t as hot as it should have been or the suit was doing an impossibly good job of insulating him from the heat. If he had to wager a guess, he would have said that some amount of fresh water had to be mixing with the superheated water being thrust upward from the earth’s core. It couldn’t have been too much, though, judging by the sheer amount of sulfur-reducing bacteria proliferating on the walls.

The sludge was the color of a blood orange and shimmered in his light. It was composed of colonies of archaea—single-celled organisms capable of thriving in some of the most extreme environments on the planet, from the deepest oceanic hydrothermal vents to the caldera of active volcanoes. They were one of the earliest forms of life on the planet; one theoretically responsible for producing the oxygen that eventually became the Earth’s atmosphere. Their evolution was fascinating. Not only were there species capable of photosynthesizing as well as any plant, there were also those that thrived in the complete absence of oxygen. Some utilized a process known as chemosynthesis to produce biological energy by metabolizing the carbon in rocks, while others still were able to oxidize ammonia, sulfur, and even methane, a toxic component of the planet’s earliest atmosphere. Was it possible that was what they were doing down here?

Payton offered Hart a hand. She grabbed it and allowed him to help pull her to her feet. She stared straight up into the hole in the rock above her. It was easily ten feet up and their lights barely penetrated the darkness.

“Over here,” Nabahe said.

He stood on the far side of the pool, his back to them, his light shining onto the cavern wall at such an angle as to reveal the face carved into the stone. Shadows formed in the recesses of its eyes and its screaming mouth. There was something hideous about it, something that made the hairs on the back of Payton’s neck stand up. Beside it was a dark crevice from which he could almost feel the cold breath of the earth emanating.

Thyssen was halfway across the pool when a red light blossomed from his monitor. He stopped and held it up just high enough that Payton was able to see a single beacon in the upper corner of the screen. It drew incrementally closer to the center as Thyssen slogged across the pond.

There was a second face carved into the wall on the other side of the orifice, through which Payton could see little more than the reflection of their lights from the surface of the water, which grew noticeably warmer with each step. A cloud of steam drifted at the edge of sight. There was something about the passage that made Payton uncomfortable on a primal level.

“The faces,” Nabahe said. “I’ve never seen faces like those before.”

“We need to keep moving,” Thyssen said.

“Look at their expressions. If the others served as guideposts, then what do you think these are trying to tell us? Ancient tribes throughout the American Southwest routinely carved backward spirals into rocks to mark dangerous trails and to serve as a warning to—”

“Do you see another route?”

Nabahe turned and shined his light up toward the hole in the roof.

“One we can reach?” Thyssen said.

“We can backtrack. Try to find another way around.”

“This is the first time we’ve seen a beacon in hours. We can’t risk losing it again.” He held up the monitor. “It’s less than a hundred yards straight through there.”

A second dot appeared from the edge of the screen, moving rapidly toward the first.

“Dr. Calder!” Thyssen shouted. “Dr. Duan!”

His voice echoed away from him into the darkness.

Payton glanced at Hart from the corner of his eye while he listened for a response. The expression on her face was one of apprehension. She felt it, too. There was something . . . wrong with the tunnel, something unnatural, and it was setting off all of his internal alarms. Humankind hadn’t survived for millions of years without developing a set of survival instincts that rivaled those of any creature to ever walk the earth.