Subterrestrial (20 page)

The fall.

The memory struck her with another bout of coughing, which barely brought up enough fluid to dampen her tongue. She remembered running away from something. A dark shape running low to the ground and with frightening speed. She remembered the waterfall. Mitchell’s hand slipping from hers. Grabbing for it only to find her feet rising above her head. A sensation of tumbling through vast space, both weightless and impossibly heavy. Impact with the water. Darkness. And the cold. The bitter cold that whisked her silently into oblivion, in which she was neither aware nor unaware, as though for several moments she had simply ceased to exist.

Mitchell crawled beside her.

“Your legs. The wetsuit ripped.”

He shined his beam onto her legs. The Thermoprene curled outward from lacerations weeping rich red blood. He opened his backpack and removed the medical kit. There was barely enough gauze to clean the wounds and stanch the flow of blood. The wounds weren’t as deep as she initially feared, but the stinging was ferocious.

“The rocks down there were sharp,” Mitchell said. “This stream can’t have been running through here for very long or it would have smoothed them.”

“The water’s returning,” Calder said.

“And good thing for us or they’d be scraping us off the ground back there.”

She heard the note of fear in his voice. He understood the implications every bit as well as she did. She’d known what would happen all along. A volume of water that large couldn’t be displaced indefinitely. No matter how far it was expelled, the laws of physics dictated that it would eventually return. There was simply nowhere else for it to go. The problem was that the influx of water would be unpredictable. These caverns that had miraculously remained dry for millennia could find themselves filled, while the flow of water began eroding entirely new caverns or settling in ways that could completely alter the existing shoreline around the world. It would be an amazing time to be a marine biologist, only up on the surface, not down here.

She’d seen the way that shadow moved and wanted nothing to do with it. Using Duan’s remains as bait was a trait she could only ascribe to a higher level of intelligence. Despite their innate cunning, even sharks lacked the mental faculties to entice their prey. In all of the ocean, she could think of only a few species of cuttlefish, squid, and anglerfish that used coloration and bioluminescence to aggressively lure their prey within striking distance, which was nothing compared to this level of deception. Of course, they were also dealing with an organism with terrestrial adaptations, much like a crocodilian, although one capable of scaling trees. If it was indeed the same animal that attacked Duan in the river, they were potentially dealing with a species unlike any the world had even seen.

“Try walking. We need to find out right now if you’re going to be able to.”

He held out his hand to help her to her feet, but she brushed it aside.

“I’m fine.”

She hobbled a couple of steps away from him so he wouldn’t see the pained expression on her face.

“Not the word I would have chosen.” He shined his light on her back and her shadow stretched across the ground in front of her. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“For what?”

“For saving your life.”

“What makes you think I needed saving? You think I can’t take care of myself?”

“I have no doubt you’re more than capable of taking care of yourself. When you’re conscious and not actively drowning, anyway.”

“What do you want? A reward?”

“It wouldn’t hurt you to say thanks. You know, so things don’t get awkward between us.”

“Too late for that.”

“Listen—”

“Shh!”

Calder stopped and closed her eyes. She’d heard something. A clattering sound, barely audible beneath Mitchell’s incessant yammering.

Clack
.

A clicking sound from the distance, like a stone striking flint.

She glanced at Mitchell, who swept his light across the walls. It barely illuminated a small fissure at the top of a flowstone formation before he shut off his light and they were again thrust into complete darkness.

Another clicking sound.

A handful of pebbles struck the ground maybe thirty feet to their left and scattered across the limestone.

“It’s coming,” he whispered directly into her ear. A chill traced her spine. “We need to move quickly and quietly.”

She nodded, even though he couldn’t see the gesture. His hand closed over hers and he gently pulled her toward where she’d seen the crevice.

Clack
.

Clack-clack
. 

The wounds on her legs sang in pain. She stifled a gasp and somehow managed to keep moving. There was fluid inside her boots that she prayed was just water. It was all she could do to minimize the squelching sounds as she staggered across the room. The racing of her pulse in her ears was too loud for her to hear anything else.

Mitchell stopped without warning. She raised her hand and found the wall, closer than she’d expected. His soles squeaked as he scurried up the flowstone, urging her to follow. She had to release his hand to find the leverage she needed to climb after him. The crown of her head struck the rock lip. She ducked inside and crawled as fast as she could.

Clack . . . clack
.

The sound was louder now.

Closer.

The crevice narrowed as she crawled. She had to lower herself to her elbows, and even then her backpack scraped against the rock. She couldn’t raise her head, not that she could see a thing anyway.

Clack
.

The sound originated from right behind her. She instinctively crawled faster and ran into Mitchell’s feet. He was flat on his belly and using his toes to propel himself deeper into the tunnel. He made a rustling sound and she realized he’d taken off his backpack. It scraped as he shoved it ahead of him. The tunnel constricted even more and she was forced to do the same.

From behind her, a wet noise . . . faint, almost like a cat licking its paw.

She froze.

Her breath echoed in the confines.

Again, the slathering noise. It sounded so close, and yet simultaneously some distance away. She couldn’t divine its location with the strange acoustics.

Clack
.

Whatever it was knew they were in there. Assuming it couldn’t see them in the darkness any better than they could see it, it had to be hunting them using one of its other senses, but which one?

She held perfectly still and willed her heartbeat to slow. Each inhalation came shallower and quieter than the last.

Mitchell remained motionless ahead of her. She hoped it was because he’d heard it, too, and not that he’d run out of room to crawl or, heaven forbid, gotten himself stuck.

The wet sound again, followed by an expulsion of air.

She felt the warmth suffusing the bandages on her legs. She tried to silently gain traction with her toes, but slipped on her own blood.

The resultant squeak echoed through the tunnel.

The noises behind her ceased. She closed her eyes as tightly as she could and held her breath. Maybe it hadn’t heard. Or perhaps she’d startled it and it was even now retreating—

Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack
.

The sounds grew frenzied. Something struck the sole of her boot and jerked her backward.

Calder screamed and yanked her foot. Another tug in reverse. She pulled with everything she had, freed herself from what felt like a hook through the rubber sole, and scurried deeper into the earth.

Snapping sounds behind her. Frantic scratching. She felt the movement of air. Smelled carrion.

Clackclackclackclackclack
.

She smacked the top of her head. Over and over. Ran into Mitchell and shoved. Tore the skin on her knuckles and fingertips in an effort to find traction. She barely registered the changing intonation of her screams before the ground fell away from beneath her and she tumbled headfirst onto something marginally more forgiving than the stone.

Mitchell grunted and rolled out from beneath her. His flashlight beam streaked from his hand, blinding after so long in the pitch black. It raced across the stone walls and settled upon the mouth of the tunnel above them. Her blood glistened on the edge.

Calder scooted backward and pushed herself to her feet. The light wasn’t powerful enough to illuminate the tunnel’s full length. She could see maybe twenty feet of blood-smeared stone and fresh scratches in the limestone.

Mitchell closed his hand over her mouth and drew her to him.

“Shh,” he whispered into her ear. “You’re all right now.”

She hadn’t realized she was still screaming and quieted herself through sheer force of will. They watched the far end of the beam for any sign of movement.

The only sound was the distant
clack . . . clack . . . clack . . . clack
from the other end of the tunnel, where the predator paced from one side of the adjoining cavern to the other.

Nabahe had known something was wrong the moment he smelled it. The scent was one he would never forget, no matter how long he lived. He’d smelled it before, half a lifetime ago and half a world away.

He’d been driving through the desert in the middle of the night, back when his eyesight had only begun to fail him. He’d caught just a flash of eyeshine when the coyote stepped out into the road from behind the creosotes. He hadn’t even had time to brake. There’d been a thud and the animal had bounced up over the hood of his Wrangler and into the cloud of dust trailing him.

He remembered sitting there, staring down the empty road as droplets of blood congealed with the settling dust on his windshield, until he summoned the courage to open the door and walk into the red glare of his taillights. The coyote was a sacred spirit in nearly all Native American cultures, whether as a teacher, a trickster, or even a god. To leave one lying there bleeding, whimpering as it tried to drag itself the remainder of the way across the road, would be a sacrilege, if not an outright act of cruelty. So he’d wrapped it in a blanket from his trunk and loaded it into the back seat, its insides barely contained by the fabric. By the time he reached the nearest medical facility, a tribal clinic on the Tohono O’odham Reservation, its jaws were locked on its protruding tongue and its eyes had lost their luster.

The emergency room staffer, a nurse practitioner with a sun-blistered face, had known there was nothing they could do for the animal and had asked him kindly to help her lift it out of his car. During the process, the blanket had fallen open and the animal’s viscera, partially contained within the silver sheath of the peritoneum, had fallen from its belly.

It was that stench he recalled now, one of immediacy and transiency, one that heralded the arrival of Másaw, the Hopi caretaker of the spirit, and the black flies, the scourges of flesh.

Nabahe didn’t need to see the man to know he was dead, yet his feet propelled him forward, seemingly with a will of their own. He stepped around Thyssen, who tore the fibrous material from the stone as he continued to shout into a communication device in his palm and advance into the earthen corridor. There were recesses on both sides, just as there had been where they examined the primate’s skeleton. The one on his right contained a man folded into a fetal position, his forehead pressed to his knees, his arm hanging at his side. His blood dripped from between his fingers with a slowing
plip . . . plip . . .

The man’s wetsuit was torn in dozens of places. The flesh beneath it was macerated and thick with clotting blood. The profile of the man’s face was unfamiliar. It felt like a posthumous insult to be unable to mourn this unknown man, unlike the corpse stuffed into the wall to his left. He recognized Butler immediately, even with the lacerations on his cheek and the crimson mask on his face. A flap of hair and scalp hung over his ear.

“What in the name of God happened to them?” Payton asked from behind him.

Nabahe could only shake his head. These men looked as though wild animals had attacked them, but how had they been carried down to this awful place so quickly? And what kind of animal was capable of doing something like . . . this?

He looked up and shined his light from one side of the tunnel to the other. Stone walls that had at first appeared seamless were actually anything but. There were discolored patches roughly the size and shape of the holes inside of which the bodies had been unceremoniously interred. They were a subtle shade of brown apart from the surrounding limestone, although upon closer inspection, it was the variation in texture that delineated them. Where the rock appeared waxy and soft, the discolorations had an almost papery feel to them, like a wasp’s nest. They billowed outward ever so subtly as he walked between them.

Plip . . . plip . . .

His beam penetrated the thin coverings, just far enough to reveal the dark shapes encased within. He was reminded of his grandfather, who once held a rattlesnake’s egg up to a candle to show him the developing embryo inside. This was different, though; the shapes inside appeared fully formed.

Thyssen shouted at the top of his lungs.

Nabahe whirled and watched the man close his eyes, shoot the cuffs of his wetsuit, and visibly compose himself. When he opened them again, there was something alien about his face, as though it were a mask at emotional odds with his eyes.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to try to raise the base again from a different location, presumably one closer to the surface.”

He strode forward with his customary confidence and appraised both bodies.

“Allen Butler was a world-class engineer and friend. Desmond Martin was one of the finest men with whom I’ve had the privilege of serving. The world is a poorer place for their loss.”

“Serving?” Payton said. “I was under the impression this was a private corporate venture.”

“It is. And it isn’t. There’s more at stake here than I’m prepared to divulge at this juncture.”

“Prepared to . . . ?” Payton said. “These men are dead! Look at them! For Christ’s sake! Look at what’s been done to them!”