Subterrestrial (21 page)

“There are no small sacrifices in the name of progress,” Thyssen said.

Nabahe detected movement from the corner of his eye and heard a soft crinkling sound. He turned and shined his light onto the semitranslucent covering, which, now that he really scrutinized it, reminded him more of the secretions cave swallows used to make their nests and affix them high up on cavern walls. The strands were fibrous and distinct, like a potato sack. A shadow shifted behind them.

“Is that what we are? Sacrifices?” Payton said. “You didn’t feel the need to mention any of this when you showed up in Vietnam?”

“You were all too willing to believe anything I told you, Thyssen said. “Besides, we didn’t know about any potential threats at the time. Until this very moment, we all believed that the greatest danger was the inherent geological instability.”

“You knew about the sea lions.”

“Which can be found throughout the arctic in similar conditions. We had no reason to believe—”

“But you suspected.”

“Guys,” Nabahe whispered.

The shadow shifted again, and there was a distinct crackling sound. The smell intensified, which had hardly seemed possible a second prior.

“All evidence pointed to the recent extinction of an unclassified species of primate, one potentially from the hominin tree,” Thyssen said. “Perhaps even a remote chance of its survival. And if that were the case, it would have been naive to think that a single species could live in isolation without others doing the same.”

“Guys,” Nabahe said. There was definitely something in there. Something living.

“You realize that as recently as twenty thousand years ago,” Payton said, “this entire area was above sea level and served as a land bridge for any number of species migrating from Africa and Asia into the Americas?”

“Our working theory is that as the seas rose, your theorized bridge was gradually replaced by the discovery of a network of subterranean passageways,” Thyssen said. “We’ve found stone flakes that match those of proto-human tools found in caves from Alaska to Argentina.”

“But think about all of the other species that could have survived down here. There’s fossilized evidence in both China and America of the same species of dinosaurs, for the love of God. Everything from saber-toothed tigers to the mother-loving
Tyrannosaurus Rex
! Did you ever stop to think—?”

“Guys!” Nabahe shouted.

They turned as one to look at him. While Thyssen remained composed, Payton’s face had reddened and his fists were clenched at his sides.

“There’s something in there.”

Their lights converged upon the filamentous sheath. The crackling sound became increasingly insistent. The covering bowed outward. What looked like a pointed instrument traced a line down the center. From the opposite side.

Payton leaned closer and extended his hand toward it. Hesitated. It retracted when he finally touched it.

“Jesus.”

A rustling sound from behind them.

Nabahe whirled and looked for movement.

Plip-plip. Plat.

Martin’s hand. He thought he saw the middle finger twitch, but it couldn’t have. The man was dead, wasn’t he?

All of the fingers curled slowly inward, whether from the contractures of rigor or conscious movement, he could only guess.

Nabahe stood and took an uneasy step toward where the hand dangled.

Plip-plat. Plap.

A light whipped from side to side behind him, throwing his shadow wildly down the tunnel as though in an attempt to take flight.

“Where’s Emily?” Payton said.

“Dr. Hart?” Thyssen called.

Nabahe attempted to shush them. When that failed, he could only tune them out. Something was definitely wrong here. He could feel it in the air, an electrical sensation that caused the muscles in his neck to clench and his heart rate to accelerate.

“She was right behind me a second ago,” Payton said.

“She couldn’t have gone far,” Thyssen said. “Not without any of us seeing or hearing—”

A tearing sound.

Nabahe spun around in time to see the sheath split and a dark shape tumble through the seam and spatter onto the ground. He caught a glimpse of the gun in Thyssen’s hand as he brought it to bear on the shape.

A flash of discharge.

A deafening clap of thunder.

Nabahe threw himself to the ground and covered his head with his hands. The beam from his headlamp swept across the limestone and onto a spatter of blood.

Hart froze. Pebbles rained down on her, forcing her to tuck her chin to her chest. The loud cracking sound. Was it the shifting of the strata or something else? She held her breath and waited for countless tons of rock to crush her.

The ground remained still beneath her. She risked a glance up. If it hadn’t been the sound of settling rock, then what could have made such a loud noise? It had sounded almost like a gunshot.

Hart cautiously resumed crawling.

She hadn’t come this far to be dissuaded by noises or to follow a group of strangers blindly through these warrens. She’d seen what she had come here to see and she didn’t care what anyone else thought, she was going to find it, even if it killed her. This was the culmination of all of the years in school and research in the field. This was her chance to go where no one had gone before her and to see what no one else had ever seen. This was her chance to potentially make first contact with an unclassified hominin that evolved down here in the darkness, in, for all intents and purposes, an evolutionary vacuum. This was her Jane Goodall moment, the one that would change the course of her life.

Breaking away from the others was terrifying, but they’d be able to find her with their tracker. Or at least she hoped they’d be able to. She didn’t want to think about how furious they’d be when they did or about the thousands of horrible things that could happen to her on her own, not least of which was the prospect of the entire mantle slamming down on her and compressing her to atoms.

Her breath echoed around her and every scrape of the toes of her boots was amplified tenfold. She didn’t know how far she’d crawled, only that she could no longer hear the hollow intonation of the larger cavern behind her, and the tracks she now followed were no longer damp but rather flaked under the pressure of her hands.

She regretted abandoning all of her supplies, but there had simply been no other way to reach the mouth of the tunnel. The idea had hit her while the others walked down yet another stone corridor in yet another stretch on the godforsaken maze. She had just emerged from the sulfurous water and was standing there, dripping in the darkness, when she realized that she didn’t owe these people anything. They’d come to her for her expertise and experience. If they wanted either, they were going to have to let her off her leash.

Before she even made a conscious decision to do so, she was swimming back through the channel toward where she’d watched the simian shape crawl into the hole in the cavern roof. Her pack had given her just enough of a boost that she’d been able to leap up against the wall, push off with her right foot, and grasp the lip inside the orifice, almost as though it had been placed there for that exact purpose. It had taken a feat of strength and desire to pull herself the rest of the way, but here she was now, closing the distance between her and all of her professional hopes and dreams.

Hart realized she was holding her breath and released it with an audible gasp that echoed away from her into the darkness. Even her pulse seemed to echo. The tunnel felt as though it were constricting her, squeezing the air from her lungs, the very life from her breast. She scraped her shoulders and her elbows, raked the top of her head, abraded her chin. Her heart beat faster and faster. Her breathing accelerated to the point that she realized with a start that she was no longer able to exert any conscious control over it. The urge to turn around, to return to the others, overwhelmed her, while the prospect of wriggling backward, unable to see where she was going, scared the living hell out of her. What if the others weren’t where she’d last seen them? What if they’d gone looking for her in the wrong direction? She had no means of tracking them and no prayer of finding her way back to the surface.

This had been a terrible idea, just like so many others. She’d rushed to judgment without thinking things all the way through and in doing so had damned herself. She was going to die down here and no one would ever find her body.

She closed her eyes and lowered her head. Panicking would only make things worse. She focused on her breathing, on counting between each inhalation and exhalation. She imagined herself back in Kokolopori, with columns of sunlight arcing through the lush canopy from the seemingly infinite blue sky. She could almost smell the dew dripping from the tips of the leaves and the guava ripening in the trees. Almost see Tamu trying to sneak up on her through the bushes, feel his clumsy hand close over hers, hear his playful cries—

Her eyes snapped open.

She’d definitely heard something. A high-pitched shriek from a great distance that almost sounded like . . .

A smile spread across her face. There on the ground, spotlighted in the beam from her headlamp, was a sight that erased all of her doubts and fears. There, in a patch of silt, was a handprint. It was a partial at best, but it was enough to see the imprint of the first two knuckles and the curvature of the base of a short, blunt thumb. She would have recognized it anywhere. It was almost exactly like that of a bonobo.

She looked for another print, but the impressions became less distinct as the sand grew deeper. It must have washed into the tunnel with the flooding. It was fine and silty and almost reminded her of a tropical beach, although the nearest one was thousands of miles away.

The ceiling receded until she was once more able to crawl, which allowed her to increase her speed. Her exertions no longer echoed and she trembled with excitement, not fear.

Another shrill cry. Closer this time.

It was an alarm call. She was certain of it.

The tunnel abruptly opened into a cavern. The ceiling was vaulted and spiked with stalactites, lending the overall impression of a gothic cathedral. Ahead, the ground was steep and buried beneath an avalanche of boulders. The cave had collapsed so long ago that flowstone had trickled between the rocks and absorbed them into its mass. The trail following the strange topography was clearly evident.

Hart stood and ran her fingers across the smooth stone composite. It was worn through eons of use and reminded her of soap the way it had molded to the shape of the hands and feet that had crawled over it through the eons. She recalled the prints captured in the flowstone near where they first exited the River Styx and could only imagine how many more individuals it must have taken to wear a path like this into solid stone.

“What are you waiting for?” she said.

She bounded up the slope, all the while attempting to gauge the gait of the animals that had forged the trail. They were considerably smaller than she was and seemed to move in a lurching motion that favored their front appendages. All of the handholds felt the same, as though they were used for both hands and feet. Their feet must utilize a hallux first digit capable of grasping like a thumb.

The ground fell away behind her, while the stalactites drew ever closer to her head. They were worn by hands, worried into a variety of geometric designs that would have been invisible were it not for the shadows cast by her light. She had to view them indirectly, from the corner of her eye, as they vanished completely when she shined her beam directly at them, much like the faces of The Watchers.

The escarpment grew steeper, forcing her to balance on a narrow ledge and rise to her full height. Her legs shook as she negotiated the shallow handholds. Once she reached a flat surface large enough to accommodate her body, she hauled herself up and clung to the ground while she caught her breath. She wondered if she hadn’t just passed the point of no return, from which there was no physical means of going back.

She raised her head in an effort to see—

Something grazed her cheek.

Hart pulled her face away so quickly she nearly slid right back over the edge. She shined her beam onto it and released an audible sigh of relief.

In her mind, she’d pictured the stinger of a cave scorpion, but it was just a little question mark–shaped plant, unfurling like a fern. She’d already started climbing again when it hit her.

She looked back at the plant. It was brown and crisp and on the verge of death, yet still there was no way it should have been able to take root down here at all. Not unless . . .

Hart craned her neck in an effort to see the top. Even when she stood, she couldn’t see high enough to tell if there was a passage up there in the darkness. Her only choice was to find a secure grip and do the last thing in the world she wanted to do.

She turned off her headlamp and waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. An ethereal purple glow slowly drew contrast from the shadows, illuminating the smooth stone and giving form to the rocks above her. It was barely enough light by which to negotiate the slope. She tested each grip several times before trusting her weight to it. The light was mesmerizing. It was such a deep shade of violet that there were moments when she wondered if she were actually seeing it at all. What could cause a phenomenon like that? Was there access to the surface? Some shaft deep enough to allow light to pass through a vein of amethyst?

A scratching sound.

Hart looked up and what felt like sand struck her face. Her eyes filled with tears. She tried to rub them on her shoulders.

Another scratching sound.

She tucked her chin. This time the grains clattered from her helmet.

Something was definitely up there.

She risked a glance up. A shadow passed across the purple glare.

Her heart raced at the prospect that the primate she was following might be up there, just out of—

A scream from directly above her.

Hart looked up into the stalactites.