Subterrestrial (22 page)

Movement.

A flash of teeth.

She stepped back onto open air.

And then she was falling.

“What the hell is that thing?” Payton whispered.

Thyssen knelt over the remains and shined his light onto what was left of the creature. He’d been so surprised by the sudden movement that he’d drawn his pistol and fired instinctively, without getting anything resembling a good look at what he was shooting. Now he could only stare at the mess of blood, tissue, and feathers and imagine what it must have looked like in life.

The bloody feathers at first appeared white, but closer inspection revealed the coloration to be a cumulative effect. They were actually translucent, like a jellyfish, with a coarse texture and barbs near the vanes. The abdomen was ruined and bloomed with viscera. Its legs were bare and scaly, and reminded him of those of an ostrich or a roadrunner, with long articulated toes and tiny talons. One leg slowly scraped the ground, drawing an arch through the blood.

Thyssen nudged it with the barrel of his pistol and its head flopped sideways onto the limestone.

He closed his eyes and saw the house in Diomede Village, the bloodstained mattress and the riot of footprints. When he opened them again, all he could see were the sealed recesses that lined the walls well beyond the reach of his light.

“Are those teeth?” Nabahe said. “What kind of birds have teeth?”

Thyssen stood. He knew exactly what kind of birds had teeth.

He shined his light through the tear in the covering and onto the corpse inside. The man had been dead for some time. The blood had drained from his face, leaving it pallid and waxy. His eyes were gone, as were the tip of his nose and his earlobes. Where his abdomen had been was an indistinguishable mess of macerated flesh and what looked like a giant brown raisin.

“It’s reptilian,” Payton said. “Those scales on its breast are tubercular. It has a nuchal crest with dorsal spines along its neck. An external eardrum with a subtympanic shield, like an iguana. And feel the feathers. They aren’t keratinized. Feel how soft they are? They’re made of collagen. See? They aren’t feathers at all. They’re protofeathers. Do you know what this means? Feathers aren’t just adornments; they’re integumentary organs. Extensions of the skin itself. Skin capable of producing both scales
and
feathers.”

“It’s a goddamn dinosaur,” Nabahe said.

“It’s so much more than that. Protofeathers aren’t capable of sustained flight. And see the way the blood beads on them? They serve as a water barrier and, more importantly, help to preserve its internal body temperature. This is an endothermic reptile. What you’re looking at is proof positive that dinosaurs evolved into modern day birds.”

“I don’t think the guy in there is too impressed. In case you didn’t notice, there’s not a whole lot left of him.”

Thyssen had noticed, and it wasn’t even the most remarkable thing about the dead man. If he was one of the victims taken from Diomede, then he couldn’t have been dead for more than forty-eight hours, which meant the remains had somehow been transported down here and sealed inside the wall to be utilized as a food source. It was almost as though the creature had emerged from the confines like a bird from an egg. Or maybe . . .

“We need to find Dr. Hart,” he whispered.

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

Thyssen tuned out everything around him and listened for a repeat occurrence. There was a subtle change in the air, a sense of displacement. Alarms went off inside his head in a desperate attempt by his subconscious mind to issue a warning he couldn’t interpret, a tip-of-the-tongue sensation. Was it something he’d heard? Something he’d seen?

He was only peripherally aware of Payton heading back toward the underground passageway calling for Dr. Hart, of Nabahe complaining about being misled, of the fact that an extant species of dinosaur could potentially validate every one of the theories Thyssen’s family had spent three generations attempting to prove.

His eyes settled upon Martin’s hand. He recalled how the fingers had twitched. They were now curled inward like claws.

Clack
.

Clack
.

Contractures—involuntary tightening of the muscles—occurs during the early stages of rigor mortis, roughly three to six hours after death and following the primary stage of flaccidity. They are the result of muscular fibers burning through the body’s remaining reserves of adenosine triphosphate, ATP, the use of which causes them to flex, bending joints and seemingly animating the body of the deceased. It starts with the muscles in the face and spreads outward through the body, from the shoulders and hips to the elbows and knees. The fingers and the toes are the last, and their contractures signal the end of rigor and the onset of secondary flaccidity. Martin’s muscles would soon relax, and the process of decomposition would begin in earnest, commencing with a rapid drop in body temperature.

Suddenly, everything made sense. The bodies weren’t walled inside there just to feed them.

He grabbed Martin by the wrist and pulled him out of the recess. He crumpled to the ground on his side, his knees drawn acutely to his chest.

Clack
.

Clack-clack
.

“Did you guys hear that?” Nabahe whispered.

The bodies of the dead provided the heat necessary to incubate them.

Thyssen kicked Martin’s thighs out of the way and aimed his pistol at the man’s abdomen. His wetsuit was ripped and crisp with congealed blood. His belly had been opened right up the middle, parting his abdominal muscles. Thyssen saw what looked like a bubble of the peritoneum between them, but he knew exactly what it was. It squirmed deeper inside as though fleeing the light. He pulled the trigger and Martin once more folded forward. Again and again he fired, until he couldn’t hear the spent casings tinkling to the ground over the ringing in his ears.

He jacked the empty magazine, snapped another home, and turned toward Butler’s body. He was already reaching for the engineer’s shoulder when his brain caught up with his eyes.

A glimpse of Nabahe’s face as he blew past, his eyes wide, his mouth framing a shout Thyssen couldn’t hear. And behind him, a dark shape charging straight toward him.

Thyssen turned to fire and took the impact squarely to his chest. He left his feet. His head bounced from the ground. He saw stars and tasted blood. His helmet cracked and his light died. He instinctively raised his arms in front of his face. Implements as sharp as razors sliced through his forearms. He felt the warmth of blood, then agony as every nerve ending clear down to the bone came to life.

Something clawed at his thighs. Snapped at his face. He smelled death on the creature’s breath as it flung strands of blood and saliva onto his face.

He tried to fire the pistol, but couldn’t seem to make his hands work.

A flash of discharge.

He caught a glimpse of a row of teeth like those of a shark, ribbons of blood unspooling from their tips, and then they were gone.

The report had been right next to his ear and had hit him so hard he was certain it ruptured his eardrum. He grabbed for his ear and felt the dampness of blood. The conch stung from the tattoo of discharged particles.

Someone grabbed him by the collar of his suit and dragged him backward. He could barely make out the contours of the walls in the dim light, which shifted wildly with the exertions of whoever wielded it.

He felt heat on the back of his head. Smelled sulfur.

A voice shouted directly into his ear, but he couldn’t decipher the words. They sounded as though they came from miles away.

He had just enough presence of mind to take a deep breath before a sharp tug pulled him over the edge and he was immersed in hot water, which brought with it a whole new level of pain.

Mitchell had spent more time down in these warrens than anyone else, yet he was beginning to feel as though he’d only explored the smallest fraction of what was actually down here. For all he knew, these tunnels were infinite and ran from one magnetic pole to the other, filling the entire mantle like an enormous ant farm. All he knew for sure was that the two primary laws of aquatic physics still applied. Even in the absence of running water, he could use those rules to predict the course it had taken long ago. These tunnels might have been the result of arbitrary flow and chemical interactions with the acidic limestone, but they still demonstrated an element of predictability.

He’d learned that for flowstone to form there had to be an orifice through which some quantity of fluid passed. Mere drops of condensation and the eternal patience of nature formed stalactites, stalagmites, and all of the various other speleothemic projections. Duan undoubtedly would have been able to lend deeper insight that would have saved Mitchell a number of false starts and wrong turns, but he tried not to think about the geologist’s fate for fear of losing his resolve, which was about the only thing keeping him going. Given enough time, he firmly believed he could find the others and lead them back to the surface, but with whatever killed Duan hunting them and millions of gallons of water speeding their way, time was their greatest enemy.

He’d ripped the sleeves off of his wetsuit and used them to replace the torn Thermoprene on Calder’s lower legs. The makeshift bandages did a better job of holding in her blood, yet still the occasional rivulet flowed along the top of her foot and between her toes. She was walking better, though, and that was all that mattered. She’d paled considerably and hadn’t spoken in some time, which was something of a mixed blessing.

They hadn’t heard whatever sliced through the sole of Calder’s boot since they left it pacing behind them. Mitchell wouldn’t soon forget the clicking sounds it made and placed each footstep as softly as possible in hopes that when it did catch up with them, he’d be able to hear it with enough warning to react. If he did, the plan was simple.

Run.

It wasn’t much of a plan, but until he came up with something better, it would have to do. He carried the flare gun from the emergency kit. It wasn’t especially accurate and even a direct hit wouldn’t do a whole lot of damage. He could only hope that it would buy them some time, and as they’d already learned, even a few steps could mean the difference between life and death.

Plip
.

Plink
.

The dripping water echoed all around them at once. It streaked through his peripheral vision and glistened on the damp walls, where primitive artwork was etched into the limestone. The subjects ranged from stick figures to more stylized triangular, rectangular, and more anatomically correct forms. They hunted with arrows, spears, and axes and felled animals both small and large. He recognized deer, bears, and mammoths, while other animals appeared to be random combinations of others or outright imaginary beasts. There were sections where the walls were scored black with carbon near fire pits so old the ashes had been sealed beneath several inches of flowstone.

Calder spoke in a whisper, and even then her voice carried throughout the cavern.

“If whoever made these could find their way in here, then we can find our way out.”

Mitchell nodded. He drew a measure of comfort from her observation, at least until they reached the end of the cavern and found the bones. They were brown with age and accreted minerals and staked to the walls by lengths of petrified wood. Disarticulated bones littered the ground beneath their suspended feet. They were shorter and broader than modern humans, their skulls markedly apelike. Bony decomposition had been arrested by their absorption into the limestone. Speleothems hung from their prominent brows and chins. There had to be a dozen of them on both sides of an opening in the wall, above which someone had carved eyes. Stalactites hung from the mouth of the orifice like fangs.

“That’s probably not the best sign, is it?” Mitchell whispered. He shined his light across the walls and the ceiling in search of an alternate egress.

“Doesn’t look like we have much choice in the matter, does it?”

“More of a choice than those poor bastards, anyway.”

Neither of them had to say it out loud. It was obvious the dead men had been staked there as sacrifices, presumably as offerings to secure safe passage.

He felt the weight of their hollow sockets upon him as he passed under their stares and entered the tunnel. The movement of air was cool against his cheeks. The distant sound of running water beckoned him. It smelled of wet soil and minerals, with maybe the faintest hint of brine.

The decrease in temperature was subtle at first, but he reached a point where it fell increasingly faster with each step. It was the strangest sensation. He felt the humidity and sweat cooling on his face, constricting on his skin. His breath plumed from his lips. His beam reflected off the thin layer of ice riming the walls. Everywhere else had been warm, at least to some degree, heated by geothermal forces beyond his limited understanding. This, though . . . he was smart enough to know what such rapid cooling meant.

There was surface access ahead of them.

They were going to live.

He tried to picture the geography of the Bering Strait. If his internal compass was right, they ought to be west of Speranza Station, but by how much he could only speculate. They had to be somewhere near Big Diomede Island, upon which there was an abandoned Cold War–era Soviet military base where surely they’d be able to find a means to signal for help.

In his mind, he was already being hauled up into a rescue chopper when there was a loud
snap
from beneath his foot. He stopped and shined his light onto a thin sheet of broken ice. The water underneath was barely deep enough to cover the soles of his boots. He stepped farther out onto the ice and watched fissures race outward from his foot, but it didn’t immediately collapse. He transferred all of his weight onto it and waited for it to give way.

The pool was roughly circular and covered with a layer of ice that attenuated his beam to such an extent that he couldn’t tell how thick it was or how deep the water below it might be. The ceiling was domed and sparkled with icicles that had formed from the imperfections in the rocks. His reflected light produced an almost silvery glow.