Subterrestrial (26 page)

The male rose to his full height, took a deep breath, and doubled over as he released a scream louder than any she’d ever heard a primate make. It echoed away from them into the distance, where it reverberated for several seconds before dissipating into the silence. The male stood silhouetted against the tunnel, which stretched a good thirty feet deeper into the earth, toward the origin of the light, where massive dark shapes faded in and out of the darkness in a way that reminded her of the upper canopy of the jungle in the moments before sunrise.

Another scream answered from far away. It echoed around her before dying amid the columns.

The male bounded down from the rock and loped through the tunnel. The others resumed their travel calls as they followed. Hart watched the shapes take form in the distance. They were definitely trees. There was no doubt about it, but how . . . ?

Hart emerged from the tunnel into a world beyond her imagination, one that suddenly filled with screams.

“Over here!” Payton called.

Nabahe raised his headlamp toward the sound of the voice. Payton stood diagonally above them up the steep, rocky slope, holding something Nabahe didn’t recognize from the distance.

“What did you find?”

Nabahe ducked out from underneath Thyssen’s arm and helped him lean against a boulder. The color had drained from his face and his eyes had taken on a bruised appearance. The bandages were no match for his wounds. His hands were red with blood, which dribbled from his fingertips. He transferred more and more of his weight to Nabahe’s shoulders with every step. Nabahe couldn’t help but look up at the treacherous slope and wonder if they’d soon reach a point where they’d be forced to split up if they hoped to escape.

“Go on,” Thyssen said. “I’ll catch up.”

Nabahe heard the truth in the man’s voice, but nodded and turned his back on him anyway. He scurried uphill through a narrow crevice and found himself on a ledge so narrow he was hesitant to even attempt to stand.

Payton braced himself against the stone embankment and stared toward the top of the incline. A helmet hung from his hand. It was pitted and scarred, but there was no blood, at least none that Nabahe could see. His light had been steadily dimming for the last hour or so, although he wasn’t prepared to admit as much, even to himself.

“Do you think—?”

“No,” Payton interrupted. “The helmet was unclasped. She must have taken it off on her own. Maybe she lost her grip on it and it fell down here.”

Nabahe swept his beam across the ground at Payton’s feet. The absence of blood didn’t necessarily mean there hadn’t been a struggle. He’d lived in the desert long enough to be able to read the stories the ground told, maybe not well enough to interpret them, but certainly well enough to get the gist. The scuff marks in the dust and scattered pebbles, the smudged footprints and scored rock all spoke of a physical confrontation, one whose outcome—

His light settled upon an impression in the dust. It was a partial print at best, but the impressions were distinct.

“You don’t suppose she’d have any reason to take off her shoes, do you?”

Payton glanced down at him with an expression of confusion that vanished when he saw what Nabahe had found. He knelt and brushed at the edges with his fingertips. The ball of the foot was clear, as were two of the toes, one of which almost looked like it was bent totally sideways and had been used to grasp the ledge.

“She was right,” Payton said.

“We need to catch up with her,” Nabahe said. He chose not alert Payton to the fact that there’d been a struggle. The idea of pushing on with a renewed sense of urgency was more than a little appealing, though. After narrowly escaping whatever the hell that thing had been by climbing into the narrow chute, they couldn’t move fast enough for him.

“I’ll scout ahead,” Payton said. He glanced downhill at Thyssen. “Do what you can with him.”

“I don’t know how much farther he can go.”

“We’ll deal with that when we have to.”

“And when we do?”

Payton looked at him for a long moment, his expression indecipherable from the shadows hiding his face. He started climbing without another word, leaving Nabahe to pick his way back down the slope to where Thyssen had slid down the rock to his haunches. He peered up at Nabahe from a face drenched with sweat.

“She’s dead, you know.”

Nabahe offered his hand and helped Thyssen to his feet. He draped the man’s arm around his neck and did his best to find balance for both of them.

“The ancient Hopi believed that when the Earth was new, all of the people and animals lived beneath its surface. There were four worlds, one above and three below. It was in the darkness of the bottommost world that all life began. Their ancestors ascended from one level to the next until they emerged into the Fourth World, beneath the watchful eye of the Sun Spirit, Sawa, their creator. On the surface, however, Masauwu, the Spirit of Death, ruled. And so the Hopi came to accept that the price of living was that they must always be in the presence of death, and thus wasted none of their precious time in the sun worrying about something that was every bit as much a part of their lives as the air they breathed.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s no sun down here.”

Thyssen slipped and they both fell to their knees. Nabahe grimaced and fought through the pain to drag them both over the next crest. The slope only grew steeper, but it almost looked as though there was a trail that wended up between the rocks.

“Your research and mine aren’t so different,” Thyssen said. “The science might be anecdotal in the eyes of some, yet the vast majority of human knowledge can be traced to oral traditions. Maybe there is no god of thunder riding his chariot across the sky or a supreme being who hurls lightning bolts from the clouds. One must weed the belief from the garden of fact in order to lay bare the truth, whether or not one chooses to accept it. Is it coincidental that nearly every indigenous tribe’s story of creation begins with a journey from the underworld? Is it so much harder to believe that those tales could be true than that humans magically appeared in an idyllic garden with a talking snake? The stories that predate modern religion, that were old long before the first scrolls were pressed, share more commonalities than all of the doctrines marketed as the word of various monotheistic gods.”

“In my experience, belief defines one’s reality.”

“Yet just because one believes something fervently enough doesn’t necessarily make it so. Proof is the currency of fact. Look at the evolution of humankind. We have physical evidence that traces modern humans’ origin through literally dozens of physical incarnations to a common shared lineage with apes. We can track the migration of Homo sapiens from Africa to Asia, and ultimately to the edge of the Arctic Circle and down through the Americas. We’ve found evidence of habitation in caves from Beringia to Antarctica, evidence that proves there was a mass migration during the Last Glacial Maximum. But none of that evidence proves this mass migration happened aboveground. Why would protohumans choose to travel through the snow and ice in sub-zero temperatures when there were plentiful resources in Africa and Asia, closer to the warmth of the equator? Why would we assign such counterintuitive thought processes to even primitive people, when our species’ greatest evolutionary triumph has been the continuous increase in cranial capacity? Would not the Arctic be full of the frozen carcasses of migrating primates if that were the case?”

Nabahe was beginning to feel like he was dragging Thyssen. The man stumbled with nearly every step. Payton was already near the top, his crawling silhouette limned by his headlamp.

“Assigning thoughts to apes is no more reasonable than believing they were created by an omnipotent being,” Nabahe said.

“I’m talking about instinct, not cognitive ability. Any animal exposed to the cold will seek warmth. That’s basic physiology. Self-preservation prevents such suicidal risks, especially in baser animals.”

“Were that the case, Columbus never would have found the New World.”

“You’re speaking of individuals; I’m talking about entire species,” Thyssen said. “Whole populations don’t set out on journeys that ultimately lead to their extinction. I believe that our ancestors made the journey underground, where they were spared from the elements, tunnels from which they emerged only when they were confident they would be able to comfortably sustain themselves. Tell me that doesn’t mesh with your theories. I’ve read your work. We share the same beliefs, you and I.”

Payton shined his beam down at them from the top. The added light allowed Nabahe to focus more on what was ahead than on where he was planting his feet. The final leg was the steepest, but once he was within reach, Payton would be able to help him with Thyssen.

“Say you’re right,” Nabahe said. “Say we’re both right and modern humans migrated into the Americas via a warren of underground tunnels. Say that explains the nearly simultaneous appearance of humans in both North and South America and the distinct physical similarities between peoples separated by thousands of miles and whose historical territories never once overlapped. Say we’re right about everything. What’s in it for Halversen?”

“I don’t work for Halversen,” Thyssen said.

“They’re the ones who sent you here.”

“Granted, but I remain firmly in the employ of DARPA.”

“Then what’s in it for you?”

“I have a personal stake in proving what you and I both already know.”

“And DARPA?”

Payton braced himself on the top ledge and extended his arm toward them.

“DARPA’s stated mission is ‘to prevent technological surprise by our adversaries, and to create technological surprise for our enemies.’”

Nabahe stopped and stared directly at Thyssen, who raised his hand to shield his eyes from Nabahe’s headlamp.

“You want to turn this into a giant military base?”

“Is it really any different from putting a network of satellites over everyone’s heads?”

“Satellites can’t pop out of the ground and start shooting at you.”

“You’re right. Most of them have sophisticated laser-guided targeting systems that could knock a bird out of the sky.”

“That’s what the Nazis wanted to do.”

“And had they done so, the war would probably have had an entirely different outcome.”

Nabahe could only stare. He’d been so intent on proving his theory that he never stopped to consider the ramifications of being right. Thyssen was wrong; humankind’s greatest evolutionary triumph wasn’t the increase in cranial capacity, it was the capacity for warfare.

Payton grabbed Thyssen by his upper arm and helped him crawl up onto the ledge. He looked at Nabahe when he spoke.

“You won’t believe what’s up there.”

Mitchell closed his fist around the climbing piton and silently removed it from his backpack. It was barely five inches long, and the tip formed more of a wedge than a point, but he was just going to have to make it work.

Clack.

The sound came from his right, near his feet. He didn’t dare move them for fear of attracting its attention.

Clack.

Calder made a scratching sound as she inched away from it.

A huffing sound, followed by a wet, slathering noise.

Mitchell could positively feel Calder’s fear radiating from her. Even her best efforts to quiet her breathing were beginning to betray her.

Clack.

It was mere inches to his right, between Calder and him. So close he could have reached out and grabbed it and still he couldn’t see it. He could only guess at its size and shape. It smelled of death and decay, like the cavern where he’d found the dead sea lions, only more subdued, somehow more . . . earthy. He could feel it beside him as little more than a displacement of the air, an invisible presence moving stealthily through the darkness.

Clack.

Another huff, from farther to his right. More slathering sounds elicited a whimper from Calder.

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

It had found her.

Mitchell acted without thinking. He swung his fist backhanded and buried the piton into flesh. He was already retracting it and winding up for a second blow when he felt the warmth on his hand and heard a high-pitched screeching sound reminiscent of the cry of a hawk.

Skree!

It was upon him before he could swing again. He barely managed to raise his arms in time to keep the jaws from tearing apart his face. They snapped so close he had to turn his head, exposing his throat. He felt the heat of its breath, the dampness of its tongue flicking against his neck. That was the source of the slathering sound; it used its tongue to smell, like a snake. It was far larger than he had guessed. He wouldn’t be able to hold it back for very long.

Something sharp pierced the flesh of his thigh. He felt it inside of him a heartbeat before the searing pain and a rush of blood.

Mitchell shouted and struck blindly at the creature. The piton impacted repeatedly with a wet
thuck . . . thuck . . . thuck
, yet still it strained to reach his throat.

Calder screamed. He heard the thumping sound of her striking it with her fists and tried to find the voice to tell her to get out of there while she still could.

It turned and snapped at her, momentarily easing the pressure from his left arm. He grabbed it to keep it close and wrapped his arm around its long sinewy neck. It was like trying to strangle a python, only rather than a covering of fine scales, its neck bristled with what almost felt like . . . feathers?

Skree!

The sharp implement inside his leg withdrew and the creature’s weight shifted from his midsection. He struggled to maintain his grasp on its neck while he stabbed it over and over with the piton.

It rounded on him before he could brace himself. He could only pull it closer to him. Once it broke his grip, though . . .

It flailed and shook its neck. Mitchell drew his knees to his chest and tried to plant his feet against its breast. It battered his head until his vision filled with stars, then wrenched its neck free. Drew it out of his reach like a viper preparing to strike.