Subterrestrial (27 page)

Mitchell shoved with his legs and felt it rise. Tried to get his forearms in front of his throat before it delivered the killing strike. Its teeth snapped right above his face.

Skree!

A spattering sound. Fluid poured onto his chest and pattered the stone.

The creature bucked and thrashed, but Mitchell managed to keep his legs between them until it finally ceased fighting. Its head fell limply against his forearms. He remained frozen in place, panting from the exertion, until his shaking legs could no longer support its weight.

He rolled out from underneath it. The body hit the ground with a slapping sound.

“Brooke?” Mitchell said.

She sobbed and crawled to where he lay. Her trembling hands found his shoulder, then his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and felt her shudder against him.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“No,” she whispered and withdrew from his embrace. “Are you?”

It felt like there was a flaming shard of metal in his thigh.

“No.”

He reached up and fingered the sharp tips of the stalactites overhead. If they hadn’t been there . . .

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but where there’s one, there’s undoubtedly more.”

“Sharks are solitary hunters.”

“As are bears and mountain lions. That doesn’t mean they don’t share their habitat with others of their species, though.”

“Feel its teeth.”

“I’m glad I didn’t have the chance.”

“No. Feel them.”

She took his hand and guided it to his right. The creature’s scaled upper lip peeled back and he felt the warmth of its gums, then the smooth contours of a tooth. The front half was rounded and curved to a sharp point, while the back side was jagged with shallow notches.

“It’s serrated.”

“Like the teeth of a tiger shark. For sawing through flesh.”

“Jesus.”

Mitchell slid his fingertips over its long scaled snout to a prominent ridge, from which short pointed feathers protruded. They grew longer over the top of its head and formed a spiked comb maybe eight inches long.

“What the hell has feathers
and
scales?”

Skree!

The sound was faint and came from some distance away, yet there was no mistaking it.

“We can’t stay here,” Calder whispered.

“You say that as though it was an even remotely appealing option.”

He crawled over the carcass toward the mouth of the cave. Its body was smaller than it had felt when it was on top of him. In all, the thing must have been roughly the size of an ostrich, and it had the same long, bristling quills on its back and short wings from the tips of which short digits with claws protruded.

Calder turned on the flashlight. She kept the lens in her closed fist so it produced little more than a red glare, but it was enough to see the creature’s slender legs. They were feathered, although the way they grew reminded Mitchell of fur. It had two long toes in front—wide and splayed like an enormous hoof—and a third held high. It was crowned with a hooked claw that was easily three inches long.

Mitchell pressed his palm to the wound in his thigh. The claw had missed the major arteries, but if he didn’t stanch the flow of blood soon, he was going to be in big trouble.

He crawled past the beast’s feathered tail. It was broad and half of the thing’s overall length. He didn’t need to be a scientist to know what he was looking at.

He dropped down from the ledge. His injured leg gave way and he collapsed to his knees.

“You’re hurt,” Calder whispered. She rolled over, dangled her legs closer to the ground so as not to aggravate her own injuries, and alighted beside him.

Mitchell thought she was referring to his leg until he saw what it had done to his forearms. They were covered with shallow lacerations running in every direction, from which a fine layer of blood had risen.

“It’s nothing,” he whispered.

“Hold still.”

She removed her backpack and fished around inside until she found the last of the gauze and the alcohol.

“Don’t you dare.”

She swabbed his arm and he nearly came out of his skin. The blood had already stopped flowing by the time she finished patting it down with the gauze.

“We’d better hang onto that,” he said. “And hope we don’t have a reason to reuse it.”

“That’s gross,” she said, but she still handed it to him.

Instead of tucking it into his backpack, he used the opportunity to discreetly remove the rope from the climbing anchors. As soon as she turned the light in the opposite direction, he placed the gauze over the puncture wound on his thigh and cinched it in place with the rope. He bit his lip to keep from shouting when he pulled it tight.

Skree!

The sound was closer, but the acoustics made it impossible to tell how much.

“Look over there.”

Mitchell followed the beam toward another passage in the rock wall. He did his best not to limp as he followed her along the rear wall of the cavern to an orifice, through which he could see only darkness hiding behind the flowstone columns and stalagmites as tall as termite mounds.

They stood in silence and listened for movement inside.

Skree!

The sound made the decision for them. It was definitely moving in their direction, but at least he could tell that it hadn’t come from inside the passage.

Mitchell walked beside Calder, scrutinizing every shadow cast by the beam as she swept it from one side of the tunnel to the other. The passageway was maybe ten feet wide and almost as tall. It sloped gently downward into standing water, which almost seemed to rise as they advanced into it. Over their feet and past their ankles. It was nearly knee-deep when the walls receded and they entered a cavern the size of a barn. The central portion was raised and ringed with stalagmites. The water formed a moat around it. As they sloshed toward it, Mitchell realized that not only was the water growing warmer, it was definitely rising.

Calder shined the beam through the gap between two stalagmites and onto a strange display. It looked like someone had taken dozens of oblong stones, stacked them on end beside one another, and used some sort of brown paper to hold them in place.

“That’s the oddest rock garden I’ve ever seen,” Mitchell said.

“They aren’t rocks,” Calder said. “They’re eggs.”

Below Speranza Station

Bering Sea

Ten Miles Northwest of Wales, Alaska

65°47′ N, 169°01′ W

It was a realm of perpetual twilight. The violet light reminded her of the last rays of the sun as it disappears behind the horizon. The trees were tall and black, permanent silhouettes standing sentry over a cavern proliferating with miracles beyond her understanding. The leathery leaves of the upper canopy reflected the glow of what looked like sparkling icicles hanging from the domed roof, but it had to be seventy degrees and so humid that her bangs stuck to her forehead and cheeks. There were more in the trees themselves, luminescent strands of goo with tiny beads that seemed to move up and down the length as she watched. They resembled the spittle bugs that infested the juniper shrubs at her parents’ house in Colorado, only these produce light and somehow sustain higher orders of life.

The shapes in the upper reaches were indistinguishable from the shadows. While they no longer shrieked down at her, she could still feel them up there, studying her through means she could no more fathom than the means by which they had survived for millennia by the light of insects she would have sprayed if they were in her garden. It was the perfect symbiotic relationship, an entire biome that sustained multiple species of life without generating the slightest waste. The glowing bugs allowed the plants to photosynthesize, and they in turn produced the oxygen and fruit for the primates, whose feces and remains nourished the soil. There was so much history in this one cavern that undoubtedly predated the first human habitation aboveground.

She could barely see the outline of the large male on top of a boulder from which mushrooms bloomed in a scalelike pattern. They were parabolic and produced a faint green glow around the edges. He reared to his full height and screamed into the trees.

Whaah!

The only response was the nervous shuffling overhead. The scraping of claws on wood and the rattling of bark and dead leaves.

Hart turned in a circle, but the other primates that had helped guide her here had vanished without making a sound. She now stood alone at the edge of a clearing, surrounded by massive trees ripped from some prehistoric forest and under the scrutiny of an inestimable number of unclassified simians that might as well have been ghosts.

Whaah!

The intonation was different. Higher pitched.

A shadow responded with a whistling sound as it plummeted through the canopy, breaking branches and shredding foliage as it went.

Hart stepped backward so quickly she tripped over a tuft of grass and landed squarely on her rear end.

The animal alighted right where she’d been standing. It screamed, raised its arms over its head, and struck the ground repeatedly.

The first male jumped from the rock and bounded across the clearing to position himself with his back to her, between the aggressor and Hart. The fur on his shoulders, neck, and the crown of his head stood in a pointed Mohawk. He screamed and beat the ground at the other male’s feet.

The canopy erupted with hooting. There had to be at least twenty of them up there. She was startled by how close some of them were, as though they’d moved through the shadows and into striking distance without her even suspecting.

Both males grunted and feinted. Ducking in and out. Striking blindly as they circled each other. The saliva on their teeth reflected the purple glow, which was barely bright enough to delineate the bare skin of their faces from their white hair, which must have lost its pigment in the absence of the sun.

Hart slowly stood and eased out from beneath the branches and toward the center of the clearing, careful to keep the male between her and her would-be assailant, who was larger than the male who had brought her here, but he was also slower. The first male, the one who first attacked her, ducked the second’s overhand strikes, moved in close, and raked his nails across the other’s face and chest, opening glimmering violet slashes.

The hooting grew louder and more frenzied. She’d seen videos of violent confrontations between chimpanzees, but had never seen anything like it in person. The sheer strength and ferocity these primates possessed was frightening. More terrifying still was the bloodlust of the spectators, who acted like ancient Romans cheering for gladiators to tear one another to shreds.

“Stop it,” she said, but even she couldn’t hear her voice over the racket.

She turned around and looked for something. Anything.

Several four-foot branches stood from the ground in the darkness at the edge of the tree line. Skulls had been staked on top of them through the holes where the spinal cord had once passed. Other bones she didn’t immediately recognize hung from them by weeds braided into thin rope.

Hart pried the nearest from the ground and ran toward the fracas. It was heavier than it looked and threw her off balance when she raised it.

The two males shrieked and wrestled in a flurry of teeth and claws. The ground was damp with blood. The first male threw the second off of him and onto his back.

Hart screamed and slammed the skull to the ground between them. The stick snapped and the tied bones flipped through the air. The skull tumbled away from them before coming to rest on its vertex, a row of teeth like those of a shark protruding from its upper jaw.

The canopy fell silent. The only sound was the heavy breathing of the combatants, who crouched in anticipation of attacking once more.

The second male snarled and lunged for the first.

Hart stabbed what was left of the stick into the loam directly in front of him.

“Whaah!” she screamed.

Her voice echoed through the cavern in the resulting silence.

She raised the stick again and prepared to swing it. A chimpanzee could easily rip a man’s arm from the socket or bash in his skull. After witnessing these two going at it, she knew there wasn’t a stick big enough to fend off either of them if they came at her.

Her pulse thundered in her ears. She wished she hadn’t interceded, but what was she supposed to do? Let them kill each other?

The second male rose to his hind legs and took a step toward her.

Hart stumbled backward and swung the branch between them.

He screamed and hopped out of range, where he dropped to all fours with his face shielded by his shoulder, just as the first had before he had charged her.

She switched the stick from her right hand to her left. The second male turned his head to follow the motion. Somehow this magnificent creature could actually see the pathetic club.

Hart stared at him for several seconds before letting the branch fall from her hand. It clattered to the dirt at her feet. She looked from the second male to the first, then back again.

Neither of them moved. They seemed to have lost interest in each other, though. Their spiked fur slowly flattened to their bushy heads.

Her hands shook when she adjusted her wetsuit so that she could sit Indian-style on the ground, the third point in a triangle.

The first male pushed himself to his feet and held his hands high. They swayed as he waddled toward the second, who brought around his flank to deflect the impending blow. The first stopped just outside of range and slowly lowered both hands to the ground. It slashed first one, then the other, leaving an
X
-shaped furrow in the dirt.

The second male peered down from behind his shoulder. His face was covered with blood, which dripped from his chin when he rocked back and screamed in his high-pitched voice.

Whay-ahh!

The trees came to life and primates rained to the ground all around her.

They swarmed over her, touching her skin and pulling her hair, tasting her and feeling her, climbing into her lap and onto her shoulders. She allowed them to do whatever they wanted, regardless of how uncomfortable or how much it hurt. She tried to count them, but had no luck whatsoever. It was simply a mass of primates with no beginning or end. She laughed and wrestled and played.