Subterrestrial (28 page)

Whaah!

They all climbed off of her and bounded off into the forest, their traveling calls trailing them as they crashed through the underbrush.

Hart was still smiling when the larger male loped over and rested his hands on the ground in front of her, palms up. She placed hers on top of his. He grunted, nuzzled her forearm, then slowly removed his hands from beneath hers, crawled to the nearest tree, and vanished into the dark canopy. When she looked back at the first male, he was watching her with his head cocked to the side. There were lacerations across his cheeks and chest, but he appeared oblivious to the pain.

“Come on over,” she whispered.

He cocked his head to the other side, pursed his lips, and hooted.

She held out her hands, palms up, as the other had just done. Still, he didn’t rise from where he crouched.

“Whaah!” she said, but the sound didn’t come out right.

Hart grabbed a handful of dirt and scattered it in frustration.

The male rose and leaned closer, as though to better see what she had done.

She stared at him for several seconds before raising her hands and slashing at the ground to leave an
X
in the dirt.

Whaah!

He walked closer and clumsily brushed away her
X
. When the dirt was smooth again, he used the nail on his curled index finger to scratch what looked like a triangle.

Hart looked up at him and traced his design with her finger.

The male climbed into her lap and buried his face in her shoulder. She stroked the fur on his back and listened to the joyous sounds of life in the distance, beneath which she heard what almost sounded like rain.

Calder leaned between the stalagmites and shined her flashlight onto what Mitchell had initially mistaken for mere stones. She had no doubt whatsoever that they were actually eggs. She’d seen enough in her experience to know, although never out of the water. Forty percent of all shark species are oviparous and lay egg cases colloquially nicknamed mermaid’s purses. While the shape varies from one species to the next, they are all composed of collagen fibers—aggregates of monounsaturated, protein-rich fatty acids—and utilize tendrils to tangle amid the coral and seaweed on the ocean floor, which serves to camouflage the embryo long enough for it to absorb its yolk and to conceal it until it is large enough to venture into the open ocean.

These were different, though. At least superficially. Rather than pouch-shaped, they more closely resembled eggs from a distance. As she neared, she could see that the casings were semipermeable, fluid filled, and immobilized by a papery sheath that looked like it had been made by wasps. The eggs were arranged in concentric rings, the outermost of which still glistened beneath the damp sheath, which tore easily enough and allowed her to direct her beam directly onto the eggs, revealing the shapes of the embryos inside.

That was where the similarities ended.

While embryonic sharks look like giant sperm with fins, these were definitively bipedal organisms. They had bulbous heads and short fore appendages. Long hind legs that wrapped around the yolk sacs and cradled them to their bellies. Tails that wrapped all the way over their heads.

She brought the bulb to within inches of one. The creature inside shifted sluggishly in response to the light and raised its tiny arms to the sides of its face.

“Tell me all of those aren’t what attacked us in that cave,” Mitchell said.

Calder swept her light across the nest. There had to be more than a hundred of them. The thought of these caverns positively teeming with those monsters was horrifying.

But also impossible, she realized with a start.

A stable predator-prey model dictates that a minimum level of prey per predator needs to be maintained in order to support a population of any size. Apex predators formed the very top of the food pyramid. She and Mitchell would have to be positively tripping over prey species to feed a population numbering in the hundreds. And then it hit her.

The colder temperatures.

The aquatic nature of the egg casings.

The sheer number.

Skree!

Closer this time.

“We need to keep moving,” Mitchell said.

Calder held up her hand to silence him while she formulated her thoughts. The embryos were meant to develop slowly and only hatch in response to external stimuli. A dramatic increase in the ambient temperature would theoretically indicate a thawing of the ice caps and the subsequent heating of the Arctic Sea, meaning the species would be able to return to the surface and expand its territory. Until then, they remained in a form of stasis, their development retarded by the cold and the water table, the rising of which wouldn’t affect them due to the semipermeable membranes, which helped the creatures regulate their internal functions despite immersion in the cold saltwater. But if the water were even a few degrees warmer, as one might find with an influx from tropical sources speeding through these underground tunnels from halfway around the globe, it would likely trigger the entire nest to hatch.

This was an aquatic species that could survive the extinction of its entire adult population, one that could adapt to any environmental conditions, and one whose numbers could increase almost exponentially in response to the increased availability of prey.

Calder shook her head; she should have recognized it right away.

The outermost rings.

They looked like they’d been freshly laid because they
had
. They’d been laid in response to the sudden abundance of prey in these warrens. Namely the men who had died down there when the tunnel collapsed. And those who came after them.

Skree!

“Snap out of it, Brooke!”

They weren’t like sharks at all. They were like brine shrimp, triops, and ray-finned fish of the Cyprinodontiformes order. Their eggs were capable of diapause, of surviving countless years without hatching, until such time as the right environmental conditions stimulated the hatching instinct. By going down there, where humankind was never meant to go, they had provided the necessary impetus to expand the population, which they’d just given access to the surface world.

“We have to destroy them,” she whispered.

“What?”

“The eggs. We have to destroy them all. This isn’t a nest. It’s a repository. Don’t you see? Some of these eggs were laid generations ago. They only hatch in limited numbers and in response to fluctuations in prey populations. All of these new ones? They were laid in response to
our
arrival!”

Mitchell leaned over her shoulder and surveyed the nest.

“Jesus.”

Calder caught a glimpse of the rope tied around his thigh and the skein of blood on his wetsuit. A rivulet flowed over his knee and dripped into the water.

Skree!

Then again, maybe they were more like sharks than she wanted to admit.

“We’re out of time,” Mitchell said.

“We can’t allow them to hatch.”

“It won’t matter if we’re dead.”

“It will to whoever comes down here after us.”

Splashing sounds in the distance. Coming in fast.

“The saline concentrations,” Calder said. “Water from the Bering Sea reached all the way to the Caribbean. Think what would happen if these things followed the same route. Imagine if they reached the jungles of the Yucatan. There would be hundreds of them before anyone even knew they were there.”

“We’ve been lucky twice. Our luck can’t hold out forever.”

Skree!

The cry echoed throughout the cavern. The splashing sound was right on top of them. She shined the beam toward the tunnel and caught a hint of movement.

Calder dropped her backpack into the water. Unzipped it and dumped out the contents. Found the case with the flare gun. Opened it. Loaded the cartridge. Snapped it into place.

“You’re going to be the death of me,” Mitchell said.

“Go,” she said. “You’re going to need a head start.”

He looked down at his injured leg, then back at her.

“We go together or not at all.”

“Look at you. You can hardly walk, let alone run.”

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

“I’ll be right behind you,” Calder whispered.

Mitchell stared into her eyes for a long moment, his lips writhing in frustration, then turned and limped toward the shadows at the back of the cavern.

Calder listened to the sloshing sounds of his passage, beneath which she heard a faint huffing noise.

She eased quietly behind the nest and found a gap between stalagmites through which she could see across the nest and into the tunnel. Ripples radiated outward from the darkness.

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

The vocalization sent chills up her spine.

She readjusted her grip on the flare gun and pointed it down into the center of the nest.

A soft splashing sound from beyond the reach of her light. The ripples turned to waves that broke against the nest before the surface stilled once more.

What was it waiting for?

Calder shined the beam around the circumference of the tunnel, then across the water, which sparkled with disturbed sediment. There was no hint as to where it was. No movement. No sound. Only silence and motionless water. For the briefest of moments, she allowed herself to hope that it might have elected not to risk the fate that had befallen its brethren in the cave. And then she heard a sound that made every muscle in her body tighten.

Plip-plat.

Plap.

Plip.

It was the sound of dripping water.

Directly behind her.

She whirled and watched it rise from the water to its full height. Water poured from its feathers and its long snout. Its lips peeled back from rows of razor-sharp teeth. It lowered its head so that it looked up at her through its reptilian eyes. Its forked tongue flicked across the surface of the water. Its body swelled and it released a guttural clicking sound.

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

Calder slowly raised the flare gun.

It tracked the motion with its eyes. The slits constricted to two small dots.

She pointed the barrel at the nest again.

The creature opened its mouth wide and screamed.

Skree!

She felt the warmth of its breath, even through the wetsuit. Spittle slapped her thighs.

Its neck continued to move, retracting to its body like a spring compressing. It was going to strike and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Her only option was to pull the trigger and hopefully save the others in the process.

Her hand shook so badly she could barely tighten her finger on the trigger.

It raised one foot from the water, which drained off of two limp digits. A third stood erect, its massive claw twitching like a scorpion’s stinger. It placed the foot back into the water and halved the distance between them without making so much as a single ripple.

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

“Hey!”

The creature turned toward the source of the sound.

Mitchell stood at the periphery of the light. He’d unwound the rope from his thigh and coiled the end around his fist. He used it like a whip, flinging droplets of his blood into the air before striking the water.

It shrieked at him and turned back to Calder.

She stared into its eyes as she pulled the trigger. Watched the orange glow reflect from them.

Skree!

It lunged at her.

Calder took the impact against her shoulder and was momentarily airborne before her mouth filled with water. She pushed herself to her hands and knees and glanced back to see the creature flopping on the flames. The fibrous sheath burned hot and fast and issued a cloud of rich black smoke. The fire took root in the beast’s feathers as it attempted to smother the fire with its body. It screamed and hissed and thrust its snout into the blaze.

Mitchell grabbed her by the arm and pulled her to her feet.

“There’s a way out back there!” he shouted.

Calder caught one final glimpse of the creature through the haze of smoke and the rising flames, and then she was running through a narrow crevice.

Its awful screams trailed her into the depths.

The situation was unraveling faster than Thyssen could ever have imagined possible. Even after seeing with his own eyes what those creatures had done to the inhabitants of Diomede Village, he’d honestly believed that everything was still under control. The majority of the inhabitants had been evacuated, and those too stubborn to leave had been caught entirely unaware, most of them while they slept. The thought that he and his team might be unable to handle whatever had crawled from that vent had never crossed his mind. Even placing the fail-safes—assuming Martin had lived long enough to do so—had seemed like a waste of time and manpower just to satisfy Butler’s desire for redundancy. It was that overconfidence that would prove his undoing.

He’d given up on trying to raise Speranza on the com-link. There’d been no answer for so long now that he was beginning to think that it might not be a consequence of a weak signal after all. His men should have returned from the mainland with their supplies by now. The first thing Wiley would have done was dispatch them into the tunnels with the signal repeaters. Even if the men had been unable to follow his trail, the repeaters surely would have boosted their signal enough to reconnect them to the surface. The fact that Butler was crammed into the limestone suggested that the station had probably already been overrun. Their only hope was that Wiley had contacted Washington and at this very moment there were retrieval units streaking across the Bering Sea. If he hadn’t, then they were all going to die down here.

Unless . . .

“I need to rest,” Thyssen said.

Payton leaned him against a column and helped him slide to the ground.

Thyssen slipped off his backpack and removed a small black case, inside of which was a handheld detonator with a trigger for his index finger and a button on top for his thumb. They still had one means of contacting the outside world.