The Omega Project (22 page)

Two more appendages protruded below the handlebar sight organs, only these offshoots were arms—shorter, four-foot-long raptor arms, each ending in a clawed thumb and forefinger. Poised below the cluster of arm sockets was either the creature’s thick neck—or maybe it was its abdomen, I don’t know. All I could see was the hint of a beaked mouth, and a cluster of sockets for those hypnotically powerful eight tentacles.

We stood and stared at one another,
it
clearly more fearful of me than I of it, despite the fact that any one of its tentacles could squeeze me to death like an anaconda.

I only broke eye contact when I felt something wiggling on one of my calf muscles. Looking down at my naked body, I was shocked to find it was covered, not in tetrodotoxin gel, but with foot-long leeches! These slimy black creatures were bloated from sucking my blood—the revelation of which instantly made me woozy, and I toppled forward—only to be caught by my cephaloped guardian, who gently returned me to the cool embrace of the underground stream. Lacking the strength to move, I laid my head back against a rock and watched as the creature delicately plucked a ripe leech from my right calf muscle, revealing an ant bite the size of a quarter, the raised flesh badly bruised.

The ceph’s using the leeches to suck out the ant toxin …

Before I could even weigh the implications of that thought, I caught a glimpse of the underside of its tentacle—hairless pink flesh adorned with two rows of suckers.

I held up my right arm—the telltale welts matched.

My mind raced in its delirium. The cephaloped had rescued me from drowning, it had somehow restored the use of my appendage … and it had saved me from the ants!

“Thank you.”

The startled land squid moved so fast I could not track it, the massive creature somehow disappearing from view. Sitting up, my eyes scanned every square inch of cave before and around me.

It was gone.

What the fuck, Eisenbraun?

Vertigo sent me sprawling back into the water, the disturbance igniting the stream in shimmering waves of fluorescent orange light. Triboluminescence is a geological feature of both sphalerite and tremolite; friction applied to these two minerals actually causes the rock to glow. The entire bed of the stream must have been composed of one or both of these minerals, the rapid movement of the rushing water across its surface bathing the entire underground passage in its ethereal orange light.

Lying back, I stared at the cave ceiling thirty feet above my head. Stalactites hung like twisted canine teeth, the smooth crystal rock twinkling as it reflected the glowing stream.

Giddy, I recited a rhyme that traced back to my Cub Scout days: “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”

The words echoed throughout the passage, dispersed into God knows how many connecting tunnels. Lying gently in the stream, I was stuck in my Omega dream, far from merry.

Was it a dream? How could it not be? Nearly every episode, every near-death experience since my “awakening” could be traced back to something I encountered before I had been forcibly frozen, from the giant bats on Dharma’s sexy emerald moonscape surcoat to my imagined rescuer—an evolved land octopus—no doubt conjured from my brief yet satisfying first encounter with Lara and her two intelligent pets.

The memory served me well. I realized the cephaloped had not simply evaporated into the cold, dank cave air—it had expertly camouflaged itself.

Sitting up slowly, I scanned my surroundings once more. The stream wove its way through and around three-to-five-foot-high stalagmites, a cluster of which was covered in moss.

Hmm. My shy cephaloped guardian did have hair to disguise …

Removing an engorged leech from my left ankle, I tossed the grotesque segmented worm at the rock cluster—which miraculously bloomed into a head and tentacles, one of which caught the dark projectile.

“Bravo, Oscar.”

The spooked cephaloped scurried back another five feet, but remained visible.

I held up my hands, hoping to disarm its fear … no pun intended.

After several minutes, the giant terrestrial squid moved closer.

Removing another leech, I reached out passively with it.

The cephaloped hesitated. After a moment it extended one of its muscular tentacles an impressive twelve feet and accepted my offering, releasing the leech back into the stream.

Encouraged, we repeated this exercise until I stood naked before it, leech-free.

Holding out my right arm, I pointed to the bruised-yellow traces of suction marks, then at the being’s closest tentacle. I nodded slowly.

The ceph nodded back. We were communicating …
Now what?

Weak from hunger, I motioned to my mouth.

Somehow the intelligent creature seemed to understand. It looked around, only there appeared to be nothing edible in the cave.
It’s debating whether to bring the food to me or bring me to the food.

Rendering its decision, the cephaloped moved to the nearest cave wall. Stretching a tentacle above its head in one fluid motion, it scaled the rock face like a spider, using its sucker pads to grip the surface. Reaching up to the ceiling, it suspended itself effortlessly from two stalactites using two of its legs which, anatomically speaking, were now functioning as arms.

For a long moment its simply hung there, watching me with those telescopic yellow eyes—then, with the grace of a gibbon, the ceph reached two of its remaining six tentacles to the ceiling behind it, gripping two more stalactites while simultaneously releasing the first, moving away from me like a trapeze artist swinging from one acrobat partner to the next, its eyes shifting as its body seemed to turn itself inside out with each revolution.

Its haunting yellow gaze left me only after it disappeared into the darkness.

I was alone.

Should I follow it, stay put, or explore the rest of my imaginary surroundings?

Deciding on the latter, I climbed onto the rocky shoreline and headed downstream in the opposite direction of my rescuer. I was naked, both physically and metaphorically speaking—a twenty-first-century
Homo sapiens
deposited into the primordial future, lacking weapons and access to my own biological crutch of intelligence. And perhaps that was intentional—my mind sending me a message in my cryogenic dream:
There will be no cheating in this Great Die-Off, Eisenbraun …

“There you are.” Bending over, I picked up my jumpsuit, pleased to find the binoculars hidden beneath the tattered garment, now stained in frightening clusters of my own blood. After carefully checking the clothing for any insect stragglers, I dressed and began to feel a little less vulnerable.

The location of the jumpsuit indicated the cephaloped had brought me into the cave this way; had it purposely left in the opposite direction? Assuming it intended to feed me, why had it not brought me to the food? Was it afraid that I might again be exposed to the dangers of the forest? Dream or no dream, the ants had nearly made me their breakfast and I had experienced the agony of every bite; that the forest held other unexpected threats, I had no doubts. Still, why had it rescued me? Was I a curiosity, a diversion, or had I become its pet?

I followed the passage another half mile until it twisted up ahead. Rounding the left bend, my ears were assaulted by a rush of rapids as the cavern dropped several hundred feet in a steep three-level grade. Feeling the rocks taking a toll on my bare feet I debated whether to continue on. My eyes followed the course of the stream, which appeared to slow, disappearing into a section of tunnel that seemed different.

Using the binoculars, I confirmed my suspicions … the new passage below was bleeding daylight.

It took me twenty minutes to negotiate the descent, another five before I found myself standing before the entrance to a grand chamber, the arched ceiling towering six stories above a shallow pool of water that glistened emerald green. The cavern ran on perhaps another five hundred feet before narrowing to an exit cloaked in curtains of mist, backlit by a brilliant haze of sunlight.

I sloshed knee-deep through the waterway, each stride releasing cascading ripples of sound and light up the walls of the chamber, my jaunt accompanied by a bizarre echo of raindrops. Pausing to listen to these random splattering sounds, I looked up, expecting to find a rooftop of dripping stalactites … discovering instead a colony of giant bats! Thousands of the creatures hung inverted in a cloud of twitching bodies, the raindrops—bat droppings.

My heart pounded heavy in my chest as I continued moving toward the light at a snail’s pace, praying the demonic mammals would remain asleep. The force of the stream increased as I neared the mist-enshrouded exit, my eyes gradually adjusting to the daylight.

My God …

The thirty-foot-high arch ended in a dizzying precipice, the stream bleeding over its ledge to become a waterfall that plunged a thousand feet onto the rock-strewn beach below. That I knew the beach was doubly unnerving: I had crossed the seemingly endless plain spread out before me days ago. The cave where I now stood was situated within the cliff face I had scaled my first night in la-la land.

It felt early. The sky was bathed in predawn gray, a light mist playing across the valley of sand. A salty breeze howled softly through the archway, but the ocean, thankfully, was nowhere to be seen. Just to be sure, I reached for the binoculars dangling from my neck and scanned the western horizon.

It was out there somewhere, concealed behind distance and fog. Having witnessed the full moon’s effect on the tide, I thought it possible the beach might remain a barren desert for another three to four weeks, depending on the radical pattern of the altered lunar orbit.

Three to four weeks …
I wondered if I’d be awake by then.

But wait … the desert was not barren after all! As the sun rose behind the cliffs, its golden rays reflected a brilliant spark upon an immense object that had washed ashore against its will. I trained my glasses on the spot, the glistening monstrosity anchored in the sand perhaps a mile or so away.

Oceanus …

20

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

—B
UDDHA

It became almost impossible to think clearly or organize my thoughts.

Real or not, the process of withdrawing the ant toxin had cost me a pint or three of blood—at least that’s what it felt like. Woozy, I backed away from the precipice, retracing my path as quickly as I dared through the cavern of bats, sensing, from the increased activity overhead, that the furry fanged creatures were awakening with the dawn.

I cannot say how long it took me to return to the section of cave where I had last seen the cephaloped; perhaps it was an hour, perhaps half a day … or maybe I had never left? Maybe I had dreamt the whole bat-infested chamber and the vision of
Oceanus
beached like a giant globe while I lay—delirious; the entire episode a hallucination caused by the real or imagined loss of blood. All I know is that one moment I thought I was slogging my way up stream, the next—I was lying in it.

The prolonged immersion in cold water helped remove the inflammation from my body and eventually revived me. And yet I felt so drained that I could have remained there indefinitely, floating in waves of ethereal orange light had my hunger pangs not intervened.

Rolling over onto my knees, I dragged myself onto my feet and leaned against a stalagmite, the dripping rags clinging to my limbs assuring me that I had at least ventured through part of the cave. And so I set off again, this time moving upstream, following the path of the eight-legged being that had saved my life, even though I could find no evidence that our shared moment in time had ever taken place.

The stream ran on for miles, forcing me to hike uphill along a rocky shoreline that twisted and turned and occasionally intersected other “dry” passages. I ignored these auxiliary routes as they were dark and offered little promise of food. Somewhere up ahead was an exit to the forest, and I had little choice but to find it.

Daylight became a speck in the distance, then a narrowing funnel, then finally a hole in the ceiling where the water rushed in. Working my way up to the exit by way of stalagmites and boulders, I crawled through a four-foot slit in the rock—emerging beneath the root system of a massive tree that fed from a swollen river, the overflowing banks of which were surrounded by wild ferns amid a backdrop of lush greenery.

The sun was high in the sky, filtering through a swaying canopy of treetops located several hundred feet above the fertile forest floor. Shrill chirps rented a woodland air still damp from a morning rain. Somewhere up ahead the thicket reverberated with sound and I moved toward it, readying myself to rush back to the stream at the first sign of anything resembling a hungry ant.

It was not ants that I heard thrashing in the bushes but a snake, its coiled seven-foot oily black body entwined by the crimson red legs of a three-foot-long centipede. The spotted yellow and violet caterpillar-like insect was adhered to the serpent’s midsection, the smaller attacker’s fangs having already delivered their venom.