It had followed us—all the way from our landing, to our camp, back through the forest and into this cave that wasn’t a cave. Even though my brain wasn’t working, my trigger finger knew that if I didn’t kill that cat, it was absolutely going to kill me.
I fired three times without thinking. The bark from that gun in such a small, enclosed space should have been deafening, but I barely heard it. The punch to my shoulder, on the other hand, was not insubstantial. The first shot hit it in the shoulder and staggered it back, but the other two missed. It snarled and backed out of the chamber. I couldn’t see it anymore, but its roars were terrifying.
Even though my ears were ringing, I heard a low hum coming from the room to my right. I glanced over, but couldn’t see anything there. At the same time, the purple glow from the other chamber had grown much more intense.
The jaguar’s head reappeared just over the ledge. I kept the gun pointed at it, waiting for it to come again, but it was wary now. And then the hum abruptly stopped. What replaced it was worse. Snarling sounds like the jaguar in front of me was still making.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I said to myself. I shot again at the wounded jaguar and missed. It disappeared again.
“Luis…” I shouted. “See what’s making that glow in there.”
He was still holding the lance, but he’d left his gun in the other chamber. I spared a quarter second to snap a look at him. It was enough to see that all the blood had drained from his face. He didn’t budge.
I needed to put some space between me and the darkened doorway with the growling sounds, but I didn’t want to get close to that light if it was something dangerous. The growling was getting louder. I had no choice.
Pointing the gun between the dark door and the one where I expected the wounded cat to reappear, I backed towards the purple light.
The jaguar leapt back onto the ledge. At the same time, the darkness in the other doorway seemed to shimmer and another jaguar appeared.
The new jaguar wasn’t advancing yet, just standing in the doorway with its ears laid back, baring its teeth. The wounded cat hunched low to the ground like it was getting ready to pounce. I’d seen my own cat do the same thing a hundred times when it was out in the yard trying to catch birds. I fired and caught it in the chest just as it started moving. It dropped, but didn’t stop snarling and trying to move forward. I shot it in the head and it finally stopped.
The other cat sprang forward as I was raising the gun for another shot. I wasn’t fast enough. I could see its three-inch fangs and each whisker in its face before it slammed into me. The force of impact threw me through the doorway and sent my gun flying. The jaguar landed with its front paws on my chest and snarling.
Instinctively, I shut my eyes and raised my arms in a vain attempt to protect myself. Then suddenly, the jaguar wasn’t on me anymore and the smell of singed hair was in my nostrils. I opened my eyes to see a streak of blue lighting pass over me and catch the jaguar in its hindquarters. The jaguar screamed in pain as the lightning blast threw it against the wall, and I looked back at Luis to see that the blade on his lance was glowing now.
Luis hollered and another streak of lightning shot from the tip of his lance, but the cat dodged it this time. I pushed myself up as the jaguar turned on Luis. Fingers closing on the baton that had fallen from my pocket, I scrambled to my feet. I just wanted the jaguar to stop. I couldn’t reach my gun, but maybe I could distract it enough to give Luis another shot. I thought about throwing the baton at it. It was a stupid idea, but what other choice did I have?
The jaguar snarled and moved toward Luis, nimbly dodging another burst of energy.
I raised the baton for a throw. I just have to stop it.
The cat crouched for its pounce. And then, to my utter shock, it sat back on its haunches and went to grooming itself.
I snatched up my gun which had skittered over into the corner. The jaguar followed me with its eyes, but didn’t make a move until I raised the rifle. When I pointed the gun at it, it stood up and focused on me. I was sighting it straight down the barrel, debating internally whether to pull the trigger.
“Wait,” Luis said. He was standing behind one of the two columns I’d just noticed against the far wall of the chamber. I was glad it wasn’t just me having crazy thoughts about not shooting. Keeping my finger on the trigger, I slowly lowered the barrel and the jaguar sat back down.
“I don’t know what just happened,” Luis said. “But you pulled that staff thing out and the jaguar stopped cold.”
I was confused too. “First you blasted it with lightening from a spear,” I said. This whole thing was beyond bizarre. “How’d you do that?”
Luis shook his head. “I don’t know. I just kinda twisted it here…” He twisted and the blade glowed again. “Then I squeezed…” With that, a burst of electricity shot into the wall.
“Alright, stop shooting,” I said. “You’re gonna blow something up.”
Luis nodded and the glow disappeared again. “How’d you stop the cat though?”
Now it was my turn to shake my head. “I have no idea,” I said. “Maybe I squeezed it? I just remember thinking that I wanted it to stop.”
“You mind controlled it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “Maybe. I raised the baton to throw at it and that’s when it stopped.”
“Maybe it has to do with the motion you make. Like a Wii.”
I looked at the script etched into the baton for some kind of clue. Nothing stood out to me and I ran my fingers along the script looking for something that looked like a stop or start command. “How would I make it start again?” I was asking when I heard a snarl behind me. The jaguar had stood up.
Quickly, I raised the rod as if I was going to throw it and the jaguar sat back down.
“Is that like a pause button?” I asked. We both looked back at the cat.
“I would say that’s ridiculous,” Luis said, “but considering the circumstances…” he trailed off, looking back at the cat. “You wanna find out?”
Curiosity had always been my greatest weakness. I considered that this could be a terrible idea. But what the hell. I nodded.
“I’m gonna try to make him stand up and then pause him again,” I said, handing Luis the rifle. “You better shoot his ass if he moves.”
With a deep breath, I thought about the cat standing up and ran my finger along the same inscription as before. The jaguar stood and bared its teeth. I raised the rod up and it sat back down.
“Holy shit!” I said. I looked back at Luis, who was standing there grinning. He nodded towards the rod I was holding. “To activate man-eating jaguar, tap button on wand. To pause man-eating jaguar, raise wand.”
“What the fuck just happened?” I said.
“We have now seen some shit that no human alive has ever seen,” he said. “No one would ever believe this.”
“So is it a robot?” I asked. “Is it mind control?”
“I have no idea what we’re seeing right now,” Luis said. “Let’s go look at the one you shot.”
We went back out to the other chamber where the first jaguar lay in a pool of blood in the doorway. I shined a light on it while Luis poked it with his walking stick.
“It feels real,” he said. “Heavy, solid. It bleeds, clearly.” He petted its fur and peeled its teeth back. “It’s even got ticks.”
“Let’s cut it open,” I said. “See if it’s real.”
Luis sighed heavily, but he pulled out his knife.
“I don’t know what to say,” Luis said twenty minutes later, covered in blood. “It’s real. As strange as it is, I really thought this thing was going to be some kind of robot. But it’s not. At least not as far as I can tell.”
“Implants,” I said. “See if there are any in the back of its head or something.”
Luis sighed heavily, but he turned the creatures head and started looking. It was hard to see with all the blood and fur.
&n
bsp; “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” Luis said. “It’s got bumps and stuff but I don’t know what bumps are normal for a jaguar’s head. Somebody more qualified would have to look at it.”
I nodded. “My guess is implants.”
We went back to the glowing room. The resting jaguar was still there.
“Have you ever seen this painting called The Gypsy?” I asked. “By Henri Rousseau. “It shows a woman sleeping in the desert with some kind of instrument next to her. A guitar or a lute or something. And there’s a lion checking her out. Just standing over her, not eating her or anything.”
“I’ve seen it,” Luis said. “I was really into art in high school. I wanted to be a painter.”
“I mean…” I said, nodding towards the sleeping jaguar.
“Yeah, but in the painting the woman is asleep, not the lion.”
“I know, but didn’t you ever wonder why? I used to think she didn’t know it was there, but how could you sleep through a lion coming up on you? What if she wasn’t scared because she had some way to control it?”
Luis eyed me skeptically. “You’re a conspiracy theorist, aren’t you?” he said.
“Look at the shit we’re seeing right now,” I said. “We got stalked by a jaguar into an undiscovered ancient Mayan ruin, or whatever the fuck this is. Then we found some glowing, powered device that works like a remote control for said jaguar, right after you started shooting lightening from your new laser spear—this isn’t convincing you even a little bit that some of this conspiracy shit might be true?”
“I didn’t say that,” he said. “Even if I hadn’t believed before, I believe now. Let’s see what else is in here.”
I finally took a moment to look around the room. This was the mushroom chamber we’d seen from the entrance. The purple glow lit up the room. The walls were covered in carvings like the other room, but this room also had a pair of head-high columns—stela— standing against the far wall. The glow was coming from mushrooms growing on the outer surface of one of them. I glanced back at the jaguar, which continued to watch us, but hadn’t moved otherwise.
Luis pulled out a knife and started to pry one of the mushrooms free from the column. “Ouch!” he exclaimed, dropping the knife. “Fucking thing shocked me.”
“A mushroom shocked you?” I asked, walking over.
“They’re not mushrooms,” he said. “They’re some kind of devices. Look at them.”
I immediately saw that he was right. At a glance, they could be mistaken for mushrooms—the kind that look like discs growing from the sides of trees—but these were definitely not that. They were embedded in the stela in a way that reminded me of the switches in a breaker box. It appeared that they had originally been embedded into each stela but now only one of the stela had any.
I counted twelve empty slots for devices on the empty stela. The other stela had twelve “mushroom” devices inserted, but only two were actually glowing. The glow that we’d seen came from those two glowing mushroom devices.
Each device was about three inches long and protruded from the stela by about half that. They were inset in areas devoid of inscriptions, but there were carvings to the left of each row. Instructions?
The upper surfaces of the devices were smooth and had a pearlescent sheen that softened the glow they reflected. The purple glow came from the underside, but I couldn’t figure out what made them glow.
“What is this?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Luis said. “No one has ever found evidence that ancient civilizations had power, or electricity, or light.”
“Or electric lances or remote-controlled jaguars,” I said.
Luis started to say something, then changed his mind. “True,” he said.
We looked around some more and after a moment, I said, “The Baghdad Battery.”
Luis looked at me blankly.
“They found inscriptions and drawings from ruins in Baghdad of what looked like a modern battery. Vessels with some kind of rod inserted with a coil wrapped around it leading to what looked like a light bulb. And they found electrically-conductive residues in pottery. They found stone urns with similar residues in Great Zimbabwe. But otherwise, I agree: no ancient electricity.”
Luis nodded. “That sounds vaguely familiar.”
“I’m just saying—clearly we have no idea what a lot of ancient cultures could do. And the Spanish destroyed all the writings and records they found in South America. Who knows what these people knew?”
Of the two devices that were lit, the device on the second row was pulsing, while the other was a solid light.
“I think I grabbed one of these by accident when I came over here,” I said. “I don’t know which one it was, or what exactly I did.”
“Look at this,” Luis said. He handed me a golden disk with dark blue lacquer running around the rim. It was inlaid with the mushroom material, which started to glow when I touched it.
I ran my thumb along the glowing bits of the tablet I held and the circular pattern carved into the wall between the stela lit up.
This time the light was a very bright purple that filled the room.
“Fuck this,” Luis said. “Let’s go.” He headed for the doorway and I was right behind him. But the doorway was blocked. Some kind of energy of the same purple color filled the doorway and there was no getting through it.
We turned back to look at the glowing wall. Despite apparently being made of stone, the light in the wall seemed to be swirling. More buttons had appeared on the stela, apparently, they’d just been recessed. I tried touching the tablet again, but that didn’t seem to work. All of a sudden, my brain was filled with a loud buzzing sound. I held my hands to my ears, but it was immediately apparent the sound wasn’t coming from outside. The light flashed to an intensity like the midday sun. I closed my eyes and shielded them with my hands, but it seemed to just burn through them. I knew the door was blocked, but I tried to run anyway. I couldn’t move. I tried to turn to see what Luis was doing, but I couldn’t move my head. My heart pounded in my chest and fear blazed through every cell in my body. The light flared out towards me. Instinctively, I tried to scream, but nothing came out. And then I passed out.
3
I can’t describe where I was when I awoke. It was a room. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was inside some kind of seed—like a walnut or something. All the walls were rounded, and a faintly brownish-tan color. My head pounded like I’d drank a fifth of scotch the night before. I was laying on a bed of sorts. It was soft, but too flat. There was a dim light, but it was impossible to tell where it came from. I looked around for a source, but it just seemed to emanate from the walls. I got up and realized I wasn’t alone.
A woman sat in a recess in the wall, watching me serenely.
“I’m sure you had quite the scare,” she said. “Apparently, no one’s come through that portal in nearly 6,000 of your years. And the wards were still active. Do you feel alright?”
I looked at her dumbly, trying to process the meaning of the words she’d just spoken. Her voice was low and had an almost musical quality to it. I was having a hard time looking at her because my head hurt so much, but I could see that she was wearing some kind of one-piece bodysuit that looked to be made of liquid metal. It wasn’t shiny exactly, but when she shifted it seemed to flow.
Something about her was very strange looking, but she was oddly attractive. She was tall and slender but curvy. She had full lips and her eyes tilted upwards at the corners—huge almonds set into her face like gems in a ring. She watched me without saying a word, but I could sense her amusement.
I tried to respond but my mouth was parched. My first attempt at speech resulted in nothing more than a dry croak. “I’m fine,” I said, finally getting enough saliva on my tongue to make sound. I looked myself over to make sure what I was saying matched reality. Nothing seemed broken or out of place, but I felt foggy. “I have a bit of a headache, but I feel okay otherwise.”
&nb
sp; She nodded. “The headache will go away. It’s a time dilation effect. A bit like jet lag, in a way.” I looked at her quizzically. “Well, it’s not quite like jet lag,” she added, “but it is difficult to think of reasonable analogues you would understand.”
I looked around. “Where are we? Where’s my friend?”
“This is a quarantine pod,” she said. “It will help you acclimate to the time difference. You won’t have to stay in here too long, but you’re not quite ready to leave yet. And your friend is fine. In a separate pod. I’ll go talk to him when I leave you.”
My headache was clearing up rapidly and as it did, I was able to look at her more clearly. Her skin was similar to the color of a tarnished copper penny, but had a faintly bluish color to it, and her face was long and angular. I was so taken by her other features that I almost didn’t even register this fact, but she didn’t have any hair. But most strikingly, there were no whites in her eyes and they were huge. They were way bigger in proportion to her face than any I’d ever seen before, and they weren’t just slanted in the corners, they were angled. She wasn’t human.
I felt panic start to grip me, but it dissipated as soon as it began. I still felt like I should panic, but I was calm. I assumed it was something she was doing, but it didn’t bother me. She looked like some kind of elf—weird and stunningly beautiful. And something about it made me very uneasy.
Her words took a moment to sink in.
“Quarantine?” I said. “Where?”
She ignored my question. “Pressure,” she said, clapping her hands together. “That’s a better analogy.” She looked to me again, “Have you ever been diving? You have to come up slowly—“
“—to prevent the bends,” I finished.
“Right. This pod is basically a time decompression chamber.” She looked at me expectantly.
“I heard the words you said,” I told her. “But none of that makes any sense to me. Time decompression?” I felt like I’d just woken up from a dream that was rapidly slipping from my memory. I thought I remembered going into a cave that turned out to be an ancient ruin, and there was a jaguar, and then a bright light—my head hurt.
Children of the Sky (The Talari Subversion Book 1) Page 3
