Escape From The Center of The Earth (To The Center Of The Earth Book 3)

by Greig Beck

  She turned to him. “Or how about a species of flatworm that…”

  “Shut up!” Croft yelled.

  “Keep that talk behind your teeth, soldier!” Loche yelled back. He turned to Jane. “But I think we get it.”

  Janus overheard and stepped closer. “Ah, could anyone else be infested?” His brows were up.

  Mike shrugged. “I don’t know. But I kinda think we’d know by now if they were.”

  “Fine, then how about we get the fuck out of here?” Janus looked around momentarily before back to Loche. “Captain?”

  Nina pointed. “What about Williams?”

  Loche shook his head and looked from the now-empty pile of clothing to the newly formed red bulbs above what was left of him.

  “It’s over. He’s gone.” He turned and circled a finger in the air. “Let’s go, people.”

  Mike glanced at Jane. “One day, one down.”

  EPISODE 13

  “If at every instant we may perish, so at every instant we may be saved” ― Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

  CHAPTER 13

  A small smile curled Ally’s lips, just a little, as she dreamed. Even though she was heading back to the hellish interior of the Earth, it didn’t worry her a bit. She had spent eight months being beaten, raped, fed, watered, and walked like a dog by creatures from a lunatic’s nightmare. Her only respite was that the total darkness had rendered her blind to what they looked like. Whatever was in store for her now, she knew it was preferable to that living hell.

  Ally floated and dreamed some more: in her dream, she held under one arm an M249 light machine gun—it was powerful and had been one of her favorite weapons. She also had half a dozen grenades strung around her belt. She sprinted through dark labyrinths and ran down the gargoyles who had trapped her—she shot them, many times each, decimating them and showing no mercy. And when she bailed the rest up in a dead-end, she filled their cave with grenades and obliterated them. She inhaled the burning bloody stink and her smile widened.

  Time meant nothing to her now. In a world without days or nights, hours stretched or maybe went past in the blink of an eye. The priority was staying alive, not counting minutes.

  The impact after deacceleration wasn’t hard, but it still knocked the wind from her and jolted her from her slumber. She knew from her experience that there was no time for drowsiness and to survive, you needed to come alert instantly.

  She shot to her feet and stood, listening to her surroundings. Beside her, Captain Zhukov groaned and rolled over, and Dr. Andrina Valentina lay still, breathing groggily on the cave floor. In the air hung some rocks, bones, and there was even an ancient, rusting storm lantern used for caving in the 1800s.

  Zhukov sat up. “Where are we?”

  Ally flung out a hand, flat. “Quiet.”

  She turned slowly. The cave was in a blue twilight as the crystals shone like fluorescent lamps, and many were unpolished and sunk in the rock. It was a raw cave, untouched, and she remembered how the crab people had taken them all from the previous cavern they had arrived in. Maybe that meant this one hadn’t been discovered yet.

  She relaxed a little and dropped her arm. “I think we’re good.” She turned. “Is Valentina okay?”

  Zhukov shifted over and knelt beside her. He lifted her hand and then helped the doctor to sit up. He nodded. “Just still dazed. She had a soft landing.”

  “Wha…?” Valentina’s eyes blinked open. She looked around. “Where…?”

  “Good question,” Ally replied. “Captain, do you have your GPS?”

  He nodded and felt in his pack for a small box which he pressed and slid switches, illuminating a small screen. He shook his head.

  “I don’t think it’s working. It says we’re below Japan.” He looked up. “Impossible.”

  “Nope. Very possible. Down here, the size of the geography is vastly different. A thousand miles on the surface is just a day’s walk down here.” Ally began to move about, keeping her footfalls soft. “We need to move. Above us is now blocked so we need another way out.”

  Zhukov helped Valentina to her feet, and the doctor walked to the wall and grasped one of the rod-shaped crystals. With a dry crack, she pulled it free. It lit her grimy face a pacific blue. “Where is this place?”

  Ally snorted. “Welcome to the center of the Earth.”

  ***

  Zhukov did a quick weapons and supplies check. He was glad they each grabbed packs so they had plenty of food, ammunitions, and were moderately well armed. For now.

  He wasn’t yet sure exactly where he was and was not inclined to believe the tall, black American woman, with wild hair and even wilder eyes. After all, she had been held captive by inhuman monstrosities for nearly a year and he bet that it had created some severe psychological trauma for her to deal with.

  Ally approached him with a grim expression. He smiled. “So, I’m hoping you know another way out.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And one that’s still viable, especially as we have the screechers now.” She smiled. “We just need to get there.”

  He looked around at their cave and its multiple exits. “We first need to find our way out of this cave.”

  Valentina rubbed her head. “What a nightmare this has become for us.”

  “Nightmare? It hasn’t even begun yet.” Ally walked closer to the shorter woman. “You need to steel yourself, lady, because we will be tested down here like at no other time in our lives.” She turned away for a moment, but then paused. “And just something to bolster your spirits—your objective was to find me.” She held her arms out. “And look, here I am. Mission accomplished.”

  “Mission accomplished?” Zhukov scoffed. “Mission is accomplished when we get you home. And one more thing. I am part of a two-pronged mission. We were sent to find you, but there is another mission being sent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, I assume to find their way down here as well. Something about searching for red people, and a cure for cancer.” His brows rose. “Does that make sense to you?”

  Ally laughed softly as she began to nod. “Yeah, a lot. It’s wonderful news. And it just changed our plans. That’s where we will go to find our way home.” She walked past several of the cave mouths and then at one she lifted her head and sniffed. “Here.”

  Zhukov and Valentina joined her and inhaled.

  “I can’t smell anything,” Valentina said.

  Zhukov also shook his head. “Dead air.”

  Ally turned back and inhaled again with closed eyes. “I smell plants, heat on rocks, and the tang of ozone—this is our way out.”

  Zhukov scoffed softly. “Really?”

  Ally nodded. “When you can’t see, you learn quickly to rely on other senses.”

  “How far do we need to go?” Valentina asked.

  Ally shrugged. “We head southwest and hopefully I can pick up some landmarks.” She turned to face the pair. “Look, comrades, I will be brutally honest. This is the deadliest place I know. Everything is strange, oversized, and wants to kill you. If we can find the others, our odds of survival will improve enormously. If not, then I give us a twenty percent chance.”

  Zhukov laughed. “While we are alive, our odds are always good.”

  Ally nodded once. “That’s the spirit.” She turned away. She knew that if they didn’t find the other people, then they’d need to locate a different gravity well. And that meant traveling up into the labyrinths by themselves. And even though they had the screechers, they’d have to navigate around eight miles of climb in the darkness—she suddenly thought she might have been optimistic about that twenty percent chance.

  Valentina still held onto her rod crystal, and Ally pointed. “That reminds me, grab more of the crystals. We can use them instead of running down our flashlight batteries.”

  In moments more, they had several each loaded into their packs and also held one of the rod crystals in their hand that fluoresced a magnificent cerulean blue.

  “Okay,
follow me. But remember, move silent and move fast. We’ve just become tiny morsels of meat in a very big and very hungry food chain.” She stopped. “Questions?”

  “I don’t know where to start. So, I’ll stay quiet, learn as I go, and keep up.” He nodded to the female doctor. “Valentina?”

  She just shook her head.

  Zhukov shrugged. “After you, Lieutenant Ally Bennet.”

  Ally turned to the darkness, tilted her head, listening for several moments for the tiniest scratch of claws on rock, or breath, or scent of a beast, and then after a few moments, satisfied, headed in.

  ***

  Ally could tell that these raw caves were uninhabited. They were dust-dry, and there had been little geological movement, as there were no tumbled rocks to navigate or rips in the walls from shifting stone.

  After around an hour, she began to leave the coolness of the dry cave behind and started to enter an area of thicker, hotter air, and soon the glow of her crystal was paled by a stronger glow from up ahead.

  Ally slowed and spoke over her shoulder. “Everyone be ready, we’re coming to the exit. That might mean the external area of the cave may be inhabited, and remember, the world here is a very primordial place.”

  Valentina wiped a streaming brow. “How long did you say we need to be in it?”

  Ally chuckled. “I’m guessing, but we may need to cross up to fifty miles. If we can do ten miles a day, that’ll get us there within a week.”

  Her expression softened when she saw the horror on the Russian woman’s face. “Don’t worry, we survived months down here.”

  “But you said you all died—and you were captured,” Valentina shot back.

  “Well then, let’s hope we can learn from their mistakes,” Zhukov added.

  Ally pointed at the screecher on Valentina’s belt. “We already have.” She turned back to the red glow from outside. “Come on—the sooner we start, the sooner we’re home.”

  ***

  Ally saw that their cave never opened up to have a large entrance. In fact, it ended as just a rip in the stone only about a foot and a half wide, and with the blood-red light streaming through it, it looked like a fresh wound. The upside was it meant that nothing big could have made the cave its home.

  A few creatures looking like ten-foot-long millipedes with feathery antenna and grasping hands instead of hundreds of feet scurried from their path, and Ally was first to lean out of the crack. The Russians followed.

  “Svoloch.” Zhukov placed a hand over his eyes. “It’s so… red.”

  Before them was what looked like a desert landscape with spartan, scabby forest that stretched as far as the eye could see before it curved beyond the horizon.

  “I feel like I landed on Mars,” he whispered.

  Ally squinted in the red glare as she looked for imminent threats. There were trees, twenty feet high and sparsely clumped together, with their tiny foliage so tight and dense they looked like brains on a single stem. Below them were plants that might have been fleshy cactus, spindly reeds, and lumps of dark, purple rock.

  “It’s going to be hot,” Ally sighed. “We’ll need to protect ourselves from the direct light. Make hats.”

  Zhukov held a hand to his brow as he looked up at the boiling red cauldron above them. “This… this was beneath our feet the whole time. This entire world?” He lowered his head to turn slowly. “How could we not have ever known about this? With all our science?”

  “That’s a joke, right?” Ally laughed darkly. “Want to know something really funny? You guys knew about it first. Some damn Russian fool by the name of Arkady Saknussov found his way down here over five hundred years ago. No one believed him. Then another group of damn Russian fools scaled down here in 1972 by following old Saknussov’s notes. Only one woman escaped alive from that expedition by the name of Katya Babikov.”

  “I heard that name whispered in our briefing,” Valentina said.

  “And then you damn American fools came, yes?” Zhukov raised his eyebrows.

  “No, my team came to stop more Russian assholes blowing up the world from down here.” Ally grinned like a death’s head and leaned toward the man. “But this place ate them all before we could get to them. And kill them.”

  “Politics,” Zhukov grunted. “I hate it.”

  After a moment, Ally leaned back and nodded. “Yeah, you and me both, Boris.”

  “Viktor,” Zhukov replied.

  “Whatever.” Ally turned away.

  Valentina stepped out of their cave mouth a little. “Is this… like when you were here?”

  “No, we had to deal with a jungle.” Ally also eased a little further out of the crack and looked up the rock face. “The upside? Nothing big is going to be able to sneak up on us.” She pulled back. “The downside is that even the small things here can be deadly. Plus, we got less shade. And the light and heat here is a killer.”

  Zhukov checked his GPS and then held an arm up. “That’s the direction of the ocean trench. If their well is in the same place, then that’s where we will meet them.”

  Ally nodded. “It’s also the place where Dagon and his followers live.”

  “Dagon?” Zhukov turned to frown. “The fish god?”

  “Yeah, I can fill you in as we travel.” She stepped back into the small cave and shucked off her pack to then rummage through it. All she could find was a small cloth that might have been for self-cleaning; it’d have to do. She wrapped it around her head, making sure one end dangled down over her neck and then tucked the front up a little so it jutted on her brow, making a little shelf to guard her nose and face. It’d have to do.

  Zhukov and Valentina watched her and set about doing the same, and in moments the trio looked like a small squad of foreign legionnaires.

  Ally checked her weapon, ensuring it slid easily and rapidly from her holster. She took a deep breath.

  “Ready?” She didn’t wait for a reply and headed out.

  In only a few steps, the heat felt like a hammer blow, and she knew that crossing the desert when they were already fatigued and with little supplies or water meant they would have to forage. She hoped that the cactus things were like the surface variety, and they’d be able to suck water from them. If it turned out to be deadly, well, then they were as good as dead anyway.

  She led them down the rocky front of the cave to the ground. Small lizards scurried from their path, and things like stick insects on stilts with high polyp eyes like those on a snail watched them from the shade of the purple rocks.

  Zhukov chanced another look up. “It’s like boiling fire. Like the surface of a sun that never sets.”

  Ally also glanced up at the fiery ceiling. “Yeah, the last group of scientists told us it was the molten core held back by a layer of volcanic glass hundreds of miles deep. This inner world, the solid core, has been here perhaps nearly as long as the surface world. Somehow, back then, the ocean poured in and then life sprang up. But things took a different path when it came to evolution.” She smiled at him. “Think dinosaurs, but not like those we are familiar with, but from the insect kingdom.”

  “That’s insane,” Valentina replied. “I’m a medical practitioner and biologist with extensive troglodytic flora and fauna experience, and I know my evolutionary theory—insects only grew large on Earth because of the lack of predators and also due to the higher percentage of oxygen in the primitive atmosphere.” She inhaled deeply. “And the oxygen levels seem normal here.”

  Ally smiled at the woman. “You’ll get used to it. But one theory my team, my former team, came up with was the constant radiation had an effect.” She lifted her hand, palm up to the red light. “Feel that? That’s a form of radiation constantly bathing the environment. You can bet something like that will cause mutations after a few hundred million years.” She shrugged. “Anyway, believe what you want. Our travels will educate you.”

  Zhukov turned about. “We can trek for about four hours and then take a break. But we should keep a loo
k out for anything edible and a water source. We can try the cactus, but I don’t really want this to be our first option. Some cactus contain chemicals that can destroy your liver.”

  “Agreed.” She extended her arm for Zhukov. “You get to be first out at point. I’ll take next.” She glanced at the small Russian female doctor. “You can bring up the rear.”

  “Is good.” Zhukov checked his weapon one last time and headed out.

  The ground was red dust with small balls of something like pumice that crunched beneath their boots like popped rice. Ally tried to keep watch at all quadrants and felt like a heel for sending the Russian guy to lead, but this way, she could assess their risks, and if anything jumped out, it’d be at him first, giving her an extra second to react, as she bet she would have lost her edge.

  Still, she got a knot in her stomach when she thought about what they may encounter. The fauna down here mimicked the biological niches up on the surface, so if there were flat plains with plenty of open space, there would be creatures built for speed—herd animals—as well as predators. And those predators might have a whole range of different camouflage techniques—for all she knew, those weren’t purple rocks at all. She scoffed at the thought, and then gave the next large purple lump a hard stare for a few moments.

  To his credit, Zhukov kept his head up and showed no signs of tiring at all. Ally looked over her shoulder at Valentina and saw she was already twenty paces behind and falling further back every minute.

  “Keep up,” Ally urged.

  The woman nodded but didn’t look up. Not a good sign. Ally knew they’d need to take a break soon, but by the look of the way the Russian woman held her canteen, it meant she was drinking too much fluid too quickly, and therefore, wasting it.

  They were just passing under another of the weird trees that had bark-like smooth skin and leaves that were fat, each the size of a hockey puck. Ally had been eyeing the spikeless cactus things previously as a water source, and she guessed it was best to try them now when they weren’t desperate. She still had some water to wash her mouth out if need be.