by Greig Beck
There was no shadow, of course, but a sixth sense screamed at her to turn around. She did. And wished she hadn’t.
Looming over her was something that froze her blood. One of the lake worms, as wide around as a pine tree and rising twenty feet in the air, hung over their raft.
The small gripping legs along the side of its head flared wide and even though there were no discernible eyes, the Russian woman knew it saw her.
The great stinking hole of a mouth opened wide, displaying a perfect ring of comb-like teeth.
Valentina was like a small rabbit in the hunter’s spotlight and could do nothing but sit frozen with her eyes wide as the mouth came down… and over her.
***
The raft rocked hard, and Ally and Zhukov glanced at each other then spun.
Valentina wasn’t there anymore.
“No.” Ally half got to her feet, ready to dive into the water, but Zhukov lunged for her and grabbed the back of her pants, dragging her backward.
“Don’t…” he pointed, “…look.”
About two dozen feet from the rear of their raft, a broad, glistening body lumped the water surface and then went under again. But it wasn’t the only one. There were others now. They were the big ones that had obviously finished dining on the spider crabs and, drawn to the area by the abundant food, were still hunting. The humans on the raft would be easy pickings.
“Oh no.” She eased back down.
One of them glided closer, making a V-shaped wave in the inky water.
“We need to, we need to…” she began but knew there was no way they’d out-paddle the huge thing.
“Off the raft!” Zhukov yelled.
He grabbed up his pack and made a lunge for Valentina’s pack as well. Then with them looped over one arm, he used the pole-paddle to drag them close to the ledge where the young worms basked. He tossed the bags.
Ally leaped onto the ledge, followed by Zhukov. The pair ran to the wall and as far back from the water as they could, and watched as their raft was smashed from below and then pulled under.
Zhukov went to one knee and pointed his gun back at the dark lake. One of the creatures rose, towering above them, dripping water. The pair stayed still as stone and watched the thing for several moments.
They couldn’t see any eyes on it, and maybe it was sensing for movement, or heat, or scent, or something else. After another moment, it slid back below the water.
Zhukov lowered his weapon. “Poor Valentina,” he said softly, and then lowered his head. “My team, all of them, now gone.”
“This place.” Ally sighed and rested a hand lightly on his shoulder.
“Yes, this place,” Zhukov replied and crossed himself while whispering his lost friend’s names. He slowly got to his feet.
“Fuck off.” Ally kicked one of the small worms that had started to investigate her boot. Thankfully, the others ignored them.
The pair looked out over the lake and watched as the huge bodies patrolled the dark water, some of the backs that breached easily the size of whales. They stayed as far back from the edge of the rock shelf as they could manage. But it was still a risk, as given the small ones were equally at home on land and water, then maybe the big ones had no problem coming up onto the shelf when they wanted to.
“So, we’re committed now.” Zhukov turned away from the dark lake, and the pair both looked up to the dot of red light a hundred feet, straight up, above their heads.
“Yup.” Ally exhaled loudly through her nose. “I get the feeling that sooner or later one of those big bastards is coming up here, and I don’t want to be here when it does.”
“Agreed,” Zhukov said while running his light over the crags and crevices of the rock wall. “I think it can be done. Maybe.”
“Hmm.” She turned to him with a half-smile. “You ever free-climbed?”
“I have done a lot of cave and cliff climbing. But not free-climb,” the Russian replied warily. “Is the same but without ropes, yes?”
She grinned. “Is the same, but ten times more deadly.”
He nodded. “Good, I was getting bored.” Zhukov then moved his light up a broken seam in the cave wall. “We can climb easily along there.” He lifted his light. “And then this shelf of stone will get us close.” He sighed. “But then there is just cave roof for twenty feet out over the water. Maybe hand holds, but that’s all.”
Ally nodded. “Well, if you slip, it won’t be the fall that kills you.” She looked back to the dark water still being patrolled by the leviathans.
Just as they turned away, something splashed close behind them, sending a surge wave up over their rocky platform. Both whipped around, but nothing was climbing behind them.
“Well, I’ll take that as a little incentive to get moving.” She took her pack off her shoulders. “Throw out everything we don’t need and keep Valentina’s pack, as we don’t know how much harder the trek will be if, ah, when, we emerge.”
Zhukov set to work rummaging in his pack. Their water bottles had remained full, and they had little to throw away, but they held onto the last scraps of food, their weapons, last ammunition, and their remaining fleshy bulbs of the cactus-like plants. They pulled their packs back on, and Ally shook her head.
“Too heavy.” She looked up. “We need to ditch some of the weapons.”
Zhukov’s brows went up. “That will be suicide.”
She remained looking up. “It’ll be suicide if we don’t.”
The Russian stood firm. “No, we climb with the packs until we need to free-climb the ceiling. We remove them and wedge them in the rocks and tie a rope from us to them. If we make it to the hole, and can climb it, then we can recover the packs.”
Ally looked back up, working the angles. They could get to within twenty feet of the hole, and they had a good fifty feet of rope. She nodded. “Okay, Viktor, doable.” She slapped Zhukov on the shoulder. “So, let’s do it.”
Ally led the way, skirting the pipes of living flesh that lay on the rock shelf and even jammed in the cracks of the wall. The pair followed a natural rift upward for about fifty feet before they had to ease across to another crack. It took them another thirty minutes to get to the shelf of stone that they slithered along, and then reached its end.
Ally looked down; they were about eighty feet up, and with little light on the lake, it was nothing but darkness below them. That was good, as the last thing she wanted to see was the beasts circling in the dark water like a school of monstrous sharks.
They both slid their packs off, and Ally withdrew her length of rope. She drew Zhukov’s pack closer to hers, and she tied one end of the rope around both pack’s shoulder straps. Lastly, she checked the long blade she had strapped to her hip to make sure the hilt band was keeping it in place.
“I go first,” she said.
He shook his head. “No, I think I am strongest and should—”
“Thanks, Sir Galahad, but you don’t need to. I’m lighter and an experienced free-climber.” She looked toward the shaft of red light that seemed to be coming from a hole no bigger than her fist.
“Okay, here’s the plan. I’m going to climb across, and hopefully will be able to break through the clay cone. Then I’ll climb out and tie the rope off.” She snapped the rope between her fists. “This stuff is elasticized rope and extremely strong—it’ll hold a small elephant. That means it’ll hold the packs and you. You can climb it out.”
“Good.” He laughed softly. “Because I’m sure I was going to fall.”
“I won’t let you fall. Ever.” She held his eyes for a moment before turning away.
Ally mentally mapped out her route, noting the handholds, toe placement positions, and risk spots. Thankfully, it looked dry and maybe that was due to it being so close to the vent and the red, bone-dry atmosphere outside.
She then drew in a deep breath, also sucking in all the courage she could muster. “Here goes nothing.”
She reached out a hand and grabbed a small knob of
rock, tested it, and then stretched out a leg to a toe hold. It held. And then she was off.
Ally scaled slowly. Her arms and legs were still not as strong as she would have liked, but the lower muscle mass from being underweight meant she had less bulk to pull upward.
In a few moments, she was halfway and refused to look back or down, instead staying focused on the red dot of light ahead of her.
She clung for a moment like a human spider and tried to work out her next handhold. There was a tiny crevice she thought she could jam a couple of her now abraded fingers into and stretched toward it.
As she wormed her fingers into it, she felt something soft that wriggled.
“Fuck.”
She jerked her hand back as a luminous blob of jelly with a dozen legs scuttled out, looked at her once with too many unreadable button eyes, and kept on going along the rock face.
“You creepy little bastard.” Ally calmed her breathing and reached for the crevice again. This time, nothing was disturbed, and she hung for a moment to compose herself.
After another few seconds, she looked toward her destination—only another few feet until it started up into the beginning of the cone.
She started off again but purposely slowed herself. She remembered that overeagerness can cause mistakes, so even though her fingers, wrists, biceps, and shoulders screamed at her, and she just wanted it over, she forced herself to be patient as she scaled up into the base of the cone.
The red heat was like a laser beam as it fell on her skin after the many hours in the total darkness of the cool river cave. And as she wedged herself in, she rested her head for a moment and closed her eyes.
“I’m in,” she yelled.
“Very good,” the faint voice of Zhukov yelled back. “Can you see anything?”
“Not yet.” She reached down to carefully pull out her long blade and began to dig it into the base of the clay cone. After several minutes, she had punched a hole roughly the size of a baseball through the clay matrix, and she put her eye up to it.
The heat and light stung her but when her vision cleared, she saw there was nothing but red, dry earth.
She groaned. “Desert. More damn desert.”
She had hoped for some sort of forest, or at least for some sort of cover. She hoped it was worth it, losing Valentina, and she began to smash more of the cone out.
Ally paused for a moment. What about things being outside waiting for me? she wondered. She rejected the idea as they had no choice; they were marooned with their backs literally to the wall.
She doubled her efforts, smashing and hacking until a foot-wide piece of clay fell outward.
“Ow.” A blast of red heat bathed her face and she squinted from the full assault on her eyes.
“Okay?” Zhukov yelled.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s just red, hot, and dry,” she replied
There was still nothing moving about outside or any risk she could see so she continued her hacking, working her way around the pipe until the entire cone shifted. She then reached up and pushed it, toppling the cone to the side where it fell onto the dry, cracked earth and shattered like a clay pot.
“We’re out,” she yelled back down.
Ally then turned to look behind her for the first time, and a huge grin split her face.
“A goddamn forest!” she yelled.
She heard Zhukov’s muffled reply and briefly looked down. But now after being in the red light, anything below her in the darkness was impossible to see. She quickly hauled herself out and pulled along some of the rope tied to her waist with her.
In a few more seconds, she found a stout rock that was perfect for tying the rope around. She tested it, and then went back to the hole in the ground, and leaned in.
“Rope is secured, come on up.”
She continued to lay down, looking back into the darkness, and felt the rope being slowly pulled back down for a moment until it was tight. Then it strained as weight was added to it.
The rope swung from one side of the hole to the other as the man must have been swinging free now. She made sure it never got hung up on one side of the hole lest it become abraded and cut. She then hung her arm down with the flashlight and saw the Russian captain, no more than ten feet down, slowly pulling himself up.
“Nearly there,” she said with her lips curled up in a smile.
In seconds more, his head breached the hole, and he blinked a few times and looked around. Ally grabbed his shirt and dragged him up and out, where he rolled to lay on his back for a moment.
He turned his face to her. “Thank you.”
She leaned over him and kissed his forehead. “We made it.”
“This far, you mean.” And he sat up. “But yes, we survived the cave.” He turned back and gave a small salute. “Thank you for your service, assistance, and friendship, Doctor Valentina Adrina Sechin.”
“Adrina. I never knew her full name.” Ally also saluted. “I won’t forget it.”
Zhukov got to his feet and held out his hand. Ally took it and he hauled her up.
“I hate this place, but I hated down there even more,” she said.
Zhukov looked at her, and then looked harder.
“What?” She frowned.
“Your skin…” He lifted her hair back off her face.
“God, is it worse?” She held fingers to her cheek.
“No, looks, better. Much better.” He pushed her hair back behind her ear.
Ally trailed her fingers over where she knew the lesions had started. They seemed to have shrunk. And some weren’t there at all anymore.
“Maybe you hated the caves, but maybe they were good for you,” he said with a half smile.
“And maybe it’s just all the dirt washed off.” She placed a hand over her eyes and turned about. “A few more hours out in this and I’ll be right back to how I was.” She sighed and began to rummage in her kit. “And I’m starving.” All she saw was a few of the fleshy cactus-like bulb-leaves. “And I’m definitely sick of sucking on these things. Last resort only.”
Zhukov chuckled. “Well then. Let’s see where we are, and how much more we have to travel.” He checked his GPS and turned slowly. In a moment, he stopped and looked up toward the forest. “We’re close,” and then he suddenly craned forward, frowning at the device.
“What?” she asked. “Problem?”
He began to laugh and looked up, his eyes beaming. “You want some more good news? Another signal blip appeared on the GPS—it must be the other team.”
Ally closed her eyes and rocked her head back on her neck. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She then grabbed the man and pretended to waltz with him for a few seconds.
“Home,” she said and let him go. “Home! I’m going home!” she yelled to the boiling red sky.
CHAPTER 17
“Hey.” Joshua Loche had stopped them on the cliff top and frowned down at his GPS.
“What is it?” Jane asked.
“Croft, Angel, what do you make of this?” Loche asked.
The two men slung their rifles and came to look at the small device. The others also crowded around.
“That’s weird. Says there’s another team down here. Who could that be?” Croft asked.
“Malfunction?” Angel asked, then snapped his fingers. “Hey, could it be the Russian woman you left behind? Or maybe an old device from the last mission?”
“Katya didn’t have any GPS or other devices,” Mike said. “And I’d be surprised if any device would keep working nearly a year in these harsh conditions.”
“Maybe you’re right. But the signature is moving.” Loche looked up. “And it’s converging on our position, from the north. So, we’re gonna find out real soon.”
“Wait a minute.” Janus blew air from between his lips and held a hand to his forehead. “This is mind blowing.” He continued to hold his forehead. “There was another mission we sent that entered in Russia via the Kola Superdeep Borehole.”
“Russi
ans?” Mike asked.
“Yes.” Janus paced for a moment. “They were never meant to come to the center of the Earth, only travel as far down as necessary to rescue Ally Bennet.” He turned and held up a finger. “But what if something went wrong? What if they were forced to come all the way?”
“Did they know about our mission?” Loche asked.
“Yes, I’m sure they did,” Janus replied.
“No way they could survive without help,” Matt said.
“Then that’s what they’re looking for. If it was me, I’d try and improve my odds of survival by linking up with another team.” Loche pulled his small field glasses from his pack and scanned the forest edge ahead, and then the line of red desert. After a moment, he lowered them.
“Do we link up, or do we proceed?” Jane asked.
“We proceed,” Janus shot back. “We have a mission.”
“If they managed to rescue Ally, I vote we link up,” Mike shot back.
“Why?” Janus’ brows were up. “They’re going to come to us anyway. I’m betting they’re tracking us as well. We continue on, they’ll catch up—two birds, one stone, right?”
Jane turned to Joshua Loche. “What do you think?”
Loche’s face was devoid of expression. “Mr. Anderson is right. The mission is the priority. We proceed on course.”
“Good man.” Janus nodded.
“But.” He lifted his gaze to Jane. “We move slowly, and maybe allow our mystery party to catch up to us. Besides…” He nodded to the children. “Little legs can’t move that fast anyway, right?”
Jane smiled and nodded.
The group set off again and spent the next few hours winding their way down from the cliff top at the end of the jungle valley and toward the plain. There was still plenty of forest left to navigate, but then they expected to be out on the desert within a few more hours.
Croft led them through a wall of large-leafed ferns, and they came out onto a pleasant-looking meadow with a stream running through it. The large trees overhead had grown to create a canopy roof, just allowing filtered red twilight to shine through.
