Pandemonium

by Warren Fahy

  “You’re crazier than I am.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “The Trofim Lysenko?” Andy asked.

  “Yes. He also said that there were monsters inside the city,” Nastia said.

  “Like what?”

  “Well … he said that my grandfather was attacked by a ghost.”

  “Oh,” Andy shrugged. “Ghosts I can handle.”

  Kuzu retrieved his bow from below his seat as he examined his weapon.

  Bear noticed him and brought his bow over to compare with Kuzu’s, which was a three-armed bow, made to be loaded with a fourth arm. With all his might, Bear could only half bend it. Kuzu was pleased to find that Bear’s arrows could equally work with his bow, and especially pleased when Bear offered him a dozen of the aluminum shafts.

  Hender approached Kuzu and spoke to him in his own language. “Do you still think humans mean us harm?”

  Kuzu replied, “They want to kill off everything else from our world.”

  “They? There is no ‘they,’ Kuzu,” Hender said in a buzzing rebuke. “Remember? There is only one. And one. And one. No ‘they!’”

  Kuzu let loose a long, rumbling laugh, his chest compressing like bagpipes. “That is how you win, Shenuday,” he said. “I learn from you.”

  “This is not chess, Kuzu,” Hender said.

  “Oh, yes, it is.”

  9:11 P.M.

  They arrived in the town of Gursk by helicopter, landing on a children’s football field in the pouring rain.

  Three waiting cars conveyed them to a small hotel, where they had twenty minutes to deposit their luggage and freshen up. The sels occupied the room adjoining Nastia and Andy’s room. Andy overheard them arguing, in Kuzu’s language mixed with English. They had been given a room together, which was a mistake and one that the small hotel seemed unable to rectify despite Andy’s efforts.

  Twenty minutes later, the sels and humans met downstairs in a private dining room, where they were joined by Kaziristani officials and a man who introduced himself as Galia Sokolof. He was the man who would be their guide into the city.

  “How could your government allow terrorists to take over this facility?” Andy asked the officials tactlessly.

  Galia answered, to the consternation of the Kaziristanis. “The government of Kaziristan sold the city of Pobedograd to Maxim Dragolovich for 380,000 American dollars in the year 2001 in a perfectly legal transaction. He is not a terrorist.”

  “We sold salvaging license to company whose stated intent was to scrap city for steel,” snapped one of the officials, butting out his cigarette in an ashtray on the table and shooting a look at Galia.

  “I won’t argue,” Galia said, closing his eyes and waving a hand.

  “Well, it sounds like a bargain for a whole city,” Andy said.

  “It’s not unusual,” Nastia said. “Many of these underground facilities from the Cold War have been sold for bargain basement prices by local authorities. Nobody has much use for them. In Moscow, the underground is so extensive and secret that some people even live there, in places the government does not even know about. An entire subculture of people are devoted to exploring and mapping these places,” she said. “Of course, I am not involved with such individuals.”

  “Of course,” said Dima. “That would be illegal.”

  The Kaziristani official continued. “There is only one way left into the mine. We have already sealed all other entrances with explosives and concrete, including all the city’s ventilation shafts on Mount Kazar.”

  “Are you sure?” Andy asked.

  “We are sure. And we were going to seal off the last entrance, too, before we got word that we must let your team in. We will do so, but with these conditions: You are to set timed explosives in the train tunnel heading west from the city. No one seems to know how far that tunnel goes. And you will have eight hours from the time you enter to complete your mission before we seal the entrance. Is that understood?”

  The Russians looked at one another across the table and the Americans looked at one another, as well.

  “All right,” Jackson said, raising his warm beer and taking a swig. “So I guess we’re done?”

  “All right,” Ferrell agreed. “Thank you for the hospitality, and I guess we should all get some sleep. We’ll meet here at 0500. Sweet dreams.”

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” Bear grinned at Kuzu.

  MARCH 31

  5:49 P.M. MAXIM TIME

  Geoffrey, Nell, and Sasha looked through Hell’s Window together, sitting in chairs in front of the banquet table, which they had turned parallel to the long portal. Each night they all took an hour after dinner to observe the world of Pandemonium, a necessary distraction from the mountain of terror pressing down on them as they waited for help that might never come.

  Nell had opened the leather-bound book she had found in Stalin’s desk, ruffling its marbled edges. As she leafed through the pages, penned in Cyrillic script, she thought it might be a journal of some kind, with many illustrations that looked like the animals of Pandemonium. On the inside cover of the antique book she now noticed a name and a date: Tpoxum , 1958. “Geoffrey…”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you think of this?” She showed him the name in the book. “Could this be … Trofim?…”

  “Denisovich … Lysenko?” Geoffrey completed the name as he looked closer and compared the strange letters to the name of the famous Ukrainian agricultural scientist. “You could be right!”

  All biologists, especially plant biologists like Nell, knew the story of Trofim Lysenko, who rose in the Soviet Union on his unorthodox theories of acquired inheritance before falling when those ideas proved disastrous for Soviet farming. His star had already dimmed by the late 1950s, Nell remembered. “Maybe Stalin sent him here when he fell out of favor.”

  Geoffrey scanned the sketches that recorded fantastic species, some of which they had seen today, each looking like something imagined by Jules Verne. “If it is Lysenko’s journal, then he must have been here.”

  “Look at his drawings, Sasha,” Nell marveled. On the first page was a cross-hatched pen-and-ink drawing of an oval window with curtains to either side.

  Sasha pointed at the drawing. “That’s this window!”

  “Yes,” Nell said.

  The book’s pages were filled with sketches of species they had not yet seen or even imagined.

  “Wow, honey,” Nell suddenly realized. “Look at all the underwater species he’s cataloged here.”

  A fuchsia and orange sphere of six-inch tongues rolled over Hell’s Window above and Sasha shouted. “Hey, you guys! Here comes the sushi wagon!”

  They both looked up. “Sushi wagon?” Geoffrey asked.

  “It’s a sushi bar on wheels! Everything loves the sushi wagon,” she said. “I was wondering when one would show up. Watch!”

  The buoy-sized ball rolled down the window like the sticky toys children throw at walls; and when it reached the bottom of the window, gammarids and even aggregators leaped out of nowhere to tear off the sashimi-like tongues of flesh covering the globe’s surface.

  “It’s like a giant Volvox,” said Geoffrey, shifting his bound foot that continued to throb with pain. The large ball rolled along the window’s ledge with its vividly hued tongues. “Maybe it’s a colony of creatures that fuse together into these spheres.” Animals were attacking it from all directions.

  “Everything’s ripping off pieces of it. How does it survive?” Nell wondered.

  “Don’t worry,” Sasha said. “That’s how the sushi wagon makes babies. Dimitri told me that one out of a hundred pieces of sushi has eggs inside that hatch in the stomachs of the animals that eat them. They turn into new sushi balls and burst out!”

  “Wow,” Geoffrey said. “Now that’s bad sushi.”

  Nell pointed at a milky slug or flatworm that was the size of a throw rug, which glided over the top edge of the window. She rose and examined its ventral s
urface as it shimmied over the glass. “I think I’ve seen one of those before.”

  Geoffrey noticed there were ten S-ing rows of suction cups extending around the giant flatworm’s head. “I’ve definitely seen one of those before,” he said, and he hobbled to his feet and stood closer to the window. “It’s some kind of land octopus.…”

  “It’s a ghost!” Sasha cried, clutching Nell’s arm.

  “No,” said Nell.

  “Look,” Geoffrey countered, pointing at the suction cups.

  “Amphipods and mollusks,” Nell said.

  “Both ancient groups of animals,” Geoffrey agreed.

  “It makes sense,” Nell said. “They must have been isolated for hundreds of millions of years to diverge this radically.”

  “But how could this place have existed so long?” Geoffrey shook his head. “That’s what puzzles me.”

  “Henders Island existed longer,” Nell reminded him. “Back to the pre-Cambrian. One tiny fragment that made it through.”

  “Dimitri said the Urals are the oldest mountain range on Earth,” Geoffrey recalled as the opalescent creature rippled rows of suction cups like a kaleidoscopic caterpillar moving down the glass. The creature turned, moving parallel with the bottom of the window, and about three feet from the edge, it stopped. Peeling its lower edge from the glass, the ghostly mollusk lifted the right side of its body outward.

  “What is it doing?” Nell breathed.

  They watched anxiously.

  One of the gammies flitted past on the window ledge beneath it and, with shocking quickness, the creature slapped down and pressed the kicking amphipod against the window.

  “Whoa!” Nell said.

  What happened next was like a diabolical miracle: the amorphous mollusk stretched down over each jerking leg of the pinned gammarid. Suction cups on its underside clamped into each joint of the gammy’s legs with some kind of beaks.

  “They have suckers like colossal squids!” Geoffrey exclaimed.

  “They’re more like jaws,” Nell whispered.

  After each joint of the animal was vised by the suction clamps, the terrestrial octopus moved its head into position and crunched the amphipod’s neck with knifelike blades that sawed through its nerve cord. All at once, the gammy’s legs went limp.

  “Dear God,” Geoffrey muttered.

  The paralyzed creature’s legs suddenly pointed forward and then backwards across the window, flexing in unison as the mollusk seemed to be testing its control of the animal’s body like a puppeteer.

  “What?” Nell gasped, looking at Geoffrey.

  The octopus rolled off the glass, now in full possession of its prey, and grabbed hold of the window ledge with the gammarid’s long legs. The flesh of the octopus changed color before their eyes, matching the amphipod’s checkered yellow-orange-and-white pattern.

  “Did that just happen?” Nell asked.

  Geoffrey nodded. “It’s like some sort of mimic octopus,” he said.

  “What’s a mimic octopus?” Sasha asked.

  “The mimic octopus,” he explained, “can fake the shape, color, and motions of more than a dozen creatures. It can make itself look and even move like a lionfish, a flounder, a sea snake, a mantis shrimp, and even brittle stars—animals from completely different branches of life. This animal might be some kind of cousin or crazy uncle of the mimic octopus.”

  Nell felt a deep, primal fear as she watched the ghoulish animal move the carcass of the gammarid, testing its control. “That thing attached itself to the gammy like an external muscular system!”

  Geoffrey nodded. He stared at the creature, remembering what one of them had done to the guard outside the power plant. He didn’t want to tell them what he had seen, and he didn’t want to scare Sasha. “Octopuses are incredibly smart,” he said.

  “An octopus predicted the winner of the World Cup!” Sasha said.

  “That’s right.” Geoffrey laughed.

  “I hate them!” Sasha said, wrinkling her nose.

  “There’s a species of fungus that turns ants into zombies,” Nell said as she stared at the ghost octopus moving the gammy’s limbs in jerky motions now, mimicking the other gammies. “The fungus actually makes the ants cut leaves for the fungus to feed on, all through a strange kind of mind control.”

  “Really?” Geoffrey asked. He squeezed her hand. “That’s why I married you.”

  A group of gammies leaped past the window now, and the ghostly octopus followed them with its gammy body, joining the herd.

  “Is it a parasite?” Geoffrey wondered.

  “Maybe it hunts gammarids like a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Nell said.

  “Does it kill its prey or just ride it like a bicycle while it’s paralyzed?”

  “Or does it do both—and trade gammy bodies for new ones when it’s through, like a predatory hermit crab?”

  “Maybe it lays eggs inside the gammy?”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “It could be the only place its offspring won’t get eaten by other gammies, at least until they gestate. Maybe it moves among them while its eggs hatch and eat the gammarid’s insides, and when the offspring are big enough, they come out to catch a ride of their own. It could be something entirely new, honey.”

  “Well,” Nell allowed, “most animals on Earth have many parasites that live in and on their bodies. Nearly a thousand species live only inside the human mouth.”

  “Yuck!” said Sasha.

  “Bacteria, viruses, fungi, and single-celled microbes outnumber cells in the human body by ten to one, and there are ten trillion cells in the human body. We’re all walking ecosystems.”

  “But I’ve never seen this kind of relationship before. Yes, each of us is an ecosystem that makes up one superindividual,” agreed Geoffrey. “But have you ever seen a parasite that climbed on board and turned its vegetarian host into a hunting machine?” Geoffrey asked.

  “Yes,” Nell said. “We turned horses into hunters and engines of war.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “Right.”

  “That’s why you married me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You guys!” Sasha shouted, rolling her eyes. “You make me sick when you do that! Look!”

  A giant gammarid the size of a lion scrabbled on six long legs over an outcrop ten yards below the window.

  “A soldier gammy!” Geoffrey whispered.

  “It’s like the monster in my apartment in New York when I was an undergraduate,” Nell said.

  “Huh?” Sasha wondered.

  “I killed a roach that big with a butcher knife one night, I swear.”

  “Oh, Nell,” Sasha said. “That’s not true!”

  The soldier gammarid flexed giant mandibles and was covered with spikes pointing laterally in each direction. It was surrounded by much smaller specimens with smaller mandibles that scrabbled underneath it. Then Geoffrey noticed the rippling muscles on the soldier’s back. “It’s a ghost!”

  The possessed gammarid suddenly attacked the smaller amphipods around it with its zombie legs and mandibles, controlled by the mollusk on its back, which fed them into the gammy’s mouth.

  “Well, that answers it,” Nell said. “They’re predators that probably lay eggs inside their prey and feed the brood when it hatches inside the exoskeleton.”

  “Parasite-predators,” Geoffrey said.

  “Parators?” Nell suggested. “Parasites that parrot their prey.”

  “Perfect.” Geoffrey nodded.

  “You guys like naming things, too!” Sasha said. “I still call them ghosts.”

  “That’s actually a really good name, Sasha,” Nell said. “Ghost octopus.” She shuddered. “You were right. This place is haunted.”

  With a violent flash of light, they were left in sudden, silent darkness before the glowing creatures of Pandemonium.

  Sasha screamed.

  “The power went out!” Nell whispered.

  Geoffrey looked around, waiting.

&n
bsp; After a beat, they heard an engine kick-start and chug somewhere below. The lights came back on, at less than half strength.

  “The emergency generator,” Geoffrey said.

  6:04 A.M.

  Maxim continued to key in passwords Sasha may have used to access the door controls. He could try only five before he was locked out and had to wait half an hour before trying again.

  The stuffy dormitory was strewn with empty cans of tuna and pineapple, their subsistence for these last days. They had kept watch through the city’s cameras, surveying the city and the train station for any sign of entry by humans.

  Suddenly, the lights went out.

  “Chief!” shouted one of his guards.

  “They cut off our power,” said Dimitri.

  A generator kicked on, throbbing distantly through the floors below, and the lights came back on.

  “They’re here,” Maxim said, grimly.

  6:05 A.M.

  Nastia spoke through her headset to the others inside the noisy helicopter as they approached Mount Kazar.

  “Cold War American complexes like Mount Weather and NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain are dwarfed by the projects of the former Soviet Union,” Nastia explained to Ferrell and Jackson, who stood with her behind the cockpit. “Five percent of the population in each republic of the USSR was provided with subsurface accommodations in the event of disaster, though few such facilities were ever finished or adequately supplied.” She fired off factoids nervously as they choppered up the snow-patched slopes.

  “Hey, let me guess. Did you write a book about this?” Jackson said.

  Nastia turned to him seriously and then laughed. “Yes. It’s called The Underground History of Planet Earth.”

  “I’ll be sure to buy it at Barnes and Noble, ma’am.” He winked. “I must say, you’re very pretty for a bookworm. No offense, there, Dima.”

  Dima had, in fact, tensed as Jackson flirted with Nastia. He tensed more as Nastia noticed it now.