Deep Silence

by Jonathan Maberry

  And then I was falling as the world vanished beneath me.

  I fell and fell.

  And Valen Oruraka fell with me; and the Italian words kept running through my head. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-THREE

  THE VESTIBULE OF HELL

  I woke up nowhere.

  A nameless place. Empty and colorless and unreal.

  I’m in hell, I thought. But that wasn’t right. There was no heat. No fire. Nothing. I’m dead.

  But that was wrong, too. I hurt too much to be dead. So I sat up. My protective suit was ruined, torn, hanging in shreds. How it had been so thoroughly slashed and my skin beneath untouched is something I’ll never know.

  I stood and stripped it off. My clothes were soaked with sweat and felt cold in the wind.

  Wind? I realized that it wasn’t that there was nothing to see, but that my eyes could not penetrate the thick and cloying mist that surrounded me. Almost at once I realized that the mist was not empty. Something moved in it. There was a clumsy, heavy thump as if the bare foot of something vast stepped down a few yards away. I crouched and tore the fighting knife from the combat harness I’d shucked. It was a double-edged British Commando-style weapon, but it felt absurdly small in my hand.

  Stupidly I called, “Valen…?”

  Another soft thump. A little closer, and with it was a rasping breath, but if it came from the mouth of some animal, then that mouth was forty feet above my own.

  I turned then and ran away. Something buzzed past me and I caught a mere glimpse of it. It was like a moth or dragonfly, but the size of it was impossible. The wings were easily five feet across, and the head of the creature was a deformed nightmare mask.

  I fled into the mist.…

  Hoooooooooom!

  * * *

  I tripped on something in the sand. There hadn’t been sand beneath my feet a moment before. Or light. I fell and rolled and came up onto fingers and toes, the knife still held in the loop of thumb and index finger. In front of me was a beach. Vast, stretching to either side of me until it vanished in the distance. There was something wrong about it, though.

  Two things. One, the sand on which I crouched was not tan or white, or even Hawaiian black. It was green. That green. Miles of it. The other problem was the horizon. I’ve been on beaches all over the world. I’ve seen bare ones and mountainous one, dunes and flats and rippled sand. This one was green with traces of mud, but it was wrong. There didn’t seem to be enough curve to it. Same with the ocean when I looked at it. I could see an impossible distance, even from sea level. The curvature of the Earth was wrong. Not flattened out, but warped, as if I had shrunk down or the world was so much larger that the anticipated and familiar curves were changed.

  “No,” I said.

  A voice said, “You see it, too?”

  I turned, and there was Valen. He had also shucked out of his protective garment and wore a plain T-shirt and jeans. His face was different, though, and it jolted me every bit as badly as the horizon line. Instead of the face I’d seen back in Washington, a man of roughly my own age, this Valen was older. Years older. Decades. He wore a heavy, unkempt beard and his hair hung down to his shoulders. His clothes were filthy and threadbare.

  Then my brain played back what he’d said. I’d heard it wrong. What he said was, “You see me, too?”

  I licked a salty dryness from my lips. “I see you.”

  The man smiled, shook his head, and touched his ear. “I can’t hear. Speak slowly so I can read your lips.”

  I did.

  “You’re Joe Ledger, aren’t you?” he asked in a voice that was cracked from disuse, and badly pronounced the way deaf people sometimes speak.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m Ledger. Which means you know why I’m here.”

  “I had to do it,” he said, and tears rolled from the corners of his eyes. “You understand that, right? I had to. I had to.”

  “No,” I said, “you didn’t. You made a choice to do it.”

  “It was for my country.…”

  I hit him. Not a punch, not a killing blow. I hit him across the face with my open palm. I didn’t want him to die. I wanted somehow, impossibly, to literally knock sense into him. He staggered, his cheek turning a livid red. Then he began to cry.

  “Did you stop it?” he begged. “Did you find a way to stop the machine?” His weeping suddenly changed to a high-pitched laughter that was so fractured it scared me. He laughed and wept, and tears and snot ran down his face.

  “God damn you to hell,” I said.

  “I prayed to him every night that you stopped it,” he replied, eyes wild.

  That’s what I heard. That’s what I understood. But the actual words that came out of his mouth were: “Y’ vulgtlagln h’ nilgh’ri n’ghftyar cahf ymg’ h’ mgepmgah.”

  It was a language that I’d heard before. In dreams. In nightmares. A language not spoken by human tongues. A language never meant for us to speak. I’d heard it in the mad wastelands of Antarctica and when I was dying of that impossible version of the flu. And in my dreams at the Warehouse. I’d heard it when Rafael Santoro and I got lost in the God Machine in the laboratory of Prospero Bell.

  It was the language of another world. Of this world in which we both stood.

  A cloud shadow passed over the beach and I turned, knowing that it was not a cloud at all. Valen fell to his knees and buried his face in the sand, weeping and praying and beating his head with his knotted fists. I looked up at the thing that rose from the vast sea. A shape out of nightmares or the prayers of the damned. A body that was only vaguely humanoid, topped by an octopus head and whose face was a mass of writhing tentacles. Monstrous wings and claws that could tear apart mountains. Behind it I saw ships slashing their way through the sky. T-craft. Sleeker and faster than anything man could ever build.

  “Ymg’ mgepah h’ mgah?” cried Valen.

  Did you stop it? He screamed it into the sand as the god of this world threw back its head and howled.

  Hoooooooom.

  * * *

  Valen Oruraka and I stood on the slope of a long valley. He was my age again. We were stripped to the waist and we both held knives in our hands made from gleaming crystal.

  Both of us were crisscrossed by dozens of shallow cuts, and on some of them the blood had already crusted over. We were both running with sweat, our chests heaving. It was as if we had been fighting here for hours. Days.

  Forever.

  Valen was weeping but he raised the knife and slashed at me. I parried him easily. He cut again and I parried again. I don’t know how he’d managed to injure me so easily, but he was no bladesman, and I was. I could have killed him outright, but I didn’t.

  I stepped back.

  “Stop this,” I said.

  A voice spoke and I turned to see two figures standing higher up the slope. Both of them dressed in the same lizard-skin armor. Except that I knew it wasn’t armor.

  “Fahf ah ahf’ ymg’ ah,” said the taller of the two. My mind could still understand the language. I heard it as, “This is who you are.”

  Those words hurt me more than I could explain. Worse than any of the cuts that had been sliced into my skin.

  “No,” I said.

  “Ymg’ ah h’ mgathg?”

  Do you deny it?

  I looked at the knife and the blood smeared along its length. I looked at Valen, who was panting and wild and terrified. Then I turned back to the Reptilians.

  “I know who you are,” I said.

  They studied me.

  “In Maryland, on the road, you tried to tell me something. You told me that I was making a mistake.”

  They said nothing.

  “You told me that you were not my enemy. I didn’t listen. I didn’t understand.”

  They said nothing.

  “I was the one who got the Majestic Black Book for you. I stopped Howard Shelton from using it to build those.” I pointed to T-craft that
scraped the ceiling of the world. The two creatures did not look up. “I thought we’d given all of it to you. I believed that. That’s why you tried to talk with me in Maryland. You knew that there was more of it and that someone was using it. You wanted me to stop them again.”

  They said nothing.

  “I can’t stop it. The machine is running. It’s going to blow up the volcano under Yellowstone and everyone I love and care about is going to die. I can’t win this for you and I can’t win it for me.”

  I held out the knife, opened my hand, and let it fall, then pointed at Valen.

  “He already won. I’m done.”

  The taller of the two took three steps down the slope, stopping inches from me. When he spoke, though, he and the shorter one both opened their mouths. They both spoke at the same time, with the same voice, even though their lips did not move. They spoke in my language. In English.

  “You are a hunter. You hunted. We followed. You found the machine that was hidden from us.”

  “Yeah, well goody for me. I got there too late. Now you can take your toys and go home and let me die.”

  The two creatures glanced at one another, then at Valen, then at me.

  “We are not your enemy,” they said. “We are not your friends. Your world is your world. Ours is ours.”

  The shorter one reached into a pouch on his belt and removed a slender piece of that damn green crystal. He showed it to me and nodded. I nodded back, though I don’t know why.

  Then the son of a bitch stabbed me with it.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-FOUR

  YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK

  Top Sims knelt on the ground with Tracy Cole’s head in his lap and a pistol in his hand, the slide locked back. He had no more bullets. Cole was alive, but fading. Going away from him, just as hope was leaving him. Ghost lay where he’d fallen and Top couldn’t tell if the dog was dead or not. Probably dead.

  They’d all be dead soon. He looked at his empty pistol and let it fall. No soldier wins every battle. Top eased Cole’s head down onto the ground and rose, drawing his knife. The old joke about never bringing a knife to a gunfight occurred to him and he actually laughed. Militiamen closed in from all sides. Grinning, raising rifles to their shoulders, fingers slipping into trigger guards.

  * * *

  Bunny crawled along the ground, fat drops of blood hanging from his slack lips and falling to mark his slow passage.

  Tate was behind him somewhere with a sucking chest wound that was going to kill him as surely as Bunny’s injuries would end his own run. Duffy’s rifle fire had stopped and all the brush up on the slope where he’d been was burning. Smith was down, too.

  It was over. The militia had won from sheer force of numbers, even though more than half of them were dead. The rest would punish what was left of Echo Team. Maybe they would make it quick. Maybe the fucking volcano would blow and burn them all.

  Bunny stopped crawling when he reached the AK-47 he’d seen lying by a burning truck. He leaned back on his knees, hissing with pain, checking the gun. Half a magazine. Shapes moved toward him.

  “Come and get it, you cocksuckers.” He put the rifle to his shoulder and took aim.

  Gunfire ripped along the ground and the man he was aiming at danced and twitched and screamed as the rounds tore the life from him. Then the men with him spun and raised their weapons. Not toward Bunny, but up. But a hail of bullets tore them down and they fell like dolls. It was only then that Bunny heard the sound of the heavy rotors as a wave of National Guard helicopters came sweeping over the camp.

  * * *

  Top knelt there and watched the militiamen scatter and run and try to hide and try to fight. And die. M134 Miniguns roared, their six rotating barrels spitting thousands of rounds, tearing apart any hope of cover, ripping through body armor. Missiles streaked like falling stars through the night and lifted escaping vehicles high on plumes of fire.

  Suddenly the whole landscape was swarming with soldiers, their guns chewing up the fleeing truckers. Armored Humvees leapt over the crests and slammed down, jouncing and then accelerating as their gunners opened up with heavy machine guns. Top smiled despite his pain and weariness. The militiamen had trained for war, had dared to wage it against their own country, and were now learning what it meant to fight that kind of war, against that kind of foe. How Mr. Church had managed it was beyond him. It didn’t even matter. The cavalry had arrived.

  He closed his eyes and bent over Tracy Cole, begging her, willing her to keep breathing. Then he threw back his head and in his leather-throated sergeant’s voice roared for a medic.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-FIVE

  YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK

  When I woke up the first thing I realized was that I wasn’t dead.

  “God,” I breathed.

  Then I realized that I was in the chamber by the vent. The heat was incredible. I rolled over onto my hands and knees and then pushed off, raising the ten trillion tons of me onto my feet. The room swayed, or I swayed, or the world swayed. All the same to me. I put a hand out to steady myself on the God Machine.

  And fell over because there was no God Machine. It was gone. Totally and completely gone. I scrambled back to my feet and looked right and left, trying to reorient myself, but I was in the right place. It was the machine that had gone.

  So, too, had the tunnels. The walls had dropped like curtains and solidified into place. Which sounds as impossible as it looked.

  The men I’d killed lay where they’d fallen. My gun was there, too, and I bent to pick it up.

  I saw a figure in the shadows a few feet away and walked over to it. Valen Oruraka lay there. Ancient, wizened, dried out as if he had lived a long, hard, bad life and withered into a mummy. I knew it was him because of the knife cuts all over him.

  Beneath my feet the Yellowstone supervolcano grumbled. Once. Like a giant turning over in his sleep. That one rumble, and then nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  EPILOGUE

  1.

  So, yeah, they found me.

  Stairs were gone, radio reception was for shit, but they knew where to look. National Guardsmen rappelled down and got me out. They asked a whole lot of questions for which I had no answers that made sense to anyone.

  When I got upstairs I didn’t find any of Echo Team. Not one. Not even Ghost. My heart started to break and I think what’s left of my mind wanted to snap. Then a colonel was there, coming at me, pushing me down onto an equipment case, pushing a cup of coffee into my hands.

  “How many?” I asked through the blackness in my mind.

  “All of them,” he said. “All of them are alive.”

  I dropped the coffee, put my face in my hands, and wept.

  2.

  “Alive” is a relative term. It is often coupled with “well.” Not this time.

  I sat vigil in another hospital.

  Tracy Cole and Pete Smith circled the drain for a long time. Circled and circled, as surgeons worked. I know surgeons get a lot of flak for being hotshots and egotists. Not from me. They are heroes in their own way. They worked all through the night and into the next day.

  Tracy Cole lost part of her lung and a lot of useful bone and tissue. Pete Smith lost his spleen. Neither of them were going to walk through the valley of the shadow with us anymore. But the shadows wouldn’t own them, either. They were on this side of the dirt, and we all have to put that in the win column.

  Duffy had nine broken ribs and a cracked sternum, all from bullets that hit him but didn’t penetrate his body armor. The company that made that armor made him a seven-figure offer to be their spokesman. He told them to stick the offer where the sun won’t shine. He told me that he’ll be back.

  Same with Tate. Concussion, seventy-three stitches, and some burns. He looks like Frankenstein, but he doesn’t care.

  Top took two bullets in the belly. Both were oddball ricochets that hit the lava rock and bounced up under his body armor. They cut him, but the angle
was in his favor and both rounds lodged in the plate steel he calls an abdomen. He’s already walking around and telling the hospital staff how to do their business. Bunny, on the other hand, had a through-and-through of the thigh. Took a lot of meat with it, but missed the bone and it missed the arteries. His fiancée, Lydia Ruiz, flew out from San Diego and was alternately giving him hell and giving him kisses.

  That left me.

  I had a bunch of cuts on my body I couldn’t explain. I had some burns and I had a moderately nasty skull fracture. They shaved my head, did some weird shit to me, and told me not to drink any booze for a month.

  Yeah, we’ll see how that plays out.

  Ghost had a rough time of it. His Kevlar saved him from bullet wounds, but the incoming rounds had kicked up a spray of jagged stone chips. The doctors removed eleven of them and put in forty-seven stitches. There was some muscle damage, and he would need rest and rehab and lots of TLC. Which he would get. He was already milking it with the practiced ease of a professional scam artist.

  3.

  Aliens.

  Junie came and sat by my bedside, and we talked. Doc Holliday called me twenty times a day, and we talked. Rudy was there, and we talked.

  Aliens.

  Where do you go with that?

  Were they gone? Why were they ever here in the first place? Would we ever really know the meaning of it all?

  A lot of Junie’s friends in the conspiracy community have always had a lot of answers. Or, theories. Some of them are dingbat nonsense. But some make a lot more sense to me than they did before. When Junie talks about these things, when she plays video interviews with people claiming to be experiencers, with people claiming to be channels for alien beings, I don’t laugh or turn away or dismiss it out of hand.

  And, weirdly, unexpectedly, it’s brought us closer. The truth of what’s in her DNA and what I saw firsthand has burned away a lot of ephemeral relationship angst and bullshit. Sometimes at night, when I think about the scaly monsters on the hill in that other world, I give them a nod of thanks.