by Greig Beck
Aimee also couldn’t help feeling pity for the small race of people who had loved the sun and were doomed never to see it again. “They would have been forced into the city because of the cold, and that’s exactly where the orthocone wanted them.”
“We don’t know that for sure and probably never will—perhaps a few survived. What if some of them escaped down to the underground sea? There’s certainly food, water and warmth. Who knows what was living on the far shores down there.” Monica smiled weakly at Aimee, looking for some sort of confirmation that perhaps the small race didn’t all perish.
Aimee nodded and turned to look at Alex who had been silent behind them; his eyes were half closed and he looked to be in a trance, listening intently to something only he could hear.
Alex was straining his senses to try and pick up any sound or impression that they were being followed or about to be ambushed. He couldn’t feel the sliding vibrations or hear the wet slithering sound that told him that the creature was near but he could not help the feeling in the pit of his stomach that it was close and they were extremely vulnerable.
One by one they pulled themselves out of the sand on the black beach with a leathery, sliding sound. Each of the worms was roughly thirty feet in length and as thick around as a large horse. The blood-red segmented bodies were covered in short bristles that increased in length towards their feeding end, which was little more than a hole with hook-like teeth circling the entrance.
These creatures were the stuff of nightmares. Adapted to living beneath the wet, black sand, they had never existed in any fossil record.
The Antarctic worms hesitated at the mouth of the cave, their blunt heads raised and waving back and forth, tasting the air as their bodies pulsated greasily. In a quivering peristaltic motion they moved into the cave the humans had escaped into. However, it was not the scent of the small mammals that drew them out of the sand; it was the orthocone’s blood that they followed. Even though the nightmarish creatures were blind, to them the blood trail was as wide and clear as a well-lit highway.
Twenty-six
The large room ended in a doorway that was blocked, but not by a conventional stone door or a cave-in; the blockage was from a large, rounded, rough-hewn boulder of granite that had been purposely rolled in front of the door to seal it off. Matt watched Alex test the stone and, satisfied by something, called him over for assistance.
He looked at Alex incredulously; the stone looked to weigh several tons and the idea that just two men could shift it was to him at the very least a waste of time and at worst a lot crazy. Matt put his shoulder to the block and felt the huge mass of the boulder. However, when Alex put both his hands against the stone, braced his feet on the floor and began to apply all his strength, it moved. The grinding movement of the large stone made the very floor underneath them vibrate as it slid a few inches at first, then a few feet. Matt could see Alex had bared his teeth and the veins in his neck bulged; he decided he needed to push a little more himself—though he felt he might have been there for counterbalance purposes only.
A stone that large had to weigh many tons—movable with several draught horses, maybe, but not by a single human being. Matt looked at Alex and said, “How did . . .”
The opening was at a width they could now fit through. Alex turned to wink at Matt and slid through.
Colder, much colder. Alex realised that although they might soon be free of the caves they would have another problem; none of them were dressed for the surface of the Antarctic. His own cave suit was ripped and punctured in many places and he’d noticed pieces missing from the others’ suits as well.
Alex brought himself back to the present—no use getting ahead of the situation just yet. There were plenty more problems to be dealt with right now. He found himself in another large chamber and soon realised that what he had at first taken to be debris littering the floor was actually thousands of skeletal bone fragments. Given what they had already been through, Alex didn’t think a few bones were going to make anyone squeamish anymore. He couldn’t detect any imminent danger so called Aimee, Matt and Monica through.
The four of them looked at the sea of bones covering the floor in all directions. Aimee and Matt crouched down and were quickly sifting through them.
“Perfectly preserved; definitely human. Maybe it’s some sort of burial chamber that was used because the ground had become too frozen for them to bury their dead?” Aimee said as she held a broken skull and jawbone in her hand while looking at the teeth. Most of them were missing and huge abscesses in the bone were plainly visible. She turned the skull over and could see a crack running right down the cranium area that had never healed. “Looks like this is what killed him or her though—some sort of accident.” Aimee turned the small yellow skull over in her hands.
“I don’t think so.” Matt was holding some longer bones in his hands. “Look at this.” He held out the bones for Aimee, Monica and Alex to see. “Notice those grooves on the thigh bone and again here on the rib? I’ve seen these marks before on bones recovered from mass graves during the great European famine of 1316. They’re teeth marks, human teeth marks. These people were eating each other.”
“Cannibals? They turned into cannibals? This is a nightmare; what would make them eat each other?” Monica was clearly shaken, her mouth trembling in both horror and disgust. Matt put his arm around her shoulders.
“Aztlan, the superpower of its time at the height of its scientific, architectural and artistic life cycle, perhaps the cradle of all civilisations, returns to barbarism within a few years. Maybe they were right; maybe their gods did abandon them. By now, even their harbours would have been iced over, making it impossible for any of the Aztlan fleet to return even if they wanted to. Forced below ground to escape the freezing conditions, running out of food to eat and wood to burn. Poor hygiene, malnutrition, did I forget anything? Oh yeah, a giant carnivorous beast was running amok in the caves below them. Man, I will never complain about having a bad day again, ever.” Matt was surveying the room as he spoke. “Do you think the eaters are here among the eaten?”
Alex toed some of the bones aside with his foot. “It was the only resource they had left; each other. Humans have an enormous will to survive. Looks like these people were sealed in; can’t tell whether they did it themselves to keep the creature or their captors out, or whether it was by the cannibals using this as their killing room.”
“Perhaps they were still praying for the sun to return. They couldn’t know that over ten thousand years later it would still all be frozen. Soon as that rock was rolled into place they were all as good as dead.” As Monica was speaking her voice wavered and shrank, and her whole body trembled.
“This can’t be all of them; there must have been hundreds and hundreds left behind. We don’t know they were all abandoned, maybe some more were rescued or, as you said yourself, maybe they headed down to the underground sea,” Aimee said. The odds were that the Aztlans had simply found more rooms like this one; she knew what could become of people who simply gave in to bleak depression. They tended to step off cliffs or just sit down and stop moving like a wound-down clock.
Matt rubbed Monica’s shoulder as if to warm her and to his credit he held back with his silly humour to instead give her comfort and some whispered words.
“I’m OK, I’m OK. Let’s just get out of here. I’d prefer that we not end up like these people and I certainly do not relish the idea of eating you guys—especially with the way that some of you smell by now.” Monica managed a watery little smile.
“You heard the lady; let’s keep going up.” Alex led on.
Sliding, liquid sounds; Alex halted. He faced a three-way branching tunnel with all of the entrances sealed with heavy stone doors. Beyond the largest centre door he sensed movement, something waited. From its reaction to their footfalls, Alex was sure the creature knew they were on the other side. It was a cold intelligence that waited in ambush for them to come through the doorway. Alex kne
w he could move the stone if he wanted to and was pretty sure the creature would be able to do so as well. He moved to the door to his right. No sounds came from behind and nothing gave Alex the tingling feeling in his stomach; he pushed. The door slid with a gritty, grinding sound. If anything, the air in the new tunnel was even colder. The walls and roof were covered in more glyphs that showed men and women running, wrestling or throwing a ball-shaped object at a ring on the side of the wall.
“Looks like basketball to me,” Alex said.
The others had squeezed through quickly; no one wanted to be left more than a body length behind. Matt now shone his torch around the walls and ceiling. “The early Mesoamericans used to play a game that was part basketball and part football nearly five thousand years ago. This might be one of their Great Ball Courts. If these Aztlans were the forefathers of the Olmecs, Aztecs and Mayans, then we should be able to assume that they had similar or in some cases identical cultures.”
Matt stopped again to study one of the carvings. “The games look very similar. In most of these races the arenas were of significance to the people and their gods. The courts were considered to be portals to the Mayan underworld and were built in low-lying areas or at the foot of great vertical constructions. In fact, Mayan legend has it that the mythological Hunahpu and Xbalanque played a ball game with the lords of the underworld. I’d say that this tunnel will probably lead us to one of their open-air courts.”
“Open air? I like the sound of that. Hey, be careful!” Monica grabbed Matt as he was about to put his foot in a hole cut into the floor.
“What is that? Is that for drainage?” Alex had noticed that the holes were cut in the floor near the wall every hundred feet or so.
“Probably, a culture this well established and advanced would have had some form of drainage and sewerage system constructed. Most likely it’s gravity based, so it could be flushed downhill. There’s probably all sorts of sewerage tunnels underneath us as well.”
Alex groaned to himself. This was likely how the creature managed to get into the city after the Aztlans sealed the deep sacrificial chamber, and there was a good chance it was also how it planned to ambush them again now. “Let’s move on, quickly now.”
The tunnel was becoming more ornate and the architecture more magnificent. Large trapezoidal stones fitted together, forming a perfect seal. Jutting stone corbels of fierce creatures interspaced with large oval stone heads with benevolent stares looked out at the small group as it hurried along the tunnel. Smaller side doors gaped open and these offered little more than black holes into unknown passages of the Aztlan city. Their breath steamed in the torchlight and for the first time, ice crystals crunched under foot.
“We must be close to the outside, or at least where the outside used to be before it iced over.” Alex felt they were in a race now, he mentally checked off his armoury—his rifle was gone but he still had his blades, and a single grenade. His propane cylinder was out and Aimee had lost her gun a long way back. Not much if it came to a stand and fight; but if it came to that in this enclosed space, he didn’t think they would last very long no matter what armaments they had. Best if the lights went out before that happened.
The tunnel terminated in another stone door, this one also of the magnificent red granite and polished to a glass-like finish. At one time the door probably slid open as silently and smoothly as any modern-day palace door; now it was locked. Not by stone or steel, but by a rim of blue ice crystals surrounding the entire perimeter.
“This is it. At least we will be out from the stone and we can get a proper reading of depth. I might even be able to get a signal out to home base.” Alex had reached around into his backpack and withdrew his small sonar device in readiness.
“How are we going to open it?” Monica was running her hand over the blue ice.
Alex could hear the suppressed excitement in Monica’s voice and took a step up to the door to test its weight and thickness and whether there was any give in the edges. It must have weighed several tons and without something to melt the surrounding ice was not going to move any time soon. Even combining his great strength with that of all the others he doubted they’d be able to do more than get red faces. The only option was to use his last grenade.
“Here’re the options. One, we can find another way to the ice. Means we’re going to have to double back, and we don’t know how far. It’s a pretty good bet to assume the creature hasn’t given up yet so we may run into it again. Also, I reckon all the exits will be as iced up as this one. Second option is we use the last grenade to blow the door. It will get the door out of the way, but not the ice. Further, it will alert anything in these caves as to exactly where we are. It also means we will have exhausted our last major defensive ordnance.”
Alex expected them to think over the option for a minute or two. However, Monica jumped right in.
“Blow it up. I’m not going to go back down into those black holes again.”
Alex recognised the panic in her eyes. Even if they escaped, it might be a long time, if ever, before Monica wanted to go caving again.
Aimee looked across to Alex. “Blow it.”
Matt nodded. “Yep, bombs away; blow it.”
Alex smiled. “OK then, let’s make some noise.” He removed the small grenade from his belt pouch and wedged it into the corner of the door frame. Most of the explosion would be thrown back into their chamber, but there was nothing available for him to use to concentrate the blast towards the door—it had to work the first time as it was. Alex instructed them to move back down the chamber and take cover in the side tunnels, to brace themselves and cover their ears. Alex set the timer for thirty seconds and ran down the corridor, dived into a side tunnel and covered up.
The blast was deafening even with their hands over their ears. The hot whoosh rushed past them down the corridor, followed by the sound of bouncing debris of various sizes. Alex was the first back to the doorway—the grenade had worked spectacularly. The door was gone completely and their first sighting of the Aztlan city surface was before them.
Twenty-seven
The smoke was clearing and all four of them stood bathed in a blue glow. In front of them the thick stone door had fallen away to reveal a solid wall of ice now barring the doorway. Its clarity was almost magical as it allowed them to see a blue world beyond and at least fifty feet out into the city courtyard.
“It’s like being underwater.” Aimee put her hand on the ice; it was slick from the heat of the explosion, but other than that untouched.
Monica was now also running her hand over the surface and shaking her head. “Oh, no. We should have expected this, it’s prehistoric ice; extremely old and usually occurs when snow falls and is compressed over a long period of time. The more it’s compressed the more the air is squeezed out and the larger the ice crystals become; then it becomes very transparent at depths.” She stood back and looked like she was about to cry. Then, in a voice like a small child she said, “I thought for a moment it was the sky.”
Matt put his arm around her again and asked, “Why is it blue?”
Aimee answered this time. “For two reasons. The ice is blue for the same reason water is blue. It’s a form of reflection, but also at this depth it is the result of a molecular stretch in the water which absorbs light at the red end of the visible spectrum.”
Alex looked at Aimee. “I’m no expert, but I’ve heard it’s rock hard, is that right?”
It wasn’t really a question. Alex knew the differing densities of ice as it related to his training for warfare in frozen oceans. A blue iceberg could tear a ship’s steel hull like paper.
“Yes, like iron.”
Alex pointed his sonar up at an angle from the bottom of the doorway, as close to vertical as he could get it. In a few seconds he was able to read his depth from the surface.
“Very good. Only about a hundred feet.”
Alex removed a short, wicked-looking black blade from a hidden sheath on his t
high. The knife was one of several that he carried as standard equipment in the field. It was a modified K-bar, shortened and strengthened from its normal seven-inch length but still with the recognisable bowie features that U.S. Marines had carried into battle for generations.
He crouched down for a moment, looking up at an angle towards the outer rim of the door frame and then swung his arm. The blade connected with a squealing crunch and dug in about two inches. Alex could feel the juddering impact all the way up his arm. Hard as iron was right, he thought; a blow that powerful should have sunk the blade to the hilt. Like a machine he kept swinging his arm, occasionally changing hands to balance the impact and also share the fatigue across his shoulders. After twenty minutes he had a hole dug into the centre of the door frame ice approximately a foot in depth and diameter.
“How long to get us to the surface?” Aimee had her arms folded and was looking at him with a worried look on her face.
“Can I help?” Matt had also decided that one man, even one with superior strength, was going to take a very long time to get to the surface digging through a hundred feet of iron-hard blue ice.
Alex sat back for a moment and drew some deep breaths. He smiled at the three of them. “I estimate it would take me about twelve days to dig us up and out to the surface. If I had a dozen grenades it would definitely speed things up a bit. But no, I definitely do not plan to spend nearly the next two weeks digging through ice. I only need to get a hole dug so we are out from under the stone lintel. Then hopefully my comm unit headset can get a signal out. It doesn’t have a very long range, but I’m betting my superiors won’t have given up the search for us yet and if there are military choppers in the vicinity they will be carrying some armaments that can cut through the ice. And yes, Dr. Kerns, I would be delighted if you could take over for a few minutes.”
