Coins, rings, bracelets…every manner of precious or semi-precious metal ornament adorned the creatures—every last one of them. The treasures were threaded like beads onto strings of what looked to Pierce like strands of twisted gut, and they were worn like amulets or totem necklaces. Some of the strings were heavy with dozens of pieces of jewelry; evidently, the creature whose image had been captured digitally was a pauper among his peers—or hers, Pierce thought.
For just a moment, the horror of the attack was eclipsed by this new mystery. This was a form of complex animal behavior…evolutionary behavior. Pierce didn’t know exactly what the explanation was for all of it, but he knew that it almost certainly had nothing to do with Manifold Genetics.
After a few minutes, the procession ended; the last of the enormous creatures vanished down the adjacent tunnel.
It was only then that Pierce had an opportunity to scope out his surroundings. But for the fact that he had just witnessed at least a couple dozen of the creatures passing, he would not have believed that he was in a cave. The monochrome green of the night-vision device revealed only upright walls of dark rock in every direction.
“I’m gonna need that back soon, pardner.”
Pierce turned to get his first look at the man who had evidently come to his aide. The man’s digital camouflage uniform showed him to be a soldier. There was a patch with three chevrons affixed to his body armor vest, and next to it a name tape that read “De Bord.” It was impossible to make out much detail in the green display, but Pierce thought the man looked quite a bit more mature than most of the enlisted soldiers he’s seen in the camp. The sight of the uniform slammed a door on his musings about the extraordinary creatures, and reminded him that a lot of people had just died... King might have died.
But they just ignored us. We’re obviously on their turf now; why didn’t they attack?
It was a mystery that would have to wait. Darkness engulfed him as he lowered the monocular and extended it toward the soldier.
“Sergeant De Bord is it?”
There was a pause as the other man took the goggles from him. “That’s right.” De Bord sounded confused by Pierce’s knowledge of his identity.
“I saw your name tag. So, am I your prisoner?”
De Bord chuckled. “I reckon we’ve got bigger things to worry about. For now, let’s just focus on getting out of here, and finding your friend.”
“I’m not too sure where ‘here’ is. What happened?”
“I saw you take a tumble into this here cave. Those…whatever they are…they were headed your way, so I went in after you.”
Pierce felt a guiding hand on his shoulder and allowed the soldier to steer him out of the recess where they had hidden.
“We can’t be more than a hundred meters from the opening,” De Bord continued. “Just keep a hand on my shoulder and we’ll be outside in no time flat.”
“Do you have a flashlight? I don’t think we have to worry about those creatures anymore.”
“I hope you’re right about that. Hang on.”
Pierce winced as a light flared in the other man’s hand, revealing the cave walls in their true color—dark rock of indeterminate composition. De Bord directed the beam down the passage in the same direction from which the creatures had come, and started walking with Pierce in tow.
As they moved along the cramped passage, Pierce decided to exploit the sergeant’s evident willingness to engage in conversation. “So I take it the Army is here because of those creatures, right? What do you know about them?”
“Not a whole helluva lot. They came out of nowhere, wrecked everything, and then just like that, decided to skedaddle. The rest of it is all above my pay grade. I just do what the brass tells me to do.” He stopped abruptly and directed the light overhead.
The circle of illumination on the rock ceiling showed nothing particularly remarkable, but in the ambient light, Pierce saw that the tunnel ahead sloped upward and ended abruptly.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t understand,” the sergeant said, turning to face him. “This is where you fell in…where I found you. But there’s no opening.”
Pierce felt cold dread creep over him. “Maybe we passed it already.”
“Not a chance.” De Bord pointed to something on the floor—a broken loop of black plastic a few inches long. “I cut that off your hands right where I found you. The mouth of the tunnel was right here.”
Pierce stared up again, but there wasn’t even a hairline crack in the rocky expanse overhead. It was as if the earth had closed the door behind the retreating creatures, sealing them in.
18.
A closer inspection of the camp only confirmed what King had seen from a distance. There was abundant evidence of the battle—wrecked tents and equipment, discarded weapons, a littering of brass shell casings, and everywhere, spatters of blood slowly drying to a black crust in the warm desert air—but there was not a single body, human or otherwise, to be found. Hoping against hope, King tried calling Pierce’s cell phone, but the call went directly to the archaeologist’s voice mail.
Nina stayed close as they ventured cautiously into the perimeter, but stopped a few steps in and bent to illuminate the ground with a small flashlight. “Look at this.”
King glanced quickly at her find, but did not immediately grasp its significance. “A footprint?”
“Look at it,” she insisted. “It’s huge. What do you wear, size 12? It’s at least six inches longer than your foot.”
He made no effort to hide his irritation. “We already knew they had feet. And that they’re big.”
“But it’s hominid, for sure.” She pointed to the round depression made by the heel and ball of the foot, then counted the toes as if doing so would emphasize her point. “This has toes. Humans are the only species on the planet with a foot like this.”
“Not anymore.” He stood and did a quick visual sweep of the area. “I don’t see what the big deal is. I thought monster footprints were a dime a dozen.”
She shook her head. “Most are provable fakes, and the rest are highly suspicious. This one…well, we know exactly what made it. It’s real, tangible proof.”
“Put this in practical terms for me. What are we dealing with here? Could these things be mutants of some kind?”
She shrugged. “The legends of the Mogollon Monster—and other creatures like it—go back to prehistoric times. I suppose in a scientific sense, they are the result of a mutation—that’s what drives evolution—but it’s more likely that they’re a lower branch on the evolutionary tree. An ancestor species, or at the very least a distant cousin. We know that hominid species like this had to have existed in the past; this just proves that they’re still around.”
King shook his head. “I’m not interested in proving anything. I want to know where these things come from, and why they are on the warpath. In case you weren’t paying attention, that wasn’t a lone monster wandering the hills harassing hikers. That was a whole tribe, and I think if there’d been a tribe’s worth of these things roaming these hills all this time, someone would have found proof that was a little more definitive.”
“That’s why it’s so… Wait, what are you trying to say?”
“Think about it. Nothing like this has ever happened. The attack on the highway, this…what’s different now?”
She blinked at him.
“The attack happened simultaneously with the appearance of that mist,” he continued, not trying to make a point so much as review the disjointed facts for his own benefit. “Those soldiers were expecting it, or at least expecting something to happen.”
“So you think this could be the result of something the government is doing?”
“You’re the expert on this kind of thing. What do you think?
She laughed without much humor. “Being an expert on paranormal phenomena is a little like being an expert on Santa Claus. I can give you chapter and verse on the mythology and the rep
orts, but no one is an expert on the real cause. That goes for paranoia about secret government conspiracies, too. You can’t really be an expert on something that’s completely imaginary.”
“It’s not all imaginary,” King muttered. His experiences, both with government shenanigans and phenomena well outside the accepted scientific norm, probably made him more of an expert than she, but that wasn’t something he was going to share with her. “The mist, those creatures…it’s all connected somehow. We’re not going to find our answers here.”
“Where then?”
King stared at the footprint, one of dozens—perhaps hundreds—that were clearly visible leading both into and away from the camp. The creatures’ path of egress was clearly marked, and it wouldn’t take the skills of a legendary Indian scout to pick up their trail…a trail that would almost certainly lead him to George Pierce, or at the very least, resolve the question of his friend’s fate. But his intuition told him that the answers to the important questions would not be found in the lair of the Mogollon Monsters. “Lightning isn’t supposed to strike the same place twice, right? I’d say that’s a good place to start.”
19.
De Bord continued to sweep the dead end with his light, muttering in disbelief. “It was here. I know it was.”
Pierce didn’t know what to say. He had no recollection of his fall, but the evidence that this was where they had both entered the tunnel was right there on the ground. He knelt and picked up the discarded plastic tie. “Maybe we took a wrong turn. Maybe one of those creatures picked this up and dropped it here.”
“There were no turns,” De Bord insisted. “And I recognize this place.”
“Then there’s some other explanation. Whatever it is, we’re not getting out this way.”
De Bord appeared reluctant to accept that assessment, but after several more minutes of searching with both his eyes and his hands, he relented. They made their way back to the niche where they’d earlier hidden, and then kept going.
The tunnel gradually opened up, and before long they saw—and smelled—evidence of habitation. Pierce resisted a scientific curiosity to examine the piles of fresh scat that littered the floor; a glance was enough to tell him that the creatures were omnivores, but there was nothing of behavioral significance in the distribution. The creatures were not marking territory or defining their living space, but merely answering nature’s call as they made their journey. Aside from the stench of their excrement, the air in the tunnel seemed to be fresh, and that was an encouraging sign.
Acting on a sudden inspiration, Pierce took out his phone and checked for a signal. There wasn’t one, but as they progressed, he watched for bars to appear. If he could get reception, it might indicate the proximity of an opening to the surface. He was about to explain this idea to De Bord when the soldier abruptly raised a hand, and then pushed him back a few feet.
“There’s a whole mess of those things up there,” he whispered, dousing his flashlight.
Pierce felt his pulse quicken. “What are they doing?”
“I didn’t take the time to look. Hang on, I’ll check it out.”
Pierce heard the soft rush of fabric scraping against the floor as De Bord crawled away, and then after a minute, heard it again indicating the soldier’s return. “They’re lining up the bodies.” There was a hint of disgust in the man’s tone. “Going through the pockets of the dead, it looks like.”
Pierce withheld comment on the unusual behavior, but it was another significant clue. While robbing the dead might be a contemptible act for a group of humans, it wasn’t something that mindless animals did; for a predator or a scavenger, a corpse was just so much meat. But these creatures evidently possessed the capacity to value objects, even those that had no utilitarian purpose.
“I want to see. Can you give me the night vision device?”
De Bord sighed wearily. “I guess there’s nothing else to do right now, but be careful. If they see us, we’re gonna be up shit creek.”
Pierce wasn’t so sure about that, but took the monocular from the soldier and held it to his eye as he crawled forward to the edge of the chamber where the creatures were engaging in their own peculiar funerary rites.
There were at least two dozen of the creatures moving about in the cavern, and about half that many lined up against a nearby wall unmoving, presumably dead. Pierce noted the care that had been taken in arranging their bodies; they were all oriented in the same direction, limbs straightened against the onset of rigor mortis, and arms crossed on their chest. Their totem necklaces had been removed but Pierce caught a glint of something metallic in the mouth of each fallen creature—an obol, he realized.
The human remains had not received such elaborate treatment. The bodies of the fallen soldiers, too many for Pierce to count, had been piled up in the center of the chamber where the creatures were meticulously searching each one in turn. Pierce saw watches and rings torn from hands, and coins shaken from wallets. The loot was laid out carefully in a pile, and when a body yielded nothing more, it was dragged to another mound on the wall opposite from where the fallen creatures lay. Amid the uniforms of dead soldiers, Pierce saw other human remains—some in an advanced state of decay, some withered away to mummified husks but still clad in tattered jeans and hiking boots.
They’ve been doing this for a while, he realized. He had read up on the history of the Superstition Mountains during the long plane ride; every year, going back at least a century, a few hikers, many of them dreamers searching for the Lost Dutchman gold mine or some other bit of treasure from folklore, vanished in the desert wilderness. Here, it seemed, was the answer to that mystery.
It didn’t, however, explain the tetradrachm.
The creatures spent only a few more minutes searching the dead. When they had finished their grisly task, the collected items were gathered into what looked like a leather sack, carried by one of the creatures who already possessed a prodigious totem necklace. He barked stridently to the rest of the group, and then as if answering to a collective consciousness, they all fell in behind him and moved single file into another tunnel on the far side of the cavern.
Pierce knew that his only priority should have been finding a way out, but scientific discovery had always been his single motivating purpose. Teaching, lecturing and writing. Those were the things he had to do as a professional, but working in the field, uncovering mysteries so ancient that no one even knew they had been forgotten, was what drove him. He had wanted to be an archaeologist from the moment he had first watched Indiana Jones trekking through the jungles of Peru in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Given a choice between escaping danger or making a spectacular discovery, Pierce had only one guiding principle: What would Indy do?
As the last of the creatures vanished into the passage, George Pierce moved forward into the burial chamber.
20.
After driving cautiously along an unpaved Forest Service road for about five miles, headlights off to avoid drawing attention to their presence, King spied a distant blaze of light in the objective of his PVS-7. He stopped the Humvee in the middle of the road and got out for a better look.
The source of the illumination was, even at a distance, easily recognizable as another military compound. The camp was at least twice as large as the forward operating base where they had been taken after being captured, and was situated only a few hundred yards from the long asphalt ribbon that had to be US Highway 60. The size and close proximity to the highway suggested that this was probably the central command for the military exclusion zone. It was only when he peered through a pair of binoculars he’d found in the Humvee that King realized that this camp had also been attacked.
This base had faired better than the FOB from which he and Nina had escaped. Teams of soldiers were busy working to repair the damage, most of which had occurred along the northern edge. Closer to the center of the camp, a row of Humvees was lining up in readiness to venture outside the wire. King knew the patrol wa
s probably going to find out why the other base hadn’t reported in. It was time to get off the road.
Before he could return to the Humvee, he spied another vehicle approaching the camp from the east along a track that cut across the desert. With its blazing headlights, it was impossible to see the vehicle using night-vision, but King’s suspicion that it was not a military truck was confirmed when it pulled up to the base. In the glare of the portable generator-powered sodium vapor lamps, and aided by the binoculars, King saw a white SUV with an indistinct logo painted on the door.
The occupant, a balding man in civilian clothes, got out and was met by a several soldiers who emerged from a central tent. Curious, in spite of the need to find concealment, King watched the brief but animated exchange between the civilian and the officer in charge. It ended when the civilian angrily got back in his vehicle and left in a cloud of dust.
King hastened back to the Humvee where Nina waited impatiently. “Well? Do you have your answers?”
King turned a switch and the Humvee’s diesel engine rumbled to life. “No, but now I know who does.”
21.
“What is that?”
Nina glanced over at King, but in the darkened interior of the Humvee she could only distinguish a vague silhouette. His hand was outstretched, pointing. “What is what?”
“Oh, sorry. There’s a bunch of buildings. Some kind of mine operation?”
She nodded. “Must be the copper mine. It closed a couple months ago. Some big multinational bought them out and shut it down. Put a lot of people out of work. It was a profitable operation, but I guess the new owner thought they could make more by closing it down to drive up copper prices.”
“I wonder if there isn’t another explanation,” King said, thoughtfully.
Nina wasn’t sure what the economic hardships of a small mine had to do with the attacks by the Mogollon Monsters. It was evident that her new investigative partner saw a connection, but he had hardly said a word to her since leaving the road surreptitiously following the vehicle he had seen leaving the military camp. Nina hadn’t actually seen the SUV; they had been driving without lights, and she had only caught a few glimpses of the other vehicle’s tail lights in the distance.
Callsign: King - Book 2 - Underworld (A Jack Sigler - Chess Team Novella) Page 8
