by Brian Hodge
Holding back his troops, he thrust the butt of his M-16 against the floor, which solidly deflected the blow. He took a tentative step forward, found the surface steady and unyielding, and with a few long strides, crossed the floor and slid up next to the yawning black rectangle.
The rest of the rats followed, several with their heavy-duty flashlights in hand. The first pair leaped into the darkness, lights blazing, the second pair covering them with their M-16s. Still no enemy fire.
As flashlight beams played wildly on gray stone walls, Martin stepped through the uncannily tall door, averting his eyes from the lights to keep from being temporarily blinded. The walls rose higher than the beams could reach, all bare stone, cracked in places, splotched with green-gray mold. The air reeked of mildew and something vaguely sulfurous. He counted six walls, all of varying widths, and two arched portals, both nearly as tall as the main doorway. No furnishings, no adornments—nothing to indicate that this place had been used by human beings for a very long time. However, the distinctive pressure at the back of his neck, a sure warning of an enemy presence nearby, grew more insistent.
He tapped the nearest man—PFC Cortland. “Private, let’s have a look through one of those doors, shall we?”
Cortland nodded and crept to one of the archways, flashlight in his right hand, the muzzle of his M-16 balanced on his forearm. At Martin’s signal, he crouched and quickly thrust his flashlight through the opening. When the yellow-white beam fell upon the thing in alcove to his right, Martin’s heart almost stopped.
For a disturbing second, he thought it was alive: a twenty-foot-tall wormlike beast rising from a broad, bulbous base, numerous whip-like tails curling around it, multiple rows of needle-like spines running the entire length of its body. Atop a gnarled, spindly stalk that protruded from the base, a bright, cyclopean, sapphire eye glared at him with the disconcerting illusion of sentience. When he took a few steps toward it, the glittering eye appeared to follow him.
“God awmighty,” came a low whisper from behind him, and he glanced back to see Sergeant Samuel Barrow leaning in to study the grotesque figure. “That is one ugly motherfucker.”
“Not that I’m an expert on local culture,” Martin said, “but this looks like a whole lot of nothing I’ve ever seen anywhere.”
Mesmerized, Barrow knelt to peer at the brilliant, egg-sized stone. “How much would you say that’s worth, Lieutenant?”
“Doesn’t matter, since it’s not going anywhere, Sergeant.”
Barrow snorted. “Just askin’.”
Martin was about to order Barrow to move on when the first blast of gunfire rang from beyond the chamber. He automatically ducked and swiveled, just in time to see the strobing flashes of machinegun fire in the anteroom, the reports shattering the silence of the enclosed space like the clashing of deafening cymbals. He scrambled toward the towering archway just as the body of PFC Guiliano hurtled past him like a broken marionette and struck the floor with a moist, sickening thud. A long, arrow-like shaft protruded from the young man’s neck, and it dawned on him then that the gunfire had come only from M-16s.
Through the ringing in his ears, he made out Sergeant Collins shouting, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
Confusion reigned as men whirled uncertainly, evidently deprived of their targets. Martin clambered through the portal and grabbed Collins by the shoulder. “What the hell happened?”
“The bastards are in here! They just appeared out of nowhere and cut loose with—something. Arrows, blowguns, something. Quiet as hell. But they were in here all along.”
A few of Sieber’s men had rushed in from outside, but Collins held the rest of them back. “Stay put. If there are more outside, we don’t want them getting in here.”
Then, from the adjacent portal, a deep thrumming sound, like a heavy engine warming up, reverberated from the building’s depths. Martin peered through the arched opening and for a second glimpsed a distant flicker of light—a reflection perhaps—as something large but indistinct began moving slowly toward them.
“Don’t know what that is, sir,” Collins said, “but I’ll make book it ain’t about to wish us good day.”
“Let’s pull back and pin them inside,” he said. “We’ll see how this big rock candy bastard holds up to a couple of thousand-pounders.” He nodded suggestively at the ceiling.
“You heard the man!” Collins sang out. “Fall back to our original positions. Squad order. Move it, move it!”
Martin glanced around and realized Sergeant Barrow had never emerged from the secondary chamber. He quickly thrust his head back through the opening, realizing too late how careless he had just been; he was almost surprised when nothing streaked out of the darkness to spear him. Beyond Guiliano’s prone, twisted body, he could discern the errant sergeant’s back. Barrow was kneeling as if in prayer before the tall, monstrous-looking statue in the alcove.
“Sergeant, let’s move. Now!”
“Just coming, sir,” came the low, gruff voice. The figure straightened and ambled unconcernedly into the dim light that shone through the archway. “No worries, Lieutenant. Everything’s under control.”
“Good. You can carry Guiliano’s body out of there. Make it fast, Barrow; I reckon we’ve got ten seconds before anyone left inside this place ends up in a few more pieces than he’s accustomed to.”
Like a gorilla lifting a sack of bananas, Barrow hoisted the dead man to his shoulders and lumbered through the door. With a mocking leer, he growled, “Come on, Lieutenant, time’s a-wasting.”
Martin saw a discarded flashlight on the floor, picked it up, and on a whim, shone it into the dark room Barrow had just vacated. As the deep, pulsing beats of the approaching engine bore down upon him with increasing intensity, he stood peering at the thing he had come to think of as the demon god, and his anger began to seethe.
The giant, sapphire-hued stone—the god’s eye—was gone.
Now, he was forced to turn and face the heavily thrumming apparatus—for machine it must be—which at any moment would burst from the dark opening into the anteroom. Something was moving slowly up the passage, just beyond the range of his beam: an erratically writhing shape, still indistinct but larger than a man, issuing deep thudding and chugging noises like a locomotive.
He felt a sudden tug on his bicep and whipped his head around to see Sergeant Collins glaring at him in warning. “Come on, Lieutenant. Standing your ground don’t look like the best plan today.”
Before he could react, he felt a bone-numbing impact and found himself hurtling awkwardly through the tall portal, into the blistering sunlight. He landed heavily on his back, his breath exploding through his mouth, his helmet clanking sharply against a stone in the tall sawgrass. Without pausing to catch his breath, ignoring the God-awful pain at the back of his head, he struggled to his feet, just in time to see an obviously wounded Sergeant Collins crawling through the doorway toward him.
At that moment, his eyes began playing tricks on him. He knew they were because the serpentine cables that sprang like grappling hooks out of the darkness, instantly encircling Collins’s body and dragging him back inside, precisely resembled the spiny appendages of the sculpted demon god in the alcove. Collins cried out in pain and disbelief, his hands scrabbling desperately but vainly at the rough stone floor; then his body vanished into the rectangular black maw. The long, mortal wail that rang mournfully out of the darkness was silenced a moment later by a sharp, wet ripping sound.
Gunfire erupted around him, and half a second later, two of his men yanked the pins on a pair of grenades. The cry went up—“Fire in the hole!”—and Martin lowered his head as the pineapples sailed into the abyss beyond the door. Three seconds later, with a gut-wrenching boom, a huge blossom of orange flame roared from the opening, sending a hail of prickling shards over the crouching men. Then the tilted porte-cochere groaned like a dying elephant and slowly toppled, throwing up a thick cloud of gray dust, which quickly cloaked the structure. Inside th
e building, something—the ceiling of the anteroom, perhaps—collapsed heavily, sending a tremor through the ground beneath Martin’s feet.
As the smoke and dust slowly dissipated on the hot breeze, he saw that rubble now completely choked the building’s entrance. The upper third of the twenty-foot portal was all that remained exposed, dribbling a pale, thin streamer of smoke and dust.
“Imagine that—with just a coupla pineapples,” came Barrow’s voice, and Martin turned to glare at the smug-looking sergeant. A coating of grime rendered his simian features barely recognizable.
“Seems to me,” Martin said, almost surprised by his own vehemence, “I made mention a while back that what we found in that place was to stay there.”
Barrow scowled incredulously at him and waved a hand at the destruction. “Don’t tell me, sir, that with all this, you’re gonna get riled over a friggin’ trinket?”
"It's not the trinket," Martin said, his anger stoked by the sight of the sergeant's repugnant face. "It's when I tell you something, you better listen and listen good. We've got men dying out here. If your selfishness costs somebody else his life, I'll throw your ass back in that hole myself. Is that clear?"
Slack-jawed, Barrow slowly nodded. But if he intended to respond, he never got the chance. Like black lightning, something coiled around his legs, ripped them quickly out from under him, and began dragging him toward the smoking ruin. With a cold thrill of dread, Martin saw that a long, spiny tendril the color of gunmetal had snared Barrow and was now retracting into the partially blocked opening. He bolted after the writhing figure, raising his M-16 in one hand and popping off several shots into the black mouth, from which several more spiked cables whipped forth like living barbed wire.
Now one of the appendages slithered down the rubble toward him, its tip rhythmically tapping the ground like the questing tongue of a snake. He drew to a halt and quickly backed out of harm’s way, his eyes lifting to meet Barrow’s last regretful gaze. One of the sergeant’s hands slid into his shirt, dug for a second, and then emerged holding a small green bundle, which he wound up and hurled into the air. As the package landed with a thud right at Martin’s feet, Barrow disappeared without so much as a whimper into the leering black gullet.
Martin scooped up the canvas ammo pouch, knowing what he would find inside, and stuffed it into a deep thigh pocket. He unhooked a grenade, yanked the pin, and heaved it with all his strength into the opening. Then he spun and hauled at top speed away from the advancing arms of the enemy, calling out for the platoon to fall back to the tree line. Around him, soldiers scurried for cover, and then the world exploded again, the shock wave washing over his back like a fiery sirocco.
By the time he reached the cover of a huge teak tree, the world had fallen eerily silent. One of his hands dipped into his thigh pocket and withdrew the ammo pouch that Barrow had tossed to him. He held it up discreetly, lifted the flap, and inspected the glittering shape that hid within.
The egg-shaped jewel seemed to radiate its own light—a brilliant electric blue generated deep within its cold, crystalline heart. Captivatingly beautiful, he thought; it had certainly captivated Sergeant Barrow. Martin knew that, back home, Barrow had two little boys, one of which had been born just before he had left for his first tour of duty.
As of today, they had no father.
PFC Cortland ambled up to him, sweat pouring down his youthful face. Martin stashed the stone back in his pocket and made himself forget it existed. Cortland shook his head wearily.
“Charlie’s gotten damned clever, ain’t he, sir?”
Martin nodded ruefully, his eyes locked on the towering house of deadly secrets. In fifteen minutes, on his order, a flight of Thuds would be knocking it down like a house of cards. “Yeah, private, I would. Mighty damned clever indeed.”
Day One
Chapter 1
Driving on the interstate, the casual traveler rarely engages two synapses reflecting on what lies beyond the forests of billboards, traffic signs, food and fuel plazas, viaducts, floodlights, and orange barrels, the prevalence of which would suggest that civilization’s mantle extends well into those remote, sparsely populated corners of the United States that many have forgotten still exist. Even when dusty prairies, broad rivers, rolling hills, or forested mountains dominate the vistas surrounding our asphalt and concrete conduits, there is always the sense that little truly changes from one place to another. When one exits onto an unfamiliar side road, seldom will his confidence of locating an Exxon, a McDonald’s, and perhaps a Wal-Mart be shaken for very long. And when one’s adult perceptions have been shaped almost exclusively by the urban sprawl along the western shores of Lake Michigan, the expectation of a vast human footprint on any given locale comes all the more honestly.
It was the odd, almost overwhelming sense of isolation, rather than the gravity of his current undertaking, that dominated Russell Copeland’s musings as his city-bred Lexus bounded roller coaster–like up, down, and around the narrow, winding thread of West Virginia 201—a highway in name only, its surface so pitted and potholed that his car’s recent alignment had been shot quite thoroughly to hell. He met traffic infrequently, which was fortunate, since avoiding a disastrous sideswipe meant veering so far to the right that he risked plummeting down steep, rocky embankments or plowing into close-pressing trees whose roots had actually burrowed up through the asphalt. The shadows beneath the dense canopies of oak, walnut, sycamore, and pine seemed less the product of obstructed sunlight than sovereign, burgeoning masses of darkness that teemed with unseen life, the sounds of which occasionally gusted in through his open windows. At least the early spring air smelled earthy and sweet, and certainly cleaner than the cloying, almost sickly odor that permeated the forest preserves around Chicago.
So far, the West Virginia experience felt nothing like a homecoming, which rather surprised him, for as a boy, he had lived very near here, at the edge of a now-defunct dolomite quarry. His dad, a stone-processing company executive, had earned a respectable salary for his day, so his family fared much better than the majority of the local population, whose existence could be described politely as modest (or more bluntly as squalid). Still, Byston County’s sole private school had provided young Russell with a more than solid education, and when it came time to choose his own calling, he fled as far from rural West Virginia as possible, into a field that ensured a permanent escape from these desolate, gloomy backwoods. His specialty was electronics and, for the last half-dozen years, electronic security. Having qualified for high security clearance, he now contracted primarily with the government, recovering sensitive data from confiscated computer systems. The field excited him, and the money wasn’t bad.
Until recently, he had actually been happy.
Until his final blowout with the lunatic Megan…
Judging from the unsightly hovels, decrepit-looking gas stations (some of which still bore the trademarks of oil companies that no longer existed), and slovenly commercial establishments, little had changed overtly since his final escape from Silver Ridge. Still, the years had effected certain alterations on the socio-economic landscape; most of the quarries were closed, the coalmines cleaned up, the forests largely protected from ravaging by timber companies. Over time, the locals had slowly shifted from one brand of poverty to another—though they nowadays suffered in relatively good health, since Medicaid offered the nonworking poor marginally better benefits than the working poor had ever known.
A stark reminder of how far he was from home, in the thirty miles since Elkins, he had not passed a single familiar fast-food restaurant; only a couple of nondescript burger joints and a diminutive shack called The Chicken House, whose sputtering neon sign boasted that their birds were fed on nothing but the finest yellow corn. Somehow, he didn’t think he was sold.
Even when he drove into the town proper, he found few recent commercial developments and not a single residential subdivision jammed with expensive, clapboard shoeboxes like the ones that
mushroomed on virtually every spare acre from Illinois to Ohio. As seemed fitting, the tiny downtown sprang from a 1940s-vintage postcard, every business locally owned and bearing the name of its proprietor. The bank and the department store belonged to the Bullards, the hardware store to the Kolodnys, the garage to the Hobarts, and the pharmacy to the Wamplers. There was also a church (Baptist, naturally), a post office, a courthouse, and a fire station, none of which exhibited the first sign of life on this late Sunday afternoon. Having long ago closed the book on this part of his past, he had only the vaguest recollections of any of these places, and in his memory, they needed considerably less paint and fewer replacement windows.
At the next intersection, Greenhill Road, he turned left and drove another mile or so, now passing small but well-kept houses with very green, immaculately trimmed yards, flagstone walkways, and expensive cars out front—obviously the seat of whatever money remained in the community. Knowing he must be nearing his destination, he checked the house numbers against his scribbled directions. Around a curve, past a neat, stone-walled arboretum, and there it was, tucked into a grove of lush white pines, barely visible through the boughs: his sister Lynette’s house. His mind finally snapped back to his reason for being here, and he involuntarily slowed the Lexus to a crawl, a token gesture of respect for the dead, before turning into the driveway.
In his Evanston neighborhood, garages were often larger, but Lynette’s house blended pleasantly into its surroundings; a bit cramped, but well kept and reasonably comfortable-looking. Like many of the nearby homes, it resembled a miniature Tudor, with a pair of gables, half-timberings, and an ornate chimney, though an incongruous screened-in porch jutted awkwardly from the left side of the house. To the right, just beyond the cluster of evergreens, a similar house pressed so close to the property line that a breezeway could have easily connected the two. He parked behind Lynette’s silver Grand Am, slid out of the driver’s seat to the sound of joints creaking, and paused for a moment to summon his nerve before venturing toward the door.
