Forsaken

by Michael McBride

  Kelly loaded the thermos and rolls into her backpack, shouldered it, and struck off toward the adjacent field. The barbed-wire fence was broken in places and snarled with tumbleweeds in others. Roche held down the upper wire so she could climb over, then stepped across himself. He glanced back at the design and shivered. There was something about it that made him uncomfortable on a primal level.

  “Are you coming or what?” Kelly called.

  “Yeah,” he said, and turned away from what almost looked like a map from where he stood.

  The briars left burrs in his socks and jeans, no matter how hard he tried to avoid them. Most of the weeds were as tall as Kelly, and were it not for the dead oak tree that marked the entrance to the mine, they might never have found it. The majority of the other entrances had been sealed off by order of the Ministry of Defense, who missed what must have been a late addition by the RAF that wasn’t on the original blueprints.

  The hatch was a rusted sheet of iron with hinges that squealed so loud the sound echoed clear across the plains. The ladder inside was little more than iron rungs bolted to the bare limestone for the first twenty vertical feet, after which Roche and Kelly were forced to use their flashlights and an extreme amount of caution to pick their way down a steep talus slope lined with chunks of nearly petrified wood that could only loosely be considered stairs. The walls were resplendent with artwork, from designs with a strange, haunting beauty to graffiti featuring the kind of language that could make a sailor blush.

  Roche and Kelly were a hundred feet down by the time the ground leveled off and tunnels took form. They were smooth and solid, a feat accomplished by early quarrymen who took an inordinate amount of pride in their work, or at least that was what the librarian who first told him about this place had said.

  It was frighteningly easy to lose their bearings in the darkness, but they’d been down here so many times during the last week that they’d learned their route by rote. Left, right, left, left, right. Kelly had once said that the echo of their footsteps sounded like the ghosts of the people who’d worked down here a century ago. The image was somehow comforting and became how he chose to think of the scuffing sounds that terminated in the dead end ahead of them, where the cases filled with Kelly’s equipment were stacked under a tarp.

  They’d used ground-penetrating radar to detect the hollow space underneath the crop circle and had spent endless, grueling hours hammering through eight solid feet of stone with pickaxes. They first broke through last night, but had decided to wait until this morning to finish the job and explore what they believed to be a cavern of decent size. The idea had been that they could do so with clear heads after a good night’s sleep, yet Roche was certain Kelly hadn’t been able to close her eyes any longer than he had.

  “Would you care to do the honors?” she asked.

  “You trying to get out of working?”

  “I figure this is your moment.”

  “You’re going to wait until I get all the way through and then you’re going to run in there ahead of me, aren’t you?”

  She smiled, unscrewed the lid of the marmalade, and dipped her finger into the fruit. Slurped the bergamot from the tip of a fingernail with yellow and pink polish.

  “You know me too well.”

  When she lowered her hand, her fingers unconsciously tapped against her thumb. It was a nervous tic of sorts, which, now that he really thought about it, she’d hardly exhibited at all over the last few days.

  He hefted the pickaxe and drove it into the wall. Cracks radiated away from the small hole they’d made last night. He struck it over and over until the broken rock was shin-deep and he’d created a passage easily large enough to crawl through.

  True to her word, Kelly was already halfway through by the time he set aside the tool and flung the sweat from his brow. He might even have said something snarky had he been able to think clearly. As it was, he felt as though he were watching himself enter the cavern from a great distance, somehow a witness to the moment rather than a participant.

  Kelly stood at the bottom of the slick stone slope, silhouetted by the beam of her flashlight, which reflected from something metallic. He heard what almost sounded like whispering, but by the time he grabbed his own light and followed her into the darkness, he recognized the sound for what it truly was.

  Running water.

  The aquifer was barely visible through a manmade hole in the cavern floor, above which someone had installed a waterwheel carved from a single piece of stone. The subterranean river was so far down that his light barely reflected from its smooth surface. It would have to rise a good ten feet to be able to spin the paddles of the waterwheel, which was connected to a series of cogs that rotated a massive lodestone ring around an iron post that terminated against the stalactite-riddled ceiling. The copper wire wrapped around it was bluish-green with oxidation.

  “It’s just like the machine inside the pyramid in Antarctica,” Kelly said.

  Roche studied the ancient contraption. In many ways it seemed even more sophisticated than the power source that activated the gene-altering chamber. The height of the waterwheel suggested it would only spin under specific environmental conditions that caused an absurd rise in the groundwater, rotating the lodestone ring around the iron post and inducing an electrical current in the copper wire. Flowstone had accreted over the toroid at the top, absorbing it into the roof of the cavern. In fact, the layers of minerals were so thick that he could barely see the copper design radiating outward from the giant silver ring.

  “The electricity passes from the copper wire to the toroid,” Roche said, “which distributes it across the design wired into the ceiling.”

  “That charge is then conducted to the surface by the silicon dioxide in the greensand and the sheer volume of water retained in the limestone, producing a ton of heat and essentially steaming the crops directly above us.”

  “You’re saying that someone built this down here thousands of years ago with the sole intention of producing an image on the surface that could only be seen when the aquifer was running at the exact right height.”

  “Of course it sounds silly when you say it like that.”

  “It sounds ridiculous no matter how you say it.”

  “More ridiculous than using these designs to activate an ancient pyramid buried under the Antarctic ice cap?”

  She smirked and spun the waterwheel to make the lodestone ring turn. A faint current crackled in the copper wire.

  “Do that again,” Roche said.

  She spun the waterwheel, faster this time. Bluish bolts of energy rippled through the ceiling.

  “Keep going,” he said, and sprinted back toward the entrance.

  The walls blew past in the darkness as he nearly outraced his light. Right, left, right, right, left.

  Up the slope and the ladder.

  Out the chute.

  The briars raked at his face as he sprinted toward the onion field. Hurdled the fence. Hit the ground running.

  The heat from the electricity coursing through the greensand formed a carpet of fog, through which he watched the exact same design re-form in the crops before his very eyes.

  This time there was no doubt.

  It was definitely a map.

  4

  JADE

  Benue River Delta, 15 miles south of Musari, Nigeria

  Dr. Jade Liang slogged through waist-deep water that reeked of sulfur and rot. She kept her emerald-green eyes on the banks and the overhanging palm and fern branches for venomous snakes. The Benue River Delta was positively alive with them, and the nearest treatment facility was in Kaltungo, so far away she’d be long dead before arrival. The jungle was so dense she would never have been able to pick her way through it, even if it meant sparing her the scourge of the mosquitoes humming around her head. Much as she loathed them, she vastly preferred them to the black flies that had been the bane of her existence for the last week. They didn’t sting, but after crawling all over the corps
es, their little feet transferred all sorts of vile germs and the products of decomposition onto everything they touched.

  Upon returning from Antarctica, she’d taken a sabbatical from her teaching position at the University of Colorado Medical School, sold her townhouse, and volunteered her services on a full-time basis to the United Nations’ International Criminal Court and its investigation into crimes of genocide by Boko Haram, the de facto western branch of the Islamic State. She justified the decision to herself as doing her part to combat evil and injustice, but when it came right down to it, whether under the auspices of the U.N. Criminal Court or not, she’d still be wading through this swamp in search of answers to the questions that had plagued her for the last six months.

  When she was first dispatched to Musari, Nigeria, she’d arrived with a full contingent of U.N. peacekeepers to find the village still burning and its inhabitants piled in a mass grave. Among them she’d discovered the body of a young woman with a strangely elongated cranium, which she’d written off as a product of artificial cranial deformation of the kind practiced by many primitive societies, until she encountered the same mutation on a living specimen in Antarctica, caused by what she now believed to be the spontaneous evolution of mankind. The activation of the machine inside the pyramid submerged beneath the ice had triggered a process by which their chief engineer, Dr. Dale Rubley, had undergone a frightening physical transformation when microscopic organisms of extraterrestrial origin infiltrated his isolation suit, altered his DNA, and subsumed his physical form. The resultant creature would have killed them all were it not for the intervention of a quasi-military group called Unit 51, about which she still knew next to nothing.

  Several weeks had passed before she was able to compartmentalize the events that transpired in Antarctic Research, Analysis, and Experimentation Station 51—AREA 51—and she realized what should have been painfully obvious the entire time. For the girl she’d found in the mass grave to have exhibited the same characteristics as Dale Rubley, she either needed to have undergone the same physical metamorphosis or have descended from others who had, which meant that somewhere out here in this infernal jungle there was potentially an alien species capable of unlocking the secrets of human evolution.

  It was while investigating the murder of sixteen missionaries outside of Lafia that she first heard the rumors. The victims had been “necklaced”—a horrific means of execution by which the victim’s hands were tied behind his back and a tire filled with gasoline was hung around his neck and set ablaze. It sometimes took as long as twenty minutes for the poor souls to die as the flames ate through layer after layer of flesh, which must have felt like an eternity to the lone survivor, who battled through unendurable pain to tell investigators about the nineteen women who’d been abducted with him and the abuses to which they’d been continually subjected. When pressed on where they’d been taken, he could remember only that his captors had referred to their camp as “near the bobbies,” but he’d died before he could clarify what that meant.

  It took peacekeepers forty-eight hours to find the abandoned camp, along with the remains of thirteen of the girls, in a clearing near the Ankwe River. While examining the victims and documenting their horrific wounds, which suggested that their last twenty-four hours on this earth had been a living hell, she’d overheard her U.N. escorts discussing which way the caravan of perpetrators might have gone while studying the most recent satellite imaging. Several of the aerial views had shown stone mounds nearly concealed beneath the thick canopy that she might have dismissed were she not able to extrapolate their contours into perfect circles. It wasn’t until that precise moment that she understood what the dead missionary had meant by “bobbies.” Most Nigerians spoke a kind of pidgin English not unlike the Creoles in Louisiana. The term was slang for a woman’s breasts.

  Local authorities in Yola had tracked the movements of the Boko Haram contingent into the Mandara Mountains, which suggested they were either holing up in the volcanic range or trying to outrun their pursuit into Cameroon. The peacekeepers had been dispatched that very evening, but she’d elected to stay behind in hopes of getting a better look at these so-called bobbies.

  Jade was beginning to think she’d either misread the map or misinterpreted what she thought she’d seen. She’d been navigating this maze of channels for more than four hours now and was starting to wonder if she’d somehow lost her way. For the structures to have been visible through the canopy, they had to have been at least fifty feet—

  A crackling sound from the underbrush lining the bank to her right.

  She drew her hijab across her face with one hand and thrust the other into her jacket. Closed her fist around the grip of the Ruger LC9 handgun in the sling under her armpit. The semi-automatic pistol was almost comically small, but fit her tiny hand, barely bucked when she fired it, and could punch a hole in an attacker large enough to toss a softball through.

  A crocodile slid from the bushes and vanished into the murky water. It reappeared several seconds later, maybe twenty-five feet ahead of her. She held perfectly still and watched it drift away from her on the weak current until it rounded the bend.

  She realized she wasn’t breathing and gasped for air.

  What was she doing out here? There were any number of things just waiting to kill her and there wasn’t a single person on the planet who knew where she was. And why hadn’t she told anyone? Because no one would have believed her. She was starting to wonder if she believed herself.

  Jade nearly had herself convinced to turn around when she saw it through the trees. At first it looked like little more than an outcropping scoured in places to the bare granite by the wind, but she was able to push through a stand of tree ferns and onto dry ground to get a better look. It was easy to see why they were called the bobbies. There appeared to be six of them in all, although only two of them clearly stood apart from the jungle, which had grown over them in such a way as to conceal all but their shape. Each was built from concentric rings of stacked stones that grew smaller and smaller until they reached a peak reminiscent of a nipple. The levels had eroded through the years and now formed what could have been mistaken for oddly terraced piles of rock had she not known exactly what she was looking at.

  They were pyramids.

  She was only peripherally aware of the Nsude Pyramids, built by the Igbo people far to the southwest. Many archeologists speculated they were even older than those in Egypt, but that definitely wasn’t her field of expertise. All she knew was that she was a hard day’s walk from where she’d found the remains of the girl with the elongated cranium, standing at the base of a pyramid hidden in the jungle, and didn’t believe in coincidences.

  Jade skirted the bask of crocodiles sunning themselves on the bank and rounded the far side of the pyramid. It was only when she noticed the crunching sounds of her footsteps on the detritus that she recognized the complete and utter lack of birdsong.

  She looked up into branches so still it seemed as though even the wind held its breath. There were no lizards staring down at her or monkeys chittering from their enclaves. No warblers or sunbirds flitting through the canopy. Not even a viper camouflaged among the dangling leaves.

  A faint buzzing sound beckoned from somewhere ahead of her. She knew exactly what it was.

  Jade ducked underneath a fallen tree and fought through saplings and vines all vying for the same light gap. Her pulse thumped so hard in her temples that she could barely hear the flies.

  The muddy ground became choppy with what looked like footprints, and a path of sorts formed where there had been none before. The vegetation grew so thick she had to crawl, and for the first time she caught a whiff of the awful stench lurking beneath the intermingling scents of blossoms, moss, and stagnant water. The puddles in the muddy tracks were brick red and roiling with mosquito larvae.

  The path led to a twisted tree trunk that angled up the slope of the concealed pyramid. Some sort of animal had excavated a burrow underneat
h the trunk and tunneled beneath the crumbled granite.

  Jade removed the Maglite Mini LED flashlight from her jacket pocket and shined it into the hole. The beam reflected from standing water that terminated against a rock abutment nearly a dozen feet in. The smell emanating from inside was more than she could bear, even with the hijab covering her mouth and nose.

  She took a deep breath before she could change her mind and squirmed into the burrow. The water was startlingly cold and filled with organisms flagellating beneath the surface. In her mind, they were all snakes preparing to strike her, but she could only move so fast while keeping her light and gun above the surface. The tunnel ended at the base of a vertical chute maybe five feet tall, above which was a space reminiscent of the inside of an igloo. Spiderwebs covered the domed ceiling, although not so completely that she couldn’t see the intricate pattern of stars carved into the granite. She contorted her upper body and managed to get her legs underneath her. Cautiously stood and shined her light into the inner sanctum.

  The flies took flight from the remains on the ground and cast amoeboid shadows across the walls. The body was still articulated and undeniably human, unlike the majority of the bones heaped against the walls, which were so jumbled it was impossible to tell where one ended and the next began, let alone to which species they’d once belonged. Judging by the pelvis, the body was female, and likely one of the missionaries left behind at the abandoned camp mere miles away. It had been stripped of muscle and flesh to the connective tissue and knots of tendons at the joints.

  The engorged flies ignored her and returned to their meal.

  “We . . . know . . . you,” a deep, disembodied voice said from directly behind her.

  Jade screamed and spun around. Her flashlight reflected from a pair of eyes before they retreated into a dark recess.