Forsaken

by Michael McBride

  Forward Operating Base Atlantis was an aggregate of futuristic prefabricated buildings erected in a wagon-wheel formation. Each of the twelve buildings forming the outer ring were connected to each other and the mess hall in the center by hermetically sealed corridors. Like everything else, they were composed of multiple thin layers of steel, wood, foam, graphite, silicone, and aluminum, which combined to form a lightweight product with remarkable insulating properties. The base was fireproof, waterproof, and could withstand every conceivable threat Mother Nature could throw its way, shy of dropping two vertical miles of ice directly on top of it, anyway.

  When Morgan finally spoke, it was in little more than a whisper.

  “We just received a coded message from The Hanger.” It was the code name for Unit 51’s base of operations, which was located in a formerly abandoned underground bunker in a remote corner of Joint Base Langley-Eustis, near Washington D.C. “Intel intercepted another encrypted communication from south of the Mexican border.”

  “Where specifically?”

  “Impossible to tell. They bounced the signal off of nearly every satellite up there.”

  “Have we broken the encryption?”

  “Partially?”

  “And?”

  “Another reference to ‘the sleeping god.’”

  Barnett froze with the handle of the front door in his hand. He looked Morgan squarely in the eyes.

  “You’re certain?”

  Morgan nodded.

  It was the third such message their cryptanalysts back in the States had plucked from the ether using those particular words, for which there was no direct historical or cultural correlation. Unfortunately, gods had apparently become Unit 51’s domain, especially considering the first two references to this sleeping god had come in the days following the activation of the Antarctic pyramid and in the vicinity of sites of strategic importance.

  Barnett already had more than he could handle right now. He would have to deal with this development later, when he had a few free seconds to consider the implications of there being a second faction hovering around the periphery of his team’s investigations.

  The facility was quiet this time of day. The third shift was still asleep in the barracks, and the second shift was gathered in the daylight room, where they were subjected to a barrage of ultraviolet radiation designed to replicate the sun’s rays. Those who had the day off generally spent their time in the mess or the rec room, where there was a pool table, several big-screen TVs, and every video game console known to man.

  Barnett’s chambers were separate from all the others. The front half served as a command center, while the rear, which he rarely saw, functioned as his private quarters. He walked around his desk and plopped into the swiveling chair, in which he’d spent more nights than the bed mere feet away on the other side of the wall.

  Morgan closed and locked the door behind him. He took a seat in his customary chair opposite Barnett.

  “You saw the design on the security camera, didn’t you?” Barnett said. “The one Zeta painted in blood on the window.”

  Morgan nodded.

  “It’s a match, isn’t it?”

  “Right down to the smallest detail,” Morgan said.

  “You know what you need to do.”

  “It isn’t going to be easy.”

  “Trust me. It’ll be easier than you think.”

  Morgan shrugged.

  “I hope you’re right,” he said.

  “When was the last time I wasn’t?” Barnett asked.

  “I’ll take Stevens,” Morgan said. “When do we leave?”

  “You’re still here?”

  Morgan smiled and rose from his chair.

  “Get some sleep, chief. You look like crap.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment since I feel a whole lot worse than that.”

  “You keep biting people’s heads off and you’ll have a mutiny on your hands.”

  “If anything like what happened to Berkeley and Jonas happens to anyone else, that’s a forgone conclusion.”

  “Give these people more credit than that. They know what they signed on for.”

  “We need to figure out what’s down here before we put that to the test.”

  “Everything’s under control,” Morgan said, and headed for the door.

  “Be safe,” Barnett said.

  Morgan froze and held perfectly still for several seconds. He offered a quick glance back over his shoulder before exiting and leaving Barnett alone with his thoughts. He knew how it sounded, but something bad was coming.

  He could feel it in his bones.

  9

  JADE

  Teotihuacan, March 25

  It had taken Jade several hours and countless phone calls to track his current location, but once she’d done so, making the necessary arrangements had been easy enough. The drive from Musari to Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport had only taken a couple of hours, and the flight to Mexico City had been surprisingly short, all things considered. Now here she was, speeding across the Mexican countryside less than twenty-four hours after watching what she believed to be an alien drone commit suicide by crocodile, rushing to meet a man who had no idea she was coming and likely had no desire to see her, anyway.

  She hadn’t so much as spoken to Cade Evans since she’d boarded a plane in Argentina six months ago, bound for anyplace warm and far from the nightmare in Antarctica, but she was certain he was the only one who would be able to help her make sense of her situation. While she had always been fiercely independent and went out of her way to prove it, there was a part of her that was tired of trying to do this on her own.

  No one could possibly understand what she was going through, especially if she couldn’t. Before she’d allowed herself to be manipulated into going to AREA 51 in the first place, everything in her life had been orderly and compartmentalized. She’d not only been at peace with her place in the universe, she’d genuinely believed herself to be the master of her own destiny. Nothing made sense now, and the process of trying to fit the pieces of her shattered worldview back together was driving her inexorably out of her mind. What troubled her most wasn’t that she had tracked an alien being into the darkest depths of the African jungle, but the implications of having done so, which scared her nearly as much as the idea that she had somehow left herself vulnerable to the emotion of fear.

  The green-and-white Volkswagen Beetle taxi dropped her off at the visitors’ center, where she paid for admission and joined the tourists working their way through the claustrophobic stalls of the souvenir vendors, who shouted over each other in an attempt to sell what appeared to be variations of the same wares. She felt foolish rolling her travel suitcase behind her, but she hadn’t really taken the time to think any of this through. Had she, undoubtedly she would have talked herself out of coming to Teotihuacan at all.

  She’d expected Teotihuacan to be a remote archeological site like the Igbo bobbies in Nigeria, not a tourist trap within a day’s walk of one of the largest cities on the face of the planet. Once she was inside the complex and the tourists fanned out, though, she could almost envision this sprawling primitive metropolis as it must have been in its prime. Unfortunately, everywhere she looked were the ruins of ancient structures that reminded her of those submerged at the bottom of the lake in Antarctica, especially the massive pyramid in the far distance ahead of her. It rose from the horizon at the end of the wide gray path against the backdrop of a mountain that looked like another, even larger pyramid.

  The active excavation wasn’t hard to find. It was right in the middle of the main path, cordoned off with wooden posts strung with chicken wire, and partially shielded from view by two construction trailers. Despite being covered with dirt from head to toe, Evans was recognizable the moment he climbed from the enormous hole in the ground, where it appeared as though the Earth had collapsed in upon itself.

  He set a large wooden crate onto a stack with several others, looked up i
nto the cloudless sky, and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his gloved hand. After a moment, he shielded his eyes from the sun and turned in her direction. She offered a halfhearted wave, although she wasn’t sure he saw her until he did an almost comical double take and headed straight for her.

  Evans passed through the flimsy gate and stopped several feet from her. He cocked his head and appraised her for several seconds before smirking, pulling off his gloves, and proffering his hand.

  “Dr. Jade Liang,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d see you again so soon. Or, you know, ever again.”

  “This isn’t a social call.”

  “Knowing you, it never is.”

  She wanted to let him have it for even insinuating that he knew her, or anything about her, but bit her tongue because he was right.

  “Is there someplace we can go to talk?”

  He inclined his chin toward the trailer to his right, through the windows of which she saw several kids who barely looked out of their teens organizing stacks of bones on long wooden tables.

  “Hard to believe we were ever that young, isn’t it?” Evans said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Jade said, despite having been thinking the exact same thing.

  He took the handle of her suitcase without asking and rolled it toward the trailer.

  “You coming or what?”

  She followed him up a set of weathered wooden steps and into what could only be described as a sauna.

  “Jade?”

  She turned to see Anya Fleming striding toward her from the office at the back of the trailer with a beaming smile on her face, and felt an uncomfortable—and surprising—pang of jealousy. Jade internally kicked herself and made a mental note to figure out where that emotion was rooted and weed it out.

  “Oh, my God,” Anya said. “I can’t believe you’re here! Wait until you see what we found. You are not going to believe it. I mean, you probably would, of course, but it’s still . . .” Her words trailed off. Jade watched the younger girl’s expression run the gamut from excitement to curiosity to suspicion. “I’m not going back to Antarctica. Don’t even think about asking. It’s all I can do to get through a single day without what happened down there consuming my every waking thought.”

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Good,” Anya said, but there was no hiding the wariness in her voice. “Then why are you here?”

  Jade glanced at Evans, who sensed her discomfort and rescued her.

  “Show her the remains,” he said.

  This time it was Jade’s turn to blanch.

  “Not that kind of remains.” Anya giggled and lit up once more. “Just regular old human remains, although I’m sure you’d be proud of the way I pieced together the cause of death for this one.”

  She whirled and headed for the opposite side of the trailer, where the graduate students were lost in their work.

  “I didn’t expect to find her here with you,” Jade said, and cringed at the way the words sounded to her own ears.

  Evans cocked an eyebrow, but proceeded as though he hadn’t noticed.

  “She and I have been here since leaving Antarctica. You’d be amazed at what all we’ve found in these underground tunnels, which we might never have found had we not activated that pyramid.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?”

  “I’m not entirely sure I want to know.”

  Anya assumed the head of the examination table, which was essentially a sheet of warped plywood with improvised wooden legs, and waved her hands over the bones spread out across it. They’d been arranged anatomically as though the skeleton were lying on its back, only flattened into two dimensions since the ribs were disarticulated and the skull rested on its base.

  “Comminuted fracture of the mentum,” Jade said. “Complete absence of the odontoid process of the second cervical vertebra. The fracture line suggests anterior blunt-force trauma.”

  “He fell onto his chin and broke his own neck,” Anya said.

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “Yeah, well—”

  “What about the linear scratches in the cortices of the ribs here, here, here, and . . . here?” Jade asked.

  Anya crinkled her brow and walked around to the side of the table so she could better see what Jade was pointing at.

  “Those scratches are on the undersides of the ribs.”

  “The ventral surface, technically. As are those on the second through fifth lumbar vertebra and the iliac wings of the pelvis.” Jade made eye contact with Anya. “Are they not ritualistic, postmortem injuries?”

  “Not like any I’ve ever seen.”

  “What do you mean?” Evans asked. He leaned over Jade’s shoulder to get a better look.

  “There’s no sign of remodeling,” Anya said.

  “You hadn’t noticed them?” Jade said.

  “Give me a break. We only recovered them this morning.”

  “They should have been readily apparent from the moment you first saw them.”

  Jade saw the hurt on Anya’s face, took a deep breath, and forced herself to step back from the situation. As one of the world’s leading forensic anthropologists, she could read the COD of this individual in her sleep, but there were historical and cultural variables for which she couldn’t account.

  “What do you think could have caused these injuries?”

  “You’re asking me?” Anya said.

  “If I were to wager a guess, I would attribute the markings to the activity of scavengers.”

  “The only scavengers down there are insects.”

  “Based upon the preponderance of adipocere, there can’t be very many to leave so much flesh on the corpses.”

  “Then what else could have caused the scratches?”

  “I don’t know.” The words sounded foreign coming out of Jade’s mouth. “It almost appears as though something was trying to claw its way out.”

  Evans took her gently by the shoulder and turned her to face him. His eyes locked onto hers.

  “Maybe now would be a good time to tell us why you’re here.”

  10

  KELLY

  4 miles north of Salisbury

  What in the world was she doing here? Maybe there was a point in time when she could have convinced herself that Roche’s work was somehow an extension of her own, but the similarities had always been superficial at best. Sure, there had been some amazing coincidences between her work with standing waves and his with crop circle designs, especially when it came to combining their research to activate the ancient machine inside the pyramid. When it came right down to it, though, she was a graduate student in seismology and he was a . . . what was he?

  There really was no name for what he did, at least not one she’d be willing to say to his face. Before she’d been dragged out of her comfortable life back in Oregon and into this mess, she’d have thought he was positively out of his mind. And now? She didn’t know what she thought about him. All she knew was that she thought about him a lot.

  From where she sat on the rocky knoll overlooking the crop circle, she could clearly see him pacing the design through the withered leaves of the onion plants. He thought it looked like a map, although from where she sat, it reminded her more of a maze. And there he was, the man in the maze, a symbol memorialized throughout the American Southwest and attributed to the Tohono O’odham people, for whom it represented their creation, their rise to the surface from the underworld.

  She’d compared the design against every known sound waveform and hadn’t found anything remotely close to a match. The lack of symmetry basically precluded one from the start, but she’d at least needed to try to find one or she never would have been able to justify her presence here in England, let alone the need to withdraw from her classes and travel halfway around the world to work with a man eight years older than her and who reminded her of the most traumatic episode of her life.

  Roche caught her looking and w
aved. Despite the smile on his face, she could tell that the situation was eating him alive. He was a man who needed to know everything—to understand everything—and yet the more they learned, the less they knew. Unfortunately, they’d now crossed the line from the marginally scientific into the speculative, which meant that she either needed to pack up and head back home or abandon any pretense of professional collaboration.

  Her left hand was fretting—as her mother had called it—so badly she could barely manipulate her fingers well enough to close the file with the photographs of the primitive machine a hundred feet below her and then the laptop itself. The nervous tic made her look like she was jamming out on an air guitar, unless she invested an absurd amount of concentration into making it stop. It was only when she closed her hand into a fist and really thought about it that she realized she couldn’t recall another incident since the first morning Roche had been waiting for her outside of customs with a greasy paper bag full of croissants and an unguarded smile that betrayed the fact that he hadn’t been entirely certain she was going to come. Which made it that much harder knowing that she was going to have to walk down the hill and tell him that she was leaving.

  Kelly tucked her laptop into her backpack and slid it onto her shoulders as she stood. Professionally speaking, the diversion hadn’t been a complete waste of time. She’d recognized the potential for the primitive machine and gathered as much information about it as she could. While it had been constructed to utilize the flow of running water to produce a single burst of electrical current strong enough to essentially cook a design through the earth and into the field above it, the same principles could be applied to the generation of waves from subterranean seismic events to produce a constant stream of renewable energy, easily enough to power entire cities for the foreseeable future. She’d mentioned the idea to Dr. Davis Walters, her graduate advisor. With neither her knowledge nor her consent, he’d taken it to Dr. Edward Parsons, the Dean of Oregon State, who was already her biggest fan thanks to the funds Hollis Richards had funneled into the university to secure her services in Antarctica. Dean Parsons had personally contacted her this morning to let her know that the university would be more than happy to fully fund her research—at the cost of the patent, of course—and that he’d already arranged for a plane ticket to be waiting for her at Heathrow.