Forsaken

by Michael McBride

  Ordinarily, it spent the better part of the day using the long bones scavenged from its meals to carve petroglyphs into the walls, seemingly lost in its work, between episodes of pacing like a caged tiger. She’d studied the pictures of the dens in Egypt and the cavern miles above her head and had simply assumed that it was in the process of creating the same thing down here. Perhaps that was what it wanted her to think. For the last eight hours, however, it had done little more than crouch with its knees drawn to its chest on the far side of the cavern, hidden behind the stacked remains of its meals. It had only risen twice, both times to defecate in the corner. The way it sat now, so silent and still and yet undeniably sentient, she realized that something fundamental had changed inside of it. If it had been toying with them before, what was it doing now?

  Tess tucked her hair behind her ears, leaned forward, and pressed the button to activate the speaker. A clicking sound echoed from inside the chamber.

  Subject Z inclined its head toward the sound. It waited expectantly for several seconds before lowering its head once more.

  Tess wasn’t sure exactly what she intended to say. It had demonstrated a willingness to communicate with them, if only on its own terms. She wasn’t about to let it slam that door in her face, especially not when she thought she just might know a way in.

  “You’re not in there because he’s afraid of you,” she said. “You know that, right? You’re in there because he’s mad at you.”

  The creature cocked its head and a dark slash appeared on its face where its warm lips peeled away from its teeth and formed a hideous smile.

  “You’re in there because of what you did to his friend.”

  Uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uh.

  She’d heard recordings of that sound from inside the demolished research station during the bloodbath six months ago, but until now had been unable to elicit the response through the course of her work.

  “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  It cocked its head in a way that reminded her of Seldon, her childhood cat, and the way he would look at the balls of yarn in her mother’s sewing basket before swatting one onto the floor to play with it.

  “You even know where Hollis Richards is, don’t you? That’s the ace up your sleeve. I should tell you, though. Whatever leverage you think that gives you is worth somewhere between jack and squat. As far as the director’s concerned, his friend is already dead and you will die and rot in there.”

  Uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uh.

  Goosebumps raced up the backs of her arms. The intonation of the sound was different, almost as though it were attempting to communicate a different emotional response using the same basic phonemes.

  It rose from its haunches and crossed the cavern in strangely coordinated, halting movements. It had broken the tips from a row of stalagmites and used the stumps like stepstools so it could better reach the wall where it was currently working on the masterpiece it refused to let them see. Whatever part of it had once been human was now long gone. Even the subtlest unconscious movements were alien, almost as though its body were somehow affected differently by the laws of gravity and inertia. Its elongated cranium appeared too bulbous and heavy for its slender frame, necessitating a hunched posture, sharper curvature of its neck, and a means of locomotion that reminded her of skating, as though it sat backward into its haunches and flexed its knees to keep its center of gravity aligned with its pelvis and ankles. It balanced on the balls of its feet as though wearing invisible heels and sharpened the broken tip of a pig’s femur on a rough patch of rock, generating a faint bluish glow.

  A bolt of inspiration struck Tess. She accessed the digital memory of the system, highlighted the pixels corresponding to the shade of blue produced by the friction of the bone against the stone, and reset the thermal gradient window to that value, plus or minus three degrees. The resulting image showed everything below 86.3 degrees as black and everything above it as white, essentially washing out all detail and leaving only the bright shape of the creature against a seamless black backdrop. She then programmed the system to gather all data within that thermal range since its inception and plot it simultaneously.

  “Does it make you mad?” she asked. “Knowing that you’re at the director’s mercy?”

  “As . . . you . . . are . . . at . . . ours?”

  Its voice was deep and resonated from inside the chamber. The manner in which it spoke reminded her of trying to play a record backward.

  Tess gasped and released the button. Her heart was beating so hard and fast that she could barely breathe, let alone think straight. She concentrated on staving off the onset of hyperventilation and focused on slowing her racing thoughts. Her hand still trembled when she pressed the button again, but her voice came out sounding a whole lot more confident than she felt.

  “Is that what you believe? Don’t think for a moment that I’m impressed by this whole caged-animal act. I have a hunch you genuinely think that you’re only in there because you allow yourself to be, that you could get out of there any time you wanted.”

  It swiveled until it faced the window between them. The way it perched on the broken speleothem made it look like a gargoyle on a parapet.

  “I see the way you attack your meals when you know we’re watching, but I also see how you consume them when you think we’re suitably impressed by your aggression.”

  It cocked its conical skull first one way, then the other. She’d gotten it to speak once. She had to figure out how to do so again. Perhaps her mistake from the start had been to appeal to its intellect, to attempt to draw it into conversation, rather than appealing to its base emotions.

  “You want us to think of you as an animal because you believe that gives you the upper hand. You want us to underestimate you, to unconsciously concede any advantage that in reality you don’t possess. You’ve overestimated your worth to this project. You’re a curiosity at best, a cosmic parasite of no more importance in the grand design than a cockroach—”

  It moved with such speed that its thermal signature was a blur.

  Thud.

  The steel door shuddered.

  Tess threw herself backward from the console so quickly that she toppled her chair and nearly tripped over it.

  The impact momentarily staggered the creature. The thermal camera directed at the interior door showed an animal at the mercy of its savagery, beating and slashing at the barrier with such ferocity that it opened fresh wounds from its knuckles and nails. The smears glowed orange against the black door.

  Thuck.

  It struck the door with its forehead so hard that it stumbled backward, lost its balance, and landed squarely on its rear end. Ribbons of blood unspooled from an ugly gash and dribbled over the prominent ridge of its brow, down its gaunt cheeks, and swelled from the tip of its peaked nose.

  Uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uh.

  Droplets of blood burst from its mouth as it issued the horrible sound.

  After several long, silent moments, its chest deflated and it gingerly pushed itself back to its feet, stumbled forward, and pressed its forehead to the glass as though in an effort to see her. The blood on its face formed a ghostly orange image on the monitor. It reached up to the window and smeared the blood with its long fingers until it obscured the glass so she couldn’t see inside.

  An image appeared on the main monitor, signifying the completion of the task she’d programmed. It looked like thousands of blue lines drawn in every direction without any rhyme or reason. They cut through countless spectral white blobs, which overlapped one another like so many sunspots.

  She righted her chair, took a seat, and instructed the program to eliminate all points of data corresponding to thermal signatures greater than 89 degrees, which purged the white shapes from the screen. From there, all she had to do was digitally subtract the points of data generated in three-dimensional space that didn’t coincide with the wall and strokes that weren’t of overlapping nature and . . . voilà . . . she was left wit
h a digital re-creation of what the creature had been carving into the limestone.

  “Well, what do you know?” she whispered.

  She removed the transceiver from the charger on her console and pressed the button to speak. A crackle of static from the open line echoed from the tunnel behind her.

  “I need Barnett down here,” she said. “Right away. Tell him I think I’ve found—”

  Thud.

  She flinched at the sound and dropped the transceiver. She could see the creature on the monitor, its hands to either side of the window and its face flattened to the glass.

  “The . . . serpent . . . god . . . will . . . rise . . . from . . . the . . . dead . . . and . . . consume . . . you . . . all.”

  “Serpent god?” she said, but she knew it couldn’t hear her.

  It turned, walked to the rear of the cavern, and once more crouched in the same position as it had most of the day. Blood dripped from its forehead like the first drops of rain ahead of the coming storm.

  “None . . . of . . . you . . . will . . . survive.”

  13

  BARNETT

  Uncharted, FOB Atlantis

  “You’re certain it’s him,” Barnett said.

  “You tell me,” Dr. Desmond Bly said. “I’m not entirely convinced it’s even human.”

  The tunnel was barely wider than Barnett’s shoulders. He wouldn’t have ordinarily considered himself claustrophobic, but he’d never contemplated the idea of deliberately wedging himself into a crevice from which he wasn’t certain he could be extricated. It wasn’t what he thought of as a rational course of action. Of course, Bly wasn’t necessarily known for being rational, which was what had drawn Barnett to him in the first place. He needed someone completely lacking in fear to explore some of these passages, where even the remote drones seemed hesitant to go.

  “How much farther?” Moira asked from somewhere behind him.

  “Another thirty meters,” Bly called back.

  Barnett was annoyed by the American’s use of the metric measurement, but elected to say nothing since the distance sounded much shorter than a hundred feet, which he couldn’t help converting to fifteen body lengths. With his arms pressed against the sides of his head and neck, he felt as though he were beginning to slowly asphyxiate. It took all of his concentration to focus on his movements.

  Push with his toes; pull with his fingers.

  Push with his toes; pull with his fingers.

  The light mounted to the front of his helmet illuminated the limestone directly beneath his face. It was smooth and hard, yet looked almost like wax. The scratches were new and identical to those they’d seen in the ice cave. The trail of dried blood flaked with the slightest contact.

  “How could anything drag someone my size through here without his active participation?” Barnett asked.

  “You’d be amazed how pliable the human body becomes when even the unconscious control of skeletal muscles is suspended,” Moira said. “I once worked a case where they found a teenager’s remains wedged into a culvert barely larger than my thigh.”

  “Delightful,” Barnett said, and again returned his concentration to the mere act of moving himself in maddeningly small increments while staving off the not-entirely-irrational fear that any single inhalation could broaden his thorax to the point of becoming stuck.

  How Bly had even discovered this passage was beyond him. It wasn’t on any of the sounding maps and they were nearly a half-mile diagonally into the mountain from where they’d found Jonas’s body. He would have to see that more drones were dispatched into these warrens or they might never find where Hollis Richards had gone. As it was, with a six-month head start, he could have found his way onto any number of seafaring vessels that could have taken him to any port around the globe. In many ways, Richards had been like a father to him while his own had been traveling the world investigating strange and troubling phenomena he hoped would one day help him solve the mystery of his own grandfather’s death, mere miles away inside the remote Nazi communications station. While Barnett had agreed not to intervene in the events inside AREA 51 that culminated in Richards’s transformation, he owed it to him to put him out of his misery.

  Barnett felt a sudden influx of cool, stale air against his face when Bly crawled from the tunnel ahead of him. With it came a stench that nearly relieved Barnett of the breakfast he’d been eating when Bly tracked him down in the command center. He did his best to breathe through his mouth as he squeezed from the orifice, rolled onto his back, and used his arms to push off against the bare stone. The return of the flow of blood to his little fingers assailed him with pins and needles.

  He crouched, covered his mouth and nose with his hand, and took in his surroundings. The cavern was maybe the size of a backyard shed and not quite tall enough for him to stand fully erect. The stalactites forced him to crawl and cast moving shadows from his headlamp across the smooth walls.

  The remains were suspended from the stalactites in the middle of the chamber by a crisp brownish substance that reminded Barnett of the casing of a praying mantis’ egg sac. It deteriorated with the slightest touch and fell to the mess on the ground like ashes. The puddle of blood was dry and congealed with chunks of flesh and bone that had leaked through the bottom of the cocoon-like casing, which was black and distended with more of the same.

  Moira crawled from the egress behind him and nudged him out of her way. The flash from her camera strobed throughout the chamber, turning night to day and back again, as she captured the scene from all angles. She spoke into the recording device clipped to the collar of her jacket as she examined the body.

  “The remains are completely bound and immobilized. Enclosed by some sort of fibrous, teardrop-shaped sling. Connected to the ceiling and the surrounding stalactites in a fashion reminiscent of—Jesus—a spider’s web.”

  Barnett tilted his head and shined his light toward where she was looking. There was no other way to describe it. He revised his initial impression from a mantis’s egg sac to a paper wasp’s nest. Or maybe the nest of a cave swallow. There were distinct similarities to both.

  “Fetal position, breech, head up and between its knees,” Moira continued. “The skull is consistent in size and shape with Homo sapiens sapiens, which apparently needs to be specified down here. There is minimal residual soft tissue. Perhaps a swatch of desiccated scalp with either dark brown or black hair. An estimated ninety percent of the remains are concealed from view by unknown organic material, thus limiting structural evaluation.”

  “Is it Berkeley?” Barnett asked.

  “Your eyes work as well as mine. You tell me.”

  Barnett had hoped she’d recognized something that he hadn’t, because from where he stood, all he could see was a skull—red with dried blood and misshapen by tendons and connective tissue—that could have belonged to anyone. There were no identifying features, at least none that he could clearly see without doing what he dreaded doing next.

  “Do you have all of the pictures you need?” he asked.

  “I believe so. Why—?”

  Before she could even finish her question, he had his knife in his hand and with a flick of his wrist slashed through the bottom of the sling. The remains sloshed to the ground in a rush of partially congealed blood and bodily dissolution.

  Barnett scooted back, but not fast enough to keep it from flowing over his hands and covering the knees of his pants.

  “That’s my cue,” Bly said from behind him. He was little more than a mole-like silhouette squirming into the Earth by the time Barnett turned around.

  “You could have given me some warning,” Moira said.

  “Whatever did this to him is still down here. I kind of thought you might want to expedite the process to make sure you weren’t still here if it decided to come back.”

  “When you put it like that . . .”

  Barnett tugged at the torn sling and ripped off a piece with a sound like tearing carpet. The tensile strength w
as phenomenal in the direction parallel to the fibrous strands, and yet it peeled apart without much effort at all.

  “What do you make of this?” he asked.

  “They look like some sort of collagen bands, but without a microscope, all I can do is guess.”

  She knelt before the remains and traced them with her headlamp. The bones had remained articulated, largely because of the tendons and ligaments that had yet to decompose. Several had snapped upon impact, leaving the body partially splayed on its side, its appendages bent at unnatural angles. The victim’s fatigues were tattered and sopping with blood, but there was enough left of the insignia on the left breast pocket to identify him as a member of the Exploration Division.

  “It’s Berkeley.”

  Not that there had ever really been any doubt, but confirming the body belonged to a man they knew was missing was vastly preferable to determining it belonged to someone they had yet to discover had vanished.

  “Look at this,” Moira said. “Right there. On his rib cage. Linear scratches. Here, here, and here.”

  “That’s not the cause of death, though.”

  “No.” She shined her light on the exposed cervical vertebrae beneath Berkeley’s chin. “That is.”

  It looked like the bones had been repeatedly clamped in a vise until they shattered, leaving the tendons, connective tissue, and shriveled blood vessels to hold them together.

  “Ouch,” Barnett said.

  “And then some.”

  “So what’s the significance?”

  “Of the scratches in the bone? They were inflicted postmortem. Not even the slightest evidence of attempted healing. Same with these on his iliac crests down here, and even up here on his zygomatic arch and frontal bone.”

  “Apparently you’re going to have to explain it to me,” Barnett said.

  “We found him balled up inside that . . . whatever that is. Picture him with his legs drawn to his chest and his head between his knees.”

  He stared at the carcass for several seconds.