Forsaken

by Michael McBride

  Now was the time.

  Barnett clicked on Dr. Liang’s beacon, which opened her personal data file, and instructed the computer to connect him via the video calling feature on her cell phone. He imagined her pulling her ringing phone from her pocket, staring at the unknown name and number, and debating whether or not to answer—

  “This is Dr. Liang.”

  The expression on her face morphed from curiosity to confusion to resignation when she saw his face. She closed her eyes and he could almost hear her debating whether she should just hang up. While this was amusing, he was running short on time and even shorter on patience.

  “I have to admit I was more than a little surprised to find you in Mexico, Dr. Liang,” he said. “And believe me when I say that’s not something that happens very often.”

  She opened her eyes and looked back at him from half a world away. Her eyes were such a bright shade of green they appeared digitally enhanced and seemed to bore straight through him.

  “How did you find me?”

  “The GPS beacon in your cell phone.” While it was a lie, he could have just as easily tracked her that way and she knew it. “It’s funny to think that the American people rejected the idea of government registration, yet rushed right out and paid their hard-earned cash for the right to carry their own personal tracking devices.”

  Her footsteps echoed from what sounded like a plywood floor as she exited the trailer, presumably to distance herself from anyone who might overhear. The blazing Mexican sun created reddish highlights in her black hair.

  She stared at him for several moments before speaking. It was her turn to catch him off guard.

  “It’s still alive, isn’t it?”

  While he prided himself on his ability to be prepared for any given situation, her question had come from so far afield that he hesitated before replying, giving her all the answer she needed. There was no point in denying it now.

  “How did you know?”

  Jade nodded and glanced off-screen, as though communicating with someone.

  “You should have told us,” she said.

  “That information is available on a need-to-know basis, and you simply didn’t need to know. So again I ask, how did you know?”

  She shook her head.

  “You didn’t think that was something we needed to know?”

  “Does this knowledge have anything to do with the reason you’re currently in Mexico?”

  This time it was her turn to hesitate.

  “We’re on the same side, Dr. Liang,” he said. “Why don’t we just lay all of our cards on the table so we can dispense with this maddening tête-à-tête?”

  He caught a glimpse of Dr. Evans passing behind her in full scuba gear before she covered her camera with her palm. When she uncovered it again, she was in the shade of a wall composed of giant gray stones. She sighed and seemed to deflate of her customary bluster.

  “I encountered a drone in Nigeria.”

  Barnett sat straight up in his chair.

  “You what?”

  “Remember how I found that girl with the cranial deformation in Musari?”

  Of course he did. He remembered every detail from her initial dossier to her debriefing aboard the Aurora Borealis.

  “You went back in the hope of determining whether that little girl you found in the mass grave was an anomaly or part of a larger population.”

  She nodded. There was no need to explain. He understood how her mind worked. In many ways, they were the same—focused, driven, indomitable. There was no way he would have been able to let it go, either.

  “And you found exactly what you were looking for.”

  “Yeah . . . A drone like Scott and Rayburn. Like Richards.”

  Armand Scott and Paul Rayburn were engineers who’d been stationed at AREA 51. They’d been infected by the alien organisms and transformed into drones that helped Subject Z hunt the men and women inside the station.

  “And it told you that our subject was still alive?”

  “It said to ‘free us’ and then waded into a river full of crocodiles.”

  Dr. Clarke had been right about their ability to communicate and about there being others out there, which meant that she was undoubtedly also right about it sending messages to them. It couldn’t be coincidental that Dr. Liang had been the recipient of one that had caused her to head for Mexico, where two of the few people on the planet who would understand that message just happened to be excavating the site to which Subject Z had drawn a map inside the cavern beneath his very feet.

  “What can you tell me about the feathered serpent god?” he asked.

  “You’re asking the wrong person. My work is clinical, not spiritual. There’s no overlap whatsoever. I don’t know the first thing about serpent gods, gods of the underworld, or sleeping gods. I’m out of my element—”

  “What did you say?”

  “If you want mythology, you’ll have to talk to Cade or Juan Carlos. That’s not my area of expertise.”

  “Where is Dr. Evans now?”

  “Cade?” she called.

  “What is it?” he answered from some distance away. The scuffing of his footsteps on gravel announced his approach. Dr. Liang tilted her phone and Dr. Evans appeared, his face flushed and his hair wet. The shock of seeing Barnett struck him like an uppercut. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, Director Barnett. I suppose I should say I hoped I’d never see you again.”

  Barnett got right down to business.

  “What do you know about the sleeping god?”

  “I could ask you the same. I only just heard the name today and, honestly, I didn’t think it was an accurate translation.”

  “Where did you hear about it?”

  “There’s an ancient inscription above the entrance to the maze.”

  “What maze?”

  “How could you know about the sleeping god if you didn’t know about the maze?”

  There was obviously a connection they were missing, but it didn’t appear as though Dr. Evans knew anything more about it than Barnett did.

  “I want you to stay there until I can get a team to your position,” Barnett said.

  “Nuh-uh. I want nothing to do with anything even peripherally related to you or Unit 51.”

  “Listen to me very closely, Dr. Evans. You are a part of this, whether you like it or not, and I’m afraid that you and the others are in danger. I can have a team there in under twelve hours. I want you to stay where you are and call the number I’m sending to Dr. Liang’s phone right now if you see anything remotely out of the ordinary. Anything at all. Do you hear me?”

  “You obviously didn’t hear me. I don’t want—”

  “Is there someplace nearby that’s secure? Someplace where you can withstand a siege for any length of time?”

  “What are you talking about? We’re in the middle of a tourist attraction, for Christ’s sake. We’re surrounded by people from all over the world. What could possibly happen?”

  That was the problem. Barnett simply didn’t know.

  “Twelve hours, Dr. Evans.”

  Barnett disconnected the call and grabbed his remote transceiver.

  “I need someone from IT in here,” he said. “Right now.”

  Special Agent Cheryl Love came through the door within a matter of seconds. She was wearing a tank top and cargo pants and carried with her the scent of the mess hall.

  “I need access to any computers within the range of this satellite feed,” he said. “Tell me you can do that.”

  “Without breaking a sweat.” She shoved the last bite of cornbread into her mouth and talked around it. “What are you looking for?”

  “Anything having to do with a maze. Preferably a file with any kind of imagery.”

  She knelt beside his chair, brushed off her palms on her thighs, and tucked her straight, shoulder-length blond hair behind her ears. Her fingers moved so quickly across the keyboard that his eyes couldn’t keep up.
r />   “There are fifteen active IP addresses that don’t correspond to cellular devices.”

  An array of green dots appeared on the aerial image of the ruins.

  “Get me into any one of them registered to the research center at Teotihuacan.”

  “Take your pick.”

  She gestured toward his monitor with a flourish. There were eight dots total, four of which were within a three-hundred-foot radius of the trailer where he’d found Dr. Liang.

  “That one,” he said, and tapped on one of the green dots inside the trailer itself.

  “You want me to mirror it while we’re in there?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Within thirty seconds she’d hacked into the system and breezed through the directories faster than he could read them. It was no wonder the Department of Defense had put up such a fight to keep her.

  Love pulled up an image and stepped back from the monitor.

  “Is that what you want?”

  Barnett stared at the gray-scale image of several concentric rectangles beneath the ground at the foot of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Suddenly everything made sense.

  The pattern Subject Z had drawn in blood on the window of its cage.

  The design of the crop circle in England.

  The subterranean imaging of the maze beneath the temple.

  All of the pieces fell into place and led him to an overwhelming realization.

  They were already too late.

  21

  ROCHE

  FOB Atlantis

  Roche and Kelly had hardly found the restrooms and followed the scent of chili to the mess hall when Special Agent Maria Avila arrived. She was barely five feet tall and couldn’t have weighed more than one-twenty with her boots on, but her black eyes were hard and flat and suggested that she wasn’t one to be trifled with. She smiled when she introduced herself, although she wasn’t quite able to pull it off. This assignment was beneath her, and she made no secret of it.

  “Now, if you’ll please follow me . . .”

  Avila led them through the buildings at a much faster pace than Morgan had. Roche didn’t even bother with the spoon and drank his chili from the bowl, which he hurriedly set on the table with the computers as they rushed through the main building and headed back outside.

  She took a different boardwalk from the one that had led them to the base. They were nearly to their destination before Roche recognized where they were going. He glanced at Kelly from the corner of his eye. She’d obviously figured it out, too. Her fingers were fretting so fast inside the pocket of her jacket that it looked like she was trying to smuggle a wild animal. He wanted to say something reassuring, but after the way she’d looked at him in the elevator, he wasn’t sure that anything he could say would be interpreted as such.

  Seeing the ruins lighted and drained had given him an almost clinical sense of detachment, but as the pyramid rose above him, the memories came flooding back. He remembered watching the monitors inside the research station while the men inside the pyramid brought the machine to life and nearly electrocuted themselves in the process. Rushing to the power station to help the wounded men from the elevator careening toward the surface, the impact from which had destroyed the shaft and tore the entire structure from the side of the mountain. Being hunted through the dark station and narrowly escaping a violent death at the hands of the alien creature that Morgan claimed was still alive. And presumably waiting for them somewhere down here in this horrible place.

  They never should have come back.

  Kelly gasped and appeared to be on the verge of hyperventilating.

  “Are you all right?” Roche whispered.

  She nodded and stared up at the pyramid, her feet seemingly rooted to the boardwalk. He placed his hand against the small of her back and guided her up the switchbacking stairs to the entrance to the pyramid. She closed her eyes when she reached the landing and took several deep breaths.

  Kelly had told him once how she still dreamed about this place and described floating outside this very doorway, fighting against the current with only one flipper, swallowing her fear, and swimming inside. The decision to enter today had to be a thousand times harder for her.

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” he said, although he wasn’t certain if he said it for her benefit or his own.

  The main corridor was well lit and the walls were strung with so many power cords that he could barely see the petroglyphs behind them. A pair of workers in isolation suits brushed past them. The reflection of the lights from their visors concealed their faces.

  “Don’t worry about the suits,” Avila said. “We don’t need them where we’re going.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Roche said.

  He peered up the ascending corridor toward the chamber with the massive statues before ducking his head and following Avila down into the depths. It felt as though the walls were closing in on him, which they were to some extent, forcing him into a crouch before disgorging him into the room housing the primitive machine that had caused Dale Rubley’s transformation.

  The memory of the expression of sheer terror on Ron Dreger’s face as this very room filled with steam assailed him.

  The rungs of a ladder protruded from the well in the center of the floor. Avila descended first and stepped to the side. Roche followed and waited to help Kelly down.

  “What happened to the Nazi sub?” Roche asked.

  “What Nazi sub?” Avila said, but Roche could tell she knew exactly what he was talking about.

  He hadn’t been this far down before. When last he was here, this tunnel had contained an underground river flowing fast enough to generate the power the pyramid required. It led them deeper into the Earth and to a point where the ceiling lights gave way to darkness, despite the sheer quantity of power cords lining the walls. A faint glow beckoned to them from the cavern at the end of the tunnel, most of which was walled off behind the kind of barrier that appeared to have been built to withstand a nuclear detonation.

  Roche instantly realized what was on the other side of the wall. It took Kelly a few seconds longer.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  Roche didn’t see the woman seated at the console to their right until she turned at the sound of Kelly’s voice. In doing so, she revealed the bank of monitors in front of her.

  There was no mistaking the shape of the thermal signature on the screens. It cocked its elongated head toward the camera and moved in a blur.

  Thud.

  The inset door shuddered.

  Kelly screamed and stumbled backward.

  “Jesus,” Roche said. There was a part of him that thought—or maybe just hoped—that Morgan had been lying to them, despite the fact that he hadn’t offered a single hint of doing so. “I saw that thing get shot.”

  “A ballistic hypodermic needle,” a deep voice said from behind him.

  Roche turned and watched a silhouette emerge from the dark corridor. He didn’t have to see the man’s face to know to whom the voice belonged.

  “Cameron Barnett,” he said.

  “Surely you understand the kind of unprecedented opportunity we had,” Barnett said. “We couldn’t afford to kill it. We might never have had another opportunity to study an actual living alien organism.”

  “You should have killed it when you had the chance.”

  Thud.

  The door shuddered in its frame. Kelly backed even farther away from it and wrapped her arms around her chest. She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off the monitor.

  “I don’t think it shares your sentiment,” Barnett said.

  “After it killed all of those people . . .”

  “Unfortunately, Mr. Roche, there is more going on here than I could ever hope to explain.”

  “Not that you would.”

  Barnett smiled.

  “Suffice it to say that the stakes are higher than you could ever imagine. Believe me when I say that I would never have reached out
to you and Ms. Nolan had there been any other option.”

  “It can’t get out of there, can it?” Kelly asked in a voice so small that Roche wasn’t initially sure that she had spoken.

  “That barrier literally makes an armored truck look like it’s made of tissue paper,” the woman at the console said. “Trust me. I wouldn’t be anywhere near it if it didn’t.”

  “Allow me to introduce Dr. Theresa Clarke,” Barnett said. “Dr. Clarke, it is my honor to present Mr. Martin Roche, formerly of the United States Marine Corps and the National Security Agency, and Ms. Kelly Nolan, the brilliant graduate student in seismology at Oregon State whose work with standing waves helped unlock the secrets of the pyramid above us.”

  “Regretting that now, aren’t you?” Dr. Clarke said, and proffered her hand to each of them in turn. “Call me Tess.”

  Kelly looked away from the monitor for the first time. Her face was a ghostly shade of pale.

  “Have you been in there with it?” she asked. “I’ve seen it up close. I know exactly what it’s capable of doing.”

  Tess opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  “Before joining our team, Dr. Clarke was a senior research scientist at SETI,” Barnett said, “where her work in xenoarcheology helped identify numerous manmade structures on planets throughout our solar system.”

  “Theoretically manmade,” Tess said. “There’s no way to either prove or disprove my findings without physically evaluating the structures, and I’m afraid we’re a long way from having the ability to do so, which is why I no longer teach remote sensing and geospatial analysis at Penn State. After the way they destroyed my reputation, I was lucky SETI was even willing to look at my résumé.”

  Roche assessed her very quickly. There was nothing deceptive about her words or her mannerisms. Barnett, on the other hand, was wound so tightly that it looked as though the vein in his temple might burst at any second. His congenial manner belied the situation. There was something terribly wrong here and he was under an immense amount of pressure to fix it. Roche was in no mood for pleasantries and cut right to the chase.