Thud.
She looked up from the puddle and to the door.
“Director Barnett?” she said.
She could hear him barking orders from inside the command center. He seemed oblivious to the screaming, which grew louder and more frantic by the second.
Thud!
The door shook in its frame. The knob rattled.
She backed slowly away. Stumbled over a cot. Regained her balance.
Thud!
Tess turned and sprinted for the command center.
Behind her, the frame splintered with a loud crack and the door burst open.
40
EVANS
Teotihuacan
“You’ve got me,” Evans said. “Let the others go. I won’t cause any trouble.”
Black Skull pressed the barrel of his pistol harder into the back of Evans’s head in response.
While they moved much faster with the lights on, they still made several wrong turns. Anya floated in the lead. She’d managed to keep from tripping several booby traps and avoided some that had already been sprung. Lord only knew how much longer her luck would hold out, though. Not that Evans was going to make it very much farther, either. He was growing colder by the second and a bone-deep exhaustion threatened to overwhelm him.
Their captors had replaced Anya’s saturated shirt with a field dressing of their own, and while it was considerably more effective, Evans was still losing blood at an alarming rate. If he wasn’t able to hold his own swimming, they would have no further use for him. He needed to do whatever he could to get Anya and Jade out of harm’s way before that happened.
“I can help you find what you’re looking for,” he said. “Just let them go. They’re of no use to you.”
Black Skull nudged him with the pistol hard enough to drive his mouth and nose underwater. The two men did their best to keep their talking to an absolute minimum, which suggested there was something about either their speech patterns or their voices they feared might give away their identities. Like Villarreal, they didn’t use contractions, a common trait among people for whom English was a second language, although neither had any trace of an accent. They were both over six feet tall and in exceptional physical shape, as defined by the musculature beneath their wet fatigues. Their tactical masks covered the entirety of their faces, save for the mesh eye sockets that revealed the occasional glimpse of their stark white skin, light eyebrows, and piercing blue eyes, and yet still they did their best to minimize their frontal exposure. They stayed behind their captives and dictated their route with monosyllabic instructions.
“Right,” Silver Alien said. He clenched his fist in the neckband of Jade’s shirt and used it like a choke collar to control her.
Evans could tell she wasn’t going to last much longer, either. While the momentary respite had helped, she was fading fast.
“Left.”
“I have done everything you asked,” Villarreal said. “Please. Take what you have come for and let us all go.”
Evans wanted nothing more than to break his nose. He’d betrayed all of them to these men, who, he had no doubt, intended to kill them all once they had what they wanted, assuming it was even down here at all.
“Right.”
Anya glanced back. The sharp bend prevented the lights from illuminating the passage ahead of her.
“Right,” Silver Alien said again, and tightened his grip on Jade’s collar until she gasped for air.
“Don’t hurt her,” Anya said.
She took a deep breath and swam cautiously around the corner.
“How much are they paying you, Villarreal?” Evans asked.
Villarreal answered from somewhere behind him.
“It is not about money.”
“Then what is it about?”
“Quiet,” Black Skull said and jabbed him in the base of the cranium.
“Answers,” Villarreal said.
The short corridor terminated in front of Anya, leaving her only one direction to go. She waited for the command to be given.
“Right.”
She swam slowly away from the light and into the darkness once more.
“You do realize they’re going to kill all of us, don’t you?” Evans said.
“They will not. We have a deal and I have upheld my end.”
“And what was that?”
“I would notify them the moment we discovered what I believed to be the royal burial.”
“All of this to loot a tomb?”
“I care nothing for treasure, although I am certain a fortune in jade and obsidian awaits. I am interested only in the remains themselves. Do you not see? For all of the surviving murals, there is only record of one king. The largest and most advanced civilization of its kind in all of the New World, one that thrived for more than five hundred years, and we have record of only one ruler?”
“None of the surviving murals are complete. You said so yourself.”
“They represent the first example of statist propaganda. Their rulers would have been memorialized alongside their gods, and with even greater frequency.”
“Turn right,” Silver Alien said.
“You are a scholar of ancient Egypt,” Villarreal said. “Consider how detailed the surviving records are. Every dynasty and every pharaoh are recorded in perfect detail, while there are no such records here, despite how similar the two societies are in nearly every other way, from the arrangement of the pyramids to the designs of the cities themselves. Have you not asked yourself how two civilizations so similar could develop simultaneously on opposite sides of the planet?”
Anya gasped. The sound echoed from around the corner.
They rounded the bend and the lights swept across the water, revealing her shoulders and the back of her head. She turned to face them and held up her forearm, revealing deep diagonal lacerations from her wrist to her elbow.
“Jesus,” Jade whispered, and swam toward her. Silver Alien jerked on her neck to stop her. She rounded on him with fire in her eyes. “I’m going to help her, whether you like it or not.”
She tried to remove her own shirt, but her captor wasn’t about to relinquish his leverage.
“Cut off my sleeve,” Evans said. “The neoprene should provide enough compression to help stop the bleeding.”
Something sharp pressed into the back of his arm. He glanced over his shoulder in time to see the blade pass through the neoprene and enter his arm.
The pain was instantaneous.
Evans gritted his teeth as Black Skull used the knife to draw a circle around his biceps until the sleeve separated. Evans tugged it from his wrist and cringed at the amount of blood diffusing into the water. Granted, the cuts were superficial, but he was running out of blood to give.
He held out the sleeve for Jade. He saw the sympathy on her face. The fear. The understanding of what was to come. His hand lingered on hers when she took it from him.
She pulled the sleeve as tightly as she could over Anya’s forearm.
“This will only slow the bleeding,” Jade said.
“She needs a hospital,” Villarreal said. “Please. Let me take her. She has nothing that you want. She has not seen your faces.”
“Keep going,” Black Skull said.
“There’s a log with spikes.” Anya’s voice trembled when she spoke. “Right below the surface. We’re going to have to swim underneath it.”
“Then do it.”
“I need the light.”
Black Skull shoved Evans forward and shined his light down at the water. The beam hardly penetrated the murk.
“Well?”
Evans could barely discern the outlines of the spikes right in front of Anya.
Tears dripped from her chin when she looked down at the water. She was positively terrified.
“I’ll go,” Evans said.
“If you try anything—anything at all—she will die slowly,” Black Skull said. “While you watch.”
Evans shrugged out of the
man’s grasp, pulled on his diving mask, and switched on the light. He dove without a word and swam cautiously past Anya’s treading legs. His own legs were rapidly losing strength. Numbness had settled like a lead weight into his right foot, while a white-hot pain radiated from his calf.
The log was mounted to the walls roughly three feet above another one just like it. The razor-sharp spikes were splintered from obsidian and easily a foot long, leaving the narrowest of gaps between them through which to swim. There was no way he was getting through there with his air tank, so he unclipped his harness and let it sink into the cloud of sediment. He turned his head sideways and watched the spikes pass, mere millimeters away, from the corner of his eye as he swam. One sliced through his wetsuit and the skin on his shoulder, forcing him to alter his course ever so slightly. By the time he drew his legs through the other side, he was out of air and swam toward the surface. It took several moments to catch his breath.
“The gap is maybe a foot wide,” he said. “I’ll go back down with my light so you can see. Watch out for those spikes.”
He dove again and shined his light through the obsidian gamut.
Anya passed through first, followed by Black Skull. Despite Villarreal’s protests, he made it to the other side without incident. Jade came next, with Silver Alien right on her heels. While Evans could have easily pushed him down onto the spikes, he had no doubt Black Skull would kill the others without hesitation. He waited just long enough for the second man to pass through before streaking toward the surface, where his captor was ready and waiting to press the gun to the back of his head once more.
They swam through a long straightway toward the distant wall, which drew contrast as they neared. The ceiling rose at an angle above them until it leveled off, maybe five feet over their heads. There were no branching passages, at least that Evans could see.
“What do you expect to find with the remains?” he asked.
“There is a reason the Aztec named this place Teotihuacan,” Villarreal said. “This is the birthplace of gods. The signs are all around us.”
Evans laughed. He couldn’t help himself. What Villarreal proposed was insane.
“You honestly believe you’re going to find the remains of a god?”
“When the Spanish conquistadores arrived in the sixteenth century, the Inca genuinely believed they were gods. Viracochas, they called them, because their white skin resembled that of their creator god. The motif of light-skinned outsiders figures prominently in the legends of every indigenous culture throughout the Americas. The Aztec, the Maya, the Inca. They all have stories of white gods arriving from the sky, bringing with them knowledge beyond the understanding of the natives and instructing them in how to build advanced civilizations and pyramids. Like the one above us. Like those in Giza. Or the one in Antarctica. You of all people should understand. You have seen the proof with your own eyes.”
“A superior race of white beings,” Evans said. “Where have I heard that before?”
“Quiet,” Black Skull said.
“You mock me, but it is true. In our field, we make the mistake of viewing history through modern eyes. Instead, it must be evaluated with an open mind. We must take into account the fears and superstitions of the times, for they are critical to understanding the people and their motivations. The Mayan and Mixtec codices, the bas-reliefs of Tiahuanaco and Palenque, the Ica stones and Nazca lines . . . all of them speak to the arrival of white gods from the sky, gods from whom all men descended. Even the story of Quetzalcoatl that led us here tells us as much. We are on the verge of solving one of the oldest riddles in the history of mankind.”
Anya stopped at the end of the corridor. There was nowhere else to go. She looked back at them with sheer terror in her eyes. Unless they’d made a wrong turn some time ago, they’d reached the center of the maze.
And nothing was there.
“You’re just as guilty of imposing your own interpretations upon these so-called findings,” Evans said.
“You are wrong,” Villarreal said. “I seek only the truth, whatever it may be. I care nothing for the ideology of these men or their Aryan—”
The gunshot was deafening.
Evans shouted in surprise and whirled to see Villarreal sink beneath the water, his blood running down the obsidian wall.
41
ROCHE
The Vault, FOB Atlantis
Roche lunged for the rack of assault rifles, grabbed a SCAR 17, and pulled back the charging handle to load a round into the firing chamber. Shoved past Avila and Love. Pulled Kelly to the side of the open door.
“Stay right here.”
He fought his way out of the command center while all the others were trying to get into it. People were tripping over each other. Trampling each other. Screaming. Crying. Toppling cots and racks of supplies. Scattering their contents across the floor.
The door to the generator room stood open, the trim surrounding it broken. The inside of the door was gouged with scratches. The pool of blood continued to expand outward from inside the small room, following the course of the trident-shaped footprints that led into the main room before vanishing amid the chaos.
He grabbed the nearest person, a man he didn’t recognize.
“What’s going on?”
The man shouted something unintelligible and struggled free of his grasp.
“It’s over there!” Tess screamed.
Roche followed her line of sight to the left side of the room as a rack stuffed with boxes of dried rations crashed to the floor.
Barnett appeared at his side, a rifle seated against his shoulder.
“How did it get in here?” he shouted.
“I don’t know,” Roche said, “but we’d better figure it out in a hurry before any more of them get in. If they haven’t already.”
Avila emerged from the command center with one of the bullpup assault rifles at her shoulder.
“Get everyone inside and lock the door!” Barnett shouted.
She took up post beside the door and sighted the vault down her short barrel as she hustled people past her and into the command center.
A scream.
Roche swiveled toward the sound. A flash of movement from his left and the screaming stopped. A woman collapsed to the ground in a wash of blood.
He advanced in a shooter’s stance. Waved Barnett farther to his left so they could hopefully corner it—
A blur of movement behind a shelving unit.
Roche lunged backward before it fell and it still nearly took off his toes.
“Do you see it?” Roche asked.
“Negative,” Barnett said.
Roche watched the director from the corner of his eye as he stepped around the fallen shelving unit. Barnett crouched over the fallen woman and without taking his eye from the rifle, felt for a pulse in the side of her neck. He removed his hand dripping with blood.
“Everyone’s inside!” Avila shouted.
“Lock the door behind you!” Barnett shouted.
The command center door slammed shut. Avila sealed the others inside with the thud of a deadbolt. And locked Barnett and Roche outside with a creature they couldn’t see.
“Are the walls of the command center bulletproof?” Roche asked.
“All of the interior walls are reinforced with galvanized steel.”
“Will they withstand a direct shot from one of these?”
“Probably.”
“That’s not very reassuring.”
“Then let’s not put it to the test.”
The walls behind the fallen shelves were bare concrete. The units that remained upright granted glimpses of spaces behind them that couldn’t have been more than a few inches deep, at the very most.
“It can’t have gotten very far,” Barnett said.
Roche turned slowly to his right, scrutinizing the dim room down the bullpup rifle’s short sightline.
There was nothing moving through the overturned cots or behind the drums o
f water. It was as though whatever it was had simply vanished into thin—
Something streaked through his peripheral vision and struck the ground with a soft plat.
Roche raised his rifle and threw himself backward in one motion. Hit the ground on his shoulders. Pulled the trigger.
A dark shape raced across the ceiling.
He fired over and over again.
Bullets ricocheted and concrete shrapnel flew.
Skree!
Blood spattered the ceiling and the creature plummeted from above him.
Roche flipped over, propelled himself to his feet, and ran toward where it hit the ground. Kicked over cots until he saw something move—
It reared up from the ground and struck at him.
He dodged to the side and rounded on it.
“Coming your way!” he shouted.
Discharge spat from Barnett’s rifle. Sparks flew from the floor and bullets sang through the air before embedding themselves in the outer wall of the generator room.
The serpentine shadow veered back toward Roche, who was ready for it this time and put a bullet through the side of its throat.
Its momentum carried it to the middle of the room, where it collapsed and slid through its own blood.
“Is it dead?” Barnett asked.
Roche could barely hear him over the ringing in his ears. He shoved the cots away from where the creature lay and approached with his finger on the trigger.
It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. His first instinct was to call it a bird, but its legs and quill-like feathers were the only parts of it that were remotely avian. They bristled from its sharp jawline and neck, grew in a fan from its reptilian tail.
“It’s a goddamn dinosaur,” Barnett said, although even that term insufficiently captured its ferocity.
Its snout was like a crocodile’s, only shorter and thinner, its facial architecture that of an adder, much like the rest of its body, which was serpentine, and yet simultaneously plated, like an armadillo. Its hind legs reminded him of those of a raptor, especially the way the middle digit—with its long, hooked talon—stood erect.
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