Forsaken

by Michael McBride

  Roche stepped on its head, kicked its body over, and put one final shot through its heart for good measure. Its belly lacked the protection of its back, especially near its gut, which bulged unevenly as though it had swallowed a bunch of rocks. He nudged them with the toe of his boot and felt them slide over each other. He pressed harder and what looked like the abdomen of a yellow jacket unfurled from the underside of its tail. One of the rocks squeezed down the length of it and dropped to the ground in a pile of sludge.

  “It’s an ovipositor,” Barnett said. “Parasitic wasps use them to lay their eggs inside of host species.”

  He turned on his flashlight and shined it onto the egg sac, the walls of which were so thin that they could see the outline of the creature inside, curled tightly into a ball, its tail wrapped all the way over its head, shoulders, and back. It started squirming the moment the light hit it.

  “It cuts its prey with those long claws,” Barnett said, “and uses its ovipositor to lay its eggs inside of it.”

  Everything fell into place for Roche, who sprinted to the generator room.

  A pair of giant sacs hung from the ceiling, the bottoms of which were black and saturated with blood. Past them, in the far back corner, was what was left of Harrison, his entire midsection torn open.

  “How long was it between when you found Harrison and when those egg sacs appeared upstairs?” he shouted.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think!”

  “An hour, maybe?”

  Roche backed from the generator room and closed the door.

  “Get everyone out of here,” he said.

  “We’ve been over this—”

  “Those things up there are all about to hatch. If we don’t get out of here now, we won’t be getting out of here at all.”

  Barnett looked from the dead creature to the generator room.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. “Their gestation time is a matter of hours.”

  “Get that hatch open!” Roche shouted as he ran past him to the command center. He banged on the door until Avila opened it and searched for Kelly. Took her by the hand and pulled her to his side. “Everyone out!”

  “Where are we going?” Kelly asked.

  “To the surface.”

  “I’m not going back up there,” Anna cried.

  “If you stay here, you will die.”

  Roche pulled Kelly to the base of the stairs. Brought his face to within inches of hers.

  “Stay right behind me,” he said. “Hold on to the waistband of my pants and don’t let go.”

  The electromagnetic locking mechanism above them disengaged with a loud thunk. Barnett gripped the wheel in both hands and looked down at him.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Is there someplace we can take all of these people where they’ll be safe?”

  “If we can get them all to the power station—”

  “We can’t all use the elevator at once.”

  “Then we split up.”

  “We have a better chance if we stay together.”

  “Zeta’s cage,” Tess said from somewhere behind him. “It’s easily large enough to hold all of us.”

  Roche looked up at Barnett in the red glare.

  “It could work,” Barnett said.

  “There’s no time to debate it.”

  “Then we have no choice.” Barnett spun the wheel until the secondary lock disengaged. “Tell me if there’s anything above me.”

  Avila stood in the doorway to the command center. She glanced at the wall of monitors.

  “Not that I see.”

  “We go up fast. Mr. Roche and I will take the lead. Avila, Love, Tolliver. You bring up the rear. Don’t let anything get the jump on you.”

  Love yanked the charging handle, seated the assault rifle against her shoulder, and glanced at the man beside her.

  “Nothing’s getting past us,” Tolliver said.

  “Everyone else. Stay close to us and keep your eyes open. If anything happens to us . . . if we have to split up for any reason . . . get to the northern end of the first sublevel. Are we clear?”

  Kelly curled her trembling fingers under Roche’s waistband. Her hand felt so small and cold against his back.

  He turned without thinking, leaned his face closer to hers, and kissed her. She gripped him by the neck and kissed him back with an almost desperate urgency.

  “On my mark,” Barnett said.

  Roche pulled away and met Kelly’s stare.

  “Nothing will happen to you. I promise.”

  “Three. Two. One.”

  Roche bounded up the stairs as Barnett climbed through the open hatch.

  42

  JADE

  Teotihuacan

  Jade’s ears echoed with a high-pitched ringing sound, beneath which she could hear Anya screaming as though from far away.

  Black Skull held his pistol in his outstretched hand, across from which the wall was decorated with bone, brain matter, and high-velocity spatter. The dark shape of Villarreal’s body sunk out of sight beneath him.

  Before Evans could react, the man pressed the barrel of the gun against the base of his skull, producing the smell of singed hair.

  “Unless you are eager to learn how many bullets I have left, I recommend you find a way forward.”

  Anya continued to scream.

  Jade pulled her closer and got right into her face.

  “Calm down, Anya. Right now.”

  “They just killed Juan Carlos!”

  “And they’ll kill us all if we give them a reason, so you need to settle down and use your head.”

  Anya’s wild eyes searched hers for any sign of hope. Her panic fled her on a rush of tears as she started to cry.

  “We have to go back the way we came,” Evans said. “We must have taken a wrong turn.”

  “No,” Jade said. “This is the right way. We’ve exhausted all other options.”

  She knew it and the men with the guns knew it, too. Either she and her friends found what their captors had come here to find, or this was where they would die. Even if they did find it, at best they were only buying themselves some time. Once these men had what they wanted, there would be nothing to prevent them from eliminating any potential witnesses. Jade had worked enough crime scenes and understood that even forensic evidence often wasn’t enough. Without eyewitnesses, criminals nearly always went free, even in the face of a preponderance of evidence. These men were professionals. Whether anyone had seen their faces or not, they would leave no one who could possibly identify them behind.

  “I’ll look down below,” Evans said.

  “If you are not back up here within fifteen seconds, I will kill one of your friends.”

  Evans stared at Black Skull with hatred in his eyes, but dove without saying a word.

  Jade watched the aura of his light grow smaller below her feet until it was barely visible. It made a circuit around the dead end before rising to the surface. He breached, took a deep breath, and dove back under again.

  “We have to be missing something,” Jade said. “Shine your lights on the walls.”

  The man who held her by the collar did as she asked. His beam explored the wall to her right, starting at the level of the water and working higher and higher until it reached the ceiling. He moved on to the wall that blocked their way and did the same thing. It was covered with the same kind of strange characters and primitive writing she’d seen throughout the ruins, only these were carved directly into the stone, rather than painted onto it.

  “What do they say?” Black Skull asked without looking up from where he watched the light below him through the churning sediment.

  “You just killed the only person who could have told us.”

  The man had no response.

  Jade studied the petroglyphs as the light passed over them. The lower ones were crusted with accumulated sediment from the flooding. Above them was a giant circular design, at the center of which was a skull w
ith an open mouth and extended tongue. Immediately surrounding it were the alternating heads of Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc, just like on the face of the pyramid above them. The rings radiating outward were symmetrical and filled with animals: jaguars and coyotes, rabbits and snakes. The outermost rings featured random, unrecognizable designs. If there was some significance to them, she couldn’t decipher it.

  Other characters framed the circle. She recognized the skull-faced god of the dead, Mictlantecuhtli, and his wife, Mictlancihuatl, on their thrones in the underworld. Quetzalcoatl, his serpentine visage fringed with feathers, appeared to be aligned against Xolotl, with the face of a dog and the body of a man, in an attempt to prevent him from reaching what looked like a gate or threshold, inside of which was a figure with a circular face, from which pointed rays radiated.

  She recalled the story Villarreal had told them, about how Xolotl had traveled to the depths of Mictlan to unearth the rotting bones of an extinct race of beings, and experienced a sudden moment of clarity. Villarreal had said these men had come here in search of remains he’d inferred they believed were of extraterrestrial origin, an extinct race of beings. Was it possible the legend had somehow grown from a seed of truth?

  The light followed the course of the drawing all the way up to the ceiling, where there were three rectangular holes, almost as though whoever built the wall had forgotten the last three bricks. They were maybe eighteen inches wide and eight inches high, not nearly large enough for them to squirm through, even if they were able to climb that high.

  “There has to be a way to get to the other side,” Silver Alien said.

  If these petroglyphs represented the story Villarreal had told them, then she had to believe that the way through was hidden somewhere within it.

  Xolotl had tricked Mictlantecuhtli into allowing him to take the carcass. How did one trick death?

  Evans burst from the water behind her and gasped for air.

  “Can you see any more carvings on the wall down there?” she asked.

  “There aren’t any below the waterline.”

  “Like they were designed only to be viewed with the tunnels flooded?”

  “The same way we were able to navigate the booby traps.”

  Jade studied the designs. Had they been carved there as instructions or as a warning?

  The man behind her shined his light onto the wall to her left.

  “Go back to the carvings,” she said.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  “The story. There’s something about it . . .”

  How did someone trick death? Maybe Xolotl hadn’t tricked Mictlantecuhtli, but had made a deal with him instead. A deal with death. A deal he then reneged upon. He hadn’t tricked Mictlantecuhtli, he’d cheated him.

  He’d cheated death.

  The phrase had an alternate meaning. They’d circumvented numerous booby traps throughout the maze, cheating death every step of the way. Perhaps the ancient Teotihuacano had set one final trap for them. And if that were the case, she needed to figure it out in a hurry because she wasn’t going to be able to tread water much longer. As it was, she could barely keep her mouth above the surface.

  And then she saw it.

  The skull at the center of the circular design was meant to be Mictlantecuhtli, who was often depicted with his tongue hanging out. His mouth was perfectly circular as well, although the edges of the disk fitted into his jaws weren’t perfectly aligned.

  “There’s a hole in his mouth,” Jade said.

  Silver Alien shined his light onto the center of the design.

  “Where? I do not see . . .” His words trailed off when he recognized the deception. “Very clever.”

  He swam closer to it and appraised it from several angles before nudging it with the barrel of his gun. The disk turned sideways in the hole, making it easy to grab and wiggle out. He shined his light through the hole and peered inside.

  “There is something back there.”

  “What do you see?” Black Skull asked.

  “There is a room behind the wall, but it is too dark to estimate its size.”

  “We need to find the way in.”

  “You have to cheat death,” Jade said. She stared at the hideous visage of Mictlantecuhtli. He held out his arms: one raised to the sky, the other extended and gripping a spear shaft. “You have to reach through the hole.”

  “You mean you have to reach through the hole,” Black Skull said, and turned his weapon on her.

  Jade didn’t have enough strength left to argue. Her legs were done and no amount of willpower would save her from drowning. Her only hope was to get out of the water.

  She looked at the hole for several seconds, took a deep breath, and stuck her hand inside. Slowly. Feeling every inch of the cold stone until she found the inner edge.

  Her legs gave out, transferring the strain to her arm. She grabbed the protruding tongue with her other hand and did her best to hang on.

  Evans took her around the waist, squeezed his fingertips into a crevice, and attempted to keep her from sinking.

  “Get on with it,” Silver Alien said.

  She reached carefully into the open air until her fingers grazed what she knew would be there. The spear shaft was nearly petrified and as thick as a shovel handle. It was a lever, she knew, but what she didn’t know was what the depiction of Mictlantecuhtli hinted was above her.

  “I need a belt,” she said,

  “Why?” Black Skull asked.

  “Just give me your belt!”

  He hesitated, but ultimately slid it from the waistband of his pants and handed it to her. She removed her hand from the hole, fed the end of the belt through the buckle to form a loop, and thrust it through the hole. It took several tries to slip the loop over the wooden lever. She pulled it tight, extricated her arm from the hole, and handed the end of the belt to the man with the gun pointed at her. It was all she could do to wedge her fingertips into the edge of the circle and hold on.

  “Pull it,” she said. “Hard and fast.”

  “You do it,” Black Skull said and held the belt out for Evans.

  He looked at Jade, who nodded that it was going to be all right.

  Evans wrapped the end of the belt around his fist and gave it a solid jerk.

  Nothing happened.

  He pulled it again, harder this time.

  Still nothing.

  He tugged again and again.

  “Stop,” Silver Alien said. “Something must be—”

  The lever abruptly moved. Evans toppled backward into the water. The severed end of the belt whipped past Jade’s cheek. The obsidian guillotine passed through the darkness on the other side of the wall and embedded itself into what sounded like wood with a resounding thuck.

  “The mechanism must have been stuck,” Evans said.

  He’d barely finished the sentence when the wall in front of him dropped several feet straight down with a thud that shook the entire maze.

  There was a three-foot gap above the level of the water. Jade threw both arms onto the top of the sunken door and clung to it for dear life.

  Silver Alien pulled himself out of the water and onto the top of the wall, where he crouched and shined his light down into a square chamber roughly ten feet to a side.

  Water fired through the hole in Mictlantecuhtli’s open mouth and spattered the dry ground with the force of a fire hose. At the center of the room was a broad, tiered stone plinth. On top of it rested a granite sarcophagus, inside of which was presumably what the Teotihuacano had gone to such extreme lengths to hide.

  And what these men had come to find.

  43

  KELLY

  The Mess Hall, FOB Atlantis

  They emerged from the vault into a world that had changed dramatically since they’d last been there. The mess hall looked like a tornado had blown through. Tables and chairs were toppled and scattered throughout the room. The door to the walk-in cooler stood wide open, a grating buzzing sound ec
hoing from within.

  Kelly held on to the back of Roche’s pants as though her life depended upon it, while the fingers on her left hand went crazy at her side.

  Barnett led them to the nearest door and started typing on the control panel. She didn’t at first see the dead man at her feet, his abdomen smashed beneath the door. His face and shoulders were skeletal where the meat had been torn from the bones.

  She cringed when the panel issued a loud beeping sound. The door retracted into the ceiling with the whirring of hydraulic gears.

  The adjoining corridor was narrow and dark. She could barely see the red light inside Midnight over Roche’s shoulder and past Barnett’s head. They entered in single file. Slowly. Barnett slid to the left and Roche took point on the right. They sighted their assault rifles from one side to the other as they advanced.

  The main table lay on its side, surrounded by broken computers. The security monitors at the front of the room flickered with rotating live feeds from elsewhere in the building. One of them had fallen and shattered on the floor.

  She passed an enormous egg sac on her right. The almost flaky outer layers glistened with the fresh application of some viscous fluid, almost like papier-mâché. Blood dripped from the bottom and pattered the floor in a puddle that positively reeked of death. She could see the side of a man’s face through a gap between the fibrous strands that bound the nest to the ceiling. His cheeks were pale and the skin around his eyes dark. She’d never seen him before, and yet felt a pang of guilt. This entire mountain should have been destroyed and the ice dome collapsed onto this horrible place.

  A crackling sound from inside the nest.

  Her first thought was that the man might still be alive, but the half-lidded expression on his face convinced her otherwise. There was something else in there with him. Something alive.

  She felt Roche tense. He turned toward the sound and stared at the nest for several seconds before hastening his pace toward the door.

  Someone whimpered behind her.

  Kelly closed her eyes and prayed that the creatures hadn’t heard. As it was, the sound of their tread was too loud. The soles of their shoes were sticky with blood and peeled from the floor like masking tape.