Forsaken

by Michael McBride

  The elevator slowed as it approached the surface. The whine of the motor was eclipsed by the sound of gunfire.

  Another creature scaled the wall of the shaft beside them.

  The temperature dropped by the second and she felt the first stirrings of the frigid wind. The shaft brightened, if only by degree. Claws scratched at the edges of the emergency hatch above them in a frantic attempt to get inside.

  “I really hope that evacuation team of yours is here,” Roche said.

  “Don’t worry. They’ll be here.”

  Gunfire from directly above their heads. A loud screech and a feathered form flopped past them, bounced from the wall, and plummeted into the depths.

  “Get down!” Roche shouted. He tackled Kelly and shielded her body with his.

  Bullets ricocheted from the roof and the side of the elevator.

  Barnett hit the ground in front of Kelly, his face only inches from hers. A sliver of metal shrapnel protruded from his forehead. The blood was already running through his eyebrow. He groaned when he pulled out the sliver.

  The elevator rose through the floor of the power station and they ascended into chaos.

  Love shot wildly around them, her bullets striking the machinery and the creatures alike. Her eyes were feral, her blond bangs stuck to her face by a crimson spatter.

  Barnett threw open the door and burst from the elevator. He started shooting the moment he passed Love.

  The creatures were everywhere. Scurrying up the walls and across the ceiling. Ducking through the maze of pipes.

  A ferocious gust of wind blew straight down the central walkway from the open front door, through which she could see only blowing snow. Kelly nearly sobbed in futility until the Valor momentarily emerged from the storm. It vanished every bit as quickly.

  “Get to the plane!” Barnett shouted.

  Kelly grabbed Roche’s hand and sprinted for the door. He held the bullpup SCAR by the pistol grip and fired behind him toward the ceiling.

  An agent in winter fatigues backed slowly away from the front door and onto the slick platform, shooting at the roof above him as he went.

  The moment Barnett passed him, the man turned and ran for the tiltrotor.

  Kelly dashed out into the blizzard behind them and zeroed in on the open side door of the tiltrotor. Tess leaned out and shouted something Kelly couldn’t hear over the roar of the rotors ramping up for liftoff.

  Shadows passed through her peripheral vision and struck the ground to either side of her. Bounced up and raced to cut her off.

  Roche shot to either side, which only served to drive the creatures wider in their approach.

  Love screamed from right behind her.

  Kelly glanced over her shoulder in time to see Love hit the ground. Her rifle clattered away from her outstretched hand. Her eyes locked onto Kelly’s and she reached for her, a scream on her lips—

  The creatures were upon her before she could release the sound. They tore at her with their hooked claws and ripped chunks of flesh from any part of her they could sink their teeth into.

  “No!” Kelly screamed.

  They looked up at her as one, their scaled snouts dripping with blood, and moved with blinding speed. They halved the distance between them before Kelly regained her momentum.

  Barnett climbed up into the Valor and fired back over their heads.

  Kelly ducked and focused on diving through the open door the moment she was within range.

  The rotor wash battered her in the face. The plane rose a good foot before settling to the ground again.

  “Hurry!” the copilot shouted from the cockpit as he closed his door.

  The camouflaged agent stopped when he reached Barnett, shot several times behind them, and tossed his weapon inside. He gripped the rail inside the door and reached for her.

  “Come on!”

  Kelly grabbed his hand and he pulled her up into the plane. Roche scrambled in behind her.

  The moment they were all onboard, Barnett pulled the sliding door closed.

  Thump-thump!

  The creatures struck the side of the plane as it lifted off, knocking it sideways. One leaped up onto the door, clung to the metal, and repeatedly struck at the window.

  The plane rose into the storm, leaving Forward Operating Base Atlantis behind. The rotors tilted and the creature’s feathers blew wildly. It shrieked and tried to hold on, but the force of the impelled air was far too great.

  Kelly pressed her face against the glass and watched the creature fall to the landing platform, where a dozen others attacked its bloody carcass the second it hit the ground.

  Roche gently pulled her into the seat beside him. She buried her face in his shoulder and started to cry.

  51

  BARNETT

  The Hanger, Unit 51 Base of Operations,

  Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Hampton, Virginia,

  March 29

  Barnett felt like he hadn’t slept in a week. His eyes burned, his head ached, and every inch of his body hurt, but he wouldn’t allow himself to rest until he made sense of the events that transpired simultaneously at Teotihuacan and FOB Atlantis. There was no doubt in his mind that the two were intrinsically related. He just didn’t know how. Not yet, anyway.

  Debriefing the various parties involved had helped gather a wealth of information, although correlating it was like trying to put together a puzzle without having any idea how the finished product was supposed to look. There were pieces scattered everywhere, and yet he was only able to make a few of them fit together, which did little more than hint at the overall picture. Worse, he could sense that time was no longer on his side. His adversary had stepped out of the shadows in what he considered a declaration of war, although he had yet to figure out where the battles would be fought, or even who they were fighting, only that one of them had spoken in what sounded like German, Villarreal’s last word had been “Aryan,” and all the masked assailants appeared to have the same blue eyes. The only thing he knew with complete certainty was that the consequences of losing would be dire, especially if what Dr. Liang said about Hollis Richards’s message during his final moment of lucidity was true.

  Unit 51’s base of operations was known as The Hanger, a name owed to Hollis Richards, who wanted to name it Hanger 18 after the building purported to contain UFO technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, but the Department of Defense hadn’t shared his sense of humor. It had, however, very much liked the idea of sharing his money, so a compromise had been reached.

  While on the surface it looked like an ordinary abandoned airfield in a remote corner of Joint Base Langley-Eustis, beneath the surface it was something else entirely. The facility was originally built in the early 1950s at the fringe of what was then known as Langley Air Force Base as an emergency relocation center for the National Military Establishment in the event of a nuclear holocaust, to ensure the continuity of the national security apparatus and command of the armed forces. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the momentary end of the Cold War, the three-hundred-thousand-square-foot bunker was largely forgotten and the aboveground structures converted into storage, at least until Hollis Richards caught wind of its existence and made the DoD an offer it couldn’t refuse.

  The subterranean complex had since been given a complete renovation. There were three sublevels, each of which required increasing levels of security clearance. Few ever saw the offices, computer labs, and temporary residential suites on the first sublevel, let alone the state-of-the-art scientific and medical laboratories on the second. Maybe a dozen or so people even knew of the existence of the third sublevel, and of them, only a handful had been granted access to view the unique artifacts stored in the climate-controlled vaults, the majority of which the world at large could never be allowed to know existed.

  Barnett strode down the main corridor on Level 1, away from his office, where he’d been poring over his notes from the debriefings. He was in a vile mood, as evidenced by the fac
t that everyone went out of their way to be anywhere he wasn’t, so for him to be summoned so unceremoniously to the computer lab suggested they’d finally found something useful. He didn’t so much care that he had the Pentagon breathing down his neck or even that the President himself was demanding an explanation he couldn’t give; the deaths of forty-five men and women who’d devoted their lives to the cause—his cause—weighed heavily upon him.

  Morgan was waiting outside the lab when he arrived. There were cracks in his ordinarily impassive façade.

  “That good?” Barnett said.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  The name “computer lab” didn’t really do it justice. The suite had been converted into a computer forensic laboratory rivaling that of the FBI, including advanced forensic workstations, rapid-action imaging and duplicating devices, and even a wireless interceptor. The room was clean to the point of sterility and illuminated by pale blue lights.

  Avery Price was sitting at the main terminal beneath the display screen on the wall. He was a little guy with thick glasses, a clubfoot, and tattoos covering every inch of his body, and he could work the kind of magic with computers that had made him a legend at the NSA, where digital wizardry was a minimum qualification.

  He turned, jutted out his lower jaw, and blew his bangs from his eyes.

  “Did you prepare him?”

  Barnett glanced at Morgan, who shook his head.

  “So here’s the deal,” Price said. “I had the system running through all of your ancillary digital video files from Atlantis like you asked. Surveillance, logs, chats, blah blah blah. Anyway, I came across a series of auto uploads from a guy named Bly, right?”

  Barnett sat beside Price and stared almost reluctantly at the screen. He had no desire to relive yet another death.

  “He was our speleology consultant.”

  “The guy who mapped all of the caves. I know. That’s some sick stuff he was doing down there. You ever see any of his footage? Just watching it made me claustrophobic.” Price read the impatience on Barnett’s face and got right down to it. “So, as you know, while he was actively spelunking—that’s the formal term, you know—he was recording with a camera that automatically downloaded the footage into archives from which the main computer generated three-dimensional re-creations of the caverns using the actual physical measurements. Just like a virtual colonoscopy, in a way. Anyway, the raw footage was never really meant to be watched. I suppose Bly might have done so eventually. You never know. But with there being a final recording and all . . .”

  “You watched it?”

  Price bit his lower lip and nodded.

  “You found something in the video.”

  Again, Price nodded.

  Barnett had officially listed Dr. Desmond Bly’s status as Missing-In-Action, Presumed Deceased. He was still in the process of piecing together the events surrounding the initiation of Protocol Delta and the subsequent attack on FOB Atlantis, but as best he could tell, Bly had never made it back to the base. Until now, he’d been reasonably comfortable in the assumption that the speleologist, like so many others, had been killed by the creatures during the siege. His remains were among those that hadn’t been recovered, and likely never would be.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Barnett said.

  Price used a handheld remote to start the recording. The time display in the corner showed that they were 0:28:32 into a 4:19:16 recording. There was no audio to accompany the video, yet Barnett found himself straining to hear.

  A flashlight played across intricate petroglyphs visualized with the aid of what looked like chalk. Those surrounding the colored section were worn nearly smooth.

  “Where is this?” Barnett asked.

  Price gestured at the monitor to his right, which showed the entirety of the warrens in 3-D. Barnett was well acquainted not only with the map, but with the location, which was roughly forty feet straight up from the ice cavern where Berkeley and Jonas had been attacked.

  On the screen, Bly walked through a narrow corridor that almost looked manmade. The walls were smooth and even, the corners sharp. He ran his fingers along them as he walked.

  “Can you get me detailed imagery of his immediate vicinity?”

  Price framed that area of the map inside a box. With a click of the mouse, it expanded to show Barnett exactly what he expected. There were large gaps of missing data above the ice cavern where the tunnels had been too small to properly map, but he could easily see how they led to the cavernous space Bly approached in the recording.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  On the monitor, Bly’s flashlight focused upon a stone sarcophagus nearly identical to the one underneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan. He watched helplessly as Bly shoved back the lid far enough to reveal a mummified corpse with the head of a stag.

  Both Price and Morgan turned away, leaving Barnett to watch alone as the view swung upward to show the ferocious jaws of the creature that struck at him from where it hung upside down through a hole in the ceiling. He witnessed Bly’s death from his perspective and felt the speleologist’s terror as he looked down and watched his legs flail and his blood spatter the granite slab. Until the twitching ceased and the creature released his body. Bly landed on the sarcophagus, where he lay still, his blood pooling beneath him and dripping over the edge of the lid. The angle of the camera revealed just a hint of the desiccated cadaver inside. The blood dribbling onto its bony forearm almost made it appear to move.

  Price clicked the remote and fast-forwarded nearly three hours. He stopped when the point of view abruptly shifted and rewound just far enough for Barnett to witness the speleologist’s body rolling off the sarcophagus and flopping to the ground.

  Bly lay flat on his chest, his head turned to his right. The majority of the screen was filled with the limestone directly underneath him, but the right corner revealed the side and a portion of the head of the sarcophagus. Human legs passed through the field of view and stopped at the very edge of the image, where the man to whom they belonged fell to his knees and leaned over the open coffin.

  Barnett caught a glimpse of a face covered with blood and bruises. The man’s features were deformed, but not to the point of being completely unrecognizable.

  “Les Dutton,” Barnett said.

  Another pair of legs crossed the screen. There was no mistaking to whom they belonged. The bare skin was pale and gray, the heels elevated so that the creature walked on the balls of its feet, its long nails striking the floor.

  Subject Z stood behind the kneeling cook and reached around the front of his neck.

  Dutton closed his eyes.

  In one violent motion, the creature tore out his throat and he collapsed forward in a wash of blood.

  “What the hell is it doing?” Barnett asked.

  “Best we can tell?” Morgan said. “Bleeding the victim onto the remains.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Subject Z held Dutton there for several minutes before casting his body aside. The creature walked around the side of the sarcophagus and stopped right in front of Bly’s camera, so close that the entire screen became fuzzy and gray. The image resolved when it stepped back, and for a split second revealed the withered legs dangling over Subject Z’s arm.

  “It took the remains,” Barnett said.

  He snatched the remote from Price’s hand and fast-forwarded. Minutes passed and the view didn’t change. An hour.

  “There’s nothing else,” Price said.

  When he reached the end of the recording, there was a rush of black water. Bly’s body slid toward the wall, his headlamp constricting against the limestone. Then only darkness when the flooding destroyed the camera.

  Barnett looked from Price to Morgan and back again.

  “Why in the name of God would it take the remains?”

  52

  EVANS

  Evans stood b
etween two rolling dry-erase boards. He’d enlarged photographs of the massive statues inside the pyramid and taped them up in the same order as they appeared in the Grand Gallery outside of the chamber that had transformed Dr. Dale Rubley into the creature—now classified as Subject Z—that had nearly killed them all six months ago. When they first entered the pyramid, what felt like years ago now, his first impression had been that the gallery had been designed to hold a large number of people, to impress upon them the might and majesty of the gods who were responsible for the transformative powers of the ancient machine contained within. Here were these same gods, only now he had seen two of them in the flesh.

  There were fourteen statues total, seven to either side of the central walkway. Some were considerably taller than the others. All of them wore animal masks and stood bare-chested in all their glory. He stared at the fifth statue on his right. The man had the wings of an angel and a sun disk mounted above his head, which was concealed beneath a mask with the face of a crocodile and the plumage of a tropical bird. It wasn’t just that he had seen the same mask on the corpse in Teotihuacan that bothered him; it was that he had seen the creatures represented by the mask both inside the flooded tomb and on the videos recorded at Forward Operating Base Atlantis.

  While he was no expert on extinct life-forms, he felt fairly confident that they represented a species of dinosaur that had somehow survived into the dawn of the era of man. It not only made sense that the creatures should be revered by primitive societies, but that they would use them to protect their most valuable treasures, in this case, the bodies of what they believed were the corporeal forms of their creator gods.

  Although Dr. Murphy, who’d miraculously escaped Antarctica physically, if not psychologically, unscathed, was still formulating her theory, she believed the feathered serpents were capable of entering into extended periods of cryptobiosis, a state triggered by hostile environmental conditions in which all metabolic processes simply ceased until more favorable climates prevailed and they returned to metabolic life as though waking from a deep sleep. It wasn’t unheard of in the natural world. There were numerous species of shrimp, insects, and nematodes that could exist indefinitely in a state of suspended animation and countless mammals and reptiles capable of extended periods of hibernation and brumation. It stood to reason that the extreme cold shift in Antarctica following the crustal displacement had triggered cryobiosis, or perhaps merely the sudden disappearance of prey species had caused the creatures to effectively shut down, like they speculated was the case in Mexico. If their theory was correct, the dinosaurs had been hatched inside the human remains in the sealed Ceremonial Well and found their way through the maze to where the animals were entombed with the body of the Feathered Serpent God. They’d slithered through holes only large enough to accommodate them in their juvenile form and entered a state of cryptobiosis when there was no longer any available food. Or perhaps it was the lack of water. Or heat. Or a combination of factors.