PLAZA

by Shane M Brown

  'And?' prompted Ethan eagerly.

  Rourke indicated the entire Plaza with one precise hand gesture. 'Well, why weren't these people defending themselves against attack from the outside?'

  'I don't follow,' said Ethan.

  'The bunker entrances, the tiers, lines of sight, the high ground locations - they all face the Gallery, not the surrounding landscape. They're all pointing right into the middle of the Plaza.'

  'Towards the Gallery? You sure?'

  Rourke licked his lips. 'The danger wasn't from the outside. These people were defending themselves from something that was already here.'

  #

  Alone in the bunker antechamber, Claire scanned the six piles of dive gear she needed to prep for storage. Regulators first, then do the scuba tanks.

  She couldn't wipe the smile from her face.

  The chocolate coins had worked perfectly. The prank was exactly what she needed to break the stifling mood settling over the camp. End of season always had that affect. It felt like a big family breaking up.

  Marco and Patrick had already prepped their gear for storage. Good boys, those two. Once Marco had stopped coming onto her, they had gotten along famously. She grabbed up the box of reusable sandwich-bags and began sealing every regulator's mouthpiece.

  Apparently the divers found it challenging to work underwater with a mouth full of cockroaches - especially the giant things that passed for cockroaches around here. You couldn't kill one with a shovel. Squatting over the gear, she felt the half a dozen scraps of paper crinkle in her pocket. This last day had been an email and address swapping frenzy. Everyone was trading contact details, and she was surprised by the half a dozen contacts people had pressed onto her. People she actually wanted to stay in contact with, and who apparently felt likewise.

  She felt pleasantly surprised. It wasn't that she didn't fit in, just that she was always so busy. She was awake before dawn and usually exhausted and asleep seconds after her head hit the pillow. Socializing, apparently the high point for many of the volunteers and staff, was even more exhausting. They called her the 'Sherriff', but so what? She was paid to kick ass and put out fires. She decided to treat it like a compliment, even if it was partway a criticism. What did they expect when her problem was safety on the most dangerous excavation in the world?

  Half of them didn't even realize that the biggest safety risk wasn't actually inside the site, but rather completely surrounding it. An oxbow bend of the river completely surrounded the Plaza. That made her site flood prone. And not just a little flood prone. Six industrial-grade pumps ran twenty-four seven to keep their boots dry. Without the pumps, the place would be a seven hundred meter wide swimming pool. Same with the silt walls surrounding the site. They kept the river out, but needed constant monitoring. Twice now they had needed the walls assessed to ensure their integrity was up to the task. Ambrose Rourke had been helpful in that regard, sourcing an engineering consultant to perform the assessment and helping Claire oversee the structural upgrades.

  And then, to make things even more complicated, she discovered the excavation was polluting the river. Containing all the liquid sediment they pumped from the Plaza became a major headache. It meant more earthworks, isolating their branch of the river, and then forming a silt storage pond large enough to land a seaplane. They could only release the silt back into the natural watercourse gradually, and the resulting silt pond constantly threatened to top the silt wall and flood the dig when it rained.

  Her first day on site, when it still looked like the archaeologists were trying to patch the gaps between the ruins with all their khaki tents, she had looked down from the plane and asked about the different colored tarpaulins.

  Ethan had pointed awkwardly across her seat through the small window. ‘Blue is for the medical tent. Orange for the kitchen area. Green for the communications tower. Red for security. It's for navigating on site. Until you know the Plaza, it can be easy to get lost. It changes every season after all. Nothing stays in the same place. Every time we dig, the place changes.'

  Oddly enough, learning about that little system had made up Claire's mind to accept the job. It was a clever system, and suggestive of the types of practical minds she might like to work with. Sometimes, often actually, it was one little thing that made up Claire's mind. One little sign.

  'Flying in at night,' Ethan had gone on to say, pointing down at something, 'is even more incredible.'

  He was pointing at the lights. Ten tall floodlight towers were spread around the top tier. For working at night, Claire had assumed. Later, she learned they were security lights.

  She smiled at her own naiveté. The two issues giving her the most problems were the two things she’d least expected. Security and the river. She'd never even considered the river encircling the entire site, even though one of her marketable skills was commercial diving safety, which, like right now, was taking up more and more of her time.

  She checked everyone's log books were up to speed, signed and dated. The bends could strike a diver a long time after they finished their last dive. Claire had witnessed it during a backpacking trip around Australia. A girl in the bunk across from hers had woken screaming in the night, her muscles all twisting up. Apparently she'd spend the first day of her holiday on the Great Barrier Reef. She spent her first night in a hyperbaric chamber.

  OK. You can't put it off any longer. She'd left moving the scuba tanks to last. Those buggers weighed a ton when they weren't underwater. She attached a regulator to every tank and checked the pressure. Too little pressure and air could leak back into the tank and let mildew grow on the inside. Not good for the lungs. Better than giant cockroaches, but only marginally. Her tanks all checked out. She knew they would. Where's that tank trolley when you need it?

  She hauled the tanks to the orange plastic enclosure and clipped them into place, sweating under her army-green cargo shorts and yellow polo shirt by the time she'd finished. Now they were ready for the next season's diving.

  She hunted around the chamber for anything she'd missed. All the tripods and lights were staying, as well as the cables that kept them juiced up. The tables pushed against the wall were collapsible, but Ethan generally left everything intact to save time later. She didn't bother with Ethan's tape measures and tools in the corner. He knew what he wanted left out for next season.

  And apparently he wants me to come back.

  She thought about Ethan's offer of another season’s employment.

  She had interviewed with Ethan over the phone before he'd initially offered her the job. The seasonal work proved ideal. She'd managed to travel between seasons, and it turned out her co-workers were some of the best folks she'd ever met. The volunteers, the divers, the grad students - the visiting experts in any field she could imagine - at first she suspected pure luck was responsible for such a great pack of people all winding up working at the same place, but then she realized that it wasn't the people, but their shared goal. Someone who might be a seething malcontent stuck in an office was a happy-camper out here. The entire experience taught Claire how important it was for people to have jobs that interested them in some way.

  Her motivations weren't so simple.

  Sure, she appreciated the significance of the Plaza - a mysterious new culture, incredible discoveries, fabulous stonemasonry and all that. It might have interested her more if she was sitting back watching it all on the national geographic channel, but she didn't have time to kick back and enjoy it. She didn't share their wonder. To her, the world was full of mysteries. It was cool to be a part of uncovering one, but in the back of her mind she couldn't help think that they would never truly figure out this place. It would end up like Stonehenge or Machu Picchu and all the others - a pack of theories with no foreseeable way to be proven either way. Truth be told, when she first entered this very chamber, she thought it looked more like a Roman bathhouse with strange artwork scrawled on the walls than anything she'd seen on the television associated with the Azte
cs or the Mayans.

  She was here because it was where she needed to be.

  At nineteen she'd married young and, as it turned out, to a jackass. Thankfully she'd realized this before they started pumping out kids. A broken marriage sounded tragic, but it was nothing like that. No kids, no pets, and they were only renting where they lived. She used the settlement money first to go back to School and then to travel.

  When the money ran out, she wasn't ready to stop, so she found a way to travel and work at the same time. So far she'd done safety work in the Philippines, Malaysia, New Caledonia and now here. If it hadn't been for her 'insignificant other' she would never have started this chapter of her life. It had been the best time of her life, but did she still want this kind of life? Sleeping in tents, washing by hand, toilets in the jungle, never really feeling clean....

  And her job was getting harder and harder. Every day the Plaza offered new problems. When they started the dig, they never anticipated underwater work, but here she was right now packing away scuba gear that provided people's life-giving oxygen. She was responsible for every stage of their preparation and use. No way she would have signed up for this gig had she known she'd end up doing this. Somehow all the responsibility had crept up while she was just doing whatever it took to keep the site functioning. Responsibility was intimidating.

  She lifted her cap and wiped her forehead on her sleeve. That was everything stowed except her own dive gear. She squatted and gathered all her gear. She lifted the awkward load, hugged it to her chest, and copped a nasty whiff of blood.

  Oh, yuck.

  She sniffed her buoyancy vest. Yep, it was on the gear again. It pervaded everything. That hot copper smell. She didn't know if the silt they were sucking from the bunker was high in copper, but it certainly smelled like warm blood. Others had commented, so it wasn't just her. She'd learned the hard way to shower after every dive. The smell proved impossible to remove from bedding. She had to throw away her near-new sleeping bag. Every season the smell got stronger, or perhaps her intervals away from the site cleansed her olfactory palate and left her vulnerable again. Whatever it was, she hated it.

  Still, the smell was worse in the Gallery where poor Joanne spent most of her time, and Joe never complained.

  The Gallery was a place Claire wouldn't miss seeing again. She could deal with the sweat and the leeches. The mosquitoes and mudslides. The scorpions as big as dogs hunting earthworms you could trip over. But the Gallery was something else.

  She'd seen bone-weary people after a full day's excavation walk an extra three hundred meter detour rather than take a shortcut through a well-lit section of the Gallery.

  Artwork isn't what I'd call it. Pornography, more like it. And not the good kind.

  At the top of the stairs, Claire dumped her gear and swung shut the double doors. The huge corrugated iron doors were fashioned on site. The Plaza was self-sufficient to the point that Claire often felt she was living in a small middle ages hamlet. They customized and repaired everything on site.

  She kicked the bolts down into the stonework and then snapped the padlock shut. As she stood, something caught her eye. She picked it up. For a few moments she crinkled the object in her fingers.

  In that instant, she made up her mind about Ethan's offer. Now that she'd decided, she wanted to tell him straight away.

  She stuck the gold chocolate coin wrapper in her pocket and went to find him.

  #

  Joel had no idea where the balloon-raft was now.

  He ran for his life.

  He and Libby had run in different directions. It was probably the smartest thing to do. If only they'd stayed on the god-damned raft....

  ...thump-thump-thump-thump...

  So close together, his heartbeats wetly lapped the sides of each other.

  ...closer...

  Joel was a pure-blooded running machine. A biological organism built with one goal - to drive forward, hurdle forward, at the greatest possible speed. It was a primeval function. Blood code. When something this big was chasing you, trying to eat you, the human body knew what to do. Will power alone seemed to make him move faster. He screamed at himself in his mind. Run as fast as you can. No - run faster!

  In a very strange way he felt good. Good like the man who outruns the lion. But this was no lion. A lion would have been an improvement on this thing, whatever it was.

  Joel switched left around a thick tree trunk, considering then dismissing a quick-step bluff to the right to throw off the thing. Could he bluff this animal? Best not risk it. Whatever pursued him was driving pretty hard for the hoop.

  Man, if ever get out of this, I'll have a story to tell. My God - another one!

  The trees off to his right shivered before its branches disgorged the big brother of the freak show behind him.

  You must be joking me. Give a guy a chance at least!

  He slid to a stop as the ground twenty feet in front began shimmering. A third animal was blocking his path. And he knew what they were.

  Joel's heart kept pounding full-tilt. He bent to pick up a length of broken branch. He turned on the spot as the creatures closed in. He wasn't going to be telling his story after all. But that didn't mean he couldn't fight.

  And fight he did. Right to the very end.

  #

  Kline walked through the Gallery swinging the canvas bag by its rope shoulder strap.

  He couldn't wait to show Rourke. Rourke would flip his wig. Kline smiled at the prospect. Who knew, but maybe what Kline had in the bag might be enough to shock the unflappable security chief. That will be a first.

  Kline blinked, stopped, and pulled the flashlight from his belt. The Gallery had two potential entrances, one east and one west. Only the east entrance was open when Ethan excavated the Gallery. No one had figured out how to open the west entrance. With one functioning entrance and no natural lighting, things got real dark, real quick.

  Five chambers into the Gallery, a traveler found themself in pitch darkness. Five chambers passed quickly because every Gallery chamber was also an intersection to those surrounding it. The chambers were perfect cubes, six meters across, each with four archways to its surrounding chambers.

  Cubes of spooky darkness, Kline thought. Apparently the archaeologists agreed. They had installed pairs of knee-high fluorescent lights in several chambers leading to their work areas. Giant glowing mushrooms, Kline called them. They were no substitute for a good flashlight.

  Even in the Gallery’s lit sections, a very small portion of its total, getting lost was a real risk for the newbies until they learned to follow the power cables back to the exit. They hadn't needed a newbie hunt for weeks, Kline realized. The volunteers must have passed around the navigation tip about the power cables.

  Twelve intersections into the maze-like Gallery, Kline looked left and right down two identical corridors.

  Hmm....I'm lost again.

  Not lost in the conventional sense. He knew exactly where he was in relation to the dirt-jockeys, but not where he was in relation to Rourke.

  He needed the goggles. Listening to ensure none of the researchers were walking nearby, he quickly slipped the goggles from his backpack and pressed them to his face. He scanned all around himself - walls, floor, archways - there it was, above the left archway.

  OK. I'm back on track. He shoved the goggles quickly away and followed the left corridor.

  All these short corridors linking the chambers looked the same to him. Only the ever-present peepshow changed. The wall carvings. His flashlight lit up the walls ahead. Knee to shoulder-high, the continuous strip of gruesome stone carvings extended along both sides of every corridor.

  A man lying disemboweled was followed by a man crawling along carrying his own leg. Next was a man running and clutching the stump of his missing hand. The fine detail was amazing. He could actually see the fear in the stone faces.

  Pure gold.

  He never tired of studying the carvings.

  Klin
e stopped, his path ahead blocked. In theory, every chamber had four exits. One for each compass point. But just to make things interesting, the original occupants added some obstacles. Some archways were blocked by a solid stone slab. Some of these slabs had a triangular hole in the center. The triangle hole seemed to have no purpose except inconvenience. A normal-sized person could squeeze through one, as Kline did now. He dropped his bag, rifle, and flashlight through the hole. Head first, he twisted his wide shoulders through and then dropped down to put his palms on the stone floor. Annoying, but hardly a true obstacle. He wriggled his hips through, dropped down one leg and then pulled his other leg through.

  He stood and straightened his uniform in the dark. What had the people who built this place been thinking? This was like something from Alice in Wonderland. Whenever he travelled through the Gallery, he felt like he'd been invited to play a game but not given the rules. It was hard to win a game like that. Kline liked winning.

  He picked up his gear, or rather, everything but his flashlight. Where did it go? He hadn't heard it roll away. He felt around with his hands, but only found one of the weird grooves that led under the walls.

  Oh well, this area was now out-of-bounds for the dirt-jockeys anyway. Security staff only beyond this point. He could use his goggles freely here, so without his flashlight he wasted no time slipping the elastic strap over the back of his head. This would speed things up; he wouldn't need to travel from memory.

  Twelve intersections later, three of which he had to climb through, Kline approached a chamber where bright welding sparks bounced off the stone floor. Rourke was finishing his contraption.

  Kline hung back for a moment in the darkened passageway and watched Rourke work. Across the chamber, a statue-like object stood concealed under a blue square of tarpaulin. Kline had only seen under that tarpaulin once, but it had dominated his thoughts, his dreams, ever since.