Intulo: The Lost World

by JE Gurley

  “Come and get me, Devil,” he called out and laughed.

  Pain exploded in his head and spread throughout his body. He went into convulsions. He felt ribs crack. The rifle slid from his lap, and a fresh stream of blood gushed from his wound.

  So much for taunting the devil, he thought.

  The convulsion and the pain subsided, but the presence in his mind didn’t. He felt as if someone had wrung every thought, every emotion from his body, leaving only a husk. He feared if the presence left, there would be nothing left of him. The devil came closer. He could hear him in the tunnel, slithering like a serpent across the rock. The floor of the tunnel shuddered again, the thunder of the devil’s footsteps, he thought. Using what little strength and willpower remained, he flicked on the flashlight.

  The devil was a black carpet gliding across the floor toward him.

  “What are you?” he asked.

  The devil paused. He felt it was staring at him, licking its chops. Trying to decide how many licks to my chewy center. His lack of apprehension surprised him. When drowning in fear, fear didn’t seem important. The floor of the tunnel began quaking. Shards of rock fell from the roof. A strong wind bearing the heavy ozone smell of the air just before a summer shower rushed down the tunnel. He tore his gaze from the devil and pointed the flashlight in the other direction. A wall of water reaching almost to the roof swept down the tunnel toward him. Drowning wins, he thought. Too bad devil.

  The black mass broke into a dozen ebony creatures that looked something like the giant millipede that had bitten him, but he knew these were infinitely more deadly. They were supercharged millipedes. Suddenly, the group retreated, slithering down the tunnel away from the water and quickly disappearing among the shadows. At first, he thought it was fleeing from the water, but through the tenuous threads of consciousness linking him to the devil, he knew the devil wasn’t fleeing, but rushing toward something else at the bottom of the mine with a sense of anger so strong it dispelled all other thoughts. When the devil, if devil it was, fled, a sense of calmness he had not felt in many years enveloped him. With serenity came acceptance.

  The wall of water was a speeding locomotive, smashing into Duchamps, snapping his spine, and pulverizing his head into the rock floor; then picked up his broken body and flushed it like sewage from the mine.

  25

  July 6, 2016, 4:00 p.m. Ngomo Volcano –

  The searing heat blistered Masowe’s skin, but he was oblivious to the damage the hot obsidian inflicted on his bare feet. He had discarded his boots and his clothing and danced the Hunter’s Dance naked before the largest campfire in the world – Ulungu. The great swamp beneath the earth was burning. The trees and plants had become a blazing inferno, fueled by pockets of methane gas and proto-petrochemicals oozing from the ground and the water. Flames soared halfway to the roof, spilling heat like rain over the entire chamber.

  The roar of the flames overshadowed the high-pitched whine of the Cerberus eating away at the base of the pillar of stone holding up the roof of the magma chamber. Where the lasers cut into the hard granite, globs of red-hot molten rock ran down the side of the pillar like candle wax. Not for millions of years had the stone felt such intense heat, not since the lava drained from the chamber, flowing back to its origin near the Earth’s molten outer core.

  Masowe had no one to play a pedi flute or ugubhu mouth bow to accompany his dance. No goatskin isigubhu drum pounded out the beat to which he danced. He wore no umfece ankle bracelet made of moth cocoons filled with small pebbles to jingle with his steps. He danced the Hunter’s Dance alone, in anticipation of facing his enemy, without stabbing assagi spear or cowhide isihlangu shield. He did not have an impi band of warriors to protect him in battle. His weapon was his mental connection to Intulo, and his shield was his faith in his sangoma father’s teachings.

  The air was thick with suffocating smoke. It parched the inside of this throat and baked his lungs. He could see for only a few meters around him, but he had no need for vision. He was not hunting his prey. It hunted him and he was not running from it. He had opened his mind to Intulo, treading carefully in the dark nether regions of the creature’s mind lest it wholly consume him. Through his eyes, he showed the creature the destruction of its lair and the slaying of its offspring. Intulo’s rage rose until it became a dark, roiling storm cloud pierced by flashes of ebony lightning. Its unrestrained fury seared through the mental link between man and creature.

  A normal man would have shut down his mind or fled in abject terror from the blasts of elemental hatred assaulting him, but he was a warrior, a member of the Zulu tribe. He was no longer a security guard working for the Van Gotts Corporation. He was Shaka Zulu reborn.

  He knew now the creature was not truly Intulo and the magma chamber was not Ulungu, home of the gods. It was just a creature from the forgotten past, a misanthropic evolutionary dead end. Without its giant insects for food, it would turn to men to satisfy its craving. He must stop it.

  The link between them ran both directions. Through Intulo’s alien mind, he saw images of the flood sweeping through the mine. Soon, the wall of water would reach the inferno where the intense heat would flash it into steam. The magma chamber was a sealed pressure cooker, allowing the expanding steam nowhere to go. Pressure would build, further weakening the surrounding rock. Between the machine’s belching heat melting the support pillar and the force of pressurized steam, the roof would collapse. He would kill his prey.

  Intulo was coming. Masowe could feel its presence. The individual creatures that comprised the hive-mind monster outpaced the torrent of the flood in its haste to stop the destruction of its young. It fired bolts of dark agony at Masowe. The mental shield his father had taught him to create deflected most of the power, but enough got through to wrack his body with pain. He collapsed on the ground, his chest heaving for breath in the cloying, black smoke. Above the din of flame and manmade laser energy, he heard the deep rumble of falling rocks and the sharp, brittle cracking of the roof above him. A shower of rock pelted the glassine obsidian shelf with the sound of rain on a window. The laser drill was weakening the pillar and the roof was beginning to collapse.

  Masowe did not regret dying. His only regret was having no trophy of his kill to display on the wall of his mining camp room. He crawled across the shelf to where he had discarded his clothing. The agony of his naked body pressed against the heated rock made each movement torture. His hands sought his pants pocket. He withdrew a small, beaded gourd, his ishungu to ward off evil, and clasped it to his chest.

  Intulo flowed down the rocky slope of the chamber, an avalanche of evil careening toward him. The creatures did not pause to observe the destruction of its domain. They slithered up the slope to the shelf intent on punishing Masowe. Cracks raced up the flanks of the granite pillar as it swayed in an invisible zephyr. At last, its enormous weight grew too heavy for the weakened base to support, and the colossal spire of stone slowly toppled. The roof cracked, at first where the pillar pulled fee, but then fissures radiated outward, reaching for the walls of the cavern. With a sound of the rending of a world, the chamber began to tear itself apart.

  Intulo waited before devouring him, savoring his terror as an appetizer. Masowe stared up at the horde of ebony creatures rearing on their rear legs, encircling him, staring at him with an intensity that would have crippled its normal insect prey, but his agony weakened their hold on him. As the fringes of the deluge reached the inferno, flashing instantly to steam, an earsplitting hiss erupted, shaking the ground. Intulo, intent on its prey, ignored the devastation around it. Masowe forced a smile to his blistered lips just before the creature ripped into his mind with a sledgehammer blow, and then enfolded his body in a dozen tight, deadly embraces. He did not feel the burst of scalding steam spilling from the cauldron. Nor did he hear the thunderous roar, as the entire magma chamber collapsed in on itself, pulling the surface above down into the void created by its demise. Hunter and prey both lay entombed be
neath kilometers of solid rock.

  Masowe hoped his ancestors would be proud of him.

  26

  July 6, 2016, 5:30 p.m. Ngomo Mine, 70 Level ore conveyor –

  Bray stopped at small alcove in the tunnel they had been following. A 55-gallon drum of hydraulic fluid and a smaller drum of lubricating oil took up most of the space. A rack on the wall held two grease guns, an oil-stained gallon bucket, and a flashlight dangling by a string. A locked toolbox sat below it.

  “This is it,” he announced.

  Alan stared at the alcove searching for the promised way out. “Where?” he asked.

  Bray rapped his knuckles on an unpainted wooden door set into the wall. To Alan it looked like a cupboard. Bray opened the door, revealing a metal cage barely large enough to accommodate one person, suspended from a steel cable the diameter of his thumb. Wisps of smoke drifted up from below.

  “What is it?” Alan asked.

  “A dumbwaiter. The maintenance crew uses it to reach the main motor housing for the belt conveyor and the rollers. It keeps us from shutting it down when they need to grease the bearings. There’s just enough room to squeeze from beneath the conveyor and reach the walkway. We’ll have to go up one at a time,” he added.

  “I don’t think I’ll fit,” Tells said.

  Alan sat the doctor on the toolbox. His face and skin were a sickly gray. Alan worried he was near having a heart attack. The smoke drifting up the shaft set off a spasm of coughing. His hands shook as he braced himself on the toolbox to keep from keeling over.

  “You’re positively svelte,” he said. “This heat has melted the pounds off like a sauna.”

  “You are an excellent liar, young man, but I appreciate your attempt to humor me.”

  “We’ll get you out, Doctor,” Alan said. “We’re not leaving you behind.”

  On the journey to the maintenance shaft, thick smoke filled the tunnels making breathing difficult for all of them, especially Tells. Alan and Sandersohn had supported the doctor by resting his weight on their shoulders while he struggled to put one foot in front of the other. Seeing where they were going had been a challenge. They had followed Bray’s unerring lead. Without his intimate knowledge of the mine, they would never have made it through the labyrinth of tunnels.

  “Sandersohn, you go up first. Take the machinegun just in case any creepy crawlies are up there. I’ll bring up the rear.”

  Sandersohn laid the MP5 in the bottom of the cage and crawled inside. “Cozy,” he said.

  “Pull that cable down,” Bray said. “It’s weighted on the other end and won’t take much effort to lift you to the top. When you get out, send it back down using the crank up there.”

  “Right,” Sandersohn replied and began pulling the cable. “Don’t dawdle,” he said as the cage disappeared up the shaft.

  “This time I’ll go last,” Bray said.

  “We’ll flip a coin later,” Alan replied.

  As the dumbwaiter bearing Sandersohn climbed the shaft, Alan pulled Eve aside. He hadn’t had much time to speak with her, to explain how he felt about her. He didn’t want to die without having said it. Her beauty enraptured him. She wasn’t magazine model beautiful –high, thin cheekbones, pencil-thin eyebrows, and eyes so dark with mascara they looked racoonish. His ex-wife, Sharon, possessed that kind of beauty, but she was cold and aloof. Eve had what he called a cute-girl-next-door beauty, magnified by her lack of makeup and her inner determination to survive. Soot from the smoke streaked her cheeks, and her hair lay plastered to her scalp beneath the hardhat, but even in the harsh glow of the flashlights, her face looked angelic in spite of her fear.

  “I want to thank you, Eve.”

  “For what?”

  “For making me realize my work has been a crutch. I substituted the Cerberus for a chance at any relationship and thought I was coming out on the winning end. I was wrong. I like what I see in you and what I feel about you. It’s like you kick started my heart.”

  “You made me live again, Alan. I was dead inside, bitter and angry at what life had done to me. Now, I think I could love again. Maybe I already do.”

  He drew held her to him, relishing the feel of her body against his. For a long, tender moment, he forgot where they were and what they faced. The sound of the cage descending brought it all back in a painful rush.

  “Ladies first,” he said, ushering her into the waiting dumbwaiter.

  She peered through the open metal-grate bottom of the dumbwaiter down the shaft and took a step back, shaking her head. “It’s not safe.”

  “Of course it’s safe,” Bray insisted. He reached in, grabbed the side of the cage, and shook it, rattling it against the side of the shaft. “See?”

  Eve glanced at Alan. He nodded his head. She smiled, crawled inside, and smiled back at him. Then she began pulling the cable.

  Alan checked his watch. Two hours had passed since leaving Masowe in the swamp. He didn’t know how much longer they had. He looked at Bray. “I’ll go last.”

  Bray cocked his head to one side and stared back at him with a wry grin. “Look, you said an inferno was raging below us in a volcanic magma chamber. After what I’ve witnessed today, I believe you. This smoke backs you up. Your plan is to collapse the roof of the chamber, right?”

  “If everything goes according to plan.”

  “The mine has hollowed out this old chunk of rock like a wheel of Swiss cheese. It’s almost a half-century old. Some of the wooden supports are as old as the mine. The flood washed out God knows how many of those supports. Small tremors can shut us down for days. A major shake can collapse tunnels. What do you suppose will happen when a chunk of rock several kilometers in diameter crashes to the ground?”

  Alan was embarrassed that he hadn’t considered the possibility. As an engineer, albeit not a mining engineer, he should have made the calculations. His original plan to close the Cerberus tunnel had morphed into a more ambitious project to seal the entire magma chamber and lava tube system. Its conception had been spontaneous and had changed with the circumstances. Beyond his goal to stop the creature, he had given no thought to the wider aspects of his scheme.

  “I see.”

  “Get the others out of the mine. Don’t worry. I don’t intend to remain behind, but this leg will slow me down. You’ll have your hands full with the old man. I can take care of myself. It’s my mine, my decision,” Bray replied. He turned to Doctor Tells. “You’re next.”

  Tells was too weak to pull himself up. It took nearly fifteen minutes for Sandersohn to get the dumbwaiter up the shaft using the hand crank. Alan waited impatiently for cage to come back down, expecting the floor to give way beneath him at any moment. Finally, it was his turn. As he crawled into the cage, the floor shuddered. The toolbox bounced across the floor. A grease gun fell from the rack.

  “It’s starting,” he said. “There’s room for both of us in here if we suck in our guts and hold our breath.”

  Bray shook his head. “We might fit, but only one of us can reach the cable. One person can’t lift two, especially a man with one arm. Sandersohn can’t lift us either. Hurry. Don’t waste time arguing.”

  Alan grabbed the cable with both hands, but let his right arm do most of the work. Another tremor struck, stronger than the first. The dumbwaiter swung like a pendulum, banging against the sides of the shaft. He pulled faster. When he reached the top, Sandersohn reached in and dragged him out of the dumbwaiter. He crawled into the narrow gap between the conveyor rollers and the floor. He didn’t envy anyone whose job entailed working in such a confining space while the conveyor was moving just inches from their faces.

  “Did you feel the tremors?” Sandersohn asked, as he released the brake and began frantically cranking the handle to lower the dumbwaiter to Bray.

  “Yeah, we don’t have much time.”

  “Get Eve and Doctor Tells out of here.”

  Alan hesitated. He was getting tired of leaving people behind.

  “Don’t be
a fool, Alan,” Sandersohn snapped. “You can’t help here. Now, get out of my way.”

  He crawled from beneath the conveyor. Eve and Tells sat on the tough, steel-fiber infused fabric of the two-meter-wide belt. Rollers along the edge folded the belt upward to form a trough to keep the ore from spilling out.

  “Help me with Doctor Tells,” he said to Eve.

  Together, they got him to his feet and began walking down the conveyor. Another tremor hit. It was the strongest one yet. If not for the curved edges of the conveyor, Alan would have toppled over the side, taking the others with him.

  “The cable snapped!” Sandersohn yelled from beneath the conveyor. “It fell down the shaft. I can’t bring Bray up.” He was frantic. When he poked his head out from beneath the conveyor, his stricken face highlighted his panic.

  Alan cursed himself for not planning their escape better. How many others are going to pay for my mistakes? “There’s nothing we can do for him,” he said. “We have to get out of here.”

  “We have to do …”

  The walls of the tunnel groaned a low, mournful note. For a moment, Alan thought it was calling his name. Alan’s uncanny ability to know when a collapse was imminent went into high gear. The magma chamber was collapsing and taking the mine with it.

  “Get out from under there,” Alan yelled to Sandersohn.

  The low groan rose in tenor to become an agonized scream as rock shattered under the enormous pressure from above. The conveyor heaved, tossing all three to the belt. Alan landed on his injured arm with Tells sprawled across him. A knife blade of agony plunged into his brain. He fought the darkness dragging him down into unconsciousness. The tremors came on top of each other like waves crashing on the beach. This time the shaking did not subside, but grew worse. The mine was collapsing around them.