Callsign: King II- Underworld (10 page)

Pierce did as instructed, aware of his heart thudding in his chest. After a few seconds, he heard other sounds—grunts, labored breathing, the slap of skin against stone—and almost gagged as a rancid odor, like a heap of rotting skunk flesh, filled his nose. It was the distinctive smell of the creatures that had attacked the camp—he had smelled it earlier, though not as strongly—during the mayhem. The creatures were indeed close, and getting closer, and Pierce expected at any moment to feel large hands close over him.

Instead, it was his guide’s hand that reached out from the darkness to tap his shoulder. “Here. Take a look.”

Something hard, about the size and weight of a small camcorder, was pressed into his hands. He realized that it was a night-vision device like the one King had given him earlier in the night. A green glow showed him which end was the business end, and he quickly held it up to his right eye.

Looking through the objective lens of the night-vision monocular was like watching a movie on a tiny television screen. It was hard to believe that what he was seeing wasn’t just footage from a monster movie, but was actually taking place just a few feet away. A line of the enormous hominids was moving past the niche in which they were concealed. More than a dozen passed by as Pierce watched, and every single one of them carried a body—either the camouflage-clad form of a soldier or one of their own species—all dead, he assumed. What was most surprising to Pierce was the complete absence of the ferocity he had witnessed during the attack. The creatures moved with a single-mindedness reminiscent of ants trekking relentlessly between their hive and a food source. He sucked in an involuntary breath as one of the beasts turned its shaggy head and glowing eyes to look at him as it passed, but the creature did not even break its stride.

It was only as the monster moved away that he realized he had seen something else.

In the chaos of the attack on the military camp, he had seen the creatures as nothing more than enormous shaggy animals, driven by mindless instinct. But as they paraded by, he saw evidence of more complex behavior—one of creatures reached back and with a quick tug, removed the hair from its body—
much
more complex.

Holy shit
, Pierce thought,
the hair isn’t natural
.

The photo he had seen earlier, had showed one of the creatures with a single ancient Greek coin, worn like a medallion on a string around its neck; it was the very aberration that had brought him here. And it was nothing alongside what he now beheld.

Coins, rings, bracelets…every manner of precious or semi-precious metal ornament adorned the creatures—every last one of them. The treasures were threaded like beads onto strings of what looked to Pierce like strands of twisted gut, and they were worn like amulets or totem necklaces. Some of the strings were heavy with dozens of pieces of jewelry; evidently, the creature whose image had been captured digitally was a pauper among his peers—
or hers
, Pierce thought.

For just a moment, the horror of the attack was eclipsed by this new mystery. This was a form of complex animal behavior…evolutionary behavior. Pierce didn’t know exactly what the explanation was for all of it, but he knew that it almost certainly had nothing to do with Manifold Genetics.

After a few minutes, the procession ended; the last of the enormous creatures vanished down the adjacent tunnel.

It was only then that Pierce had an opportunity to scope out his surroundings. But for the fact that he had just witnessed at least a couple dozen of the creatures passing, he would not have believed that he was in a cave. The monochrome green of the night-vision device revealed only upright walls of dark rock in every direction.

“I’m gonna need that back soon, pardner.”

Pierce turned to get his first look at the man who had evidently come to his aide. The man’s digital camouflage uniform showed him to be a soldier. There was a patch with three chevrons affixed to his body armor vest, and next to it a name tape that read “De Bord.” It was impossible to make out much detail in the green display, but Pierce thought the man looked quite a bit more mature than most of the enlisted soldiers he’s seen in the camp. The sight of the uniform slammed a door on his musings about the extraordinary creatures, and reminded him that a lot of people had just died... King might have died.

But they just ignored us. We’re obviously on their turf now; why didn’t they attack
?

It was a mystery that would have to wait. Darkness engulfed him as he lowered the monocular and extended it toward the soldier.

“Sergeant De Bord is it?”

There was a pause as the other man took the goggles from him. “That’s right.” De Bord sounded confused by Pierce’s knowledge of his identity.

“I saw your name tag. So, am I your prisoner?”

De Bord chuckled. “I reckon we’ve got bigger things to worry about. For now, let’s just focus on getting out of here, and finding your friend.”

“I’m not too sure where ‘here’ is. What happened?”

“I saw you take a tumble into this here cave. Those…whatever they are…they were headed your way, so I went in after you.”

Pierce felt a guiding hand on his shoulder and allowed the soldier to steer him out of the recess where they had hidden.

“We can’t be more than a hundred meters from the opening,” De Bord continued. “Just keep a hand on my shoulder and we’ll be outside in no time flat.”

“Do you have a flashlight? I don’t think we have to worry about those creatures anymore.”

“I hope you’re right about that. Hang on.”

Pierce winced as a light flared in the other man’s hand, revealing the cave walls in their true color—dark rock of indeterminate composition. De Bord directed the beam down the passage in the same direction from which the creatures had come, and started walking with Pierce in tow.

As they moved along the cramped passage, Pierce decided to exploit the sergeant’s evident willingness to engage in conversation. “So I take it the Army is here because of those creatures, right? What do you know about them?”

“Not a whole helluva lot. They came out of nowhere, wrecked everything, and then just like that, decided to skedaddle. The rest of it is all above my pay grade. I just do what the brass tells me to do.” He stopped abruptly and directed the light overhead.

The circle of illumination on the rock ceiling showed nothing particularly remarkable, but in the ambient light, Pierce saw that the tunnel ahead sloped upward and ended abruptly.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I don’t understand,” the sergeant said, turning to face him. “This is where you fell in…where I found you. But there’s no opening.”

Pierce felt cold dread creep over him. “Maybe we passed it already.”

“Not a chance.” De Bord pointed to something on the floor—a broken loop of black plastic a few inches long. “I cut that off your hands right where I found you. The mouth of the tunnel was right here.”

Pierce stared up again, but there wasn’t even a hairline crack in the rocky expanse overhead. It was as if the earth had closed the door behind the retreating creatures, sealing them in.

18.

A closer inspection of the camp only confirmed what King had seen from a distance. There was abundant evidence of the battle—wrecked tents and equipment, discarded weapons, a littering of brass shell casings, and everywhere, spatters of blood slowly drying to a black crust in the warm desert air—but there was not a single body, human or otherwise, to be found. Hoping against hope, King tried calling Pierce’s cell phone, but the call went directly to the archaeologist’s voice mail.

Nina stayed close as they ventured cautiously into the perimeter, but stopped a few steps in and bent to illuminate the ground with a small flashlight. “Look at this.”

King glanced quickly at her find, but did not immediately grasp its significance. “A footprint?”

“Look at it,” she insisted. “It’s huge. What do you wear, size 12? It’s at least six inches longer than your foot.”

He made no effort to hide his irritation. “We already knew they had feet. And that they’re big.”

“But it’s hominid, for sure.” She pointed to the round depression made by the heel and ball of the foot, then counted the toes as if doing so would emphasize her point. “This has toes. Humans are the only species on the planet with a foot like this.”

“Not anymore.” He stood and did a quick visual sweep of the area. “I don’t see what the big deal is. I thought monster footprints were a dime a dozen.”

She shook her head. “Most are provable fakes, and the rest are highly suspicious. This one…well, we know exactly what made it. It’s real, tangible proof.”

“Put this in practical terms for me. What are we dealing with here? Could these things be mutants of some kind?”

She shrugged. “The legends of the Mogollon Monster—and other creatures like it—go back to prehistoric times. I suppose in a scientific sense, they are the result of a mutation—that’s what drives evolution—but it’s more likely that they’re a lower branch on the evolutionary tree. An ancestor species, or at the very least a distant cousin. We know that hominid species like this had to have existed in the past; this just proves that they’re still around.”

King shook his head. “I’m not interested in proving anything. I want to know where these things come from, and why they are on the warpath. In case you weren’t paying attention, that wasn’t a lone monster wandering the hills harassing hikers. That was a whole tribe, and I think if there’d been a tribe’s worth of these things roaming these hills all this time, someone would have found proof that was a little more definitive.”

“That’s why it’s so… Wait, what are you trying to say?”

“Think about it. Nothing like this has ever happened. The attack on the highway, this…what’s different now?”

She blinked at him.

“The attack happened simultaneously with the appearance of that mist,” he continued, not trying to make a point so much as review the disjointed facts for his own benefit. “Those soldiers were expecting it, or at least expecting something to happen.”

“So you think this could be the result of something the government is doing?”

“You’re the expert on this kind of thing. What do you think?

She laughed without much humor. “Being an expert on paranormal phenomena is a little like being an expert on Santa Claus. I can give you chapter and verse on the mythology and the reports, but no one is an expert on the real cause. That goes for paranoia about secret government conspiracies, too. You can’t really be an expert on something that’s completely imaginary.”

“It’s not all imaginary,” King muttered. His experiences, both with government shenanigans and phenomena well outside the accepted scientific norm, probably made him more of an expert than she, but that wasn’t something he was going to share with her. “The mist, those creatures…it’s all connected somehow. We’re not going to find our answers here.”

“Where then?”

King stared at the footprint, one of dozens—perhaps hundreds—that were clearly visible leading both into and away from the camp. The creatures’ path of egress was clearly marked, and it wouldn’t take the skills of a legendary Indian scout to pick up their trail…a trail that would almost certainly lead him to George Pierce, or at the very least, resolve the question of his friend’s fate. But his intuition told him that the answers to the important questions would not be found in the lair of the Mogollon Monsters. “Lightning isn’t supposed to strike the same place twice, right? I’d say that’s a good place to start.”

19.

De Bord continued to sweep the dead end with his light, muttering in disbelief. “It was here. I know it was.”

Pierce didn’t know what to say. He had no recollection of his fall, but the evidence that this was where they had both entered the tunnel was right there on the ground. He knelt and picked up the discarded plastic tie. “Maybe we took a wrong turn. Maybe one of those creatures picked this up and dropped it here.”

“There were no turns,” De Bord insisted. “And I recognize this place.”

“Then there’s some other explanation. Whatever it is, we’re not getting out this way.”

De Bord appeared reluctant to accept that assessment, but after several more minutes of searching with both his eyes and his hands, he relented. They made their way back to the niche where they’d earlier hidden, and then kept going.

The tunnel gradually opened up, and before long they saw—and smelled—evidence of habitation. Pierce resisted a scientific curiosity to examine the piles of fresh scat that littered the floor; a glance was enough to tell him that the creatures were omnivores, but there was nothing of behavioral significance in the distribution. The creatures were not marking territory or defining their living space, but merely answering nature’s call as they made their journey. Aside from the stench of their excrement, the air in the tunnel seemed to be fresh, and that was an encouraging sign.

Acting on a sudden inspiration, Pierce took out his phone and checked for a signal. There wasn’t one, but as they progressed, he watched for bars to appear. If he could get reception, it might indicate the proximity of an opening to the surface. He was about to explain this idea to De Bord when the soldier abruptly raised a hand, and then pushed him back a few feet.

“There’s a whole mess of those things up there,” he whispered, dousing his flashlight.

Pierce felt his pulse quicken. “What are they doing?”

“I didn’t take the time to look. Hang on, I’ll check it out.”

Pierce heard the soft rush of fabric scraping against the floor as De Bord crawled away, and then after a minute, heard it again indicating the soldier’s return. “They’re lining up the bodies.” There was a hint of disgust in the man’s tone. “Going through the pockets of the dead, it looks like.”

Pierce withheld comment on the unusual behavior, but it was another significant clue. While robbing the dead might be a contemptible act for a group of humans, it wasn’t something that mindless animals did; for a predator or a scavenger, a corpse was just so much meat. But these creatures evidently possessed the capacity to value objects, even those that had no utilitarian purpose.