52
EVANS
Evans stood between 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.
Regardless of the mechanism, it was the nature of the booby trap that concerned Evans. Why had the bodies of these supposed gods been entombed where no one was likely to ever find them and why had they been left guarded by a species that would no doubt slaughter whoever came in search of the remains? Was it because they didn’t want grave robbers to disturb the eternal rest of their gods, or was it because they feared what might happen if their gods ever got out? The Teotihuacano had called theirs the “sleeping god,” which, by the mere definition of the term, suggested there was also a waking state. As absurd as it sounded, it was that notion that had brought him down here from his accommodations on Level 1.
Evans turned toward the opposite dry-erase board and leaned on his crutch, which he absolutely despised. It chafed his armpit and made him feel like an invalid, but it was far better than the alternative. His entire right leg was immobilized in a soft cast while his injuries healed. The surgeon had done a remarkable job of repairing the muscle and closing the wounds, or so he had told Evans multiple times, although they still itched like nobody’s business.
He stared at the statue of the woman with the snout and antlers of a deer. While they had assumed the corpse in the sarcophagus Dr. Bly discovered was male, it could just as easily have been female, and the once-living embodiment of this stone goddess. Two deities from this pantheon, both similarly entombed and guarded by creatures capable of overcoming any of the weapons of the time, linked by the discovery of their tombs thousands of miles apart and mysteriously connected by the activation of a pyramid beneath the Antarctic ice. Both gods were immortalized in the Grand Gallery outside the chamber responsible for the physical metamorphosis of Subject Z, the very creature that had dispatched one of its drones to the burial site of the Feathered Serpent God in Mexico and somehow infected Les Dutton to effect its own escape from FOB Atlantis, along with the body of this very stag-faced woman. But not without first slitting the throat of its drone and spilling its blood onto her remains.
While Evans had been beating his head against the wall trying to figure out why, Jade had made the connection. The legs in Bly’s video had provided the answer. When Subject Z had lifted the ancient remains from the sarcophagus, the legs had dangled from its arm, while those of a mummified corpse would have been brittle and incapable of bending at the knees without someone physically breaking them.
Again, he thought of the inscription above the maze. If the creatures left to defend the sarcophagus had merely been in an extended period of suspended animation, was it so hard to believe that the gods themselves weren’t, as well? And if that were the case, then were these sleeping gods even human at all?
Evans feared that the answer, as insane as it sounded, was of great consequence.
Prior to the events in Antarctica, he would have laughed at the mere suggestion that an alien race had ever visited the Earth. But now that he’d seen the proof of it with his own eyes, he could feel the threat it posed at the very heart of his being, and he was forced to contemplate the reason these beings had come in the first place, which—if the drone that spoke in the voice of Hollis Richards were to be believed—was nothing shy of enacting the end of the world.
“Are you hungry?”
Jade’s voice startled him. He turned to find her standing in the doorway with an apple in either hand. He shook his head, but gratefully accepted her gesture anyway.
Jade joined him in his re-creation of the Grand Gallery and looked over the photographs of the sculptures.
“Do you think they’re real?” she asked.
“Of course. I saw them with my own eyes. Probably even took these pictures.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.” She looked him in the eyes when she spoke, as though searching inside of him for an answer beyond that conveyed by his words. “Do you think they’re really gods?”
“Gods?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I think they’re real and not products of fiction? Yeah, probably. But do I think they are omnipotent beings descended from the sky . . . ?”
He didn’t know how to finish his thought, so he let his words dissipate into the silence.
Jade nodded.
“I’m not sure what I think, either.”
She gazed around the rest of the largely empty room. It wasn’t until that very moment that Evans realized he’d already made plans for what to do with the rest of what he inwardly thought of as his office.
“Barnett offered to fly me back to Nigeria,” she said.
“Are you going to take him up on it?”
“As much as I want to help the UN and the people of Africa, I don’t know if I can just step back into that life, you know?”
“Yeah,” Evans said. “It seems almost unreal now, doesn’t it?”
She smiled wistfully and disappeared inside of herself for a moment. It was a rare unguarded moment for a woman who was the living embodiment of a fortification.
“So what comes next?” he asked.
“The remains of Hollis Richards are scheduled for autopsy tonight. I’ve already gotten authorization to participate.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Evans held her hand. It took her several moments to meet his stare.
“I thought you were leaving,” she said.
“So did I.”
“It’s what Hollis said, isn’t it? You believe him, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
She smirked.
“That makes two of us. If someone had told me a year ago that I’d be in a secret underground bunker waiting to do an alien autopsy, I’d have probably laughed myself to tears. And yet”—she gestured with open arms to the room around her—“here I am.”
“Here you are,” he said, and pulled her closer.
“Everything changes if we go down this road,” she said.
“I’m counting on it.”
Evans slid his fingers through her hair, cupped the base of her skull, and brought her lips to meet his. Her hand slid around his waist and drew his hips against hers. Her lips parted and—
“I can’t leave you guys alone for two seconds, can I?”
Evans withdrew and leaned his forehead against Jade’s. He didn’t need to look back to know who it was.
“You really need to work on your timing, Anya,” he said.
“And you need to find a better hiding place.”
“We weren’t hiding,” Jade said.
“Oh, I could see exactly what you were doing.”
“What can we do for you, Anya?” Evans asked.
“I thought you’d want to see this.”
She strode into the room and held out a piece of paper. It was a computer printout of a photograph. Evans glanced at it and started to return it to her, but pulled it back when his brain caught up with his eyes.
“Where was this taken?”
“Mosul.”
“Iraq?”
“Unless you know of a different one.”
“I mean, you’re certain it was taken in Iraq?”
“Director Barnett said the picture was taken by a Kurdish soldier fighting to liberate Mosul from the Islamic State.”
Evans’s heart rate accelerated as he studied the photograph.
“When do we leave?”