15,506 feet below the surface
11:14 p.m.
Bertha Lybrand focused on moving.
Big breath in, step left, step right, big breath out, step left, step right …
She carried Mack uphill, a flood of horror on her heels. Patrick was somewhere behind her, letting off short bursts with the EBR that echoed through the stone tunnels like rolling thunder. Her legs had wanted to give up hours ago — she hadn’t let them then, she wouldn’t let them now.
Kirkland caught up to her.
“Let me help,” he said.
He pulled at Mack; the shifting weight made her stumble.
She shoved Connell in the chest. Too hard. His shoulder smashed into the wall. He spun off, skidded, almost fell.
“Get up front,” Bertha said. “You have to cover Reeves and Sanji!”
He had the wide eyes of a deer in headlights, eyes she had seen years ago when tracer rounds lit up the desert. When men screamed. When men died.
Kirkland nodded hard, his helmet bobbling. He sprinted ahead, EBR held in a white-knuckled grip.
Up ahead, she saw it, saw the light. Not like the light of the creatures, not colored and flowing, but fixed and steady. Like daylight. That was impossible, they were so far belowground — a small part of her wished desperately that the maps had been wrong, that they were close to the surface and about to break out of this hell.
Behind her, Patrick fired off another three-round burst, then another: Ba-da-da! Ba-da-da!
Pain-filled screams riddled the air. Not human screams — the impossible earsplitting squeal of those things. She’d never heard anything like it, not even in nightmares.
Big breath in, step left, step right, big breath out, step left, step right …
The breaths weren’t big anymore. Her stomach clenched. Lungs burned. Legs cried out for rest. The light, getting closer, stronger.
“Rocktopi,” Mack said.
“Mack, shut … the …”
She didn’t have the wind to finish.
Step left, step right, keep going, soldier, you stop and you die.
It wasn’t the first time she’d run for her life. The IED tearing through the troop transport. Sergeant Cole’s guts spraying across the roof. Parnell’s leg, torn off, accidentally sent flying when Kalb kicked it. Blood everywhere. Screaming. The crash. Out into the night. Rounds pouring in. Firing back at nothing, just pulling the trigger so she could do something. The order to run. Sprinting, sprinting, sprinting after someone she thought was Lieutenant Berg, but it wasn’t Berg, it was Alhassen, just another grunt like her, no idea what to do or where to go. Her legs, burning, burning until she couldn’t run anymore. Stopping. Puking. Hiding. Waiting for death, waiting for what they would do to a woman. Knowing she had to save the last bullet for herself.
Mack’s feet skidded off the side of the tunnel, bringing her back to the now. His feet hit the side because the tunnel was narrowing, funneling her toward that growing light. Ceiling, lowering. Sides, pinching in.
“Goddammit, Lybrand, move!”
Was that from the then or the now? The now, because it was Patrick, shouting at her even while he defended her back.
She had to squat. How the fuck could she run and squat at the same time? Her legs were going to catch fire and burn her alive.
Patrick fired off another burst. More screeches, closer screeches, so close they had to be right on top of her.
The ceiling lowered further. Duck-walking now, and a new memory, that ridiculous drill she’d done in boot where she carried a fucking chunk of telephone pole while squatting, refusing to quit until at least one of the men in her unit quit first. She’d thought that duck-walk shit was just like high school algebra — when would she ever use it in real life? Drill Sergeant Petty with the last fucking laugh.
Up ahead, Sanji crawling, because the ceiling was too low to even squat. His big body blocked the light like an eclipse of the moon.
The moon … his big ass in that tight suit … hey, girl, that’s funny.
She stumbled. Her knees ground against stone. She fell forward, pushed Mack ahead of her. He hit, groaned. Something stomped down hard on her ankle — they had her, they were on her. Patrick fell on his ass next to her.
He turned, looked at her, eyes wide, lip snarling, spit string from lower lip to upper teeth. The look of a human monster, a killer, and in that moment she knew this was him, the real him behind the sweet talk and the compliments and the desire to be a better man.
At his core, this barbarian was the essence of Patrick O’Doyle.
“Get your ass up, Lybrand! Move or die!”
He looked down the tunnel. Spit flying, he screamed the pure truth of rage, then squeezed off three bursts: Ba-da-da! Ba-da-da! Ba-da-da!
Bertha was back up even before the second burst finished. Patrick’s screams chased away the fatigue and the self-pity, made her heart pound in her ears and eyes and feet and hands. She crawled past Mack, grabbed at his neck, squeezed up a handful of KoolSuit and started dragging him along the stone floor.
“Get up, Mack! Get up, you motherfucker!”
Patrick screamed at her, she screamed at Mack, good for the goose, good for the gander.
The ceiling lowered to not even two feet: light filling all of that space, blinding, bottom to top and left to right. No more Sanji — he had to be through.
She crawled, two legs and one hand, dragging Mack along. He moved a little, tried to get up, tried to help.
Jagged rocks dug into her knees and shins, stabbed at her hand. The rough ceiling pushed against her backpack, tapped at her slung rifle, knocked on her helmet, and then she was through, rolling onto her left shoulder.
Light everywhere now, bright as day (it’s not day just stop it but what if it is the sun what if you’re out) she stood — lots of clearance, at least higher than her head and thank God for that — she reached back in, grabbed Mack’s hand, dragged him through the opening like a dead fish sliding across ice.
Sanji, next to her. “I have him!”
He grabbed Mack.
Bertha stood, unslung her rifle, shrugged off the backpack and let it drop. She meant to kneel and aim down the tunnel, give supporting fire to Patrick, but before she could, something caught her eye — something that made her look, a giant’s hand palming her head and turning her.
Sky. Sunlight.
It couldn’t be.
Bertha stood in a cave. Not a tunnel, but a cave, because this one ended, it opened up to a bright cavern so large she couldn’t quite comprehend it at first. The light held a strange blue tinge that seemed to cast a dull pallor on everything. She looked to the cavern’s ceiling, had to shield her eyes against a brightness so intense it might as well have been the sun itself.
Fifteen or twenty feet away, the cave’s edge. Veronica and Kirkland standing there, staring out. Sanji, dragging Mack to join them.
In a dream, a vision, Bertha walked forward on rubbery legs, the muscles in them long since drained of all strength.
The cliff ended at a drop-off, two hundred feet, at least, a fall that would stop suddenly on hard-edged boulders. The cavern floor, far below, filled with strange, clumpy orange things that might be trees. A glistening river meandered through fields of multicolored plants laid out in regimented rows.
Farmland?
Ba-da-da!
Behind her, Patrick’s weapon.
What the fuck was she doing?
“Kirkland, with me, now!”
She jogged halfway back to the squat opening, saw Patrick crawling through. She sprinted the last few steps, threw herself down on her belly, aimed through the opening.
Seventy meters in, flashing monsters, a wave of color.
What had Mack called them?
Rocktopi.
Too many to count. A wall of glowing sickness, pushing forward like brackish water rushing up a rusted pipe. Her helmet light gleamed off double-crescent knives, their solidity and hardness a lethal contrast to soft bodies and boneless tentacles.
Fifty meters and closing.
Bertha squeezed off a three-round burst, then another as Patrick scrambled to his feet.
“Get up,” Patrick said as he scrambled to his feet. “Run, goddammit!”
“Nowhere to run, sir,” she said. “Cliff.”
“Cliff? Shit. Hold this position.”
The sound of his boots rushing away.
She fired again: Ba-da-da!
A creature fell, but the psychedelic wave washed over the top of it, not slowing. Their rough skin scraped against the rock: the rattling rasp of a million paper-dry leaves.
“Lybrand, fall back!”
She pushed to her hands and knees, then her feet, shuffled backward, stock tight to her shoulder, and her vision focused down the length of her weapon, toward the tunnel’s dark opening.
A hand between her shoulder blades, stopping her. A big hand.
“Hold here,” Patrick said to her. “Free fire.”
She dropped to one knee again, waited for the horror to pour out of that crack. Behind her, Patrick screamed at Kirkland.
“We have to run, now.”
“There’s nowhere to run,” Kirkland said. “Look at this fucking cliff!”
Kirkland was on the edge of hysteria. Lybrand wasn’t that far from the same. But Patrick, his voice was stone itself, rigid and unbendable.
“Then break out the climbing rigs,” he said. “Move, man!”
The tunnel opening started to flicker with color.
“Too late,” she shouted. “They’re here.”
She ejected her magazine, popped in a fresh one, set a second full one on the stone in front of her.
“Goddammit,” Patrick said. “Kirkland! On my left! Reeves, get Mack’s sidearm and his two magazines. Lybrand, give your sidearm to Sanji, now!”
Bertha shifted the rifle stock to her left shoulder so she didn’t break aim, drew her Glock with her right, held it up above her head, where it was instantly snatched out of her hand.
“Reload it,” she said.
“Got it,” Sanji said.
Patrick knelt on her left. He popped in a fresh magazine.
Down the tunnel, the disco glow grew brighter.
“Reeves, Sanji, stand behind us,” he said as he shouldered his weapon, aimed. “Do not fire until I tell you to. Kirkland, short bursts, you understand?”
“I … I …” The man’s words were more breath than voice. “I don’t think I can do this.”
“You will fire when I tell you to fire,” Patrick screamed. A war cry. The voice of a god, a god that could do the impossible and get them through this if they just listened to him. “Short bursts, Kirkland — aim, squeeze, release, do you understand?”
“Yes, yes I understand!”
“Safeties off,” Patrick said. “Fire on my command. Pick a target, put it down, pick another target. Maybe it’s a good day to die, but it isn’t our day.”
Bertha choked on a sudden laugh, and then it was out of her, uncontrollable and ridiculous.
The glow brightened. The monsters were almost there.
“Something funny, Lybrand?” Patrick asked without moving his gaze or his aim. The war scream was gone — he sounded calm, measured.
“Depends,” she said. “Did you stay up at night to write that corny shit, or did it just pop out?”
“Shut up,” Reeves said. “For fuck’s sake shut up both of you no jokes how can you make jokes?”
“Kind of wrote it,” Patrick said, ignoring Reeves. “Came up with it when I was twenty-two, taking a shit in a ditch in Panama. You don’t like it?”
She didn’t have time to answer.
A sickening, flashing mass squeezed out of the opening, seven or eight of them at once, mashed together like lumps of glowing Play-Doh. They sprang up, from a condensed mass to full-size individuals, black-spotted skin shimmering in blood red and lava orange. So much bigger than the little ones — these stood as tall as a man, taller if you counted waving tendrils that held deadly, double-crescent blades.
Just fifteen yards away. They screeched, and they flowed forward, new limbs squishing out like toothpaste shot full-force from a new tube.
A tentacle as thick as a python reared back, whipped forward — a knife whizzed through the air, straight at Lybrand’s face. She flinched right, felt something slice into her left cheek.
Their screeches rang loud — Patrick’s rang louder.
“Front row, fire!”
Three Heckler & Koch HK416s opened up. The cave’s air trembled with the roaring report of automatic fire, one tight three-round burst indiscernible over the next.
Bullets punched through soft bodies, kicking up a spurting rain of pale yellow fluid. The front row sagged, fell, and those behind poured over the top.
Bertha sighted, squeezed off a burst. Her target quivered, twitched, stopped. She angled to the center, found another, squeezed again. Sprays of yellow. Orange and red light blinking out, leaving the yellow-brown black-spotted skin, but it kept coming. She hit it with another burst. It shivered, shuddered, made her think of the man she’d killed, how he’d kept twitching after he’d died.
She angled right for another, fired before she noticed it wasn’t coming toward her, it was running away, squishing its body back into the opening.
“Cease fire!”
The gunshot echo pulsed through the huge cavern behind them, slowly fading out.
Dead, wounded and dying rocktopi littered the cave floor, spurting thick, oily, yellow fluid in all directions. Some lay still. Some shuddered as if caught in a freezing wind. Still others reached their long tentacles toward the funnel mouth, pulling themselves slowly forward inch by agonizing inch. Even in an unknown creature, Bertha recognized the obvious struggles of the wounded desperately trying to escape.
O’Doyle stood, switched his EBR back to single-shot. He turned and offered it to Sanji.
“Trade me,” he said.
Sanji took the rifle, handed over the Glock.
Bertha watched Patrick reach to his chest, pulled the Ka-Bar from its sheath. He held the knife in his left hand, the Glock in his right.
He looked at her.
“You okay?”
She nodded, remembered the crescent blade slicing her. She reached up, felt at her cheek. It burned. Her fingers came away bloody, but not that bloody.
“I’m fine,” she said.
He nodded once. “We have to finish the job, and we have to conserve ammo. You ready?”
His eyes bore the remorseless look of a cold-blooded killer. How could she have thought herself in love with him? But she understood: this had to be done. No way of knowing what else those things were capable of. Cut off from the surface, Patrick wasn’t taking any chances, even if that meant he had to brutally dispatch the wounded.
She handed her rifle to Reeves, who stared, stunned, shocked. Bertha reached out and took the Glock from her hand. No snotty comment from Reeves this time. No, not when she saw what life was really like.
Bertha held the Glock in her right hand. With her left, she drew her own Ka-Bar.
She looked at Patrick, nodded.
He stepped close to the nearest rocktopi. A half-stuffed, yellowish-brown garbage bag, still moving. Faint colors flickered across skin that had blazed like a lighthouse beacon only moments earlier. He aimed his Glock at it, stretched out his foot until his toe rested on a double-crescent knife. He slid that foot backward, pulling the blade away, metal scraping loudly on gritty stone.
Bertha suddenly wanted him to leave it alone, let it crawl away, or die, or whatever. Wasn’t this awful enough already?
Patrick crouched, closed in, blade out in front of him.
The creature let out a soft noise, a hiss more than a squeal. It sprouted new tentacles, tentacles that gripped the stone slab and tried to pull its body away from Patrick — an amoeba reaching out, desperate for life.
Patrick slashed, a flick of the wrist, opening up a long line that spurted thick yellow. Tentacles spasmed, vibrated, quivered. The thing deflated, lifeblood gushed out onto the stone.
A pulse of yellow — KoolSuit yellow, she noticed — waved across its skin, then faded out.
It squeaked, a tone that would have sounded cute if it were made by a cuddly animal or a dog toy.
A thick smell billowed up: rotting meat mixed with hot tar.
O’Doyle gagged, convulsed once, covered his mouth with the back of the hand that held the Glock.
Bertha heard Sanji vomit: once, twice, a third time.
The creature fell still. No noise. No light.
Patrick stepped toward the next one, stopped, turned to Bertha. He gestured to one close to her, still twitching, and with one word told her it was time.
“Well?”
She nodded. They were fighting to survive. She wasn’t going to leave him hanging, make him do all the black work.
Time to step up.
Bertha walked to her victim. Yellow globs bubbled up from bullet holes. The skin glowed black, something she wouldn’t have thought possible until now. It wasn’t crawling for its life, because it couldn’t — tentacles half formed, shrank back, half formed again.
In her younger days, she’d had a bumper sticker on her car: Join the Army! Travel to foreign places, meet exotic peoples, and kill them.
Didn’t get more exotic than something that wasn’t even a person at all.
She gave her head a hard shake. Not a time for a crisis of conscience. They were three miles underground in a place so hot they’d die without these suits. Three of her fellow guards were dead. And these things had thrown a knife at her — if she hadn’t moved when she did, that blade would have punched into her face.
Bertha sighed, stepped toward the creature.
“Sucks to be you,” she said.
She raised the Ka-Bar.
Before she brought it down, the rocktopi started to squeal.
Bertha Lybrand would never forget that noise. It would echo through her thoughts for the rest of her life.
11:18 p.m.
Angus crouched low, by the tunnel wall. Randy was in front of him, also down low — just as shocked, just as surprised.
“I think that was gunfire,” he whispered.
The rolling echo had finally faded away. Thirty meters ahead, a boulder that mostly blocked the end of the tunnel. Beyond that boulder, light. Not a halogen, not portable of any kind, but something stronger. Something bigger.
Something that shouldn’t be there.
Randy turned, leaned close. Too close, like he always did.
“Angus, do you think that was gunfire?”
“I don’t know,” Angus hissed. “How the fuck would I know?”
Sometimes Randy asked obvious questions. And he always — always — thought Angus had all the answers. Most often, Angus did. Not this time, though.
Randy seemed as freaked-out as Angus felt, although Angus wasn’t going to show it. Randy glanced to the boulder and the light beyond.
“Should we go up there? We have to see what that light is, don’t we?”
Just once Angus would have liked the guy to make up his own fucking mind. No matter what happened, Angus always had to make the decisions.
If that had been gunfire — and Angus was sure it had been — then who was firing? And who were they firing at.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “Randy, give me the tablet.”
Randy slid his pack around, handed it over.
Angus tapped the Marco/Polo app. The app activated the RFID ping. He watched the screen, waiting for results.
Six names popped up, with six corresponding soft dings.
“Six?” Randy said. He reached for the tablet. “Who is it?”
Angus slapped his hand away, quietly read off the names.
“Reeves, Haak, Lybrand, O’Doyle, Hendricks and Mister Giant Cock-Face himself.”
Randy sucked in a hiss of breath.
“Kirkland is down here? This far?”
For such a smart man, Randy asked so many stupid questions.
Angus tapped the screen, looked at the vital signs. Randy leaned in to look.
The pulse and heart rates of Kirkland and the others were racing, all except for O’Doyle, who was normal in both categories. Temperature steady across the board — the suits were working fine, of course.
“They’re excited,” Randy said. “And look at the beta waves — aside from Mack, everyone’s readings are through the roof. Like they were in a fight. Maybe they were the ones doing the shooting?”
Or being shot at, although only an incredibly stupid person would shoot at Patrick O’Doyle.
Angus understood Reeves and Haak being down here, and Mack, of course. Maybe even Lybrand and O’Doyle, to protect the staff, but Kirkland? Angus had fantasized that Kirkland might be the one to find all the KILROY WAS HERE signs. Now, Angus didn’t want that at all, because it seemed that Kirkland had reached the kidney-shaped cavern before he had.
That wasn’t how this was supposed to go. That motherfucker could not have been the first one down here. He just could not.
“Let’s move up,” Angus said. “But be real quiet.”
Randy crawled toward the boulder, Angus close behind. Together, they slowly rose up and peeked over the top.
Angus Kool was a man of science. He’d seen many amazing things in his years, even discovered a few that no one before him had ever known. He’d walked in places no human being had ever walked. If anyone on Earth could have been prepared to witness something this unprecedented, he knew it should have been him. And yet, staring over that boulder, he had trouble comprehending what his eyes showed him. His logic failed him, as did his vocabulary.
“What the fuck?”
Randy nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said, which wasn’t any kind of an answer at all.
They were at one end of the massive kidney-shaped cavern. It curved slightly off to the right, growing wider and taller before bending back to the left. The walls arched high overhead until they met at the center, but the zenith couldn’t be seen due to the blazing light there that illuminated the cavern with a strange, bluish hue. The cavern stretched away so far they couldn’t make out details at the far end. Acre upon acre of never-before-seen plants grew in orderly rows. A river curved softly, water rippling but mostly calm. Near the cavern’s center, a small village of dilapidated stone buildings, crumbling like the ruins of some ancient Aztec temple.
That bluish light reflected dully off small, moving bits of metal — silverbugs, crawling through the crops, along the riverbanks and down … were those paths? Yes, paths that wound through the strange fields and around the strange trees. There was even a bridge over the river, a bridge that gleamed with the soft warmth of precious metal.
A bridge of platinum.
“Angus, what is all of this?”
Angus shook his head, not caring, for once, that Randy was asking yet another stupid question.
And then, he forgot about the question, forgot about Randy, forgot about everything, because the “villagers” showed themselves.
They came down the path, shapes that didn’t make sense. Limbs forming, extending … living, pulsing, moving like multicolored fractals. Soft bodies flowing in a way that mammals could not, that insects could not, in a way that made Angus think of jellyfish or a swimming feather star, of the pulsating, hypnotic patterns of a hunting cuttlefish.
“I don’t …” Randy said.
“It’s, can’t … they aren’t …” Angus answered.
“But aren’t they …” Randy said. “How can it?”
In the tiny parts of his brain still capable of rational thought, Angus knew that he and his best friend had just set the bar for the stupidest conversation of all time.
Some of the creatures moved quickly, tentacles stretching out at crazy speeds. Others moved slowly, assisted by others.
“Wounded,” Randy said. More rational now, perhaps he was regaining the intelligence smacked away by an eyeful of the impossible. “Maybe from the gunfire.”
Angus nodded absently.
The column of creatures flowed across the bridge and into the village. They spread out. The slower-moving ones were helped into buildings. Still more of the creatures spread out, occasionally piping up with a screech reminiscent of a diamond saw slicing through a core sample.
“Angus … are we looking at aliens?”
Angus nodded absently again, although he wasn’t sure if he was still doing that and hadn’t stopped from before.
“Maybe,” he said. Definitive, and with authority. Because that was how a genius rolled, right?
He tore his attention away from the bizarre visage, looked around the cavern. Past the trees and fields, stone walls sloping up at steep angles. In those walls — and not just at ground level, but all over, some two or even three hundred feet off the ground — were hundreds of dark spots.
Tunnel entrances.
The metallic flashes came faster — the silverbugs were moving, moving fast. They formed a line from the village toward the bridge, the same way the boneless beings of light had come. Angus expected them to do that jerking thing, the up-and-down thing, but they didn’t. The flashing creatures reacted though, their patterns shifting from dozens of colors and patterns to pulsing waves of orange and red.
“Those squid-things are holding something metallic,” Randy said. He reached into his webbing, pulled out a small pair of binoculars. He focused in.
“Oh my God, those are knives,” he said. “Some kind of double-bladed thing. I don’t see any guns. These creatures must have attacked our people. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Angus felt numb. Numb, and stupid — a feeling he was most unfamiliar with. Our people? What the hell was Randy talking about?
“There’s more silverbugs,” Randy said. “They’re carrying something.”
He pressed the binoculars against Angus’s chest, hard enough to make Angus take a step back to maintain his balance. Randy pointed off at an angle to the right.
It was ridiculous to get angry at Randy, especially now, of all the times, but he was getting angry nonetheless. Aliens or monsters or whatever they were, Randy was being … well, he was being pushy.
Angus needed to let that go, needed to be logical. He looked through the binocs in the direction Randy wanted.
Silverbugs, hordes of them, all pressed together, platinum liquid flowing between the crumbling stone buildings. Like an army of cartoon ants pilfering a picnic basket, they carried what looked to be long, thin sheets of steel.
The red and orange creatures swarmed in, lifted the sheets away from the machines.
The line of silverbugs leading to the bridge started to jerk, to twitch — that sickening down-up-down dance.
Angus had seen enough. He didn’t know what was going on, and he really didn’t want to find out. This wasn’t discovery, this wasn’t science, this was Cthulhu nightmares carrying big-ass knives, this was high-tech platinum ALs jerking away like dogs humping a leg. It was wrong, all of it, and he didn’t want to deal with it for one moment longer.
He slid back down behind the boulder. Randy didn’t follow. What an asshole. Angus grabbed his webbing, pulled him down.
“We need to get back to the surface,” Angus said. “I mean like right fucking now. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Randy’s lip curled up, and this time, he wasn’t looking through binoculars. He was looking right at Angus. Not near Angus, not at the floor, but eye to eye, hard — something Randy just didn’t do.
“We have to get the others,” Randy said. “You know we do.”
The others? It took Angus a second to understand what he meant.
“No,” Angus said. “Fuck no we don’t.”
Randy leaned closer. Behind thick lenses, his eyes narrowed. Angus leaned away.
“We are going to help them,” Randy said. “Understand me? You and me, together, we’re going to help them.”
The tone of voice, the intensity … this wasn’t Randy, not the Randy he knew. This was like a completely different person. He was serious about helping those stupid fucks?
Angus tried to stare back, tried to overpower Randy the way he had done so many times before. The effort lasted all of a second, then Angus felt his face flush hot as he looked away.
He, looked away, from fucking Dirty Randy.
The heat, the stress, seeing those crazy things. Randy was wigging out, that was all. Angus could manage that. Get Randy back to the surface, everything would be back to normal. He wanted to help? Okay, Angus had a way to do that.
“There’s a thumper update coming up in a few minutes,” Angus said. “We can use the portable thumper to send a message back, have the surface system broadcast one of our pre-programmed SOS messages.”
Randy’s eyes softened slightly.
“Which message?”
There, that was more like it.
“Well, I didn’t happen to program a message for Hostile Tentacle-Creatures Swinging Big Knives, but situation fourteen seems to be the best.”
Randy thought, nodded.
“Armed claim jumpers,” he said. “That will get the authorities out here on the double. The surface should be crawling with SWAT teams and Utah State Troopers inside thirty minutes. Good call.”
“Goddamn right it is,” Angus said. “So get it done.”
Randy scrambled to do just that, whipping off his backpack and pulling out the small portable thumper.
Control. Angus had control again. He clung to the emotion, took strength from it. The situation was insane, but at least having control felt familiar, normal.
He slid the tablet into his backpack, then rose up slowly, leaned an elbow against the boulder, watched through the binoculars as Randy started setting the portable thumper up on its collapsible tripod legs.
The boneless creatures, the glowing fractals … they were along the line of twitching silverbugs. A hundred of them, maybe, carrying three of four sheets of the steel. They carried them to a tunnel entrance.
Randy, at his right, again taking the binoculars, again not asking for them.
Angus watched the column sweep into that dark space, briefly lighting the entrance with oranges and reds, until they vanished inside. The dark shadow returned.
Through the elbow leaning on the boulder, he felt a rhythmic vibration: the portable thumper’s hammer banging out a rapid, complex dance — sending a message instead of just receiving one. The vibrations lasted only seconds.
“Packing up,” Randy said. He handed the binoculars over. Angus took them, looked at them oddly, as if they were somehow responsible for this bizarre situation.
Randy started collapsing the portable thumper.
“Good,” Angus said. “Now we can get the fuck out of here.”
He turned back to the boulder. He stared through the binoculars for a few more seconds. The few squishy creatures that remained were lying in the village, either twitching slightly or completely still.
Angus felt a tugging at his backpack. He spun around, but Randy already had the tablet in his hands.
“We’re not leaving,” Randy said. His fingertip tapped madly at the screen.
“Goddammit. Enough of this bullshit. Give me the fucking tablet, right now.”
Randy paused in mid-tap. He glared over the black rims of his glasses.
“Angus, I’m going to tell you something I should have told you a long, long time ago,” Randy said. “If you don’t shut your motherfucking mouth, I’m going to hurt you.”
Randy held that stare another moment, until fear blossomed in Angus’s chest, until he imagined Randy’s fists smashing into his mouth, his nose, his throat.
Angus sat down.
Randy started tapping the screen again.
The rage didn’t build inside Angus, it exploded all at once. Rage and frustration and humiliation, because Angus wanted to kick that asshole in the balls but he couldn’t do it, because Randy would then get up, and he would beat Angus, just like the kids in school had beat him, over and over and over again. Angus hated them, hated feeling weak, hated Randy.
In that moment, that flush-faced moment where he felt small and weak and helpless and stupid, felt like a loser, he wanted Randy Wright to die. He wanted it with everything that he was.
“Got it,” Randy said. “I mapped the Polo signals. Kirkland and the others are about two hundred feet up. That tunnel the glowing creatures went into, it’s part of a series that may lead to Connell and the others. I think the creatures are going after them.”
He looked up from the screen, stared down at Angus. This time, Angus couldn’t look away, even though he wanted to.
“We’re going to help them,” Randy said. “You and I. Together.”
Angus felt like a worm, a crawling worm that wanted to burrow away from the light. He hadn’t felt like this since high school. And the reason for that feeling was Randy Wright, his supposed best friend.
Had Angus really been whining about wanting someone else to make the decisions? Because Randy had just made one, and Angus didn’t like it.
Not one fucking bit.
Randy reached down, offered his hand.
“I know you’re scared,” he said. “I’m scared, too. But we have to do the right thing. We have to help. Are you with me?”
No, I’m not with you, you backstabbing asshole. You’ll pay for this shit. I gave you everything and you bully me? You’ll learn.
Angus clasped the offered hand.
“You know it, buddy,” he said. “With you all the way.”
Randy smiled. He pulled Angus to his feet.
11:19 p.m.
On the surface, the thumpers’ sensitive seismic sensors picked up the tiny repetitive throbbing from below. All six of the thumpers processed the message, read the instructions contained within.
As a unit, they beamed a sync signal to cue up their efforts and began broadcasting the pre-programmed Situation Report No. 14 on all radio frequencies.
11:23 p.m.
After three rings, a groggy-voiced André Vogel answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“André, did I wake you?”
A pause.
“Who is this?”
“You don’t recognize my voice?”
Another pause. Kayla smiled, trying to picture the look on the man’s face.
“Meyers,” he said. No more grogginess. “I don’t believe it. You know damn well that using restricted access codes to reach me is a federal offense.”
Kayla’s anger bubbled just from the sound of his voice, but she stayed calm.
“I’ve got a matter of national importance,” she said. “Please hear me out. I only need two minutes.”
André Vogel had come up through the ranks, starting out as a computer analyst, eventually moving into the field and finally earning the powerful role of NSA director. Vogel answered to only one person: the secretary of defense.
“You’ve got a lot of balls calling me, Meyers,” Vogel said. “But then you always did have balls. Since this is the only chance you’re going to get, go ahead.”
“I’ve found something that will make your career.”
A huff, the sound of a man who was already in a top position of power and didn’t need any help.
“And that is?”
“It’s not that easy, André,” Kayla said, trying hard to keep her tone respectful. “There are conditions.”
“Well, give me an idea of what this wondrous piece of information is and we’ll haggle over a price. I can’t believe you wouldn’t go through normal freelance channels on this.”
“It’s not about the land of sand and oil or any of that penny-ante bullshit,” Kayla said. “This is the biggest thing you’ve ever heard of.”
“Of course it is.” Vogel was fully awake now, that familiar growl back in his voice. “I’m assuming that since you didn’t go through the usual channels, this isn’t your usual price.”
“It’s not,” Kayla said. “This is big, beyond anything we’ve seen before. It’s not money I want.”
She heard a rustling sound, wondered if he was rubbing at the corner of his squeezed-shut eyes with thumb and forefinger, the way he did when he got pissed.
“You’re wasting my time,” he said. “If you don’t want money, what do you want?”
“I want back in.”
“Back in what?”
Kayla looked at the handset as if it were stupid. She had to be patient, see this through. Not the time to get angry. She took a deep breath, put the handset back to her ear.
“I want my life back,” she said. “I want to be reinstated to the NSA.”
Another pause, this one so long she wondered if he’d just hung up without a sound. She found herself chewing at her thumbnail.
“That will never happen,” he said, his words clipped. “You don’t know how lucky you are to even be alive.”
Her frustration welled up, started to bully her thoughts around. So hard to focus, to keep kissing this fool’s ass. She had to keep playing the game.
“So I sold some information to a corporation,” she said. “So what? It didn’t hurt anything. No harm, no foul.”
“You know damn well that’s not why you got the boot.”
The anger, the frustration, the humiliation, they all combined forces, rushed up from her lungs through her throat and out her mouth.
“Yes it is, Vogel. Because I’m a woman. When men did the same thing, you didn’t kick them out. You think I don’t know what it was really about? Your damn boys’ club couldn’t handle that I was better than everyone else!”
She heard him clear his throat — something he did when he was even angrier than when he rubbed his eyes, something he did when he was trying to control his temper. The sound chilled her, made her feel like she was ten years old again, hiding in her room, waiting for her father to come punish her for some trivial offense.
“I’m going to tell you this one time, and one time only,” he said. “Because I don’t think you’re ever going to get it, but when I write you off for good, I want to know in my heart that you know the truth. You didn’t get kicked out for selling secrets to Genada, Meyers. No one gives a shit about that. You got kicked out because of those children.”
She blinked, not comprehending.
“What children?”
Whatever control Vogel had, it disintegrated, shattered by his roar.
“The children you tortured, you sick fuck! I saw the pictures. You and those goddamn pliers. What state secrets did you think a nine-year-old girl would have? You’re a psychopath. They wanted to put you down like the animal you are, and you know what? I’m the one that stopped them. And every night when I go to sleep, I see those pictures in my head, the girl and her seven-year-old brother — fucking seven years old — and I know I made a mistake.”
Was Vogel drunk? Did he think she was really stupid enough to believe this was about that mission in Kiev? Ridiculous. She’d got the information she’d been sent to get, so what else mattered? She vaguely remembered hearing something about “the children” when he shit-canned her, but that was just smoke and mirrors to hide his real reasons.
She felt a sharp pain in her thumb, pulled it away from her mouth. Blood trickled down. She’d bitten the nail, torn it down to the quick until it split the skin.
Think, girl, think. She had him on the phone. She wouldn’t get him back, not ever.
“I found a new species,” she said. Not what she had wanted to say. Not what she had practice saying. The words had just come out.
When he spoke again, it was the worst of all his voices. With André Vogel, Director of the NSA, anger came in three phases: exasperation, then yelling, then the quiet monotone.
“A new species,” he said.
He wasn’t asking a question, he was simply repeating it as if to make sure he’d heard her correctly.
“Yes, I know, but listen.” Her words rushed out like she was trying to say something — anything — to stop Cyrus from getting the belt. “It’s an intelligent species. I’ve never seen anything like it, no one has. They attacked a camp I was watching. They killed people, they killed Americans. It’s a new discovery and a threat to national security. You can take this straight to the president.”
The COMSEC unit’s soft beep drew her attention. It had just completed its periodic frequency sweep — it had isolated a clear transmission signal.
“I’ve known you for a long time,” Vogel said. “You’re a psycho, but you don’t bullshit. Do you have proof?”
She stared blankly at the COMSEC unit, checking the readout and not believing what she saw. At the same time, she realized she’d watched that entire attack and hadn’t shot any video. Not a single frame.
“Meyers, you better have proof. You don’t just—”
“I’ll get your fucking proof,” she said, then broke the connection.
Everything was falling apart.
She reread the message on the COMSEC’s display.
“Angus,” she said. Now it was her voice that came out as a monotone. “Angus Kool, you fucking little prick.”
Kayla shut down the COMSEC unit, detached the main controller. Built that way, built to be portable. Without the extra power and signal amplifier, the range was much shorter, but she didn’t need a lot of range for what came next.
She knew exactly where to begin.