Black Rain: A Thriller (34 page)

“You all right?”

Danielle was sitting, first-aid kit by her side, pouring hydrogen peroxide on the slash across her calf. “I’ll live,” she said, as the peroxide bubbled and foamed.

Verhoven turned to where McCarter and Hawker were systematically checking the ceiling. “Give it up,” Verhoven shouted. “You’re liable to get hurt swinging your necks around like a bunch of bloody pelicans.”

McCarter paused in his search, took a few more peeks, then lowered his rifle and started back toward the others. But beyond his position, Hawker continued checking the deeper part of the cave, systematically scanning the shadows between the chandeliers of hanging stone.

Verhoven laughed. “Paranoid,” he said.

He turned back to Danielle, examining her injury. “A good war wound, that. Make you a nice scar.” Danielle glared at him and Verhoven laughed again, more animated than any of them had seen.

On his way back to the others, McCarter stopped for a closer look at the animal that Verhoven had killed. It lay on its side, very much dead, but still twitching in places. Dark fluids oozed from its wounds and an oddly pungent odor wafted from its body. The smell reminded McCarter of rotting vegetables. At close range the scent
was strong enough to compete with the sulfur of the cave.

This animal was smaller than the one that had attacked them on the chain the night before. Maybe half the size. It looked sort of gangly and long in the limbs, almost like a juvenile. He guessed its weight at two hundred pounds, though it had seemed much larger as it dropped toward them.

He examined what was left of its head, damaged badly by the shotgun blast that had killed it, a blast that would have disintegrated a human skull. The head was large in proportion to the animal’s size, and very angular, almost wedge-shaped, narrowing sharply at the front. Its remaining eye was unlidded, glistening beneath a viscous gel, like a polished, wet stone. It was black from head to toe, with stripes of a slightly lighter shade that were mostly visible as differently textured skin. The surface of the skin itself was slick with some type of dark secretion, which it seemed to be oozing from millions of tiny pores.

Whatever it was, it was unlike anything McCarter had ever seen or heard of. Even the shape was foreign. The body was all angles, like overlapping plates. The arms and legs were thick, but the joints were simple and exposed, like hinges on a door, one slot for the lower half and one slot for the upper. Muscular sinew could be seen where they bent, like bundled wires in a conduit. The severely pinched neck seemed almost insectlike and behind it stood distinct rows of stiff, bristlelike hairs that grew in a converging V-shaped pattern.

An evil-looking thing, McCarter thought, with all the tools of a predator: stereoscopic vision, a sleek, strong
body, claws that resembled angled steel blades. Its mouth hung open on a set of powerfully muscled jaws and was filled with teeth like sharpened railroad spikes.

McCarter looked up toward the ceiling, upon which the animals had been crawling. The image of that ancient Mayan painting came to him, humans standing erect on the ground, blithely unaware of the Xibalbans directly beneath them, walking inverted with their feet on the underside of the earth’s surface.
If I knew something like this lived down here
, he thought,
I’d consider this the underworld too
.

As he shook off a chill, Danielle and Verhoven came up beside him, gawking at the thing, just as he had. Danielle seemed especially interested in the entry wounds from Verhoven’s shot. The damage resembled a pane of glass punctured by an errant baseball, with long fissures radiating from the wounds.

With the barrel of her rifle, Danielle reached out and pushed on the body. It was stiff. She tapped on it. It almost sounded hollow. “An exoskeleton,” she said. “Bones on the outside. Large animals don’t grow like this. Only insects and crustaceans.”

“It’s a damn gogga, then,” Verhoven said, using the Afrikaner slang for crawling bugs.

McCarter nudged Verhoven and pointed out a broad purple smear on his jacket, where the animal had hit him. The fibers of the coat were fraying and discolored, as if the smear was corrosive.

“Some kind of secretion,” Danielle said. “It’s all over the body of this one.”

As Verhoven pulled off the field jacket and tossed it
aside, Danielle leaned closer to the animal. “Do you smell that?”

McCarter nodded. “Almost like ammonia,” he said. “I smelled it when the other one attacked us last night. But this is a lot stronger, even though this one is smaller.”

Danielle nodded, looking back toward the pools by the dam. “I was thinking the same thing,” she said. “And I think I know why. Ammonia is a base, an acid neutralizer. I think that’s what this thing is secreting—only, from the way it’s destroying that fabric, I’m guessing it’s a lot stronger than ammonia.”

“What good would that do them?” Verhoven asked.

Danielle nodded toward the pools. “That’s how they survive. They secrete this stuff to counteract the acid.”

McCarter remembered trying to help his son learn chemistry and repeated trips to the science department to ask fellow professors questions he could not answer. Bases were just as dangerous as acids. When the two were combined they would neutralize each other, but individually acids were corrosive and bases were caustic. Both were horrendously destructive to organic tissue and to materials far stronger than human skin. He turned to Danielle. Her calf was exposed where she’d cut off the torn section of the pant leg. Her skin was red but not blistering. “What about your leg?”

Danielle looked down; she guessed the torn section of her pant leg was fraying like Verhoven’s jacket, although she’d discarded it into the darkness somewhere. “I put peroxide on it,” she said. “I was thinking about infection, using it as an antiseptic, but peroxide is an acid, to
some extent, it must have counteracted any of the base that got on my skin. It does feel strange though, almost like it were burning with a cold fire, like peppermint on the tongue.”

“Might want to use some more peroxide,” McCarter said.

As Danielle pulled out the plastic bottle, Verhoven held his hand out over the dead creature. “Notice anything else?” he said, looking at Danielle.

She shook her head.

“Dead animals radiate heat,” he said. “When you take one down, you can feel it pouring from the wounds. But not this thing.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“Cold-blooded maybe, or colder-blooded than we’re used to.”

“Might explain why the heat sensors have trouble picking them up,” Danielle said.

Verhoven pointed to the tail, where the tip split into a pair of spikes, like dual stingers. “Remind you of anything?”

Danielle nodded and McCarter thought of the body in the water with the two great holes in its chest, wounds from something that went in and came back out. It was terrible, a killing machine—but part of McCarter could not help but be in awe. “What the hell are these things?” he asked.

He exchanged glances with Danielle and Verhoven, but it was clear that neither of them had a clue.

A moment later Hawker joined them. He took a brief look at the animal. “Nice,” he said, sarcastically. “This trip is so much fun. Remind me to bring the whole family
next time.” He turned to McCarter. “Let’s not forget why we’re down here.”

Despite an unshakable sense of awe they moved on, following the path that led beyond the plaza as it took them back into the deeper part of the cave. Soon, the craggy walls narrowed, closing in on them before becoming smooth with tool marks once again. They continued in a narrow valley that soon became a tunnel as the ceiling sloped down on them. The carved tunnel led to an even narrower rectangular doorway less than four feet high and perhaps eighteen inches wide at the most. They had to squeeze and duck to force themselves through. As soon as they reached the other side, a weak, raspy voice called out to them.

“Mr. Kaufman?”

McCarter responded. “It’s us, Susan. Not Kaufman.”

She stepped from the shadows. “Professor McCarter?”

“Are you all right?” he said.

She ran to them. Right into McCarter’s arms, who grabbed her in a bear hug, only slightly embarrassed. He could hear her wheezing and pulled out her inhaler, which he’d found and remembered to bring with him.

She used it immediately. “I heard the guns,” she said, her eyes welling up with tears. “I didn’t know if—”

She broke off her sentence, scanning the faces and stopping on Hawker’s. She seemed confused. “What are you doing here? What happened to Kaufman’s men?”

“Most of them are gone.” McCarter said. “Kaufman’s up on the surface. Brazos is guarding him. We heard you on the radio,” he added. “Apparently you couldn’t hear us.”

“I didn’t get any response,” she said. “Not sure I was using it right, and I think I killed the battery trying to call out.”

She went on to explain the attack, and details of her survival. “When it killed the other man, the radio came sliding across the floor and hit me. I grabbed it and I just ran,” she said. “I came down here and I found this door. It turned out to be a dead end in there, but by the time I tried to get out those things were trying to get in. They scratched and dug at the entrance for hours, but I guess they couldn’t fit through. So I stayed put.”

“That’s somewhat comforting,” Hawker said. “But we still have to go back that way to get out. And the sooner we go the better.”

Susan took McCarter by the hand. “Yes,” she said, very seriously. “But there are some things you have to see first.”

She led them deeper into the chamber, down a long, narrow passageway, past one empty room after another, rooms that had been cut from the rock itself, rooms with smooth, vertical walls and flat, even floors. It was a level of workmanship more advanced than that of the plaza outside. In fact, where Susan’s footprints had cleared the dust, the ground shone like expensive marble. McCarter bent to examine it, but Susan beckoned him to follow.

She pointed out a wall, covered with strange geometric symbols and, beside them, carved Mayan glyphs. And then she led them to a pile of debris where part of one wall and the ceiling had collapsed. She knelt down beside it.

McCarter paused, stunned. A figure lay there, half-buried in the rubble, partially hidden by the piles of
rock. In the gray darkness it appeared to be the body of a child, but as the lights converged on the remains it became clear that it was something else.

The body was perhaps four feet tall. The legs and pelvis had been separated from the torso and whatever meat or flesh it once carried had long ago succumbed to decay. The skull was shaped like a man’s but deformed and bulbous. A pair of great empty holes that must have once contained eyes sat in the upper half of the face, with bony ridges above and a forehead that sloped radically backward.

Instead of a rib cage, the body had two broad plates that curved out from its backbone, wrapping the body and fusing together in the front, completely covering the chest cavity. Somewhat like the exoskeleton of the animal outside, with thousands of pinprick holes in the bone.

McCarter touched the fragile skull, running his finger across its smooth surface. It reminded him of a horseshoe crab he’d found washed up on the beach when he was a child.

“It was almost completely buried,” Susan told them. “I cleared most of this away. It helped me pass the time.”

“What is this?” McCarter asked.

Susan shook her head.

Danielle didn’t seem to hear. She was staring, eyes and mouth wide open. “My God,” she whispered. “I never expected … I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it.”

D
anielle Laidlaw gazed at the malformed body lying among the rubble. She had an idea of what it might be, though it was a conclusion she still found hard to accept.

McCarter seemed to sense her feelings. “This means something to you,” he said. “Something more than it means to the rest of us.”

Words flashed into her mind—deceptions. She could tell them it was just what it appeared to be, a deformed skeleton that had been entombed in the temple for a thousand years or more, a birth defect gone horribly to the extreme. But she guessed it was more than that. And she was sick of lying.

She looked back at the skull, studying the smooth curve of the forehead. She noticed a thin line embedded within the bone, a strand of golden fiber, not much thicker than a spider’s thread. Similar strands led from each eye socket back across the top of the skull, a third strand from where the ear would have been. The bone had grown over them in places, like a tree might engulf a wire tied around it.

She was certain now, as certain as she could be, and
when McCarter noticed the metallic strand and looked toward her, she knew the time for the truth had arrived.

“It does mean something more to me,” she said, finally answering McCarter.

He was staring at her, his jaw clenched. “It’s been pretty damn obvious since Kaufman and his people showed up that we were here for more than Mayan artifacts,” he said. “So is this what we came here for? Is this what everyone is so willing to kill for?”

“Take it easy, Doc,” Hawker said calmly.

“No,” Danielle said, waving him off. “It’s all right.”

She put a hand to her forehead. She felt sick.

Across from her McCarter took a deep breath. “I would like an explanation,” he said.

She nodded and spoke plainly. “I needed your help to find this place,” she said, “because we—the NRI—believed we could find a power source here, a device or piece of machinery that would be capable of creating energy through the process of cold fusion.”

McCarter’s face softened, but more, she thought, from surprise than anything else. He asked almost the exact same question Hawker had asked an hour before. “Why would you possibly expect to find something like that here?”

“Because that person,” she pointed toward the body, “whoever he or she was, brought it here.”

McCarter looked back toward the body, blinking and shaking his head as if his mind were in a fog. “I don’t mean to be deliberately thick,” he said, finally. “We’re all exhausted and not thinking clearly, but I honestly have no idea what you’re trying to tell us.”