Immortal (46 page)

Ethan was about to reply when he saw movement at the mouth of the caves. Mercenaries were sneaking forward carrying boxes of what looked suspiciously like explosives, and were mounting them near
the cave mouth.

‘Damn,’ he said. ‘They’ve got Kip Wren, so now they’re going to blow the cave mouth in and seal it.’

Ellison Thorne nodded.

‘That’s what we did, more than a hundred years ago now,’ he said. ‘Blew the entrance so that nobody would find it. Was a bunch of goddamned scientists that decided to dig
through the rubble and found these caves back in 1986.’

Ethan turned as he heard Oppenheimer arguing with Saffron as they backed into the cave. The old man hurried away from her with his awkward gait, his cane clicking in the darkness until they
could no longer hear it.

‘Now where the hell is he goin’?’ asked John Cochrane.

‘He still wants the bacteria,’ Ethan said. ‘Even now it’s all that he’s interested in.’

‘To hell with him,’ John Cochrane said.

‘I can still change him,’ Saffron protested. ‘He’s not completely destroyed yet.’

‘Leave him,’ Ethan said to her, grabbing her arm. ‘He doesn’t care about you or anybody else. All he gives a damn about is his own immortality.’

Saffron shook her head as she leapt to her feet. ‘I can’t leave him down here!’

Ethan watched her dash away before he turned to Ellison Thorne. The big man sighed heavily.

‘We don’t have time for this.’ He looked around the cave at them all, and then his features creased with concern. ‘Where’s Lillian?’

Ethan scanned around them, but could see no sign of the medical examiner.

‘Oh you’re kidding,’ Lopez uttered, looking behind her into the depths of the cave.

‘She’s going after the bacteria too?’ McGuire said in disbelief.

Ellison loaded his rifle as he gestured to the cave entrance and looked at Ethan.

‘
You’ve
got to get out of here,’ he said. ‘And you need to take Saffron and Lillian with you. We’ll hold out until your reinforcements arrive, if they ever
do. We can blow this cave in from the inside once you’re clear, which will prevent Oppenheimer’s men from getting to us. We’ve got enough dynamite left to do it, and Kip
won’t survive beyond noon. We win.’

Ethan glanced at the mercenaries outside the cave, and saw in the background two of them trying to stabilize Kip Wren, an intravenous line now in his arm.

‘Don’t worry,’ he replied, ‘Doug won’t let us down. Shall we do this the old way, as one?’

Ellison Thorne nodded, and as he did so he and his comrades began loading their rifles once more. Behind him, Lopez picked up Kip Wren’s rifle and began stuffing a Minie ball down the
muzzle, following it with wadding. Ethan checked his pistol – six shots remaining, and he had a spare magazine. Twenty-one shots in total, plus five rifles: twenty-six shots, against maybe
seventy or eighty heavily armed men.

‘It’s suicidal,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Even if we do get clear, we’ll still be outnumbered and we can’t climb back up and out of Misery Hole without getting
shot.’

‘Ain’t got no choice,’ John Cochrane said. ‘I’d liked to have had all eight of us here and an army behind us, but those days are long past.’

Ethan stared at Cochrane, and then suddenly something smashed through his thoughts like a freight train as he squatted in the half darkness, watching Ellison and his men loading up.

‘Eight of you?’ Ethan said.

Ellison Thorne glanced at him but said nothing as he finished loading his rifle and aimed it at the cave entrance. Ethan slapped his head in disbelief.

‘My God, I’ve been such an idiot!’

Lopez smiled in the darkness.

‘Nothing new,’ she chortled, and looked at Ellison Thorne. ‘Something you need to tell us?’

Ellison shook his head, but Ethan spoke for him.

‘The supplies,’ he said, ‘the medicines and clothes and everything that you would have needed to survive this long. Paperwork, documents, evidence that you weren’t a
hundred fifty years old. Damn it, you
do
have someone protecting you.’

‘That ain’t no concern of yours,’ Ellison warned him with a pointed finger.

Ethan wasn’t about to be intimidated, and on an impulse he fished the old photograph from his pocket and looked at it.

‘You all said the same thing,’ he pointed out. ‘This photograph was taken after the Battle of Glorietta Pass, 1862. I didn’t realize it until we got here this morning,
but now I get it. This photograph was taken
after
you’d escaped from the Confederate retreat into Texas. It was taken
after
you’d sheltered in these caves.’

Lopez frowned curiously.

‘So what? There’s seven of them in the picture,’ she said.

‘Sure there are,’ Ethan nodded. ‘But who was holding the camera?’

Lopez stared at him for a moment as she realized his point. Ellison Thorne was about to answer when Edward Copthorne shouted out a warning.

‘Enemy to the front!’

Ethan whirled to see four mercenaries plunge into the entrance and open fire randomly into the darkness, the staccato clatter of their assault rifles deafening in the confines of the cave.
Behind them, Ethan glimpsed a half-dozen more men carrying what might have been plastic explosives, hugging the walls of the cave as they prepared to blow the entrance.

‘Take out the shooters first!’ Ethan hollered as Ellison’s men took aim.

Ethan ducked his head away from the noise and the smoke as all five rifles fired at once, the barrel of Lopez’s weapon barely a foot from his head as she blasted one of the attackers deep
in the belly, the soldier folding over the round and tumbling to his knees.

Ethan aimed at one of the men carrying the explosives and fired, catching him cleanly in the chest. The soldier crumpled and dropped his explosives as Ethan leapt up from behind cover and
charged forward through the thick veils of smoke, aware of the bayonets glinting alongside him as Ellison, Copthorne, McQuire and Cochrane all dashed out toward the entrance with a volley of war
cries.

As they crashed into another wave of attackers rushing down toward them, Ellison Thorne shouted to Ethan above the din.

‘Find Lillian and Saffron! I don’t want any o’ these bastards slipping past and killing them, and you’ll need to get them out before we can blow the entrance!’

Ethan whirled to see Lopez ramming the wicked bayonet of her rifle straight into the chest of a screaming soldier. He shouted her name and tossed his pistol in a graceful arc toward her. Lopez
whirled and caught the pistol before diving for cover behind scattered rocks and opening fire on their attackers.

Ethan dashed back into the cave, struggling to see as he plunged into the darkness.

Jeb Oppenheimer cackled to himself as he clambered awkwardly over endless jagged rocks in the darkness, his way lit only by the solid-gold lighter he held like a lantern in
front of him, a white handkerchief wrapped around it to protect his fingers from the heat. The interior of the cave was low, forcing him to stoop in order to move forward. But he could smell a
breeze that drifted into his face from somewhere ahead in the impenetrable blackness, cool air touched with the scent of damp but also of something else, an almost clinical smell that he could not
identify but which seemed somehow familiar.

The noise of fighting behind him had faded, the complex turns and twists in the cave deadening all sound. Drops of water plopped in fat drips into puddles on the ground, seeping through the
bedrock from hilltops hundreds of feet above his head. The thought of millions of tons of solid rock bearing down upon the chamber from above sent a wriggle of fear twisting through his gullet but
he pushed on, driven by the knowledge of what resided somewhere deep within these prehistoric caves.

Ahead, the weakly flickering flame of his lighter reflected off something embedded in the rocks that glittered like pearls. Oppenheimer slowed as the low ceiling of the tunnel rose and he
squeezed through a narrow vertical cleft in the rocks into a chamber filled with a shimmering pool of crystalline water so clear that the light of his flame illuminated the floor perhaps twenty
feet beneath the surface.

But that was not what drew his eyes and caught the breath in his throat.

Above his head, immense crystals like giant geometric tree trunks were lodged at angles to span the width of the chamber above the shimmering water. Like giant causeways made of translucent
glass, they criss-crossed above the water and sparkled in the weak light of the flame as though encrusted with jewels.

‘Gypsum,’ Oppenheimer gasped, recognizing the immaculate nature of what was otherwise a nondescript mineral.

But here it possessed a purity the likes of which he’d never seen. He began easing his way into the cave, staring in awe at the crystals and the flickering water. The strange scent
he’d detected earlier tainted the air around him, and he recognized it as ammonia. A flickering motion on the cavernous ceiling caught his eye, and he looked up to see bats roosting in their
thousands above him, their wings fluttering as they clung to their rocky domain. As they did so, he saw an occasional droplet of fluid fall from the heights, dropping into the water with a tiny
splash and ripple, the cause of the endless shimmering of the surface.

Slowly, placing his feet near the edge of the pool, Oppenheimer peered over the edge. There, deep below the surface, he watched the tiny droplets fall through the beautifully clear water to join
a bizarrely colored deposit deep beneath the surface, a kaleidoscopic multitude of fungi and mosses. Oppenheimer guessed that the droppings in the water must clear overnight when the bats were out
hunting, settling on the bottom of the pool. In the reflection from the surface of the water that illuminated his wrinkled face, Oppenheimer saw his own smile beaming back at him like a shimmering
ghost as a disembodied voice echoed through the cave around him.

‘It’s guano.’

He whirled to see Lillian Cruz watching him from the entrance to the chamber. Oppenheimer regarded her for a moment and then decided that she was no threat to him as he turned back to the
water.

‘The guano has ammonia in it,’ he said, almost to himself.

Lillian stepped into the chamber, gesturing to the water. ‘It also has high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen,’ she said. ‘Along with ammonia it contains uric, oxalic,
phosphoric and carbonic acids, various earth salts and nitrates.’

Jeb Oppenheimer’s mind was working overtime as he nodded to himself, gesturing to the giant gypsum crystals soaring above the chamber.

‘The gypsum and sulfur crystals mean speleogenesis: cave forming by sulfuric acid dissolution,’ Oppenheimer said. ‘The limestone cavern would have formed from the bottom up, in
contrast to the normal top-down carbonic acid dissolution mechanism of cave formation. Sulfuric acid, derived from hydrogen sulfide, would have migrated from nearby oil deposits.’

‘The cave then floods over time with water draining through fissures from the ground above, creating these pools,’ Lillian added.

Oppenheimer nodded eagerly, gesturing up at the crystals with his cane. ‘The water falls,’ he said, ‘hitting the crystals and sometimes taking with it bacteria that were
encased within the crystals when they formed millions of years ago, bacteria like
Bacillus permians
.’

Lillian nodded.

‘The bacteria fall into the water and mix with the guano at the bottom. Phosphorus in guano is an essential plant macronutrient,’ she said, ‘that’s why it’s used so
heavily in fertilizers. The guano, laden with the bacteria, are kept in solution by the water in the pool. The bacteria, provided with a nutrient source by the guano, are reanimated and come into
contact with all manner of mosses, fungi and bottom-feeding invertebrates.’

Oppenheimer’s laugh rattled out in the chamber, echoing back and forth around them as he spoke.

‘Some insect and invertebrate species are semi-aquatic, and others live on the surface. They consume the bacteria-laden guano, and are likewise consumed by the bats that hunt them!’
Slowly he turned to face Lillian, his wrinkled features alive now as finally, after so many years, he realized that he had found something that had existed in folklore for millennia. ‘The
bats carry the bacteria, giving them their unusually long lifespans. They also process the bacteria through their gut and excrete many of them back into the water, or spill blood through injury
into the pool.’

Lillian nodded, and despite the fact that he knew she hated him, she smiled.

‘Which over time ladens the water with the very fluids the bats have ingested, alive with a form of
Bacillus permians
that has evolved within these caves to live symbiotically
within mammals.’

‘But what was the fuel?’ Oppenheimer struggled to understand. ‘What metabolism was required to sustain them for such long periods inside human beings?’

Lillian no longer held the truth back from Oppenheimer. In fact, she appeared to enjoy revealing to him what she had learned. ‘Iron, from the hemoglobin in blood,’ she replied.
‘Anyone who carries the infection will suffer from anemia if iron supplements are not provided in their diet.’

Oppenheimer looked at her pleadingly, like a child who has misbehaved yet yearns desperately for one last chance.

‘But how could it have made the transition to humans through a single encounter?’

Lillian regarded the old man for a long moment before replying.

‘Cross-species communication is possible in bacteria through something known as quorom sensing. The bacteria use it to coordinate gene expression via the density of their population. If
there’s enough of them present in a biological species, the genes are activated and any infection shows symptoms.’

‘My God,’ Oppenheimer exclaimed. ‘Like the bioluminescent luciferase in fish that glow underwater, produced by
Virbio fischeri
. The gene cannot be expressed by a single
cell, only when the population is large enough does the production of luciferase begin.’

‘The bacteria’s ability to express the gene is only activated when enough are consumed by the host species,’ Lillian confirmed.