Subterrestrial (38 page)

“Igloo Four, do you copy?” Ryan said through the speakers.

“
Copy, Tango Charlie Seven.
”

“We have a big problem down here.”

Calder shined her beam from one hole to the next. All of them bent one way or another several feet in. She looked for scratches or any other kind of marking to indicate—

She froze.

Below the uppermost hole was a series of scratches that almost looked like . . .

“An arrow.”

Calder swam through the hole without a second thought. Her heart thudded in her ears. It had been an arrow. No doubt about it.

She twisted and contorted her body to navigate the tunnel, which led her higher and higher. Another arrow passed right before her eyes, and she made a sound that could have been a laugh or a sob.

Francis called to her, but she tuned him out.

Another arrow.

She blew through a cave maybe four feet tall and passed straight through the roof, following the arrows that continued to lead her upward, until the tunnel leveled off and she swam into a large granite cavern with walls that sparkled with feldspar.

She swam toward the surface and breached mere inches from where Mitchell, covered with a crust of dried blood, had wedged himself into a tiny recess. His eyes were closed and concealed by shadows. His face was so pale she was certain she was too late.

“’Bout time you got here,” he whispered.

His eyes opened a crack.

Calder squealed and threw her arms around him.

Hang Sơn Đoòng

Quảng Bình Province, Vietnam

17°27′25″ N, 106°17′15″ E

Six Months Later

Hart raised her face to the sky, closed her eyes, and allowed the sun to caress her features. She had to remind herself to take moments like these to savor the smells of the jungle and the playful shrieking from the canopy before she started to take them for granted. Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined she could be at such peace with the world.

June unconsciously tangled her fingers in Hart’s hair while she slept. She’d finally been weaned to a bottle, which meant that Hart could take a more active role in her upbringing. She was the first to be born into this strange new world, and they’d named her after the month of her birth, largely because it was a sound the primates could approximate.

There was no telling when she and her team would be able to share everything they’d learned with the rest of the world, but for now it didn’t matter. Let the government concoct whatever stories it needed to tell regarding their origin. As far as she was concerned, none of that mattered. DARPA had done right by her and the species tentatively named
Homo beringius
by leasing this system of caves from the Vietnamese government. She didn’t spare a thought for how much both the land and their continued privacy must have cost.

The jungle was still recovering from the flooding. They’d been forced to thin the trees to reduce the competition for the sparse nutrients left in the soil, but they’d been able to recycle them to make tree houses and bridges spanning the upper canopy for the eleven survivors. While at first they’d only reluctantly taken to the attenuated sunlight, they now thrived beyond her wildest expectations. Two other females were pregnant and, with the way they cavorted, she figured there would be more on the way soon enough.

In exchange for continuing to work with them, she’d been required to sign away her old life, which she’d done without reservation. Everything she’d ever wanted was right here in front of her.

“Now you try,” she said.

Hunt slapped his palms on the ground and tossed handfuls of dirt into the air. He was so easily frustrated, yet he always battled through it. With more than a little coaxing anyway. The wounds on his chest had left nasty scars that reminded her of leeches, and he still had a mean streak that occasionally led to some tense moments, but he’d become surprisingly close to Payton, who was every bit as confounded by it as she was.

“Come on, big guy,” he said. “You can do this.”

Hunt made his usual pissed off grunting sound, from which they’d derived his name, and shoved Payton off of the stump upon which he sat.

Several of the younger females chittered from the branches overhead, where they’d stealthily hidden so they could watch. Hunt beat his chest and bared his teeth for their benefit.

“Stop preening, would you?” Payton said. He shoved Hunt and the two of them ended up wrestling in the dirt.

“Shh!” Hart said, but it was already too late.

June opened her eyes only long enough to peek at Hart before closing them again. While her retinas lacked traditional rods and cones, the photoreceptors responded to various degrees of brightness, and she appeared to be able to use her eyes under low light conditions, but it was still too soon to tell for sure. The fact that she continued to open them, which prevented her eyelids from growing together, was cause for optimism.

The baby’s mother screamed and dropped from the trees. Jen was never more than a few feet away at any given time. The fact that she even let Hart near her offspring was an honor that had taken her an absurd amount of time to earn.

Jen swatted both Hunt and Payton before gathering her offspring and climbing up into the lower canopy, where she offered the baby a breast and cooed peacefully as she rocked back and forth on a tangle of vines.

Hart patiently took Hunt by the wrist, turned over his hand, and drew the symbols on his palm again. He shook his head and grunted, then raised his fists to pound them again.

“Just try,” Hart said. “For me.”

The primate appeared to deflate when he sighed. He climbed onto the log beside her and commandeered the specially designed tablet. It was a modified version of a model used to teach blind children how to read braille. She’d convinced one of the DARPA engineers to retrofit it with the symbols she’d been able to interpret.

Hunt pressed one that looked like a horseshoe with a dot in the center.

“
Eat
,” the computerized voice said.

Wheet
.

He scratched his head with his knuckles and looked in Payton’s direction.

“You know this one.”

Ee-uht
.

He tried again.

Ee-tuh
.

Hunt clapped his hands and screeched. Hopped up and down on the log.

“Halfway there,” Hart said.

He tapped the button with the telltale shape of a banana.

“
Banana
,” said the computer
.

Noh-neh
.

Nah-nuh
.

Ee-tuh nah-nuh
.

Payton removed a whole bunch from his backpack and handed it to Hunt, who raised it over his head and screamed triumphantly.

Others joined his cries, but there was something different about them, something that made the hairs rise on the back of Hart’s neck.

Payton must have felt it, too. He stood and looked at her before turning his attention to the forest.

The canopy fell eerily silent. Even the jungle five hundred feet above them was suddenly bereft of birdsong and the chirruping of tree frogs.

Hart turned in a circle. She couldn’t see any of them in the canopy. Not one of them. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d all vanished at once.

A crunching sound in the distance. The acoustics were strange, but she’d been down here long enough to interpret the different intonations caused by the adjacent caverns. The sound had come from the dark tunnel that led deeper into the system of caves, away from the surface. Considering they’d sealed the western egress to limit entry to the lone access-controlled gate, there was no reason for anything to have been back there.

More crunching sounds. Gravel, she realized. Grinding against the bare stone beneath the tread of something moving on two legs.
The
stride was uneven, as though whatever made the sounds was either injured or attempting to mask the sounds of its approach.

Payton eased down the slope and stood at the edge of the column of light, where small plants grew from the cracks between the rocks. Another foot into the darkness and there was no life whatsoever, only a residual crust of evaporated seawater.

More crunching.

A dark shape momentarily resolved from the shadows.

“There’s something back there,” Hart whispered.

None of the primates ventured in that direction. They foraged and played clear up to the gate to the east, but for whatever reason never went west. She figured it must have been because somewhere back there was access to the tunnel that ultimately reached the Bering Sea, where she’d been following the story of a team of Canadian climatologists who’d gone missing near the Inuit settlement on Dorset Island, within the Arctic Circle.

Payton unclipped the transceiver on his hip and was about to call the guards stationed at the makeshift research station when Hart reached out and lowered his hand.

More crunching sounds.

A silhouette formed from the darkness. It swayed from side to side as it staggered toward them, moving low to the ground. The canopy filled with screams when its face emerged from the shadows.

Pleese.

Hart’s eyes filled with tears. Her voice trembled when she spoke.

“Alpha?”

Nunavut Territory

South Baffin District, Canada

64°13′54″ N, 076°32′25″ W

Today

The man’s screams echo through the darkness. The sound of his pain summons them to him. They emerge from the open water beneath the ice caps and scurry into the hollow they carved into the heart of the glacier. Their talons make clicking sounds as they enter the chamber, surrounded by the carcasses of the others they’d taken with the man.

His screams reach a terrible crescendo before abruptly ceasing.

The echo fades into oblivion.

A wet tearing sound.

The hatchling squirms through the hole in the man’s abdomen and drops to the ice with a
splat
.

The creatures inch closer and wait for their offspring to find its feet. It wobbles as it stands and tests its weight on its spindly legs. Its hooked talons instinctively strike the ice. It raises its long neck, fills its lungs with the arctic air, and releases it in a cry that reverberates deep into the earth.

Skree!