Xeno Sapiens (30 page)

Val’s face was as mournful as a Basset
Hound’s.

“
I don’t see no cave, Jay,” he said
directly. “It ain’t on any map, it ain’t like the ones we passed
up, and it surely ain’t there.”

“
I guess it is, Val,” Jay said.
“You’re looking right at it.”

Val sighed. Jay wasn’t the most
colorful flower in the bouquet.

“
I know that, Jay,” he said wearily.
He scanned the sky, wishing there were some bright sunshine to warm
his upturned face. “You feel it, too, don’t you, Jay?”

Jay nodded. “I was afraid to say
anything. This isn’t the kind of thing the college fund guys sign
up for.”

“
Maybe it’s just the late afternoon,”
Val remarked. “Fucking biorhythms, or a full moon or something,” He
stared intently at some point in the distance. “Think we should
give this one the go by, too?”

Jay pulled out his sidearm, a service
issue .45, and turned it over thoughtfully in his hands. Val
watched him pull the action back, heard the snap as it shot back
into place.

“
I guess not,” Jay answered unhappily.
“Cap’n’ll have our heads if they do a follow-up. I’ll give the
patrol leader a call.” He depressed the send button on his walkie
talkie.

“
Able base, this is Guardsman Thomas,
Delta patrol. Over.”

An unintelligible response crackled
back. Jay tried again.

“
Say again, base.”

More whining and crackling came over
the transceiver. Jay snapped the radio off.

“
Screw it.”

“
That was pretty stupid,” Val
said.

“
Well, at least we don’t have to
listen to his guff.”

Val nodded absently, the subject not
seeming to interest him.

“
We’d better get with it,” Jay
said.

“
You’ve got your weapon ready,” Val
asked.

Jay reholstered his pistol and patted
it.

Val held out his arm. “After
you.”

Jay lowered his matchstick body into
the hole. The cavern floor was a yard below his dangling heels. He
dropped down and hit hard, rattling his teeth. The first thing he
noticed was how much cooler it was. And clammy. Dampness seemed to
weld itself to his skin. He pulled his flashlight from his utility
belt and swept its dim beam around. Bare rock walls, cracked and
crumbling, showed their dark faces. Fissures trickling water shone
like ice.

“
What’s down there,” Val called from
above. His voice sounded weak and tinny in the cavern, almost
drowned out by the soft hiss and roar of water from the river that
originated from this place and cut through the side of the mountain
some eighty yards away.

“
Three treasure chests, eight cases of
Crown Royal, and seventy-two naked virgins,” Jay called
back.

“
What?”

“
Rocks,” Jay answered. “Cracks in the
walls, stinking water. What did you expect in a cave?”

“
I can do without the smart-assery.
How big is it?”

Jay took his first careful look around.
He stood in a small anteroom. Solid rock crowded his back and a
narrow passage lined with stalagmites and stalactites led deeper
into the mountain. As he swept the flashlight beam forward, the
black walls of the cave changed to the wondrous green, red, and
blue formations of a cavern. Beyond fifteen feet, however, the
darkness held hard as bedrock.

“
I can’t really tell,” Jay called
back. “But it’s a cavern, not a cave. There’s a passageway down
here. Kind of narrow, but I think we can squeeze
through.”

Val took off his belt, and threaded it
through the loops on his rifle strap.

“
You ready down there,” he
shouted.

“
Send it down.”

Val slowly lowered the rifle. After a
moment he felt a tug and knew Jay had it. He squeezed into the hole
and began lowering his bulk into the cavern.

“
Be careful,” Jay said. “The ground
drops straightaway about three feet.”

Val mumbled something Jay didn’t
understand. His voice sounded as if he were speaking into a bag.
Val’s belly scraped the lip of the opening and pulled his shirttail
out. His legs flailed in empty space. His body blocked the precious
little light from above and Jay’s flashlight could hardly pierce
the gloom more than ten feet ahead.

The sudden reappearance of the sky
marked Val’s entrance into the cavern. He thumped onto the rock
floor and took a clumsy half step like a retarded Vaudeville dancer
before regaining his balance.

“
Long way down,” he observed. He
extricated his rifle from his belt and slung it around his
shoulder.

“
Looks like the passage goes on back,”
Jay said, gesturing with the light. “It might get bigger, it might
get smaller. Who knows from caves?”

Jay aimed his flashlight down the
passageway and took an unenthusiastic step forward. Neither of them
could explain the transfixing quality that had taken hold of them
as they entered the cavern. It was as if the narcotizing voice of a
femme fatale had spoken to them, but not with song. It was a
communication older than words and much more compelling.

Val followed Jay down the passageway.
Pillbugs and millipedes scurried in frightened ranks from the
light. Val saw no spiders, for which he was abundantly grateful,
but he did see a lot of insects and buggies he had never seen
before. They gathered on the cave floor like a twisting nest of
worms and slithered over the particolored rock
formations.

As the passage narrowed, both men
stooped over to keep from scraping their heads on the low
ceiling.

“
Great place for a nature excursion,
ain’t it, Val?”

“
Never mind the nature excursion,” Val
huffed. “Just keep going.”

They pressed on, squeezing between
outcroppings of rock that had bulged into their path like barriers.
The place smelled of cold water and the clammy atmosphere raised
goose pimples on their arms. As a child, Val had read a book in
which the author described the unsavory feat of wriggling through
the aorta of a butchered whale. Val knew exactly how the character
had felt.

“
Looks like it widens out a little up
ahead,” Jay said hopefully.

Val emerged from between two, craggy
rock faces. To his joy, he could stand upright again. His vertebrae
groaned with relief. He stabbed his flashlight beam at the blank
and stolid walls. The beam played along the floor and something
caught Val’s eye.

“
Jay,” he said. “Look at
this.”

Jay aimed his flashlight toward Val’s.
As the two beams converged, he saw a filthy piece of cloth that had
once been white gauze. Val stooped over and picked it up. It was
splotched and matted with mud and dried blood.

“
It’s a bandage, ain’t it,” Jay
asked.

Val’s nerve endings kicked into
wariness. He looked out ahead.

“
It’s a bandage, alright. With a blood
stain in the middle.”

“
Maybe it’s been here a while, huh,
Val?” Jay had snapped out of his torpor, but they were too far into
it. They had to go on.

“
Jay,” Val said kindly, “you know
where it came from. Our boy is either here now, or made a recent
visit. I don’t think there are that many people who get hurt, then
go traipsing through a cavern. Dig?”

“
Shit, man. This just gets better and
better.”

The weak light illuminated the pale
moon of Jay’s face. He stared at the tiny holes in the filthy
bandage. They looked like sightless eyes gone blind in the cavern’s
eternal night.

“
Let’s go on,” Val said.

They crept forward, each man feeling
the curious sensation of the walls giving way and the ceiling
rising. They stopped.

“
This is it,” Val said. “We can’t go
any further.”

Jay nodded, a wasted gesture in the
darkness.

“
Let’s look around,” Val said, “see if
there’s anything to see, then get the hell out of here.”

“
Okay.”

“
You go to the other side, and I’ll
look around here.”

“
What am I looking for?”

“
If you run across an eight foot tall,
gray Martian, you’ll know you found what you came looking
for.”

“
Take it easy, Val.” Jay pressed Val’s
arm reassuringly before plodding to the far side of the large
chamber. He began to work his way toward Val, shining his light at
the junction of the cavern wall and the floor.

“
See anything,” Jay called.

“
Nothing,” Val said. “I think I’ll...”
Val stopped suddenly. His flashlight jerked violently and clattered
off the wall. It hit the floor and rolled a short distance before
the light died. Jay heard a startled grunt.

“
Val,”
he yelled. “Are you okay?”

Jay heard a frightened moan and a
short, rapid series of skittering sounds, as if Val were scuttling
like a crab.

“
Get over here, Jay,” Val said in a
gruff whisper. “I tripped over something. I think it’s a body.” He
took a shuddering breath, “Oh, bleeding Christ, I think it’s
a
dead
body.”

Jay hurried over, moving as well as he
could without falling over something. He finally picked Val out
with his flashlight and squatted next to him. Val’s face was watery
pale and his eyes were two black bits of mica.

“
Over to your right,” Val
said.

Jay swung his light down and to the
right. He slumped backward, joining Val in a sitting position
against the cavern wall.

“
Oh, God,” Jay whimpered. “Is that
him?”

“
Has to be,” Val said harshly.
“Sonofabitch must have got a bigger dose of that poison than they
thought.”

Seth lay still on the cavern floor,
stretched out like a mummy in a sarcophagus. His small lips were
taut and flattened into bands of cracked muscle, allowing his upper
teeth to bulge bizarrely over his lower lip. His hairless, gray
scalp was streaked with wet ribbons of mud that
sparkled.

But it was Seth’s face that caused such
revulsion. His left cheek had been slashed from the cheekbone to
the corner of his mouth. Gooey clumps of mud mingled with copious
pockets of pus that oozed from the wound. The infection had spread
and Seth’s left eye, already disproportionately large, was
grotesquely swollen. Val saw Seth’s enlarged tongue through the
hole in his cheek and thought it was only by virtue of the weather
being too cold for flies that had saved him from having a boiling
nest of maggots squirming in the savaged flesh.

“
This is too much for us,” Val said.
He was calmer now that Jay was with him. “It’s time to turn this
over to the Sarge. Let him break the news to Merrifield. Go ahead
and call Able. Tell him we’ve got their guy.”

“
No can do,” Jay said. “The signal
won’t travel out of the cavern. We’ll have to wait until we get
out.”

“
Aw, shit,” Val said, irritated and
frightened at the same time. “What, the fuck. It doesn’t matter.
This guy ain’t going anywhere.”

“
How long you guess he’s been dead?”
Jay stared morbidly at Seth, as if expecting him to move at any
second.

“
Not long, I’d guess,” Val answered.
“That cut on his face. That’s what killed him, I bet.” He stood up
and paused thoughtfully. “Funny. I never knew of an infection
killing anybody that fast. You think maybe the folks on the hill
are lying about how long he’s been gone? I mean, shit, they’ve lied
to us from she git-go. This guy is a hell of a lot bigger than
six-ten. Hell, he barely looks human.”

“
I wouldn’t put it past ’em, Val. But
that ain’t our worry. Can we just get out of here?”

“
Okay. Yeah,” Val said, “Let’s go.” He
made a move to start, then stopped, his head tilted, listening to
something,

“
Jay,” he said carefully, “maybe it’s
just my nerves, but do you hear something like running water? Or
the wind?”

Jay tilted his head this way and that.
Beneath the huge emptiness of the cave, a distinct, silky hiss was
audible. It was somnolent as a dream, like white noise from thin
air. It came from no specific point.

“
The river’s just down the mountain,”
Jay said hopefully. “Maybe that’s it.”

“
Maybe.”