Xeno Sapiens (31 page)

“
We’ve done all we can here, Val.
Let’s go.”

“
Yeah,” Val agreed. He was beginning
to think about the body on the floor. “It’s out of our hands now.
Help me find my flashlight.”

“
Leave it,” Jay said. “The cops will
have to come back down here. They’ll get it.”

“
Yeah, okay,” Val said, quickly giving
in. He wanted to get out before his case of the creeps turned into
an open fit of shivering. He grabbed Jay’s belt and began winding
his way out, following the jumping flashlight.

“
I wish I knew what that noise was,”
Jay said shakily. “I guess it’s the river. Right, Val?”

“
I guess. Just keep going, will
you?”

They had neared the cavern entrance.
Jay was appalled at how dark it had gotten. A new sound appeared
amid the hissing. It sounded like tolling footsteps behind
them.

“
Almost there,” Jay said breathlessly.
The sounds of the footsteps clanged in his mind. He thought of the
most mordant and macabre possibilities. He walked another quick,
ten yards. Val lost his grip on Jay’s belt and Jay lunged forward.
Something fell from Jay’s belt and clattered at his
heels.

He found himself directly beneath the
cavern entrance. He tossed his flashlight up through the ingress.
It hit the steep side of the mountain and promptly rolled merrily
away. He jumped like an NBA all-star and grasped the lip of the
entrance. He pulled himself out. The clean air hit him like a shock
wave and he shuddered.

Jay turned to look. Val was halfway out
of the hole and clawing for more. The lower half of his body was
still below ground. Jay reached out to hook his hands on Val’s
shoulders. Just before he reached him, Val lurched backward, almost
vanishing from sight. His face showed white, unyielding panic. His
mouth hung open and new sweat appeared instantly on his
brow.

“
Pull, Jay,”
he roared. He moaned out loud,
“My leg’s caught on
a rock or something. Pull, goddammit. Pull!’

Jay slapped his hands on Val’s
shoulders and grabbed a double handful of his uniform. He hauled
backward with the willowy muscles in his shoulders and back. His
skinny hamstrings quivered and shook. His near hysteria gave him
strength. Val started to slide out of the hole by
inches.

The next moment, he was
gone.

Jay felt a sudden jerk from below, so
quick and hard that two swatches of green material had torn off
with a ripping sound. Jay still held the swatches in his
hands.

“
Val,” Jay called. He sounded like a
lost child. A gust of wind blew by the cavern and swirled through
it, whistling in mockery. The cavern’s blackness clung thick as
roofing tar. Cold drafts spiraled from it.

Jay slowly came out of is daze. He
shouted into the entrance way.

“
Val! What the hell is going on down
there?”

In answer, a rising scream boiled up
from the hole, more horrible than the uncomprehending shriek of a
wounded animal. It made Jay’s eardrums hurt. For a second he felt
faint.

“
Shoot the sonofabitch,”
Jay screamed,
shouting over the insane squealing. “Just shoot!”

A brief burst of automatic weapons fire
rattled the newborn night, accompanied by dazzling flashes that
were too bright in the cavern’s blackness. The zing and whine of
ricocheting bullets sang out of the hole.

The echoes died away, replaced by a
guttural blubbering that intensified until it became another scream
as agonized as someone being drawn and quartered. Jay looked around
helplessly in the building night as the scream went on and
on.

He scrambled to his feet and pulled his
.45 out. He stood indecisively for a second, the gun leveled at the
cavern entrance, wondering whether to take the chance of shooting
Val or leaving him to suffer at the hands of the
monster.

Another bloodcurdling scream decided
him.

His index finger contracted on the
trigger and the barrel spit out the entire clip of 240 grain
bullets. The muzzle flashes lit the night like fireworks. By the
time he heard the firing pin strike on an empty chamber, Jay was
blind with green, afterimages of the muzzle flames. His ears rang
from the roaring reports. The lazy wind tore the blue smoke into
tatters and swept it away into the suddenly silent
evening.

The screams had stopped. The dark hole
beckoned silently, an enigma begging to be solved. After a few
seconds of stunned inaction, Jay began to think more
rationally.

He reached down to his utility belt for
his walkie talkie. His hand instantly found the place it should
have been, but it was gone. It had bounced out in the cave when Val
had lost his grip on his belt.

Inside the cavern, Jay heard the sound
of breathing and the gentle scraping of a bare foot on a stone
floor, dislodging small pebbles. There was a pause, as if whoever
was down there had stopped what they were doing to concentrate on a
feat requiring total concentration.

Though he didn’t think it would do any
good, Jay called out to Val.

“
You can come out now, Val. I think I
shot the sonofabitch.”

There was no response, only a palpable
sensation of light swirling into the drain of night. Hazy starshine
glowed in the east.

“
Goddammit, Val,” Jay said with false
bravado. “You’ve had your fun. I forgive you, okay? Come on out.
This isn’t very funny.”

Silence.

“
Val?”

From inside the cavern came a heavy
grunt. Jay took a quick, reflexive step backward as something
hurtled out of the entrance and sailed past him, landing with a
heavy thump some ten feet away. He gasped and swallowed hard. The
light was too chancy to make out details, but Jay knew what had
come flying from the hole like a cork out of a bottle was Val. All
240 pounds of him.

He took five steps to where Val lay on
the ground like a dark lump. Each footfall felt like a step towards
the guillotine. He knelt down and put a hand on Val’s shoulder. His
fingers trembled as they touched Val’s cooling flesh. He turned Val
over to look into his face. Jay had the uncomfortable sensation of
eyes boring into his back. His brain was screaming at him to run
like hell, but his heart forced him to be absolutely
sure.

His breath caught in his throat and his
eyes bulged once Val was completely turned over.

Val had bled to death. On each side of
his windpipe were three, blood-smeared, elongated holes. They were
tattered and irregular. A large bruise had appeared against the
whiteness at the back of Val’s neck. Val had been throttled from
behind with such force that the choking fingers had torn holes in
Val’s skin. But Val had not died from a ruptured trachea; it hadn’t
been touched. He had bled to death, pints of blood having spurted
from horribly mangled arteries.

Jay turned sharply at a sound from
behind him. He spun around as he stood up. His heels hit Val’s body
and he fell backward.

Seth emerged from the cavern. His
slick, glistening fingers curled around the lip of the entrance.
The tips of his fingers were shiny down to the second knuckle from
Val’s blood. He drew himself up through the narrow opening and
stood huge against the barren landscape. His infected cheek burned
and his left eye bulged, as black and goggling as the eye of a
fish. His good eye glowed in the white field of his
face.

Jay pulled out a fresh clip for his
.45, fiddling in the dark with his trembling fingers. He jerked his
head up at a sudden screeching. He shoved the clip too hard and the
magazine bounced off the hand grip and shot into the darkness,
landing with a metallic clatter.

Seth’s good eye had narrowed and he
made a sudden leap for Jay.

Jay stepped backward, easily out of
reach.

Too easy. He should have gotten me
.

Seth seemed to be measuring the
distance. Jay felt something coming from Seth. Something like a
radio signal, but it made no sense. All Jay knew was that something
was trying to get into his head. It was fatally comforting and that
frightened him. The feeling lulled him, nearly made him forget
Val’s violent death at the hands of this monster. Jay literally
snapped awake and the feeling evaporated. He noticed that the
monster’s head jerked as he awoke from his stupor.

Jay rolled his eyes to the right. A
stand of evergreens poked its way from the sparse soil thirty yards
away, marching down the side of the mountain to the thicker
woodland below. He thought if he could get a three second head
start, he might be able to make it.

He bolted, spurred on by mind-bending
fear. Loose dirt and pebbles avalanched down the steep grade. He
scrambled, nearly sideways, slipping to one knee and bouncing back
up. A roar of surprise, almost like a question, erupted from behind
him just as pine branches slapped against his face. He plunged
blindly into the trees, trying to blot out the snapping, crashing
undergrowth and crushing footfalls behind him.

Jay pounded through the trees. His
heart boomed and faltered. It seemed it would pop at anytime. He
had retrieved his bayonet from its scabbard and he clutched it in
his hand, never minding that he might slip at any time and stick it
through his own heart.

The popping sound of snapping branches
urged him forward, his lungs boiling and gasping. He whipped
blindly through the forest, smacking his shins against tree stumps.
Shadows gathered around him in thick pools. He saw movements from
the corners of his eyes, as if things had stepped back into the
shadows when he turned to look.

He glanced quickly over his shoulder
and his legs wavered. Seth was gaining on him, his good eye blazing
like a fog lantern in the night. Jay stumbled with the clumsiness
of a city boy while Seth loped like a stalking wolf.

Jay called on his last reserves of
energy to push him faster. When he next took a hurried glance
backward, what he saw would stay with him for the rest of his
life.

Seth had stopped, his arms upraised as
if in supplication. For a crazy second, Jay thought he had made
it.

A streak of white flashed across the
sky. It wasn’t like a lightning bolt, but as if the entire night
sky had become a reflecting surface for a celestial flash bulb. The
blinding white stretched from horizon to horizon for a thousandth
of a second, obliterating the perception of any object in its total
white out. A sleepy, minor-key buzzing like the sound of an
electrical grid being charged rattled in the night.

Jay’s limbs began to slow. It was the
first thing he felt after the light fell over him and dissipated.
His brain numbed, refusing to tell his legs to run anymore. He felt
that every last bit of energy was being sucked from his soul. He
sensed a dim, white haze all around him. His internal temperature
rose to two hundred degrees near the surface of his skin, forming
instant blisters that burst and ran. Then, faster than it could be
said, his internal temperature plummeted to below zero.

Seventy below.

Two hundred
below.

Jay opened his mouth, trying to breathe
air that had implausibly taken on the consistency of sludge. It
froze open like a door on a rusty hinge. His eyeballs frosted over
and his limbs, going full tilt only a second before, ground to a
complete standstill.

Two hundred eighty below.
Four hundred below.

Jay was a frozen Pieta of agony. His
clothes, his body, even his hot internal organs had been flash
frozen so quickly there had not been time for ice crystals to form
and rupture the delicate tissues. In the next instant, his inertia
carried him like a bowling ball into a massive tree trunk. He
shattered into a thousand pieces that showered into the night,
catching moonbeams and scattering their rays like sparklers. The
next day, searchers would find the body of Val Sheffield and a few
pieces of Jay Thomas. There would be just enough large pieces left
of Jay to permit positive ID. None of the searchers would ever
believe he had been flash frozen and shattered like an ice cube in
a nut cracker, even though his smashed remains would still be like
grisly ice pops the next day.

Seth walked over and leaned heavily
against the tree on which Jay had died. He sucked in his cheek as
though nursing a decayed tooth and was rewarded with a flaming,
cruel jab of pain. Rocket trails burst inside his head while
burning cinders showered down behind his eyes in a fiery
rain.

He panted harshly, catching his breath,
each inhalation like a razor slash over the raw edges of his cut
cheek. His left eye was blind, the infection having built up enough
to put pressure directly on the eyeball. He spared a last,
remorseless look at the remains of Jay Thomas, then looked to the
lights of the place from which he had escaped. They glowed
urgently, beacons shimmering in halos of steamy mist.

Despite the torture he had endured
there, waking up with foreign objects in every orifice of his body,
trapped in an alien, sterile environment, he knew he must go back.
Other than his initial terror and breakout from the trap, he
instinctively knew they had controlled his every move. The
imprinting process had begun, though Seth was unaware of this. He
had fixated on the yellow-haired creature at the trap, the one
called Ingrid. She could make him well again.