Cryptozoica (34 page)

Mouzi stood at the rim holding a thick tree branch, six feet long. With the point, she prodded the surface of the pool. It looked more like a muck-filled, stagnant hog wallow. It smelled so foul and fetid that everyone recoiled from it.

Belleau circled the pool, as if his mind refused to accept what his eyes saw. “No, no. This isn’t it, is it? No. No.”

A gaseous bubble on the surface of the sludge broke with a slow-motion flatulent pop, releasing a stench not unlike rotten eggs mixed with ammonia. Mouzi pinched her nostrils shut and shook her head in mock pity.

“This is what you dragged me to this part of the world to find?” Honoré shouted, whirling on Belleau, her eyes blazing with anger. “You put me through all of this, involved me in crime and murder to lay claim to this—cesspit?”

Belleau fell to his knees at the rim, reaching out a beseeching hand toward the bubbling muck. “This can’t be,” he whispered hoarsely. “This is unacceptable.”

Oakshott stepped up beside him, intoning, “Don’t worry about it, Doctor. Everything is fine.”

Mouzi took a quick backstep, hefted the tree-branch in both hands and swung it like a baseball bat. The thick length of wood broke in half against the back of Oakshott’s skull with a sound like a whip crack. The huge man stood stock still for a second, then he achieved a shambling half-turn before toppling over unconscious. As he fell, Mouzi expertly snatched the carbine from his hand.

“Now
everything is fine,” she stated matter-of-factly.

Belleau stood behind Oakshott, examining the back of his head. The big man sat near the edge of the pool, his face as expressionless as if graven in stone.

“Just a small contusion,” Belleau said. “I don’t think she hit you hard enough to inflict a concussion. You’ll be as right as the mail in a little while.”

Belleau swept his angry, reproachful gaze over Mouzi, Kavanaugh, and Crowe. “Now that you have gained the upper hand again, what do you intend to do with it?”

“First thing,” said Crowe, taking the carbine from Mouzi, “is to remove temptation.”

Jacking the slide back and forth, he ejected the single bullet into his hand, which he then put into his pocket. He passed the rifle back to Mouzi.

“Smooth move, Deputy Fife,” Kavanaugh remarked. He turned toward Honoré and Bai Suzhen who stared at the surface of the pool. “Dr. Roxton, what time is it?”

She consulted her wristwatch. “Five minutes past three.”

“Not much chance of walking back to the monorail before nightfall,” Crowe observed.

“No,” agreed Kavanaugh. “We’re closer to the beach at this point. If we start out right now, we can probably make it by six.” He extended a hand toward Belleau. “Your phone, please.”

Belleau stared at him, feigning puzzlement. “Why?”

“Why do you think? I’ll call Bert and arrange a pickup at the beach for this evening.”

Reluctantly, Belleau reached under his shirttail and removed the satphone from the holster at his hip. Kavanaugh pressed the power button, but no icons lit up. He tried it several times, then said flatly, “It’s dead. The battery is drained.”

Crowe took the phone, examined it quickly, then glared at Belleau. “You’ve had the triangulation tracer feature on all this time, haven’t you? So Jimmy Cao would know where to find you?”

Belleau smiled but it held no humor. “Even if I had, the phone went dead some hours ago. I doubt Mr. Cao would be able to track us to this place.”

“I don’t,” declared Bai Suzhen coldly. “He’ll not give up if he thinks there’s a fortune to be found here. He has no choice but to show something to United Bamboo to justify why he went around the council and attacked me. He’ll keep coming until he finds us.”

Kavanaugh grinned. “And what he’ll do to you, Aubrey, when you show him your fabled Jacuzzi o’ crap might be worth hanging around to see.”

Crowe glanced around gloomily. “We’re going to have to spend the night here, so we’d better find a defensible position. Belleau, do you know where the School of Night’s observation post was set up?”

He shook his head. “No.”

Crowe tapped Oakshott on the shoulder with the barrel of the carbine. “Up.”

As the big man heaved himself up, Kavanaugh gestured in the direction of the cliff-face. “Let’s check over there for some high ground.”

The seven people retraced their steps through the ruins. Belleau’s gait was slow and trudging, his shoulders slumped. He muttered, “I don’t understand…the pool should have continually renewed itself, self-replicated the micro-organisms. The sample in the vial retained all those properties. I don’t understand.”

“Anything could have happened to it over the years,” Honoré said. “Perhaps the material finally just reached the end of its life-cycle. Pollutants might have contaminated it. There’s no way to tell.”

They wended their way among the fallen walls and freestanding arches until they reached a point where the ground met the cliff-face. Although nearly covered by a screen of vines, they saw a high, narrow fissure splitting the rock wall.

Honoré turned toward Belleau. “Did Darwin or your great-great-grandfather mention anything about a cave?”

Belleau opened the journal, thumbing through the pages until he found a small pencil sketch of a crack in the rock wall. “This is it, but Jacque didn’t explore it very deeply, although he suspected the tunnel passed completely through the escarpment and came out on the other side.”

“If true,” said Bai Suzhen, “it would save us some time.”

Crowe removed a small flashlight from the survival kit. “We can take a look, but I doubt the battery in this will hold up for long.”

Led by Crowe, Kavanaugh, Mouzi, Honoré, Bai, Belleau went inside, with Oakshott several paces behind. High overhead, two hundred feet or more, the narrow crack of rock showed the clear afternoon sky, like a jagged spear point of brightness. The sunlight wasn’t filtered through the mist. Rubble slid underfoot and each step was chosen with care.

The fissure gradually became a cave, widening at the bottom with the rock walls leaning toward each other at the top. Irregular stalactites hung from above. The narrow beam of the flashlight in Crowe’s hand winked dully against a tin box resting atop a large boulder. The insignia of the School of the Night was barely legible on the lid.

Everyone gathered around it and stared, nonplussed. At a nod from Kavanaugh, Mouzi opened the box. Inside lay a small spiral bound notebook and a long-handled silver flashlight.

Kavanaugh picked up the flashlight, pressed the switch and when nothing happened he unscrewed a plate on the back and an L-shaped handle popped out on a spring. “It’s an old dynamo powered flashlight. You’ve got to turn the crank to build a charge. Makes sense if you’re going to be in a place where Radio Shack hasn’t opened a franchise”

As he began turning the crank, Honoré flipped through the leaves of the notebook, holding it toward the little light cast by Crowe’s flash. “Handwritten in English,” she said, “by a doctor named David Abner Perry.”

She glanced at Belleau. “Is that the name of the observer posted here who went missing all those years ago?”

“I believe that was his name, yes.”

As Honoré read the notations, Kavanaugh’s hand cranking produced a weak, pallid halo around the lens of the flashlight. She leaned toward it, so she could scan the pages. “Perry left this record for anybody who might come looking for him. He hid weapons nearby…look for a marker.”

Kavanaugh cast the light around and saw a little scrap of red cloth atop a cairn of stone. He and Mouzi went to it while Honoré continued reading. Bai kept a watchful eye on Oakshott and Belleau.

“After only being here about three weeks, Perry did extensive explorations of this cave,” she said. “Even excavation…he found something here that he had not expected. But he’s not very precise about it. He claims he was very ill and couldn’t be sure of much of anything, but he is certain that history, as humankind understood it, is basically a lie. He writes: ‘Here on this island, in this cave, I have found the fingerprints of a vanished culture, one that molded human civilizations all over the globe, but one that our historians and churchmen conspired to keep from us.’”

“That’s a little strong on the melodrama,” commented Kavanaugh. Lifting aside the stacked stones, he and Mouzi uncovered a long, canvas bag. He unzipped it and removed an M161A automatic assault rifle, and a box of cartridges as well as a matched set of big-bored Colt Python revolvers with checkered walnut grips.

Kavanaugh said happily, “Heavy-duty stuff thirty-some years ago, but it’s still useful now. God bless Dr. Perry, melodrama and all.”

“Not too wild about revolvers,” Mouzi said sourly, hefting one of the Colt Pythons with both hands. She grimaced at the weight.

“If you’re stuck for a year on a island populated by damn dinosaurs,” said Crowe, “you’ll want firepower that has the least amount of moving parts and the least chance of jamming on you. Revolvers fit the bill.”

“Definitely,” agreed Kavanaugh, popping open the cylinder and giving it a spin. “Got a full load here and about fifteen spares. Two full mags for the M16.”

Crowe nodded approvingly. “Then we can give Hamish back his carbine. He looks naked without it.”

With a grin, Mouzi handed the unloaded carbine to Oakshott, who folded his arms and looked away. She laid it down on the cairn and took the autorifle.

Seemingly oblivious to the conversation about the guns, Honoré continued to read from the notebook, “Young Dr. Perry opened a sealed tunnel or side gallery with an explosive. He was injured while doing so. Desperate, he ingested some of the Prima Materia.”

Skeptically, Belleau demanded, “He drank it?”

“Evidently. Perry had come up with his own theories about the true nature of Prima Materia, not too different from yours. He hoped the substance would produce self-replicating progenitor cells and speed up his healing process. Instead, he became very ill.”

“Not surprising,” Belleau said. “But unless his immune system was already compromised, he should have only suffered some flu-like symptoms and then made a recovery.”

Honoré nodded. “Yes, he wrote this while he was ill…delirious. He thought he was dying. That’s why he stated he couldn’t be sure of anything. He claimed demons were watching him, waiting for him to let his guard down.”

“What happened to him?” Bai Suzhen asked.

Honoré flipped through the pages at the rear of the notebook. They were blank. “That’s it…his account just stops.”

Mouzi swallowed hard. “Maybe the demons got him.”

Handing a revolver to Crowe and the autorifle to Mouzi, Kavanaugh said, “Let’s go see what he found…if anything.”

They strode along the narrow passageway with the black rock walls pressing in on them. A brooding, unbroken silence bore down, like the pressure of a vast hand. Oakshott lowered his head between hunched shoulders and whispered, “Don’t like this.”

Kavanaugh chuckled tauntingly. “Are you claustrophobic on top of being a sucker-puncher, Hamish?”

Belleau said soothingly. “We’ll only be in here for a minute, old fellow.”

The flashlight beams showed the floor was scattered with loose shale. It was obvious the rubble had fallen within fairly recent times, shaken loose by either an earthquake or some other violent vibration.

They went on for a hundred yards, walking through darkness as absolute as eternity.  The blackness seemed to suck the energy from their flashlights, giving them little more illumination than a struck match. Kavanaugh wondered if it was wise to go on. He tried to keep other worries and fears from intruding into his single-minded march.

The cavern abruptly ended against a blank wall, featureless except for a man-size cavity that had been punched through it. A heap of broken rock and debris lay around it. Black scorch marks around the jagged edges indicated the hole had been made with high explosives.

Crowe inspected the area around the cavity and his flashlight touched a dust-covered shape humped up near a fissure. Stepping over to it, he lifted away a square sheet of canvas draped over a number of bulky objects. Kavanaugh joined him, looking at the assortment of pick axes, rock hammers and shovels arranged around a wooden crate.

Crowe prised open the lid and announced, “We’ve got some demolition charges here.”

Honoré, Mouzi and Belleau murmured in wordless unease and drew back, but Crowe said, “Don’t worry. This is Titadyn.”He brandished three salmon-colored tubes, all of them one inch in diameter and six inches long. “It’s a type of compressed dynamite, used mainly for mining in Europe. The stuff is pretty stable, not like standard dynamite that sweats out its nitroglycerin over time.”

Kavanaugh picked up a handful of small gleaming cylinders, each one tipped by long, thin cords. “Dr. Perry was using pyrotechnic fuse blasting caps. I’m not surprised he got hurt. Tricky stuff, if you’re not trained in explosives.”

“Yeah,” grunted Crowe. “Let’s see if we can’t be a little less careless with them.”

He wrapped the sticks of Titadyn in his bandana and shoved them in his back pocket. Mouzi winced and said, “What happens if you piss me off and I kick you in the ass?”

He handed her a small set of pliers taken from the crate. “Then, that’ll be you all over.”

“What’s this?”

“A crimping tool for the fuses.”

“Are we planning some demolition work?” asked Honoré.

“You never know in this place.” Kavanaugh put the blasting caps in his pants pocket and stepped through the cavity, shining the flashlight ahead of him, finger resting on the trigger of the Colt.

“Looks clear,” he said. “Dark, like usual.”

Belleau said, “I don’t see the point in this spelunking escapade. I vote we return outside.”

“Vote?” echoed Bai Suzhen with a mocking laugh. “Since when did this become a democracy?”

She laid the blade of the sword lightly against his neck. “You only have two options…to remain behind and be dead or go with us and stay alive. You will not be allowed to run free and join up with Jimmy Cao.”

“Madame, I promise you—”

“—Oh, shut up, Aubrey,” Honoré snapped. “Just shut the fuck up.”

“Let’s go, goddammit,” Crowe said gruffly.

They found themselves in a short tunnel that led through a doorway and into a wider passage. Kavanaugh looked around, casting his light into the shadows, but seeing nothing but rock. “These tunnels are quarried, man-made,” he stated.

“You’re about half-right,” said Belleau with a macabre grin.

The gallery curved, turning almost at right angles. As they walked around the bend, the tunnel curved again, adding to the seven people's growing bewilderment and apprehension. As they made another turn, they were startled to see a patch of light far ahead. Vaguely rectangular in shape and of an unearthly greenish hue, it wavered and flickered. They heard a roaring, like a distant engine idling.