Passage Graves (11 page)

Chapter 27

TUESDAY 6:52 a.m.

Stenness Basecamp

Orkney Island, Scotland

“This is bollocks,” Bailey swore. He held his soundsuit helmet at his side, waiting until the last possible moment to put on the constrictive headpiece. “She’s thinking up some clever way to blame this on us.”

“We couldn’t have done it,” Golke said as the elevator cleared ground level. “Not even at payload. Marek proved it.”

Bailey ran a hand through his hair and then unfastened the acoustic recorder clip to his belt. He sneered. “It sure has her panties in a twist, though.”

Golke
looked confused by the colloquialism.

“What? You’ve never heard ‘panties in a twist?’” Bailey asked.

“I can’t picture Thatcher in panties.”

Bailey snorted. “A thousand quid s
ays that cow wears boxer shorts!”

Their laughter subsided as the
elevator door opened. Dawn illuminated the landscape. The moon was pale and full in the sky. Sheep wandered in the mist around NCEC tents.

“Do you think God is punishing us?” Golke asked solemnly.

“What are you talkin’ about, Golke?” Bailey pulled his helmet over his head. “There’s no such thing as God.”

Thatcher joined the team in the helm just as Donovon and Marek finished routing Golke’s helmet video-feed to the monitor.

“Almost got it,” Marek said, glancing up at her apologetically.

She ignored him. He would get a piece of her mind soon enough.

Golke’s video feed appeared on the center screen. An audible gasp sounded through the room as they realized the men were wading through a sea of sheep.

“Bloody hell
,” Bailey’s voice echoed over the sound system. “Can you see this, ladies?”

“Your audio is clear, Ballistics,” Marek spoke into his headset. “What about you, Golke? You got sound, brother?”

Bailey whistled into his transmitter. “There are thousands of them!”

“Bailey, we aren’t getting anything from Golke ,” Marek said. “Can he hear us?”

There was no response.

“Bailey?” Marek turned to Donovon. “Great. Neither of them has a working headset.”

“On it.” The Irishman worked furiously with the audio receivers.

“What’s wrong?” Thatcher asked, watching Golke’s video feed. From a distance, Maeshowe looked small, almost insignificant, a lifeless dot on the wooly landscape.

Marek shrugged. “Everything was working before they left.”

“
Try again,” Donovon said.

“Yo, Bailey?” Marek pulled the mic
rophone closer to his mouth. “Do you read?”

“‘Sup, dawg?” Bailey said in his best Ebonics.

Everyone sighed in relief.

“What about you, Golke?” Marek asked.

There was still no reply.

Donovon shook his head. “His
helmet radio is bloody banjaxed. There’s nothing I can do from here.”

“Do you want them to come back?” Marek asked Thatcher.

She watched as Golke and Bailey approached Maeshowe’s entrance, momentarily dropping down into the trench that surrounded the grave.

“Dr. Thatcher?” Marek asked
.

Lee stood at the back of the room, arms crossed over his chest as he scrutinized Thatcher. She met his glare and shook her head. “As long as we’ve got communication with Bailey, we’re fine,” she answered.

As the men came out of the depression, Golke’s camera focused on the three massive rectangular boulders of the formidable doorway. One gigantic gray slab sat atop two others, creating a square arch entrance barely three feet tall. Entering the narrow passage of Maeshowe had to feel like passing through the birth canal, especially in a cumbersome soundsuit.

The screen went black as Golke followed Bailey into the narrow tunnel.

“Your torches, boys,” Thatcher said.

After a moment, both helmet lights flickered on, illuminating the passage that extended deep into the grave.

“We should be getting ambient noise on Bailey’s acoustic recorder—their footsteps, the soundsuits, something.” Marek pointed at three empty frequency bars on his computer screen.

“Don’t tell me the blasted acoustic recorder
is crocked, too,” Donovon said, fixing the wires.

Lee stepped forward, pointing
at the screen where the recording device was clipped to Bailey’s waist. “It’s not broken. It’s just not bloody on.”

“Bailey, you dumb ass!” Marek yelled into the transmitter. “Turn on the recorder.”

There was no response.

“Ballistics?” Marek tried again.

Donovon frowned. “My computer says Bailey’s receiver is fine.”

“Well, it’s not,” Thatcher said, annoyed. The mission was already a failure.

They looked up at her.

“You only gave us two hours,” Marek said.

She stared up at the screen unforgivingly. “Fix it.”

The video feed showed the men were
about fifteen feet inside. Maeshowe’s passageway tapered almost to a close. Golke slipped sideways through the narrow channel, and his headlamp lit up the adjacent rock wall. The stones were covered with ancient and modern graffiti, Viking runes and messages from the early 1900s. Bailey leaned into the camera and pointed at a curvy petroglyph shaped like the figure of a woman. He moved his gloves over the image, making the universal hourglass figure. He flipped the okay sign into the camera.

“Quit messing about and turn on the damn recorder!” Lee grumbled.

Bailey surveyed Maeshowe’s cramped inner chamber. The roof towered overhead, nearly 26 feet above his helmet. Three small antechambers jutted off the edges of the room forming the shape of a cross. The ground was a mixture of sand and pebbles.

T
he place was empty. There was no sign of life. No acoustic cannon, no terrorists—just another dead end.

A quiet swooshing sounded behind him,
like the noise of a bird flitting passed his head. Instinctively, he ducked and turned his light toward one of the dark recesses.

Nothing but dirt and rock
.

“Nobody’s here,” he said. “We’re wasting our time.”

He heard it again. This time the noise was louder. A moth hovering beside his ear, flapping its feather wings faster and faster. He tapped his helmet and looked over at Golke. “Can you hear that, mate?”

Golke pointed to his helmet and s
hook his head. His mouth was moving beneath his helmet shield. Their radio connection wasn’t working.

Brilliant. Just perfect.

“Let’s get out of here.” Bailey gestured toward the passageway. The noise was getting louder.

Golke was busy scanning the walls with his helmet camera.

The static din began to throb inside Bailey’s brain. Vibrating against his skull, inexorable and irritating, but subtle—the buzz of electricity when a television set is first turned on—right before the picture appears on screen. The ringing stung his eardrums. He tapped his helmet with his glove.

There
must be some sodding technical glitch, some goddamn irritating hum inside the speaker
.

“Marek,
can you hear me?” he tried to communicate with basecamp. “Something’s wrong with my helmet.”

There was no answer. All communication was down.

He turned to Golke. “They can’t hear us!” he yelled.

As if yelling would help. Golke couldn’t hear anything in his soundsuit.

The distortion intensified, now a tornado blowing through his brain, raging harder with each passing second.

Something was very wrong.

A bubble of fear erupted in his stomach.

Oh, God
. He cringed, realizing the sound wasn’t coming from his helmet speakers. It originated inside him, an earsplitting pick axe goring at his brain. The noise quickened into a thunderous roar. He grabbed at his helmet, trying to shake the scream from his mind. “Can’t you hear that?” he yelled at Golke.

Go
lke still had his back to him. He was searching through the dirt as if nothing was wrong.

Sweat broke across Bailey’s forehead. The cacophony forced him to his knees. He pulled frantically at his helmet. “Get it off! Get it off!”

“Bailey!” Golke’s voice exploded over the basecamp speakers, his radio connection finally coming through.

Everyone looked up at the screen.

Bailey’s feet thrashed wildly across the monitors, his body rolling in and out of the frame.

“What’s wrong with him?” Thatcher’s voice cracked. It looked as if Bailey was performing some ridiculous dance, twisting on the floor of the passage grave and grabbing at his helmet. “Did anybody see what happened?”

They had been so absorbed with solving the audio problem, no one was paying attention.

A cloud of dust swirled up from the chamber floor, twisting in the air, and obscuring their view.

Panic choked Thatcher’s throat. “Get me radio contact now!”

“Bailey!” Golke tackled Bailey, forcing him onto his back.

Bulging outwards from their sockets, Bailey’s eyes pulsated behind his helmet and then rolled back into his head. His body shuddered. The recording device fell from his belt to the chamber floor. His face began to swell. Under his helmet, capillaries burst in his cheeks. His mouth dropped in a silent scream. With a cataclysmic burst, his head exploded.

Blood splattered across the inside of his face shield.

Golke fell backwards, retching as he scrambled away from Bailey’s body.

A low-pitched
hum buzzed inside his ears. Getting louder, it reverberated off his face shield back into his brain, vaporizing every thought. He ripped open the neck of his soundsuit and pulled off his helmet to reduce the pressure. Chamber dust engulfed him as it stirred up in the air. The cloud filled his lungs. He collapsed, spitting and sputtering, digging his gloves into the earth. Every nerve was on fire, exploding with noise. Searing hot noise.

Golke grabbed at the sand. His
hands found the recording device. He flipped it on.

The basecamp speakers blared Maeshowe’s low rumble.

“160 dB, 100 Hz!” Marek yelled. “220, 30! 280, 2.5!”

The visual feed cut in and out, the view from Golke’s helmet sideways on the chamber floor.

Golke appeared on screen, his helmet off, eyes wide, ripping out fistfuls of hair. Completely mad, he spun and twisted in the dirt, unaware of anything but the noise, a clamorous supernova so powerful that cavitation bubbles formed within the cavities of his living brain. The bubbles divided, doubling, tripling, until they collapsed in an implosion of liquid-rupturing air. With one static blow, his head burst in subsonic combustion. A trillion droplets of cruor disintegrated into a cloud just above his neck. The nebulous particles mixed with Maeshowe’s rising dust. His body slumped into the dirt and landed on his helmet. Blood spilled over the lens.

Thatcher turned away in horror as the camera lost its feed.

The ground began to tremble.

A sound wave erupted from the Maeshowe. The blast rolled over Stenness, killing everything in its path. The distortion stretched well beyond the village and then stopped
, leaving the world in silence.

Chapter 28

TUESDAY 10:54 a.m.

Denburn Court Apartments

Aberdeen, Scotland

The radio dial spun through static, Celtic music, static, and then landed on the BBC News.

“The National Chemical Emergency Centre has issued an emergency press release after several civilians in Stenness, Scotland developed severe respiratory problems that led to their immediate deaths,” a female reporter announced. “There is a countywide warning for a possible Ebola outbreak…”

David sat at his kitchen table with a newspaper in hand. He paid no attention to the broadcast. It was merely background noise, a disconsolate soundtrack for the pathetic state of his life—and apartment, for that matter. He’d never bothered to pick up the ransacked furniture, a cotton tornado, the wreckage of broken glass and wood.

Taking a sip of coffee, he turned his attention to an ever-expanding stack of bills: rent, electric, a subscription renewal for Archeological Digest. Amidst the pile, he found a worn manila envelope with a return-to-sender stamp, same-day delivery posted on the front. There was no name for the addressee, just his name and address on the sender line. He was pretty certain he hadn’t mailed anything to himself in the last 24 hours.

“What the hell?”

The paper was ripped, stained, and worn at the edges. Miraculously, it held together. He sliced open one end with a kitchen knife and tipped the pocket upside-down to shake out its contents. Nothing came out.

He peeked into the opening. There was nothing inside.

“That’s weird.” He threw the envelope into the trash and reached across the table for more bills.

He stopped, noticing the lamp above the table had illuminated heavy impression marks imprinted on the outside of the strange manila envelope. Plucking the letter from the trash, he felt the raised pressure points with his fingertips. He tore down the length of the envelope, unfolded it, and turned it inside out. He sat back in awe.

Someone had spent hours drawing thousands of
lead scribbles. The paper was covered with swirling designs that collided and overlapped across the page in an indecipherable jumble. He turned the paper sideways. Four words appeared beneath the mosaic.

COME, THOU ART CHOSEN

David flinched at a knock on his front door.

T
he door creaked open, sideways and off its hinges. Thatcher peeked inside. “Dr. Hyden?”

He folded the envelope and tucked it into his pocket. “Dr. Thatcher, I thought we decided to stop seeing each other.”

Thatcher stepped into the room, nodding at the state of his apartment. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?”

“Is this a social visit?” He reached for his coffee.

Thatcher straightened. “Two of my men are dead.”

“Your acoustic weapon on another killing spree?”

Thatcher’s mouth fell open. She briskly shut it. “I need your help, Dr. Hyden.”

Here we go again
. He turned back to the table and continued through his mail.

“I’m not asking this time,” she said.

He took a sip of coffee.

“Whatever it is—whatever keeps happening.” She stepped forward. “It’s not over. Maeshowe is erupting every
77 hours, and every time it does, its detonation and blast area magnifies in size. When it goes off again—and it will go off again—everything within a 62 mile radius will be destroyed.”

David shook his head. The woman was
insane.

“
Nobody knows that ruin like you.” Thatcher released an exhausted sigh. “If I don’t figure out
why
Maeshowe is ‘exploding’ and
how
to stop it, Scotland’s gone within the week and Europe in twelve days.” She raised her eyebrows in anticipation of his criticism.

David took another sip of coffee. She was full of it. Completely full of it.
“I guess that means I should move back to the States.”

Thatcher pulled a photograph out of her coat pocket and thrust it towards him. “The least you can do is tell me what this is.”

David took the picture with a scowl. It was a freeze frame. The image was obscured by blood on the camera lens and dust thick in the air. In the background, a faint spiral petroglyph glowed on a rock wall. “An eternal stone?” He looked up at her confused.

“What’s an eternal stone?” Thatcher pursed her lips impatiently.

David rubbed at the prickly hairs of stubble on his chin, engrossed by the photograph. “It’s a petroglyph carving that symbolizes eternity. The spiral is found in ancient burial sites throughout the world…Egypt, the Americas, Great Britain…” His eyes narrowed. “But I’ve never seen it like this before. Not with a hole at its center.” Lifting the picture, he let her examine the missing portion of rock at the center of the petroglyph.

She nodded for him to continue.

“That’s rare,” he said. “Extremely rare. Eternal stones spiral endlessly and are believed to symbolize time continuing forever and ever without end, thus the name.”

“Then why is this eternal stone missing its center?” she asked.

“A hole would mean that there is a point of completion to the eternities. An end to time.”

“I’m not following.”

“Hellfire. Brimstone. Armageddon.”

“You don’t
believe—”

“Of course not.
” For the first time, David noticed fear in her eyes. She would venture out on a limb at this point. Any limb. He took in a breath of disappointment. People were willing to believe anything. “Before my father died, he drudged up some Druid myth that said there is an end to man’s existence. According to this myth, true eternal stones—these rare symbols with holes at their center—act as locks, locks that protect mankind from the end of the world.”

Thatcher leaned against the table. “If there is a lock, then there must be a key?”

“Buried somewhere in antiquity. Find the ‘key,’ insert the ‘key’ into the ‘lock,’ and according to my father, you bring about the end of the world. You unlock the Apocalypse, so to speak, and the entire human race perishes.” He studied her face, her seemingly permanent furrowed brow, the lines around the outer corners of her lips, the dark circles under her eyes. She was serious. “You don’t really believe this crap?” he asked.

Thatcher crossed her arms. She looked unsure of what to think.

David studied the photograph again, suddenly recognizing the rock wall. “Wait…this is Maeshowe. Is this some kind of joke?”

“There’s no joke.”

“Maeshowe doesn’t have an eternal stone in its chamber. I know that place like the back of my hand.” He pointed at the glowing symbol in the photo. “And what’s this, some sort of computer enhancement?”

“Nothing’s been enhanced.”

“It’s illuminated.”

She adopted his sarcastic attitude. “You’re observant.”

He sat back, flabbergasted. “How’s that possible?”

“I was hoping you could answer that.”

David set the photograph on the table. “This is a hoax. Some freak is playing you. Some psychotic fan of my father’s work.”

“I’ve got four days to figure out who
m.” She was beyond desperate, asking him for help.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Unless…”

He glanced back at the eternal stone. Something registered in his brain.

“What is it?” Thatcher asked.

“I have seen this symbol before. Glowing like this. But it sure as hell wasn’t in Maeshowe.”