The 6th Extinction

  At first he didn’t see any threat. The massive bole of a fossilized tree rose twenty yards off. Then a veil of movement caught his eye, wafting around the trunk as if on a slight breeze—but there was no wind down here. He hooked an arm around a rung of the ladder and brought his gun around, clicking on its IR beam. The cone of brighter illumination revealed what Stella’s sharper eyes had picked out.

  Around the tree, a tangle of threadlike worms squirmed through the air toward them. Each floated on small parachutes of silken strands. Jason knew how some spiderlings and caterpillars used a similar technique, called kiting or ballooning, using either wind or the earth’s static electric field to hold themselves aloft.

  The flotilla drifted toward them.

  “Move faster,” Stella warned.

  Jason obeyed, trusting her experience. He shouldered his DSR and began clambering more quickly down the ladder. Brought to his attention, he had no trouble continuing to track the threat.

  Looking up as he climbed down, he failed to note a lone scout, coasting ahead of the others. The threadlike worm brushed against his cheek and clung there, burning into his flesh like the butt of a cigarette. Stifling a cry of pain, he tried to scratch it away, but the gossamer of silk settled over his skin, as sticky as Super Glue, pasting the larva to his cheek.

  He dug harder.

  “Leave it!” Stella urged, more loudly now, nearly on top of him. “We must get off the ladder. Now!”

  Jason forced his hand back to the rungs, his eyes tearing up from the burning agony. He hurried down. Stella kept right above him. Beyond her body, the drifting mass collided into the length of the emergency ladder. Silk and flesh enmeshed into the steel, coating it thickly. Curls of sizzling smoke rose from the rungs and cables, as the creatures’ corrosive acids reacted to the metal.

  One of the individual wires in the tightly corded cable running through the rungs snapped with an audible twang.

  Oh, crap . . .

  Jason moved faster, almost sliding his way down now. He was still a good ten yards above the ground when Stella called out again.

  “Your left!”

  He twisted that way, bringing his rifle around one-handed, responding to the panic in her voice. Something large sprang off the trunk of the neighboring fossilized pillar. The creature must have been perfectly camouflaged as it worked into position, possibly drawn by the earlier passage of the three men.

  Wings spread wide as it dove, revealing its nature.

  Hastax valans.

  A flying spear.

  The sharp beak aimed for his chest, moments from impaling him. He pulled the trigger on the DSR, firing out a bullet of sound. The sonic burst struck the beast head-on. The Hastax screamed, its wings seizing up, sending it cartwheeling to the side.

  While the spear missed its intended target, the recoil of the gun came close to throwing Jason off the ladder. One foot lost its rung, but his fingers clenched hard to keep himself perched. A glance below revealed the ladder’s end sweeping from shore and dragging into the water as they swung out over the river.

  Jason held his breath, waiting for the pendulum to swing them back again—when the cable running down the left side of ladder snapped, weakened by the corrosive acids and stressed by the sudden swing.

  Jerked around, he lost his footing entirely but still hung by one hand.

  Someone else wasn’t as lucky.

  A body tumbled past him.

  Stella.

  1:24 P.M.

  Gray rushed to the shoreline as the young woman splashed into the river, vanishing underwater.

  Harrington cried out and waded into the shallows, ready to go to his daughter’s defense.

  Gray grabbed and pushed him toward Kowalski. “Stay . . . I’ll go.”

  But he was already too late.

  A shape hurtled down from above, dropping feetfirst into the river.

  Jason followed Stella underwater.

  Gray held his breath, letting two seconds tick past—then both came sputtering up. Stella struggled, her lips barely above water. Jason fought to pull her forward, but she seemed stuck. The young girl’s eyes were wide with terror.

  Jason called out. “Something’s got her leg!”

  Gray dropped his rifle, bent down, and yanked a dagger from a boot sheath. He sprang from his crouch and shot out over the water, diving smoothly under. His night-vision goggles picked up the glow from the weapon still tangled around Stella’s torso. He kicked toward the light as schools of silvery fish scattered from his path. Small fist-sized shells burst away with whips of tentacles.

  He prayed all the marine life remained equally spooked.

  He reached Stella and followed the length of her body down to where a knot of leafy vine was bound around her calf. Tendrils of dark blood seeped from her leg. He grabbed a fistful of loose vine near her ankle and sawed at it with his dagger. The razor-sharp edge cut quickly through the vine.

  Freed, Stella accidentally kicked him in the side of the head. He didn’t blame her panic. He twisted back to the surface.

  “Get the hell out of there!” Kowalski bellowed.

  As Stella and Jason splashed for shore, Gray followed, still facing the river. A trio of large shapes humped out of the water, undulating toward them.

  Luminous globes rose from the waters, lifted on dark stalks.

  He remembered those same gelatinous orbs searing through the wings of the aerial predator, burning with acid fire.

  Volitox ignis.

  Jason reached the shore, twisting his weapon up and firing. Water cannoned out of the wide barrel, along with a sound that shot past Gray’s shoulder. The passage left his head ringing like a bell struck with a sledgehammer.

  Still, the deafening blast did nothing to deter the forms barreling toward Gray.

  “Sonics don’t work against that species!” Harrington yelled. “Run!”

  With clothes waterlogged and heavy, Gray sloshed toward shore, but he knew one certainty.

  I’ll never make it.

  Ahead of him, fiery orbs lowered, skimming the water, as if drawn by his flailing efforts.

  Then a new series of blasts erupted behind him—coming not from a sonic weapon this time, but from the heavy chugging of a machine gun.

  Kowalski fired from shore, but his aim was too high.

  The rounds flew over the luminous globes and the hunters below—and struck a dark shape circling several meters above the river. It was the Hastax that Jason had stunned earlier. Bullets shredded its dazed form and sent it tumbling in a spray of black blood down into the waters, crashing amid the hunters.

  The Volitox swarmed upon it, possibly first in a defensive reflex at the seeming attack, then in an escalating bloodlust.

  Gray reached shore and joined the others.

  “That should keep them busy . . . along with other scavengers,” Harrington said. “But we should take advantage of the situation and get as far from here as possible.”

  “Go,” Gray said, breathing hard and clapping Kowalski on the shoulder in silent thanks.

  The big man lifted his machine gun and rested its bulk against his shoulder. “Like I said before, give me real bullets any day of the week.”

  As a group, they crossed along the bank, cautious of its slippery coating of algae and moss, keeping well clear of the water’s edge.

  Gray led with his weapon at his shoulder, flanked by Stella and Jason. Harrington followed, with Kowalski keeping up a rear guard. The professor eyed his daughter’s limp. The woman’s right leg remained shrouded by the severed coil of leafy vine. Her bottom pants leg was bloody.

  “Do we need to take care of that?” Gray asked.

  Harrington glanced behind them. The group had cleared a spur of rock, putting them out of direct view of the feeding frenzy. “We should,” the professor said, drawing them farther out of the way. “Over here.”

  A slab of broken rock served as a seat for Stella. Her father gently unwrapped the vine, drawing bloody thorns, ea
ch an inch long, from her skin. Once removed, the muscular coil continued to squirm in the professor’s grip, but Harrington kept hold.

  Following the older man’s instruction, Gray cut a seam along his daughter’s pants, then administered first aid using antiseptic and a bandage from a small emergency med-kit taken from the gondola.

  “Do we need to worry about poison?” he asked as he worked.

  “No.” Harrington lifted the length of vine. “Sugox sanguine is no worse than kelp. Only a little more aggressive.”

  “No kidding,” Kowalski commented.

  Vine in hand, the professor moved toward Jason.

  The kid took a step back.

  “Hold still,” the professor said. “Let me see your face.”

  Jason turned his cheek, revealing a black gash.

  Harrington lifted the writhing plant. Bright red blood dribbled from the cut end. Gray eyed those thorns anew, horror growing.

  Had that muscular vine been sucking Stella’s blood?

  The professor tilted Jason’s head farther back and hovered a fat crimson droplet over the wound.

  What is he—?

  From the gash, a fat white larva squirmed out, stretching toward that fresh blood. The professor speared it with one of the vine’s thorns, pulled out the rest of its body, then threw the vine and the impaled parasite into the river.

  Jason fingered his wound, his face sickened.

  “Do you know about botflies?” Harrington asked.

  Jason shook his head and looked like he didn’t want to know.

  Harrington elaborated anyway. “Cuniculux spinae are similar, a type of flesh-burrowing parasite. They burn their way deep into tissues and sprout oviparous spines.”

  “Oviparous?” Jason asked, looking more pale.

  “Egg-laying. The eggs hatch into carnivorous larvae that spread far and wide. After that, they mature into—”

  “I think that’s enough of a biology lesson,” Gray said, saving Jason from more details, while helping Stella back to her feet. “Let’s keep going.”

  2:32 P.M.

  Jason slogged beside Gray. They had been trekking for nearly forty-five minutes, but by his estimate, they had crossed no more than half a mile.

  If even that.

  “Not much farther,” Harrington said behind them, but Jason wasn’t sure if that was the truth or if the professor was merely trying to convince himself.

  During their hike, the tunnel had been steadily descending, falling in a broken series of steps, each no more than a meter high. Waterfalls cascaded from level to level, echoing up and down the tunnel. They were able to follow the banks along the western wall, but a few times, it required winding past stagnant ponds or fording streams by hopping from rock to rock.

  Yet, it wasn’t the terrain that slowed them the most.

  Life down here continually pressed against their small party, like a steady headwind. The sonic rifles deterred a majority of the larger creatures. But with every step, something squirmed, crawled, or flapped around them. All the while, biting flies continued to plague them, oblivious of their sonic discharges, an ever-present nuisance.

  By now, it seemed every breath burned worse than the last.

  Every yard harder to cross.

  Sweat soaked through his clothes. His eyes felt swollen and on fire under his goggles.

  The only bright side was Stella had drifted closer to him, marching at his shoulder, each taking turns keeping his or her rifle up. Initially, she or her father would try to educate them about what they encountered, classifying various species, but eventually it boiled down to a simple question for each new life-form.

  Kowalski asked it now. “Should we shoot them?”

  Jason stared ahead. Their path was blocked by what could only be construed as flocks of featherless emus, their numbers easily topping two hundred. Each birdlike creature stood on tall thin legs, likely evolved for wading among the series of ponds that dotted the immediate area. A cluster of nests held speckled eggs the size of grapefruits.

  “If you move slowly, they shouldn’t bother us,” Harrington said. “They have no natural fear of people. As long as you don’t get too near one of their nests, we should be able to pass unscathed.”

  “And if we do piss them off?” Gray asked.

  “Avex cano have a flock mentality. They’ll attack en masse. See that hooked claw at the back of their legs. It’s used for gutting prey.”

  “But mostly they’re docile,” Stella said. “Even friendly, sometimes curious.”

  She demonstrated by stepping near one and holding out her hand. It hopped closer, cocking its head to one side, then the other. Only now did Jason notice it was eyeless. Small nostrils above a long paddle-shaped beak opened and closed.

  She reached a little farther and ran her fingertips along the underside of that beak, earning a soft ululating noise from its throat. The sound spread to its neighbors, like a wave traveling outward from a pebble dropped into a pond.

  Stepping forward, Stella followed those reverberations, easily passing through the flock, leading the way now. Jason was drawn in her wake, as much by the wonder of it all as his appreciation of the woman before him.

  Nearby, an Avex stalked high-legged into one of the ponds, stirring up a phosphorescent wake in its passage, the glow rising from the thick jellylike growth floating atop the stagnant water. The creature scooped up a gullet full of that slime.

  “They graze on those bacterial mats,” Stella said. “Very nutritious.”

  “I’ll stick to a T-bone,” Kowalski commented, though he stared hungrily at the Avex flock as if trying to judge if they tasted like chicken.

  The group passed unmolested, which perhaps is what made Jason let his guard down.

  “Stop!” Harrington barked.

  Jason froze. He had been about to step over a rock—only to have it sprout jointed legs, hard and chitinous, and scurry to the side. As it turned away, a curled tail came into view, tipped by a trio of six-inch-long stingers. From the glistening dampness to those spines, they must be venomous.

  Harrington confirmed this by naming the scuttling creature. “Pedex fervens.”

  Or roughly translated: hot foot.

  Stella waved him onward.

  He continued alongside Gray, but much of the momentary wonder from a moment ago had dried up.

  After another long slog across the next hundred yards, the tunnel fell one last time and dumped into a massive space. The group gathered at the mouth of it. The sheer size boggled the senses.

  “We call it the Coliseum,” Stella said.

  That was an understatement.

  The roof was beyond the reach of their meager pool of IR emitters. The walls to either side yawned ever wider, stretching like open arms into the distance. The river they had been following broke into thousands of small creeks, rivers, and streams, turning the place into a massive stony delta. Farther out, large lakes reflected their lamps, revealing the shadows of darker islands.

  But closer at hand, the handful of petrified tree trunks that they had previously traveled past became a virtual stone forest ahead. The specimens found here dwarfed the largest redwoods, but instead of being merely trunks, the trees in this gargantuan cavern were perfect stone replicas, including intact branches and tinier stems, weaving an arched, leafless canopy overhead.

  It was a fossilized sculpture of an ancient world.

  Overhead, strange luminous creatures floated through those branches, possibly held aloft on some internal reservoir of hydrogen gas or helium. They looked like Japanese lanterns adrift on a breeze.

  The group entered the vast space, necks craning at the sheer size. Jason had read about the discovery of a trench under the Western Antarctic ice, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. This space could be its cavernous equivalent.

  “Over this way,” Harrington urged.

  The professor led them to the right, toward a wide shallow tributary of the delta. He splashed through the ankle-deep flow. J
ason followed, but he had to fight the urge to tiptoe through the stream, still wary of the water. He watched for any new threat, while taking cues from Stella, who swept her IR beam ahead of her. He noted a double row of broken pillars, each as thick as Kowalski’s thigh, running alongside their path. At first he thought they were natural formations, but the rows were too uniform. Closer inspection revealed they were actually the stubs of wooden pylons, anchored by mold-blackened steel spikes.

  The construction looked too old to be the handiwork of the British.

  Stella noticed his attention. “They’re supports for a series of old bridges that fell apart long ago.”

  “Who built them?”

  Harrington called out, drawing them all forward. The answer—and their destination—lay ahead. It was parked askew, sitting on an isthmus of rock amid this dark delta. The huge vehicle’s bulk stood two stories tall, resting atop massive new tires. A handful of shiny ladders leaned against its side.

  “We found it early on,” Stella said. “A team of British mechanics recently got her working again.”

  Jason stared in awe.

  It was Admiral Byrd’s old snow cruiser.

  3:14 P.M.

  Dylan Wright stood near the rear ramp of the largest CAAT. Irritated, he adjusted his body armor with one hand; with the other, he kept the long double barrels of his Howdah pistol balanced against his shoulder, prepared to challenge any threat found down here.

  A smaller CAAT flanked his own, engines idling. The two vehicles’ headlamps shredded the darkness. On the roofs, Dylan’s teammates manned large LRAD units installed on top. One dish pointed forward, the other backward, ready to be deployed if necessary.

  Dylan cursed under his breath as he stared up at the stalled gondola overhead. From its undercarriage, the remains of a ladder hung down.

  So Harrington and the others had gone to ground—but where?

  The growl of an engine drew his attention behind him. A second small CAAT came rumbling across the river atop its flotation treads, reached the nearby bank of rock, and climbed out of the water, demonstrating the craft’s amphibious nature.

  It trundled up to Dylan’s vehicle and came to a stop. A window rolled down. His second-in-command poked his head out.