“Hooah,” they said. I could see their inner hardness rising to the surface to supplant their fear. Well, some of their fear. I turned my face away, not wanting them to read whatever expression was there.
The ice slope dropped down into shadows. Everything around us was dead quiet. We were too deep underground to hear the howling winds, and all of the machinery here at Gateway was still.
The silence felt wrong, though. It was not the quiet of something empty, something over. It was the quiet of the poised fist. The tension in my chest was like a vise being tightened around my heart.
I licked my lips, which had gone very dry, and then took one single step down the slope. That’s when a shrill scream shattered the silence and something came rushing at me out of the shadows.
It was a man. A soldier. Not a Russian. Not a Chinese.
The man was dressed in the camo pattern of the Marine Corps. His eyes were wide and wild, with no trace of sanity. Bloody drool flew from his lips as he shrieked nonsense words.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
His clothes were torn and splashed with gore and he drove straight at me, stabbing at my heart with a bloody bayonet.
CHAPTER TEN
THE VINSON MASSIF
THE SENTINEL RANGE OF THE ELLSWORTH MOUNTAINS
ANTARCTICA
AUGUST 19, 10:41 P.M.
There was no time to dodge out of the way.
He was right there. The blade was falling.
I was dead.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
Then suddenly the man was turning, spinning, twisting, breaking apart as bullets tore into him. I heard the gunshots almost as an aftereffect. Bang! Bang! Shot after shot as Top and Bunny fired.
The marine slammed into the wall, rebounded, spun halfway around, and dropped face-forward onto the ground, making no attempt to break his fall. The bayonet clattered to the cold stone and the echoes of the gunshots banged and bounced all around me while I simply stood there. I had not moved at all. I hadn’t reacted. Not to evade, not to defend myself.
“Cowboy,” said Top. He had to repeat it again, more sharply this time, before I snapped out of it. I blinked at him, then down at the dead marine.
“What—?” I asked.
Bunny hurried over and turned me toward the light, checking to see if I’d been injured, but the blade hadn’t touched me. I saw the frown of uncertainty carve itself onto Bunny’s face.
“You okay, Boss?” he asked.
“I…”
It was all I could manage. Top came over and they both studied me for a moment, all of us ignoring the dead man.
“You in there, Cap’n,” asked Top gently.
I blinked again and suddenly the strange paralysis was gone. I was myself again and I was back in the moment. It was like waking up from a dream. One of those dreams where you think you’re awake but you aren’t. You’re trapped in that sleep paralysis that keeps you half in one world and half in the other but belonging to neither.
I pushed myself back from them and shook my head. “What just happened?”
No one answered. The facts were all there. Facts, not answers.
I squatted down next to the corpse and rolled him onto his back. He was a Latino man, maybe twenty-three or -four. Probably a good-looking kid in life, but death made him ugly; it made him strangely alien.
“Cowboy,” said Bunny, still using my combat call sign, “what happened to you just now? What was that?”
I glanced up at them, then shook my head. “I really don’t know.”
“I never saw you freeze before,” said Top. “Not ever.”
All I could do was shake my head. My lack of hesitation in combat has always been one of my most important survival skills. It was one of the reasons Mr. Church picked me to join the DMS. Hesitation kills. Hesitation in a special operator can get a lot of people killed.
So why had I hesitated?
Why?
Top said, “Who is he?”
We all looked at the dead man. The name stitched onto his pocket was GOMEZ. That told us nothing. Top tapped my shoulder with the BAMS unit and I nodded and leaned back to let him run the machine over the poor kid. If Gomez’s brain chemistry had been rewired by some kind of pathogen or bioweapon the BAMS unit would pick something up. The green lights didn’t flicker.
“What was that he was yelling?” asked Bunny. “That wasn’t Spanish.”
As if in answer, we heard other voices scream out those same words.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
The shrieks rose out of the shadows from farther down the ice slope. Top and Bunny brought up their guns. This time I was right there with them, my Sig Sauer rising with professional speed and competence. Whatever bizarre hesitation had frozen me a moment ago was gone.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
A knot of figures came swarming out of the darkness. Eight of them. All of them wearing military uniforms. All of them armed with guns, with knives. All of them covered in blood. All of them with eyes that were filled with madness.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
Russians, Chinese, and American military, coming at us like a pack of wolves.
They opened fire at the same moment we did.
The air of that strange place was instantly torn apart as if by a swarm of frenzied hornets. I dropped low against the wall, firing, firing. Top and Bunny split apart, firing, firing.
All of us firing.
The first man was a Chinese soldier and I caught him with a double-tap. One center mass to stall him and one in the head. He was close enough for that kind of precision. His own shots went high and wild. Almost as if he wasn’t aiming. He dropped down, those strange words dying on his tongue.
“Tekeli-li! Tek—!”
Bunny sawed through two others, burning halfway through a magazine. On the other side of the slope, Top was cutting a bloody swath.
It was the most savage one-sided fight I’d ever been party to. The eight of them were armed and those with guns were firing, but they weren’t aiming. Their rounds hit walls and floor and vanished into the lofty ceiling, but they came nowhere near us.
We did not miss a single shot.
It was all over in ten brutal seconds. It could not have been more than that.
Three of us, eight of them.
A red slaughter.
They fell like broken dolls. Not like soldiers, not like men. They dropped like puppets. Down and down and dead.
The whole world seemed to be filled with thunder. They had been screaming those strange words, but they had not yelled in pain. Not once.
Not one sound as the bullets tore them down.
When it was over we swapped out our magazines and waited for the next wave. Waited for more.
Waited.
Amid the echoes of thunder and the billowing smoke, we waited.
The silence that fell was strange and ugly and wrong in more ways than I can possibly describe.
No one else came running up the slope at us.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE VINSON MASSIF
THE SENTINEL RANGE OF THE ELLSWORTH MOUNTAINS
ANTARCTICA
AUGUST 19, 10:44 P.M.
We needed to understand this. I wanted to check these men, to see if there was something about them that would explain this.
The moment wouldn’t allow it. Whatever was happening … it was down there. Down the slope, inside those deep shadows.
I gave my men a quick, meaningful look and got very tight nods. They were clearly as terrified and confused as I was. This mission had started out wrong and it was slipping sideways, losing whatever tenuous shape it had.
I nodded toward the shadows, then removed a flash-bang from my rig, pulled the pin. I didn’t need to call “frag out.” We all moved back, looked away, covered our ears.
The flash-bang bounced on the dense ice, then settled into a roll, vanishing into the unknown.
Then it went off.
The
bang was huge, magnified by the stone walls and the vastness of the cavern. We ran down the slope, guns ready, barrels tracking everywhere we turned our eyes, ready to fire, ready to continue this surreal fight.
The slope was littered with chunks of ancient ice that was veined with discoloration as if polluted water had been frozen here over the centuries. We saw bloody footprints, going down and coming up. We saw pools of blood and fallen equipment. We passed through the ice layer and entered the rock hardness of the mountain. As the ice gave way we realized that we were on a stone slope, and one that was far too regular to have been anything natural. And far too old to be anything our own drills and engineers had cut.
“Looks clear,” said Bunny, though he stood braced to fight.
I put my high-intensity flashlight on the widest beam setting and shone it down. I heard Bunny gasp in the same instant my heart jumped inside my chest.
“Cap’n,” breathed Top.
“I know,” I said, my throat dry.
“I don’t think Erskine’s team was looking for no damn meteors,” said Top.
“I know.”
Bunny just said, “No.”
The slope was some kind of rampart that angled downward for at least a thousand yards. It was cracked in places, and in other places byways led off from it to form slopes both angled and flat. It became clear that this was a cavern of unbelievable size. The ceiling soared above us and, except for titanic support pillars of natural rock, the cavern stretched for miles. We could see some of it, just a hint, because of weird bioluminescence—probably some species of mold—that clung to every surface. All around, on the slope, built into the walls, and tumbled ahead of us, were gigantic stone blocks. They were stacked like prefab building units and intercut with other structures—cones, tubes, pyramids, each of fantastic size, some of them taller than the Great Pyramid in Egypt. I know how that sounds, but we were all seeing it.
The flashlight had a quarter-mile reach and it barely brushed the outer perimeters of what could only be a vast city of stone.
INTERLUDE FOUR
OFFICE OF DR. MICHAEL GREENE
EAST HAMPTON, NEW YORK
WHEN PROSPERO WAS TWELVE
The boy was being cooperative for a change. Even expansive. He’d recently had a new series of vivid dreams since their last session and clearly wanted to talk about them, and of course Dr. Greene wanted to hear every detail. Not because these sessions were billed at four hundred an hour, though that was a factor; no, it was because the boy genuinely fascinated Greene. In his entire professional career, including all of his clinical work, he’d never encountered anyone like Prospero Bell. No one as intelligent and no one with this unique combination of skills and psychosis.
“… and then I came through a door in the ice and I was in this immense city,” the boy said, continuing a long narrative that had begun with a shipwreck and a walk of days across mud flats that gradually turned into an ice sheet. “Huge city with stone buildings made from geometric shapes. Cones and balls and blocks of all kinds. Wild, because some of those stones were bigger than the Great Pyramid. I saw the pyramids, did I tell you? We went to Egypt when I was nine.”
“Yes,” said Greene, “you described that trip with great precision. You have a remarkable eye for detail.”
Prospero nodded, accepting that as a statement rather than a compliment. “This was bigger, and it looked like the stones were carved out of single blocks. They had to be a million tons. And just thinking about that level of technology knocks me out. Humans couldn’t do that, you know. We don’t even know how the pyramids were built, and each of these blocks was as big as a whole pyramid.”
“Did you see any people in this city?” asked Greene.
“People?” echoed the boy. He looked momentarily confused by the question. “You know, I … I’m not sure how to answer that. I don’t know if the word ‘people’ applies. There were citizens, I guess you’d say. Things that lived there. Really strange, very weird.”
“Describe them. Were they like the creatures you sketched?”
“No. They weren’t my people. They were different. A separate race.”
“Were they the Elder Things? You mentioned them before but you haven’t explained what they are.”
Prospero thought about that and began nodding. “I … think so. And maybe the reason I didn’t go into what they are is because I wasn’t sure. Not before last night, anyway. Not before this last dream. You’re right; I think they are the Elder Things.”
“And who exactly are these Elder Things? Are they aliens? Are they gods? What is the name of their race?”
“I don’t know. They’re too old for that. Names don’t matter to beings like that.”
“How can a name not matter? What about identity?”
“They know who they are. I guess that’s all that matters. But … maybe I’m wrong. There are names, I suppose.”
“I thought you said they didn’t need names,” said Greene.
“They don’t,” said Prospero, nodding, his eyes still unfocused, “but people need to call them something, don’t they?”
“Can you explain that to me?”
The boy said nothing for a few moments, clearly struggling with the task of explaining the interior logic of a series of dreams. Greene knew that dreams can make perfect sense and be completely clear in the mind but often could not be clearly expressed because spoken language and freeform thought do not always share the same vocabulary.
Prospero grunted and then his eyes came into very sharp focus. “I once read that the Judeo-Christian version of God as a white man with a beard isn’t based on anything in the Bible. People made that up because they need to identify with whatever they worship. Every religion does that.”
Greene nodded. That had been in one of the books he’d given Prospero to read last year when they were discussing the boy’s complex understanding of his own evolving view of spirituality.
“These beings,” said Prospero, “don’t need names for themselves, okay? But the people who worship them gave them names. Just like people made statues and carved three-D images on walls of gods and demigods and angels and all that. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Christians. They all carved those images on walls. What’s that called?”
“Bas-relief?” suggested Greene.
“Right,” he said, and Greene could almost see the word click into place in the boy’s mind. He would never need to ask for the word again. “Statues, too, and icons. All of that.”
“Iconography,” said Greene.
Prospero nodded, filing it away. “People who see spiritual beings like these need to give them form or they can’t think about them. So they paint them and draw pictures of them so they can think about them without going crazy.” Prospero’s hand strayed to his gray hood and touched the twisting tentacles. “Me, too, I guess.”
“Are you saying that the creature you drew is one of these ‘beings’?”
“Yes. No. I mean, it’s not one of the Elder Things, but’s part of that same world. Or … same universe, dimension. It’s hard to explain.”
“But this is something from your imagination.”
“No,” corrected Prospero quickly. “It’s from my dreams.”
“Which amounts to the same thing. It’s a monster.”
“Doc, why do people believe that the things we see in dreams aren’t real?”
“Some of them are,” conceded Greene, “but many dream images are metaphorical in nature. They represent other things. We talked about sexual imagery and—”
“No,” said Prospero firmly. “That’s not what I’m talking about. You’re supposed to be smart, Dr. Greene. Don’t go getting stupid on me now.”
Greene nodded, accepting the rebuke.
“I’m asking you a serious question,” persisted the boy. “But … let me put it another way. And you know I’m talking about the things I’ve been seeing in my dreams. I know they’re real, even if you and my dad don’t believe it. No, don’t l
ie. Please. I can see it in your face. You think I’m crazy, and maybe I am—by your standards, by human standards—but I know that what I see aren’t dreams, they’re visions. Like race memory for people like me.” He paused. “Let me ask you a different question, okay?”
“Okay,” said Greene.
“You know that I’m really into quantum physics. You know that I understand it. It’s not a hobby and we both know that up here,” he paused and tapped his skull, “I’m a lot older than my age. We know that, right?”
Greene nodded.
“Okay,” said Prospero. “In quantum physics, in superstring theory they talk about how there are more than four dimensions. More than height, width, depth, and time. That’s part of superstring theory, that the universe is much bigger and more complex than even Einstein thought. So, go farther. What if there are an infinite number of dimensions? What if there are an infinite number of realities? Parallel worlds, each one separated by differences however minuscule or massive.”
“An omniverse,” said Greene, nodding again. “It’s an old concept.”
“That’s right,” said Prospero, excited. “You do understand. Cool. Now … what if it’s not a theory? What if that’s true? What if there is, in fact, an infinite number of worlds, and if those worlds are—as some people believe—right next door to us, then imagine what would happen if we could build a doorway, a kind of gate, that would allow us to move back and forth.”
“To what end?”
“That’s what Dad asked me and I’ll tell you what I told him. It pissed him off, so let’s see what it does to you.”
“I’ll be sure to listen with an open mind,” said Greene.
They smiled at each other for a moment. Genuine smiles on both sides.
Prospero said, “If there are infinite worlds and if through quantum physics and the science of superstring theory we can access them, then why would we need to ever fight another war?”
“I don’t follow. How does one relate to the other?”
“Natural resources,” said Prospero. “Imagine if no one had to fight wars over limited supplies of oil, natural gas, coal. Imagine if no one ever had to fight for a place to stand, for a place to build a home. For land to raise sheep and cows and things like that. Imagine if there were infinite oceans in which to fish. If there was enough for everyone and more than anyone could ever use, why would people like my father and his cronies ever have to build bombs or fighter planes or any of that stuff?”