Callsign: King II- Underworld

The camp was a scene of absolute chaos. Dozen of soldiers tried to fight the intruders, and while they surely outnumbered their foes, the creatures were everywhere. Pierce felt foolish for having been so dismissive of them when King had showed him the picture; these things sure as hell weren’t Wookies. In fact, they weren’t like anything he’d ever seen before.

Primatology, like archaeology was a discipline of anthropology, and while his professional career had taken him down a much different section of that field, he remembered enough of his introductory studies to recognize that these animals weren’t behaving like any kind of ape species, or any other animal species for that matter. They seemed more like rioting hooligans, in the grip of mass hysteria, smashing everything in sight. The soldiers’ bullets were almost certainly injuring them, but the collective madness of the creatures, to say nothing of their imposing physical size, enabled them to shrug off all but the most lethal of wounds. Worse still, the creatures seemed to be everywhere.

“Jack—”

He caught himself immediately as he locked stares with a pair of eyes, gazing at him from across the collapsed tent. The eyes were bright red—reflective, Pierce realized, adapted for low light. While the creature looked at him, and he at it, he managed to remain perfectly still—paralyzed with fear, or intentionally trying not to provoke it, he couldn’t say—but when it tilted its head back and let out a banshee wail, Pierce had only one thought: Run!

He could hear the pounding of the creature’s footsteps as it trampled across the canvas, but he didn’t dare look back. The view ahead wasn’t much better, but he angled toward a gap in the mayhem. Running with his hands cuffed behind his back was awkward enough, but he felt compelled to duck his head to reduce the chances of catching a stray bullet, if only a little. When he reached the perimeter of the camp, he at last spared a glance over his shoulder and saw no sign of pursuit. That did little to cheer him; it seemed just a matter of time before he was noticed again.

The triple-strand of razor wire coils had been smashed flat in several places along the perimeter. It looked like a bulldozer had run over the barricade, but there were strings of bloody flesh and tangles of oddly fine hair clinging to barbs, indicating the creatures of flesh and bone had wrought this devastation. At least there aren’t any more of them coming in, Pierce thought.

The silver mist hid the ground beneath his feet, but revealed a good deal more about the setting. The military camp had been situated about five hundred yards from a rocky hillside, and in the foreground, there were several large boulders that appeared to have broken off and tumbled down over the eons of history. Pierce fixed his attention on one of the rocks that looked big enough to hide him. Tentatively at first, but then driven by a primal instinct to get as far away from the carnage as possible, the archaeologist picked his way through one of the gaps and ventured out across the mist-shrouded ground.

He was halfway to his goal, when the earth fell away beneath his feet and he plunged headlong into darkness.





16.


Nina gaped at the motionless form on the ground, not so much unable to believe what she was witnessing, as unable to decide which part of the surreal experience was most unbelievable. Investigating paranormal phenomena was a little like buying a lottery ticket; she had often imagined what it would feel like to actually find some kind of real proof, but deep down she had never really believed it would happen. And certainly not like this.

That’s a Mogollon Monster, she thought. She felt the man—King, he’d called himself—tugging at her hand, urging her to flee, and realized that she was reaching out to it with her free hand, as if touching the corpse might make it more real. “You killed it?”

Even as the words came out, she regretted the tone. She hadn’t meant to make it sound like an accusation, as if his act of self-preservation was some kind of crime against humanity.

“Yeah,” he replied, evenly. “And there’s not much chance of them showing up on the endangered species list.”

When Nina’s hand reached the creature’s hair, it felt softer than she expected. In fact, up close, the hair looked strange. Like a carpet created from the skins of different animals. She took hold of the hair and gave a tug. She gasped as a sheet of hair slid away from the body. “Oh my god, it’s clothing, not hair.”

King quickly inspected her discovery. The shifted cloak of hair revealed the creature’s true skin. It was maroon, like congealed blood and covered in what looked like large goose bumps. He ran his hand across the skin. The bumps were hard, but almost slick, like wax.

As Nina lifted the hair up, he got a better look at the backside and immediately knew where the skins had come from. “We need to get out of here,” he said. “That’s human hair.”

Nina’s eyes went wide as she dropped the hairy cloak. King yanked her up. “Move!”