Callsign: King II- Underworld

“Do you have a flashlight? I don’t think we have to worry about those creatures anymore.”


“I hope you’re right about that. Hang on.”

Pierce winced as a light flared in the other man’s hand, revealing the cave walls in their true color—dark rock of indeterminate composition. De Bord directed the beam down the passage in the same direction from which the creatures had come, and started walking with Pierce in tow.

As they moved along the cramped passage, Pierce decided to exploit the sergeant’s evident willingness to engage in conversation. “So I take it the Army is here because of those creatures, right? What do you know about them?”

“Not a whole helluva lot. They came out of nowhere, wrecked everything, and then just like that, decided to skedaddle. The rest of it is all above my pay grade. I just do what the brass tells me to do.” He stopped abruptly and directed the light overhead.

The circle of illumination on the rock ceiling showed nothing particularly remarkable, but in the ambient light, Pierce saw that the tunnel ahead sloped upward and ended abruptly.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I don’t understand,” the sergeant said, turning to face him. “This is where you fell in…where I found you. But there’s no opening.”

Pierce felt cold dread creep over him. “Maybe we passed it already.”

“Not a chance.” De Bord pointed to something on the floor—a broken loop of black plastic a few inches long. “I cut that off your hands right where I found you. The mouth of the tunnel was right here.”

Pierce stared up again, but there wasn’t even a hairline crack in the rocky expanse overhead. It was as if the earth had closed the door behind the retreating creatures, sealing them in.





18.


A closer inspection of the camp only confirmed what King had seen from a distance. There was abundant evidence of the battle—wrecked tents and equipment, discarded weapons, a littering of brass shell casings, and everywhere, spatters of blood slowly drying to a black crust in the warm desert air—but there was not a single body, human or otherwise, to be found. Hoping against hope, King tried calling Pierce’s cell phone, but the call went directly to the archaeologist’s voice mail.

Nina stayed close as they ventured cautiously into the perimeter, but stopped a few steps in and bent to illuminate the ground with a small flashlight. “Look at this.”

King glanced quickly at her find, but did not immediately grasp its significance. “A footprint?”

“Look at it,” she insisted. “It’s huge. What do you wear, size 12? It’s at least six inches longer than your foot.”

He made no effort to hide his irritation. “We already knew they had feet. And that they’re big.”

“But it’s hominid, for sure.” She pointed to the round depression made by the heel and ball of the foot, then counted the toes as if doing so would emphasize her point. “This has toes. Humans are the only species on the planet with a foot like this.”

“Not anymore.” He stood and did a quick visual sweep of the area. “I don’t see what the big deal is. I thought monster footprints were a dime a dozen.”

She shook her head. “Most are provable fakes, and the rest are highly suspicious. This one…well, we know exactly what made it. It’s real, tangible proof.”

“Put this in practical terms for me. What are we dealing with here? Could these things be mutants of some kind?”

She shrugged. “The legends of the Mogollon Monster—and other creatures like it—go back to prehistoric times. I suppose in a scientific sense, they are the result of a mutation—that’s what drives evolution—but it’s more likely that they’re a lower branch on the evolutionary tree. An ancestor species, or at the very least a distant cousin. We know that hominid species like this had to have existed in the past; this just proves that they’re still around.”

King shook his head. “I’m not interested in proving anything. I want to know where these things come from, and why they are on the warpath. In case you weren’t paying attention, that wasn’t a lone monster wandering the hills harassing hikers. That was a whole tribe, and I think if there’d been a tribe’s worth of these things roaming these hills all this time, someone would have found proof that was a little more definitive.”

“That’s why it’s so… Wait, what are you trying to say?”

“Think about it. Nothing like this has ever happened. The attack on the highway, this…what’s different now?”

She blinked at him.

“The attack happened simultaneously with the appearance of that mist,” he continued, not trying to make a point so much as review the disjointed facts for his own benefit. “Those soldiers were expecting it, or at least expecting something to happen.”

“So you think this could be the result of something the government is doing?”