Callsign: King (Jack Sigler) (Chesspocalypse #1)

Judging by the state of the compound, King was inclined to agree. It seemed very unlikely that any survivors would be found amid the ruins. But where were the bodies?

King shifted his vehicle into drive again, and steered around the wrecked camp, getting closer to the base of the hill. The cave opening was visible, a mere pockmark in the cliff face, and he pulled to a stop a stone’s throw away, but not before Felice threw open her door and jumped out.

“Wait!” King shouted after her. “At least let me break out some flashlights.” He turned to Moses. “Why don’t you have the men set up camp here. I guess Felice and I are going to do a little spelunking.”

Moses seemed inexplicably perturbed, but nodded and jumped out to relay the message to the men in the second vehicle. King took an LED MagLite from his duffel bag, along with the MP5, and hurried to join Felice at the mouth of the cave.

As soon as he stepped through the opening, he knew something was wrong. A vile odor permeated the air; a smell of animal excrement mixed with decaying flesh. The flashlight beam revealed dark streaks on the smooth floor of the passage, as if something wet and greasy had been dragged along its length.

“Was it like this before?” King asked.

“I don’t remember.” Felice’s tone was distant and mechanical, as if she had no idea what he was talking about. She quickened her step and it was all King could do to keep up with her.

A short passage led down to an enormous cavern, the depth and breadth of which was beyond the capacity of King’s flashlight to illuminate. What he did see in the cone of blue-white light was nevertheless awe-inspiring.

When he had first heard the term “elephant graveyard” he had imagined a place where a few dozen, or maybe even a few hundred skeletons would be jumbled together. But this cavern beggared belief. Directly before him was a veritable sea of gigantic bones and enormous, curving ivory tusks, some at least ten feet in length. The skeletons were packed tightly together, as might occur if individual bodies were stacked one atop another prior to decomposition, and stretched in either direction as far as the eye could see. Without knowing how far back the mass of bones went, it was impossible to estimate the number of skeletons, but it was surely in the thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands.

King understood now why the very idea of an elephant graveyard had galvanized adventurers of the Romantic era to risk everything to find such a treasure. “Incredible. There must be thousands of tons of ivory in here. How much would that be worth anyway?”

Felice ignored his question and instead skirted the cramped area at the perimeter of the bones, disappearing into the shadows. King ran to catch her, casting his light down a path that had been cleared in the bones, and found her all but running to a strange structure—something like a shrine, built entirely of elephant tusks—erected in an open area, deep in the heart of the skeleton maze.

She stopped there, and a few seconds later, he reached her side. “Damn it!” he raged. “You can’t run—”

The words died in his throat as something stirred in the shadows. He stabbed the MagLite’s beam in the direction of the movement.

To call what he beheld a man was perhaps too generous. The form shambling toward him was indeed human, but only in the strict biological sense. He was naked, except for a few torn remnants of clothes that clung to his body; it looked as if he had tried to simply tear them away, without comprehending the subtleties of buttons and zippers. His matted hair was caked with dirt and his skin was streaked with filth, some of it likely his own excrement. His face was a mask of dried blood, but despite his feral look, his eyes were lifeless, staring unfocused past King to….

To Felice.

He glimpsed movement his left, and swung the light that direction. Another figure was shuffling from the outer perimeter. Then another, and another…seven in all, at least two of them female, but all uniformly bestial in appearance.

And advancing.

Then his light found something else. More remains, but not elephants and not thousands of years old. Piled up behind the shrine was a mass of bodies, bloated and rotting, but not merely left to decompose. Bones were visible where the flesh of the arms and legs had been torn away…gnawed away.

He brought the MP5 up, but knew intuitively that a mere threat would accomplish nothing.

He turned to Felice. “We need to get out of here, now!”

But even as he said it, he realized that her eyes were also drifting, unfocused. And then, even as he was reaching out to grab her arm, she collapsed, like a sacrificial offering laid before the shrine of tusks.





13.


The Indian Ocean, 200 miles southeast of Mogadishu, Somalia



It’s like the Brugada incident all over again, Sara thought.