Tusya and Dima climbed onto the landing and tried to crank open the dog wheel on the hatch. “No good,” reported Dima.
“Let me try.” Abrams jumped to the top of the landing in the exosuit and gripped the wheel on the door with his bionic arms. The pneumatic muscles quaked as he wheeled the crank, but he couldn’t budge the wheel. “No way. It’s jammed solid.”
“It probably opens only from the inside,” Galia said. “Most of the gates that lead to the palace lock from the inside.”
“We’ll have to try to blow it open or melt through it with incendiaries,” Jackson said.
“That’ll be a hell of a job,” Tusya said dubiously, glancing at Dima.
“Come on,” Ferrell said. “We’ve got a job to do first.”
“Yes, sir,” Dima said, jumping down from the ledge. Abrams jumped down after him, his heavy suit buzzing as it absorbed the landing.
They moved on another fifty yards up the tunnel.
07:20:09
Sasha and Geoffrey sat at Maxim’s desk as they watched the monitors on the wall. Sasha noticed something on the monitor showing the inside of the train station. “Look!”
One of the heavy blast shields that had been lowered against the window was being pushed inward with erratic thrusts.
Geoffrey switched to the camera over the gate of Sector Seven in front of the station.
A giant rogue spiger leaned against the station’s window. With the trebuchet-like force of a mantis shrimp’s strike, it smashed its spiked arms through the glass, jolting the steel shutters. “Oh, crap,” Geoffrey sighed.
Sasha squealed. “It’s a monster!”
“Yes, sweetie, it is.”
The view inside the station showed one heavy shutter being wedged as two seven-foot spikes levered it open.
07:16:21
Three minutes in, running at full speed, Nell saw the first ghosts gleaming on the roof and walls ahead. Their flesh caught the light of her flashlight like cat’s eyes as she sprinted down the tight corridor, too fast for them to react to her as she passed.
She saw a lot more ahead.
07:16:20
Talon-1’s night vision showed a split in the tunnel on the dog whistle’s screen.
“There’s a fork up ahead,” Ferrell said.
They stopped at the fork where the railroad tracks continued to the right with no tracks heading into the tunnel on the left.
“Which way to Moscow, comrade?” Jackson asked Galia.
Galia shook his head, mildly annoyed. “I’ve never been here before. I know that one tunnel is a dead end, and the other goes on. Only Maxim knows how far it goes. I suspect it goes far enough.”
“OK. We’ve got to check both tunnels,” Jackson said. “And we’ll set charges in both.”
“Right,” Ferrell said. “Let’s go at least a klick down each branch before we set charges. Let’s split up. You guys take the mule and go right. That seems to be the main line. This is probably the dead end. Kuzu, Tusya, and Andy, you come with me. We’ll take Talon-1 with us.” Ferrell took one of the backpacks filled with explosives off the mule, and Talon-1 followed him. “Set the charges to go off in eight hours, then meet back here!”
“OK,” Abrams said. “Let’s leave a transponder here so we can communicate by radio.”
“Yeah,” Jackson said, setting down a cylindrical device that popped antennae out, which rotated as he activated it with a button. There was no way communications could penetrate the solid rock walls down here.
“See you guys.” Nastia waved as they followed Jackson into the tunnel on the right with Hender.
“Bye, Hender,” Andy said.
“Bye, Andy! Bye, Kuzu!” Hender said as they separated.
Kuzu emitted a rumbling bass frequency like a tiger’s purr beside Andy as they headed into the tunnel to the left, following Ferrell and Tusya behind the robot into total darkness.
07:12:12
Nell spotted a ghost peeling off the ceiling ahead. It hung down before her, shimmering light in its glistening flesh. She fired the gun at it, almost deafening herself as the sharp reports echoed down the tunnel.
The ghost dropped before her as another flipped down behind it, also dangling from the ceiling.
She fired again, jumping over the first ghost and stepping on one of its suction cups, which bit into the heel of her shoe with a crunch. She pulled her foot out of her shoe and lurched forward as she shot two more bullets into the ghost in front of her, aiming at its amorphous head as she felt two punches hit her back. She twisted around to see two thick ropes sticking to her shirt that had been shot from an octopus behind her.
She fell on her knees before the molluscan predator as its amorphous head dropped down from above and faced her. It reeled in its gooey cables that were wrapped against her right arm, pinning the gun against her chest, and began attaching suction cups to her shoulders. She convulsed in desperation and jammed the glowing hot muzzle of the weapon with her left hand into the slug’s mouth from below, the flashlight illuminating its translucent head. The creature’s entire body recoiled, turning white beneath her, and she pulled out of her shirt, wrenching the gun free as she ran down the tunnel.
Ahead of her at least three more ghosts hung from the ceiling to intercept her. The closest curled its snail-head toward her and she aimed the gun between its large black eyes. She fired only once to conserve bullets and her ears as she ran forward, cursing herself for not wearing a bra. In fact, she should have worn multiple layers to slough off the mollusks’ sticky webs. Now, they could attach to her bare skin.
07:12:10
Hender accompanied the others down what appeared to be the main train tunnel heading west from the underground city. Talon-2 rolled thirty-five yards ahead of them. After about two hundred yards, the grade leveled off and went downhill.
“Dead end!” Dima said, watching the ROV’s camera feed.
The others soon saw the ROV light up a concrete wall ahead. As they approached, they saw a memorial inscribed in the wall. Nastia translated it for them:
MAY THE 109 HEROES OF THE
REVOLUTION WHO DIED HERE
REST IN PEACE.
Jackson smirked. “I hate to think how many that translates to in real numbers.”
Nastia chuckled dryly. “You’re catching on.”
“Well, it looks like they did our job for us,” Jackson said.
“Ne gruzís’,” Dima said.
“Da.” Nastia nodded.
Abrams radioed the other team: “Hey, guys! We hit a dead end. We’re going to head back. We’ll rendezvous at the fork. Over?”
07:07:23
“Right, thanks,” Ferrell acknowledged, turning off the receiver on his helmet radio. “I guess this is the main line,” he said, glancing at the others. He gestured one hand forward, erratically, Kuzu noted. “We’ll pick a spot half a klick farther down the tunnel to set the charges. Let’s try to find a curve first to shelter us from the blast. All right?” Ferrell looked intently at Kuzu.
Kuzu realized the human must be referring to him. “Yes,” he said. “OK, Ferrell.”
Tusya looked at Kuzu and then smirked. “All right,” he said.
Andy followed alongside Kuzu down the tunnel, which seemed to go straight as an arrow into infinity. Talon-1 rolled fifty yards ahead of them, shining its lights until it came to a jog where the tunnel was slightly misaligned with an opposing tunnel, as though they had met from different directions. Though there were no train tracks in the tunnel they had come through, there were tracks in the tunnel that joined from the other direction, stretching off like laser beams into the darkness.
“This must be it,” Tusya said. “This must be the main line!”
Ferrell checked out Talon-1’s camera feed on his visor. The rails headed down more steeply up ahead. He stopped and radioed the others, glancing at Andy and Kuzu. “OK, we’re going to set the charges,” he said.
“Need any help?” came Jackson’s voice on his helmet radio.
“No sweat,” Ferrell said. “We’ll be done in a bit. Just wanted to reach minimum safe distance so the boom doesn’t collapse our egress.”
“Roger that,” Jackson said. “We should be at the fork in five minutes. See you there.”
Andy took off his helmet next to Ferrell, breathing heavily. His scraggly blond hair was damp and drooping with sweat. He looked at Ferrell defiantly. “We should be safe enough here to take our helmets off, I think,” he said. “OK? God, I just need to take a breath.”
Tusya and Ferrell both followed suit, setting their helmets down as they opened their backpacks and a case filled with sixteen cubes of M183 explosive. They proceeded to set all sixteen charges in an arch spaced over the ceiling and down each wall. Kuzu assisted them with his twelve-foot reach, memorizing each of Ferrell’s actions as he selected wires and detonators and connected them to the explosives. Then Kuzu noticed Ferrell set the countdown for twenty minutes.
“Hey,” Andy said. “Why’d you set it for only twenty minutes?”
Ferrell casually put a pistol to Tusya’s head and pulled the trigger twice, destroying the man’s brain.
Kuzu vanished.
“What are you doing?” Andy screamed.
Ferrell turned the gun to Andy.
“Oh, you f*cking a*shole!”
Ferrell shot two bullets through the marine biologist’s forehead. Andy fell to the floor, dead.
Kuzu hissed, invisible, as he clung to the ceiling.
Ferrell wheeled, pointing the gun where Kuzu had been, and he registered surprise as the sel seemed to have disappeared.
Pressed against the arched ceiling, the sel’s fur camouflaged him against the tiles. He saw strange creatures clinging to the ceiling nearby and another that peeled off the wall behind Ferrell. The creature hung down like a giant tongue behind the human, shaping itself to the contours of the soldier’s body without touching him.
Ferrell looked up and seemed to make out Kuzu on the ceiling. He raised his gun just as the animal closed over his back, arms, legs, and head simultaneously, immobilizing him.
Kuzu looked into Ferrell’s eyes as the human shrieked, dropping his weapon as the strange creature overpowered him from behind. The beaklike mouth of the slimy animal clamped into the soldier’s neck with scissorlike blades, and the man’s scream was cut off as the dog whistle fell from around his neck, its chain severed, bouncing off one of the railroad tracks below. Ferrell’s eyes looked back at Kuzu as his face drooped and the transparent creature flushed bloodred on his back.
Kuzu’s eyes jerked in different directions. He suddenly noticed other glowing animals stuck to the ceiling around him. He leaped down as jetting ropes just missed him and looked off into the tunnel that stretched miles into the unknown—all the way to one of the humans’ cities, they thought, and possibly to many more. He reached down to the detonator, and Kuzu switched off the timer.
Then he grabbed the dog whistle lying between the railroad ties and galloped back on five legs up the tunnel as Talon-1 followed him.
06:52:59
The others waited at the fork. They thought they heard the faint echoes of shouts and gunshots before they reached the branch but could not make radio contact.
“Ferrell, how’s it going, copy?” Jackson repeated through his helmet radio, but still no answer. “I repeat, how’s it going, man?”
“Look!” Abrams said.
Out of the darkness, a point of light now raced toward them.
“Andy!” yelled Hender, his voice reverberating in the throat of the tunnel like a shrill clarinet.
Hearing nothing back, the others yelled, too. Then they saw Talon-1 approaching. The ROV came within twenty yards of them before they saw Kuzu, emerging behind the robot, alone.
“What happened?” Jackson said. “Where are the others?”
“Animals attacked,” said the sel.
“No way,” Bear said.
“From Henders Island?” Abrams asked.
Kuzu shook his head.
“Where are the others?” Dima said.
“Where is Andy?” Hender asked.
Kuzu looked at Hender with both of his large eyes. “Dead.”
Hender pulled back as if he had been physically struck.
“Bombs all set, Jackson,” Kuzu said, eyeing the big soldier with one eye.
“Bullshit!” Bear yelled. “You killed them!”
“What the hell—?” Jackson paused as they saw something hurtling toward them in the tunnel.
A shocking specter shambled out of the shadow into the light. They trained their weapons on the approaching figure, which ran toward them like a glowing dog. As the creature came closer, they caught flashes of Craigon Ferrell’s face pointing at them. They saw his body running on all fours, his head raised with open mouth and eyes. His body, gripped by a glowing mass, lunged forward.
“God almighty,” Jackson said, backing up.
“A ghost!” Galia cried.
Suddenly, with a smacking sound, Ferrell’s head fell forward limply and they could see the slug’s head in its place with a pouting, bloody mouth and wide sullen eyes glaring at them.
Dima and Jackson shot a barrage of gunfire at the apparition, which finally crumpled on the floor of the tunnel before them.
Bear examined the remains. “Are you sure this ain’t from Henders Island?”
“No,” Hender said, shivering. “It’s not!”
The others looked at the pulverized carnivore that was still squirming on Ferrell’s back, jerking the human’s arms and legs randomly.
“It must be some kind of mollusk,” Nastia said, her eyes and mouth wide as she crouched to look in morbid curiosity at the flinching flesh of the creature.
“Many in tunnel.” Kuzu pointed behind.
“But the charges are set, right, Kuzu?” Jackson said.
“Yes, Jackson,” Kuzu said. “Charges are set.”
“Damn, one of those ugly bastards is above us right now!” Jackson’s flashlight exposed several ghost octopuses converging on the ceiling over them.
“Yes.” Kuzu pointed.
“God, let’s go, man!” Abrams backed away as the others scattered.
They rushed back up the tunnel toward the station.
As they ran with the mechanical mule loping alongside the tracks, they passed the hatch that they couldn’t open earlier. The lights of Talon-1 shone ahead on a huge creature barreling toward them from the direction of the train station, rapidly growing larger and glowing vivid colors. Abrams ignited a magnesium flare and took aim, hurling it forty yards down the tunnel, illuminating the beast in a blaze of light.
“Oh, no,” Hender cried.
“Spiger!” Kuzu growled.
Abrams grabbed an incendiary grenade out of a pouch on the trotting mule. He took a few steps and sidearmed the grenade like a quarterback. “Fire in the hole!” he shouted.
The grenade zipped down the tunnel and landed perfectly between the front legs of the animal that was thirty-five yards away. But the spiger launched off its tail so hard, it slid along the tiled ceiling as the grenade ignited behind it at 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The spiger screeched like an air-raid siren as it landed forty feet in front of them, its elaborate frill pulsating colors like a neon marquee. Its tail curled underneath it as it scuttled away from the heat source, rapidly moving toward them and raising its arms.
Jackson ran to meet the beast, firing two AA-12 automatic shotguns and emptying both magazines of explosive ammo at close range as he shredded the creature’s manelike frill.
“No!” Hender said. “They like noise. Don’t stand still: Move!”
The spiger recoiled as bits were blasted off its frill and buckshot pierced its armored back. Jackson stood his ground in front of it, spraying the beast as it raised one of its spiked arms and brought it down in a blinding streak, stabbing the soldier through the faceplate of his helmet through his rib cage and pelvis into the ground. Then the monster lifted the big man’s body sideways before its widening vertical jaws.
“Throw another grenade!” Nastia said.
“Not at this range,” Dima said. “We’ll burn, too!”
“Back up!” Abrams shouted.
Nastia ran in the other direction, weeping hysterically.
As they retreated, Abrams used his dog whistle to send in both Talon robots, which opened fire with their M249 machine guns as they rushed the spiger.
One of the spiger’s long spike-arms turned sideways and flicked the Talons up the tunnel toward the group like a couple of corks. Revolving in the air, their machine guns fired in all directions, their rounds ricocheting off the walls. Abrams disabled their guns as the bots clattered past them, rolling for another forty yards.
“Chyort voz’mi,” Dima cursed. “I’m hit!”
“Where?” Bear asked.
“The head!”
“You’re OK, then,” Abrams said. “Must have rung your bell, though.”
“Shit,” Dima said. “Good helmet.”
The spiger continued to pick Jackson’s meat off its arm like a shish kebab as Bear and Kuzu advanced, firing their bows simultaneously at the beast. Bear skewered the spiger’s head between its eyestalks with an aluminum shaft. Kuzu moved in and struck its second brain between the eyes on its back. The great beast crashed to the ground.
Kuzu strode toward it then and, as the others watched in awe, the sel placed three hands on the dying beast’s fur. He turned his head on his elastic neck to look at Hender. “Come on, Shueenair!” His commanding voice vibrated Hender’s bones.
“What’s he doing?” Dima asked.
“Don’t go near spiger,” Hender warned them.
Kuzu’s fur smoldered red as millions of “symbiants” evacuated the fallen predator, pouring into his fur. They attacked like needles at first, but then radiated peacefully, spreading a pleasurable feeling like an itch being scratched over his entire body. Their millions of quick pricks stimulated glands under the hendropod’s skin that produced an ameliorating hormone. After feeling naked since the humans had exterminated the exfoliating symbiants so integral to the sels’ health, Kuzu finally felt them reestablish themselves on his body and replenish the external immune system that had made it possible to survive in their native ecosystem.
Another two spigers lunged down the tunnel in the distance, a cloud of flying creatures following them.
“The train station is breached!” Abrams shouted.
“No shit!” Bear said.
“The incendiary grenade’s still burning on the tracks behind the spiger,” Abrams said. “It should keep the rest at bay for the moment, but the heat barrier won’t last long.”
They were trapped between the Henders predators on one side and no other place to go.
“Throw another grenade at them!” Nastia cried.
“No!” shouted another female voice behind them. “Come this way!”
Thirty-five yards behind them, standing on the cement landing under the hatch they had passed, a shirtless woman waved a flashlight. “This way!” she called.
“Who the Christ are you?” Bear said, awestruck by the vision.
“Nell!” Hender shouted.
“Dr. Binswanger!” Galia hailed her bashfully.
Nell waved her arm angrily. “Come on!”
The sels followed the humans quickly as Nell pulled Nastia up onto the landing first.
Kuzu pulled Hender up, and Hender could feel a sprinkling of symbiants warm his arm like a pleasurable narcotic that spread momentarily on his skin before they jumped back onto Kuzu. Kuzu’s voice rumbled softly as he spoke in his own language: “I must tell you what happened in the tunnel, Shenuday.”
“Yes.” Hender nodded.
Nastia looked at Nell. “Is that tunnel safe?”
“Safer than this one,” Nell answered.
“What happened to you?” Nastia said.
“I lost my shirt. Let’s go!”
“OK,” said Nastia.
Dima and Abrams judged that the mule could get through the hatch as Nastia and Nell went through first. Dima jumped on the ledge as Abrams pulled a variety of grenades from the packs on the mule’s back and, aided by the XOS suit, pitched the grenades as far as he could in both directions. Then he helped push the mule onto the landing and through the hatch. The mule gave a kick of its hind legs as it got a purchase and trotted through the tunnel behind Dima, Nastia, and Nell.
Before bringing up the rear, Abrams fired five more gas and incendiary grenades up the tunnel and three more in the other direction. Talon-1 came charging back down the tunnel now, and Abrams reached down and lifted it onto the platform. Then he saw one of the spigers, soaring through the air in a mighty leap directly toward him. He pulled Talon-1 inside, but before he could close the hatch the spiger jammed a spike inside the crack.
“Shit!” Abrams cursed, trying to close the door, but even the strength of the XOS suit was outmatched when both the spiger’s spikes shoved into the crack to pry it open.
Bear looked through the lurching hatch and glimpsed the giant spiger: its head was bigger than the hatch itself. “Come on! It can’t get through anyway! Let’s go!”
He stuck a shotgun through the crack and fired, blowing off one of the beast’s eyes, which only seemed to make it wrench the door open wider as it trumpeted like an elephant.
Abrams and Bear ran up the corridor.
“There are ghosts in here!” Nell called back to them as she led them forward through the passageway. “Clinging to the walls. So move fast! They’re dangerous.”
“We know!” said Nastia.
They rushed behind Nell as she ran. “This is one of Stalin’s escape routes,” she said. “It leads straight to his palace.”
“I told you!” Nastia said with relief. Then, to Nell, she said more quietly, “You know you’re topless, right?”
“Yes! I know! I’ll care about that later, OK?”
Nastia nodded. “Just making sure!”
06:43:22
Geoffrey and Sasha watched through the camera outside Stalin’s secret train landing as the battle ensued in the tunnel—but they could see no sign of Nell. When the spigers arrived, Geoffrey felt his hope sink: Sector Seven had been breached.
“Yay!” Sasha said as she saw Nell open the door and step out onto the platform, waving at the others.
“She made it!” Geoffrey whispered.
The others retreated into the passageway and left the train tunnel filled with smoke and fire. “Thank God,” he sighed; he had been gripping Sasha’s arm the whole time and now apologized to her as he let go.
“You’re really strong, Geoffrey,” Sasha said, rubbing her arm. “Was Nell wearing a shirt?”
“Um.… I don’t think so,” Geoffrey said, wondering what could have happened.
06:41:08
“Are these ‘ghosts’ related to ghost slugs?” Nastia asked.
“What are ghost slugs?” Nell asked.
“Carnivorous white slugs discovered in Wales a few years ago that are believed to have evolved in caves.”
“No.” Nell shook her head and laughed darkly. “You must be a scientist, too.”
“Yes,” Nastia said.
“They’re mollusks, but these things have suction cups. They’re land octopuses,” Nell said.
“Incredible!” Nastia said. “Are they from Henders Island?”
“No! There weren’t any mollusks there!”
Abrams checked his rearview headcam and immediately saw bad news: the spiger had somehow squeezed through the hatch behind them. Elastic diaphragms between three bony rings inside its body enabled the giant invertebrate to inchworm behind them through the tight tunnel, extending its head and snapping its jaws like double doors as it drew closer in four-foot lunges. “Heads up, that frigging thing got through!”
“Damn!” Bear said.
A translucent silhouette of a man reared up in the tunnel ahead.
“A ghost!” Nell warned.
“Oooh!” Hender trilled, disappearing as he reacted to the figure whose flesh effulged prismatic colors in the beams of their flashlights.
Nell stopped next to the tunnel that headed east toward the city.
“Just shoot it and let’s keep going!” Nastia said.
“I’m out of bullets!” Nell cried, unnerved and visibly shaking.
Dima fired at the ghost and it folded down, dropping to the ground, revealing a dozen more hanging or standing in the corridor behind it. He kept firing, revealing one after another in an infinite regress.
Nell shone her flashlight up and saw two large ghosts peeling off the ceiling above them. “There!”
Bear glanced behind them as the huffing and puffing spiger pushed toward them up the tunnel. “Come on, man! That thing’s coming!”
“This tunnel should go to your honeymoon suite, I think, Nell,” Galia said.
Nell looked back at the man who had spoken, wondering who he might be under his helmet. She remembered that Sasha had referred to their suite as Stalin’s love nest.
“Come on!” she shouted, and darted right into the smaller tunnel that headed east, the others following.
06:38:02
They emerged through a hatch that opened to a hidden room behind their bridal suite on the second story of their honeymoon cottage. The mule barely squeezed through as it followed them through a second hatch that opened into their bedroom. Dima closed both hatches behind them.
Nell looked at their unmade bed as she grabbed a T-shirt and pulled it on while the others took off their helmets, turning away. “Yeah, this was our room,” Nell said, noticing the wilted pink rose on their bedspread. She reached into her bag by the bed and pulled out some banged-up sneakers, pulling the one shoe off her foot and slipping into the new pair. “I took these to go spelunking in Hawaii,” she muttered, tying them on with trembling fingers. She looked at the faces that were now revealed around her and noticed Galia Sokolof, Maxim’s chief of operations. “Well, hello, Mr. Sokolof.” She scowled. “What brings you here?” She rose to confront him.
“I brought them to rescue you, Dr. Binswanger,” Galia said, his deep-set eyes full of remorse.
“We came to get you, Nell!” Hender said.
“I’ve no doubt that you did, Hender.” Nell smiled at him, squeezing his hand and kissing his soft-whiskered cheek as he embraced her with four aquamarine arms.
“Where is Sasha?” Galia asked.
“She’s at the palace with Geoffrey,” Nell said.
“Oh,” Galia said in surprise. “Thank God! And the others?”
Nell scowled once more. “You mean Maxim? Everyone in the city is dead now. But Maxim? Well, he may still be alive, I think, Galia, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”
“I tried to stop him.”
“Not hard enough!” Nell shouted bitterly.
“All right, now!” Abrams said, raising his bionic arms gently. “There’ll be time for that later.”
“Come on,” Nell said, leading them to the split-level dining/living room of her honeymoon condo, the dining room of which viewed the city and the living room to their right the phosphorescent waterfall.
Abrams powered down the XOS and detached its grips from his armored suit, stepping out of the machine. “Pretty swank honeymoon suite,” he quipped.
“Yeah,” Nell said.
Kuzu rushed to the window and looked over the city. On the street below, a stream of glowing Henders species flowed, in the same direction, flying, rolling, and leaping past the window from right to left, clockwise around the city.
“We should be safe here,” Galia said. “The windows are bulletproof.”
“Yeah, sure,” Abrams said.
“We better look around and make sure no ghosts are in here, or anything else,” Nastia said.
They all inspected the walls and ceiling carefully and finally were convinced the room was clean.
“Turn the light off now,” Hender warned with a soft, sing-song voice.
“Hender’s right,” Nell said.
They doused their lights immediately and gathered behind Kuzu, who was peering through the window at the dark metropolis.
Glowing swarms of bugs and iridescent eight-legged “rats” charged up the street, followed by giant spigers with fluorescing stripes rippling light on their frilled skulls. At several intersections in the distance, they could see spigers clashing and locked in mortal combat, causing grisly pileups like traffic accidents. Henders “trees” had already begun to sprout on the sidewalks, their palmlike branches dangling red and blue fruit over the streets.
“Look, Shueenair,” Kuzu said.
“Oh,” Hender sighed sadly.
“Like home,” Kuzu said in his own language.
The first bloom of Henders clover was visibly spreading, encrusting the streets and buildings, intermingled with patches of glowing colors that Nell recognized as rainbowfire. Great glowing patches of rainbowfire had spread across the high ceiling of the cavern, as well.
Nastia noticed the glowing patches with alarm, remembering the phosphorescent splotches on the walls of an abandoned Soviet uranium mine she had explored a few years ago. It was the scariest place she had ever seen, until now. “Is that uranium?” She pointed at the roof of the cavern.
“No!” Nell said. “It’s a fungus that grows here. It must like eating clover.… They were trying to get it to grow in here, but there was nothing for it to eat before.”
“Nell,” Hender interjected, clasping her shoulder. “Andy is … gone!”
Nell was gutted by the news, finding it difficult to believe. “No! What was he doing here?”
“He didn’t want us to go without him,” Hender said. His fur flickered dark colors as he reached another trembling hand out to her.
Nell gasped as Hender squeezed her hand. “How?” She looked at Galia furiously.
“A ghost got him,” Hender said.
Nell bowed her head, gritting her teeth from the blow of grief that punched her.
Abrams peered through the window on the other side of the apartment overlooking the river. To the right, a waterfall of blue light bounded, formed by water that had percolated through the bedrock from the slopes of Mount Kazar from a reservoir of bioluminescent algae that fed the subterranean cascade. Nastia looked with him through the window. “That waterfall looks like the waves back home in San Diego, when the algae are blooming,” he said.
“There must be bioluminescent organisms in the water,” Nastia said, marveling at the blue cataract.
“It looks like we’re safe here for the time being,” Bear said. “Let’s sit down for a second and get our bearings.”
They sat on the leather couches around the glass coffee table that reflected the waterfall in the window. The headless mule twitched behind the couch where Nastia, Bear, and Dima sat. Nell sat across from them, exhausted and grief-stricken, her eyes glazing over as she stared at the strange machine that continuously balanced on four legs like a foal behind the couch across from her. “That thing’s a robot, right?”
“Yeah,” Nastia said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “It gives me the creeps, too.”
“OK.” Nell nodded.
Abrams reached into a pack on the side of the mule and fished out a fresh Dragon Skin tunic, tossing it to Nell. “There ya go, Rambo. Put that on.”
“Thanks.” Nell pulled on the heavy jersey. “A ghost ripped my shirt off.”
“You did damn good for a civilian,” Abrams said.
“Yeah.” Bear nodded. “And you saved our asses.”
“Da.” Dima smiled. “Thanks.”
Abrams pushed several buttons that snapped open his body armor, and he stepped out of it. “OK, we just lost four men. And it looks like we just lost our only known escape route. What’s our plan?”
Nastia pulled out the city map and unfolded it on the coffee table between them.
Hender sat on the couch and typed into his phone:
The 14th Darkness
26,439 years ago, a long night came again, and sels came together, peacefully this time, at last. Only five were left.
“Write now?” Kuzu chided Hender as he sat beside him.
“The Books are written to remember, when darkness comes,” Hender reminded him, and he finished typing his final entry:
The 15th Darkness
Today, the 15th Darkness came.
Kuzu read it before Hender put the phone back into his belly pack.
Nell pointed at the southwest corner of Sector Six on the blueprint. “We’re here, in the main cavern of the city.”
“Yes. Where is Maxim Dragolovich?” Dima said.
“Do you want to rescue him,” Nell asked. “Or kill him?”
“I want to capture him,” Dima said. “And bring him back alive.”
Nell laughed, weeping. “So this whole thing is partially your fault,” she said. “Maxim said the government was persecuting him.” She shook her head weakly. “Though I think he was probably insane already, too.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Dima said.
“He was mad,” Galia said sadly. “But they drove him mad.”
Nell pointed at the dormitory inside the hospital sector, which was located on the opposite corner of the map from where they were. “Maxim is trapped here on the second floor of this hospital,” she said. “He was trying to turn on the electrical plant up here.” She pointed to Sector Four. “His men were seconds away from pushing the button and feeding this place with perpetual power. Can you imagine what would have happened if they had succeeded?”
“What, Nell?” Kuzu asked.
“With light and steam and heat down here…”
“Yes?” Kuzu’s deep voice vibrated the air. Purple sparks flashed in his blackened fur like lightning in a storm cloud.
The others regarded him apprehensively.
“The Henders ecosystem would explode, swiftly multiplying until it found a way to spread to the surface, Kuzu,” Nell said. “And kill us all.”
“Oh.”
“As it is, they have already infested the sectors between Maxim and the power plant,” Nell said, pointing. “They’re the only thing now that is stopping him, thank God. He’s trapped and surrounded.”
Galia looked pale, staring inwardly, his shoulders falling. “He was a great man, a great hero. You have no idea.”
“He may have been. I’m sure he was,” Nell said. “But he might be the greatest villain in human history, Mr. Sokolof.”
“They have more blood on their hands than all the villains of the world,” Galia scoffed with a ragged grimace of irony.
“You still don’t understand, do you?” Nell asked. “If any Henders species reaches the surface, not one flower or insect will survive longer than a few more decades on any continent on the face of the Earth. The entire world will look.… like this.”
“I have bad news,” Nastia said. “It is believed, by Russian authorities, that the railway line we just set charges in was completed, after all. It may still connect all the way to Metro-Two in Moscow, and from there may well reach points throughout Eastern Europe. I believe I am authorized to tell you this now, considering our situation. It is a secret that the Russian government did not want to reveal, even to this small group, unless it was absolutely necessary. But now that Sector Seven has been breached, you must know. Unless we detonate charges in the train tunnel immediately—”
“Shit!” Bear said.
“They’re set to go off in less than seven hours now,” Abrams said.
“Those incendiary grenades have probably burned out, man,” Bear said. “Those things can move now! There’s nothing stopping them!”
Abrams exchanged the heavy lithium battery pack of the XOS suit with a fresh one. “There’s enough poison gas in that tunnel to choke a herd of wildebeests.”
“Like what?” Nell asked. “What kind of gas?”
“I threw in a cocktail of everything from tear gas to chlorine to tabun gas.”
“Great,” Nell said. “Tabun works only on mammals, tear gas probably won’t have any effect on Henders organisms, but—chlorine gas, you said? That’s good. That should work. But it buys us only a little time before it is dispersed and no longer lethal.”
“It’s a tunnel. It’ll take a while to disperse,” Abrams said.
“You guys killed a spiger, too,” Nell said. “That’s good. That should occupy the predators for a while and keep them from moving on.”
“Yes,” Hender agreed.
“How can we get to the charges in the train tunnel to set them off sooner?” Dima hissed. “With all that poison gas in the tunnel now?”
“Maybe we can rig explosives to one of our flying bots,” Abrams suggested. “And control it remotely from here?”
“Yes! We could use the tunnel we just came through,” said Dima. “That spiger left the door open behind us.” As he pointed, a sound like a battering ram shook the building, making them all jump out of their seats, coming from the bedroom.
“What is that?” Galia cried.
Abrams and Bear grabbed their guns and the others ran behind them. They opened the door behind the bed and heard a pounding and scraping sound squealing against the dented hatch on the other side.
“F*ck,” Abrams said. “That spiger followed us!”
A shattering blast hit the door, bending the thick steel.
“No way it can get through,” Bear said.
Kuzu laughed deeply. “Spiger’s stuck!”
Dima looked at Nell. “OK, so there goes any chance of sending an ROV from here.”
“Let’s get out of here, and close this door, too,” Nell said.
They retreated to the living room again, and Nell waved them back to the map on the table. “OK, let’s look at this.”
“There must be another way,” Nastia agreed.
Kuzu sat next to Hender as the others gathered around the table. The large sel felt his energy surging as the symbiants that had migrated off the spiger into his fur now separated and multiplied at a rapid rate, colonizing his body. His skin could breathe again as they exfoliated it. He whispered to Hender in his own language. “Listen to me, Shueenair. Ferrell killed Andy and the other human. And he tried to kill me, too!”
Hender replied in Kuzu’s tongue. “You did not kill Andy, did you, Kuzu?”
“No! I would not kill Andy.”
“Are you lying?”
“You only ask that because they have lied to us so many times. They will try to kill us, too. This is their chance. But it is also ours! It need not be the last darkness. If you follow me now, the whole world will be ours.”
Nastia suddenly screamed, startling everyone.
Behind the couch where she was sitting, the hooded head of a ghost octopus reared up on the mechanical mule where a real mule’s head would have been. Dima used his dog whistle to back the mule away from the couch, but the muscles of the ghost had encased the robot’s legs and fought its firing servos for control.
Kuzu seized the opportunity and sprang over the couch, landing on the far side of the mule. With four hands working at blinding speed, he pulled two handfuls of magnesium flares from under the ghost and then, from a compartment in the mule’s side, grabbed an explosives pack like the one Ferrell had carried into the train tunnel.
The ghost on the robot’s back turned its snail-head toward Kuzu and shot ropes at two of Kuzu’s hands, immobilizing them. Without breaking his rhythm, Kuzu used two other hands to pick up a combat knife, unsheathe it, and slice the ghost’s ropes. Then he put the knife in another pack and slung it over one shoulder, backing away. He snagged his bow and quiver where he had set them near the stairs and shouted, “Shueenair!”
“No!” Hender replied.
The others watched, confused, as Kuzu’s fur flushed red.
“Then die!” Kuzu roared in English.
And the sel sprang down the stairway to the front door.
Bear jumped up and shot the ghost octopus on the mule’s back twice in the head with a pistol. It drooped and slid off the side of the robot as Bear followed Dima down the stairs after Kuzu, who was already gone, the front door wide open to the street.
Dima saw Kuzu on the front steps throwing a lit flare into the road in front of them, and Bear emptied his Glock pistol at the sel; but Kuzu became a shadow in the same instant as he darted up the street to the right, weaving against the flow of creatures.
The flare burned in front of the building and drew emerald swarms down from the tall buildings as Dima and Bear jumped back inside and slammed the door.
“Crazy mother!” Bear said.
Dima groaned as they both ran upstairs. “What in the hell is he doing?”
Nastia watched through the front window with Russian LOMO night-vision binoculars. She barely caught Kuzu galloping on four legs along the side of a building up the street, before she lost him.
“Ferrell tried to kill Kuzu,” Hender told Nell. “And he killed Andy, too!”
“What?” Abrams said.
Galia bowed his head. “No,” he sighed.
“I can’t believe that,” said Bear.
“Hender!” Nell said. “Why didn’t you tell us before?”
“Kuzu just told me,” Hender said.
Nell took one of Hender’s shaking hands. “I’m sorry.”
“How do we know this one’s telling the truth?” Bear asked.
“Hender never lies,” Nell said.
“The other one lied!” Bear said.
“Because he thought we were trying to kill him!” Nell said. “Because one of us lied to him!”
“Someone must have gotten to Ferrell,” Abrams said. “With a bribe, or blackmail, or something. Jesus!”
“And a threat, too, probably,” Galia said.
“I guess you never know who it’s going to be,” Bear said.
“Sure you can.” Dima spit. “The American!”
“I’m surprised it wasn’t one of you bloody Russians,” Galia said.
“Hey, this isn’t the time or place,” Abrams said. “We’re in this together, right? And you’re all a*sholes.”
“Kuzu said you’re going to kill us,” Hender said. “Kuzu said that’s why you brought us here. Are you going to kill me?”
They turned to the sel as the colors on his coat muted to blue and black, fading almost invisibly into the couch as they looked at him.
“No, dude, we’re not gonna kill you,” Abrams said, reaching out to shake his hand.
Hender reached out and took it uncertainly.
“Never, Hender!” Nastia said, extending her hand, too.
“Please help us, Hender,” Nell said with a reassuring squeeze of his other hand.
“Da! We all need each other now.” Dima took his fourth hand as he became visible again.
Hender shook the four humans’ hands. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,” he said to each.
“So what can we do, then, Nell?” Bear asked. “How do we get out of here?”
Nell pointed back to the map. “If we can get through this part of the city to the farm—less than two hundred yards away—we should be able to make it to the palace from there unharmed.”
“Oh, man,” Bear said, shaking his head.
“Through that shit?” Abrams asked. “I don’t know.”
“And from the palace we can send an ROV down the passageway I took to the train tunnel and detonate the explosives to seal it off. We have to try!” Nell said.
“That’s crazy,” Bear said.
“Do you have a better suggestion?” Dima asked.
“Is that possible?” Nastia asked. “Can you send a robot that far through solid rock by remote control?”
“Yeah,” Abrams said. “The Dalek can drop signal boosters along the way. If it can get through the ghosts, it can definitely go the distance.”
“But what then?” asked Nastia.
“Well,” Nell said. “If we can get to the palace … there might be a way we can escape from there.”
“How?” Abrams asked.
“By gondola. Through Pandemonium.”
Abrams laughed at her dark humor.
“She’s not joking,” Galia said.
“Pandemonium?” Abrams frowned.
“It’s another vast chamber that adjoins the palace,” Nell said, motioning with her hand off the edge of the table. “That way. It’s not on this map, but it’s where the ghosts come from. Stalin built a gondola that crosses the giant lake there. It may be our only way out.”
“Shit,” Bear said. “That’s crazy!”
“We tried to fix it,” Galia said. He shook his head. “But it would be very, very risky.”
“Then it’s true,” Nastia muttered.
Nell looked at her. “What?”
“There were some cryptic lines I came across by Trofim Lysenko in a letter to my grandmother. They referred to ‘monsters marvelous and fearful to behold in the depths of the Earth.’”
“He was right,” Nell said. “We found his journal, I think, in a drawer of Stalin’s desk. He may have been sent here to help set up the farm. I’ll show you, when we get there.”
“You say you fixed the gondola, Mr. Sokolof?” asked Abrams.
“The motor runs. But the pylons … one of them has partially collapsed over the lake.” He shook his silver-haired head grimly. “And the creatures there pose an even greater danger. We decided it was too risky to give it a trial run.” Galia eyed the others now with large, sunken eyes. “What about Maxim, then?”
“I hate to break it to you, friend, but there’s no way Maxim Dragolovich is getting out of here,” said Abrams. “I mean, I’m sure you’d love to have his head on a flaming pike, but we can’t risk it and we don’t have time.”
“He wants to rescue Maxim Dragolovich,” Dima said. “I want his head on a flaming pike.”
“Oh, sorry,” Abrams said. “Either way.”
“Hender.” Nell turned to the sel. “What do you think? Is there any way we can get to this gate? It leads to the farm, where we should be safe. We just need to go two hundred yards up the street outside. The others have armor. I have this jersey. Can we make it?”
Hender frowned, looking at Nell, and he shook his head. “No. The others will make it, maybe. But you won’t make it, Nell.”
“We have less than six hours before they seal the way we came in,” Abrams said. “And then flood this place with mustard gas, or whatever they’re planning to do.”
“We can’t go back anyway,” Bear scoffed.
“I agree,” Nastia said, pushing her bobbed black hair back from her tense brow. “I don’t trust them, either. They might not even open that door for us, anyway. They let me know secrets I’ve been trying to find out for twenty-five years. That alone makes me nervous. They may have lured us all here just to seal the city and exterminate the hendros. And us along with them.”
“That’s crazy talk,” Abrams said. “Someone must have bribed Ferrell. Unless he just went nuts.”
“We have to make it to the farm, Hender,” Nell said.
Hender bowed his head and closed his large eyes. “Let me think.”
The others looked at one another as the sel rose from the couch and sat on the carpet before the fireplace, holding four hands up at them as he folded his three-jointed limbs against himself like an Egyptian scarab. His coat began pulsing pink in slowing waves until his fur turned black that pulsed yellow about once a minute.
Bear whispered: “What’s he doing?”
Nell shrugged, having never witnessed this behavior. “I don’t know.”
05:15:40
Kuzu sprang on four legs, leaping like a Hindu Sagittarius clutching a three-handed bow. He blended into the façades of the buildings as he crossed the city, throwing flares down side streets to create diversions and downing two young spigers with his bow to draw off predators.
The nants on the sel’s body now counterattacked insect predators, provoking them to spray warning pheromones that further protected him. Kuzu felt his energy increasing with each stride as oxygen enriched his copper-based blood. The memories and reflexes of his entire life’s experience returned to him as he ran and leaped and bounced off walls, swinging from lampposts, flipping, skidding, rolling, cutting, spinning, and sprinting with a practiced, inspired physicality that would seem mystical to all but the most skilled human athletes. Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson practiced moving for twenty years to reach their astonishing level of prowess. Kuzu had practiced for ninety thousand years. What he could do was magic to human beings.
He chose the most direct route to the hospital and followed the city’s map imprinted in his mind’s eye. Memorizing terrain was an essential skill on his native land. As he passed each cross street, Kuzu noted the star-shaped tower in the center of the dark city. Its glowing statues of humans peered over the streets like blind sentinels. The sides of the Star Tower were illuminated by masses of wasps and drill-worms in colorful nurseries whose steady, humming drone filled the air. The skyscraper had been turned into a giant hive, and it pleased Kuzu.
When Kuzu approached the door to Sector Two, he found a crushed truck stuck in the half-closed gate. He jumped onto the vehicle’s roof and crawled through the gate, noting that the truck’s windshield had been gouged open by spigers. The cab’s doors were open, and there was no trace of humans except for their guns and some clothing scattered on the street ahead. He picked up a Kalashnikov and slung it over one of his shoulders.
Then he padded up the street on three legs in the dark, his eyes attuned to the meager light emanating from a side street up ahead on the right. He turned the corner to the open gate of Sector Three just as a horde of brown rats stampeded in the other direction. The large sel stretched and blended against the wall as the squeaking mammals passed him, chased by a wave of glowing Henders rats that launched over their mammalian counterparts, tackling them to the ground.
As the massacre of the mammals ensued, a cloud of bugs arrived, spraying an attack pheromone that signaled a feeding frenzy, and carnage rained from the sky over the screaming rodents.
Kuzu glided on four feet along the south wall and through the gate, sneaking down the street until he jumped onto the roof of a crashed limo and leapfrogged to another, as if between stones in a river.
He launched through the air and landed on the hospital steps, which were illuminated by a dimly burning light in the foyer. He slipped invisibly up them and through the wide-open front door.