? ? ?
The boys and I still reeked of the wonderful stink of fried fish and shrimp, and fried veggies—onion rings and squash and okra—and hush puppies as we gathered around the small table in their room. The Kid had his tablets set up and my old laptop, and we were studying Google Maps and some sat maps from a source known only to the Kid. I had a terrible fear they were classified U.S. government maps, but I didn’t ask and neither did his brother. We were viewing from about a thousand feet aboveground, with the crime scenes and wolf sightings tagged in bright red droplets.
“If this was the work of real wolves,” Eli said, “we could trace out a hunting ground from the sites, but since our wolves can drive around . . .” He let the sentence trail off.
“Put dates to all the sites,” I said, “and see if they form a time-stamp pattern.”
They didn’t. The Kid shook his head, his scraggly hair swinging, and mumbled, “We’re missing something. What what what?” He opened the takeout container and nibbled on a cooling hush puppy. “Got it!”
Leaving the maps in place, he opened another program and drew lines from place to place, some curving, some straight. And when I saw what he was doing, I laughed.
Only one thing connected the kill sites, and that was the canals. The werewolves were traveling to places most easily reached by boat and water. Canals were everywhere along the Gulf of Mexico, some long and straight as rulers for miles and miles, some curved in massive semicircles, some with a rare zigzag like something out of a geometry book. “What’s with that?” Eli asked.
“I had always thought slaves built the canals in the Deep South,” I said. “But that looks like something . . . humans couldn’t do.”
The Kid opened another program and traced one canal, a double canal with a raised area between the waterways like the center line on a road. It entered the gulf to reappear, still in a straight line, on an island out in the deep water. “It’s over a hundred miles long,” he said, his voice low as if he were sharing a secret or revealing a sacred mystery. “Holy freaking ancient aliens, Batman.”
“Do a search on ancient canals,” Eli said.
And when the Kid did, dozens of sites popped up, most related to a single site about the canals. He opened six of the sites simultaneously and arranged his tablets so we could see them all at once. There were prehistoric canals all over the world. And the greatest majority of them were right here, in southern Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida. I got the willies just looking at the numbers of canals and their locations.
The Kid read from one site and paraphrased for us. “Some of them are from the early twentieth-century oil exploration. Probably ones like this and this.” He pointed at some canals that seemed to be of the same width. “But some were there when the Spanish came, and they were old even then. Duuude,” he said softly, using the word almost as an expletive. “These other, older canals have been estimated at seven thousand years old, from before the end of the last ice age. The civilization that built them was considered to be a worldwide, water-going civilization, back when the oceans were five to seven feet lower than now.”
My eyes darted from screen to screen, from miles-long canals in straight lines to what looked like building sites in the marsh, as seen from the air, if the canals had been roads. Like water-going neighborhoods. Eli said, “Huh.”
A few screens later the Kid said, “The civilization—assuming it existed—was either destroyed when a massive ice dam in Canada broke and a wall of water twenty feet high flooded the entire U.S., or when the second Storegga”—he stumbled over the word—“methane gas eruption in Denmark and Iceland caused a subsurface landslide six hundred miles long and forty miles wide. That’s been estimated to have created a mega-supertsunami that swept west and buried the entire East Coast of the U.S. under thirty to a hundred feet of water. Like . . . duuude.”
“So basically, archeologists don’t want to consider a geometry-loving, water-going, water-based, monolith-building, higher civilization, prior to the Egyptians, even though there’s evidence all over the world,” Eli said. He snorted softly. “Worse than bureaucrats.” For Eli that was a major insult.
The Kid said, “In their defense, archeologists are academics. They have to publish papers to keep their jobs and funding, and no one is going to reconsider new evidence or old evidence that contradicts what they already put in print and got paid for.”
“Bureaucrats.”
“Scientists with an agenda. And speaking of which, I got accepted into MIT. I’m looking at a new doctorate. I can start when my parole is up.”