The Descent Part 40

Walker was fearless, running alongside the wall and firing at the scampering hadal. She was making for the waterfall, and Ali guessed it was the sound that was her compa.s.s. But the stone grew slick with spray or the holds were polished off or Walker's bullets were striking the mark. She fell. Walker and his men closed in around her, and all Ali could see were eruptions of light from muzzle flash.

Dazed from the kick, Ali crawled to her feet and started over to the cl.u.s.ter of excited soldiers. She understood from their jubilation that this was the first live hadal any of them had ever seen, much less fought. Walker's crack team of mercenaries were no more familiar with the enemy than she was.

'Back to the boats,' Walker told her.

'What are you going to do?'

'They've taken our cylinders,' he said.

'You're going in there?'

'Not until we've pacified the waterfall.'

She saw soldiers prepping the bigger miniguns mounted to their rafts. They were eager and grim, and she dreaded their enthusiasm. From her pa.s.sages through African civil wars, Ali knew firsthand that once the juggernaut got loose, it was irrevocable. This was happening too quickly. She wanted Ike here, someone who knew the territory and could measure the colonel's hot backlash. 'But those two boys are still inside.'

'Madam,' Walker answered, 'this is a military affair.' He motioned, and one of the mercenaries escorted her by the arm to where the last of the scientists were entering their boats. Ali clambered aboard and they pushed off from sh.o.r.e and watched the show at a distance.

Walker trained all their spotlights on the waterfall, illuminating the tall column so that it looked like a vast gla.s.s dragon clinging to the rock, respirating. He directed them to open fire into the water itself.

Ali was reminded of the king who tried to order the ocean's waves to stop. The water swallowed their bullets. The white noise devoured their gunfire, turning it into strings of snapping firecrackers. They laid on with their gunfire, and the water tore open in liquid gouts, only to heal instantly. Some of the special uranium-tipped Lucifer rounds struck the surrounding walls, clawing divots in the stone. A soldier fired a rocket into the bowels of the fall, and the trunk belched outward, revealing a nebulous gap inside. Moments later the gap sealed shut as more water poured down.

Then the waterfall began to bleed.

Under potent spotlight beams, the waters hemorrhaged. The tributary bloomed red, and the color fanned unevenly to midriver and carried downstream. Ali thought that if the gunfire didn't draw Ike, surely the blood trail would. She was frightened by the magnitude of what Walker had done. Gunning down the murderous hadal was one thing. But he had, seemingly, just opened the veins of a force of nature. He had unleashed something here, she could feel it.

'What in G.o.d's name was inside there?' someone gasped.

Walker deployed his soldiers with hand signals. Sleek in their survival suits, they flanked the waterfall, scurrying like insects. The rifles in their hands were remarkably still and steady, and each soldier was little more than the moving parts of his weapon. Half of Walker's contingent entered the mist from each side of the tributary. While the scientists watched from bobbing rafts, the other half zeroed in on the waterfall, ready to pump more rounds into it.

Several minutes pa.s.sed. A man reappeared, glistening in his amphibian neoprene. He shouted, 'All clear!'

'What about the cylinders?' Walker yelled to him.

The soldier said, 'In here,' and Walker and the rest of his men got off their bellies and went into the waterfall without a word to their charges.

At last the scientists paddled back to sh.o.r.e. Some were terrified that more hadals might come leaping at them, or shied from the blood they'd seen and stayed in the rafts. A handful went to the dead hadal for a closer look, Ali included. Little remained. The bullets had all but turned the creature inside out.

Ali went with five others inside the waterfall. Since the spray had already soaked her hair, she didn't bother pulling her hood up. There was the slightest of trails hugging the wall, and as they squeezed along it above the pool of water, the waterfall became a veil backlit by the spotlights. Deeper, the spotlights turned to liquid orbs, and finally the waterfall was too thick to allow any light. Its noise m.u.f.fled all sounds from the outside. Ali turned on her headlamp and kept edging between the water and rock. They reached a globular grotto inside.

All three of their missing cylinders lay by the entrance, heaped with hundreds of yards of thick cable. Fully loaded, each of the cylinders weighed over four tons; it must have taken enormous effort to drag them into this hiding place. Two of the cables, Ali saw, ran upward into the waterfall. That suggested their communications lines might be intact.

Under the badly abraded black stencil declaring HELIOS, the name NASA surfaced in ghostly letters along one cylinder's side. The outer sheathing was pitted and gashed with bullet and shrapnel tracks, but was unruptured. A soldier kept clearing his eyes of water spray as he worked on opening its hatch door. The hadals had tried to force entry with boulders and iron rods, but had only managed to break off many of the thick bolts. The hatches were all in place. Ali climbed around the ma.s.s of cables and saw that the first body she came across was Walker's volunteer, the big teenager from San Antonio. They had torn his throat out by hand. She braced herself for more carnage.

Deeper in, Walker's men had laid chemical lights on ledges and stuck them into niches in the wall, casting a green pall through the entire chamber. Smoke from explosions hung like wet fog. The soldiers were circulating among the dead. Ali blinked quickly at the dense piles of bone and flesh, and raised her eyes to quell her sickness. There were many bodies in here. In the green light, the walls appeared to be sweating with humidity, but the sheen was blood. It was everywhere.

'Watch the broken bone ends,' one of the physicians warned her. 'Poke yourself on one of those, you could get a nasty infection.'

Ali forced herself to look down, if only to place her feet. Limbs lay scattered. The worst of it were the hands, beseeching.

Several soldiers glanced over at Ali with great hollows for eyes. Not a trace of their earlier zeal remained. She was drawn to their contrition, thinking they were appalled by their deed. But it was more awful than that.

'They're all females,' muttered a soldier.

'And kids.'

Ali had to look closer than she wanted to, past the painted flesh and the beetle-browed faces. Only minutes before, they had been a roomful of people outwaiting the humans outside. She had to look for their s.e.x and their fragility, and what the soldiers said was true.

'b.i.t.c.hes and sp.a.w.n,' one jived, trying to vitiate the shame. But there were no takers. They didn't like this: no weapons, not a single male. A slaughter of innocents.

Above them, a soldier appeared at the mouth of a secondary chamber and began waving his arm and shouting. It was impossible to hear him with the waterfall behind them, but Ali overheard a nearby walkie-talkie. 'Sierra Victor, this is Fox One. Colonel,' an excited voice reported, 'we got live ones. What d'you want us to do?'

Ali saw Walker straighten from among the dead and reach for his own walkie-talkie, and she guessed what his command would be. He had already lost three men. For the sake of conservation, he would simply order the soldiers to finish the job. Walker lifted the walkie-talkie to his mouth. 'Wait!' she yelled, and rushed down to him.

She could tell he knew her intent. 'Sister,' he greeted.

'Don't do it,' she said.

'You should go outside with the others,' he told her.

'No.'

Their impa.s.se might have escalated. But at that moment a man bellowed from the entrance and everyone turned. It was Ike, standing on top of the cylinders, the water sheeting from him. 'What have you done?'

Hands lifted in disbelief, he descended from the cylinders. They watched him come to a body, and kneel. He set his shotgun to one side. Grasping the shoulders, he lifted her partway from the ground and the head lolled, white hair kinky around the horns, teeth bared. The teeth had been filed to sharp points.

Ike was gentle. He brought the head upright and looked at the face and smelled behind her ear, then laid her flat again.

Next to her lay a hadal infant, and he carefully cradled it in his arms as if it were still alive. 'You have no idea what you've done,' he groaned to the mercenaries.

'This is Sierra Victor, Fox One,' Walker murmured into the walkie-talkie. His hand was cupped to it, but Ali heard him. 'Open fire.'

'What are you doing?' she cried, and grabbed the radio from the colonel. Ali fumbled with the transmit b.u.t.ton. 'You hold your fire,' she said, and added, 'd.a.m.n you.'

She let go of the transmit b.u.t.ton and they heard a small confused voice saying, 'Colonel, repeat. Colonel?' Walker made no effort to wrestle back the walkie-talkie.

'We didn't know,' one boy said to Ike.

'You weren't here, man,' said another. 'You didn't see what they done to Tommy. And look at A-Z. Tore his throat out.'

'What did you expect?' Ike roared at them. They grew subdued. Ali had never seen him ferocious before. And where did this voice come from?

'Their babies?' Ike thundered.

They backed away from him.

'They were hadals,' said Walker.

'Yes,' Ike said. He held the shattered child at arm's length and searched the small face, then laid the body against his heart. He picked up his shotgun and stood.

'They're beasts, Crockett.' Walker spoke loudly for everyone to hear. 'They cost us three men. They stole our cylinders and would have opened them. If we hadn't attacked, they would have looted our supplies and that would have been our death.'

'This,' Ike said, clutching the dead child, 'this is your death.'

'We are deep beyond -' Walker started.

'You've killed yourselves,' Ike said more quietly.

'Enough, Crockett. Join the human race. Or go back to them.'

The walkie-talkie in Ali's hand spoke up again, and she held it up for Ike to hear as well. 'They're starting to move around. Say again. Should we open fire or not?'

Walker s.n.a.t.c.hed the walkie-talkie from her, but Ike was equally fast. Without hesitation, he pointed his sawed-off gun at the colonel's face. Walker's mouth twisted in his beard.

'Give me that baby,' she said to Ike, and took the little body. 'We have other things to do. Don't we, Colonel?'

Walker looked at her, eyes huge with rage. He made up his mind. 'Hold your fire,' he snarled into the walkie-talkie. 'We're coming for a look.'

The stone floor buckled underfoot, and she had to skirt deep plunge holes. They climbed a slick incline to the higher, smaller chamber. The deadly hail of gunfire had not reached this far except as ricochets, which had done damage enough. They pa.s.sed several more bodies before gaining the high floor.

The survivors were huddled in a pocket, and they seemed able to feel the light beams against their skin. Ali counted seven of them, two very young. They were mute, moving only when someone trained a headlamp on them for too long. 'No more?' Ike asked the soldiers guarding them.

'Them. They tried to get away.' The man indicated another eleven or twelve, sprawled near a duct.

The hadals kept their faces away from the light, and the mothers sheltered their young. Their flesh gleamed. The markings and scars undulated as their muscles shifted.

'Are they fatties, or what?' a mercenary said to Walker.

Several of the females were indeed obese. More correctly, they were steatopygic, with enormous surpluses of fat in their b.u.t.tocks and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. To Ali's eye, they were identical to Neolithic Venuses carved from stone or painted on walls. They were magnificent in their size and decoration, and their greased and plaited hair. Here and there, Ali caught sight of the apelike brows and low foreheads, and again it was hard to reconcile them as quite human.

'These are sacred,' Ike said. 'They're consecrated.'

'You make them sound like vestal virgins,' Walker scoffed.

'It's just the opposite. These are their breeders. The pregnant and new mothers. Their infants and children. They know their species is going extinct. These are their racial treasure. Once the women conceive, they're brought into communal coveys like this. It's like living in a harem.' He added, 'Or a nunnery. They're cared for and watched over and honored.'

'Is there a point to this?'

'Hadals are nomadic. They make seasonal rounds. When they move, each tribe keeps its women in the center of the line for protection.'

'Some protection,' a soldier spoke up. 'We just turned their next generation into hamburger.'

Ike didn't reply.

'Wait,' said Walker. 'You're saying we intersected the middle of their line?'

Ike nodded.

'Which means the males are off to either end?'

'Luck,' Ike said. 'Bad luck. I don't think we want to be here when they catch up.'

'All right,' Walker said. 'You've had your look. Let's get this over with.'

Instead, Ike walked into the midst of the hadals.

Ali couldn't hear Ike's words distinctly, but heard the rise and fall of his tone and occasional tongue clicks. The females responded with surprise, and so did the soldiers aiming their rifles at them. Walker cut a glance at Ali, and suddenly she feared for Ike's life. 'If even one tries to run,' Walker told his men, 'you are to open fire on the whole pack.'

'But the Cap's in there,' a boy said.

'Full auto,' Walker warned grimly.

Ali left Walker's side and went out to Ike, placing herself in the line of fire. 'Go back,' Ike whispered.

'I'm not doing this for you,' she lied. 'It's for them.'

Hands reached up to touch Ike and her. The palms were rough, the nails broken and encrusted. Ike hunkered among them, and Ali let different ones grab her hands and smell her. His claim mark was of special interest. One wall-eyed ancient held on to his arm. She stroked the scarified nodes and questioned him. When Ike answered her, she drew away with revulsion, it seemed. She whispered to the others, who grew agitated and scrambled to get distance from him. Still perched on his toes, Ike hung his head. He tried another few phrases, and their fright only increased.

'What are you doing?' Ali asked. 'What did you tell them?'

'My hadal name,' said Ike.

'But you said it was forbidden to speak it out loud.'

'It was, until I left the People. I wanted to find out how bad things really are with me.'

'They know you?'

'They know about me.'

From the hadals' loathing, it was clear his reputation was odious. Even the children were afraid of him. 'This isn't good,' Ike said, eyeing the soldiers. 'We can't stay here. And if we leave -'

The walkie-talkie announced that two of the cylinders had been opened and Shoat had a communications line in operation. Ali could see by his face that Walker wanted to be shed of this business. 'Enough,' Walker said.

'Just leave them,' Ali said to him.

'I'm a man who lives by his word,' Walker replied. 'It was your friend Crockett who declared the policy. No live catches.'

'Colonel,' Ike said, 'killing the hadal is one thing. But I've got a human in this bunch. Shoot her down, and that would be murder, wouldn't it?'

Ali thought he was bluffing to buy time, or else talking about her. But he reached among the hadals and grabbed the arm of a creature who had been hiding behind the others. She gave a shriek and bit him, but Ike dragged her out, pinning her arms and hoisting her free. Ali had no chance to see her. The others clutched at her legs, and Ike kicked at them and backed away. 'Move,' he grunted to Ali. 'Run while we can.'

The hadals set up a piercing wail. Ali was certain they were about to rush after Ike and whatever it was he'd just kidnapped from them. 'Move,' shouted Ike, and she ran to the soldiers, who opened a way for her and Ike and his catch. She tripped and fell. Ike stumbled across her.

'In the name of the Father,' Walker intoned. 'Light 'em up.'

The soldiers opened fire on the survivors. The noise was deafening in the small chamber, and Ali closed her ears with both palms. The killing lasted less than twelve seconds. There were a few mop-up shots, then the gunfire was over and the room stank with gas vented from their guns. Ali heard a woman still screaming, and thought they'd wounded one or were torturing her.

'This way.' A soldier grabbed her. He was taking care of her. She knew him from his confessions, Calvino, an Italian stallion. His sins had been a pregnant girlfriend, a theft, little more.