Few who lived in that area in present day knew of those events in their history. The devastation of the southeast coast of Africa had stunned the world. Still, extreme as the event was, there was a tendency in the United States and Europe to feel like it had taken place far away and life went on, most people unaware of the ticking time bomb deep inside their planet as the various governments didn’t see a need to spread panic and chaos.
That changed abruptly as the Earth’s core shifted slightly and the New Madrid Fault gave way once more. Unfortunately, the area that was sparsely populated less than two hundred years before was now inhabited by several million people.
Seventy miles north of Memphis, where the Mississippi made a sharp bend opposite the town of New Madrid, a hole opened. A hole over twenty miles in diameter, that dropped almost a half-mile down. It took with it a twenty-mile section of the Mississippi River along with the countryside all around.
The mightiest river in North America flowed backwards once more as water surged upstream into the hole. Even before the water overwhelmed them, the majority of the thousands of people who lived and worked there were dead or dying from the devastation of the violent planet below them.
The rest drowned as the Mississippi filled the hole. The ripple effect from the earthquake resonated outward. In St. Louis, to the north, the Arch collapsed. Thousands died as buildings followed.
Like a punch to the solar plexus, America now knew the threat. But still the government refused to release the information that worse was to come.
“How do they stay in the air?” Earhart asked as they circled one of the two suits.
“Something must be built into them,” Dane said. He was looking for any sort of opening. “There’s no blood,” he noted. He reached up and pulled down on the suit with the neck wound. He looked inside. “There’s a body at least,” he said as he saw flesh. And he also saw the reason for no blood — the wound was covered with the same clear material that was on the bodies in the cavern. The wound was capped off by the material but the damage to the flesh at the time of the strike had been too great. “This stuff must have snapped in place when the neck was cut. Pretty effective wound control, except not when you get half your neck cut through. Looks almost human,” he added. He wondered if the Shadow used humans inside the suits to do their bidding.
There was something strange about the body, although Dane couldn’t tell exactly what it was by the little he could see through the wound in the suit. Earhart put her hand in the wound on the other one’s chest. “Feels like the same thing; the wound was covered.”
Dane closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. There had to be a way the armor came off the bodies. Dane opened his eyes and checked the claw hands on the closest one. He noted that the claws could retract back, leaving the armored fingers free to work. The white armor was cool to the touch and judging from where it had been penetrated extremely thin. Yet Dane had seen it resist all blows except those from a Naga Staff.
He noted something on the inside of the left forearm — a small series of slight indentations. Two rows of five. Each indent about the size of a dime. He pointed them out to Earhart.
“What do you think they are?” she asked.
“I think this is an external control pad for the suit,” Dane said. “Ten, one for each number, one through ten.”
“So there’s a code?”
Dane nodded. “Most likely.”
“That doesn’t do us much good.”
Dane rubbed his chin, noting that he had a stubble of beard. He tried to remember the last time he’d taken a warm shower or shaved. “Let’s step back from things for a second and consider what’s going on,” he suggested.
“What do you mean?” Earhart asked.
“You saw Noonan die when your plane went down, yet he shows up here alive — mortally wounded from passage through a portal — but alive. He tells you that you’ll need to get some Valkyrie suits. But that you’ll need to get a Naga Staff in order to do that. So I show up with the Naga Staff. I don’t know why exactly I took it from the Bermuda Triangle Gate other than that I sensed it was the next thing to do.”
“And?” Earhart wasn’t following his thoughts.
“It seems to me—” Dane tried to figure out exactly what it was that was troubling him— “as if there’s a plan to all this. As if we’re being nudged in the right direction, to take the next right steps. Or maybe the wrong steps. I don’t know,” he ended in frustration.
“The Ones Before?” Earhart asked.
“Most likely,” Dane agreed. “They sent my team sergeant to me in the Angkor Gate and helped me there. I’d say they sent Noonan to you the same way.”
“But I saw him die,” Earhart insisted. She turned and looked at the body of her navigator, the face covered with a shirt. “And now he’s died again. How can that be?”
“I saw Robert Frost die and Washington DC destroyed in an atomic war,” Dane said, almost to himself. He felt a tingling along his spine, as if he was very close to something, but it was still just beyond his grasp. The feeling extended to his fingers. He held his hands out as if seeing them for the first time.
He turned to the Valkyrie suit. He ran the fingers of his left hand lightly over the indent keys. He paused, then did it once more. Then he pressed a half-dozen keys in rapid succession. There was a click, then with a hiss, the suit split open, hinged on the right side. A body tumbled out, the head rolling back unnaturally.
“God,” Earhart whispered as she saw the condition of the body. It was like one of those on the slabs — skin gone, covered with the clear material. She looked up at Dane. “How did you do that?”
“I just let my fingers do it,” Dane said, as if that explained it. He was examining the inside of the suit.
“They’re human,” Earhart nudged the body with the toe of her boot. The body was that of a human without its skin, but the muscles were atrophied and it probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds. There were no genitals that they could see.
“Or they use humans,” Dane said.
“Look at this,” Earhart pushed the flopping head slightly with her boot, exposing the right side of the face. There was skin underneath the clear wrap. Unblemished, almost pink skin running from just below the ear to just shy of the nose. “That’s strange, don’t you think?”
Dane went over to the other suit and punched in the same combination. It split open and another body spilled out. This one had unblemished skin on the upper half of its body and Dane knew what he was seeing.
“They’re grafting skin they take off people in the cavern,” he said. He looked at the interior of the helmet. A slightly curved flat surface was on the inside of the ruby eyes. He went back to the first suit.
He backed into the rear half of the suit, stepping up backwards and placing his feet in the heel, six inches above the ground. As soon as he was pressed against the rear, the suit swung close. He felt it press against his skin, conforming. Dane blinked as everything went dark for a second, then the screen came alive with an outside view. He knew he was in technology that was far advanced of what was even on the drawing boards on Earth.
He looked down. He flexed his fingers. When his fingers went back as far as they could go, the claws snapped forward. He bent the tips forward and the claws flipped back. He felt strange, floating above the ground. He tried to swing one leg forward and the entire suit moved him a couple of feet ahead. He did the other leg and it moved forward the same distance.
“Interesting.” He tapped the open code and the suit released him.
“We have the suits,” Earhart said. “Now what?”