The soldiers began talking excitedly among themselves. The one who’d first spotted the reflection was wasting no time. His boots and shirt were already off. “I’m going in,” he said.
He undid his belt, and then tore off his pants and underwear without the slightest hint of modesty.
Susan turned away, blushing. Lang wondered if he should be filming. “Europeans,” he said, laughing.
The naked German stood at the edge of the pool, bringing his arms up as if he might do a swan dive. At the last minute he seemed to decide against it and his friends howled in disappointment. “Looks cold,” he said.
Lang turned his gaze back to the well in front of him. He focused his flashlight on it but didn’t see much, certainly nothing metallic. He picked up his camcorder and positioned it on his shoulder. The spotlight was more powerful than his flashlight.
The German was ready to jump now, feet-first.
Lang ignored him, aimed the camera and switched on the floodlight. For a second, the light reflected off of the water and blinded him, but he quickly changed his aim and the glare went away.
On the dam, the others egged their comrade on.
Lang adjusted his lens and the focus cleared, but all he saw was a trail of minuscule bubbles, like the carbonation in a glass of undisturbed soda water. At the sound of a splash, he looked up.
The mercenary had finally jumped in. Holding his nose, he’d plunged in feet-first, to a roar of delight from his friends. He came up seconds later, exhaling a great burst of spray—which quickly became a scream.
For a moment the others laughed, remembering his comment about the water looking cold, but the scream didn’t stop and the man thrashed around violently, eyes shut, frantically searching for the side of the well. His friends froze in their tracks, confused. When they finally realized his trouble was real, they ran to help him.
The man had reached the edge of the pool now. He tried to pull himself out, but the dam’s polished surface offered nothing to grab on to. The others reached for him, clutching his arms and pulling. But he slipped free, shaking violently and screaming.
“What’s happening to him?” Susan yelled.
The soldiers ignored her. One of them stretched out over the water, grabbed the man by the hair and yanked him back to the edge. The others pulled him out of the water and up onto the dam, where he lay, shuddering and convulsing.
His friends stepped back, looks of horror on their faces; the man’s skin was dissolving, melting away from his body, bloody foam oozing from his legs and waist as the rest of his skin blistered before their eyes.
They began to shout at one another, wiping their hands on shirts and trousers, anything they could find, their own skin burning. One grabbed a canteen and poured its contents onto his hands. “Wasser,” he shouted. The others followed suit, attempting to dilute the corrosive water that had splashed onto them.
As the soldiers frantically washed their hands, they moved away from their comrade, and Susan Briggs caught sight of him for the first time. She fell to her knees and gagged, expecting to be sick. She pulled at her mask, desperate to get it off as she suddenly recalled McCarter talking about a pool of acid. She hadn’t seen it. She hadn’t remembered or made the connection.
Sixty feet away, Lang stood transfixed. He could see the soldier rocking in spasms on the floor, shaking as if an electrical current was running through his body and choking on his own tongue as it swelled in his mouth from the caustic water he’d swallowed.
His friends moved toward him one moment and then away the next. One of them picked up his rifle and aimed it, apparently intending to put the man out of his misery, but another soldier held up a hand to stop him. The convulsions had begun to lessen.
Lang watched almost to the end before he found the strength to shut his eyes and turn away. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes again, focusing on the placid black pool in front of him. This time he saw something else besides the thin trail of bubbles: not gold as the dying soldier had seen, but green. A small green disk; two actually. They were eyes.
CHAPTER 30
A dark shape burst from the water. It slammed into Lang and knocked him backward, sending the camera and his body flying in different directions. As the camcorder crashed to the stone floor its floodlight blew out, bathing the cave in a flash of electric blue.
The others turned at the flash, and in the dim illumination of the remaining lights they saw a shape mauling Lang. It pinned him down, clamping its jaws onto his torso and yanking its head from side to side. As Lang struggled, it reared back and, accompanied by Lang’s screams, tore him completely in half, slinging the top half of his body toward the shocked mercenaries.
That sight jarred them from their trance and, as the black shape charged toward them, in a panic they grabbed for the weapons they’d just cast aside.
Despite the frantic shots sent its way, the thing hit one of the soldiers in full stride, plunging into the lake with the man in its jaws and disappearing. They watched the light on the man’s belt going deeper and then going dark. A trail of bullets followed after it, but to no avail—the beast and the man were gone.
The mercenary who’d been firing backed away from the water’s edge as bloody red foam boiled to the surface. “Is it dead?”
The other soldier looked at the water briefly and then shook his head. It wasn’t dead, but their comrade was. He looked at the seven pools and what remained of Lang’s body. That was enough.
He took off, sprinting down the pathway in a reckless attempt to get out of there, tripping and stumbling in his haste. His eyes flicked from the path ahead, to the exit on the other side of the lake, then to the water beside him.
His friend shouted to him, but he kept running, dashing for the exit, leaping over piles of rock like a hurdler. He seemed as if he might make it, until a surge in the water’s black surface started toward him. The wave closed on him rapidly and the animal burst from the lake, slamming him into the cavern wall and snapping its jaws on his legs like a crocodile taking a water buffalo. Shrieks of agony echoed through the cave, followed only by gurgling sounds as the creature dragged him back into the water and beneath it.
Susan Briggs and the last of the mercenaries remained at the site of the first attack, out on the plaza at the edge of the dam. Susan was on her knees, gasping for air, in the grips of an asthma attack, while the remaining mercenary pulled the blood-covered ELF unit from the lower half of Lang’s torso. He shouted into the device. “We are having an emergency!”
He waited for a reply, and then tried again, holding the switch down with all his might, as if that would somehow boost the signal. “Lang is dead, only me and the girl are left. We have been attacked. We need help.”
He heard nothing. It was hopeless. They were too deep. The signal could not get through.
The mercenary stopped transmitting and switched off his flashlight, backing deeper into the cave, farther from the dam and the lake and directly across the smooth stone from where Susan was struggling.
From this position he scanned the cave, now eerily lit by the unmoving flashlights of the fallen men. At the lake’s edge, a bulky shape was pulling itself free of the water.
Across the plaza, the girl remained on her knees, coughing and wheezing, unaware of the danger. It would go for her and, once it had committed, he would open fire. He placed the radio on the ground beneath his feet and brought both hands to his rifle.
In the shadowy light, the bony, angular thing stalked her. It moved with its belly pressed against the ground, its long limbs folded awkwardly beneath it, its claws quietly clicking with each step. It seemed to move with deliberate caution now, pausing at one point, holding a limb off the floor as if the ground were hot to the touch. It lowered its head to sniff the spot, and then moved around the area for reasons unknown.