The beams of light crisscrossed in the dark. The sounds of the animals scurrying and hissing competed with the heavy footsteps of the men, shouts of warning and the booming sound of gunfire echoing through the chamber.
By now, Danielle had crawled back to the wall. Her leg was cramping, the muscles burning from the pain. She pulled out a flare and threw it across the plaza. The flash of the magnesium blinded at first but as the crimson light filled the cave, it exposed one shape sliding into the lake, another animal pulling its damaged body across the stone of the plaza and a third still on the ceiling, scampering away from the scene of the battle, its claws hooking into the crags in the cave’s roof, its back to the lake below.
“Hawker!” Danielle shouted, pointing to the ceiling.
Hawker twisted, sighted the creature and fired. It shrieked in pain—the voice of some tropical bird amplified a thousand times over. Its hind legs lost their grip and it dangled for a second as Hawker fired again. Hit a second time, the animal fell toward the lake, howling in agony. A stream of broken ceiling fragments followed it down as it crashed into the water with a thunderous splash.
Hawker now understood what had happened. The animals had come out of the water, gone up the side walls and stalked the humans from their inverted positions on the ceiling above. The clicking noise was the sound of the animals’ claws grabbing and releasing the stone; the scraping, their stiff bodies sliding between the stalactites and other formations.
He scanned the ragged surface above. Stalactites and other projections guarded the pockmarked surface, making it impossible to search quickly or completely from a single location. His slid sideways, craning his neck around. Twenty feet away McCarter did the same, while Danielle threw out another flare.
As the others searched the ceiling, Verhoven got back on his feet. He’d landed on his wounded hand and it throbbed with a pain beyond anything he could have imagined. The tape holding it to the shotgun had been partially torn, but Verhoven managed to load one more shell before ripping the hand angrily from the pump. He scanned the plaza around him and then glanced briefly at the ceiling above. With no sign of danger, he turned his attention to the cause of his pain; the injured animal wriggling spastically on its side, desperately trying to drag itself to the lake.
Verhoven walked toward it, cursing as he struggled to shake loose the remaining tape. When he reached the creature, he aimed carefully and then blasted a slug through its skull. The thing slumped instantly to the floor.
With great satisfaction, Verhoven lowered the Mossberg. The others were still searching the ceiling. He made another quick scan himself and then a smirk came out. “They’re gone,” he shouted, the buoyancy of a conqueror in his voice. “Dead or gone, take your pick.”
Verhoven had been in more firefights than he could count. Each one had its own unique pace; this battle was no different. With one animal dead, and the others gone, wounded and bleeding back into the lake, he could feel the energy of the fight dissipating already, blowing past like a storm on the wind. He took a final look around, ground level and roof above. They were in the clear. He walked back to Danielle.
“You all right?”
Danielle was sitting, first-aid kit by her side, pouring hydrogen peroxide on the slash across her calf. “I’ll live,” she said, as the peroxide bubbled and foamed.
Verhoven turned to where McCarter and Hawker were systematically checking the ceiling. “Give it up,” Verhoven shouted. “You’re liable to get hurt swinging your necks around like a bunch of bloody pelicans.”
McCarter paused in his search, took a few more peeks, then lowered his rifle and started back toward the others. But beyond his position, Hawker continued checking the deeper part of the cave, systematically scanning the shadows between the chandeliers of hanging stone.
Verhoven laughed. “Paranoid,” he said.
He turned back to Danielle, examining her injury. “A good war wound, that. Make you a nice scar.” Danielle glared at him and Verhoven laughed again, more animated than any of them had seen.
On his way back to the others, McCarter stopped for a closer look at the animal that Verhoven had killed. It lay on its side, very much dead, but still twitching in places. Dark fluids oozed from its wounds and an oddly pungent odor wafted from its body. The smell reminded McCarter of rotting vegetables. At close range the scent was strong enough to compete with the sulfur of the cave.
This animal was smaller than the one that had attacked them on the chain the night before. Maybe half the size. It looked sort of gangly and long in the limbs, almost like a juvenile. He guessed its weight at two hundred pounds, though it had seemed much larger as it dropped toward them.
He examined what was left of its head, damaged badly by the shotgun blast that had killed it, a blast that would have disintegrated a human skull. The head was large in proportion to the animal’s size, and very angular, almost wedge-shaped, narrowing sharply at the front. Its remaining eye was unlidded, glistening beneath a viscous gel, like a polished, wet stone. It was black from head to toe, with stripes of a slightly lighter shade that were mostly visible as differently textured skin. The surface of the skin itself was slick with some type of dark secretion, which it seemed to be oozing from millions of tiny pores.
Whatever it was, it was unlike anything McCarter had ever seen or heard of. Even the shape was foreign. The body was all angles, like overlapping plates. The arms and legs were thick, but the joints were simple and exposed, like hinges on a door, one slot for the lower half and one slot for the upper. Muscular sinew could be seen where they bent, like bundled wires in a conduit. The severely pinched neck seemed almost insectlike and behind it stood distinct rows of stiff, bristlelike hairs that grew in a converging V-shaped pattern.
An evil-looking thing, McCarter thought, with all the tools of a predator: stereoscopic vision, a sleek, strong body, claws that resembled angled steel blades. Its mouth hung open on a set of powerfully muscled jaws and was filled with teeth like sharpened railroad spikes.
McCarter looked up toward the ceiling, upon which the animals had been crawling. The image of that ancient Mayan painting came to him, humans standing erect on the ground, blithely unaware of the Xibalbans directly beneath them, walking inverted with their feet on the underside of the earth’s surface. If I knew something like this lived down here, he thought, I’d consider this the underworld too.
As he shook off a chill, Danielle and Verhoven came up beside him, gawking at the thing, just as he had. Danielle seemed especially interested in the entry wounds from Verhoven’s shot. The damage resembled a pane of glass punctured by an errant baseball, with long fissures radiating from the wounds.
With the barrel of her rifle, Danielle reached out and pushed on the body. It was stiff. She tapped on it. It almost sounded hollow. “An exoskeleton,” she said. “Bones on the outside. Large animals don’t grow like this. Only insects and crustaceans.”
“It’s a damn gogga, then,” Verhoven said, using the Afrikaner slang for crawling bugs.
McCarter nudged Verhoven and pointed out a broad purple smear on his jacket, where the animal had hit him. The fibers of the coat were fraying and discolored, as if the smear was corrosive.
“Some kind of secretion,” Danielle said. “It’s all over the body of this one.”
As Verhoven pulled off the field jacket and tossed it aside, Danielle leaned closer to the animal. “Do you smell that?”
McCarter nodded. “Almost like ammonia,” he said. “I smelled it when the other one attacked us last night. But this is a lot stronger, even though this one is smaller.”
Danielle nodded, looking back toward the pools by the dam. “I was thinking the same thing,” she said. “And I think I know why. Ammonia is a base, an acid neutralizer. I think that’s what this thing is secreting—only, from the way it’s destroying that fabric, I’m guessing it’s a lot stronger than ammonia.”