He did not linger there to congratulate himself. He didn’t think the security men would come in after him, but their bullets might. He kept running, barely even looking at this new subterranean environment, until the only sound he could hear was his own pounding heartbeat.
As the initial surge of adrenaline drained away, his legs turned to rubber. He sagged against the smooth wall of the cave and struggled to bring his breathing under control. After a few moments, when he was certain that he was not being pursued, he pushed away from the wall and took his first look at his surroundings.
He had never been in a cave before, but this one was nothing like his expectations. Although the entrance that he and the other laborers had helped uncover in the early days of the expedition, before being confined to the camp, was just large enough to admit one person at a time, the tunnel into the hillside was considerably larger. Moses reckoned that it was big enough to accommodate a truck.
The interior of the cave was illuminated by a chain of drop lights, suspended from pitons that had been hammered into the wall. The bulbs cast their light on bare stone; there were no calcium formations or phosphorescent lichens, no pools of seepage, only dust and dry rock. But there were sounds in the distance, the noise of human activity, deeper underground. Moses resumed his journey.
The passage wended back and forth, descending on a steep grade, and then abruptly opened into an enormous chamber. The incandescent light bulbs revealed only a fraction of the immense cavern, but from what he could see, Moses guessed it might be large enough to contain a football stadium. But that was only the first surprise.
Unlike the passage, this chamber was not empty. The floor was covered in what looked, at first glance, like enormous pillars of white stone.
“Bones,” Moses whispered. Not human bones, but the skeletal remains of much larger animals. Thousands of skeletons, many still adorned with a sheath of desiccated tissue, were piled up deep on the floor of the vast cavern, as far as the eye could see and the electric lights could reveal.
Along one nearby wall, he saw large plastic cargo cases stacked in an orderly row, and nearby a series of folding tables with laptop computers and other electronic devices, but the screens were dark and there was no sign of the research team. As he made a cursory examination of the equipment, Moses realized that someone had cleared a path, leading into the heart of tangled nest of bones. The noise he had heard earlier was coming from somewhere along that path.
The bones rose up on either side of Moses as he advanced toward the disturbance, shrouding the way ahead in shadows, but there was enough ambient light to guide him along. After about forty meters, the path opened onto a large circular clearing, and there Moses found the source of the noise. His eyes were drawn to the movement, and after a few moments he could distinguish the familiar features of the scientists who had gone into the cave several days before, five men and two women. They were working among the bones, but their activity didn’t look like careful research. They were building
There were ten originally, Moses thought. Where are the rest?
Something had gone very wrong in the cave and Moses intuitively recognized that the people he saw were either the victims of some terrible tragedy, or were its perpetrators. He held back, observing them, without drawing attention to himself.
The seven researchers moved like automatons. Their faces, haggard and drawn, were expressionless. They rooted in the bones, casting most of what they grasped aside, but occasionally they would take their discoveries to the center of the clearing and add it to the strange structure that was taking shape there. Moses edged forward to get a better look.
It’s a temple, he thought. A shrine. But to what?
Driven by curiosity, he risked moving into the open. He needn’t have worried. One of them passed within arm’s reach after having placed a smooth curved bone on the shrine; the man’s eyes did not even flicker in his direction. The laboring researchers were oblivious to his presence, and indeed to any external stimuli. Nothing mattered to them except the bones.
Moses knelt at the shrine and peered inside. An eighth researcher lay there, arms crossed and hugging something to her chest, but otherwise, unmoving…dead? No, he detected the gentle rise of the woman’s breast with each breath.
He recognized her instantly: Dr. Felice Carter, one of the geneticists, and the only black member of the research team. He didn’t think she was African-probably an American, descended from African slaves taken across the ocean centuries before-but the mere fact of her skin color awakened in him a sense of kinship. Without quite knowing why, he reached into the curious construct of bones…
No, not bones, he thought, and in a rush of understanding he realized what the cave was.
…and pulled the unconscious woman into his embrace.
The noise stopped.
As he hefted Felice onto his shoulder, Moses saw that the other researchers had abruptly stopped digging in the bone pile and were now all facing the shrine. Their eyes were still devoid of expression, but they were, unmistakably, looking at him.
Moses ran.
One of the men stood between him and the path through the bones, but Moses did not hesitate. He lowered his unburdened left shoulder and charged, bowling the man backward into the bone pile. Moses recovered without stumbling and resumed his flight, but through the sound of his own footsteps and the rush of blood in his ears, he could hear the others close behind.
His journey out of the bone chamber and through the tunnel passage seemed to take only a few seconds, yet at every step he felt certain that the men and women giving chase would catch him. Only as he exited the cave did it occur to him that he might be in even more danger outside, where the security force with their assault rifles would no doubt be waiting. Trusting that they would check their fire when they saw that he carried Felice, he quickened his pace.
But no one was waiting for him outside the cave entrance. The expected confrontation with the guards did not occur. Their attention was consumed by the riot that had broken out in the camp.
Evidently, the sound of shots being fired at Moses had been enough to light the fuse on the powder keg of discontent among the laborers. Perhaps believing that the security guards were beginning to execute some of their comrades, the bearers had unleashed a campaign of destruction. Thick columns of smoke rose into the twilit evening sky, marking the location of tents that were now being consumed by flames. A dull roar-shouts and screams-rolled across the floor of the Rift, punctuated by periodic gunshots.
Moses paused for just a moment, but a glance over his shoulder confirmed that the mindless pursuers were still coming, and faced with what seemed like two equally bad choices, Moses elected to brave the chaos in the camp.
The guards he had passed on his initial egress were gone. Moses could see figures moving in the haze of smoke, but no one took note of him as he entered the camp and made his way through the wreckage.
His goal was the parking area where the expedition’s vehicles had been sitting idle for more than a week, but when he got there, his hopes of a quick escape evaporated. Several of his fellow bearers apparently had the same idea, and they were armed with captured rifles. Gathering the last shreds of his courage, Moses approached one of the armed men.
“Please. You must give us a ride.”
Another man, leaning against the front fender of a dust streaked Land Cruiser, evidently the leader of the impromptu gang, shouted: “Of course you may ride with us. Five hundred thousand birr. For each of you.”
It was an obscene amount of money, and the man surely knew that none of the bearers possessed even a fraction of that, but Moses felt a glimmer of hope. “She is one of their scientists. Her company will pay what you ask.”