As they progressed, Pierce realized that the sky was growing lighter. Dawn was approaching. Although the depths of the sinkhole would remain in shadow for most of the day, Lazarus called for a break and told them to remove their night vision goggles, not because it was bright enough to see, but because even that small amount of ambient light would overwhelm the extremely sensitive receptors in the PVS7s.
Pierce was stunned by the abrupt transition to near total darkness. “All I can see is a big red blob. Is that normal?”
“You’ve been staring into a green light for the last few hours,” Lazarus said. “Just give it a few minutes.”
Pierce stood motionless, eyes closed, trying to remember how the world had looked just before the lights went out. All he could see in his mind’s eye were trees and water. As Lazarus had promised, Pierce’s vision cleared by degrees, and soon he was able to make out the treetops and a few other details.
“Those trees look like bald cypress,” he said. “We had them in swamps near where I grew up. I wonder how they got here.”
“How does anything get anywhere,” Carter answered in an even voice. “Seeds get scattered. The wind can do some pretty crazy things. Animals transport seeds over long distances. I seem to recall that cypresses are one of the oldest extant tree families, dating back to the time of the Pangaea super-continent. There could have been cypress trees on the Roraima plateau long before it collapsed into its present state. It’s also possible that this ecosystem may not be as closed as we thought.”
“What do you mean?” Lazarus asked.
“For these trees to grow like they have,” Carter said, “the water level would have to remain fairly constant. The only way that could happen is if we’re below the water table and there’s a way for water to flow in and out.”
“Like an underground river,” Pierce said.
“Could someone have planted them?” Lazarus asked after a moment.
“I suppose it’s possible,” Pierce said, “though I can’t imagine anyone going to the trouble to plant them here.”
Lazarus made a low humming sound as if considering Pierce’s answer, then said, “Maybe it was the same people who built that.”
He stretched his arm out, pointing toward a dark shape that lay more or less in the same direction they were traveling. In the gloom, it looked no different than any of the other wooded clumps they had encountered, but as Pierce continued to stare at it, he realized that it was very different.
“What the…” Pierce started forward, slowly realizing that the land in front of him wasn’t a stand of cypress trees sprouting from the marsh, but solid ground, rising more than six feet above the water, stretching away in either direction like a jetty. Protruding above it were large blocky shapes with vertical lines too perfect to be anything but the work of human hands.
Buildings.
Lazarus laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Oversized ex-Special Ops go first, remember? We don’t know what we’ll find in there. Or who.”
“You don’t actually think anyone still lives there,” Carter said.
Pierce was tempted to don his night vision goggles once more. A quick glance at the city might answer a lot of questions, but he decided to hold off a little longer. He turned to Lazarus. “This is what Kenner is looking for. I’m sure of it. We need to get there first, and set a trap.”
The big man nodded slowly. “Stay close.” He glanced back at Carter. “You, too.”
As they got closer, Pierce saw that it was not a solid land mass at all, but a jumble of irregular stones of varying sizes, heaped up to form an artificial island. “This was debris from the collapse,” he whispered. “They must have piled it up to form the city’s foundation.”
“But who are they?” Carter asked.
“We’ll find out when we get there,” Pierce said. He had a theory about what they’d find, but he wasn’t ready to share it.
When they reached the base of the elevated mound, Lazarus signaled them to halt with an upraised hand. He pulled himself up onto the rocks, staying low in a prone firing position. He surveyed the city for nearly a full minute, and then waved them ahead. Pierce scrambled up the rocks despite the cumbersome combat gear he wore. Crouching beside Lazarus, he looked out over the ruins.
That it was deserted and forgotten was obvious from the crumbling walls and the growth of vegetation. The stone surfaces were covered in moss, and trees rose up from some of the buildings. No one had lived here in a long time, and yet the architecture was too sophisticated to be the work of the hunter-gatherer cultures that had made the Amazon Basin their home. It was much more reminiscent of the structures he had seen in the excavation in Heraklion, a fact which reinforced his suspicions about the city’s original builders.
“I think we beat them here,” Pierce said, keeping his voice low.
“I didn’t see any lights through the NODs,” Lazarus said. “But it’s an unsecured environment. Stay on your toes.”
Pierce nodded. “Right behind you.”
Lazarus rose slowly, first to his knees, then to his full height.
There was a flurry of movement from atop one of the buildings, and then something shot toward them like a guided missile. Lazarus barely had time to raise his gun toward the source of the strange projectile before it struck him squarely in the chest with a sickening crunch. The object was about the size of a football but amorphous, like a cloth sack filled with stones. It rebounded away and landed on the rocky ground with a wet splat. The force of the impact knocked Lazarus back a step, and then he toppled backward, off the island’s edge.
Carter cried out, more in surprise than terror, but Pierce couldn’t tell if she was reacting to the attack on Lazarus, or warning him. Two more shapes, barely visible in the twilight, rose up from the nearest rooftop, and then swooped toward Carter and Pierce.
He had been wrong about the place being uninhabited. Although it had been abandoned by its original builders long ago, something still lived in the city. Something deadly.
37
Almost being devoured by toxic carnivorous plants was not, it turned out, the lowest point of an already very bad day. After sparing her life, Tyndareus had sent two of his goons — both wearing hazmat suits — in through a concealed door to retrieve her. Fiona wondered if one of them had been in the exosuit.
If she had known what would follow, she would have opted to stay in her cell. The men took her to a tiled room where they stripped her, sprayed her with a fire hose, and scrubbed her with stiff-bristled brushes.
Following that violation, she was allowed to dress in a pair of hospital scrubs. The two men dragged her into another examination room and strapped her to a table in five-point restraints. She was then checked over, head-to-toe, by a sneering, wretched woman. As she was poked and prodded, her blood drawn, Fiona retreated into her mind, blocking out the ongoing physical assault.
She felt Nurse Wretched fumbling with her insulin pump and tried to cover it with her hands. The leather restraints stopped her, but the reflex earned her an immediate rebuke from the nurse.
“Stop. Moving. I am refilling the reservoir. You want your insulin, don’t you?” The woman had a harsh eastern European accent, similar to Rohn’s.
What I want, Fiona thought, is to smash your face with a baseball bat. It would improve your looks. But she relented, allowing the woman to finish the procedure.
The insulin recharge was welcome, though it did little to improve her physical condition. She needed to eat — real food, not college dorm crap — and she needed sleep. Most of all, she needed to be somewhere else, any place, as long as it was far away from the Nazi mad scientist who now called himself Tyndareus.