If the locals think it’s safe, it’s good enough for me.
He had Wiggins and Davies set up camp on the largest, flattest of the ledges, not bothering to look for an overhang. He’d deal with more rain if any showed up but for now the sky was completely clear, stars beginning to show as the sun went down in the golden west. The water they carried tasted flat and warm after the liquid they’d been given in the monastery, and their field rations were no match for scented rice and fresh berries but the monks hadn’t had coffee and for Banks that trumped just about everything else. As the last of the sun went out of the sky and full dark descended, the squad were sitting around a campfire with a mug each, sharing smokes.
“Prof,” Wiggins said, “you’re the man with experience in these parts. What’s with the big red worms?”
Gillings shrugged.
“I only know what you know.”
“No traveler’s stories? No local legends?”
“Apart from the two words we all heard, words I first heard from a badly frightened man, I know nothing. I’m a paleontologist, not an anthropologist.”
“So, that’s a no then?” Wiggins said, grinning. “Not even a theory?”
“Oh, I’ll idly speculate all you want, especially back home with some whisky inside me, but I saw just what we all saw. They look like big, red, overfed earthworms, with teeth. Whether they’re carnivorous or not remains to be proven but judging by the fate of the other camel, I think we have to assume that they are meat eaters.
“With regard to what they are, where they came from… Donnie and I had a closer look than you at the carvings in the top room. That frieze on the back wall showed what I presume was the worms swarming but I have no idea if that’s something that’s ever actually happened or whether it was purely allegorical.”
The younger man piped up.
“Aye, and the ones in the carvings looked more like dragons than those thick red squirmy things we saw.”
Wiggins laughed.
“Thick red squirmy things? That’s the scientific term for them, is it?”
“I don’t know how we’d go about classifying them without a closer look,” Gillings said. “They might be little more than a mouth and an arse, or they might be vertebrates, some kind of legless lizard. We’d have to get up close to one to find out for sure.”
“Aye, well good luck with that,” Wiggins replied.
The professor laughed in reply.
“It’s not something I’ve got in my immediate plans.” He turned to Banks. “How far do you think we came today?”
“Twenty-five miles at a guess. I’ll check later with the GPS. If we get an early enough start in the morning, we should manage to get to the pickup point by this time tomorrow. It’ll be a fair hike, so I suggest we all rest up as much as we can.”
He addressed the squad.
“Wilkins, you take first watch, a two-hour stint then get your head down, that’s an order. Then it’ll be Davies, Wiggins, the sarge, and then I’ll take the early shift and kick all your arses out of bed in the morning.”
For most of the first watch, they were all still awake, sitting around the fire and trying to come up with a coherent explanation for what they’d seen in the monastery.
“It was all some kind of magic trick—ABRACADABRA, look at the wee white rabbit I’ve had hidden up my jacksie—that kind of shite,” Wiggins said.
“If it was, it was the best one I’ve ever seen,” Professor Gillings replied. “I’ll agree it was certainly staged like one, a bloody good show as you said earlier, but I’m pretty sure those worms were real. Did it look like a hologram to you? And how in God’s name would a bunch of monks in a remote desert monastery get hold of hologram technology in the first place? No, I prefer to use Occam’s Razor—the simplest solution is the first one to consider and given what happened to Donnie’s camel, I’d say we have to assume it was all too real.”
The conversation went on for a while but it kept coming back to the same simple fact: everyone agreed that what they’d been shown was a warning and one that they should take seriously.
One by one, they drifted away to find a spot where they might if not sleep at least rest. By the time Davies replaced Wilkins, Banks was the last man sitting by the fire.
He dampened it down with the dregs of his coffee and flicked the butt of a last cigarette out over the ledge of the outcrop. He retrieved his sleeping bag from his kit, wandering to the south away from the others mainly to try to get out of range of the stink of the camel.
He chose a spot near the edge of the ledge with an open view along the previous day’s route and tried to pick out the monastery on the horizon but there was only darkness. The stars were obscured now by wispy fast-moving clouds that he guessed must be the last remnants of the storm. He checked the GPS to confirm what he already knew—they had a long walk ahead of them again on the morrow if they were to reach the extraction point by nightfall. He considered placing a call with the colonel but knew one wasn’t expected until they were ready for pickup and put the phone away inside his jacket before lying down on top of his sleeping back, gazing out over the desert. There was nothing to see but gray and black shifting shadows and he fell asleep to visions of squirming red, flashing blue, and golden wire all shifting and dancing behind his eyelids.
He woke some time later to the sound of raindrops pattering heavily on his clothes and came fully awake when one struck his forehead above his eyes. He checked his watch—not quite 4 a.m. so dawn was still some way off. The rain wasn’t heavy, more of a constant drip, but he noticed it had been enough to wake everyone from their sleep apart from Hynd, who was upright and standing guard at the edge of the ledge, a cigarette hanging from his lips.
“Wiggo, stoke the fire and get a brew on,” Banks said, catching the corporal in the act of lighting his own first smoke of the day. “Sarge, you’re with me. Let’s get up someplace high and scope out the day’s walk if we can.”
It didn’t take them long to scale the outcrop and stand facing north but even in that short time, the patter of raindrops had become steadier and more persistent. Banks’ heart sank at the sight as they looked out over the desert. The plain below them was dark and in shadow for the most part but although it was not yet dawn, it was plain to see that there were obstacles in their path if they wanted to head north. Huge swathes of ground had blue electric flashes running in sheets across the sands. Before yesterday, he might have imagined it to be a natural phenomenon, some product of the previous day’s storm, but having seen the writhing worms in the monastery, Banks feared that this was exactly what the monks had been warning them of.
“Bugger me, Cap,” Hynd said. “How do we make our way through that?”
Banks kept his gaze on the plain, trying to visualize a possible route.
“Bloody carefully. We stay on the rocky bits if we can,” he replied after a while. “And as Wiggo would say, we beware of the moors. We have no idea how many of the buggers there are or where they are or even whether they’re interested in us. All we can do is start walking and hope that this drizzle eases off and calms things down a tad.”
- 6 -
Donnie had seen the blue flashes for himself when he stood to relieve himself over the ledge. Wiggins came to stand beside him and join in the morning ritual.
“Bloody hell, how many of these buggers are there?” he asked.
“A fuckload by the looks of it,” Donnie replied.
“That would be another of yon scientific terms, would it?”
“Well, it’s more than a shitload anyway… my scientific eye tells me that much but speaking as a piss-poor excuse for a scientist, I can tell you that it looks like we’re stuck here for a while.”