No good deed goes unpunished, he thought, but that was the kind of thing Rook might say. It wasn’t how Bishop had lived his life. It wasn’t how he wanted to live.
Trust the old man, he decided. But be ready to deal with whatever happens.
They were moving in a straight line. Bishop confirmed it by using tree trunks and other terrain features as visual waypoints, though doing so underscored just how vast and unchanging the forest was. The old man showed no sign of weariness, but Felice seemed to be flagging. Knight just shambled forward like an automaton, his forehead beading with perspiration. Bishop started counting his steps and was able to get a rough idea of how fast they were traveling and how far they had gone — nearly two miles in the half hour since they’d left the village and the road behind.
Another twenty minutes passed before their guide altered course, making an abrupt ninety degree turn to the right. Soon, they arrived at the edge of a narrow creek that cut across their path. The shallow water looked nearly stagnant, more a series of connected puddles than a proper stream. The fetid water reeked of decay and the hum of swarming mosquitoes was maddening in its intensity. However, the creek seemed to be a reference point for their guide. He immediately changed course again and led them parallel to the water.
Bishop sensed a change in the surrounding jungle. It was subtle, so much so that it took him several minutes to identify the difference. The sparse foliage near the stream showed evidence of being trampled. The forest was a place where animal life existed primarily in the canopy of interlaced tree branches — it was the domain of flora, not fauna. But here, at the stream’s edge, the tree dwelling animals, and the few creatures that roamed the forest floor, came together to drink. It was also a place where predators were sure to find easy prey, evidenced by the occasional stripped carcass.
The old man stopped and held a hand out to signal them to do the same. Bishop turned to Felice, who was soaked in sweat and grimacing from the sustained exertion. “Ask him what’s happening,” he whispered.
She rocked unsteadily on her feet, panting to catch her breath, but nodded. In a whisper, she posed the question in French. The man answered in a low murmur without looking back.
“He says we’re close, and that we need to be very quiet now.”
“Close to what?”
She shrugged and passed along the inquiry, but got no answer. Instead, the man gestured for them to resume the journey, but set a glacial pace. Bishop snugged the butt of the M240 into his shoulder and elevated the muzzle, just in case they were being led into a trap.
A few more steps brought them to a marshy lake that seemed to be the source of the stream. It was nestled at the base of a dark cliff and a thin trickle of water fell down its surface to replenish the lake. The man pointed to the dribbling waterfall and then touched his finger to his lips, reminding them of the need for absolute silence.
Bishop now saw that the cliff wasn’t a solid slab of rock, but was instead a hanging wall, jutting out to form a shadowy hollow behind the waterfall.
“Does he want us to hide in there?” Bishop asked, pointing. During heavy rains, the waterfall would probably transform into a raging torrent, completely obscuring the recess, but under the present conditions, it was completely exposed.
The old man shushed him again and continued along the edge of the lake. There seemed little doubt that the cave was his ultimate destination. As they got closer, he struck out across the marsh, but moved slowly to avoid splashing. Bishop silently consulted Knight with a meaningful glance, but the only answer Knight could give was a helpless shrug.
At the mouth of the cave, the old man paused again, and for the first time since encountering him, Bishop saw real apprehension in his face. He’d barely blinked in the face of the assault by the rebels, but now he seemed on the verge of bolting in panic. The emotion was contagious. Felice drew closer to Bishop, and Knight moved up so that they formed a small defensive cluster, ready to face whatever unknown terror lay beyond that trickle of water. But then their guide gathered up his courage, indicated again to the others that they stay silent and crossed the threshold.
Although the woods were shrouded in darkness, even at high noon, the first few tentative steps were like a plunge into the void. The old man advanced, and it took Bishop a moment to realize that the cave went much deeper than he first realized. The circle of light filtering in from outside shrank to nothing, and still they moved forward into the subterranean night.
Unable to see much of anything, Bishop closed his eyes for a moment and tried to focus on the rest of the sensory picture. The cave floor, which had been at first irregular and ankle deep underwater, had given way to bare rock, but now he felt the surface compress under his weight, like grass or moss on hard ground. There was an odd smell, too, similar to the earthy organic aroma of peat, but also a tang of ammonia.
Bats, he thought. We must be right under them.
Despite their best efforts to be quiet, he could hear the faint squish of sodden boots on the cave floor, the creak and rustle of clothes and rucksacks and weapons on their slings.
Then he heard something else. A weird hum echoed from the unseen walls of the cave, rising to a fever pitch in a matter of just a few seconds. It was the same noise they had heard in the pre-dawn darkness.
“Enough of this shit,” Knight rasped.
Suddenly a light flared in the darkness. It wasn’t very bright, but because his pupils had dilated in the darkness, it felt for a moment like someone had stabbed a toothpick in Bishop’s eyes. It was, he realized, just a pale green chemlight, held aloft in Knight’s right hand.
The hum stopped instantly, but then resumed again, this time with an intensity that Bishop could feel vibrating through his bones. The old man let out a yelp of alarm and deftly plucked the glowstick from Knight’s fingers, hurling it away into the darkness.
As the luminescent tube sailed end over end, it revealed the cavern in a series of flashed images that were imprinted like snapshots on Bishop’s retinas. He struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. All of his preconceived ideas about the cavern were wrong.
The cavern was enormous, far too vast to take its measure in the scant light of the glowstick. He realized they had barely left the front porch. There might have been bats overhead — the light didn’t reach that high — but the soft material on the floor was not guano. It resembled Old Man’s Beard, or some other kind of lichen, but it grew in astonishing quantities. It was just a fringe near the wall where they were walking, but further out, where the chemlight had been thrown, it was growing as thick as corn in Iowa.
Yet, that was not the strangest thing he saw.
There were animals moving about in the midst of the lichen, at least a couple dozen of them. They were about the size of farm turkeys, maybe thirty pounds, and looked bird-like, with what appeared to be feathers, or perhaps colorful scales covering their skin. They had heads with flat broad mouths, like ducks or geese. Unlike birds, though, they had long tails — longer than even their bodies — which were standing straight up in the air like antennae. The creatures might have been grazing on the frilly growth or perhaps pecking for insects, but the disturbance had cause them all to lift their heads in alarm and begin their strange ululating cry.