That was it. Not another word was uttered by any of them all the way down. Ali had never known such emptiness.
Hours later, they neared the floor. Chemical runoff and human sewage had pooled in a foul marsh stretching along the base and extending beyond the light across the floor. The stench cut through Ali's dust mask. She gasped, then dumped the stench with disgust. Closer still, her skin prickled with the acidity.
The winch landed them with a bump on the edge of the beach of poisons. A hand – something meaty, but gnarled and missing two fingers – grabbed the railing in front of her. 'Bajarse, rápido,' the man barked. Rags hung from his head, perhaps to soak up his sweat or to shield him from their lights.
Ali unhooked herself and clambered off, and the character threw her pack off. Their platform started to rise. The last of her neighbors had to hop to the ground.
She looked around at this first wave of explorers. There were fifteen or twenty of them, standing in a clump and shining their flashlights. One man had drawn a big handgun and was aiming it vaguely toward the remoteness.
'Bad place to stand. Better move before something falls on your heads,' a voice said. They turned toward a niche in the rock. Inside sat a man, his assault rifle parked to one side. He had night glasses. 'Follow that trail.' He pointed. 'Keep going for about an hour. The rest of your people will catch up soon enough. And you, pendejo, the gunslinger. Put it back in your pants before someone gets shot.'
They did as he said. Lights wagging, they followed a trail that meandered around the cliff base. There was no chance of getting lost. It was the only trail.
A bleak fog hung across the floor. Rags of gas drifted at their knees. Small toxic clouds swirled at head level, blinding white in their headlamps. Here and there, licks of flame sprang up like St. Elmo's fire, then extinguished.
It was a swamp, deathly quiet. Animals had come here by the tens of thousands. Drawn by the spillage or non-native nutrients or, after a while, by the meat of earlier visiting animals, they had eaten and drunk here. Now their bones and decay spoiled among the rocks mile after mile.
Ali paused where two of the biologists were conversing by a pile of liquefying flesh and spiny bones. 'We know that spines and protective armor are the proof of expanding numbers of predators in an environment,' one explained to her. 'When predators begin devouring predators, evolution starts building body defenses. Protein is not a perpetual-motion machine. It has to begin somewhere. But no one's ever found where the hadal food chain begins.' At least to date, no one had found evidence of plants down here. Without plants, you had no herbivores; what you ended up with was an entire ecology based on meat.
His friend pried the jaws open to examine the teeth. Something scaly and clawed came crawling out, another invader species from the surface. 'Just the way I expected,' the friend said. 'Everything is hungry down here. Starved.'
Ali moved on and saw at least a dozen different sizes and shapes of skulls and rib cages, a brand-new menagerie that was not entirely new to her imagination. One set
of bones had the dimensions of a short snake with a large head. Something else had once transported itself on two legs. Another animal could have been a small frog with wings. None of it moved.
Soon Ali was sweating and breathing hard. She'd known there would be a period of adaptation to the trail, that it was going to take time to acclimate to the depths, to build up their quadriceps and adjust to new circadian rhythms. The stench of animal carcasses and the mining network's sewage didn't help. And an obstacle course of rusting cables, twisted rails, sudden ladders, and staircases made progress more difficult.
Ali reached a clearing. A group of scientists was resting at a stone bench. She got out of her pack and joined them. Farther on, the trail dropped in a deep, winding staircase. The masonry seemed old, fused with accretions. Ali looked around for carved inscriptions or other signs of hadal culture, but there was none.
'That's got to be the last of our people coming down,' a trekker said.
Ali followed his pointing finger. Like tiny comets, three points of light slowly descended in the darkness with silvery filaments for tails. Ali was surprised. For all the walking they'd done, the platforms were not so far away, maybe just a mile. Higher, at the edge of the rim, the town of Esperanza was visible against the black night, a dim bulb indeed. For a moment she saw the boomtown's painted cliffs. The bright blue color twinkled in the toxic mist like a wishing star, and so she made a wish. After their rest, the trail changed. The swamp receded. The reek of death fell away. The trail rose at a pleasant incline. They came to a ledge overlooking a flat plateau.
'More animals,' someone said.
'They're not animals.'
Once upon a time, in Palestine, people had made human sacrifices in the valley of Hinnon, later using the valley as a dumping ground for dead animals and executed prisoners. Cremation fires could be seen burning there night and day. With time Hinnon became Gehenna, which became the Hebrew name for the land of the dead. Ali had become something of a student of the literature of hell, and could not help wondering if they had stumbled upon some modern equivalent of Hinnon.
As they trekked onto the plateau, the image resolved itself. The bodies were simply men lying in an open-air camp. 'They must be our porters,' Ali said. She estimated a hundred or more men gathered here. Cigarette smoke mixed with their pungent body odor. Dozens of blue plastic drums shaped on one side to fit the human spine gave her a clue.
They had reached the rendezvous point. From here the expedition would truly launch. Like uninvited guests, the scientists waited at the edge of the encampment, not quite sure what came next. The porters did nothing to accommodate them. They went on lying about, sharing cigarettes and cups of hot drinks or sleeping on the bare ground. 'They look... tell me they didn't hire hadals,' a woman said.
'How could they hire hadals?' someone asked. 'We're not even sure they exist anymore.'
The porters' incipient horns and beetling brows and their body art, almost defective in its jailhouse shabbiness, had a certain pathos to it. Not that anyone would have pitied these men to their faces. They had the bricklike stare and keloid scars of a street gang. Their clothing was a mishmash of LA ghetto and the jungle. Some wore Patagonia shorts and Raiders caps, others wore loincloths with hip-hop jackets. Most carried knives. Ali saw machetes – but no vines. The blades were for protection, from the animals she'd been passing for the last hour, and possibly from any stray hostiles, but above all from one another.