Immortal

61

Ethan jogged forward in a low crouch, dodging left and right between bushes of thorn scrub as he tracked north along a dry riverbed weaving through a rugged valley. The tops of the hills were now bathed in brilliant sunlight that flared brightly off the rocks. The flutter of bat’s wings whispered through the air above him as the tiny mammals raced away from the spreading dawn. Behind him Lopez followed his every footstep, whispering as she did so.

‘You sure you know where you’re going?’

Ethan, his pistol held before him in both hands, nodded.

‘Damn straight I do. Be quiet, we’re nearly there.’

Ethan saw that the valley ahead became steeper, and to his right a narrow track heavily lined with trees and scrub climbed the side of the hills before vanishing entirely on a ridge above them. Somewhere within, he now knew, was an entrance to the caverns concealed from humanity by Ellison Thorne and his men over one hundred fifty years before.

Ethan crept up to the ridge and looked over the edge as Lopez joined him.

Below them, the angular, stacked rocks of the hillside vanished into a yawning chasm perhaps thirty feet across, surrounded by trees and the lechuguilla bushes that had given the mysterious cave somewhere within its name.

‘Misery Hole,’ Lopez said. ‘Looks deep.’

Ethan peered over the edge into the depths and felt his guts convulse as vertigo scrambled his senses.

‘Maybe a hundred feet,’ he whispered, sweating from more now than just the heat. ‘I can’t see the bottom, too dark.’

‘We’ve got to get down there,’ Lopez said. ‘Fast.’

Ethan nodded as he stepped back from the edge and took a deep breath, staring into the distance. Lopez looked at him for a moment and then chuckled.

‘Oh, you’re kidding me,’ she said in delight. ‘The rough and tough Marine’s scared of heights?’

‘Why do you think I joined the Marines and not an airborne unit?’ Ethan muttered.

‘Oh come on.’ Lopez punched his shoulder. ‘Surely you must have jumped out of airplanes or something?’

‘Sure we did.’ Ethan nodded. ‘Never had a problem with that, due to having a goddamned parachute on my back. But this…’ He gestured to Misery Hole. ‘This is different.’

Ethan spotted a thick rope ladder bound to some trees fifty yards away. He reluctantly pointed to it. ‘They’re already here.’

Lopez followed him around the ragged rocks and through thick scrub until they reached the ladder. Ethan glanced at her.

‘You want me to go first?’ Lopez offered in an ingratiating motherly voice.

‘Like hell.’

Ethan took hold of the ladder, easing himself onto it and descending out over the edge. Don’t look down. Just face the rocks. Semper fi.

The ladder hung vertically over the abyss, vanishing into the plunging depths below as he clambered one careful step after another. The shadows of the cave engulfed him as he descended, the ladder swinging and twisting precariously as Lopez swayed on the rungs above him.

‘Jesus! You wanna keep still?’ he snapped, looking up at her and wincing as the whirling vertigo spun his senses again.

‘Sorry, honey,’ Lopez called back with a smile. ‘Baby steps now, okay?’

A strange odor assaulted Ethan’s senses as they clambered down, a damp and almost metallic reek of ancient soil that offered a welcome diversion of his attention. A breeze drifted up past them, cool and moist compared to the swiftly warming desert air above. Rock walls engulfed them as they climbed down, and the pure blue sky above them grew smaller. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Ethan was relieved to glimpse below him a dimly illuminated floor strewn with the detritus of rock falls and the desiccated timbers of long-fallen trees, a maze of obstacles criss-crossing the sandy floor.

He climbed down the last few feet of the ladder and dropped onto the dust with a heavy sigh of relief near the entrance to Lechuguilla Cave, a broad and forbidding maw hewn into the side of the rock walls that exhaled the metallic air of the earth itself. He had the brief impression of being in a giant dirty fishbowl, the light streaming down from above in shimmering shafts and the earth littered with debris as though a tornado had blown through.

Lopez dropped down alongside him and looked into the depths of the cave.

‘Now what?’ she asked.

Ethan was about to reply when the mouth of the cave spoke for him.

‘Satan’s teeth, you just don’t know when to quit, do you, boy?’

From the inky blackness within Lechuguilla Cave, five bayonets glinted in the light beaming down from above. Ethan watched as Ellison Thorne led his companions out into the light, their rifles pointed unwaveringly at him.

Ethan raised his hands, his pistol still in his jeans.

‘We’re not here to fight.’

‘How the hell did you find us?’ Ellison Thorne growled at him down the barrel of the rifle.

Ethan walked forward to stand within a few yards of Thorne and his men, keeping his hands raised as he spoke.

‘We followed the trail,’ he said.

‘We didn’t leave a trail,’ Copthorne shot back.

‘I didn’t say we followed your trail,’ Ethan replied, and pointed up to the entrance high above. ‘We followed theirs.’

He glanced up into the distant disc of blue sky far above. The four soldiers followed his gaze to see small bats fluttering past against the heavens, some of them diving down toward Lechuguilla and flashing past them into the darkness beyond. Ellison Thorne looked at Ethan, his eyes narrowing.

‘Those critters roost in any one o’ a thousand caves around these parts,’ he said.

Ethan slowly lowered his hands, letting his arms hang loosely by his sides as he explained.

‘We had a rough idea of where you’d be,’ he said. ‘Saffron Oppenheimer’s friends have seen you out this way before now. You said you don’t know what’s happened to you, that Hiram Conley shouldn’t have gone to Tyler Willis for help when he started becoming sick. Well, if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to find you now. You need to listen to what I have to say.’

Copthorne, McQuire, Wren and Cochrane all looked at Ellison Thorne.

‘We ain’t got nothing to lose,’ Kip Wren said. ‘Let ’im say his piece, then we’ll be gone.’

Ellison Thorne sighed and lowered his rifle.

‘Speak your mind, boy,’ he rumbled, ‘but be quick about it.’

Ethan nodded.

‘Tyler Willis told us that Hiram Conley wasn’t blessed with some kind of miracle gene that stopped him from aging. He told us that he was infected with bacteria that must have somehow been able to reside in his body, and in doing so been able to repair cell damage and therefore prevent aging.’

Lopez lowered her hands as she spoke.

‘The reason Conley became sick is that for some reason the population of bacteria in his body slowly decreased with time as they died off, and he began to age rapidly.’

‘You sayin’ there’s something living inside of us?’ Nathaniel asked in horror.

‘Everything that’s alive has bacteria inside,’ Ethan explained quickly, ‘that’s just normal. What’s unusual is that the bacteria inside your bodies keep you from aging, and for that to happen they must have evolved over extremely long periods of time to be able to exist symbiotically with human beings.’

‘Symbi-whatally?’ Copthorne muttered in confusion.

‘Symbiotically,’ Lopez said. ‘It means that you need them to be alive, but they also need you. All the bacteria in our bodies are as dependent upon us for survival as we are upon them.’

Ethan gestured up to the bats fluttering through the dawn sky above them.

‘The only mammalian species that lives in these caves is the Mexican free-tailed bat,’ he said. ‘They’ve lived here for millennia, and over that time the bacteria that also live in the caves must have somehow evolved to exist symbiotically with the bats, which are known to have extremely long lifespans for their size.’

Thorne frowned in confusion.

‘But we didn’t eat any bats when we came here.’

‘You didn’t have to,’ Ethan said. ‘The bacteria would have found a way inside you somewhere in these caves, maybe through cuts or in the water that you drank here. Humans are mammals, just like bats, and the bacteria would have been able to survive inside of you in the same way. Once inside, the bacteria would have multiplied, requiring some form of energy from your bodies in return for their existing and altering your cells to prevent aging.’

‘Iron’, Ellison Thorne said. ‘We needed extra iron in our diets, else we became anemic. These bacteria must have used it as a fuel.’

‘And many mammals have been known to get minerals from the walls of caves,’ Lopez said, ‘which would replace the bat’s own iron deficiencies after infection.’

‘All this is fascinating,’ Ellison Thorne said, ‘but right now all I give a damn about is whether or not we have ourselves a cure here.’

‘That I can’t tell you,’ Ethan said. ‘The only thing we can do is get you all out of here and somewhere safe before Jeb Oppenheimer and his crew arrive.’

‘There isn’t anywhere safe for us but Misery Hole,’ Ellison Thorne snapped. ‘We’re not going anywhere with you or anyone else, y’hear?’

‘We don’t have much time,’ Lopez said urgently. ‘Oppenheimer’s men could be here any minute.’

‘We’ll take our chances,’ Ellison replied.

Ethan was about to speak when a gunshot shattered the silence and Kip Wren let out a cry of agony as his right leg buckled and his rifle spun from his grasp.

Ethan hurled himself to his right as the old soldiers scattered for cover. As he rolled through the dust and pulled his pistol from his jeans, he saw dozens of figures dressed in black lining the edge of Misery Hole far above them. A hail of tracer fire zipped down into the darkness amid the clatter of automatic weapons.

‘Oppenheimer!’ he shouted. ‘How the hell did he find us so quickly?’

Lopez, crouched low behind a scattering of rocks, shouted back.

‘I don’t know! We need cover right now!’

Ethan looked at the swarms of mercenaries now running toward the ladder, and knew that there was only one direction left for them to take.

‘Fall back!’ he shouted. ‘Into the cave!’