Overlord

17

Aston peeled off the wetsuit, gave himself a quick once-over with a towel, then pulled on his jeans and sweater again. The far end of the cavern had several tall outcrops, almost like the folds in a giant curtain. The team had gathered around one, shining their lights into its shadows. The green crystals all around glowed twice as brightly as they had when Aston had entered the water. It seemed they continued to draw energy from the torchlight and the halogens Sol had set up again. There wouldn’t be shadows in this place for much longer.

“What is it?” Aston called out.

Slater spun on the spot, face relieved. “There you are! Where the hell did you go?”

“I’ll explain later. What have you found?”

Her face soured. “More dead bodies.”

Aston pushed through to take a better look. A corpse lay in the depths of the indentation in the rock, propped against the wall in a slumped sitting position.

“The clothes are modern,” Aston said.

“And she’s not really decomposed at all,” Slater said. “Hard to guess how long she’s been here, but not long, I’d say.”

“What do you think, Doc?” Aston asked Sol, not caring that his sarcastic emphasis raised a couple of eyebrows.

“Honestly, I’m not sure what to think,” Sol Griffin said. “I’ve made a cursory examination and there are no obvious signs of injury or sickness. I agree, she can’t have been here long, but beyond that I’m at a loss.”

Aston frowned. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but he didn’t trust Sol at all. Right now, he was convinced the man was lying about something.

“Speaking of injury,” Slater said. “Wait until you see the next one.”

“There’s another?”

Slater led him around to the next recess of stone, holding her flashlight ahead of her. She stopped and gestured him forward, clearly reluctant to get too close to whatever lay in the shadows. Marla, Aston noticed, stood off to one side, her face dark.

Aston blew out a long breath. He was so over all this already, but they were in too deep now. He moved past Slater to see a body that had been horribly abused. Its head was missing, nowhere to be seen. The torso, arms and legs had been shredded, as though someone in a furious rage had taken to it with a machete. Or something with long, sharp claws and teeth, Aston mused, a tickle of fear at the base of his spine.

“What the hell do you make of that?” Slater asked.

“I wouldn’t think an animal would do this. The body hasn’t been consumed at all, just ripped up. Animals don’t tend to kill for fun.”

“So what then, if not an animal? A tribe of headhunters?”

Aston turned away from the atrocity, happy to look at Slater’s beautiful, living face instead, even if it was blanched with horror. He shrugged.

“Hey, come here,” Sol called out from a little further around the cavern. “We’ve found another and she’s alive.”

Anders Larsen sat back, smiling at the samples of green crystals in the jars in front of him. While the rest of the team were distracted with what appeared to be some rather gruesome discoveries, he’d had an opportunity to quietly complete an array of field tests. His geologist’s soul was buzzing with what he’d found. The sparkling stuff teemed with energy, off the chart for their size. It was like nothing else he had ever heard of, let alone seen for himself. It had to be greenium, however much he hated that name.

He couldn’t even begin to wrap his head around the how and why of it all. His mind spun with theory after theory, trying to make some sense of it. But nothing in his extensive professional bank of knowledge offered up any answers. It was almost as if the cave were seeded by aliens or something. He chuckled to himself. Why the hell not? After everything else they’d seen thus far, it was no more outrageous a suggestion than any other. But it didn’t matter. What he was certain about was that this miraculous stuff was exactly what Halvdan Landvik was looking for. While the others remained distracted, he hastily packed up his gear. Right now was the perfect time to slip away unnoticed.

“This is all too much!”

He startled, turned quickly to see Jahara Syed standing behind him. The biologist hadn’t noticed his guilty jump as she stared across the cavern at the rest of the team.

“Too much?” he asked.

She looked down at him, offered an uncomfortable half-smile. “Everything is so weird, and I can’t look at any more dead bodies.”

Larsen frowned. “You’re a biologist. You’re disturbed by bodies?”

“Human bodies, yes! I study animal and plant life. I’m not a damn medical examiner.”

“No, I guess not. Me either.”

She crouched beside him. “Have you found anything interesting?”

“Yes. The crystals have unusual properties, lots of energy.”

Syed looked nervous. “Radioactive?”

He laughed. “No, thankfully. But I can’t tell much down here. I’m limited as to the kind of analysis I can perform without decent equipment. I can’t wait to get back to base camp and investigate properly.”

“Me too,” Syed said. “I’m facing the same limitations. But even with the basic equipment I have here, these tough vines are bizarre.”

Larsen clenched his jaw, desperate to be away, but he couldn’t raise suspicion. “Bizarre how? I mean, apart from the obvious.”

“Well, the obvious weirdness is the fact that they’re even here at all. Then there’s the shock the thing gave me. I’m still tingling from that. But beyond all that, the structure itself is weird.”

“Cellular, you mean?”

Syed nodded eagerly. “Exactly. Based on what I can see with the portable microscope, the cellular structure is wrong.”

Larsen found himself fascinated despite his need to get back topside. “Wrong? What do you mean?”

Syed licked her lips, shook her head. “It looks crystalline. But it’s living, organic. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was from an alien planet or something.”

Larsen suppressed a physical reaction to her voicing exactly his own thoughts of only moments before. Thoughts that were frivolous at best, but echoed now by the biologist, they scared him. Before he could say more, Slater stepped out of the folded rock across the cavern and called Syed’s name.

“Jahara, we need your help here.”

Syed nodded and stood. She glanced down at Larsen, brows creased. “What do you think is happening?” she asked.

Larsen raised his hands. “I have no idea. But let’s stick to science, yeah? It’s always best to let emotion take a back seat and just study the facts.”

“Maybe that’s good advice.” She trotted away towards Slater and the rest of the team.

Larsen watched her go, relieved that Slater had done him an inadvertent favor, and then grabbed his bag and slipped quietly out of the cavern. Landvik’s men would be in place somewhere nearby, assuming everyone had played their part correctly. As soon as he could get a signal, he’d call them in. He smiled as he hurried back through the tunnels and caves, heading for the freight elevator.