Black Rain

“Cold-blooded maybe, or colder-blooded than we’re used to.”

“Might explain why the heat sensors have trouble picking them up,” Danielle said.

Verhoven pointed to the tail, where the tip split into a pair of spikes, like dual stingers. “Remind you of anything?”

Danielle nodded and McCarter thought of the body in the water with the two great holes in its chest, wounds from something that went in and came back out. It was terrible, a killing machine—but part of McCarter could not help but be in awe. “What the hell are these things?” he asked.

He exchanged glances with Danielle and Verhoven, but it was clear that neither of them had a clue.

A moment later Hawker joined them. He took a brief look at the animal. “Nice,” he said, sarcastically. “This trip is so much fun. Remind me to bring the whole family next time.” He turned to McCarter. “Let’s not forget why we’re down here.”

Despite an unshakable sense of awe they moved on, following the path that led beyond the plaza as it took them back into the deeper part of the cave. Soon, the craggy walls narrowed, closing in on them before becoming smooth with tool marks once again. They continued in a narrow valley that soon became a tunnel as the ceiling sloped down on them. The carved tunnel led to an even narrower rectangular doorway less than four feet high and perhaps eighteen inches wide at the most. They had to squeeze and duck to force themselves through. As soon as they reached the other side, a weak, raspy voice called out to them.

“Mr. Kaufman?”

McCarter responded. “It’s us, Susan. Not Kaufman.”

She stepped from the shadows. “Professor McCarter?”

“Are you all right?” he said.

She ran to them. Right into McCarter’s arms, who grabbed her in a bear hug, only slightly embarrassed. He could hear her wheezing and pulled out her inhaler, which he’d found and remembered to bring with him.

She used it immediately. “I heard the guns,” she said, her eyes welling up with tears. “I didn’t know if—”

She broke off her sentence, scanning the faces and stopping on Hawker’s. She seemed confused. “What are you doing here? What happened to Kaufman’s men?”

“Most of them are gone.” McCarter said. “Kaufman’s up on the surface. Brazos is guarding him. We heard you on the radio,” he added. “Apparently you couldn’t hear us.”

“I didn’t get any response,” she said. “Not sure I was using it right, and I think I killed the battery trying to call out.”

She went on to explain the attack, and details of her survival. “When it killed the other man, the radio came sliding across the floor and hit me. I grabbed it and I just ran,” she said. “I came down here and I found this door. It turned out to be a dead end in there, but by the time I tried to get out those things were trying to get in. They scratched and dug at the entrance for hours, but I guess they couldn’t fit through. So I stayed put.”

“That’s somewhat comforting,” Hawker said. “But we still have to go back that way to get out. And the sooner we go the better.”

Susan took McCarter by the hand. “Yes,” she said, very seriously. “But there are some things you have to see first.”

She led them deeper into the chamber, down a long, narrow passageway, past one empty room after another, rooms that had been cut from the rock itself, rooms with smooth, vertical walls and flat, even floors. It was a level of workmanship more advanced than that of the plaza outside. In fact, where Susan’s footprints had cleared the dust, the ground shone like expensive marble. McCarter bent to examine it, but Susan beckoned him to follow.

She pointed out a wall, covered with strange geometric symbols and, beside them, carved Mayan glyphs. And then she led them to a pile of debris where part of one wall and the ceiling had collapsed. She knelt down beside it.

McCarter paused, stunned. A figure lay there, half-buried in the rubble, partially hidden by the piles of rock. In the gray darkness it appeared to be the body of a child, but as the lights converged on the remains it became clear that it was something else.

The body was perhaps four feet tall. The legs and pelvis had been separated from the torso and whatever meat or flesh it once carried had long ago succumbed to decay. The skull was shaped like a man’s but deformed and bulbous. A pair of great empty holes that must have once contained eyes sat in the upper half of the face, with bony ridges above and a forehead that sloped radically backward.

Instead of a rib cage, the body had two broad plates that curved out from its backbone, wrapping the body and fusing together in the front, completely covering the chest cavity. Somewhat like the exoskeleton of the animal outside, with thousands of pinprick holes in the bone.

McCarter touched the fragile skull, running his finger across its smooth surface. It reminded him of a horseshoe crab he’d found washed up on the beach when he was a child.

“It was almost completely buried,” Susan told them. “I cleared most of this away. It helped me pass the time.”

“What is this?” McCarter asked.