Genesis Plague (3 page)

I
t took only an hour for Pierre to maneuver the
Wavecutter
into position. Soon after, his team of four excavators were suited up and in
the water, and for the time being, Flint, Cass, and I were forgotten.

Which was just fine by
me. The readings Flint was pulling from the nascent vent and fissure would keep
the lab busy once we got back to the mainland, and I was confident I could spin
the report to emphasize the need for further study in this region of the
Pacific. A year in this water? I was kind of shocked at Cassidy’s hesitance, to
be honest.

A hundred feet above,
the
Wavecutter
floated serenely, limned by a corona of bright light from
the midday sun. I watched with interest as four giant segmented tubes were
lowered into the water from the ship. Each of Pierre’s four divers took a tube,
then they spread out around the buried wreckage of the
Antigua
.

A churning, mechanical
thrum coursed through the water, and the tubes in the divers’ hands began to
vibrate. Nothing appeared to be coming out of the tubes, but the ocean floor
told a different story. Decades of sand and collected silt instantly clouded up
from the bottom, exposing beams of wood and rusty, twisted metal. The bottom was
lost from sight in a matter of seconds as Pierre and the divers were engulfed
in the cloud of expanding silt.

Cass swam in front of
me, moving to the other side of the bubbling vent. She was searching for a
loose piece of rock she could take back to the ship for study. She wasn’t a
biologist, but that didn’t stop her from peeking into a microscope if she found
something interesting, and she was always poking around for a new element to
name after herself.
Cassinium
was the most recent designation she had
picked out, if I remembered correctly.

In the distance, Flint floated
at the edge of the fissure, staring down into it like a man at the edge of a
cliff.

“Don’t jump, Flint,” I
said. “Think of all the burgers that will go uneaten.”

“I’m getting some weird
readings,” he said hesitantly.

“What kind of
readings?”

“The bad kind. I think
we may want to consider—”

His words were cut off
as a deep rumble shook the ocean floor. For a brief moment my vision vibrated
as if someone struck a tuning fork and touched it to my temple.

The vent rock between
me and Cassidy cracked down one side, spilling more silver bubbles into the
ocean.

And then all was quiet
again, as if nothing ever happened.

“Everyone okay?” I asked,
looking around. Cassidy nodded, a little uncertain. I looked back at Flint to
see him floating a few feet over the fissure.

“I think I need a new
wetsuit,” he said flatly.

“Pierre—” said Cassidy.

“The tremors have
stopped,” he interrupted. “The excavation will continue.”

“No, it
won’t
.
You brought us down here to tell you if it was safe, and
it isn’t safe
.
That could have been a precursor to something much larger.”

“But it might be
nothing, correct?”

Cassidy paused.

“Good. Besides, we are
safe in the open water, yes? It’s not like we can fall down inside the earth.
We just swim right back to the top.”

He called for the hoisting
cable from his ship, and I realized the conversation – if it even qualified as
one – was over.

“Keep an eye on those
readouts,” Cass said to Flint. He nodded his bulky helmet as he floated back
down to the edge of the fissure.

Over the wreckage of the
Antigua
, the cloud of soot was settling. The tubes retracted up to the
Wavecutter
. For a brief moment when the ocean floor cleared, I forgot about
the tremor as I caught my first real glimpse of the scattered debris.

It didn’t look like
much until my imagination kicked in. There was a boat-shaped oval of wooden
beams on the ocean floor, roughly two-hundred feet by forty feet, crossed over
with chunks of rusted iron and piles of dark wood.

“Look at it,” whispered
Pierre. “Somewhere in there is the lost fortune of Duke Federico Vieras.”

A slender cable descended
from above, lowered by the five-ton winch at the aft of the
Wavecutter
.
At the end of the cable, and spaced out every six feet along its length, were
large clasping hooks. Several strands of excess cable hung from each hook.

“Begin over there,”
Pierre said, pointing at the widest region in the outline of the ship. For the
first time, I noticed the object slung to his back, something he must have
picked up when he went topside earlier.

“What do you need with
a harpoon gun?” I asked.

He did not turn to look
at me when he said, “I can think of many scenarios that would call for it, but
only one that does not.” He watched his men swim down to the wreckage. They
began the laborious process of moving aside rotted timber.

“We’re alone down here,
Pierre.”

He ignored me and
shouted in French to one of his divers, who had moved a large block of wood and
inadvertently caused a small section of the wreckage to tumble off to the side.

“
Merde
!”
exclaimed another diver. “
J'ai trouvé
!” He was near what would have been
the aft of the
Antigua
, holding up a large, flat piece of wood. Beneath
the wood was a closed, iron-bound chest, still intact.

“We have found it!”
shouted Pierre. “Don’t touch it! Leave it for me.” The diver cast away the
wooden plank and moved aside as Pierre approached. “This must have been the
hold beneath the captain’s quarters,” he said, searching the ground. “There!”

The other divers swam
over and followed his pointing finger to an area of loose sand with several
large bulges beneath. They fanned their hands over the ground to clear away the
silt and exposed the tops of five more chests.

“
Eureka
!” shouted
Pierre. “I knew it! Each one of these chests carries a fortune in gold!”

“Well done,” I said,
cutting through his excitement. “I think we should hurry before—”

“
Paul!
” Flint
screamed into his headset.

“Ow, Jesus!” I said, my
ears ringing. “What is it?”

“It’s happening again.
We need to leave, now!”

“What is he talking
about?” asked Pierre, shaken from his glory.

“Paul…” said Cassidy
warily as she swam in my direction.

“Flint, what are you
talking—”

But then I knew
exactly
what he was talking about as the ocean floor rumbled and the vibration we felt
earlier returned, intensifying every second.

“Let’s get to the
surface!” I shouted.

“No!” screamed Pierre.
“We can’t leave!”

“Stay if you want. You
don’t need us.”

He yelled orders in
French as the cable from the
Wavecutter
lowered toward the wreckage. The
four divers swam quickly, grabbing the cable and bringing it down, where they
lashed the smaller cables on each hook around the chests.

“Can the winch hold
everything?” I asked. If each chest was full, the payload was a hell of a lot
heavier than what Pierre told us the winch could hoist at one time.

Pierre hesitated for
the briefest of moments before he said, “It will hold.”

Cassidy was by my side,
kicking slowly upward with me, one hand clenched firmly on my shoulder. I smiled
at her to try and show her I wasn’t afraid, but she knew better. She was
terrified as well. I could see it in her eyes. I turned back to Flint to make
sure he was heading topside, but he was still at the edge of the fissure,
crouching next to one of the seismometers.

“Flint, man, forget
them!” I yelled. “We can get more!”

“It’s the readings,
Paul. No one’s been this close when—”

But the rest of his
words were lost as the ground cracked open beneath him. In the blink of an eye,
the fissure became a chasm, snapping open as if it were spring-loaded, and the
sound, like the sharpest crack of thunder I had ever heard, nearly shattered my
eardrums.

For a moment Flint
floated there, over the open chasm, looking down into it. Then he screamed as a
torrent of bubbles erupted from the fissure with the force of a cannon blast,
like an upside-down waterfall blasting toward the surface.

He kept screaming as he
was pushed backward through the water, spinning wildly. The wide stream of
supercharged bubbles churned up the ocean floor, and Flint was instantly lost
in the cloudy murk.

“No!” I yelled as I kicked
in his direction.

“Paul!” shouted
Cassidy. She had a solid grip on my shoulder and pulled me back to her. “Don’t
get too close!”

I kicked toward the
boiling fissure, Cass right behind me, both of us giving the rising bubbles a
wide berth.

Over the wreckage,
Pierre’s divers were working double time. They had five of the six chests
lashed to the cable and were working on the last.

The ground began to
shake like the set of one of those cheesy science fiction shows, where you can
tell the cameraman was rattling the hell out of the thing and the actors were
throwing themselves around the spaceship like their paychecks depended on it.

Except this was happening
with one hundred feet of distance between us and the water’s surface.

The upside-down waterfall
of silver bubbles rocketed up from the fissure, roiling up as if the center of
the earth were nothing but air. There was another loud crack and the fissure
widened. A long seam stretched toward Cassidy and me, crawling over the ocean
floor like a bolt of lightning breaking through rock. Sand at the edge of the
crack fell gently down, as if sifting through an hourglass.

“I can’t see Flint!” I
shouted.

“Maybe he’s already
ascending!”

I looked once more into
the murk next to the fissure, straining to see any sign of Flint. After another
moment of hesitation, Cass and I both kicked hard, frantic to put distance between
us widening chasm. We were crossing a few feet above the rocky vent near the
Antigua
when the ground below cracked into a spiderweb of jagged fissures.

“The temperature’s
rising!” screamed Cassidy over the rumble of grinding rock.

There was no need to
check the control panel on my chest to verify. I could feel the heat through my
wetsuit. There was intense thermal activity below, and it could mean the worst
scenario imaginable: an underwater volcanic eruption right below our feet.

I
grabbed Cassidy’s gloved hand and kicked hard. Behind us,
Pierre had all six chests off the ground, rising slowly toward the surface. The
cable snapped taught as the winch on the
Wavecutter
hoisted the full
weight of the payload. The four divers held on to the cable as it was reeled up.

I looked back in Flint’s
direction, but still couldn’t see him.

“Flint, are you there?
Flint!”

“I can’t see him,” said
Cassidy. “Wait! There, near the fissure.”

The water cleared
slightly and I could barely make out the prostrate form of Flint, rocking
gently back and forth on the ground next to the boiling stream of bubbles.

“He’ll be cooked
alive,” I said grimly. “I’m going for him. You head to the surface.”

“No, Paul! Let me. I’m
the faster swimmer.”

“No time to argue,
Cass, just—”

Pierre’s scream cut me
off. I turned just as the ground opened beneath the wreckage of the
Antigua
,
swallowing it whole, as if it never existed. The cable dangled over the open
pit, ornamented with the six iron-bound chests. Pierre and his four divers
floated around the chests, looking upward.

Pierre wasn’t screaming
about the loss of the wreckage. He was screaming at the five-ton winch which
had broken off the back of his ship and was sinking toward him almost as fast
as if it were falling through the air.

The cable went slack
and the chests began to sink into the chasm.

“Nononono!” shouted
Pierre.

I spun quickly to Cass.
“You get Flint.”

She was off and kicking
in his direction in a flash. I swam toward Pierre, my legs moving maddeningly
slow in the water.

“Move to the side!” I
screamed.

The four divers abandoned
the sinking chests and swam off in all directions, but Pierre was tugging
uselessly at the highest chest on the cable, trying to pull it far enough to
one side so it would land on the edge of the open pit.

“Let it go, Pierre!”

He ignored me, still
tugging on the chest, descending with it, and didn’t even look up when the
sinking winch hit his shoulder, gashing it open and spilling his blood into the
water. He screamed and spun away, releasing the chest and tumbling up the length
of the winch as it plummeted into the open pit and disappeared below.

I was only five feet away
from him when it happened.

“Paul!” he said meekly,
his eyes wide with fear as he was sucked down into the pit after the winch. He
was caught in the vortex of its wake and was being pulled down right behind it.

I kicked hard, churning
the water behind me as I glided forward, but stopped short at the edge of the
pit before being caught in the downward pull. There was nothing to do. There were
no options to save him.

But then the harpoon
gun floated down right in front of my face, its strap cut clean through when
the winch hit Pierre’s shoulder. Blood trailed after it.

My eyes were wide,
taking in everything, but I seemingly had no control over my actions. Without
thought, I grabbed the harpoon gun, my actions painfully slow in the water, and
aimed it down into the pit. Pierre was clawing in slow-motion at the shear wall
several feet down. He was no longer caught in the downward vortex from the
winch, but a heavy piece of twisted metal had pierced the top of his foot and
was pulling him lower. He tried to shake it off but his actions only made him
sink farther.

I pulled the trigger
and the gas-powered harpoon sprang from the gun, trailing a steel cable attached
to the handle. The harpoon cut a clean line through the water and sank into
Pierre’s thigh. He screamed in pain, then he laughed like a madman.

“Got you!” I shouted,
but it was the other way around. His downward momentum and the weight of the
metal hanging from his foot dragged me with him, and soon I was at the very
edge of the pit, feet scraping for purchase as I slid over.

As I began to fall over
the void, all I could think was
This is it this is it Oh my God Paul you’re
going to die
, but then my body jerked backward. Someone was pulling me back
– back from the edge, back to safety.

“And I got
you
,”
said Cassidy, hauling me away from the pit.

The quake subsided, and
the bubbles roiling up from the void became a slow trickle. Cassidy and I fell
back in slow motion, landing on the sand, me on top of her, both of us panting
heavily. The cable attached to the harpoon gun went limp for a moment, then it
tightened. Hopefully it was just Pierre getting rid of the chunk of metal in
his foot.

“Pierre?” I said. No
answer, so I turned to Cass, still breathing hard. “Where – where’s Flint?”

She pointed behind us,
where Flint sat upright on the ocean floor, holding one arm gingerly against
his chest. He gave me a big thumbs-up.

The harpoon gun
shuddered in my hand. The steel cable attached to the handle shook back and
forth impatiently where it disappeared over the edge of the pit.

“Is that Pierre?” asked
Cassidy. “Why isn’t he talking?”

“He probably blew out
his microphone when he screamed. Help me reel him in.”