Shadowmark (The Shadowmark Trilogy Book 1) (19 page)

After the third hastily abandoned campsite, Mina reminded Doyle she wanted to find her brother.

“Yes, I remember.” He shrugged.
 

I should be able to leave, to take care of myself.
 

The weight sank deeper into her chest. Mina hated to admit she was fully dependent on Doyle for her survival. Yet the more she observed him, the more she understood how woefully ignorant she was, and she resented him for it.
 

A new pang of guilt shot through her. Doyle hadn’t requested anything beyond Mina “pulling her weight,” as he had called it. Build the fire, keep watch some nights, and boil water. Doyle found the food. A simple system. Mina should be grateful.
 

DAY 30

D
ARKNESS
SWALLOWED
L
INCOLN
AS
HE
rounded the turn. Behind him, a gust of air blew up out of the tunnel and Alvarez breathed in sharply. Ahead, Schmidt and Carter illuminated the metal staircase with torches, the light only reaching the first few stairs.

The team had wasted too many days looking for the second tunnel opening. As soon as he could get away from the medic, Lincoln excitedly announced he was going back. Originally, he had led his team through the silo, expecting to easily find the second entrance. But when they arrived, the silo had only one. Disappointed, Lincoln somehow convinced Nash to lend him help to scour the mountain, claiming it could be an important clue. Nash, who seemed to have given up on ARCHIE and its burdensome engineers, loaned Lincoln four men to shut him up. But as the days wore on, Nash lost patience. He had ordered the soldiers helping them back to camp several days ago to deal with the ever-increasing influx of refugees. Schmidt alone had remained with them. He seemed fascinated by the team, especially Alvarez. Nash seemed too preoccupied to bother recalling the kid.
 

Unconcerned about Nash and his problems, Lincoln insisted his team could find the tunnel again on their own. Although he had marked trees while he hiked down the mountain, he had done so sporadically, hindered by his pain. Today, though, the rediscovery of the second tunnel buoyed his steps, his wound forgotten.
 

Lincoln ran his hands along the smoothly cut walls of the tunnel as he descended. The metal stairs looked crude in comparison to the low, smooth ceiling and walls. Beneath the metal cage of the steps, the floor was rougher.

Up ahead, Carter gave a shout. “Look at this!” He held his torch out in front to examine something in the ceiling of the tunnel. Lincoln and Alvarez caught up quickly. The ceiling looked normal at first. Then Lincoln saw it—a small, swirling circular pattern, no bigger than a man’s hand, carved deeply into the rock. Beautiful, he thought. He had never seen anything like it before. The pattern had no tool marks around it, no evidence of what had carved it.

“Maybe it was a laser,” suggested Carter.
 

“Hmmm. Maybe.” Alvarez ran her hands along the deep grooves in the rock.

“I didn’t say it was a good idea. More like a suggestion.” Out of habit, Carter reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette. But he had smoked his last one a week ago. He sighed and dropped his hand.

“There’s more this way!” said Schmidt, who had descended ten more stairs. He held his torch aloft so the others could see the swirling patterns. This time they intertwined with others until they covered the entire ceiling. Lincoln looked up at them in silence. Here, finally, they had found something worth looking for.

“These must have been here when you came up, Lincoln,” said Alvarez softly, “but you didn’t have a torch.”

Lincoln stretched his hand toward the ceiling, brushing his fingertips across the patterns. He caressed them. The symbols obviously meant something. Lincoln had never seen anything so stunning. A perfect circle cut into the rock that joined fluidly with other circles and swirls, all connected. No two designs were exactly alike, yet they possessed a certain rigidity and structure that conveyed order and intention.

“Do they go all the way down?” asked Alvarez.

“Looks like it.”
 

The team descended the stairs into the coolness of the mountain. Occasionally, Lincoln touched the roof of the tunnel to feel the deep grooves again. The stone was cold but not damp. About halfway down, Lincoln almost imagined the rock was warm beneath his fingertips, like the symbols were emitting heat. But when he paused to confirm, the stone felt as cold as before.

“Shouldn’t it be damp?” asked Alvarez.

“Every cave I’ve seen has been,” said Lincoln.

No one said anything else until they reached the bottom where the tunnel opened suddenly to a tall ceiling. In the dim light of the torches, the patterns disappeared. Across from the stairway, the rectangular chamber contained more symbols outlining an area the size of a large door or archway. The wall, however, remained solid stone. Nothing opened into the silo.

“Must be why we didn’t find it and you did. Something made it open and then close. But how? I still can’t figure it out. You were right behind us,” said Nelson, his light trained on the symbols. “Is this where you came through?”

“Must be.” Lincoln examined the symbols too. “The stairs were directly in front of the door.”

“At least you thought they were,” said Nelson, pointing to another outline of an arch on the wall to the right. This one had its own unique set of symbols.

Lincoln turned to Nelson. “This is solid evidence that aliens have been here before. You don’t seem as excited about that as I thought you’d be.”

Nelson frowned. “Isn’t it weird that we’re finding exactly what we’d expect to find?”

“You expected this?” Lincoln nodded to the symbols.

“Maybe. But I think we’re asking all the wrong questions.”

“What questions should we be asking?”

“Here’s another one!” Lincoln and Nelson looked over at Alvarez. She pointed her torch excitedly toward the opposite wall.
 

Carter shook his head. “There’s no way to be certain which one leads to the silo, but I’d sure like to know why it’s closed now.”

“There must be a switch or something,” said Lincoln. “Especially if we’re going on the assumption that it’s alien. Maybe the door slides into the mountain.”

“I hope we don’t get sealed in here . . .” Alvarez shivered as she inspected the three sections. The symbols covering them looked the same as the ones in the tunnel, but there was no pattern here, either. “There’s got to be a lever somewhere in here and in Corridor A. We just have to find it.”

“At least we found the stairs again. So you’re not crazy, Lincoln,” said Carter, clapping Lincoln’s shoulder.

A search at the end of the tunnel turned up nothing else.
 

“We might as well go back,” said Schmidt. “Going to be dark.”

“Wish we could take a picture of those hieroglyphs,” said Lincoln.

“Me, too,” said Carter.

“Wait! We can!” said Alvarez. She pulled out a piece of paper from her coat pocket and turned it over on a section of the symbols. With a pencil, she shaded over the top of the paper, making a relief drawing of the symbols.

“At least that’s something,” said Schmidt as he peered at the paper over her shoulder.
 

Nelson walked to the foot of the stairs with his torch. “C’mon, man,” he said to Lincoln, who had started on new relief drawings. “It’s getting late. I’m hungry, and I’m sick of this place.”

Lincoln didn’t look up. “I want as many of these as possible. We still have paper left.”

“
Why
?” Nelson turned from the stairs and glowered at Lincoln.

Lincoln stopped his shading. “Excuse me?” The others halted halfway between the tunnel and the door, looking from one man to the other.

“You heard me. You still think you call the shots around here, but last I checked, I wasn’t getting paid for this crap. And if I don’t get a check, you’re not my boss. That means I do what I want.”

“And what exactly do you think you’re going to do?” Lincoln dropped his arms and squared his shoulders.

Nelson glared back. “I’m going back to camp, where I will eat, and then I’ll go to sleep in my cold little tent. But at least I’ll feel like I’m on Earth and not some alien craphole.”

“Are you serious? We have a job to do!”

“Oh, wake up, Surrey! We don’t know what we’re doing here and probably never will. If you want to live inside this godforsaken mountain then fine, but leave the rest of us out of it.”

Carter stepped between them. “We’re all tired,” he said, directing the comment to Nelson. Then he turned to Lincoln. “How about we leave now and start fresh tomorrow?”

Lincoln scowled. “You, too?”

“We’ll come back tomorrow,” said Alvarez quietly.

“Speak for yourself,” said Nelson. “I’m not spending any more time here. If you need me, you can come find me at camp.”

Blood boiling, Lincoln looked from one to the other. They were right, but that knowledge only made him angrier. He let them go ahead as they exited.

Nelson’s mood didn’t improve once they returned to camp. Apparently, Nash had cut rations again and ordered anyone with a gun to learn how to hunt.

“It was only a matter of time,” said Carter as they picked up their reduced rations. “I’m surprised supplies lasted as long as they did.”

“Nash must not expect help or a resupply anytime soon,” said Alvarez.
 

Nelson sat glumly near his tent, away from the others. Lincoln only nodded as they discussed the situation. He wasn’t really hungry, so he got up again and offered his portion to Nelson.

Nelson refused it. “What? You think I’m a child you can placate with extra food? That I’ll change my mind? I’m done, man. Done.” He stood and walked into the trees, leaving his own ration on the ground.

Lincoln considered chucking his remaining food into the woods, but instead he stalked to his tent, dropping his ration into Schmidt’s hands on his way. Darkness fell. Fires were put out. Lincoln wanted more than anything to study the symbols in his pocket, but he couldn’t see anything in his dark tent. He heard Alvarez and Carter say goodnight, then everything went quiet. Schmidt’s buddies weren’t sitting around joking and laughing tonight.

The feeling he was forgetting something nagged at Lincoln. Tired and sore, he closed his eyes to think, but it made no difference. The symbols flickering in the firelight kept rising in his mind.

He remembered.
 

Nash—they hadn’t told him they’d found the second tunnel. But as far as Lincoln was concerned, Nash didn’t need to know right away. It’s not like the colonel could do anything. Lincoln fingered the pages in his jacket pocket. What did the drawings mean?

Over the next few days, Lincoln and Alvarez made several trips back to the tunnel. They sat for hours with his torch trained on one of the doorways, trying to decipher the hieroglyphs. But if they contained a language or code, Lincoln couldn’t figure it out. As soon as he thought he saw a pattern, he would pull out a relief drawing and compare them. But he was always mistaken. Sometimes Carter came with them, complaining he was in no shape to climb a mountain two or three times a day. Instead he spent much of his time fishing.
 

Nelson ignored Lincoln and his plans altogether. Lincoln made frequent attempts to get Nelson to explain what he’d meant by his comment in the tunnel, but Nelson refused to elaborate. After a few days, Lincoln gave up.
I’m not begging him for help
, he thought.

When he wasn’t working in the tunnel, Lincoln joined the hunt for food. Clouds and rain cooled the mountains, and the hunters always returned cold, wet, and often hungry. Lincoln always pulled out the drawings while they waited for game. Carter remarked that a deer could lie down and die at Lincoln’s feet and he wouldn’t even notice, he was so obsessed with the symbols.

More refugees turned up every day, most of them having fled to the secluded areas of the mountains, like this one, for protection. Many told stories of the invaders—giant creatures that stood on two feet with symbols etched into their stone-like bodies. They argued about the color, though—some claimed the creatures shone gold, while others said grey. One or two survivors had escaped camps the invaders had burned. Their numbers swelled, and Nash’s soldiers all pulled double duty to maintain order. Squabbles began to break out over the lack of food.

“The camp’s too big,” said Alvarez. She had come to find Lincoln at his tent before he headed to the tunnel. “I think I’ll go with you today. I don’t exactly feel safe here with all these strangers.”

Lincoln looked up sharply from the drawing he was studying. “Why? What happened?”

“Nothing. I’d like to keep it that way. Every time I have some food or water, I feel like someone’s watching me.”

“I know what you mean,” said a voice. Lincoln and Alvarez both turned. Nelson stood behind them. “I think we should leave.”

Lincoln shook his head, ready to argue. Alvarez spoke before he could. “Where would we go?”

“Doesn’t matter. Food’s going to run out soon. There are too many people here. I was talking to a guy who came from North Carolina, and apparently the Glyphs . . .”

“The what?” asked Lincoln.

“That’s what they’re calling them. Anyway, the Glyphs like to target large camps like this one. And if they do, we’re trapped here.”

“There’s always the caves,” said Lincoln.

“I thought you’d say that,” replied Nelson, “but I’m not living in the creepy alien silo!”

“You’ve made that clear. I was thinking of it more as emergency shelter.”

Carter joined them, wiping his hands on a dirty rag, having just finished cleaning a pail of fish. “I’ve thought about that, too. But have you considered that these Glyph things might want their silo back?”

“How do we know for sure it’s theirs?” asked Lincoln.

Nelson snorted, and even Alvarez tried to hide her smile.

“No, I’m serious. We think it’s been here a long time, right? So maybe it’s not theirs.”

“Or maybe,” said Nelson, his voice rising slightly, “it’s the reason they’re here.”