The Aeschylus (21 page)

“But he's not here.”

“He's not here.” Never mind that AJ was also starting to feel a good deal of personal responsibility in spite of what his friend said. He didn't think he needed to share that, though.

Dutch sighed. “All right, what do you want me to do?”

The terrain around the perimeter was rocky and rugged. The trio walked through sand when they could and stepped on protuberant stones when they couldn't. For a short stretch, they marched through the water itself, the face of a cliff cutting their progress on dry land. The water was warm, and its caress more unnatural than Kate would have thought, but neither the man in front nor the one behind seemed to notice.

On their way through the shallows, Kate saw an islet just off the shore. It was covered in greenery and the ancient, white filth
of animal droppings. It should have been teeming with birds—
or penguins or seals
, she thought, remembering how far south they were—but it was as empty as the rest. Nothing stirred along the coast but the lap of the water and the gray, creeping fog rolling in from the east.

“There,” Mason said. He had stopped just in front of her.

At first, she wasn't sure what she was looking at, but the object ahead was too regular to be of the same ilk as the terrain. Then the fog cleared, and she realized it was a wall. It wasn't a single contiguous barrier, but a semicircle of chunks, each rising some fifteen feet and extending maybe twenty or twenty-five feet lengthwise. Fence and barbed wire stretched between the gaps, a razor barrier built to deter what the walls did not. She had never seen anything like it. It was a fortress, but it looked like a fortress made from pre-assembled blocks, a giant's block house made with a giant's constructor set.

When they got close, Mason crouched by one of the gaps and produced his knife, a massive steel tool with a dozen rip teeth. He began rocking the blade, the thin wire of the fence trapped between the serrated edges. Kate could see he had probably not been the first one to get in; the fence was ripped in several places along the base. From the looks of things, something had wanted to get in, and badly.

As the last wire snapped, Mason grabbed the bottom of the fence and stood up, producing a gap just wide enough for a person to slip through. “Ladies first.”

Kate peered through with the same trepidation she had felt along the shoreline. In spite of the gap between the walls, she could not see what was on the other side. She swallowed, telling herself the answers could be on the other side of that fence, the workers could be on the other side of that fence.

“We don't have all day, princess. Vy, you go ahead.”

Without a word, Christian stepped past her and dropped to the ground. He disappeared into the opening, crawling his way through.

Mason smiled at her. He couldn't possibly predict what was on the other side, but it was a knowing smile just the same.

Kate got down on her belly and crawled. It was strange, but the ground was cold. It whispered of winter, as if in the long ago, the island had been a different place altogether. She got to her feet on the other side and found herself slipping through the gap in the concrete walls, into the inner sanctum.

When she turned, what she saw was not a surprise, not really, but it still packed a punch. There were no workers, nor any sign of Mason's missing chopper. The inner workings of the fortress—the bunkers, the towers, the machinery, the very ground itself—was a twisted and terrible ruin.

The folders had been stuffed into the kitchen pantry. They were clumped along the shelves, papers leaking out in spots and spilling to the floor. They mixed with the empty cans of food and filth left by the kitchen's last inhabitants. AJ found himself wondering why the staff had kept so many hard copies when he kicked a group of cans and found a stack of hard drives underneath. A fat lot of good they would do him now, but it didn't look like Doctor Grey had taken any chances. The place was an evidence locker.

“I never would have pictured the doc as a hoarder,” Dutch said. He was looking over AJ's shoulder.

“Yeah, me either.”

“Think you'll find what you're looking for?”

AJ looked at the corrugated file folders, the strewn papers, and wondered what other junk might be buried under the trash. “I don't know. I hope so. If all the doc was doing was collecting doughnut receipts, then I'd say he was crazier than he looked.”

“Well, this was your idea.”

“Just keep a lookout. Let me know if any of those idiots start to wander this way.”

“Yeah.”

“And stay out of sight.”

“Yeah.”

“Dutch, you hearing me buddy? No chances.”

His friend looked at him, exasperated. “Yeah,” he said.

As Dutch stepped into the hall, AJ found Gideon's flashlight and turned it on. The place looked small in the darkness and even smaller in the light, but as far as self-made prisons go, it wasn't bad. The pantry didn't look any less a disaster on second glance, but he made his own filtering system. He kept anything that looked useful, and he tossed the rest out of the pantry door.

“Still all clear, Dutch?”

“Yeah. I just poked my head around the corner. Looks like your buddy is coming back down from the helipad.”

“My buddy?”

“Melvin. I've seen the way you two stare into each others' eyes, all dreamy like.”

“Yeah, great. You see St. Croix?”

“No.”

“Keep looking.” And then, as he found payroll receipts, “Hey, you want to know how much a roughneck makes out here for a three week shift?”

“No.”

AJ tossed the file down. “It's a hell of a lot more than you.”

“You're breaking my heart.”

He uncovered accounting information, payroll stubs, insurance claims, sick reports, employee reviews, and everything else he knew existed and hated dealing with at his own job. So far, nothing useful. He tossed more files out the door, then found a couple with banking information he decided to keep. He knew that he and Dutch didn't have a lot of time before Mason came back, but there had to be something in here. Else, why would Gideon keep it all? If the man himself was present, they might have been able to ask him.

When he got to the end of it, he found he had less than a dozen sheets in the keeper pile. Cursing, he swept a line of cans off of a nearby shelf and sent them clanging to the floor.

“What the hell is going on in there?” Dutch called.

“Nothing! Nothing! That's what the hell is going on.”

“Then you and me better split, good buddy. We're not meant to be visitors.”

AJ gave the stack on the floor another go, not really looking. Then he stopped. Dutch had said something there, something about...

Visitors.

The piles of discard lay strewn across the floor, but he began digging through them with renewed fury. He created a new trash pile in the sink, a metal tub filled with dishes and old food that would have attracted a thousand bugs anywhere but here. He tossed in equipment lists, old memos, hand-written notes, and... and he stopped just as he was about to throw in a visitor's report. The Aeschylus was private property, and it was legally hazardous. All visitors were documented, both at the home office, and here at the site. He pulled a sheet from the list. The paper had been filed a week before, showing a chopper that had come in with men from the east coast office. Three men, to be exact. Two of the men were environmental microbiologists like Gideon. They had been given a task to analyze and document the first appearance of the fungus. It looked like much of their report was missing, but it had all been declared “unharmful” and “non-invasive,” and the entire thing had sign-off from the third member of the party: Valley Oil's head of legal council. Head of legal council, here on the platform. The microbiologists had stayed on The Aeschylus, but the third party had departed shortly after.

“Dutch!” he called. “Dutch, get in here!”

But his friend wasn't responding. AJ's voice drifted out into the open air, dying on the high ocean winds.

“What is this place?” the girl murmured.

Mason looked at her and then back at the hole. Some kind of basement sprawled beneath him, the earth ripped open at his
feet. To his right, one of the base watch towers lay crumpled and burned on the ground. A nearby bunker had its insides blown to the outside. The rest of the base wasn't much better: broken doors, scorched concrete, spent shell casings from another era crusting the earth like seeds. It remained as they had left it, whoever
they
were. Like the oil platform, however, the inhabitants were gone. Long gone, by the looks of things.

“Whatever it was, it's dead now,” he said.

“Where is everyone?”

“Take a look at this place. You tell me what you think.”

“It doesn't tell us anything about Gideon's friends though, does it?”

Mason turned and saw Christian reemerging from the fence. He was wet, the bottoms of his pants dripping. He gave a single shake of his head, and Mason nodded.

“We're not going any further without taking a swim. Can't skirt around the edge out there any more.”

“So?”

“So this is it.”

“It?”

“Now you're just being dense. I kind of liked that about you when we first met, but now, you're just pissing in my soup.”

“But we haven't found anything!” She looked around stubbornly.

“Why don't you take a look at that gate there and tell me what you see?”

When they had been at the docks, the path leading into the hills had been overgrown with the fungus. But if that had been overgrown, the main gate here was
infested
. There were more growths than he could count, bent and twisted and gnarled like old oaks.

“More of them,” she said. “There's no way through.”

“That's right.”

She shook her head, taking another walk around. “They have to be here. Gideon said so.”

“Gideon is whacked out of his mind. And if you think we're going to stay here and dig through those things at the gate, so are you.”

The girl might not get it, but he did. This was the end.

El fin.

And a grand end it was. No chopper. No Reiner. No goddamned fucking workers, and no goddamned fucking answers.

He turned to the nearest bunker. Without knowing he was going to do it, he threw down his rifle and kicked the closed door. The metal shuddered under his weight. It didn't solve a goddamned thing, but it felt good. Mason smashed it again, and before he knew it, he was hammering at it with kick after kick, slamming his heel into the door. The metal bent and shuddered, but it didn't give.

He looked back at the woman, and she was scared. She was right to be scared, stupid cow that she was.

Mason turned to Christian and made a
give me
motion with his fingers.

Christian reached into his pack, pulled out a breach charge, and tossed it to him. Mason caught it with both hands. He slapped it on the remains of the door, pushed the button to arm it, and then rolled around to the side of the bunker. The door blew inwards, sending shrapnel and thunder across the terrain.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?” Kate yelled.

Mason laughed. She tried to sound angry, but it wasn't working; she was still too scared.

“See if there are any more locked doors here, would you Vy? We'll give them a good once-over for the lady before we head out.”

The woman looked like she was about to say something else, but when Mason bent and picked up his rifle, she paused. “Now, they know we're here,” she said finally. “I bet they heard that all the way back at the platform.”

“Isn't that what you wanted?” Mason asked. “If anybody happens to be alive and wants to be saved, I bet they'll come running, don't you?”

“I don't know.”

“Yeah, well, I do. And we ain't gonna find shit.”

The anger was on him now, fierce and unbidden, but there was nothing to be done for it. He'd just have to ride it out.

And so would she.

He pushed past her into the open doorway. The other side was lined with shelves and boxes and, to his surprise, rifles. It looked like they had stumbled into the middle of a supply bunker.

“Nice,” the girl said, looking at the munitions. “You could have blown us sky high.”

“I didn't, so shut your mouth.”

They stepped past the wreckage of the doorway and into the body of the room. They were greeted by a pair of corpses wrapped arm-in-arm on the floor, almost perfectly preserved. It was an oddly touching sight.

“There you go,” Mason said. “Nothing but bodies.”

“These aren't blackened like the others,” she said. “And I'd say they've been dead a long time. Probably suffocated, if that door was sealed.”

“Well, they didn't die of food shortage,” Mason said, looking at the cans stacked nearby. He couldn't read any of them. Mason could speak Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and a little Spanish, but not German. That was the wrong war.

“What happened here?” she asked.

At one time or another, Mason had been all around the world. He'd been through hellfire and darkness, and he always managed to find his way back. He had a high tolerance for the unexpected, as any team leader did. But his tolerance for the
totally fucking strange
was just about to hit the red. This place was abandoned except for two stiffs wrapped around each other like a couple of homos, and the only clue they had were more of those goddamned tentacles.
Something
had torn this place
apart, but he was becoming less and less interested in what that something might be.

Christian appeared in the doorway. “Nobody else here, boss.” He noticed the two corpses on the ground but didn't comment.

“Then we're packing up.”

Part of him wanted to scout the whole island. Part of him wanted to bring the other chopper back here and do a full scan, hit every sector, and use thermal vision. But that was wrong, and it wasn't the mission. He had been letting his curiosity get the better of him, and that was dangerous. It was time to cut their losses and go.

The fact that two of his men had disappeared into the void (quite literally) would eat at him, but he'd have plenty of time to think about that later, say... when he was retired, resting in his own little beach house. He'd tell his superiors that Reiner's helo had disappeared and most likely crashed into the ocean. That was the truth. With radio communications down, that was the most likely scenario, and yet...