The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (6 page)

After work I went with him to
the excavation site and what I beheld took my breath away. Zan had indeed gone
further in toward the middle of the crater. The track he had cut was now only
about one-hundred feet from the center. The bones were there too. It was
apparent that they were arranged, not in a circle around the crater, but in a
disk, a complete disk of fossils that covered the entire seam at that level.
They did not seem to occur beneath that disk nor above it, and every single skeleton
was oriented toward the center. The only change in the bones was the bones
themselves. The skeletons closest to the middle looked nothing like the ones
that had been uncovered at the perimeter.

“Look at the head!” Zan
exclaimed, as he dusted off a particularly large specimen nearly twelve feet
long. This head wasn’t a torpedo, but was anvil shaped. Its jaws extended two
feet to each side and were filled with regular, three-inch-long teeth. “And
look at the feet,” he said, pointing to the back feet. The webs were gone. The
toes on the rear appendages now had three joints and looked nimble and
dangerous, tipped with wicked claws. “If I walk back to the edge of the fossil
bed I can see the feet change. Thirty feet back the last of the webbing
disappears. The jaws start extending to the anvil shape you see here at about
fifty feet back. These are the same animals we found at the edge. It’s like
they are evolving right in front of our eyes!” He seemed manic, jittery. If I
hadn’t known better I would have thought he had taken up a meth habit.

“Listen, Zan, I’m worried about
you,” I said, crouching down beside him. “You’re doing all right. Maybe you
should take a few days off. Say you got the flu or something. I can keep this
safe.”

He turned toward me, his face
frantic and contorted with fear. “No! No, no, no! I am getting close to
something here. Something big. It’s in the middle. Something is in the middle.
Something big. I’m going to find it. I’m going to get out of this shit-hole
once and for all! So either help me or leave me alone!”

What was I supposed to do? I
helped him. That night I came back to the mine and found him on the dozer,
gingerly pealing away at the fossil shelf, working toward the center. When I
got out of the truck and went to fire up the loader, he waved to me, nothing
more. As the night wore on we worked the layer of overburden, pulling out the
priceless tons of coal and pushing them aside as if they were so much shale.
About four hours into the dig Zan climbed down from the dozer and began to dig
with a shovel, uncovering the fossils that lay not forty feet from the middle
of the pit. He waved to me and I came down, leaving the loader running.

“Look at this.” He called out
over the competing roar of the diesel engines, his breath coming out in great,
ghostly torrents of steam in the chill air. He pushed aside the black,
crumbling coal with a booted food to reveal the latest skull.

I have to confess that at first
I didn’t recognize what it was I was looking at. I didn’t see a skull, or even a
thing produced by a natural process. There was too much order to it to be a
thing of random creation, but there was nothing in the form that suggested a
linear or sensible derivation from understandable life. I can say, however,
that the first thing I recognized, were teeth. Hundreds of them, of all sizes,
jutting out at obscene angles from what must once have been four distinct
shelves of a mouth. They interlocked and ground into one another in a manner
that must have insured a life of constant gnashing and pain. The only
consistency in the mass was that every tooth was uniformly sharp and terrible.
It would seem the evil god that had spawned this abomination could not find a
design more awful than the predator’s tooth, and so made it more dreadful by forcing
it to hurt the predator as much as the prey.

“What the hell is that thing?”
I was shaking as I spoke and it was not from the cold.

“Those are holes for the eyes.”
He sounded like a child discovering the mechanics of some simple device for the
first time: this is how a bicycle works; this is how a skateboard rolls; this
is how an animal fits fifteen eyeballs into its head.

He jumped up from the wretched
thing and climbed back onto the dozer, roaring up the engine. I was glued to my
spot, beholding the bones in the dead lights of the dozer’s halogens. Zan
called down to me, “Come on, we’re going to see what these things were looking
at. He plowed the dozer toward the center of the crater, unconcerned for the
fossil bed he had gone to such great lengths to protect until then. The tracks
of the giant Cat twisted and shattered the skeletons as Zan charged hard into
the remaining overburden. I stumbled over to the loader, dreading the act with
every halting step. I know I could not have stopped him even if I’d wanted to.

Zan charged into the remaining
feet of cover. Black dust boils rose in the lights, and cracks rang out as the
coal seam splintered in the petroleum-powered onslaught. Then I heard the ear
shattering ping of steel breaking. The dozer’s engine went dead and I watched
Zan leap from the cab and run around the front of the machine. I killed the
loader and climbed down, not sure if I wanted to know what had happened. As I
came around the dozer I found Zan looking down at the base of the dozer’s blade.
Two of the inch-thick steel teeth that lined the bottom of the blade were
cleanly broken off, rent back under the blade by the terrible pressure of the
Cat’s unrelenting drive.

“What the hell did that?” I
asked. We might be able to hide the fact that we’re using up fuel, but two
teeth busted on a new dozer was going to be trouble. “Shit. We’re going to have
to weld those on before Monday or it’s going to be our ass. What did you hit?”

Zan dusted
off the black ground the teeth had apparently struck. He spat and, using his
shirt sleeve, rubbed the spit on the patch of ground. It quickly took on a
reflective, even luminous quality like black
glass.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It looks like obsidian, but
that would never have broken steel teeth.” He dusted around the broken steel
and withdrew a six-inch-long shard of the glassy material, sharp and
dagger-like. “I’m going to see what I can figure out about this stuff.”

We decided to knock off. It was
four in the morning and even though we weren’t working on Sundays anymore, I
knew my wife would skin me for staying out so late. It was freezing outside and
Zan was on his motorcycle so I offered him a ride. We loaded the bike into the
back of the truck and set off down the road.

We pulled out of the mine’s
gravel access road and out onto the deserted Highway 70. “What do you think all
that shit is?” I asked, trying to keep fear out of my voice as best I could.

Zan’s voice was calm, reserved
in a way it had not been for days. “Do you know much about the Pennsylvanian
age?”

“It’s full of coal. I know
that. Bowling Green is Mississippian, at Hadley Hill you climb up into
Pennsylvanian.”

“Yeah, well back during the
Pennsylvanian age all this was a great big swamp. I mean really big. The
Appalachians were bigger than the Himalayas, and all the moisture got trapped
on this side making one giant swamp at the edge of a hot shallow sea. All that
shit died and sank and became coal, all the trees and ferns and fishes. But
something happened then. Nobody knows why, but everything died. Every fish and
fern and tree. All of it. Scientist think it was a meteor.”

“Oh, yeah. Off the coast of
Mexico. Killed all the dinosaurs. I saw it on the Discovery Channel. That show
about the T. rex.”

“No. That was millions of years
later. That was a meteor, and it killed like, sixty percent of the world’s
species. The extinction that I’m talking about was bigger, and they’re not
certain that it was a meteor at all. There is no evidence it was, and this
extinction took out over ninety percent of the species. The dinosaurs first
appeared a few million years later. Plants started bearing seeds, shit started
running on two legs. Everything that survived the extinction got a lot meaner
and they got meaner really fast. It was like all of a sudden a whole bunch of
pressure was put on every living thing. The ones that survived did so because
they could run, or hide, or have lots of babies.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“What if it wasn’t a meteor, or
volcanoes changing the climate that made everything die? What if it was some
new species, or old species that changed real fast and had the edge all of the
sudden? Not in a million years where everything could get used to it, but in
just a few thousand years, or even a few hundred. What if something was
changing the animals that came near it, like a virus, or some sort of mutation?
What if all those bones were the generations of some new super-predator that
got, I don’t know, changed, and then started killing off all the other species
that were just too weak to compete?”

I didn’t have an answer. I
dropped Zan off at his house, then drove home, an uncomfortable pit of anxiety
in my gut.

That night I dreamt of swamps,
great reeking swamps floating on miles of hot, rotting filth. I dreamt that
deep, deep down the rottenness beat like a heart, slowly rising up until it
bubbled onto the surface, a vast black pool of vile contamination. I heard the
screams of the tiny, unfortunate amphibians as the black pool engulfed them.
And I heard them change. I heard it. It was the sound of bones breaking, of
skin splitting. It was the noise of an incomprehensible power, ancient even in
infancy, a remnant sound from the bridging of the gulf between a dead universe
and bloody, fecund life.

I was roused from sleep by the
gasp of my wife. I didn’t need to open my eyes to know something was very
wrong. In fact, I couldn’t open my eyes. Pain came on quickly and did not stop.

“What the hell is wrong with
me?” I cried.

“Your face is...is...it’s
cooked!”

I knew what she meant. It was
the pain of twelve hours in the sun, of scalding water poured on the arm. From
my neck to my forehead the skin was tight and throbbing. Every time I tried to
speak I felt it crack, sending jolts of misery into the core of my brain.

The ER doctor questioned me for
an hour. He all but accused me of botching a batch of meth. When I continued to
deny any drug activity he threw up his hands. “Well, have you been exposed to
any radioactive material?” No, no of course not.

I had to
have my wife dial the phone and hold it to my ear. My hands were wrapped in
gauze. My face was covered in a mask of thick, white cream. I could smell the
blisters festering on my skin. The phone rang until the answering machine
picked up. “This is Zan, leave a message or don’t.”

“Hang it up.” I told her. She
was convinced I was cooking meth with Zan, and no amount of pleading would
convince her to give me a ride to his house. With no other option left, I
called the sheriff’s office. Two hours later a white police car pulled up into
my drive.

“We didn’t find Zan. Something
got his dog though. Poor thing got tore to pieces. His house was trashed, but
it didn’t seem like anything was missing. Just a bunch of food everywhere and
the tub was full of black water.” Even through my half closed eyes I could see
that the deputy was suspicious. I looked every bit like a victim of mishandled
anhydrous ammonia, and it must have seemed like I was trying to use the police
in some sort of backfired drug burn. “You mind if I have a look around?”

“Go ahead,” I muttered through
split lips, hearing the skin around my mouth crackle with the words. He poked
around the yard and shed for several minutes then returned.

“Well, if he ain’t turned up by
this time tomorrow his family can file a report.” He was halfway out the door
when he stopped and turned back to me, “You sure you and him ain’t been into
nothing?”

I didn’t bother replying.

It rained hard that night and
into the next day, and the day after that. Snodgrass called to see how I was
and to tell me that the walls of the coal pit had collapsed in the rain and
work would be halted in the bottom seams until they could get the water and mud
out. Zan’s father filed a report. Zan stayed missing.

By the end of the week the
bandages were removed and my face no longer caused people to look away. Now
they only winced. I got the call at around noon.

Mr. Snodgrass sounded tired,
shaky as he said hello. “How you doin’ boy?”

“Fine, Mr. Snodgrass. I’m a
whole lot better.”

“Good, that’s real good. I got
some bad news for you. Seems Owen and B.J. had an accident. Well, they um,
they’re dead. Ain’t no mincing words here. I ain’t got any operators worth a
damn and Monday we are going to be hitting the seam hard. I know Zan was your
friend, but the kid’s gone AWOL and I need all the help I can get. What are the
odds of getting you onsite Monday morning? You ain’t got to operate, just keep
an eye on the new ones, make sure they ain’t screwing around.”

I didn’t know what to say. I
had known Owen and B.J. half my life and on top of everything else, it was just
too much. “Mr. Snodgrass, I’m going to need more time than this.”

“How’s Wednesday then?” he
replied, not taking my meaning.

“I’ll call you next week and
we’ll figure something out.” A thought occurred to me then, and I asked the
question, “You’re not planning on digging out the crater are you?”