Earthcore, page 58
Why hadn’t she trusted her instincts? She should have never come down here.
Kirkland had escaped. So had O’Doyle, Lybrand and probably Reeves.
All of this — the hacking, the destruction, days of cooking in the desert sun — it had all been for nothing.
Kayla crawled.
A silverbug scurried over her back.
She reached for the knife, held it.
Why had Kirkland let her live? Left her with a weapon?
Maybe he was toying with her. Maybe he was the kind of sick fuck that enjoyed the misery of others. People like that were destined to burn in hell. She could at least take minor satisfaction from that fact.
Kayla crawled.
She gripped the corridor’s smooth edge, grunted as she rose to stand on her good leg. Every motion sent shattering pain though her knee, reminded her of the long reconstruction efforts to come.
If she was lucky.
Downstream. In the river, the water would carry her weight. That was the way to go. Just had to hop though this wet platinum sludge, hop carefully, then—
—movement on her left: movement, and color.
The burst of horror hit her all at once, made her atoms tingle.
Kayla Meyers looked to her left.
A wall of glowing monsters poured down the riverbank toward her, the mist magnifying their flashing red and orange bursts like stoplights illuminating the morning fog.
So, that was why he’d left her alive.
“Clever boy,” she said.
Kayla shifted her balance, hopped slightly, and turned to face her attackers.
10:26 a.m.
Say one thing for Kayla Meyers — that woman sure could scream.
She’d saved her best for last. It echoed through the ship canyon. Defiant at first, a scream of rage, then of pain, and, finally, a guttural plea that faded to nothing. Not words, really, but sounds any human being could understand.
Connell took no joy from her death. Maybe he should have left her a gun … maybe she would have held them off longer.
He kept moving, each struggling step his own personal Spanish Inquisition. Confess! Confess! He would have, gladly, to anything, just to make this pain stop for even an instant.
And yet, he kept on.
Hard to breathe. Heart, hammering.
He saw the bubble room where he’d left O’Doyle and Lybrand. He moved past that, unable to keep himself from whimpering when he slipped, when he reactively put his ruined foot down to stop from falling.
Past the ship corner, out of the canyon.
There … the entrance to the Linus Highway.
He didn’t know if he could make it.
He also knew he had no choice but to try.
The animal inside understood one thing and one thing only: survival.
Connell Kirkland limped toward the tunnel entrance.
Three miles to go.
Three miles.
10:35 a.m.
The orb descended.
A few more faint lights flickered to life. The reflections glowed like soft pearls, first appearing on the bottom, increasing in size as they arced up the curve, then shrank again as the orb descended past.
Down and down and down.
Reflections of massive, rough-hewn pillars, each larger than the Eiffel Tower, thicker than a skyscraper, each a monument of engineering and long-dead technological prowess, glided over the polished platinum. For several minutes, the pillars’ images alone covered the orb’s sides, until a new reflection arced across the metallic surface, gradually growing larger and more defined.
That reflection? A fish-eye distortion of the shaft bottom.
10:48 a.m.
This was what madness felt like.
Bertha wanted to strip off the suit, find a rough-edged rock and scrape the skin from her arms. Scrape it right off, because even that agony would be nothing compared to what she felt now.
Second-degree burns? Third? If she’d shoved her arms into boiling water and held them there for hours … that’s what this was.
She leaned heavily on Patrick. He leaned heavily on her. A four-legged whole greater than the sum of two-legged parts.
He stumbled, started to fall.
Without thinking, Bertha grabbed him around the waist. He stayed upright, thanks to a fresh wave of scorching agony ripping up her arms.
“Can’t make it,” he grunted. “You go.”
She shook her head. She would be dead right now if not for him. Bertha vaguely remembered seeing Angus Kool. Patrick had taken the man’s suit. Patrick found a way to save her, she would do the same for him.
Bertha looked back — a line of silverbugs behind them, more flowing up the tunnel to take their place.
“Patrick, we go together,” she said. “You don’t make it, I don’t make it. Do you want me to live?”
He glared down at her, like he hated her. Maybe, in that moment, he did hate her. Maybe he still would once they got out of here, but she didn’t care — as long as he did get out.
“Move,” she said.
He gritted his teeth, winced — from which injury, she did not know — then let her help him on.
10:55 a.m.
Heat.
Pain.
Connell stumbled, fell to his knees in the cave silt.
Silverbugs all around. He couldn’t hear them. He didn’t bother to see if they were shiny or burnished — if they were the kind with knives, he’d find out soon enough.
How far had he climbed? A mile? Maybe more? Maybe less?
The animal inside clawed and bit, hissed and spat.
The man leaned his weight on the rifle, tried to rise.
The world slipped. The world spun.
His face hit the cave silt, a small rock digging into his right cheekbone.
Where was he? The car … an accident … someone T-boned the car.
Cori.
His fingers tingling. Toes, too.
That sound … metallic clicking, clinking. The engine, cooling from the winter’s cold.
Connell blinked, tried to see. Everything blurry. Was that … a rock wall?
He pushed himself up on hands and knees. No, not a car accident. He was in the tunnels.
Silverbugs.
The rocktopi were coming.
His stomach, queasy … he might throw up.
Have to move. Have to move.
Connell picked up the rifle. He put the butt firmly in the silt, tried once again to rise. His arms trembled. His legs groaned. His foot howled.
Come on, come on …
He focused, begged his muscles to just do this one more thing. Inch by inch, he started to rise.
Then, he slowly started to sink.
He didn’t even have the strength to stand.
So, he crawled.
Hand after hand, knee after knee, Connell Kirkland kept moving up the Linus Highway.
10:59 a.m.
Twenty miles below Connell’s feet, the orb’s descent slowed.
The air temperature was that of hell itself, raging at just over 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit.
The curved, polished platinum came to rest on the shaft floor, settling into a perfectly fitted depression made of the same metal.
An internal computer processed data on air pressure, heat and distance traveled.
Finding those readings suitable, the computer triggered the detonator.
Chapter Thirty-Four
121,440 feet below the surface
11:00 a.m.
The orb shuddered once, then disappeared in a nova of light brighter than the sun. Shockwaves lashed out at supersonic speeds, disintegrating the countless support pillars in a billowing burst of evaporated stone. A great rumbling and shaking began as millions of tons of rock, now without support from below, began to settle into the newly created void.
Devastating heat from the blast raced up the deep shaft, melting rock along the way. Within seconds the blast erupted into the Dense Mass Cavern, spurting upward like a geyser in an expanding cloud of destruction. The orb’s cathedral room, which sat in the center of the immortal metal hull, sagged like cheap wax, collapsed in on itself, in seconds going from a magnificent technological monument to a white-hot sea of molten metal. Silverbugs erupted like popcorn, then melted in place to join the boiling pool of metal. Like a ring rippling from a pebble in a pond, the explosive heat reached out from the ship’s center, melting the timeless vessel in a quickly expanding wave.
The shockwaves also traveled downward, winning the battle between the irresistible force and immovable object. Rock simply ceased to exist as starlike temperatures evaporated everything within reach, creating a huge bubble of superheated gas.
The orb didn’t punch a hole through the earth’s mantle. It didn’t have to. The cold, calculated, precise science that once carved out the pillars had placed the shaft’s bottom a geological hair’s width from the swirling mantle. For millennia, the earth’s internal pressure pushed against the shaft floor, obeying the laws of physics and seeking the easiest way out. But the shaft floor’s precise design had held just enough strength to keep that incalculable force at bay, just enough to keep things as they were meant to be.
The orb, however, melted another half mile’s worth of crust, a calculation as fixed and precise as a surgeon’s stroke. At the bottom of that newly created bubble of plasma, the earth’s pressure — so long held in check by the thinnest of margins — finally broke free.
Magma rocketed upward with tidal-wave force, pushed ever higher by the liquid core’s grinding, pulsating pressures. The magma filled the new pocket and continued up the shaft, pushing the ten-thousand-degree gas bubble before it.
11:01 a.m.
O’Doyle and Lybrand crawled on their bellies, urged on by the unmistakable smell of fresh, outside air. The ground shuddered beneath them, pouring fuel on their desperate effort to escape the mountain.
The low rock ceiling scraped at O’Doyle’s back. He grunted as he worked his thick trunk through the narrow opening, jagged limestone tearing his KoolSuit to shreds.
He wiggled past a pumpkin-shaped rock and continued on.
11:02 a.m.
At the waterfall, the temperature soared a thousand degrees. Two thousand. More. The river instantly boiled to superheated steam. The rocktopi clinging to the ancient, tentacled sculpture died quickly, the fluid in their bodies boiling, making them swell like water balloons before erupting with audible pops.
11:03 a.m.
The ground beneath Connell shook and lurched, knocking him about so violently that he couldn’t even stay on his hands and knees. He fell to his chest. Cracks raced up the tunnel walls like bolts of splitting lightning, the sound of grinding rock following like thunder. Thick, swirling storm clouds of dust seeped into the air.
He looked up to see a fist-sized piece of rock fall from the tunnel ceiling, dust trailing behind it like a comet’s tail. The rock bounced off the wildly shaking floor, settled against the tunnel wall.
The entire ceiling gave way.
Boulders crashed down.
11:04 a.m.
Magma exploded up from the shaft floor, a great gushing pillar of molten rock jetting against the tunnel ceiling more than two thousand feet above. There it licked against an artificial sun, which sputtered once and then fell dark. A great rain of magma sprayed across the cavern, rained down to splash into the hellish pool of bubbling, liquefied hull.
Confused silverbugs scattered everywhere, rushing pell-mell in all directions. Some scampered headlong into the boiling pools and melted in a fraction of a second. Some scattered up the walls, only to be peeled off by the torrential cascade of scorching lava. Some fell motionless where they stood, internal mechanics baked to death in heat rivaling that at the earth’s center.
Swirling magma covered the ancient tile floor, forming a hell-spawned lake that rose slowly up the cavern walls. Boiling rock poured like water, flowing into the countless tunnels connected, splashing orange-hot and destroying everything in its path.
The Dense Mass Cavern trembled. A slight shake at first, then harder, then rattling as if held by the fist of a planet-sized giant. The floor cracked and jumped, torn apart by billions of tons of settling rock. The ceiling collapsed, dropping boulders the size of city blocks into the soupy mix of melted ship and liquid rock.
The orb’s burst of energy created a void that nature had to fill. The mountain slowly fell in on itself as the column of magma continued to jet upward, pushed by the pressures of the world itself.
11:05 a.m.
The Land Rover rocked wildly on its shocks, bouncing like some child’s toy as the ground shook and rumbled. He leaned heavily against the hood, trying to keep his balance on a jumping trampoline made of rock and dirt.
The world shuddered. The ground lurched. He wondered if the sky itself might fall.
Sonny McGuiness had never known fear this profound, this all-encompassing. He was down at the base of the mountain, but would that matter? Everything threw itself back and forth so violently the entire state might be breaking up.
And yet, he knew this place of death was, itself, dying, and that knowledge electrified his soul, filled him with joy beyond measure.
He raised a gnarled fist, shook it at the towering mountain.
“Now it’s your funeral, you sonofabitch!”
The peak seemed to fold in on itself, a massive circus tent with the center stake kicked out. Unfathomable mounds of rock dropped backward out of sight — the mountain started collapsing.
It was impossible for the ground on which he stood to move this much, to kick like a mule, to lift the Land Rover and drop it down over and over. Sonny held on against the shockwaves, transfixed as the cursed place tore itself apart.
He held on tight, stared up the path that led to the mesa. If he saw the woman, he’d get in and drive off, earthquake or no earthquake.
But he couldn’t leave, not just yet.
Because Sonny McGuiness wanted to watch a mountain die.
11:06 a.m.
For millennia, the big river had flowed down through the wide tunnel. Now water boiled away as magma flowed into it, flowed up, pushed higher by immeasurable pressure.
Liquid rock shot into the kidney-shaped cavern, pushing a wall of superheated steam ahead of it. Rocktopi died, but a little slower than their brethren in the ship and at the waterfall. These rocktopi had time to feel the temperature spiking. They had time to scream. Some even had time to flee.
Lava flowed across the fields, wiping out crops in a hiss of smoke.
The orange mass flowed into the village, swelling up and over buildings. It flowed inside, submerging dead and dying children.
And with those deaths, the last of the Utah tribe vanished forever.
11:07 a.m.
Pure darkness.
He wasn’t hot anymore.
Cold, actually, his hands and feet growing numb with chill.
Connell coughed. Blood in his mouth, and on the rock pressing down on his chest, pinning him.
Pain everywhere, he was made of the stuff, yet it seemed distant, as if it were a photo, a memory.
Couldn’t move his arms or legs. So much weight on him, trapping him like an insect kept in place by long pins stabbed through limbs and into wax.
Cold body, but the air in his mouth, his lungs, that felt hot. His mask had either come off or was broken. He didn’t know which.
It didn’t matter.
He tried to breathe deep, but the weight on his chest kept him to a shallow sucking, to tiny, rapid gasps.
It was over.
No one left to rescue him. No hope of rescuing himself.
He was dying.
What would it be like?
Kind of sucked, really — he should have died in a car accident so many years ago. He’d wandered through life, awash in selfish misery, spreading that misery to others. And here, miles below ground, when dying would have been the easiest thing to do, he’d rediscovered the primitive need to go on.
If would have been better to die when he didn’t want to live.
Cold all over now.
The ground trembled beneath him.
The boulders on his chest, pressing down, settling, making each breath a tiny bit shallower than the one before.
A faint light flashed through the cracks between the boulders that were his tomb. Lybrand or O’Doyle? Please, no … he’d given his own life so that those two could escape.
Please, don’t let them come back for me … too late for me …
The light, flashing brighter.
Was it rocktopi? Maybe death by blade would be better than this slow, exhausting suffocation, better than lungs compressed until they could draw air no more.
No, that light … no reds or oranges, blues or greens. Just white.
And then, a voice.
“Connell?”
He knew that voice. A voice from his past, from his dreams. A voice that could not be.
He started to speak, coughed blood again. He spat out a mouthful, drew a shallow breath, just enough to say one word.
“Cori?”
“Yes, my love. I’m here with you. Don’t be afraid.”
Blackness, then the light again.
He could smell her.
Was this a vision? Was this real?
He didn’t care. Cori was with him again. Her light filled him, erasing his agony, relaxing his devastated body.
He felt something warm and tender gently lift his crushed hand. He instantly recognized her touch. He didn’t mind the pain, as long as he could feel her again.
Connell’s hand slowly grew cold in hers, and with a tiny smile on his face, his half-lidded eyes faded away into a blank stare of stillness and peace.
11:09 a.m.
Bertha and Patrick stumbled out of the tunnel mouth and onto a small mesa. They clung to each other, had to stay standing upright on stone that bucked beneath them.
A cliff, a sheer drop … was there any way down? Yes, there, between those boulders … a path.
A grinding rumble, louder than anything she’d heard in war. It froze her in place, her and Patrick both.
