The Descent Page 12

  Every week the mass of 3-D, four-color worm lines expanded laterally and vertically beneath their maps of Europe and Asia and the United States. Junior officers took to comparing the adventure to Dungeons and Dragons without, exactly, the dragons or dungeons. Wrinkled non-coms couldn’t believe their luck: Vietnam without the Vietnamese. The enemy was turning out to be a figment of one very disfigured major’s imagination. No one but Branch could claim to have seen demons with fish-white skin.

  Not that there weren’t “enemies.” The signs of habitation were intriguing, sometimes gruesome. At those depths, tracks suggested a surprising spectrum of species, everything from centipedes and fish to a human-sized biped. One leathery wing fragment stirred images of sub-terannean flight, temporarily reviving Saint Jerome’s visions of batlike dark angels.

  In the absence of an actual specimen, scientists had named the enemy Homo hadalis, though they were the first to admit they didn’t know if it was even hominid. The secular term became hadal, rhyming with cradle. Middens indicated that these ape creatures were communal, if seminomadic. A picture of harsh, grinding, sunless subsistence emerged. It made the brute life of human peasantry look charming by comparison.

  But whoever lived down here—and the evidence of primitive occupation at the deeper levels was undeniable—had been scared off. They encountered no resistance. No contact. No live sightings. Just lots of caveman souvenirs: knapped flint points, carved animal bones, cave paintings, and piles of trinkets stolen from the surface: broken pencils, empty Coke cans and beer bottles, dead spark plugs, coins, lightbulbs. Their cowardice was officially excused as an aversion to light. Troops couldn’t wait to engage them.

  The military occupation went deeper and wider in breathless secrecy. Intelligence agencies triumphed in embargoing soldiers’ mail home, confining units to base, and derailing the media.

  The military exploration entered its tenth month. It seemed that the new world was empty after all, and that the nation-states had only to settle into their basements, catalog their holdings, and fine-tune new sub-borders. The conquest became a downright promenade. Branch kept urging caution. But soldiers quit carrying their weapons. Patrols resembled picnics or arrowhead hunts. There were a few broken bones, a few bat bites. Every now and then a ceiling collapsed or someone drove off an abyssal roadway. Overall, however, safety stats were actually better than normal. Keep your guard up, Branch preached to his Rangers. But he had begun to sound like a nag, even to himself.

  The hammer dropped. Beginning on November 24, 1999, soldiers throughout the subplanet did not return to their cave camps. Search parties were sent down. Few came out. Carefully laid communications lines went dead. Tunnels collapsed.

  It was as if the entire subplanet had flushed the toilet. From Norway to Bolivia, from Australia to Labrador, from wilderness bases to within thirty feet of sunshine, armies vanished. Later it would be called a decimation, which means the death of one in ten. What happened on November 24 was its opposite. Fewer than one of every ten would survive.

  It was the oldest trick in the history of warfare. You lull your enemy. You draw him in. You cut off his head. Literally.

  A tunnel at minus-six in sub-Poland was found with the skulls of three thousand Russian, German, and British NATO troops. Eight teams of LRRPs and Navy SEALs were found crucified in a cavern nine thousand feet beneath Crete. They had been captured alive at scattered sites, herded together, and tortured to death.

  Random slaughter was one thing. This was something else. Clearly a larger intelligence was at work. System-wide, the acts were planned and executed upon a single clockwork command. Someone—or some group—had orchestrated a magnificent slaughter over a twenty-thousand-square-mile region.

  It was as if a race of aliens had just breached upon man’s shores.

  Branch lived, but only because he was laid up with a recurring malarial fever. While his troops forged deeper below the surface, he lay in an infirmary, packed in ice bags and hallucinating. He thought it was his delirium speaking as CNN broke the terrible news.

  Half raving, Branch watched his President address the nation in prime time on December 2. No makeup tonight. He had been weeping. “My fellow Americans,” he announced. “It is my painful duty …” In somber tones the patriarch enunciated the American military losses incurred over the past week: in all, 29,543 missing. The worst was feared. In the course of three terrible days, the United States had just suffered half as many American dead as the entire Vietnam War total. He avoided all mention of the global military toll, an unbelievable quarter of a million soldiers. He paused. He cleared his throat uncomfortably, shuffled papers, then pushed them aside.

  “Hell exists.” He lifted his chin. “It is real. A geological, historical place beneath our very feet. And it is inhabited. Savagely.” His lips thinned. “Savagely,” he repeated, and for a moment you could see his great anger.

  “For the last year, in consultation and alliance with other nations, the United States has initiated a systematic reconnaisance of the edges of this vast subterranean territory. At my command, 43,000 American military personnel were committed to searching this place. Our probe into this frontier revealed that it is inhabited by unknown life-forms. There is nothing supernatural about it. Over the next days and weeks you will probably be asking how it is that if there are beings down there, we have never seen them before now. The answer is this: we have seen them. From the beginning of human time, we have suspected their presence among us. We have feared them, written poems about them, built religions against them. Until very recently, we did not know how much we really knew. Now we are learning how much we don’t know. Until several days ago, it was assumed these creatures were either extinct or had retreated from our military advance. We know differently now.”

  The President stopped talking. The cameraman started back for the fade-out. Suddenly he began again. “Make no mistake,” he said. “We will seize this dark empire. We will beat this ancient enemy. We will loose our terrible swift sword upon the forces of darkness. And we will prevail. In the name of God and freedom, we will.”

  The picture immediately switched to the Press Room downstairs. The White House spokesman and a Pentagon bull stood before the roomful of stunned journalists. Even in his fever, Branch recognized General Sandwell, four stars and a barrel chest. Son of a bitch, he muttered at the TV.

  A woman from the L.A. Times stood, shaken. “We’re at war?”

  “There has been no declaration of war,” the spokesman said.

  “War with hell?” the Miami Herald asked. “Not war.”

  “But hell?”

  “An upper lithospheric environment. An abyssal region riddled with holes.”

  General Sandwell shouldered the spokesman aside. “Forget what you think you know,” he told them. “It’s just a place. But without light. Without a sky. Without a moon. Time is different down there.” Sandy always had been a showboat, thought Branch.

  “Have you sent reinforcements down?”

  “For now, we are in a wait-and-see mode. No one goes down.”

  “Are we about to be invaded, General?”

  “Negative.” He was firm. “Every entrance is secured.”

  “But creatures, General?” The New York Times reporter seemed affronted. “Are we talking about devils with pitchforks and pincers? Do the enemy have hooves and horns on their heads and tails, and fly on wings? How would you describe these monsters, sir?”

  “That’s classified,” Sandwell spoke into the mike. But he was pleased with the “monsters” remark. Already the media was demonizing the enemy. “Last question?”

  “Do you believe in Satan, General?”

  “I believe in winning.” The general pushed the mike away. He strode from the room.

  Branch slid in and out of fever dreams. A kid with a broken leg in the next bed channel-surfed endlessly. All night, every time Branch opened his eyes, the TV showed a different state of surreality. Day came. Local news anchors had been
prepped. They knew to keep the hysteria out of their voices, to stick with the script. We have very little information at this time. Please stay tuned for further information. Please remain calm. An unbroken stream of text played across the bottom of the TV screen listing churches and synagogues open to the public. A government Web page was set up to advise families of the missing soldiers. The stock market plunged. There was an unholy mix of grief and terror and grim exuberance.

  Survivors began trickling upward. Suddenly the military hospitals were taking in bloodied soldiers raving childishly about beasts, vampires, ghouls, gargoyles. Lacking a vocabulary for the dark monstrosity below, they tapped into the Bible legends, horror novels, and childhood fantasies. Chinese soldiers saw dragons and Buddhist demons. Kids from Arkansas saw Beelzebub and Alien.

  Gravity won out over human ritual. In the days following the great decimation, there was simply no way to transport all the bodies up to the surface just so they could be lowered six feet back into the ground. There wasn’t even time to dig mass graves in the cave floors. Instead, bodies were piled into side tunnels and sealed away with plastic explosives and the armies retreated. The few funeral services with an actual body featured closed caskets, screwed shut beneath the Stars and Stripes: NOT TO BE VIEWED.

  The Federal Emergency Management Agency was put in charge of civil defense education. Lacking any real information about the threat, FEMA dusted off its antiquated literature from the seventies about what to do in case of nuclear attack, and handed it out to governors, mayors, and town councils. Turn on your radio. Lay in a supply of food. Stock up on water. Keep away from windows. Stay in your basement. Pray.

  Foreboding emptied grocery stores and gun shops. As the sun went down on the second night, TV crews tracked national guardsmen taking up lines along highways and ringing ghettos. Detours led to roadblocks where motorists were searched and relieved of their weapons and liquor. Dusk closed in. Police and military helicopters prowled the skies, spotlighting potential trouble spots.

  South Central Los Angeles went up first, no surprise there. Atlanta was next. Fire and looting. Shootings. Rape. Mob violence. The works. Detroit and Houston. Miami. Baltimore. The national guard watched with orders to contain the mobs inside their own neighborhoods, and not to interfere.

  Then the suburbs lit up, and no one was prepared for that. From Silicon Valley to Highlands Ranch to Silver Spring, bedroom commuters went rampaging. Out came the guns, the repressed envy, the hate. The middle class blew wide open. It started with phone calls from house to house, shocked disbelief twisting into realization that death lurked beneath their sprinkler systems. Strangely, suddenly, they had a lot to get out. They put the ghettos to shame with their fires and violence. In the aftermath, the national guard commanders could only say that they had not expected such savagery from people with lawns to call their own.

  On Branch’s TV, it looked like the last night on earth. For many people it was. When the sun rose, it illuminated a landscape America had been fearing since the Bomb. Six-lane highways were choked with mangled, burned cars and trucks that had tried to flee. Pitched battles had ensued. Gangs had swept through the traffic jams, shooting and knifing whole families. Survivors meandered in shock, crying for water. Dirty smoke poured into the urban skies. It was a day of sirens. Weather copters and roving news vans cruised the fringes of destroyed cities. Every channel showed havoc.

  From the floor of the U.S. Senate, the majority leader, C.C. Cooper, a self-made billionaire with his eye on the White House, clamored for martial law. He wanted ninety days, a cooling-off period. He was opposed by a lone black woman, the formidable Cordelia January. Branch listened to her rich Texas vowels cow Cooper’s notion.

  “Just ninety days?” she thundered from the podium. “No, sir. Not on my watch. Martial law is a serpent, Senator. The seed of tyranny. I urge my distinguished colleagues to oppose this measure.” The vote was ninety-nine in favor, one opposed. The President, haggard and sleepless, snatched at the political cover and declared martial law.

  At 1:00 P.M. EST, the generals locked America down. Curfew began Friday at sunset and lasted until dawn on Monday. It was pure coincidence, but the cooling-off period landed on the ecclesiastical day of rest. Not since the Puritans had the Old Testament held such power in America: observe the Sabbath or be shot on sight.

  It worked. The first great spasm of terror passed over.

  Oddly enough, America was grateful to the generals. The highways got cleared. Looters were gunned down. By Monday, supermarkets were allowed to reopen. On Wednesday, children went back to school. Factories reopened. The idea was to jump-start normalcy, to put yellow school buses back on the street, get money flowing, make the country feel returned to itself.

  People cautiously emerged from their houses and cleaned their yards of riot debris. In the suburbs, neighbors who had been at one another’s throats or on top of each other’s wives now helped rake up the broken glass or scoop out ashes with snow shovels. Processions of garbage trucks came through. The weather was glorious for December. America looked just fine on the network news.

  Suddenly, man no longer looked out to the stars. Astronomers fell from grace. It became a time to look inward. All through that first winter, great armies—hastily buttressed with veterans, police, security guards, even mercenaries—poised at the scattered mouths of the underworld, their guns pointed at the darkness, waiting while governments and industries scraped together conscripts and arsenals to create an overwhelming force.

  For a month, no one went down. CEOs, boards of directors, and religious institutions badgered them to get on with the Reconquista, anxious to launch their explorations. But the death toll was well over a million now, including the entire Afghani Taliban army, which had practically jumped into the abyss in pursuit of their Islamic Satan. Generals cautiously declined to send in further troops.

  A small legion of robots was commandeered from NASA’s Mars project and put to use investigating the planet within their own planet. Creeping along on metal spider legs, the machines bore arrays of sensors and video equipment designed for the harshest conditions of a world far away. There were thirteen, each valued at five million dollars, and the Mars crew wanted them back intact.

  The robots were released in pairs—plus one soloist—at seven different sites around the globe. Scores of scientists monitored each one around the clock. The “spiders” held up quite well. As they crept deeper into the earth, communication became difficult. Electronic signals meant to flash unimpeded from the Martian poles and alluvial plains were hampered by thick layers of stone. In a sense, the labyrinth underfoot was light-years more distant than Mars itself. The signals had to be computer-enhanced, interpreted, and coalesced. Sometimes it took many hours for a transmission to reach the top, and many hours or days to untangle the electronic jumble. More and more often, transmissions simply didn’t surface.

  What did come up showed an interior so fantastic that the planetologists and geologists refused to believe their instruments. It took a week for the electronic spiders to find the first human images. Deep within the limestone wilderness of Terbil Tem, beneath Papua New Guinea, their bones showed as ultraviolet sticks on the computer scan. Estimates ranged from five to twelve sets of remains at a depth of twelve hundred feet. A day later, miles inside the volcanic honeycombs around Japan’s Akiyoshi-dai, they found evidence that bands of humans had been driven to depths lower than any explored, and there slaughtered. Deep inside Algeria’s Djurdjura massif and the Nanxu River sink in China’s Guanxi province, far below the caves under Mt. Carmel and Jerusalem, other robots located the carnage of battles fought in cubbyholes and crawl spaces and immense chambers.

  “Bad, very bad,” breathed hardened viewers. The bodies of soldiers had been stripped, mutilated, degraded. Heads were missing or arranged like masses of bowling balls. Worse, their weapons were gone. Place after place, all that remained were nude bodies, anonymous, turning to bone. You could not tell who these men and w
omen had been.

  One by one, their spiders ceased to transmit. It was too soon for their batteries to go dead. And not all of them had reached their signal threshold. “They’re killing our robots,” the scientists reported. By the end of December, only one was left, a solitary satellite creeping on legs into regions so deep it seemed nothing could live.

  Far beneath Copenhagen, the robot eye picked up a strange detail, a close-up of a fisherman’s net. The computer cowboys fiddled with their machinery, trying to resolve the image, but it remained the same, oversized links of thread or thin rope. They keyed in commands for the spider to back up slightly for a wider perspective.

  Almost a full day passed before the spider transmitted back, and it was as dramatic as the first picture sent from the back of the moon. What had looked like thread or rope was iron circlets linked together. The net was in fact chain mail, the armor of an early Scandinavian warrior. The Viking skeleton inside had long ago fallen to dust. Where there had been a desperate black struggle, the armor itself was pinned to the wall with an iron spear.

  “Bullshit,” someone said.

  But the spider rotated on command, and the den was filled with Iron Age weaponry and broken helmets. The NATO troops and Afghani Taliban and soldiers of a dozen other modern armies were not, then, the first to invade this abyssal world and raise arms against man’s demons.

  “What’s going on down there?” the mission control chief demanded.

  After another week, the transmission bursts conveyed nothing more than earth noise and electromagnetic pulses of random tremors. Finally the spider quit sending. They waited three days, then began to dismantle the station, only to hear a transmission beep. They hastily jacked the monitor in, and at long last got their face.