The miner slowly rolled over in his cot, using the last of his strength to turn his back on Serizawa and the others. Serizawa did not attempt to refute the man’s accusation. He was more concerned with the “demon” the survivor had mentioned. Just the delirious ramblings of a dying man… or a warning?
“Not sure there’s a box for that on the insurance form,” Boyd said.
The foreman’s attempt at lightening the mood fell flat. Lost in thought, Serizawa drew an antique pocket watch from his jacket and quietly wound the stem. He found himself hoping that this was a false alarm, but the evidence against that was mounting. The next step was to see for himself, no matter the risks.
A hazmat suit landed loudly at his feet.
Fully suited up, the team made their way into the chasm, steadying themselves on guide ropes that had been set up for the rescue operations. Their flashlights did little to dispel the darkness as they entered a cavern descending steeply into the earth. The sound of his own breathing echoed hollowly inside Serizawa’s protective hood, which felt heavy and unwieldy. The weight of the suit, and his limited visibility, did not make the downward trek any easier.
Keeping one hand on the guide rope, he held the radiation sensor out before him. The clacking was nonstop now, the needle pegging the dial. Serizawa couldn’t help wondering about the quality and integrity of his hazmat gear. He suspected that Graham and the others were, too. None of them wanted to end up like those wretched souls in the triage center.
While Serizawa monitored the radiation levels, Graham documented the expedition with her digital camera. Periodic flashes lit up the cavern’s murky interior, exposing fractured stone walls and twisted metal debris. She gasped as a flash revealed a lifeless human hand extending from the rubble. Flashlight beams swung toward the hand, which belonged to a bloated corpse sprawled upon the rocks. A contorted face was frozen in an agonized rictus. Cloudy eyes gazed sightlessly into oblivion.
“They sent another fifty men down here to search for survivors,” Boyd explained, his voice muffled by his protective breathing apparatus. “Half the rescuers never made it back up, they were too weak.”
Serizawa did the calculations. That was over sixty-five fatalities so far, not including the doomed and dying men they had just left behind in the triage center. The death count was mounting by the moment and they hadn’t even confirmed the cause yet. He feared, however, that this was indeed far more than just a tragic mining accident.
Graham’s camera flashed again and again, finding additional bodies scattered in heaps through the cavern. Still more valiant rescue workers, Serizawa realized, who had perished before making it back to the surface. He admired their courage even as he mourned their sacrifice.
Squinting in the shadows, he looked away from the plentiful dead and studied his surroundings. Each flash from Graham’s camera offered a glimpse of roughly textured cavern walls and oddly curved calcite formations all around them. It was like exploring the interior of some alien moon or world fresh from the dawn of its creation. The rich, green splendor of the Philippine rain forest seemed very far away.
A work crew from the mine, drafted into service by Boyd, set up globe lights around the spacious interior of the cavern. Serizawa and Graham both gasped out loud as the first of the lights flared to life, giving them a better look at the scene in whole. Thick bands of a porous, calcite-like material ribbed the grotto.
“The rocks, right?” Boyd said, as though anticipating the scientists’ reaction. “I’ve been digging holes for thirty years, but I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Serizawa’s eyes widened as he grasped what he was seeing.
“No,” he said, his voice hushed in awe. “Not geological. Biological.” He raised his flashlight, concentrating its beam on the huge shield-shaped calcite formation that made up the ceiling of the grotto. At least twenty meters in length, its contours were clearly recognizable if you knew what you were looking for. “The ceiling… it’s bone. It’s the sternum. We’re inside a ribcage.”
Before Boyd could process that, the rest of the globe lights popped, flooding the vast cavern with cold white light. Serizawa turned about, taking in the entire scene. Now that he knew what to look for, the impossible truth was right before his eyes. Gigantic rib bones, curving upwards like the buttresses of a medieval cathedral, formed the walls of the “cavern.” A bony spine, composed of huge, boulder-sized vertebrae, ran across the floor beneath their feet, stretching the length of several football fields. Serizawa realized that he was literally standing on the long-buried backbone of some incredibly gargantuan lifeform.
Graham stepped away from Boyd, before the speechless foreman could start pelting them with questions. Like Serizawa, she rotated slowly to absorb the full magnitude of what they had discovered. Her eyes were wide behind the visor of her gas mask. She drew closer to Serizawa.
“Is it Him?” she asked quietly. “Is it possible?”
Serizawa shook his head. “This is far older.”
A hush fell over the cavern as everyone coped with Serizawa’s stunning revelation. Boyd shook his head in disbelief, while some of the work crew looked like they were on the verge of bolting. Serizawa recalled the myth of Jonah and the whale, as well another legend native to the small Japanese fishing village where he’d grown up…
“Guys!” a voice called out from deeper within the cavern. It belonged to Kenji, a young graduate student who had recently joined Serizawa’s team. “You gotta see this!”
The urgency in Kenji’s voice could not be missed. Serizawa and the others hurried toward him, while trying not to stumble over the rubble and vertebrae. They found Kenji standing under a beam of natural daylight shining down from above. The sunshine lit up more of the cavern’s interior, allowing an even better view of the colossal skeletal remains, but that was not what immediately caught Serizawa’s attention. His eyes were drawn to yet another astounding discovery.
Two gigantic sac-like encrustations hung like barnacles from the colossal breast bone that formed the ceiling of the cavern. Each the size of a large boulder, the sacs had a rough, gnarled texture that might have formed from some kind of hardened resin or other secretion. Even more than the skeletal structure of the cavern, the sacs appeared unmistakably organic. Serizawa, whose background was in biology, thought that they resembled the egg sacs of some unknown organism, albeit of unprecedented proportions.
He aimed the radiation sensor at the closest sac, which elicited a flurry of clacking from the detector, but when he turned the sensor toward the further sac, the clacking died off noticeably. The detector registered only the pre-existing background radiation of the cavern.
Interesting, he thought. Theories and possible explanations began to form within his brain. Although he had devoted much of his career to the covert study of unknown megafauna, he had never encountered specimens like these before. Was it possible that…?
“That one,” Kenji pointed out. “The one that’s broken. It’s almost as though something came out of it…”
Indeed, one of the enormous sacs appeared to have shattered from the inside. Giant chunks of its husk were strewn about the floor of the cavern, dozens of feet below the ruptured specimen. Serizawa made a mental note to have every fragment collected for analysis. The nature of material might provide valuable clues into what sort of organism had produced it.
“Wait,” Kenji said. Fear entered his voice as the full implications of his observation sank in. “Did something actually come out of there?”