But how could science explain how a man with no protective garments survived for days in an actual inferno? How could anything make sense of that?
We dropped and dropped.
I looked down at the floor of the pit and saw something else that made no fucking sense at all.
The floor of the pit seemed to be… receding?
“Boss?” called Bunny, his voice crystal clear through the high-tech earbuds we all wore. “Are you seeing this?”
We paused, toes touching the slope.
“Cap’n,” growled Top, “either I’m losing my shit or that floor is dropping.”
We watched, looking for signs of structural collapse, for cracks in the ground, for sudden releases of trapped gas, for the tumble of boulders and debris. All of that should have been happening if the pit floor was falling inward.
That’s not what we saw.
It’s just the floor was farther away, as if the pit itself had been somehow stretched.
“I can’t be seeing what I’m seeing,” said Bunny.
“Keep your shit wired tight, Farm Boy,” snapped Top. “If that’s what’s there, then that’s what’s there. So nut up and deal with it.”
Bold words. Probably as much for himself as for Bunny. Meant for me, too.
I checked the line, making quick calculations. “We’re going to have to hit the slope twenty feet above the bottom and walk down.”
“What if it keeps… um… getting deeper?” asked Bunny.
“Then we figure it out on the fly,” I said.
“Hooah,” said Top, and after a moment Bunny said it, too. “Hooah” was the Ranger catch-all phrase for anything from “yes, sir” to “fuck you,” and right now both seemed applicable.
We kept dropping.
The floor receded more and more.
“Fuck this,” I bellowed and hit hard on the slope, unclipped and ran into the pull of gravity. I heard thumps and curses behind me as the others did too. The slope was steep, and gravity wanted to kill us, but we ran into its pull, angling our bodies for balance and to slough off the acceleration. For a wild moment I thought we would keep running and running until we reached Hell itself. The actual hell. The devil and his demons and all of that biblical bullshit.
This was close enough.
Goddamn, it was close enough.
And then the floor was there. Hard and rocky and real. It was stable, too. I don’t know how the bottom got deeper, but whatever it was seemed to have stopped. It was ordinary ground under my feet. I wanted to kiss it.
Bunny and Top came running down to where I was, and then stopped, trembling, panting — more from fear than the exertion.
Top unslung his weapon, a Heckler & Koch MP7 with a forty-round magazine, and he had a Milkor MGL 40mm six-shot grenade launcher slung over his shoulder. He had not come to screw around. Bunny had his shotgun in his big hands and was sweeping the barrel around the perimeter.
He froze, looking behind me, and I whirled, drawing my Sig Sauer fast and bringing it up in a two-handed grip. Top turned, too, and we realized that the pit floor wasn’t the only thing that had gone off its rails.
“What the?” was all Bunny could manage.
The drone descended and hovered about his shoulder.
“Lizzie,” I said hoarsely, “are you seeing this, too?”
Her answer was an inarticulate croak.
We were all seeing it.
I don’t know where we were, but it wasn’t the same pit we dropped into. It couldn’t be. Even with the ropes still dangling above us and the drone having followed us here.
We stood on a flat space of ground that was much wider than the opening of the pit above. No idea how that was possible, but it wasn’t the weirdest or worst thing about this moment. James Mercer, naked and burned but alive, knelt a dozen paces away, the Book of Uttu in his hands, his blind eyes clicking back and forth across the pages as his lips read words aloud in a dead language. Beyond him was the wall we’d seen in the drone’s camera, with the obscene vertical slit from which poured an unnatural and lurid red light. There were the legions of spiders gnawing at the opening.
All of that was what we expected to find. Kind of.
But not the rest.
Not the dozens of people down there. Thirty or forty of them, dressed in robes of white and red and gray. Robes set with jewels and metals I could not identify. Men with muscular, bare arms and long plaited beards, like priests from some old temple carvings. Except they were very real and they held tools — axes and sledgehammers. All of them had swords and knives in leather scabbards at their hips.
They all stood in attitudes of surprise, frozen in their act of attacking the wall.
Even that wasn’t the worst.
Far from it. Give me enough whiskey and I could work out some logic to them being down here. That, at least, was close enough to sanity for me to postulate something I could force myself to accept.
But the spiders? No. Not them.
And I’m not talking about the thousands of small ones that had survived the hellish heat to climb down here from above.
There were other spiders here.
Big ones.
Strange ones.
Some the size of rats. Some the size of dogs. A few as big as wild boars. Massive, bloated monsters that quivered on hairy legs.
And the others.
Ponderous and improbable abominations with speckled red and black bodies that stood not on eight legs, but on three. Tripodal spiders with too many eyes and mandibles that snapped and clacked and dripped with steaming drool.
I knew for sure — without the slightest doubt, without needing to lie to myself — that nothing like them had ever before walked on this green Earth. I had no idea where they were from, or how Mercer had conjured them into this place, but they didn’t belong in this world.
I heard a sound, a high-pitched whimper, and prayed that it wasn’t coming from my own throat. Though it probably was.
In my ear, I heard Lizzie’s hushed and horrified voice. “Joe… is this real? Am I seeing it?”
“You tell me,” I said quickly. “You’re the expert.”
“Not… god, not in this,” she gasped. But a moment later she said, “Those men, they’re dressed like Sumerians. It’s like they stepped right out of a bas-relief carving from one of the ancient temples.”
“Those fucking spiders, Doc,” asked Bunny nervously, “you got anything on them? What are they?”
“I don’t… I don’t know.”
The spiders and the armed men stared at us, surprised for a heartbeat — and that was all it was — by our presence. Of aliens in their sacred place.
Then, with a ululating howl that tore the air, they all swarmed toward us.
9
I GENERALLY LIKE to know who the hell I’m fighting. I’m a long damn way from the concept of “kill ’em all and let God sort it out.”
Most of the time.
This wasn’t one of those times.
10
THE PRIEST — AND I had to accept that it was what he was — closest to me raised an adze and swung it at my head. I shot him in the face. Twice. Because I really meant it.