“Yes.”
Five thousand feet later, Remo said, “I’m leaving before you talk my fool ear off.” He slashed through his strap with his fingernails and plummeted the last several yards to solid earth.
The skydiver’s parachute, freed of the extra weight, bobbed and lingered in the air for many seconds, then set the man on a hilltop near a small tree. He continued to sit there for a long time, thinking things over.
Remo snaked across the prairie until he found one of the dead victims. He gave the body a quick once-over, then relieved it of its equipment, wadding up the melted parachute and stuffing it back inside.
He had some phone calls to make.
Chapter 3
It was amazing what a decent meal could do to lift your spirits. After they left the little Route 66 roadside store on that day weeks and weeks ago, Jacob Fastbinder made a meal from stolen groceries. Fastbinder’s tastes were a little more cultured than those of his American son. Jack would eat nothing but lunch-meat-and-mustard sandwiches for days at a time and be happy. Fastbinder had been raised in a wealthy German household, and he opened a half-dozen tiny cans that had been stacked on the gourmet shelf at the market. Oysters, caviar, pâté, all of it went onto tiny slices of pretty good rye bread. Fastbinder ate until he was near to bursting.
Satisfied, he began noticing the control panel of Jack’s Earth Drill. Various computers and gauges were bolted to a hastily constructed steel rack. There was a navigation system that, Jack explained, used what few digital seismological mappings were available for tracking their route in the subsurface. New features were mapped out in real time as Jack’s Earth Drill pinged the underworld with ultrasound.30
Fastbinder wasn’t the genius his young son was, but he was still a brilliant, educated engineer. He read the data on the displays easily enough, and he was shocked.
“Jack, why are we so deep? Where are we going?”
The teenager grinned excitedly. “Big cavern I mapped out on the way over. The place is the size of the Mall of America, and it’s like five miles down. Talk about a hideout. They’ll never find us there.”
“Five miles,” Fastbinder breathed. “That’s impossible.”
“That’s what the research says. I looked it up. The deepest mines are 12,700 feet deep, and that’s not even 2.5 miles. We’re going twice that.”
Fastbinder spotted an external temperature gauge. They were up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit already. The interior of the mole was sixty-eight and holding, but Fastbinder started sweating anyway.
“Why are we doing this thing, Jack?”
“I told you, it’s a good hideout.”
‘We’ll burn up.”
Jack’s eyes sparked. “It’s cool down there, Pops. That’s why I found it. There was this cool place I passed through on the way over. It’s a subsurface water shaft. Must come from some underground river closer to the surface. I figure an earthquake or something opened up a crack that went almost straight down, and the river started following it. It’s like a twenty-thousand-foot waterfall. I put a drone down there and got enough of a reading to show me that it’s a honking huge cavern system. The air-temperature reading I got was sixty-four degrees Eff. I guess the river cools it down.”
But Jack Fast had a more compelling reason for wanting to see the deep cavern. He showed his father the photographs that his drone probe had transmitted back to him. Photographs of people.
Jacob Fastbinder thought his son was joking, but that didn’t make sense. Jack Fast had always been a straight shooter, always telling his father the unadulterated truth. He had earned Fastbinder’s trust.
Still the elderly man experienced mounting fear as the hours stretched into a full day. Jack’s Earth Drill crawled inexorably down at a steep angle, effortlessly forging its impressive and beautiful tunnel system. She seemed robust enough, and Jack’s estimations of the tunnel strength were impressive.
Fastbinder hadn’t known real terror as he lay dying in the old antique Mighty Mole, but now, even when his son assured him he was safe, Fastbinder grew terrified. His claustrophobia mounted as they stared at the darkness endless hours—the brilliance of the static electricity would have blinded them without a near-black shield over the front and back windshields.
Then the ordeal was over. Fastbinder sat up out of a fitful nap, roused by uncanny silence and stillness.
“We’re here,” Jack Fast said. Now that the blinding electric bolts were turned off. Jack shoved back the tempered-glass blast shield and they looked upon a new world.
Jack’s Earth Drill had emerged atop a sand dune, and below them stretched a plain of sand, rock and white slime. JED’s spotlights revealed a wide river of crystal-clean water, and they could barely see the walls on the other side of it.
“It’s a quarter-mile wide at this point,” Jack said. “There’s a mile of open space in front of us and look at this! There’s not just one river coming in here, there’s three rivers!” After checking the instruments he squinted into the darkness. “Two more rivers come into the cavern at the other end, plus the first one coming out over here, and they all empty into a big river that keeps going down. This is really amazing, Pops!”
“Yes.” Fastbinder was thinking about it. “If the river caverns are traversable during the dryer months of the year, humans could come and go. But where are the people now?” Fastbinder’s eyes prowled the high-contrast shadows for the freakish white faces from the blurry photograph.
“Hiding, probably. Check it out!” Jack placed the spotlight beam on a white, oily patch. “Let’s get closer!” He engaged the battery dives. JED’s treads rolled down the sandy dune at the speed of a leisurely walk, in near silence. The slimy patch began to look more like a pile of slimy things, then it became something recognizable.
“Fish parts,” Fastbinder said. “Now we know what they eat.”
“Yech.”
“See the bones? They even strip off the ribs to eat. It has minerals the flesh doesn’t have. They probably consume the organs, too, for the same reason.”
“Hey, Pops, Jules Verne was right! ’Shrooms!” The rear of the hill-sized pile of fish scraps was smoothed over and fuzzy with thick mold and small copses of pale mushrooms, some of them knee high. A large quantity of them was scattered on the rock beside the hill. They looked fresh, as if someone had dropped them only minutes before.
Amid the fallen fungi were slimy, glimmering footprints.
“We must have drove the poor suckers off. But they’re not getting far.” Jack looked determined as he steered JED deeper into the cavern, following the footprints to a neighborhood of nests made from desiccated mushrooms.
“Zee two other rivers come into the cavern here, making it the coolest place in the cavern,” Fastbinder observed, feeling energized and excited now. “Very cozy, eh, Jack?”
“Oh, yeah, looks great,” Jack replied sarcastically, making his father laugh.
Then they saw them. People. Lots of pale, hideous people.
“Pops,” Jack asked when he got his voice, “what’re we gonna do with these ugly suckers? They look pretty low on the evolutionary scale.”
“They will be good for many things, Jack,” Fastbinder said, his mind spinning with new ideas as JED turned sharply around a protective outcropping and bore down on the terrified crowd of pale-skinned, white-haired people, now trapped against the back wall of the cavern system. JED blocked their escape route, and Jack Fast halted the earth drill. From a hundred feet away they observed the mob in fascination.
They were obviously albinos and they were all hideous, cadaverous creatures. They were pushing and shoving one another in terror, and one of them was wounded. Father and son saw the sudden spray of crimson, and with it the scent of fresh blood had to have wafted over the crowd.