The raucous noise of the jungle had ceased — there were no chirrups, buzzes, or clicks of insects. Nor any squeals and squeaks of tiny animals, or even the thud as clumsy, leathery-winged pterosaurs slammed into tree canopies overhead.
It wasn’t quite total silence as there was the constant drip of moisture in the humidity-laden jungle. But there should have been more.
“Yeah, nothing. You think we got company?” Drake asked, now also scanning the foliage.
“I think something’s out there, watching us,” Ben said and turned to wave Helen up. He then signaled to Chess, pointed at his eyes, and then to the jungle on either side.
Chess nodded and motioned to Francis and Shawna to spread a little into the jungle, where they’d do a quick reconnoiter. Nicolás simply stayed hunkered down with wide eyes.
“That doesn’t look right.” The path or animal tracks they had been following ended at a wall of vines and Ben squinted toward it. “Eyes out while I take a look.”
He eased to his feet and walked carefully toward the end of the track. Oddly, it seemed firm like packed earth or stone beneath his boots, and he pulled his gun in tight to his shoulder.
He used his peripheral vision to track the foliage beside and above him, as he closed in on the unnatural looking wall of green. When he was a few feet from it, he paused and eased his gun barrel forward to part the hanging green drapes. He half smiled.
“Hello again.”
He waved Drake and Helen up to his position. As they approached, he half turned.
“Found an old friend.”
Behind the wall of vines was a stone idol, roughly human-shaped but with the head of a snake. Its lower half was covered in gnarled roots, and the pitted nature of the stone hinted at eons of weathering.
“Look.” Ben pointed with his barrel to the idol’s feet. There were smaller carvings of people, many dismembered or without heads. “Still feeding the snake Gods, I see.”
“This looks far older than the previous ruins we encountered,” Drake said. “What do you think, Helen?”
“Well, humans have lived here ever since they crossed the Bering land bridge around 15,000 years ago.” She scoffed softly. “I mean, from modern times that is. This looks definitely pre-Columbian, and the weathering on this hard stone could make it easily 5,000 to 7,000 years old.”
Drake snorted. “Gotta give these guys full marks for persistence. They kept coming, kept trying to establish outposts or temples, and they kept getting massacred.”
Helen reached out to rub a hand over the degraded snout and fangs. “Well, they regarded this place as the home of Gods and monsters, so they believed that ascending here every 10 years meant they were bringing themselves closer to their Heaven… and their Gods.”
She looked down and wiped aside some of the greenery they stood on. “There is, was, a pathway here.” She scraped some more, and then looked up. “How long did it last this time before their hungry Gods turned into the monsters they feared?”
“Hey, check this out.” Drake had moved to the side and pulled away some monstrous-sized palm fronds. There were steps leading down to a dark passageway that was about six feet around. He sniffed and held his gun up. “Bad news.”
Ben and Helen did the same.
“Yeah, I think we’ve found a nest,” Helen said.
“The natives built it, and the snakes took it over. Just like last time.” Ben turned to see the mercenaries appear out of the jungle. He lifted a finger to his lips and then motioned toward the foliage. “Let’s get out of here.”
The group silently vanished into the dark wetness of the primordial jungle.
From deep inside the lower chambers of the dark cavern, a leviathan Titanoboa’s tongue flicked out to taste the air. Its glass-like eyes were unblinking in the near total darkness, but it saw well with nocturnal, motion sensitive, and also thermal vision.
The fallen magnificence of the room it nested in was lost on its reptilian brain, and the magnificent columns, carvings, and glyphs telling stories of mighty empires that once lived were no more than the rock they were once carved from.
From outside, it detected the tiny exhalations of the creatures at the tunnel entrance, and though it had never sensed them before, an inherited memory was triggered and it became excited by the sweetness of their warm breaths.
It began to slide forward and from beneath it came the sound of crunching as bone fragments, some age-browned and some still with traces of marrow, were pulverized beneath its 5,000-pound body.
At the tunnel entrance, it paused for a moment to taste the air again. It was able to determine the small herd’s number, their size, and the direction they had taken.
The monstrous snake poured forth from the cavern like a green and brown-scaled river, only just fitting through the opening.
It knew its hunting territory and knew what was up ahead. It took to the trees to follow the small herd of biped animals.
CHAPTER 45
The night passed slowly. Emma got very little sleep and when morning finally came, her eyes were dry and crusted and she was still exhausted. She had kept her arms wrapped around her son, who thankfully slept easy.
And why wouldn’t he? she asked of herself. To him, nothing that was going on was abnormal, or even some sort of new normal. To him, it was just the facts of life of everyday living, and always had been.
The thing about the future was it always became the present. But now, the past was also becoming the present. For her and Ben, they were cursed with the sensation of actually registering the changes. They knew that tomorrow would be vastly different to today. But as the re-evolutions occurred, it was as if people’s consciousness, memories, and experiences were the last thing to be altered — like a computer program updating but only in batches and saving the most complex until last.
She carefully eased her arm out from under her son. The light was still on in the basement and she saw that the space that had once been for storage, with a few bottles of Ben’s father’s and grandfather’s wine, old furniture, packed books, and broken toys, was now something so completely different. It was as if it belonged to someone else — there were kitted-out rooms, a kitchen, and well-stocked pantry, and it was spotless, as well as fortified.
It was an entire other house down here, and obviously where they were supposed to sleep now that above ground was too dangerous because of the freaking giant vampire bats that had evolved.
“They can have the night, and we can have the day,” Zach had said about them. We’ve surrendered half our world already, and never even got a chance to fight, she thought.
She stood and walked from one table to the next, looking at maps, a radio, computer equipment, and even a gun and ammunition rack. It was exactly how she imagined some of the doomsday preppers probably lived — except doomsday was real and it was like an approaching storm that was creeping up on them faster every day.
She opened up the computer and also flicked on a bank of external cameras from their upstairs. She saw that inside the house was a mess; that’s what happens, she guessed, when you “forget” to lock doors and pull down the external window shutters; the monsters got in, real monsters. She then flicked to external view and saw the morning light shining down on a mist that snaked through the massive banyan-type forest outside. It looked almost mystical.
A few antlered animals browsed on the dew-covered lawn and seemed more interested in the grass than potential predators—must be safe now, she thought.