and the women were opening their ears so they could hear better next time.'
'I don't see no survivors,' moaned a boy.
'I don't see no haddie, either,' said another. Haddie was the hadal, whoever that was.
'Keep looking,' Branch said. 'And while you're at it, collect tags. At least we can bring
their names out with us.'
Some were covered with masses of translucent beetles and albino flies. On others a fast-acting fungus had reduced the remains to bone. In one trough, the dead soldiers were glazed over with mineral liquid and becoming part of the floor. The earth itself was consuming them.
'Major,' a voice said, 'you need to see this.'
Branch followed the man to a steep overhang where the dead had been laid neatly side by side in a long row. Under their dozen light beams, the platoon saw the bodies had been dusted in bright red ochre powder, and men sprinkled with brilliant white confetti. It was a rather beautiful sight.
'Haddie?' breathed a soldier.
Beneath the layers of ochre, the bodies were indeed those of their enemy. Branch climbed across to the overhang. Close up now, he saw that the white confetti was teeth. There were hundreds of them, thousands, and they were human. He picked one up, a canine, and it had chip marks where a rock had hammered it from some GFs mouth. He gently set it back on the ground.
The hadal warriors' heads were pillowed on human skulls. At their feet were offerings.
'Mice?' said Sergeant Doraan. 'Dried-up mice?' There were scores of them.
'No,' said Branch. 'Genitals.'
The bodies differed in size. Some were bigger than the soldiers. They had the shoulders of Masai, and looked freakish next to their comrades with bandy legs. A few had peculiar talons in place of fingernails and toenails. If not for what they'd done to their teeth, and their penis sheaths made of carved bone, they would have looked quasi-human, like five-foot-tall pro linebackers.
Also scattered among the hadal corpses were five slender figures, gracile, delicate, almost feminine, but definitely male. At first glance, Branch expected them to be teenagers, but under the red ochre their faces were every bit as aged as the rest. All five of the gracile hadals had shaped skulls, flattened on back from binding in infancy. It was among these smallest specimens that the outside canines were most pronounced, some as long as baboon canines.
'We need to take some of these bodies up with us,' Branch said.
'What we want to do that for, Major?' a boy asked. 'They're the bad guys.'
'Yeah. And dead,' said his buddy.
'Proof positive. It will begin our knowledge about them,' Branch said. 'We're fighting something we've never really seen. Our own nightmares.' To date, the US military had not acquired a single specimen. The Hezbollah in southern Lebanon claimed to have taken one alive, but no one believed it.
'I'm not touching those things. No, that's the devil, look at him.'
They did look like devils, not men. Like animals steeped in cancers. A lot like me, thought Branch. It was hard for him to reconcile their humanlike forms with the coral horns that had bloomed from their heads. Some looked ready to claw their way back to life. He didn't blame his troops for being superstitious.
They all heard the radio at the same time. A scratchy sound issued from a pile of trophies, and Branch carefully rooted through the photographs and wristwatches and wedding and high school graduation rings, and pulled out the walkie-talkie. He clicked the transmit button three times. Three clicks answered.
'Someone's down there,' said a Ranger.
'Yeah. But who?' That gave them pause. Human teeth crackled under their boots.
'Identify yourself, over,' Branch spoke into the radio.
They waited. The voice that replied was American. 'It's so dark in here,' he groaned.
'Don't leave us, man.'
Branch placed the radio on the ground and backed away.
'Wait a minute,' said the chain gunner. 'That sounded like Scoop D. I know him. But we didn't get his location, Major.'
'Quiet,' Branch whispered to his troops. 'They know we're here.' They fled.
Like worker ants, the soldiers scurried through the dark vein, each bearing before him one large white egg. Except these were not eggs, but balls of illumination, cast round and individual by each man's headlamp. Of the thirteen yesterday, there were just eight left. Like souls extinguished, those other men and lights were lost, their weapons fallen into enemy hands. One who remained, Sergeant Dornan, had broken ribs.
They had not stopped moving in fifty hours, except to lay fire into the pitch blackness behind them. Now, from the deepest point, came Branch's whispered command: 'Make the line here.' It passed, man by man, from the strongest to the stricken up the chain. The Rangers came to a halt in a forking passage. It was a place they had visited before.
The three stripes of fluorescent orange spray paint upon the Neolithic wall images were a welcome sight. They were blaze marks made by this same platoon, three to indicate their third camp on the way down. The exit was no more than three days up. Sergeant Dornan's tiny moan of relief filled the limestone silence. The wounded man sat, cradled his weapon, laid his head against the stone. The rest of them went to work prepping their last stand.
Ambush was their only hope. Failing here, not one would reach the light of day, which had taken on all the King James connotations they had ever known. The glory of the light of day.
Two dead, three missing, and Dornan's broken ribs. And their chain gun, for chrissake. The General Electric gun with all its ammo. Snatched whole from their midst. You don't lose a weapon like that. Not only did it leave their platoon without suppressing fire, but someday some bravo like themselves was going to meet its solid wall of machine-gun fire made in America.
Now a large party was closing fast upon their rear. They could clearly hear the approach on their radio as things, whatever they were, passed by the remote mikes they'd placed on their retreat. Even amplified, the enemy moved softly, with serpentine ease, but quickly, too. Now and then one brushed against the walls. When they spoke, it was not in language any of these grunts knew.
One nineteen-year-old spec 4 hunkered by his ruck, fingers trembling. Branch went to him. 'Don't listen, Washington,' he said. 'Don't try to understand.'
The frightened kid looked up. And there was Frankenstein. Their Frankenstein. Branch knew the look.
'They're close.'
'No distractions,' Branch said.
'No sir.'
'We're going to turn this thing around. We're going to own it.'
'Yes sir.'
'Now those claymores, son. How many in your ruck?'
'Three. Everything I got, Major.'
'Can't ask for anything more than that, can we? One here, I'd say. One there. They'll do just fine.'
'Yes sir.'
'We stop them here.' Branch raised his volume slightly for the other Rangers. 'This is the line. Then it's over. Then we go home. We're almost out, boys. Get your sunscreen ready.'
They liked that. Except for the major, they were all black. Sunscreen, right.
He moved up the line from man to man, spacing the mines, assigning their fields of fire, weaving his ambush. It was a spooky arena down here. Even if you could put aside these bursts of cave paintings and strange carved shapes and the sudden rockfall and flash floods and the mineralized skeletons and the booby traps. Even if you made this place at peace with itself, the space itself was horror. The tunnel walls compressed their universe into a tiny ball. The darkness threw it into freefall. Close your eyes, and the mix could drive you mad.
Branch saw the weariness in them. They had been without radio contact with the surface for two
