The Twelve

At the elevator, Peter became aware that something wasn’t as it should be just a few seconds before Alicia stepped from his line of sight. There was no rational explanation for this knowledge; it simply came to him out of the stillness, a feeling deep in his bones.

“Lish, come in.”

No answer.

“Lish, can you read me?”

A hiss of static, then: “Stay there.”

There was something unsettling in her voice. A feeling of resignation, as if she were severing a rope that held her over an abyss. Before he could respond, her voice returned: “I mean it, Peter.”

Then she was gone.

He radioed the surface. “Something’s wrong, I’ve lost her.”

“Hold your position, Jaxon.”

Had she said the left tunnel? Yes, the left.

“I’m going after her,” he told Henneman.

“Negative. Stand pat—”

But Peter failed to hear the rest of Henneman’s message. He was already moving away.

At the same time, Lieutenant Dodd had commenced a mad dash down the switchback into the cave. He was unaware that the chain of radio transmission had been broken and that neither Peter nor, by extension, Alicia knew that the bomb at the base of the main entrance had disarmed itself—the first mishap in a cascade of events that would never be fully reassembled to the satisfaction of Command. Somehow—a short in the line, a mechanical defect, a whim of fate—the receiver at the base of the cave had lost contact with the surface. A first-class, A1 screwup if ever there was one, and now Dodd was racing into the mouth of hell.

His first descent had taken fifteen minutes; moving at what counted as a dead sprint down the treacherous, hairpinning pathway, he made it to the bottom in fewer than five. At the edge of his vision he perceived a scuttle overhead, accompanied by a high-pitched squeaking, but in his haste he failed to process this; if Hennemen’s order to blow the package came before he’d made it back out, his team would fire it anyway, killing him in the blast. The only thing on his mind was reaching the bottom, repairing the detonator, and getting back out.

There it was. The receiver. Dodd had left it on a smooth, tablelike boulder situated at the tunnel’s mouth; now it lay on the ground, tipped onto its side. What force had knocked it away? Dodd dropped to his knees, his breath heaving in his chest. Rivers of perspiration spilled down his face. A ghastly stink was in the air. He gently took the device in his hand. The receiver had two switches, one to arm the detonator, another to close the circuit and fire the bomb. Why wasn’t it working? But then he understood that the antenna had come loose, knocked askew in the fall. He withdrew a screwdriver from his pack.

The ceiling began to move.

Alicia noticed the bones first. The bones and the smell, an overpowering stench—rank, biological, like the bottled gas of a grave. She took a step forward. As her boot touched down she felt, then heard, a crunch of bone. The skeleton of something small. The tininess of the skull, its mocking grin of teeth: a kind of rodent? Her field of view widened. The floor was carpeted with the brittle remains, in many places piled knee- or even waist-high, like drifts of snow.

Where are you? she thought. Show yourself, you bastard. I’ve got a message from Louise.

Martinez was close, very close. She was practically on top of him. For the first time in many years Alicia knew the taste of fear, but more than that: she knew hatred. A pure force, binding and suffusing every part of her. All her life seemed called to this moment. Martinez was the great misery of the world. It was not glory she sought or even justice. It was vengeance; not killing but the act of killing. To say, This is from Louise. To feel his life leaving him under her hand.

Come to me. Come to me.

From out of the gloom a shape appeared, a flash of white skin in the beam of her rifle. Alicia froze. What the hell …? She took a step forward, then another.

It was a man.

Ruined and sagging, old beyond old, his figure emaciated, a sketch of bones; his skin was bleached of all color, almost translucent. He was huddled in nakedness on the floor of the cave. As the light of her rifle passed over his face, he did not flinch; his eyes were like stones, inert with blindness. A bat was writhing in his hands. Its long, kitelike wings, the sheerest membranes stretched over the attenuated fans of fingered bone, fluttered helplessly. The man brought the bat to his face and, with a shocking energy, enveloped its dainty head in his mouth. A final, muffled squeal and a tremor of the creature’s wings and then a snapping sound; the man twisted the body away and spat its head to the floor. He pressed the body to his lips and began vigorously to suck, his body rocking with the rhythm of his inhalations, a faint coo, almost childlike, pulsing from his throat.

Alicia’s voice sounded clumsily huge in the cavernous space. “Who the hell are you?”

The man pointed his blind, rigid face toward the source of the sound. Blood slicked his lips and chin. Alicia noticed for the first time a bluish image crawling up the side of his neck: the figure of a snake.

“Answer me.”

A faint puff, more air than speech: “Ig… Ig…”

“Ig? Is that your name? Ig?”

“…nacio.” His brow crumpled. “Ignacio?”

From behind her came a sound of footsteps; as Alicia spun around, the beam of Peter’s rifle swept her face.

“I told you to wait.”

Peter’s face was a blank, transfixed by the image of the man huddled on the floor.

Alicia pointed her rifle to the man’s forehead. “Where is he? Where’s Martinez?”

Tears swelled from his sightless eyes. “He left us.” His voice was like a moan of pain. “Why did he leave us?”

“What do you mean, he left you?”

With a searching gesture, the man raised one hand to the barrel of Alicia’s rifle, wrapped it in his fist, and pulled the muzzle hard against his forehead.

“Please,” he said. “Kill me.”

They were bats. Bats by the hundreds, the thousands, the millions. They exploded from the roof of the tunnel, a solid airborne mass, swarming Dodd’s senses with the heat and weight and sound and smell of them. They blasted into him like a wave, sealing him inside a vortex of pure animal frenzy. He waved his arms madly, trying to deflect them from his face and eyes; he felt but did not yet wholly experience the sting of their teeth, drilling into his flesh, like a series of distant pinpricks. They are going to tear you to pieces, his mind was telling him; that’s how this is going to end; your awful fate is that you’re going to die in this cave, torn to shreds by bats. Dodd screamed, and as he screamed his awareness of the pain became the thing itself, attaining its full dimensions, his mind and body instantly achieving a unity of pure annihilating agony, and as he pitched forward toward the detonator, with its glowing lights and switches, his physical person assuming in that elongated instant the properties of a hammer, falling, his one thought—oh, shit—was also his last.

The blast wave from the prematurely detonated first package, rocketing from the tunnel into the cave’s complex of halls and cavities with the energy of a runaway locomotive, reached the King’s Palace as a terrific bang, overlapped by a pop of pressure and a deep subterranean trembling. This was followed by a second lurch underfoot, like the deck of a boat tossed by a giant wave. It was an event in equal measures atmospheric, auditory, caloric, and seismic; it had the power to rouse the very core of the earth.

They were known as hangers: sleeping virals who, their metabolic processes suppressed, existed in a state of extended hibernation. In this condition they could endure for years or even decades, and preferred, for reasons unknown—perhaps an expression of their biological kinship to bats, a buried memory of their race—to dangle upside down, arms folded over their chests with a curious tidiness, like mummies in their sarcophagi. In the various