Ancient Echoes (25 page)

Hammill and his men dropped to the ground and watched.

Lightning flickered,
then
a strange
rumbling thunder echoed through the valley although the sky remained clear. The
men grew nervous, but Hammill kept focused as the searchers began to climb the
mound. From what he could see through the binoculars, nothing was up there. He
picked up his sat phone to give an update on his success at finding the
pillars.

He watched the searchers at the top as they stopped and
talked,
then
saw a strange pirouette by Charlotte Reed
and one of the men. His sat phone wasn’t working, which made no sense. He
smacked it against his palm then tried again.

“Aw, fuck!” Crawford, aka Crawfish, then simply Fish
muttered.

The Hammer looked up just in time to watch as one by one,
the searchers walked between the pillars.
And disappeared.

He nearly dropped the expensive communications equipment.
“Holy shit!”

NOTHING HAD CHANGED, and yet
everything had. The first thing Michael noticed was that the tracks that had
been going up the
mound,
were now going down it. They
were on the other side; they had crossed over, but to what, he didn’t know.
Quade’s mouth uplifted in a tiny smile while Charlotte and Jake
stood still.
They spoke not a word; their eyes said it all.

Michael turned slowly. The distant trees looked the same as
those before, and the mountain ranges hadn’t changed. Yet, the very air felt
different, heavy,
almost
sandy.

Jake broke the silence. “It can’t be,” he said, looking down
at the footprints. “I don’t get it.”

Even the phlegmatic Quade was excited. “It is said that the
first and greatest alchemist, Hermes Trismegistus, used his alchemical powers
to create a portal between worlds—in alchemical terms, to create a
transformation.”

“That’s crazy,” Jake said, incredulous
that they would be discussing such a thing.

“Is it?” Quade asked. “Look around you. Open your eyes.”

“Quade is right,” Michael said. “The pillars are simply a
visible part of the phenomenon. Their rumbling, thunderous sound is a warning
you're approaching an altered reality.”

 “It makes no sense,” Jake insisted. “And it’s wrong.
Horribly wrong.”

“I’m going to try to go back,” Charlotte announced as she
walked through the pillars. Nothing happened. She remained in full view of the
others. She then entered the pillars through the opposite direction with the
same results. She went through forwards, backwards, around the pillars and then
through. She even walked backwards between them. Nothing worked. “It’s all
right,” she said, trying to project strength. “When we need to, we’ll figure
out a way.”

Jake nodded at her, wanting to encourage her strength even
as the full impact of all this built within him. “We knew we were going to have
to find our own way back, and we will. But first we follow those tracks going
down the mound. The students are here, alive, and we’re going to find them.”

Quade, Charlotte and Jake climbed down. Something held
Michael back. He took the red stone from his pocket. The color radiated even
more vibrantly than before. “Lady Hsieh,” he said softly, “
are
you here somewhere? Will I see you again?”

A flock of crows circled the pillars. Caws, too loud,
created a wall of noise.
Then, a shadow.
He put the stone
back in his pocket and slid down the mound to the others. “Something’s near,
watching us. We’ve got to be careful.”

A low growl sounded. They froze.

“What was that?” Charlotte asked.

“I don’t know,” Jake said, drawing his Smith and Wesson 327,
with a five-inch barrel, eight round, .357
magnum
. He
was more comfortable with it than the Remington strapped on his shoulder.

Michael and Charlotte chambered their rifles.

“The beasts here could be different from those now in
Idaho,” Quade said. Even he sounded tense now. “We don’t know what era this
‘world’ is from, how long it’s been here, how the beasts evolved.”

The creature shrieked now, louder, and a heavy musty odor
wafted near.

“I think,” Charlotte said, her voice small, “it’s coming
closer.”

They backed away from the sound, then turned and quickly put
some distance between themselves and whatever hid out there. They walked on a
slight upward grade when Jake cried out. Horror on his face, he slowly moved
toward some bushes.

One Adidas sneaker with the foot still in it lay before him,
along with tufts of curly red hair. More gnawed and scattered remains were
near.

Jake found torn clothing and an I.D. to confirm what he knew
as soon as he saw the hair color.

They dug a shallow grave and buried as much of Ted Bellows
as they could find.

Washington D.C.

JIANJUN SAT IN STARBUCKS, a grande
mocha latte and cranberry-orange scone in front of him as he tried once more to
reach Michael by phone and text. He kept getting “out of range” messages. That
was the first time it had happened with a satellite phone, but he knew it was
theoretically possible. He tried not to worry, telling himself that Michael was
simply in a canyon where the satellite waves couldn’t reach.

Jianjun would try again soon, but in the meantime he did
further investigation of Phaylor Laine Pharmaceuticals, Jennifer Vandenburg,
and Calvin Phaylor.

He learned that Vandenburg’s only child had progeria
syndrome, a rare and fatal disease. In the archives of the
Wall Street
Journal, Financial Times, Forbes
and
Bloomberg,
he read about Calvin
Phaylor’s sudden fall from glory. Those reports led him to the archives of the
New
York Times
, and a fifteen-year old article entitled “Death Stalks Group
Seeking Answers to Life.”

He read that Phaylor and PLP had sponsored an International
Symposium on Genetics in Medicine to bring in top scientists from around the
world.
Two of them, Dr. Chou An-ming and Dr. Niels Jorgansen,
died tragically the day before attending.

Jianjun nearly jumped out of his chair. Finally, a
connection! He got himself a frappuccino with whipped cream to celebrate and
continued reading.

To calm the People’s Republic of China’s suspicions about
Dr. Chou’s deadly accident, the FBI investigated. Jianjun suspected Interpol
and the CIA were also involved. Nothing was found according to news reports,
but it was the beginning of the end for Phaylor. A year later, he was put on
administrative leave for fiscal irresponsibility, and a year after that, he was
dismissed. A search for a new CEO began. Milton Zonovich acted in the position,
but eventually the board selected Jennifer Vandenburg.

From what Jianjun had read about progeria, Vandenburg would
have known there was a problem with her daughter by the time she became CEO of
the world’s largest pharmaceutical company. Under her leadership, PLP launched
some initiatives that had to do with genetics and stem cell research. Nothing
helped Vandenburg’s daughter, however.

Jianjun hacked into PLP’s administrative and email records,
but could find no inside information.

Both Jennifer Vandenburg and Calvin Phaylor lived in New
York City.
Time to schedule another trip.

FROM THE MOMENT Melisse stepped
between the pillars, everything felt out of kilter. She tried to tell herself nothing
had happened, but she couldn’t ignore the way Ted had vanished from her sight.

The university group had scrambled off the
mound and huddled together fearful and awestruck.
Some insisted nothing
had changed for them, and that it was Ted who had somehow disappeared, not
them. The argument was far from resolved when they heard a loud, eerie shriek.
They ran from the mound and the pillars, but were too scared to climb back up
the steep mountain they had descended. They knew how slow and difficult that would
be.

They clung close to each other as they tried desperately to
make their way eastward, the direction they hoped would lead back to Telichpah
Flat. They felt guilty about leaving Ted, wherever he was, but were too scared
to stay near those unearthly pillars. All they wanted to do was go home.

Hungry and tired, they eventually stopped. They gathered
wood for a campfire. Melisse and Devlin still had their metal canteens, so they
at least could boil water to kill the
giardia protozoa,
an intestinal
parasite that lived in the area’s streams and creeks.

The moon was high when the forest erupted in a series of
howls. They weren't the shrill cries of coyotes, and the group wondered if they
were wolves.

“Does anyone have a gun?” Brandi asked.

When no one answered Devlin said, “I think the only one who
did was fired.”

Rempart tried not to think about stories he had heard of
strange creatures found out here. “Any wild beasts are much more afraid of you
than you are of them,” he announced, hoping to quell fears by platitudes.

“How does he know?” Brandi loudly whispered to Rachel.

“Everyone, get some sleep,” Rempart ordered. “We have a long
day tomorrow.”

The students glanced at each other, every one of them too
nervous and fearful to move until Melisse said, “He's right.”

o0o

As the sun began to rise, Melisse awoke.

Her mind kept telling her that what she saw was impossible,
yet offered no logical answer.

She unclipped a tracking device from the inside of her cargo
pants pocket. The green light wasn’t blinking. It looked dead. The tracking
device kept tabs on where she was, so that, if the situation grew dangerous,
she could be rescued. She suspected the electro-magnetic transmission that had
stopped her watch had shorted the device.

The others still slept. She crept to the shelter of some
trees. In another of the many pockets of her cargo pants she carried a phone.
Dire emergencies only, she’d been told. This qualified.

The state-of-the-art phone looked like a Blackberry, but the
water-tight lead-titanium alloy case shielded it from everything short of a
nuclear blast.
It uplinked to a constellation of 66 low-earth
orbiting satellites that blanketed the globe.
Its high capacity Iridium
battery used a solar charger to avoid any downtime.

It was as dead as the tracking device.

“What are you doing?” She jumped and spun around to see
Vince approach. “I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he said. “What’s that?
A phone?”

She put the phone back in its case and shoved it in her
pocket while saying, “Phones don’t work out here.” He might be a weakling, but
he knew electronics. A high tech sat phone would cause questions she didn’t
want to answer.

She hurried back to the camp where others were stirring.
Hunger had caused them to wake early.

“Shouldn’t we go back to the pillars to see if we can find
Ted?” Brandi asked.
“First Brian, now Ted!
I’m
scared!”

“Ted probably couldn’t climb up the mound,” Devlin said. “I
doubt we’ll find him.”

“I don’t get it.” Brandi began to sob. “I don’t understand
where we are! What’s happening to us?”

The others started walking, leaving her behind. They had the
same questions, and no answers.

She waited a while, but no one returned, no one offered
comfort. Finally, she dried her eyes and set off after them.

As she walked, she noticed a strange, musky smell similar to
that near the pillars. She began to move a bit faster. Her breathing quickened;
her pulse pounded. The others were a lot farther ahead than she realized. She
tried to jog toward them, but her legs were weak and tired, and before long a
stitch caused her side to ache. She stopped, hand to waist, and bent forward in
pain. She heard a noise in the brush up ahead.

“No,” she whispered, dropping to her knees. “Help me,
somebody.”

It was Melisse. She realized Brandi had fallen behind and
went back to help. She was just about to take Brandi’s arm when she smelled the
foul odor. Leaves rustled; a twig snapped.

She put her hand at the back of her waist under her jacket
and sweater and gripped a Beretta M9 semiautomatic pistol. It was warm against
her skin, the familiar handle oddly comforting in this peculiar environment.

“Come on,” she ordered Brandi. “Move it!”

“It’s here,” Brandi whispered.

A flash of movement.
Melisse spun
left, toward the brush, gun in hand.

A low growl rumbled. A strange beast, well over a
hundred-fifty pounds and shaped like an enormous brown weasel stood with its
long snout in the air as if trying to analyze their scent. Then it rose up on
its back legs, as tall as Melisse, its eyes yellow and malevolent, its claws
long and glittering as if made of gold.

She had never seen, never heard of, anything like it. Trying
hard to quell her shaking hand, she raised her gun. The beast’s growls grew
louder, fiercer, as if it knew what a gun could do. The lips curled and a
snake-like forked tongue lashed out at them. Shocked, Melisse nearly dropped
the Beretta. In a surge of pure muscle, the monster leaped.

Two hands on the gun, Melisse fired, hitting its shoulder.
The beast seemed to pivot in mid-air, and her second shot missed it altogether.
It ran for the cover of the brush.

She fired once more.

She heard the crackle of dead twigs behind her this time.
She spun around, gun poised.

“Stop!
Don’t shoot!” Devlin
shouted.

She lowered the handgun as the group cautiously moved
forward.