The Pod: Part 1

November 20, 2015November 20, 2015 ~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Prologue

In the early twenty-first century, scientific research turned heavily to minute, molecular machines visible only through electron-microscopes. With them came hopes for everything from micro-manufacturing to bio-regulation. This latter thought alone made the public fearful, and only after the research and development moved into its application phase did the populous began to see its obvious benefits.

The programmable technology, so minute and inexpensive to manufacture, was soon loaded with various directives and deposited into laboratory mice. The mice in turn, were implanted with varying types of cancer cells, and the technology unleashed against the cancer. With a ninety-eight percent success rate in the first clinical trial subjects, the new technology was hailed as the most noble discovery since Penicillin more than a century before.

The technology, hitherto referred as nano-tech, was soon adapted to millions of new uses. It’s applications appeared limitless. Everything from automotive fluids to beauty soaps contained the microscopic robotic contraptions, each type programmed to ease man’s burden or enhance his vanity. The applications were so varied, in fact, that nano-tech soon became an under-thought in the consciousness of man. Much like electricity, it was so abundant and ingrained in the collective consciousness, that the “common man” thought nothing of it in day-to-day life, no matter its risks or widespread benefits.

Bureaucratically speaking, concerns were audible. State-houses heard rising notions and concerns of apocalyptic leanings from both learned and worrisome alike. These notions, said the tech’s inventors, scientists, and manufacturers, were outlandish. Even still, whole scores of compliance parameters were dreamed up and implemented to soothe the naysayers. Beyond any red tape however, people and corporations invested in the nano-tech and its components stood to make vast fortunes. Metaphorically speaking, the local purveyor of electricity could charge rates at thousand of times more for the electrical current and conduit flowing through every facet of the home in the developed world. Only after multiplying such a sum several thousands of times could one begin to grasp the immense, financial gains that lay beyond the tape-line. While many companies did manage to successfully wrestle the red tape, equally as many failed or succumbed to corporate sabotage.

The leader in this new, iconic field, began small but grew exponentially. Over the course of a single, fiscal year, it multiplied in size and profit by a tenfold. By the end of the second year, it had grown a hundredfold, and so on in this vein for nigh-on a decade before it plateaued as an industry leader.

Nano-Particulars, the aforementioned, sought to incorporate nano-technology into every facet of life. In that, they very well might have succeeded. From motor-oils to shampoo, food to medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and everything in between. Nano-Particulars’ manufacturing prowess was second to none. After a time, each new innovation sprinted through approval processes to be released and daunt its competitors. Each product, in turn, incorporated nano-tech to increase its effectiveness.

In the advent of a new golden age, there was little backlash for the exorbitant prices and outrageous claims of the products, that were rather hard to prove or disprove. One such example was the conditioner Nano-Cream, said to contain nanites programmed to eat away weakened strands of hair so that new ones might grow faster, healthier.

Despite the heat Nano-Particulars took from all angles, their first class R-and-D department, reputable PR staff, and lightning-witted, young CEO bounced back with greater impunity. In the midst of this hyped era, the CEO imagined new ways to apply this technology, patented the ideas, then set his company to work– for good or ill. One, particularly controversial idea was the Nano-Mask. The idea was that one would install the software, design a new face within it, and hookup the mask into a computer. In turn, the mask would download the new data, rearrange itself over a period of a few hours, then afterward could conform to the face. The nano-tech bots would attach lightly to the skin, becoming opaque so to appear as though no mask existed. It effectively rendered identity fluid, obsolete.

Of course the novelty to the idea soon gave way to far too many terrifying possibilities. The most glaring example; the ease with which it could be employed to frame others for crimes. The idea was quietly put to rest. Unhindered, the young CEO turned his sights to other projects, the foremost of which began a cataclysm of events whose effects exist to this day, The Pod.

Short Story: The Plain and The Pretty

November 3, 2015January 6, 2018 ~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The Plain and the Pretty

Sarah Morgan was a mostly normal girl. She brushed her teeth, combed her hair, and went to school. Day-in and day-out, she would sit in class at Bacatta High-School as dusty teachers lectured on about things as ancient or oxidized as themselves. These were things that would never affect her, that she’d never need in a million years. Despite the obvious trivialities that dribbled from their word-holes, sluiced across the other, assembled brains in class, Sarah took notes. Always. She dutifully copied every word of each subject, every single lecture, each day.

She would’ve stopped, but had no reason to. For that matter, she didn’t care to. It made her look busy and kept her hands at work. She scrawled pages with lightning speed, her eyes always down-turned at the back of every class, but her ears honed on each syllabic resonance and every phonetic clamor against her eardrum.

The only times Sarah wasn’t writing were lunch and dinner. Otherwise, when not recording lectures, it was creating magical fairy-lands, or dark, mysterious dungeons. All along the walls of her bedroom were stacks and stacks of notebooks, loose-leaf sheets of paper, even torn napkins. Each one was categorized, placed in a specific stack.

Where some teenage girls’ walls were splattered with friendly-faced photographs, budded artistic drawings, or the occasional half-nude pop-star, Sarah’s were empty. They were also impossible to find for all the towers of notebooks along them. And where most teenager’s rooms– whether girl or boy– were impassable from weeks-old piles of clothing, papers, and the general left-overs sloth-like youth, Sarah’s was impassable from used pens and nail-like pencil-stubs that created a fine layer of unstable floor above the carpet.

To enter Sarah’s room without agile feet was to take one’s own life in their hands– a fact that her mother and father loved to remark on. Whatever, it kept them out of the room, left her to work in peace. All she wanted to do was write, even skipped frequent meals when a particularly interesting passage flowed like a sieve from her thinker onto her pages.

While she wasn’t plain looking, Sarah didn’t have the bombshell-looks of the cheerleaders, or the brain-gasm smarts of the nerd-girls, or even the dexterous phalanges and sexual curiosities of the band and orchestra girls. In fact, whatever clique one could think to name, she wasn’t in. She was merely a hitch-hiker on the road of life, presently stuck on the far-side of the fast-lane that was high-school.

No-one bothered her, not even to pick on her. For that at least, she was grateful. She liked being alone, even if it was boring sometimes. So it was with extreme irritation to her inner-muse when, one day, she slammed notebook-first into someone in the hallway. Her notebook crumpled, fell. A pair of loud thumps signaled the collision of Sarah’s front-half with another’s. A catastrophic cascade of books tumbled to the floor. Opposite swears drowned the back-step and crouch of both Sarah and her new-found acquaintance.

The girl’s hands slipped beneath her pile of books and papers on the floor, while Sarah’s gathered the loose pages she’d added to certain, earlier sections of the notebook. Sarah’s eyes only captured her fellow victim of circumstance for a moment, but it was clear she was one of the “pretty girls;” a part of the clique that relied on genetics rather than talents– or anything else for that matter– to fit in. They held power over the boys, the prettiest of them alphas that dominated the other girls. Whether Alpha or not, this girl was certainly close to leading the pack.

“Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

Sarah muttered something similar– more of a grumble than an apology. Even so, the message came across well enough that the girl continued with piercing, blue eyes. “I just moved here. Name’s Allison– most people just call me Ali.”

“Sarah,” she mumbled with less than a cave-man’s intelligence.

Allison gathered the last of her books, stood up, “Well, Sarah, sorry again. Maybe I’ll see you ’round.”

Sarah “mmm’ed” in reply, slid the last of her pages into her notebook, and continued on her way. The clack of Allison’s heels were distinct all the way down the hall, even over the din of lunch-time students in the halls. When the bell screamed through-out the school, it finally drowned the heels’ last reverberations, and ushered in a rise to the din as the students headed for class.

For the rest of the day, Sarah thought little of the collision, returned to her notebooks to record the geography lecture. The topic was long, as arduous as the formation of the lands that dictated the first part of the word. The teacher’s tongue and throat droned while his plump hands drug chalk across the board at an Earthly, slow pace. Sarah’s hands worked too fast for him. She had to drag out her other notebook just to keep moving. The jump between subjects and books made her eyes ache and her head spin, but even so, she managed to make it through the class.

The rest of the day was easy, mathematics formulas and theorems, and biology notes kept her busy. Both teachers were young, agile with their words, wasted no time between them. When the last of the two classes came to an end, Sarah had just enough time to stuff her notebooks in her backpack before the door uncluttered from the dismissal bell. By the time the mass of bodies formed the shapely, single-file line, she was up, headed for the hall.

She slipped out in the dissipation of students in divergent streams, floated out to the far-side of the hall to head for the stair-well. She dodged the few locker-clingers that blocked her path, her feet quick to juke sideways and back in-step without a missed beat. Near the end of the hall, a clamor sounded behind her like a band-geek’s tuba had just fallen and shattered on the tile floors. She smelled “fight” before the word was ever uttered. Her neck craned backward as her feet continued forward.

Indeed, a pair of the testosterone-fueled, genius-carriers of the Y-chromosome had begun to trounce one another. With what little Sarah could see, it was like one of those hockey-fights– sans the usual, impressive act of balancing on ice-skates while they pummel one another. It ended as quickly as it began, the two boy-children torn apart by a pair of teachers over shouts. Sarah rolled her eyes. The next moment came in actions that seemed to slow time. She lifted a foot, began to rotate her head back to her forward-path. As her eyes caught the view ahead, a locker door was flung open. Her foot came down just as the door’s edge bisected the bridge of her nose.

She was smacked by the door, fell to her ass. The locker-door made a thwanggg with the sound of cheap metal. Sarah was certain her tail-bone was broken– or maybe that was just the feeling of her fractured pride. The locker-door flung closed as Allison’s face appeared, her piercing-blue eyes wide as saucers.

A hand covered Allison’s slacked jaw, “Oh. My. God.” Sarah half-expected the pretty girl to laugh at the plain-girl’s misfortune, was doubly stunned when Allison extended a hand to pull her up. “Oh my god. I’m so sorry!”

Sarah took her hand, “S’ok.”

“Sarah, right? Are you alright?” She asked as her hand pulled a jacket from her locker.

Sarah’s wits returned slowly, “Uh, yeah. Allison, the new girl.” Allison nodded. “I remember– Ali, that’s what you said earlier.”

“Yeah, are you sure you’re alright? I totally wasn’t paying attention,” She asked while she fished an arm out of the jacket, stuck her arms into it.

Sarah shrugged, the interaction already belabored past her comfort-zone. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, “Yeah. Nothin’s broken. Was my fault anyhow.”

Sarah wanted to make a move away, but it was clear Ali’s guilt was beyond that of the other pretty girls. Her turned head and eye-contact made it all the more clear she wasn’t going to let Sarah go until they’d exchanged some pleasantries– at least there was some sign of life in that pack of wannabe-plastic people that called themselves rulers.

“Well, still, I’m sorry.” She fished out her backpack, shut the locker. Sarah sensed the dreaded walk-and-talk that people did as Ali started forward, “Those fights happen a lot here?”

Sarah had trouble matching the pace of Ali’s “don’t-quit” legs, but moved in-step beside her to the stairs, start down them. “Uh, I dunno’. I never see ’em, just usually hear ’em– and usually at lunch.”

Ali grimaced, “So they happen a lot then?”

Sarah shrugged, “Once or twice a week.”

Ali rolled her eyes with a huff as they rounded the first foyer, “God guys’re retarded. It’s like… they don’t even have half the brains they were given. Just drooling, slobbering, ogres with B-O and ape-brains.”

Sarah laughed. Genuinely. It surprised her too. It even started with one of those throaty-snort sounds people made when they were genuinely amused. It made Ali’s piercing-blues brighten, her lightly tanned face almost glowed as he cheeks dimpled.

Sarah nodded, “Yeah, they’re cave-people with less hair.”

“At least most’a the time,” Ali joked.

They giggled laughed all the way down to the main-floor, were at the hallway for the front doors before they could speak again. The doors ahead gleamed like a holy beacon– and indeed to some they were– as the autumn sun splayed late-afternoon rays across the floor before them. The buses had already begun to depart, the crowd of bodies thinned to only the last, few hangers-on that waited for rides from parents.

“Shiiit!” Sarah groaned as she watched her bus lumber away.

“What’s wrong?” Ali asked with a glance.

She threw her head back, her shoulders slumped, “Bus’s gone.”

Ali patted her back, “Ah, don’t worry. I can give you a lift.”

They stepped from the less-populated entrance, “It’s cool. I’ve walked before. No biggie.”

Ali sighed, “Oh come on, Sarah. I smacked you with that door. It’s the least I can do.”

Sarah contained the squirmy discomfort that wriggled within her. In truth, she didn’t much mind walking if the alternative was more intimate time with another person. Before she could protest further, Ali wrapped both her arms around Sarah’s right bicep.

“Come onnn, my car’s right around the corner.”

Sarah sighed, “Okay, okay.”

Ali half-drug her the length of the red and white brick school, her gait double that of Sarah’s. They rounded the corner to the insanity of the Junior-Senior class parking-lot. All manner of cars from all makes and years filled the horizon; from old, rust-bucket clinkers whose mufflers were only such in a theoretical sense, to brand-new, shiny BMWs and Mercedes bought with the greasy cash of wealthier mommies and daddies.

Ali drug Sarah clear across the parking-lot, all along the way the two were forced to dodge the erratic, imbecilic drivers they called peers. Ali even heated up, flipped one guy off after he shouted, “Nice ass, baby. Now, move it!” She finally stopped at the rear-end of a relatively new soft-top convertible, Camaro. The car said enough to tell Sarah that Ali had some money– or her parents did anyhow. While she doubted it was BMW or Mercedes money, for a plain-girl forced to ride the bus everyday, Ali was leaps and bounds beyond her own fiscal benefactors.

“Wow. Nice car,” Sarah said with admittedly more awe than she’d have liked.

Ali slipped into the driver’s seat, and the engine roared to life, “Yeah, it gets me where I need to go. Sucks in the winter though– too much power and not enough weight.”

Sarah buckled her belt, “Better than the bus, I bet.”

“Oh definitely,” she agreed as she backed out, followed the aisles to the line of cars that waited for the turn onto Orwell Avenue. “So where we headed?”

Sarah was still enamored with the plush interior. It smelled of something like dream-sicles tasted; creamy and orange with just a hint of cold.

“Sarah?”

“Huh? Oh, right. Up Orwell to Marigold, then a right on Beech,” Sarah said oblivious to her driver’s ignorance.

“Gonna’ need a play-by-play,” Ali replied through the right from the school onto Orwell.

“Just keep going forward. It’ll be on the left.”

The shopping mall gleamed in Ali’s rear-view mirror behind and to the side of other student drivers. Ahead to the left, Orwell branched off in city-blocks that gridded the northern section of town in a long rows of quaint boutiques, shops, and various, other establishments too small for the sky-scraping madness further North on the horizon.

All along Orwell Avenue, traffic made its start-stop procession through the three-way stop-lights that made up the bulk of the South-side of “downtown.” The cozy, beige brick and mortar shops that were sandwiched side-by-side, ended abruptly with the Y-fork of Orwell and Armistice. Sarah kept Ali on track past the police-department that hid the first sections of the southern neighborhoods. Then, well-manicured lawns rose and fell with the hilly topology of the middle-class side of town. The more expensive houses were even further South, undoubtedly where Ali lived.

The hilly rise of the police-station fell to Lotus Drive. After a few houses, Hyacinth passed with its sloped, Northern incline, and Marigold peered out at its re-leveled height to match Orwell. Ali’s left turn was greeted by a block of cookie-cutter houses one either side. The Camaro slowed to a stop at Willow and Marigold, kicked up into second before the next intersection and the turn on to Beech from the three-way stop. At the left, the river that ran from Grove Park to the center of town, was visible between the side yards of Elm Street’s houses. It marked the property lines of the homes on either side, twisted and turned beneath the small bridges on Orwell and Asimov– two of the main Avenues through town– to deposit in a pond far ahead.

Sarah pointed to a tall white house, its lawn as well-manicured as the rest on this side of town, save for the few weeds that grew through the cracked, cement driveway. As usual, it was empty in the early afternoon. Mom and Dad wouldn’t be home for another few hours.

Sarah readied to slip out of the car– in truth, readied to bolt like a deer in the headlights– and glanced to Ali, “Thanks for the ride.”

Ali smiled with perfect, white teeth that met one another at crisp angles, were obviously the product of expensive orthodontics; yet another testament to the pretty-versus-plain girl contrast between them.

“Anytime, Sarah,” Ali said. She hesitated as Sarah pulled on the door handle. She was almost to freedom when Ali spoke again, “Hey umm… Can I ask you something real quick?”

Now Sarah was a deer in the headlights. She had the vacant face of terror and confusion, the dumb stare into mysterious, fast-approaching glowey things that even Sarah couldn’t name in the moment. The question formed on Ali’s lips innocuously, much like the graceful automobile that went about its business as unwittingly as that most mentally-stunted of animals.

Ali drove on, completely oblivious, “Do you mind if I hang out here for a while? I mean, I don’t wanna’ be rude or anything but home kinda sucks this time’a day.”

With all the nimble majesty of an airborne deer in mid-collision, Sarah replied, “U-uh, s-sure, I guess.”

She would have said no, knew she should have, but something had compelled her not to. Terror might have been its source, or perhaps mere stupidity. In either case, a mental five-K began for Sarah the engine cut-off and Ali stepped out of the car. Sarah followed, even to the door, where the only indication that something was expected of her was the way Allison stepped aside to let her reach the knob. While she dug for her key, tried to produce it to unlock the door, the five-K turned to hurdles.
Why’d she accept the ride? Why’d Allison offer it? Was this some prank by the other pretty-girls? Was it mere chance, or even fate? Even then, what was the point? Sarah was a loner; a fact she knew and liked-well about herself. What good was companionship to her? What good was her companionship to another? More importantly, what would Allison think when she inevitably twisted her ankle stepping into Sarah’s room? Would her neurotic note-taking and ceaseless word-smithing become a new focus of taunts for the pretty-girls and their gimps? And why’d Allison’s house suck with her undeniable wealth?

All these questions sprinted through her mind in the micro-seconds it took for her to unlock the door and step into the foyer. She held the door politely, half-prepared to slam it shut on Ali’s face, but knew she couldn’t. As much as part of her wanted to kick Allison to the curb, the rest was intrigued at how things would play out– what exactly the answers to those questions would be.

She followed Ali up the stairs as she rubbernecked the white, tastefully decorated walls filled with typical, middle-class photo-frames, knick-knack shelves, various electronics and faux-wood furniture.

“Wow,” Ali said as she stepped aside to let Sarah up the stairs. “This place is nice.”

Sarah snorted, “Nah, it’s just home.”

Allison shrugged, followed her through the dry-walled archway and into the kitchen, “I like it. It’s cozy.”

Sarah set her pack on the table across the kitchen, “Uh… cool I guess. Well, you want somethin’ to drink?”

Sarah went about the tedious process of listing the house’s entire beverage repository before they settled on pop. They sat at the table in an awkward silence while Sarah’s leg made restless shakes underneath it.

Again the perfect teeth appeared as Allison broke the awkwardness with a smile, “I’m guessing you don’t have many friends.”

“Uh…”

She smacked her forehead, “Wow that sounded really insensitive.”

“No, it’s–”
“What I meant to say is; you seem nervous, like you don’t hang out much.”

Sarah opened her mouth to protest, but her mental faculties were tied up in the questions she’d asked. So much so that the lie-production machine in her brain had no room to cater to her already-minute ego.

She closed her mouth with a long sigh, sank back in her chair to open it again, “It wasn’t insensitive. I got what you meant. I’m not really easily offended anyhow. Stuff just sorta’ rolls off’a me.”

Ali chewed a corner of her lip, “You’re sweet, Sarah, but I’m an idiot.”

Sarah shrugged, attempted reassurance, “I can’t tell you for sure since we just met, but you don’t seem like one.”

“See what I mean,” Ali replied with a bigger smile than before. “You’re sweet.”

Again, Sara shrugged, “I dunno’ maybe. But you’re right anyhow. All I do’s hang around by myself. At home and at school.”

She frowned, “That must be lonely.”

Sarah slurped a sip from her can, “Sometimes, but not really. It’s just how I’ve always been. I mean, no one who doesn’t have mental problems wants to be alone all the time. For me, it’s just easier.”

Ali seemed intrigued, “Well, why don’t you make friends?”

“Just too busy, I guess.”

Her intrigue grew, “Busy how?”

Sarah was suddenly timid, quiet. Her mouth squirmed, her forehead hardened, angled closer together. Her face pointed downward at the floor, but Allison leaned to get a better look at it. Sarah was too scared to explain her utterly obsessive-compulsive writing habits. There was too much in her brain that didn’t want to come off like a freak. What little ego and pride she had was too delicate, fragile, to take the risk. All the same, Allison waited.

“Earth to Sarah. Come in Sarah,” Ali joked.

She shook off her petrified trance, “Uh, well, I um… uh… Mostly write.”

Ali’s eyes brightened, “Write? Like stories and stuff?”

Sarah was profoundly terrified– to the point that all the words she knew of to describe fear summed together still didn’t describe its depth.

Her words tumbled out like dice from an upturned cup, “Uh, well sh-yeah. I mean, um… most of the t-time anyhow.”

“Does anyone ever read ’em?”

Sarah shrugged. She knew the answer was no, but the ambiguity of a shrug seemed like it might keep the conversation from turning to its inevitable point. Eventually it would get there, no matter what, but Sarah hoped there would be time before then.

Ali was leaned forward, “Why not? You don’t want ’em to? I could read some if you want.”

Sarah sighed, “Ali, I don’t wanna’ sound like a jerk, but … it’s just not something I really wanna’ share with anyone.”

Allison’s pretty-face had that pinched frown and glisten that pretty-girls get when on the verge of tears from even a minor pin-prick on their feelings. Sara winced. Contrary to her expectations though, Allison blinked, and the gleam became depth-less intrigue.

“Well I get not wanting to be judged, but… d’you mind if I ask why you’re so worried about it?”

It was a fair enough question, and Sarah wasn’t rude enough to say “fuck-off” just quite yet, but even so, she wasn’t sure she had an answer. “It’s just not something I share with anyone. Just something I do ’cause I do it. I don’t really know why I do, but… well it’s like people who hang out with friends. That kinda’ takes the place of that.”

Allison grimaced, “Yeah, I get it, but… do you share anything with anyone? I mean, anything more than the air you breathe?”

Another fair question, granted more invasive than the last, and especially callous for two people who’d just met. But it was more than tame for a pretty-girl. Sarah was once more forced to run through the list of questions that had arisen at the door. She saw a clear pattern emerge from her knowledge of pretty-girl/plain-girl dynamics.

Sarah eeked out a grimace, “You’re gonna’ grill me about this ’til I let you read something aren’t you?”

Ever the more perceptive pretty girl, Ali giggled, “Most definitely.”

Sarah threw her head back, smacked it on the chair, “Blah.” She growled a throaty word that crescendoed in a whine, “Fiiine.” She stood with her shoulders limp, trudged forward, “C’mon.”

Ali followed her from the kitchen out to the right, down the long hallway that opened to the various rooms on either side. She stopped at the door to her room, only one arm limp now, the other with a hand on the knob.

“You light on your feet?”

Ali squinted confusion at her, “Huh? Oh. Well, I was in gymnastics for ten-years.”

“You’ll need it,” Sarah warned.

She shoved open the door. It only just cleared the height of the pens scattered at its threshold. In Allison’s view, the door gave way to stacks of notebooks, and the pen-covered floor. Her jaw fell open, her eyes nearly popped from her skull. Sarah stepped in– or rather-tip-toed– across the plastic and metal pens and wooden pencil-stubs. She slid sideways onto her bed as Alison planted one sure foot before the other to close the door behind her. Her eyes swept the room as she made a small circle inside the towers of notebooks and stacks of loose-leaf papers.
She almost came full-circle, but stopped on Sarah atop the bed, “Holy hell! I thought you were joking. But you aren’t. There’s gotta’ be five-tons of paper in here.”

Sarah shrugged, “Maybe. I’d have to do the math.”

Allison had the sudden urge to rush for a stack, begin tearing through it and soaking up the words inside. Instead, she stepped to Sarah’s side, almost slipped and fell, but managed to maneuver an upright sit from the near-fatal mishap.

Her jaw finally shut to wet her mouth, “Sarah, it’s really hard not to want read this stuff when you see it like this.”

Sarah was melancholic, “A lotta’ people’d probably disagree.”
“Yeah, but they’re not here.”

She had a point. “Dig in if you wanna’, I don’ really care.”

The bright-eyed intrigue returned to scan the room, “Wh-where should I start?”

“Doesn’t really matter I guess. You mind if I write?”

There was a slight shrug as Ali stood for a stack across the room. She walked for the stack like an acrobat; her hands flat, arms locked for balance across the strewn floor. She reached for a red-covered notebook, returned to Sarah’s side while she scrawled across a fresh piece of paper. The intermittent pauses between ink-scratches gave rhythm to Ali’s thoughts. In the span of a page and a-half, she was transported to a world where a king had sworn fealty to his subjects only to be back-stabbed by a traitor courtsmen whom viewed him as weak.

More short stories gave way to poems about love and death, beauty and pain. The words flowed with rhythmic rhymes and swelled with alliteration whose pace was ever-more kept by the tempo of Sarah’s pen. Every-few pages, detailed histories of worlds, cities, and people would arise with intriguing dichotomies, secrets, and flaws to put the greatest of literary contemporaries to shame. All of this, in only one notebook.

It could’ve been a fluke, Ali knew. She dove into another. Then another. The pattern held strong. All the while, Sarah’s pen worked. A pause a drum solo saw it tossed at the wall ’til it bounced, fell with the others on the floor, and was replaced with a new one.

Ali finished a fourth notebook, the sun already set in the sky. She looked sideways at Sarah, curiously absorbed in her work, as though the world in her mind was the only one that existed.

“Sarah?” It took a minute before her pen stopped, and her head rose from the page with a dull question on her face. Ali was hesitant, all the more emphatic for it, “I’ve read a lot of books and stories. But this is by far the greatest stuff I’ve ever read.”

Sarah’s brow furrowed in disbelief; partly from her self-consciousness, and partly from distrust that a pretty-girl like Allison would ever read, “You don’t have to flatter me, Ali.”

She was insistent, “Sarah, I’m not.” Sarah’s eyes narrowed skeptically. “I know I’m mostly eye-candy to people– like I haven’t got brains– but I know greatness when I see it. Apart from hanging out with friends, all I do is read– like you write. All these stacks of notebooks? That’s how my room looks, but with other people’s books. And I’m telling you this stuff is awesome!”

Sarah was suddenly dumbstruck by her own prejudice, as if Ali had heard her thoughts all along. She was also, admittedly, flattered by the idea that someone found her work so intriguing. At the same time though, she was profoundly embarrassed by the way she’d thought of Ali. Here was a girl not unlike herself, save a hyper-critical label Sarah had applied to them both, defying said label to befriend and show her admiration and interest.

“Uh… I-I’m sorry,” Sarah admitted suddenly. She put her pen and paper aside, sat forward to speak openly to Ali. It was a curious thing to her, she’d never opened up to anyone, let alone a stranger. “I judged you, Ali, I’m sorry. I’m an ass.”

It took her a moment to connect the subtext that had lingered between them all day, “Huh? Oh you mean ’cause of the pretty-girl stuff, right?”

“Uh… I wanna’ make sure we’re on the same page… what d’you mean by that?”

Ali explained, “I know you know. You’re what pretty-girls call a plain-girl, someone who’s not super-model gorgeous, or otherwise wrapped in plastic to their eye-lashes. Truth be told, I’m not really either. I just got lucky genetically. I hate those girls.”

“You hate them? But I thought–”
“That I was one?” Ali asked. Sarah nodded in acknowledgment. Ali chuckled, “I know I look it, but I’m not. It’s one’a those weird coincidences– like the ISS they people confuse for a UFO… it doesn’t quite look like a star, and you know it’s not a plane, so what else could it be? Most people go for UFO ’cause they’re not thinking that the space-station’s there.”

Sarah simplified it for her, “You mean Occam’s Razor, right?”

“Exactly,” Ali replied. She pulled her legs in to sit cross-legged on the bed. “I didn’t keep talking to you at school today ’cause I’m an airhead who’s got boundary issues. I like you. You seem interesting. You probably didn’t even notice it, because you’re always writing, but I have two morning classes with you.”

Sarah’s brow furrowed, “Man, I really got pay more attention.”

Ali laughed, smiled, “Point is, I knew I’d either end up being poached by the vapid pretty girls, or be alone. I saw some one that looked interesting, got curious. I was just lucky that I bumped into you at lunch.”

Sarah rubbed her nose, smiled, “I don’t know if the after-school thing was luck, but I get what you’re saying.”

Ali chuckled again, “I really am sorry about that, by the way.”

Sarah shrugged, adjusted herself to hug her knees, “It’s no big deal.”

Ali grimaced, “Actually, it kinda is. If you hadn’t hit that locker door, we wouldn’t be hanging out right now. And I wouldn’t know how awesome you are. And you wouldn’t have someone to tell you.”

For once, Sarah felt perfectly at-ease without her hands constantly working her pen across a page, “That’s… actually a pretty good point.”

They met each other’s eyes with giddy looks that transferred glee between them, and suddenly fell into a mysterious fit of giggles. The plain and the pretty together at last, both equally enamored with the other; one, for its unquenched thirst for friendship, the other for its insatiable hunger for mental stimulation. It was a freak-accident-caused friendship that they both knew would last ’til death. The first few weeks of hanging out only further proved it as Sarah and Ali returned daily from school to write and read respectively. Long evenings soon turned to long nights and weekend sleep-overs, and the latter pushed the former ever-nearer toward greatness with her unassailable support.

The precarious nature of their meeting alone would have given Rod Serling another one for the black-and-white picture-show. The plain and the pretty, Sarah and Ali, writer and reader, entwined in friendship forever over a simple, innocuous mishap.

Krubera: Part 6

October 30, 2015October 29, 2015 ~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The Plains

The five set out across the plains with relative ease. The lakes that dotted the landscape here and there, sank through the haze the nearer they came. The tall grasses hid them beneath the gentle sway the wind imparted to them. Every few minutes, one of the group would stop to gather samples of the different foliage and soil. Raymond remarked on the odd composition of the latter, cited that the minute composition of limestone was inconsistent with the world’s place inside a mountain.

As they trudged forward through the knee-high grass, Raymond mused aloud to the others, “It’s possible that the peninsula has been here for millions of years in its entirety. Gagrinsky may have grown upward as the plates shifted, closed it off from everything but the Black Sea. It could have been only a small pond then, or even a lake– smaller than it is now.”

“How do you explain the ceiling then?” Chad asked, the camera at his eye as it captured the plains with a wide, slow pan.

“I can’t be sure until there’s a core drilling,” he admitted. “But I suppose one theory could be arches. If they had spanned the chasm from one side of the growing range to the other at its peak, it would have only been a matter of sediment, dust, or anything else settling over them for millions of years to create the ceiling.”

A ear shattering shriek split the air. Like that of an eagle but much in higher pitch. It dizzied them with a sine that spiraled downward into a growl. The group froze in its tracks, scanned the skies. The luminescent ceiling was all that cut through the thick mist, visibility reduced to little more than a few meters.

“The predators are out now,” Anthony said as he rubbernecked the mist. “Prey must be diurnal.”

Elliot’s voice was airy, quiet, “Probably why we haven’t seen anything yet.”

They waited, listened. When the next call came, it was further off, headed away from them.

Elliot sighed relief, “C’mon. We don’t know how long the day lasts here”

Liana readjusted the rifle in her hands, followed Elliot to match her pace.

To the right, a pond was half-shrouded by mist that seemed to sink further and further toward the ground. Elliot hoped it wouldn’t delay their trek– it was already getting harder to see the forested ridge, and she didn’t like the idea of climbing in the fog. While the day might last much longer here, as the laws of the surface need not apply, it might also be much shorter. Though it was certain the cavern’s light-source had curiously thickened the air. Her lungs were heavy, fatigued by the foreign oxygen.

“Wait, wait,” Elliot said with a flail of her hand.

She turned for the others, worried for the oxygen levels. Liana watched her step past with curious look, turned to follow her again. The shriek sounded high overhead. Elliot froze mid-step, her mind blank. Liana crouch-walked to her, pulled her downward. With a slow, calculated momentum, she shouldered her rifle, raised it to the skies, the mist too dense to see anything.

The shriek pierced their ears, forced hands over heads.

Liana swiveled, yelled, “Down!”

The team fell to the ground, covered their ears against another shriek. A shadow raced at Liana as she dropped; a massive gray blur that swooped down, skirted the air where Liana’s head had been. Air rushed as it passed, cried out with a vile high-pitch to their ears at such close range.

Liana yelled, “Up! Up!”

The group had just enough time to regroup in a single-file crouch, when the second run came. She waited, timed her words, caught sight of a spear-like beak, barbed at the lower end, attached to a swept back, horned head. Its appeared as a demonic crane that rocketed at them. She yelled.

They were on the ground before it passed, but Chad screamed. He lay on his back, a wolf-sized predator atop him. Liana took aim, fired her rifle in short, loud bursts. The bullets sprayed green blood from its lizard-like body. It thrashed in pain and anger, its long beak embedded in Chad’s shoulder. Forelimbs extended from its torso, forced Chad agaisnt the ground. The body gave a hard jerk, ripped its beak free. Blood dripped from the barbs as it yelped, shrieked. It reared up at Liana atop Chad’s chest. Her rifle rose. The creature’s feet balled up. It sprang toward Liana. She squeezed the trigger.

The creature animal was blasted backward mid-leap, fell with a twitch. It leaked, milky, green translucence from its body, bore no feathers, but forearm-thick muscular bulges beneath its leathery wings.

Chad screamed again. Elliot rushed over examined his wound; the beak had pierced straight through the left clavicle.

Liana shouted, “Get him quiet!”

Elliot opened her mouth to speak, her voice drowned in a high, rasping roar. This one was much closer, Terran in nature. Raymond and Anthony rushed to Chad, silenced him. Second and third roars came from opposite directions. Before Elliot could speak, Chad was silent, on his feet. Blood leaked from his shoulder, his face red from the pain, he moved fast. He hurried past her, then Liana, sprinted away from the sounds.

“Get him before he’s out of sight,” Liana commanded.

She took up aim once more as Elliot and the others sprinted past her. Her feet made slow, quiet back-steps, her eyes darted around the forward area. The roars came again, ahead of her this time.

Light thumps were all that was audible until a heavy breath emitted death and dried blood at her. The silhouette of a medium-sized animal sped across the path the team had made. Its spine was curved, like that of cat’s, but the muzzle was large, blunt. It bounded across, disappeared into the mist. Liana’s feet worked her backward at a slow, consistent pace, the distant team audible behind her.

The first Terran-creature rushed at her in a diagonal path. Two bursts spattered blood from its chest. Its legs gave out mid-bound. It tumbled forward, end-over-end, dead. Life faded from its yellow eyes, visible in deep sockets and framed above a heavy jaw-line. Sinew and wounds made the beast’s head appear as though its skin had been turned inside out. Its ears were absent, mere openings near the crown. The other beasts growled a heavy menace. Liana’s feet worked faster, were too slow.

The two beasts came into view. Their blunt snouts flared with razor-sharp teeth. A second set gave a violent oscillation from the back of the throat. They launched at her in unison. The rifle barked without aim. Liana was tackled, the rifle thrown from her hands. Heavy claws dug into her sides. She screamed in agony, felt blood drain from her sides. She grasped for the diving knife at her waist, managed to thrust it hard into the weight on her chest.

One of the beasts stumbled back with a high yelp. The second took its place, dug its claws deep into her chest. The stench of death overwhelmed her, the pain torturous. The beast made a sharp inhale as it sniffed, snorted at her, opened its mouth to reel back its head for a death-strike. Its head snapped forward, met her arm to block it. Teeth sank into her forearm, lashed it from side to side. She struggled to keep the beast’s teeth from her neck, tried to roll away, felt the SMG beneath her. She rolled back and forth. Her arm weakened. The weapon slipped out beside her.

With a forceful hand, struck the beast in the neck. It rasped, stumbled back. The SMG rose. The beast returned, readied to strike. The barrel pressed the neck, spewed ammunition from the barrel to shred its airways, and severe its spinal cord. Liana’s adrenaline kept the trigger down as she scurried backward, the creature dead. Her hand released only after it fell over dead.

She swallowed hard, bloody and sickened, turned for her rifle. Shouts and screams emitted from the direction the team had gone. She retrieved the rifle and her knife, sprinted with a limp after the sounds. Each breath was a knife in her side, but she dared not stop. Torn flesh burned and bled from beneath her shredded wet-suit. She stumbled down Chad and the others had created as their shouts grew louder, coherent.

Elliot yelled with desperation, “Your knives! Get your knives!”

Liana emerged from the mist into a small grove of trees, the other four bound up by thick vines, suspended a meter in the air.

Anthony’s neck was stretched upward, his voice a grunt, “It hurts!”

“Liana, No!” Elliot screamed.

She stopped with heavy pants, looked to the ground. More, long vines, thick as sea-rope criss-crossed the patchy soil with hundreds of small thorns and wet suckers in them like a squid.

“Don’t…. touch them,” Elliot shouted, her breath strained as the vine squeezed her.

Liana dodged the vines with nimble feet, watched the team rise slowly upward. Her eyes followed the vines upward and deep into the canopy of conifers. She found a bare spot where the vines had been triggered, stepped into it.

She called to the others, “Stay still.”

The rifle rose in her hands, grazed the torn flesh at her abdomen. The rifle cracked once. A bullet whizzed over Elliot’s head, split the vine that curled around and over her. She fell free, hit the grounded with a winding thud, coughed and choked for air. Liana shifted her aim, freed the others with more cracks of the rifle.

Elliot choked for air, pushed herself up. Her throat rasped for air as she tore thorns form her arms and sides, brushed off a viscous liquid that had begun to coat her. Raymond and Anthony did the same, hurried to Chad on the ground whom struggled to breathe.

Liana took careful steps over the vines, examined Chad’s wounds, “He’ll be fine. Get him up. Chad moaned, took a sharp breath. Liana neglected her own injuries, to help lift him, “We need to move.”

She checked the magazine in the rifle, cast it aside, for a new one. Elliot stepped to her, knelt to examine the jagged skin at her belly. It had been scalped to the dermal layer, the epidermal-layer like a flap that hung, still connected.

“Jesus, what the hell happened?” Elliot asked as she surveyed the puncture wounds.

The animal’s claws had stabbed her sides as though it had tried to grasp her. The motion necessary suggested digits that moved independent of the hand or foot connected, like fingers.

“You need to be bandaged,” she said, her voice grave.

“We need to move.” Liana protested.

“Damn right we do, but we’re not going anywhere with you like this,” she said, poking a finger into the wound. Liana fell to her knees, gasped and whimpered. “Ray, Tony; I need gauze, alcohol, and pain killers.”

Liana doubled-over, clenched her eyes shut and grit her teeth, “What are you going to do?”

Raymond passed over supplies to her, Anthony still at work on Chad, now propped upright. Raymond knelt to aid Elliot, poured alcohol onto a large swath of cotton-cloth.

“This is going to hurt,” he winced, sympathetic.

“Do it any–”

He swabbed the wound. She screamed through her teeth, tortured by fiery needles. Her voice resounded off the trees and the empty clearing. It was answered by a shriek.

“Son of a bitch!” Anthony cried backward. “Can’t we be off the menu just this once?”

“What do you expect, we’re wounded prey to them,” Elliot said over Liana’s cries.

She tried to silence herself, but Elliot’s knife was out. It sliced away the torn flesh, gave way to a hard pressure against her exposed dermis. Tears squeezed through her eyes, stuttered breaths inhaled with whimpers. Elliot wrapped her abdomen with a large roll of gauze, threw her hands back and forth fast.

“Done,” Elliot said to Raymond. “Get her up.”

They got beneath either of her shoulders, lifted her to her feet. She hung limp from the pain, the weapons at her back dangled, smack together. Her feet caught the ground, took off with Raymond at one-side. Elliot helped Anthony lift Chad, followed after the others. Their legs ached from the slope of the forest, the shrieks nearer behind them. Elliot glanced back to see a small animal scamper into view, devour the piece of Liana’s flesh she’d left behind.

The slope peaked a few moments later, the shrieks banked away, headed back for the scene of carnage Liana had left behind. The treeline opened ahead. A dirt clearing appeared with a river through one third of it. The mist was thinner here, the far-side of the river clearly stone as it would off and round to the right. Small crocodile-like creatures sat lazily on the far side of the bank, as if sunning themselves. The group slowed, quieted.

The creatures resembled their surface relatives in every way, save for their minute size. They were as large as a toy dog, with heavy jaws and short, squat snouts in place of a croc’s wide rounded one. Their claws were long, stiff, stuck out several inches from finger-like appendages. The crocodile creatures seemed to notice them, but paid them, no mind. Even so, the group passed by them nearer the trees, came to a downward slope.

Liana begged to stop, panted for water. Raymond set her upright against a rock, her face pale, covered in sweat. Elliot grabbed for a bottle, handed it over, set Chad beside Liana.

She checked his wounds, moved onto Liana, “How’re you doing?”

“Fine, just… tired,” she breathed, weak.

“Looks like blood-loss,” Chad said. “But I wouldn’t rule out poison.”

“No poison… just tired.” Liana wheezed.

“It could be both,” he siad with a look to Elliot. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

“Its blood loss,” Raymond said with certainty. “I’m exhausted, and I didn’t get attacked like she did. Plus her wounds were clean– there would have been some residual left over if it were poison. Discoloration of the wound, discharge, a reaction from the alcohol– something.”

Anthony fell back in a sit beside Chad, “I think we’re all exhausted, but we’ll need to keep moving. We’re going to have to set camp eventually.”

“Christ, I wish we’d just slept through the day,” Chad groaned.

Anthony was sarcastic, “Why? So we could be eaten in our sleep?” He shook his head. “Look the fact is, it will get dark again. When that happens we have to move, otherwise we will be eaten. The night will be our best time.”

“Then we need to find somewhere safe, out of the way and off the ground,” Elliot said, with a glance around.

The path ahead sloped down, but the river twisted off in the opposite direction. Both paths disappeared back into canopied forest. She was at a loss, if they stayed in place too long, they risked an attack, but if they headed back into the mist now, they risked having to set camp in the open grassland.

She sighed frustration, “Set camp here. We need to rest, and this seems like the safest place we’ve come across so far. When we do leave, we’ll head back down into the mist and the trees. Two tents. Pack it in.”

Raymond and Anthony acknowledged with a nod, broke open two tents and helped the others into them. Elliot sat watch for the first two hours the others slept until Raymond woke to relieve her. She handed over the pistol Liana had given her. He ushered her into a tent. Liana lay on the floor, deep in sleep, her breath labored from pain and morphine. Elliot settled beside her, fell fast into sleep.

She was awoken by Chad four hours later, sat up with a start. His arm was now placed in a make-shift sling, made from a torn remnant of his flannel over-shirt. He put his free finger to his lips, motioned for her to follow. She grabbed Liana’s SMG, crawled out. The area had changed since she had slept; now free of mist and with a receded river while daylight waned overhead.

Chad crouched at the rock they’d taken refuge at, pointed across the river with his uninjured arm and the video-recorder in his hand. There, by the water, were a dozen, long-necked animals. They bore features of deer, save that their skin was of hard, reptilian scales, and their bodies sported thick-veined muscles. They reached up into the low trees, chewed off large sections of the needles that crunched in their triangular muzzles. The smallest ones, juveniles Elliot guessed, sprinted at trees. They leapt up, suddenly began to climb like an arborist with spiked shoes. She took the camera from Chad to zoom in on the creatures’ feet. Where a normal hoof was rounded, adapted only for running, these also had large, heavy spikes in the front, no doubt for climbing.

They watched the animals in silence for a few minutes while they finished their meals and bounced off into the forest. Elliot was elated; for once they weren’t on the menu, and it was almost worth it. She was taken by the alien beauty of the scene, her mind on the creatures’ skin.

She mused at Chad beside the rock, barely above a whisper, “Everything here seems to have evolved from reptilian ancestors, or else adapted their distinguishing features; hardened skin or scales, long bodies, jointed feet, etcetera. All of their natural defenses are reptilian too; sharpened spins, or vestigial bones, barbs– I’ve yet to see a single feathered animal.”

Chad was silent for a moment, replied thoughtfully, “You think Ray’s right?”

“You mean about the rock bridges?”

“Yeah. You think its possible?”

“I’m not a geologist,” she admitted. “But I trust Ray. If he thinks that might be it, I agree.” Chad hesitated, then, “It does seem odd though. I wouldn’t have thought any number of arches could’ve formed this.”

An idea came to her, her voice hushed, “Of course! I can’t believe I didn’t see it before!” Chad’s brow furrowed in confusion. “That’s why everything here is so radically different.”

Chad’s confusion manifested words, “Elliot, what the hell are you talking about?”

“The Single-Impact Chad, that’s what did it.”

Chad still wasn’t following, but he knew what the “Single-Impact” was. Postulated by Luis and Walter Alvarez in 1980, the Single-Impact Theory stated the last, massive extinction event was most probably caused by a hundred-and-eighty kilometer wide asteroid. After it struck the Earth, the changes to the global atmosphere would have equaled that of thousands of atomic bombs. The result was extinction of some seventy-percent of Earth’s life at the time.

Chad had only begun to piece it together, when Elliot helped him along, “The bridges form right?” She illustrated long arches with her hands, “It takes thousands, maybe millions of years of water for the valley between sides to form, leaves the arches behind. The result is two, connected edges of a mountain range that frames the valley’s ceiling– like rafters of a roof.” Her hands hands made a quick slide sideways, “Then, the water recedes. Sediment and soil blow around for eons, end up sprinkled on top of the framing. Meanwhile, the water moves inland again as the mountains begin to rise. The combination blocks off what, at the time, could have been described as horseshoe valley. Finally, the impact event occurs, and the dust and fallout settles over the extensive “framing,” and finishes the roof. Over the eons, the mountains grow, shift, over take it.”

Chad understood at last, his eyes wild, “Do you know what this means?”

Elliot’s tone matched his eyes, “This world is the direct lineage of the world before the impact event. And it’s been totally preserved.”

Krubera: Part 5

October 23, 2015October 23, 2015 ~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The Lost World

Elliot rose from her dazed, half-sleep at the incessant beep of her wrist device, programmed to alert of dawn on the surface. Across the small, LCD screen, SGSM relayed the local weather; “MORNING: SUNSHINE, AFTERNOON-NIGHT: RAIN AND THUNDER.”

She read it over twice, marveled at SGSM’s ability to reach her here, through the mile of mountains and caves above. Her minor awe gave way to a sore groan, and a stiff neck and back as she pushed herself up for the tent’s flap. Her pack scraped gravel on rock, was drug out with her other gear into a pile to break down the tent. The others awoke at the disturbance, followed suit to stow their gear, and encircle the pile of glow-wands and torches, They made plans by its eerie green light while Liana half-listened from a far, and Anthony passed out a handful of sheathed diving knives.

He affixed his knife to a leg as he explained, “The final passage could be long, end in a shaft with thousands of those creatures. We should be prepared to defend ourselves if we need to.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t, and we don’t,” Elliot said.

Though it was a discovery of epic proportions, a single species wasn’t the lost world she sought. Even if there were millions of that said, single species, hidden away in a cavern that had been lost to time, she needed more to justify the expense that had been spent.

The group hoisted up their packs, re-fixed their air-tanks to run the few, last-minute checks, and exchanged their boots for fins.

Elliot ran a double-check on everyone, with close attention to Liana’s gear, “’Gonna be okay with the weight?”

“Zelenyĭ.” Elliot’s face sketched confusion. Liana sighed, “Yes.”

Elliot stepped for the water’s edge, the others lined up beside her, “If something happens, pull the tether.” She gave the length of cord that connected them a tug, tightened the three and a half meters of line between each of them, Elliot at its lead.

She bled her air hose’s line, “Let’s do it.”

The breather’s rubber mouth-piece set into place on her mouth, and she dove with torrent of aeration around her. Her feet kicked forward until the resistance on her line slacked, then tightened four more times. They were all in the water now.

She clicked on the HID flashlight at her wrist, grabbed it up to shine it backward. One-by-one, beams flared on at her, each of the team-members illuminated by the piercing, bright light. With a thumbs up, and a quick, left-to-right flick of her light, Elliot turned away, began to swim forward.

The passage seemed endless from the start; her beam shattered the darkness until it overpowered the light, swallowed it whole. She made, slow, forward progress, the others in time with her. Their wrist lights scanned each crack, crevice, and bulge of stone twice-over to assure nothing lay in wait to ambush them. Not a single nook nor cranny of the twenty-meter deep passage escaped scrutiny.

They continued on at the slow, methodical pace for roughly twenty minutes, until Elliot’s light hit debris on the floor, forced her to pause. She angled back at the others, tread water to motion them up. Her light swung back on to floor and debris, twitched up at the ceiling. Not even Liana needed to be told what the debris meant; this was where the shaft had once ended, evidently broken open by something– most likely, an earthquake or a simple, tectonic shift. Whatever the cause, it single-handedly proved at least half of Elliot’s hypothesis. Krubera’s depths had been opened to them. Whether or not her Lost World was truly ahead, only time would tell, but at least she’d been partially right.

Elliot studied the damaged ceiling and the debris; huge chunks of rock had been dislodged, large enough that even the five of them, together underwater, could have lifted a single one. If it had taken such force to create the fracture, open the door way to what lay ahead, should it have been opened? She asked the question somewhere in the back of her mind, but had no time for its various philosophical conundrums; they were running out of air, living on borrowed time.

She motioned forward again, continued half a kilometer as the passage slowly shrank in height and width. At times it bulged wider, even deeper than before, but ever-returned to its claustrophobic narrowness. After the fifth bulge, the floor-to-ceiling distance was less than two-thirds what it had been when they’d entered it.

Just as she thought it might go on forever, Elliot’s light kissed an opening, sprinted forward into a wide, open darkness beyond. She followed after it, stopped short as a school of three-hundred fish swam darted through the light in angled paths. The rest of the team caught up to her, stopped beside her just beyond the opening.

The spectacle ahead was nearly indescribable, large bass-like fish, patterned in various hues of concentric rings, boucned the light of their torches off thick, armor-like scales. They lacked any ocular organ, but along their sides ran thick, scaled-tubing just below their dorsal fins. It seemed present everywhere on the dozens of species of fish that criss-crossed the large, open lake just beyond the reaches of her light; an extensive, over-adaptation of a surface-fish’s lateral line. She caught trout-like bodies with dorsals that sported wide, translucent webs between sharp, spear-like spines. Other, frying-pan shaped, round-fish bore tails and anal-fins that shared the spiny protrusions, and long, stream-lined shapes with thickened pectoral and pelvic fins. The latter suggested an evolution meant to increase speed and maneuverability without hindered defense.

One of the stream-lined schools wandered too close, caught sight of her small movements to stay steady beneath the water, and shot off with frightening speed into the darkness behind it. She smiled, suppressed giddy glee; before, she’d been apprehensive of admitting the inevitable, but now she wanted to scream it from the highest mountains– she had found the lost world!

For more than seven hundred years, man had speculated on its existence. Decades of contemporary media frenzy made the phrase an overt selling point for books, movies, and television shows, its original idea diluted beyond recognition. The lost world had become anything hidden beneath a rock, under a canopied jungle, or tucked away just out of view. But this world was different, a picture of evolution in action to surpass any they knew of.

While many of her colleagues no longer subscribed to the theory, preferred the watered-down Hollywood versions, Elliot had sought the glory and splendor of its pure form. The select few that shared her version said that it was trapped somewhere in a jungle, or hidden within an unexplored ocean, or ancient tundra. Elliot said caves, and now she was right.

A strange feeling rippled through her; they needed to continue, but…. Something stopped her train of thought. Light bounced and flitted around her, the tether tugged back, her body went with it, reeled in toward the others.

A massive silhouette thrashed left-to-right just out of range of the group’s lights. The ripple she had been small school of eel-like fish that fled from the silhouette. They cut through the water like snakes with fins, swarmed into the tunnel with a powerful wake. Elliot’s attention was fixed to the mass in the shadows; It swam like a shark, undulated in circles that drew it closer, but was shaped like a crocodile in profile. The long, blunt figure was thin from top to bottom, roughly eight-meters from head to tail. Its jaws and teeth would be proportional in size.

Elliot’s heart stopped. They needed a way out of the water, had no idea what lay ahead, and knew there was nowhere to run to behind. Only one hope for escaped was open; a dim-light that glinted dully of the surface far forward and above the canopied passage that they hid in. Elliot’s muscles were frozen, petrified. They would have to cross open-water before they could reach it– and it might not even help if it wasn’t the surface.

Her body shook as she tread around slowly, careful not to create more of a disturbance than necessary. Her hands sank in front of her, made a slow circle. The four understood, inched toward her to form a large circle. Each person now had a view behind and beside the next. They had no choice by to group up, move as one entity in the hopes that the predator would pass by such a large, illusory animal, or avoid it entirely. Their evasion tactic was the as that of schooling fish, but could it work in a world where fish had evolved differently? There was only one way to know.

They kept ranks, closed the small gaps that formed around them, schooled forward languidly. Their breaths quickened collectively, the aerators bubbled faster. The predator turned for them. Elliot drew a sharp inhale from her mouthpiece, forced back a stuttered cry. It closed the distance to the edge of her torch’s light, appeared in full-view.

Its crocodile-shaped head gave way to a slender, shark-like body absent of a dorsal fin that cut a swath through the water. Its pectoral fins left small wakes behind it with sharp spines, swept back to a massive tail that propelled it forward with sideways pumps. The body gleamed as the light caressed it, rubbery and with more, barbed spines that stuck out every which way, and were clustered around the cranial hump near its crown.

Elliot’s hand went for her knife, unsheathed it as they schooled forward, angled for the surface.

The predator’s tail snapped sideways. It shot through the water with unnatural speed. The group split down the middle, missed it by a hair’s breadth. It followed through, overshot by a meter to come about at them. The group re-formed behind Elliot with Anthony at the lead; its maneuvers were slow, but its charge was lightning fast.

Anthony back them up and across the open-water. His aerator belched with terrifed breaths that made massive plumes of bubbles every few seconds. Another charge came. They split, let it follow through, regrouped faster. Elliot returned to the lead. The creature lumbered in a turn, readied to charge a third time.

Elliot was too slow. The others split, but her trembling arm jumbled a move. She was half way in the path of the thing. A forceful tug on the rope jerked her body back fast, created a strong wake in the water, alerted the beast of their tactic. It followed through a final time to come about, but did not charge. Instead, its fins and tail ceased altogether.

No one dared move, the light from the torches illuminated the terror in one another’s faces as they sank back toward the bottom. The creature descended with them, neared the bottom.

Something rocketed between Chad’s legs, startled him. It forced a shutter through the water. The predator was on him with a dart. Chad dove away, recoiled when his line pulled taught. The broke ranks, cut their lines to swim off as fast as possible. Elliot swam backwards, let the others pass, waited for the creature to round on her.

A might pump its tail force it ’round, another rocketed it towards Elliot. In one motion she balled up and kicked out of its path. It wasn’t enough. Her velocity was too low. One of the jaw’s barbed spines snagged her diving fin. The force of the creatures speed nearly pulled her leg free. It remained intact, drug her along behind it. She bit hard on the mouth-piece, nearly punctured the rubber.

The predator slowed, suddenly sensed her weight. It thrashed, bucked her like a rag-doll. She dropped the torch. Its beam fell to the floor, her eyes largely useless without it. Her hands were rigid, tense. Her arms fought the thrashes for her knife, pulled it free with all of her might.

The dim light from the others’ torches glided up, away, their positioned fixed as it flung back and forth in her goggles. She felt sick, ready to vomit, grit her teeth against the rubber. Her body hunched in a ball to grasp her legs.

The creature began to roll, upend itself to dislodge her. The knife slipped beneath the strap on the fin. With a quick flop, the creature righted itself. The strap slid away. She swore silently, foght for another grip. The predator rolled in the other direction this time, pulled her toward its back and the multitude of barbed spines. Her grip tightened on the knife. It slipped under to sever the strap just as the creature flopped back again. One of its upper-jaw barbs caught her arm with the motion. She screamed through the water. The breather fell free.

Tears formed beneath her goggles. Her arm made angry, erratic flails, hacked at the creature’s face with desperate violence. The knife plunged above the mouth. It snapped, sprinted forward, the knife drug back by the force. It twisted and writhed its way forward, Elliot out of air. The knife came free, her arm still caught, almost shredded to pieces by the flails.

The knife plunged a final time, met the un-armored hump of spines behind the head, sank into flesh softness. The beast struggled harder, Elliot near unconsciousness, ready to drown. A final burst of adrenaline compelled her into furious rage as she pulled the knife out, stabbed it back into the hump a dozen times. It twisted back and forth with a final pierce, forced itself deeper.

The creature’s movements suddenly ceased, and it began to sink, pull her down. Green-tinted blood flowed out from the creatures brain. She hacked at the spine in her arm, her vision narrow and fading. Red mixed with green in the darkness as she hacked off the barb, tore it from her arm. Her hands felt for her breather, her chest heaved. It graced her lips with a welcome breath of oxygen that re-focused her eyes enough to retrieve her light.

She rocketed up and away, glanced back at the trail of blood that leaked from her arm, saw the predator’s body swarmed by smaller scavengers. The open water ahead narrowed quickly to a small passageway, grew shallower. A shock-wave of bubbles appeared as something dove into the water. She shined her light her ahead, her knife ready. A body kicked toward her, accompanied by Raymond’s face. She exhaled, relief, followed him from the water, and burst through the surface at a small rock ledge.

She spit the breather free, coughed and choked for air. Hands grasped and worked to pull her onto the ledge, turn off her air-tank, pull it free form her back. Her eyes clenched shut from pain as Chad began disinfected and bandaged the wound. Her screams and cries were quieted by gritted teeth and the terror of what the might bring. When her eyes finally opened, minutes later, what filled their vision was nothing less than spectacular.

Elliot was awe-inspired. Her mind raced at the implications while her adrenaline flowed with the rush of pain and the glory of their discovery. The rock ledge was roughly a stone beach beside a jungle treeline of palms, ferns, and other thick foliage in a semi-darkness. All around the trees were composed of thick iron-hued bark, that wrapped up the trunks like coils. But at their tops, were leaves with a marvelous, chemical-luminescence that glowed green to taint the area with an eerie light.

Elliot looked closer, saw that everything green glowed, some more brilliant than others. As she marveled at the wonder and eerie beauty, the device at her wrist vibrated. SGSM updated her screen with a scrawl of blocky text; “SGSM READS EARTHQUAKE MAGNITUDE 8.7: EURASIAN-ARABIAN PLATE: SHOCKWAVE ETA; 15-MINUTES TO CURRENT LAT-LONG: ADVISE APPROPRIATE MEASURES.”

Elliot read the update twice; an eight-point-seven was unheard of for the Eurasian-Arabian fault. While the plates had collided more often lately, this would be the largest quake there since SGSM was launched. Elliot found once more questioned what she’d gotten into, informed the team.

“At this depth it’s going to be a hell of a shake,” Anthony said, nerve-wracked from the attack.

“Just keeps getting better doesn’t it?” Chad asked, sarcastic and furious.

Anthony grimaced, “We’re here Ellie. We found it. What’s the next move?”

Elliot looked them over, surveyed her bandaged arm. They were all exhausted, their faces haggard, tired. There was little time before the shock wave would hit, and only two options; the jungle, or a path of tall grasses far to the right, where the tree-line ended. The jungle’s glow menaced her away form it. Jungles had a way of getting people killed easily, quickly, when they weren’t paying attention. Sprinting into it to find cover wouldn’t help. With her vision adjusted to the low-light, she judged it was a half a kilometer to the end of the tree-line that was roughly three to four kilometers wide.

She dropped her pack, removed her fin, “Boots on.” They followed. Elliot continued as she laced and tied her boots, “It’s a half-kilo to the plain– what we’ll call east for now. If we hurry we might it away from the water before the shock-wave hits. Maybe find a safe-spot to brace ourselves in it. Either way, we need to move.”

They finished changing, bolted for the jungle’s edge. The eighteen kilograms of weight at their backs made walks a chore. This was a nightmare. They ran for ten whole minutes without slowing. Their chests heaved with sharp, painful breaths, eyes darted sickeningly for stable ground. Elliot suddenly questioned if anywhere down here was safe. They were sprinting through something that shouldn’t exist, a hollowed-out mountain, where any shock-wave could knock loose tons of limestone from the ceiling. From what Elliot could tell, it was at least two kilometers high, any debris that might hit them….

She didn’t want to think about it, pushed her aching limbs for the edge of the trees ahead. A glance at her wrist said they had less than five minutes, and were only slowing. She felt each weighted step tear at her calves, the weight on her back excruciating. Liana was far at the back, the most encumbered, with almost forty kilos, but Elliot was afraid to look back, check on her.

The first region of plains appeared within reach. Knee-high, wide bladed, grasses imbued with a small glow lit a gentle slope upwards to a hill with sparse, deciduous trees atop it. Elliot used the last of her strength to cut a path through the grasses. They felt wrong against her suit, felt thistle-like, with small punctures, as though it tried to grab hold of her. She slowed further, could hear Raymond’s heavy breaths behind her.

The incline began, steeper than she’d anticipated. A foot misstepped. She stumbled. Raymond caught her mid-stride, drug her up. She scrambled, struggled to regain her balance as he sprinted past, pulled her forward. Raymond let go as she recovered, took the lead. Anthony passed her first, Chad on his heels with terror etched into his face. Liana caught up, matched her pace as she fought her way up the hill. Liana was red-faced, her teeth grit and face serpentine as though madness had seeped in.

They barreled up the hill together, reached the top with the last of their strength and fell into the cover of a large, twisted tree. Its limbs large enough to stand on. Not a moment later, the ground began to shake. They braced themselves against the shock-wave that rocked the ground beneath them with violent heaves. Branches cracked and split in their ears, their eyes clenched shut.

Elliot’s wounded arm shook from agony as she strained to keep herself up. Loud debris hit plummeted to the ground somewhere near the jungle. The ground at one edge of the hill ripped, tore free to heave a large chunk upward and create a plateau. The quake climaxed in a violent, stuttered tremble, that shook their bones and snapped tree-roots with loud cracks of wood.

The last of it drifted off as though it were a massive box-truck that passed by, rumbled the roads it traversed. The sounds and shakes drifted off, dissipated. The five fell to the ground, exhausted. Elliot’s arm bled through its bandage. She sank against the tree, shook from the pain. Liana passed a bottle of water around as Chad re-bandaged her wound.

Exhausted, bloodied, and bruised, Elliot surveyed the plains from the edge of the new plateau. Liana appeared beside her over the scent of MREs warmed on small hotplate. Elliot had redressed in her hiking clothes, her wet suit beneath them before taking in the view. An unsettling beauty in this became more evident as she looked out.

This was a different world, lost millions of years ago, walled up and morphed by natural forces since the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Drop-by-drop it seeped back into the other world, the two so radically different they were incompatible. Elliot felt like an alien in this place, physically stressed and stunted by a noon-time darkness. Even so, the sun’s absence to have had little impact on the flora’s prolific abundance. The world must have compensated the sun’s loss with some yet, undiscovered force, but for now it was impossible to say what that was.

Elliot’s mind drifted, her eyes plotted the horizon. She re-estimated the ceiling between twelve and sixteen kilometers high; it accounted for the cave’s entrance, and more than part of the Gagrinsky range. They must have moved further both downward and laterally than she’d realized.

Despite a shroud of mist-like vapor that clung to every inch of the air ahead, four kilometers or more to the north, a small range of jagged rocks rose in a wide berth. The micro-mountains appeared as massive stalagmites accumulated from eons of calcium runoff from the sky above. Between the plateau and mountains, the plains were dotted with rivers like great, veinous tendrils that transferred water from lakes to Eastward beaches like the one they’d emerged on. By the looks of it, the whole lost world was simply a peninsula.

Indeed, the jungle to their west was roughly the five kilometers wide from this angle, a near square when Elliot considered the width they’d seen then run. Beneath the plateau, and East through the sprawl of plains and mist, more, wooded plateaus covered in coniferous trees rose randomly with hazy glows and silhouettes. The trees seemed larger, on the realm of eight or ten times their surface counterparts.

Beside her, Liana sat silently to stare out on the world they’d found. The plateau rose high enough to give them a downward view on the darkened valley they’d come from. The grasses’ effervescent green, provided scarce light that emanated through it with just enough light to see the trampled path they’d made.

Elliot’s eyes were fixed on the mountains and a river that snaked through the plains, into and behind the range. Thin clouds drifted over their peaks to obscure them, as Elliot wondered where the air might have come from. Evidently the trees, or something else, still exhaled oxygen, but it was certainly of a different consistency than their surface counterparts.

It occurred to her now, how heavy and thick the air felt. The CO2 content would have to be higher here, she postulated, due to the creatures’ divergent evolutionary lineage. It gave some time-frame to when the two world split, diverged on their separate paths. It had to have been sometime in the Jurassic or Cretaceous, when the oxygen content and composition was most unlike now, but still enough to allow for respiration. That put the divergence somewhere between two-hundred and sixty-odd million years ago; about the time that conifers ruled the earth, to roughly the last of the dinosaurs going extinct.

The last hundred-million years had altered the earth so greatly, that Elliot found herself both terrified and intrigued at what might lay, unseen, in the distant mists. The water that spilled into the Black Sea was now an exchange of both ecosystems, but even so, nothing had been large enough to suggest even half the divergence they’d already seen. More importantly, the risk of contamination to both words had increased dramatically simply from the quakes. Whatever was here could be in danger of disappearing if the right fish, crustaceans, or even microbes transferred from the Black Sea to the water here. Their own presence alone could be enough to destroy nature’s delicate balance here, but she could think of no other way to protect it but to leave.

Her curiosity wouldn’t let her leave though. She thirsted to understand, discover everything here. It was all so foreign that an internal ecstasy had flooded her veins, while the rest of her fought to keep focused on survival. In truth, they were trespassing in this place, and all of them knew it. If they stayed too long, it would inevitably kill them. And yet, she couldn’t leave– not until she got what she came for, or at the very least, something to return with to prove its existence.

Elliot buried her thoughts, turned her eyes from the eerie beauty around her, to address Liana, “How’s your back?”

She hid her fatigue well, “No worse for wear.”

Elliot sighed, “I can’t believe we found it. It seems so… surreal.”

“I can believe we found it,” Liana admitted. Her voice turned grave, her eyes narrow, “but I am not certain it will allow us to leave.”

Elliot’s eyes widened with alarm, “What? What makes you say that?”

Liana spoke stoically, she greeted her own death, “You said it yourself; this place has been undisturbed for millions of years. Evolution has been allowed to adapt unabated by a human presence. Everything here is a possible danger. There is no co-habitation of man. No degradation of nature at the hands of Humanity. It does not fear us. We are food, nothing else. In our world, we rule. We control nature to suit ourselves. If we have illness from plants, we eradicate the plants or artificially mutate ourselves so that they are no longer a concern. We control our world. But this world–” She hesitated with a distant look through the plains. “This world controls its inhabitants. These two methods of existence are mutually exclusive. Either we won’t survive, or it won’t. It is the nature of the universe to be chaotic and disordered. That pits the odds against us.”

Elliot’s chest was stabbed form the silence after her profound words. Her mind drifted to the strange creature at their cavern campsite. It was only then that she realized how eerily silent the valley was. Other than a breeze that swayed the grasses of the plains, there was no wind. Its silent stillness contradicted the most-accepted theories of Jurassic and Cretaceous evolution. Most stated that animal life, thought to have gone extinct, gradually evolved into avian creatures. She expected to find flocks of birds that screeched endlessly, glided through the air or fluttered between the treetops. But she saw none, not even the creature they’d found in the cavern.

Concern bubbled in her, popped by Anthony’s voice that rippled her chest, “Elliot?”

“Huh?”

He shot her a look, “You alright?”

“Yeah. Just… thinking. What’s up?”

He nodded slowly, skeptically, stepped up beside her, “I was wondering what you thought of filming things. This’d be a good place to start, right?”

Her mind returned to the task at-hand; to document their discoveries, retrieve samples for John and the Museum. She turned away from the plateau’s edge and Liana, “Yes, it would.”

Liana seemed to consider something, then followed her Anthony toward the trees where Raymond and Chad had sat to eat. When Elliot was sure they were ready, she began, “We need samples from everything here; grass, soil, trees, rocks– anything that visibly differs from a previous sample, needs to be re-sampled. In the mean time, someone needs run the camera. We have enough battery and video for forty-eight hours. It’s important we take back as much evidence as possible, otherwise the museum may not organize a second expedition.” They nodded in affirmation. She continued, “If we’re able to get near any Fauna that can be filmed, we need to focus on showing a clear, evolutionary difference form anything we’ve seen before. Since everything here seems radically different than surface life, it shouldn’t be much of a problem, but it goes without saying.”

She looked at the team’s tired faces, lit and shadowed by the luminescent patchwork of bark, grass, and amorphous leaves around them. She knew they were exhausted, but in just two days they were scheduled for a return flight from Abkhazia, and needed to move as fast as possible.

“Way I see it, there’s five main sections to the area: The jungle, water, plains, forest and mountains,” Elliot said as she turned away from the group, gestured outward. “We need as many samples as possible from each area. We’ll save the jungle for last, hit it on our way out. Tony, where’s your book?”

He handed over his sketch-book. She drew up a crude map of landmarks with an X for their position. She set a compass rose on the map, placed the jungle at the west, the mountains to the northwest, and the forested plateau to the east and south-east. The water south encompassed most of the, with a circle and the word “passage” scrawled near the entrance they’d found. She etched out a route, prepared to alter the route in time. It stretched forward into the plains, curved with them to the mountains, and down to the jungle and water.

She passed it off to the others, “We’ll start moving in twenty minutes. Until then, I need two people taking samples from here, and someone getting as much footage as possible from this vantage point. If we find a suitable place along the trail, we’ll set camp. Chad, cam duty; Tony and Ray, samples.” They set to work as she looked to Liana, “I need to see your bag.”

She nodded, dropped her pack to remove the components of several weapons. In the space of five minutes, she assembled three firearms of various sizes beside boxes of ammunition of their calibers.

“Jesus,” Elliot remarked. “Were you expecting an army?”

Liana laughed, “This is standard for any expedition I partake in. Outfitting for war is much heavier.”

“Speaking of which–”

“There is no worry,” she interrupted. “It’s eighteen kilos plus the eighteen you provided. I was trained to carry fifty-five on a light day. I’m fine.”

“This is only eighteen kilos?” Elliot asked, surprised at the arsenal before her.

A pistol laid beside a larger, pistol-like weapon, and beneath a long, menacing rifle. Beside them were small, white, clay-like blocks.

Liana explained, “These are super-lightweight, special law enforcement weapons. The rifle is the heaviest at three kilograms, the SMG at one and a half, and the pistol at one and a third. I brought five magazines each for the rifle and SMG, seven for the pistol. Most of the weight comes from the magazines and ammunition; one hundred rounds for the first two, and ninety-four for the pistol.”

“That’s a lot of ammo.”

Elliot suddenly thought of her fight with the predator, wondered what it would to take down a land predator. She had gotten lucky during the attack. Large land-predators would be much more difficult. She gave an unconscious look at the bandage Chad had affixed as Liana stole her gaze.

“It is not that much. There is no doubt we could use it all.”

“Is this why they sent you? So they could send military armaments to protect us?”

“Not exactly,” Liana admitted uneasily. “Georgian soldiers use Russian hardware. This is German.”

“German?”

“These are Heckler and Koch weapons,” she pointed to each weapon in turn. “The rifle is an S-L-eight, the SMG an M-P-seven, and the pistol an M-K-twenty three. They’re German-made for civilian agencies, collectors, and stockpiles– I believe your own military even uses them– Unfortunately, they are also very illegal right now.”

Elliot suddenly remembered a news article she’d read before she’d left for Abkhazia. Illegal weapons had turned up in militant hands near the Georgian borders. A silent question suddenly rested on her lips, Liana sensed her apprehension.

“I see you have heard something of these weapons, no?” Elliot winced. Liana explained quietly, “Yes, these are militant weapons. Understand this though; the Georgian government sent me, but did not outfit me. I was not walking into the unknown unarmed. As such, I choose the best of what was available to me.”

The words did little to ease her tension at their illegality. If, for some reason, these weapons were connected to her team, they could face a serious issue upon exiting the caves. She stilled a rapid heart-beat; there were more important considerations at hand.

She looked to the white blocks, “So what’s this?”

“Composition-Four.”

“Which is?”

“Explosive ordinance,” Liana replied. “Highly-potent in any quantity. I don’t intend to use it, but it could be useful.”

Elliot’s face filled with concern, “Is it dangerous?”

“Not unless it is armed,” Liana reassured her.

Elliot returned her attention to the weapons, “Will all this do the job?”

“Without a doubt,” Liana replied, her face fixed, certain.

“Give me the pistol,” Elliot said. Liana hesitated, raised an eyebrow. Elliot was instantly defensive, “I’m not walking away unprotected if I have a choice.”

She reluctantly passed Elliot a holster, “Clip it to your belt.” She pointed to a the side of the pistol, flicked it back and forth in its grooved housing. “Safety on while it’s holstered or not in use… Safety off otherwise. Understood?”

Elliot nodded. Liana had been right, the weapon was light in her hands, even lighter as it slid into the holster. She snapped the holster shut, took the magazines from Liana, slipped in them in the pockets of her pack. Liana slung the other two weapons over her shoulder along with her pack.

Chad started for them, “Tapes done, Ellie. Got as much as I–”

A bright light suddenly flared ahead of them. It began to crawl upward along the impossibly distant walls of the cavern, sprinted along to its high ceiling to shower light down on them. It was a fiery, porous sunlight that overtook the brilliance of the chemical luminescence through-out the cavern. As it climaxed in bright haze, the green glow dissolved away and the haze thickened.

Chad fumbled with the camera, pointed it at the ceiling, his voice airy with delight, “Looks like it’s finally morning here in the lost world.”