Cavern of the damned, p.1
Cavern Of The Damned, page 1
Cavern of the Damned
Russell James
Copyright 2017 by Russell James
www.severedpress.com
Dedication
For Christy,
I promise to only take you into a cave through fiction.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter One
Fear rippled through the herd like a shockwave.
Almost as one, over a hundred elk snorted a warning into the night air. A malevolent presence closed in. They’d felt the same way before, when the scent of the wolf pack or the tread of a cougar put them all on high alert. But this unfamiliar sensation inspired a more skittish dread. Whatever approached they could feel more than smell, sense more than hear.
The Montana valley opened to the west, but this predator stalked them from that direction, cutting off the easy escape. The herd began a stuttering trot east with the clomp of hundreds of heavy hooves. Males moved to the herd’s edge and nudged females and calves to the center.
The danger drew closer. The sensation of being watched, of being stalked grew stronger. Bulls snorted and swept the air with their antlers. Something from deep in the species’ past warned them of an attack from the air.
Terror rose in sync with the growing sensation of danger. The herd broke into a sprint. The thunder of hooves and the thump of colliding bodies echoed in the narrowing valley. The ground rose. Branches snapped as the herd’s outer members crashed through the enveloping forest.
A chorus of tiny clicks filled the air from all sides, randomly jumbled together, but each individually uniform. They shot back and forth across the herd, right to left, front to back, like spiders spinning a web in unison.
In the center, a calf stumbled to the ground. Others did not see it fall, could not have stopped if they had. Shoulder-to-shoulder, none could move in any direction but blindly forward, controlled by the collective will of the terrified herd.
The calf squealed from near misses and grazing strikes as hundreds of hooves rained down all around it. One hoof struck bone and the calf’s foreleg shattered. It let loose a high-pitched wail.
The herd didn’t stop. The brown furry mass charged forward. The sound of thudding hooves and snapping branches retreated and left silence in its place. The calf faced the predator alone.
The air above filled with the sound of flapping leather.
With wide, terrified eyes the calf searched the sky for the death that it sensed stalked it. Black fluttered against black, shadows swirled around shadows. Beating wings churned the air into a foul eddy of wet fur and urine.
Then they swarmed.
A near solid mass of black bats struck the calf from all angles. Their great weight pinned it to the ground. Sharp white teeth flashed in the darkness and plunged into its hide. The calf cried out from pain, and fear, and abandonment.
The bats tore away great strips of flesh, like stripping bark from a tree. It cried out with one last gurgling scream, and collapsed. The bats responded with a frenzy of shearing skin and beating wings.
Then as a single flight, they took to the air. Bats clamped slices of blood-soaked flesh in mouths and claws. The colony banked as one and headed east.
By dawn, scavengers had found the remains. Birds, insects, and opportunistic coyotes had started the process of erasing the last remnants of the calf from existence. Days later, a hiker wandered through this desolate spot in Montana, and stepped right over the spot where the calf had breathed its last. The hiker had no inkling of the killing that had taken place.
And as they had for so long, the killers remained undiscovered.
Chapter Two
Dr. Grant Coleman removed the lock and threw the storage unit’s rollup door skyward. It slammed into place overhead. He sighed, pushed his glasses back up on his nose, and flipped the light switch. A single long fluorescent fixture flickered awake and illuminated the sum of his life’s work.
Crates filled the left side of the unit, stacked nearly to the ceiling. The rest of the world might have gone digital, but for Grant, the science of paleontology remained old school. As far as he was concerned, all the high-definition scanning and sonic mapping in the world could never deliver the accuracy, or intimacy, of excavating a fossil by hand. Inside each of these crates lay a block of stone he’d chipped from some former lake bed or inland sea. And within each block of stone, he hoped, a fossil lay secreted, awaiting discovery. The magic of being the first set of human eyes to ever see something never faded.
Copier paper boxes of varying vintages filled the room’s other half, each stuffed full of his records. Faded maps of past digs, hand-written notes caked with mud, pencil-sketch drawings. Most of those imagined the extinct creatures he’d excavated. The plan this year had been to take his overdue sabbatical, and spend every day in his lab with a dental pick and a paintbrush, resurrecting monsters back into the light of day.
But then Anderson College cut the paleontology department budget. Not cut it back, but cut it off. Sports Medicine better dovetailed with the Board’s plan to build the school a powerhouse football team. So contractors turned Grants’ lab into a recuperative sauna, and he and his “boxes of rocks” became persona non grata. He’d packed up his desk and notes, and the school let him keep all his fossil finds, as long as he footed the bill to get them off campus.
He sighed and leaned against a crate in the storage unit. Short, balding and a bit paunchy, he and his thick, inexpensive glasses weren’t going to make a great first impression in the dozens of interviews he’d have to do to land his next teaching job.
He perused this meager culmination of his life’s endeavors, and wondered where it would all go next. He was three months behind on the rent on this space. Hell, he was at least three months behind on paying for damn near everything. A professor’s salary didn’t go far, but it sure went farther than no salary at all.
His last resort reared its hideous head again. Sell some of his finds. He’d dismissed the idea for months, and that had been months too long. He looked past the crates tied to his current research to a smaller one on the top of one stack. He climbed up and pulled the box down. Back on the ground, he pried off the lid with a screwdriver.
Inside laid two trilobites, ubiquitous hard-shelled creatures that ruled the seas 520 million years ago. Not the focus of his research, but they were in such good condition, he’d spent hours prepping them anyway. Worth something, but not a lot.
His eyes stopped at a real treasure. From beside the trilobites he drew a tooth the size of a Bowie knife. It had once belonged to a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Now that would be worth a week full of groceries.
He had to sell something that used to chew sauropods so he could chew hamburger. What a circle of life that was to think about.
“Are you Dr. Coleman?”
Grant turned around, startled at the sudden break in the silence. A thin man in faded jeans and an untucked button-down shirt stood just outside the storage unit. Grant was on the short side, but this guy would have towered over him even if he’d been average height. Grant guessed him at 6’5”. The visitor had a thin, angular face framed by longish dark hair and a beard.
“Are you a debt collector?” Grant said.
“Ha, ha. No way.” He extended a fist for a bump. “Frazier Leigh. I’m a producer/director.”
Grant put down the box and awkwardly bumped Frazier’s fist. “And what can I do for you?”
“Dude, it’s way the opposite. It’s about me going to do something for you. Hire you.”
While there was an initial elation at the idea of a paycheck, Grant’s natural inclination to look a gift horse in the mouth stepped in and crushed the emotion. “Hire me for what?”
Frazier sat on the corner of one of the crates. “You’re majorly into the era of enormous mammals.”
“We don’t really call the Late Pleistocene Era that.”
“Whatever. But that’s what it was. Sabre-tooth cats, wooly mammoths, giant sloths. Everything way bigger than today’s versions.”
It irked him to have his life’s passion boiled down to the level of a kid’s cartoon. “Your point?”
“You’re preaching that there are other extinct species yet to be discovered. A lot of them.”
“Of course. Fossils are rare finds.”
“But I read your stuff. Actually cool once I got past the science mumbo-jumbo. Giant mole rats. Squirrels the size of trash cans. You say that every niche filled by something now was also filled by something back then. Only that something was mucho bigger.”
“No one’s certain why megafauna took over the
“How about a bat?”
Grant gave it some thought. “It would be possible, but the muscles to get the thing off the ground would be proportionally larger than a smaller, more aerodynamic bat.”
“Maybe something like this?”
Frazier pulled a few photos from inside his suit coat pocket and handed them to Grant. In them, lichen and dirt had been scrubbed away from grey stone to expose primitive art. The shallow carvings depicted a giant bat in battle with spear-carrying stick figures. Another showed a crude rendition of a human skull. Grant’s era of study overlapped the advent of man, and he’d absorbed some considerable expertise in the early Neolithic Period. He’d spent a lot of time poring over prehistoric artwork for confirmation of man interacting with megafauna. He could separate fakes from the authentic. These looked genuine.
“Where were these taken?” Grant asked.
“In the boonies near Yellowstone National Park.”
“Assuming these are authentic—”
“Oh, they are.”
“Assuming that, you need an anthropologist. I’m not the right expert to look for more carvings.”
“No, but you’re the expert to look for what’s behind the carvings.” Frazier pulled out a picture of a pine-forested hillside. Smaller trees and bushes grew from a triangular pile of boulders in the center of the shot. “The artwork surrounds this mound of rocks. Ground penetrating radar showed a cavern on the other side. I think that thousands of years ago, a tribe of dudes in loincloths sealed something inside that cave, and then chiseled warnings into the rock for the rest of the world to leave it be.”
Years in the field had made Grant an expert in analyzing terrain clues to divine its history. The boulders and stone at the hillside’s base had fallen from the weathered outcrop above. But there were no similar debris piles elsewhere. And the rocks had too pyramidal a pattern to have randomly ended up in that formation.
“I’m doing a documentary,” Frazier said. “Recording the discovery of whatever remains we find in that cave. I need an expert to verify that they’re no hoax. That expert could be you.”
Grant’s thoughts careened out of control. Being front and center in a documentary discovering a new extinct species would be a career maker. He’d get the right to name it, could publish papers, perhaps command national media attention. Forget crawling back to Anderson College. He’d have the Ivy League courting him.
“Sign on for the expedition and I’ll cut you a check for a thousand dollars right now,” Frazier said. “At the end of the shoot, I’ll wire the bank of your choice the rest.” He quoted a payment of twice Grant’s former annual salary.
A thousand dollars would get him out of the hole immediately. A skillful negotiator would have kept his cool, not betrayed his combination of relief and enthusiasm. Grant couldn’t help but smile.
“Where do I sign and when do we leave?”
Frazier extracted a folded sheet of paper from his coat pocket. “You sign here, and I pick you up at the Bozeman, Montana airport the day after tomorrow.”
With his apartment pantry empty, sooner was certainly better. He studied the photo of the sealed cave and imagined what he’d discover on the other side.
“Got a pen?” Grant asked.
Chapter Three
Less than forty-eight hours after Frazier Leigh’s invitation to adventure, Grant’s prop-driven commuter plane touched down at the tiny airport in Bozeman, Montana. The captain had apologized that the terminal’s jet way didn’t lower enough for this small a plane, so the aircraft had stopped on the parking apron and the passengers exited the old-fashioned way, on a set of rollup steps.
His first impression was that indeed this was Big Sky Country. The sun burned low in the west, but that didn’t diminish the dazzling blue, broken only by a smattering of cumulus clouds. It might have just been his imagination, but there seemed to be a crispness to the air that matched its clarity.
Grant had dressed for the dig, in convertible khaki cargo shorts and his wide brimmed hat. But the flight out of Salt Lake had been delayed over two hours and he doubted he’d get any meaningful work done today unless the cave site was within the Bozeman city limits.
He followed the passengers into the terminal to baggage claim. His bag stood out among all the others circling on the baggage carousel, much larger and much more battered. He leaned in as it approached, grabbed it with both hands and heaved it to the floor. His tools of the trade clanked together inside. He’d assumed from Frazier’s minimal understanding of anything scientific that he’d made no preparations for any professional recovery of any fossils they found. He actually looked forward to providing a little education to Frazier and his crew on proper paleontology, along with the viewers at home when the film debuted.
Just outside the security line, he spotted Frazier Leigh, wearing what looked like a black wool poncho over a T-shirt and faded jeans. A red and black checked bandana covered his head. He looked anxious as he waved Grant over.
“Let’s go! The crew is waiting.”
Frazier whirled and went for the door. Grant jogged after him as fast as pulling his oversized suitcase would allow.
A white, windowless van with a rental firm logo and a Los Angeles phone number on the door waited at the curb. A small orange U-Haul trailer hung clamped to its trailer hitch. Frazier rolled open the side door for Grant and then rushed around to the driver’s side.
An earthy mixture of stale perspiration and greasy fast food rolled out of the van’s open door. There were no seats and the floor and walls were bare steel, the white paint scratched and gouged from years of rough use. Black boxes of filmmaking gear filled the rear of the van. Two men sat across from each other on rolled up sleeping mats. One had short-cropped hair and the toned body of a fitness buff compressed into a Guns and Roses T-shirt a size too small. The other was a stout guy with unkempt curly black hair and glasses with thick black frames.
“Hey there,” Grant said. He wrenched his bag up and into the van.
“’Sup,” Guns and Roses said with a flick of his index finger. His eyes were red and rheumy.
The other guy gave Grant a nod from over his shoulder and went back to staring at his scuffed Nikes. Grant climbed in and rolled shut the door.
“This is Doctor Grant Coleman,” Frazier said from the driver’s seat.
“Ooh, Doctor,” Guns and Roses said. He steepled his fingers and nodded at Grant in hammy reverence.
“The sarcastic one there is Willie Jacobs, our cameraman. The other is Gil Bateman, sound and special effects.”
Grant wondered what special effects a documentary would need.
“This bloody air is so dry!” a British female voice said from the passenger seat.
Grant turned to see a willowy platinum blonde with outsized fake breasts. She grimaced with blinding white teeth. With a squirt of moisturizer, she wrung her hands together. “Do get the air back on.”
“Phoebe here’s the onscreen talent,” Frazier said. “Have a seat, Doc. We need to roll if we’re going to get to the site before dark.”
Grant knelt between the front seats. Frazier stomped the gas and the van lurched into the traffic exiting the tiny airport.
“I thought we were shooting a documentary,” Grant said as he hung onto the back of the seats for balance.
Behind him, Willie stifled a laugh.
“Yeah,” Frazier said. “Well, I had to morph the concept to sell the project to backers.”
It seemed unlikely, at the best, that could have happened in the short time since Grant signed his contract.
“So we are going with reality show,” Frazier said. “Phoebe uncovering the tomb of the unknown creature. Definitely higher ratings in every key demo with that.”
“This wasn’t what I signed up for,” Grant said.
“Oh yes it was. ‘Video production’ was what you signed a contract for. And that’s what we’re doing.”
“What are your qualifications for a paleontology dig?” Grant asked Phoebe.
She stared him dead in the eyes with a look of utter boredom. Then she let out a high-pitched, blood-curdling scream. Grant flinched, startled. Phoebe stopped and went back to looking bored.
