Excavation

“Maybe the air is going bad,” Norman said with a worried expression on his haggard face.

“Don’t be a fool,” Ralph snapped. “The air would have been worse when we were deeper.”

“Not necessarily,” Maggie said. Her eyes had narrowed suspiciously, squinting at the darkness beyond the light. “Not if there was a source giving off the noxious fumes.”

Ralph still scowled, clearly tired and irritated. “What do you mean?”

Instead of answering, Maggie turned to Sam. “All those tarantulas. From the look of them, they were well fed. What do the feckin’ things eat down here?”

Sam shook his head. He had no answer.

“Oh God!” This came from Norman, who had taken the lead with the flashlight. The gold path led over a short rise into a neighboring cavern. From the echo of his exclamation, the chamber was large.

The others hurried to join him.

Maggie stared at the scene ahead, holding a hand over her mouth and nose. The sting burned their eyes and noses. “There’s the answer. The source of the tarantulas’ diet.”

Sam groaned. “Bats.”

Across the roof of the next cave, thousands of black and brown bats hung from latched toes, wings tight to bodies. The juveniles, squirming among the adults, were a paler shade, almost a coppery hue. Sharp squeaks and subsonic screeches spread the warning of intruders across the legion of winged vermin. Hundreds dropped from their perches to take flight, skirting through the air.

The source of the odor was immediately clear.

“Shit,” Ralph swore.

“Exactly,” Norman commented sullenly. “Bat shit.”

The floor of the cavern was thick with it. Carved pillars, fouled with excrement, speared upward through the odorous mess. The reek from the aged droppings was thick enough to drive them all back with a stinging slap.

Norman tumbled away, choking and spitting. Bent at the waist, he leaned on his knees, gagging.

Ralph looked as if his dark skin had been bleached by the corrosive exposure. “We can’t cross here,” he said. “We’d be dead before we reached the other side.”

“Not without gas masks,” Maggie agreed.

Sam was not going to argue. He could barely see, his eyes were watering so fiercely. “Wh… what are we going to do then?”

Denal spoke up. He had hung back from the cavern’s opening and so had borne the least of the exposure. Even now, he was not facing ahead, but behind. He had an arm pointed. “They come again.”

Sam turned, blinking away the last of the burn. He took the flashlight from the incapacitated Norman. Several yards down the gold trail, three or four white bodies scurried across the rocky landscape. Scouts of the tarantula army.

“To hell with this,” Ralph said, voicing all their concerns.

“What now?” Maggie asked.

Sam glanced forward and backward. Everyone began talking at once. Sam raised the light to get everyone’s attention. “Stay calm! It won’t do us any good to panic!”

At that moment, Sam’s flashlight flickered and died. Darkness swallowed them up, a blackness so deep it seemed as if the world had completely vanished. Voices immediately dropped silent.

After a long held breath, Norman spoke from the darkness. “Okay, now can we panic?”

Joan ushered Henry into her lab. “Please make yourself at home,” she offered, then glanced at her wristwatch. “Dr. Kirkpatrick should be here at noon.”

Behind her, Henry had paused in the dooway to her suite of labs, his eyes wide. “It’s like a big toy store in here. You’ve done well since our years at Rice.”

She hid a smile of satisfaction.

Slowly, Henry wandered further into the laboratory, his gaze drifting over the plethora of equipment. Various diagnostic and research devices lined the back of the room: ultracentrifuge, hematology and chemistry analyzer, mass spectrograph, chromatograph, a gene sequencer. Along one wall was a safety hood for handling hazardous substances; along the other stood cabinets, incubators, and a huge refrigerated unit.

Henry walked along the row of machines and glanced into a neighboring room. “My God, you even have your own electron microscope.” Henry rolled his eyes at her. “To book any time on our university’s, it takes at least a week’s notice.”

“No need for that here. Today, my lab is at your full disposal.”

Henry crossed to a central U-shaped worktable and set down his leather briefcase, his eyes still drifting appreciatively around the room. “I’ve had dreams like this…”

Chuckling to herself, Joan stepped to a locked stainless-steel cabinet, keyed it open and, with two hands, extracted a large beaker. “Here’s all the material we collected from the walls and floor of the radiology lab.”

She saw Henry’s eyes widen as she placed the jar before him. He leaned over a bit, pushing his glasses higher on his nose. “I didn’t realize there was so much,” he said. The yellowish substance filled half of the liter-sized beaker. It shone brightly under the room’s fluorescent lights.

Joan pulled up a stool. “From the amount, I judge it must have filled the skull’s entire cranium.”

Henry picked the beaker up. Joan noticed that he quickly grabbed it with his other hand. The stuff was heavier than it appeared. He tilted the jar, but the unknown substance refused to flow. Replacing the beaker on the table, he commented, “It looks solid.”

Joan shook her head. “It’s not.” She grabbed a glass rod and thrust it into the material. It sank but not without some effort, like pushing through soft clay. Joan released the rod, and it remained standing straight in the jar. “Malleable, but not solid.”

Henry tried to move the glass rod. “Hmm… definitely not gold. But the hue and brilliance are a perfect match. Maybe you were right before, a new amalgam or something. I’ve certainly never seen anything like it.”

Joan glanced at him, eyebrows raised. “Or maybe you have. Let’s compare it to the gold cross. You brought it with you, yes?”

He nodded. Twisting back to the table, Henry dialed the lock on his briefcase and snapped it open. “I figure it’s safer with me than at the hotel.” He removed the ornate Dominican cross and held it toward her.

The workmanship was incredible. The Christ figure lay stretched and stylized upon a scrolled cross; the pain of his agony sculpted in the strain of his limbs, yet his face was full of passionate grace. “Impressive,” she said.