The Day of the Nefilim Read online

  The view from the dunes

  A FEW DAYS LATER, after netball and as arranged, Bryce and Reina stopped at Tommy’s place on their way to the dunes. We’ve got a couple of bottles, they said, and bring some smoke, some of that leaf you had the other day, and we’ll lie in the sun and watch the boys at the camp work. Good enough, said Tommy, who wasn’t doing anything anyway. He’d just had a couple of tattoos removed, and didn’t feel like working.

  “More bloody army, mmm. Foreign again, yeah? Or were they ours?” Tommy was saying a short time later. He was pretending to be interested for Bryce’s sake, and as usual he wasn’t doing a very good job. They were in Reina’s pickup, heading around the bay towards the dunes. Tommy was sitting between Bryce and Reina, trying to roll a smoke, and failing because the road was bumpy. “Ah, fuck it,” he said, folding the plastic bag back into his pocket.

  “There’s no such thing as our army, mate,” said Bryce. “You should know that by now, with all the bloody lectures I’ve given you. They all belong to the ruling class. The elites, if you want to use the modern term. Armies always have, always will. These guys are UN, they belong to the big State, the new one. They’ve got zip to do with us, that’s for real.”

  “Yup,” replied Tommy.

  “Yeah, yup,” said Bryce. As usual, he was frustrated by his friend’s indifference, but he’d gotten used to it when they were in the army together. “I suppose you won’t care about them until they do something that fucks you up personally.”

  “Fair guess, mate. Do you want some of this?” Tommy had found a joint somewhere.

  They turned off the main road and took a smaller track. After a couple of minutes, the track ended. They got out of the pickup and walked into the sand dunes.

  After a short walk across the sand, they reached their favorite outcrop of rock. It was easy to get to, comfortable, and gave them a good view of the military encampment. Once they were settled, Reina pulled a pair of binoculars out of her pack.

  A few of the soldiers were still unloading equipment from the trucks, even though it was a few days since the convoy had passed through town.

  The stuff was being taken into a tunnel that both Bryce and Tommy knew well. For as long as they could remember, it had been a local landmark, where the local children would play all the games that children play anywhere when such a wonderful resource as a cave is available. It was – or at least it had been before the soldiers arrived – a short cave, about fifty feet long, with a gently sloping floor that ended with an impassable rock face where the roof had collapsed some time in the distant past.

  Things must have changed. They had watched from their hiding place over the last few months as the cave had swallowed huge amounts of equipment. Building materials were taken into the tunnel and never reappeared. They had seen tons of tailings being taken in trucks to the water’s edge and dumped.

  They had all sorts of theories that came and went, depending on what they saw, what the latest whisper in town was, or what their mood was. Tommy’s interest was casual. If Reina and Bryce hadn’t been interested, he wouldn’t have bothered coming out here. Reina agreed with Bryce; there was something going on. Whether or not she cared much about it was another matter.

  * * *

  The General peruses some artefacts, and we meet Bisset

  PAST THE POINT where the rock fall had been cleared, a string of lights illuminated ancient walls, sloping down and fading into the distance.

  They had found a lot, but as for knowing what the tunnels meant – the answer, it was hoped, was somewhere below them. That, at least, was what the drones had been told. As far as they knew, they were here to dig up the secrets of the past, to move long lost knowledge to the surface in container loads of rubble and artifacts.

  A new tunnel had been built near the entrance. It branched off from the old one and housed the offices and research areas. The rooms here were lit, heated, sealed, and entirely functional. This was the General’s first stop.

  He stopped briefly at a door that bore his name. He went into his new office and dropped his case on the desk. So, this was going to be home for a while. He looked around. They’d set it up well enough. It would do. He turned and left again, heading further down the corridor to the research labs.

  The archaeologists were there, sorting through artifacts that had been brought up from the lower levels. The objects were piled together on long tables, waiting to be classified according to whatever system had been contrived for the exercise; an intellectual folly which the General was happy to have no part of.

  Bisset, the chief archaeologist, was there. Middle-aged and paunched, he usually made up for a lack of hair by using too much oil, but working here must have been getting to him, and he had let what was left of his hair do as it wished. It was sticking out like a frizzy gray halo, making him look like the mad scientist he almost was. He was holding a fragment of something up to the light and turning it around slowly, dictating notes to one of his staff.

  He glanced up as the General approached. “You’ve arrived,” he said, dispensing with formalities. “You’ll want to take a look at these. They’re only the small ones. Here are some photos of some of the larger pieces that have had to stay down below because of their size.” He indicated a pile of prints. “There are thousands of the things, and we’ve only just scratched the surface.”

  The General thought back to when the first samples had been put in front of him. It had been several months ago, in Bisset’s office at Mount Weather.

  “This is strange stuff. I’ve never seen anything like them. What do you make of them? Not a fair question, I suppose,” he had asked the archaeologist.

  “On the contrary, it’s a very fair question,” Bisset had replied. “Mysteries like this have been around for a long time, though they never get much of an airing in public. The Smithsonian’s got a lot of it, but only our own people have access to it. As far as we know, this is the largest collection that’s ever been found at a single site. Even Acambaro is nothing compared to this.”

  Bisset had shifted his attention to a small group of clay figures. Two human figures, male and female, were standing side by side, facing a lizard-like creature slightly taller than them and standing on its rear legs, supported by its tail. The three of them could have been having a conversation.

  There was enough knowledge on this table to rewrite all of human history. But history, of course, could not and would not be rewritten. The future was more important than the past, and the present would take whatever shape was needed to provide the required future.

  “We’re going to have a strange few months, aren’t we, Professor?” The General picked up a ceramic of a stegosaurus.

  “It looks that way,” Bisset replied. “The items on this table, including the one you’re holding, were found under rock at least two million years old. And the tunnel system itself is at least as old. This changes a few things.”

  * * *

  An encounter in the dunes

  BARK, ONETHIAN AND THEAD have joined Kali to see what has attracted his attention. Sahrin and the Senator come over as well. The whole crew is there.

  Below them, the ground appears to be alive. A pulse rises and falls, like heat existing on some other scale of temperature. Trails of comings and goings are almost visible, as though what is happening is just around the corner of perception, asleep in a dream of its own. Bark feels something familiar in the scene.

  The activity on the ground surrounds a cave entrance at the bottom of a cliff.

  “Playtime?” Onethian rubs his muscular hands together like the idiot he can be sometimes.

  “You could try being a little more serious,” the Senator says, displaying a rare moment of resistance.

  “I could,” grunts Onethian, “but I’m not going to.”

  “Shall we take a look?” Bark remembers that he’s the Captain.

  Onethian and Sahrin return to the winch. The ship soon starts to move again, swaying slightly in the
wind as it descends. When the bottom of the hull reaches the treetops, Bark calls for the winding to cease. Thead finds a space among the branches, and lowers the ladder to the ground.

  A short walk across the sand dunes separates them from the site of Kali’s discovery. They set out, and are about to descend an incline when they notice below them the three people that they had seen from the ship. The strangers are watching the same area that has caught their own attention.

  As Bark expects, Bryce, Reina and Tommy fail to see the new arrivals, who are now standing directly in front of them and inspecting them with great interest.

  The visitors and the locals are in the same space, but like two signals traveling down one wire, they are out of phase with each other. They are in different versions of the same world.

  “They’re a strange color,” says Sahrin. She looks at Reina’s dark coffee-colored skin, and then at Tommy, who is an even darker shade of the same color. Bryce is more her own color. “I like her,” she says, looking back at Reina. “She’s gorgeous.”

  “She’s impressive, yes, but this one’s dress sense is winning the battle for my attention. Just look at this,” Bark says, nodding towards Bryce, who is shading his eyes against the sun as he peers down into the encampment. Had he known that his grip on fashion was being questioned, he wouldn’t have been able, let alone motivated, to defend himself. As usual, he was in jeans, tired runners and a torn denim jacket with a big yellow smiley face on the back. “Shocking,” says Bark, feeling suddenly pleased with his own choice of a loose red and purple striped silk shirt, burnt orange tights, and embroidered canvas boots. Bark can always be relied on to dress for an occasion, even one that has little chance of happening.

  “Could you tell what rank he was?” asked Bryce.

  “What rank who is?” says Thead. The local’s speech warbles slightly, as though he is speaking under water, but it can be understood.

  “Remember,” says Onethian. “They can’t hear us.”

  “I know that!” snaps Thead, who has a problem with Onethian and his unending helpfulness. “I wasn’t talking to him, I was talking to us. Even you, if you’ve got anything sensible to say.”

  “A general, I think, I don’t know. Do you want a turn?” Reina handed Bryce the binoculars.

  “They’d be handy,” says Bark.

  “We don’t need more crew,” Sahrin says.

  “The glasses, not the locals.”

  “Oh, the glasses… yeah, I guess.”

  “It’s guarded all the time, and now that there are more soldiers, we’d never get in, no way,” said Bryce.

  “Did you hear that? They want to get in there,” says Onethian.

  “It’s not as though we want to get in, anyway, right?” said Reina, suspecting that Bryce might be missing his soldiering days.

  “Nah,” replied Tommy, watching a bird in a tree and at the same time feeling relieved that neither of his friends were sounding serious about going down there.

  “These people appear to have the advantage of a bit of local culture,” the Senator says. “And if they’ve been watching this place for a while, they might have some useful information.”

  “That may be,” replies Bark, “but I’d prefer that we rely on our own judgment.” The others agree, and begin to move down the hill.

  “But why don’t you stay, Senator, and see if their conversation sheds any light our situation. We’ll be back soon,” Bark says, turning to follow the others.

  The Senator, never one to argue (at least that is how he sees himself) finds a space on the rock ledge and sits down.

  It doesn’t take Bark and the others long to reach the perimeter fence. They stop in front of it, and look along its length and then at each other. They shrug, as if deciding something not very important at all, and then walk through it. It flickers briefly, creating a brief nimbus of fairy lights around them.

  * * *

  Underground in the control room, a private currently more interested in a recent earthquake in the Ukraine than anything else was making a coffee when he was drawn back to his computer by the beeping of an alarm.

  On the screen he saw that the fence’s field had been breached in five places, all close together, as though a group of something was moving together.

  “Shit,” he thought and said in Ukrainian. “Intruders.” He flicked through the cameras along the fence. There was nothing there. Everything was fine; the fence was intact.

  Damned machine. It hadn’t acted properly since they hauled it off the truck. Private Dosteyin went back to his coffee.

  * * *

  Archeology 101

  THE GENERAL AND THE ARCHAEOLOGIST were standing with a group of engineers in front of a wall, surrounded by the crumbling remains of subterranean buildings. The General reflected, not for the first time, on the attraction of archeology. To unveil these things that had been buried, unseen and unsuspected, for so long that no human had any idea of the time involved…

  The original inhabitants of the excavations had been human, or at least humanoid, judging by the architecture. Whoever they were, they had been tall; the doorways and steps suggested a height of seven or eight feet. They didn’t yet know how many kilometers of tunnels there were, but it was a large system, bigger than the others that had been found in other parts of the world.

  There were three other locations that were known of. One was in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. Another was in the Himalayas, inside the Chinese border, which had meant that some high-level and very careful cooperation was going on. The third site had been found under the sand in Saudi Arabia, at a place where nomads had gathered for rituals for as long as they could remember, and where earthmovers and trucks and scientists and soldiers now gathered.

  And there was this site, near the northern tip of the North Island of New Zealand. It was the fourth site, the last to be identified.

  Time was short. The other three sites were ready and waiting. Everything was in place.

  The UN had been sure that there was something to be found when they sent the first party of surveyors here. The ruins had been found exactly where they had been expected; at the point which, combined with the other three sites around the world, formed an irregular but very precisely shaped tetrahedron, the four corners of which were occupied by these impossible ruins, buried under rock that was millions of years old.

  The workers who had been involved in the initial exploration had been given all the normal mind-clearing drugs, after which all memory of the excavations had been removed. As always, there were a few in whom the suggestion didn’t take, so there had been some accidents to arrange. Training mishaps, the odd helicopter crash, that sort of thing.

  The New Zealand site was the last piece of the puzzle. There had been some tension in the air at Mount Weather when the General had left to come here. There was doubtless a lot more now.

  The wall in front of them was at the end of one of the labyrinth’s main tunnels. They were almost a kilometer underground.

  Both men could feel what had been described in the reports. The soldiers and engineers who were with them stirred uneasily. The first people to stand here three months ago had described it as a feeling of apprehension that grew stronger the longer you stayed in the vicinity of the wall. Eventually, it became so strong that it was impossible to remain there. It crawled at the base of your brain, physical and thoroughly visceral. An unnamed dread of something.

  They could feel it now.

  “Amazing,” the General said, his flesh gathering into cold goose bumps. His breathing had become shallow. “I found it hard to believe the reports.”

  “It gets worse than this, sir,” one of the soldiers said, moving back a step.

  The archaeologist moved closer to the wall. He was sweating heavily. Fumbling, he pulled an implement from one of his pockets and picked at the surface of the stone. After a few seconds he interrupted his scratching and paused, seeming to pay attention to something in the air. Then he leaned c
loser to the wall and placed one ear against the surface. He turned and beckoned.

  The General went over and put his ear against the wall. A deep humming sound was audible somewhere behind the rock. The feeling of apprehension was getting stronger. They moved away, putting welcome distance between themselves and the rock face.

  The General turned to a sergeant. “Get a team down here with a resonance cutter and get to work on it. Keep me informed. If there are any problems, I want to know. And I don’t want anyone going through there when the wall is breached. As soon as you’ve made it through, call me.”

  * * *

  A kilometer above, the three locals were still there, but their vigil had entered a familiar and relaxed stage. Reina was rolling a joint from Tommy’s leaf, while Tommy himself lay on his back, hands behind his head as he dozed, smiling, in the warmth of the afternoon sun. Bryce was pushing the cork into a bottle of wine with the handle of a knife.

  The Senator, deeply impressed by this capacity for luxury, and warming to the three of them, decides to join in by chewing a few bindoo leaves. They soon have the desired result.

  “You seem to have a relaxed attitude towards things,” he says out loud, not caring that they can’t hear him. “You would probably enjoy bindoo,” he smiles dreamily. He offers them a sample from his pouch, and shrugs happily when they ignore him.

  * * *

  Having passed through the perimeter fence and interrupted Private Dosteyin’s routine, the others arrive at the mouth of the tunnel.

  “What is it?” asks Sahrin, who has never seen a cave before.

  “It’s a hole,” replies Bark. They move forward, tentatively edging into the mouth of the cave. It looks as though it goes on forever. “It’s a strange thing indeed,” says Bark. A guard standing nearby remains oblivious of their presence.

  This is the place that Kali had seen from the ship. The movement in the air that had drawn his attention is barely visible now; like smog over a city, it exists only in the distance.