Raising the Past Page 2

  Haphnee wrapped her arms around Teechoo’s trunk and squeezed it tight, as she was fond of doing when they wrestled. But the trunk that had so often wrapped around her waist and lifted her into the air remained limp.

  “I am sorry, old friend.”

  Haphnee began to sob as she felt Teechoo’s body sway. Haphnee would have cursed at the never-ending storm if she had the energy, but she feared her end would come soon as well. Her people, her poor people, would be coddled like infants by the Ferox, eager to learn the new ways of doing things. Teechoo groaned and fell to his side like a cut tree, pounding a massive depression in the snow.

  Haphnee ducked under the prodigious tusk and trudged toward Teechoo’s belly. She leaned against it and listened.

  Nothing.

  The rush of air that normally sucked into his massive lungs had stopped. The thump of his gigantic heart was silent. Haphnee gripped Teechoo’s fur and sobbed.

  She knew what she had to do to survive. It was the only chance she would have to save her people, to save the entire world that the Aeros had shown to her on that fateful day in the woods. Haphnee drew her bone blade and placed it against Teechoo’s thick hide.

  A sudden shift in the breeze caught Haphnee’s attention. She spun around and readied her weapon. Nothing was there. The wind shifted again, from above. Haphnee looked up and saw an object floating twenty feet above her.

  When she’d looked into the blue light so long ago, she’d seen things—impossible things, including the object hovering above her. It looked just as she remembered it, dark as the night sky and as round as the moon. The light had told Haphnee there was only one thing she could do if she saw this object—hide.

  The work went fast, cutting with her blade. As she slipped inside her carved-out crevice she began to feel warmer. She knew now that the storm wouldn’t let up for some time, if ever, but she had no choice. A haze of gleaming white snow was the last thing Haphnee saw before closing the thick layer of Teechoo’s still-warm hide over her body.

  EXPEDITION

  1

  DISCOVERY

  Brian Norwood ran for his life. The ice behind his feet crumbled and fell away as he neared the safety of thick permafrost. He looked back. The fissure was at his heels, opening like a monstrous jaw. Norwood screamed and cursed himself. If only he had been less eager, this whole mess could have been avoided.

  That morning, he had rolled out of his cot and roused his hired crew. Six o’clock was an early start, and the crew would have grumbled if they weren’t being paid so much. Norwood paid top dollar and he expected top performance from his team, even if they were working on four hours’ sleep. They could sleep when the expedition was over.

  Of course, this was just a preliminary expedition and Norwood wasn’t accustomed to joining the grunt crew—not one of them held a Ph.D.—but the potential of this discovery seemed so promising, so glorious, that he had to see it himself before funding a full expedition. The site was first discovered when an Inuit whaling group had seen a pair of tusks jutting from a wall of permafrost during the summer, when the ice was low. When Norwood had heard their story, he paid for their silence and began plotting the excavation. He had chosen to return during the early winter, when the sun still graced the sky but the ice was more solid and could support a full-sized camp. He was now rethinking that expectation.

  The plan was to set off a few small explosions, softening the ice enough to allow the team to chisel the rest of the way. All Norwood had wanted was a peek, a brief glimpse to confirm the Inuit’s claims; then he would call in the troops, his team of experts, to dig out the rest.

  A fully intact mammoth in the Canadian north was a groundbreaking discovery for two reasons. First, it was in Canada. Most mammoth carcasses were found in Siberia. Red tape from the Russians and travel concerns slowed most expeditions to a crawl, and if anything was ever found, it had to remain in Russia. Canada was much more receptive to American science teams and usually happy to assist. Second, if he found what he was after, cloning a mammoth would soon become a reality. Its location in Canada made moving the mammoth body to his patented Freeze Lab in Los Angeles a snap. Once there, it could be dissected and analyzed for viable DNA. It would be a relatively simple task and provide the means to the realization of all his dreams: fame, academic prestige, money and respect.

  Norwood felt his foot fall through the ice. Had he been in better shape he might have outrun the spreading crack, but the love handles that had emerged over the past few years slowed him down. His dim hazel eyes grew wide as he felt himself falling backwards. The crew was yelling to him, but he couldn’t make out the words. All he heard was the cracking of the ice and the pulse of blood rushing through his head. Most people would have thought about the freezing water below, or the dagger-like shards of ice falling around him, but Norwood thought only of his father.

  You never achieved anything! He heard his father saying over and over. You took everything I gave you and spent it on foolish trips to various hells on Earth. You screwed over your sister. You gave up the family business. You wasted everything I taught you, and for what? Norwood was sure this was how he would enter the gates of hell. What better torture could the devil conjure for him?

  He braced for the freezing impact that would suck the air from his lungs, chill his body to the core and sap his remaining energy. He found little comfort in the fact that death would come quickly.

  Whack! He hit a surface, but the plunging cold he expected to envelope his body never came. He had a burning pain in his left side, but he was alive.

  Norwood looked up through the new crevice and saw only a darkening blue sky. The light was faint at the bottom, but he could make out the smooth walls on either side. Smooth walls? Norwood leaned in, inspecting the wall, but couldn’t discern anything more. A sound like a babbling brook caught his attention. It was water—running water—he could hear it trickling down the wall. Ten below zero, and the ice was melting.

  “Dr. Norwood! Are you all right?” A man shouted from above.

  Looking up, Norwood saw Ron, one of the men he had hired in Montreal, leaning over the edge of the crevice, peering down. “I’m here. I’m okay,” Norwood said.

  “Dr. Norwood, thank God. You’re alive,” Ron said with a wave of relief that Norwood knew was due more to the fact that he was still alive to sign their checks than any personal concern. “Should we throw you a rope?”

  Norwood hesitated, his mouth wide open to speak. He sat on the icy floor, his hands, ass and feet all touching it. A rush of liquid, a centimeter deep, pulled his eyes to the floor. It pooled around him, soaking into his clothing. The walls appeared to be melting at an incredible rate. What could cause such rapid melting? The dynamite would cause some at the source of the explosion, but this was a constant and sustained melting—there had to be a cause.

  “Dr. Norwood, a rope?”

  Norwood had forgotten all about the fall, about the pain in his ribs and the setting sun. “No… A flashlight. Get me a flashlight.”

  “What? The sun is going down, sir. I think—”

  “Ron, do I pay you to think?” Norwood said with sudden seriousness. “No, I don’t. That’s my job. Now get me a damn flashlight!”

  Ron disappeared over the edge without another word. He returned in thirty seconds with a flashlight and rope. Ron tied the rope to the flashlight and lowered it toward Norwood. As the flashlight came low, Norwood took hold of it and untied it. He then gave the rope a tug. It was secure on the other end. “Are you okay?” Ron asked again. “Let me know when you want to come out. We’ll pull you up.”

  Norwood gave a silent thumbs-up to Ron then turned toward the closest wall of ice. The flashlight blinked on and lit the crevice in bright blue. He squinted as his eyes adjusted to the bright, reflected light. Ice was normally a dull surface that absorbed more light than it reflected, but this ice was different. Norwood could see that a constant stream of water was trickling down the entirety of the wall. He pointed the b
eam of light forward at knee level and saw steam rising from the crevice floor. He bent down to one knee, dipping it in the three-inch deep pool of water that had already gathered, and he removed a glove.

  Warm water rippled over his hand as Norwood submerged it. He stifled the sudden urge to pee and scrambled to his feet. What in God’s name was going on? Norwood’s brilliant mind hurried through several theories for what could be causing the strange phenomenon, and none of them were pleasant. Geothermal activity could be the culprit, but that was unlikely; there hadn’t been any activity here for a hundred thousand years. Perhaps what the Inuit had seen was a derelict submarine—a nuclear submarine. Radiation could be melting the ice. Norwood walked away from the melting ice wall with one hand stretched out for the rope and the other pointing the flashlight at the steaming pool of water that splashed beneath his feet.

  The ice floor had become slick, polished by the warm water. Norwood slipped like he had stepped on a bar of soap in a porcelain tub, and he careened backwards. As his hand reached out, he felt the rope passing between his fingers. He squeezed his fingers hard around the rope and slammed to a stop against the wall. The flashlight fell to the ice floor. A momentary crashing and splashing of noise echoed as Norwood righted himself on the slick floor.

  With the rope secure in one hand, he leaned down to pick up the flashlight. He bent over, stopped, and listened. Silence.

  Silence.

  Norwood picked up the flashlight and pointed it toward the ice wall.

  It was no longer melting, but had refrozen as smooth and as clear as a pane of glass. But it wasn’t the ice or the melting of ice that now held his attention.

  A ruddy shadow fifteen feet tall loomed behind the ice wall. Norwood imagined that the shape could be anything—a submarine, a frozen whale or an SUV for that matter—but what separated it from any other theory were the two tusks that now lay exposed, jutting ten feet from the wall like thick, curved flagpoles.

  Norwood’s grip on the rope loosened and he slid to the quickly refreezing floor with his back to the wall. He grinned and stared unblinking for thirty seconds.

  “Dr. Norwood?” Ron said from above, with a tinge of genuine concern in his voice.

  Norwood looked up and saw Ron’s head hanging over the edge, no doubt still worried about the welfare of his benefactor. His fears were misguided of course; money wasn’t going to be a problem. Norwood looked back to the frozen mammoth encased in the icy tomb and laughed.

  2

  EDDY

  A swirling cloud of terra cotta colored dust billowed behind a faded red Jeep as it sped down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. The bright sun glimmered off the windshield, free to shine at full strength in the cloudless Arizona sky. The posted speed limit was forty miles per hour, but having not seen another soul for forty-five minutes, Eve Bailey felt no compunction to remove her foot from the gas pedal.

  Eve’s long blonde hair was pulled and whipped by the wind as she twisted the steering wheel back and forth, dodging lizards, avoiding potholes and just plain having fun. She cleared a hill and saw the road stretching out before her, a straight line drawn out across the desert, disappearing into the horizon. Eve smiled and the muscles of her right leg tensed as she shoved the gas pedal to the floor. Her head jerked back from the sudden increase in speed and she laughed out loud.

  The trip to Eddy’s should have taken two hours, but she was cutting that time in half.

  Eddy.

  Her thoughts drifted and her foot eased up on the accelerator. She hadn’t seen Eddy Moore in two years. She remembered when she first met him on a dig site. He was finishing his Ph.D. in paleontology and she had just started hers in paleobotany; at the dig site as interns, they were equals. They had swiftly become friends, inseparable, able to trust each other with life and limb, but to Eve’s continual frustration, not with love.

  Eddy always seemed to be so wrapped up in his work, even back when she was in her prime: young, stunning and very, very available. She once changed clothes in front of Eddy, expressing, “I trust you not to peek,” when in truth, she wanted him to peek. But he was true to his word and kept his head turned away the entire time. Eve had finally given up trying to seduce Eddy and decided to keep their tight friendship just that: a friendship.

  They’d worked together for five years on various projects and were very successful—a Diplodocus in Montana, a Paralititanin (the second of its kind ever found) in Egypt, a ground breaking Giant Foosa dig in Madagascar and the T-Rex. They had put together a team of professionals that had become more like a family, available to work on any project that suited their fancy. They were the best at what they did and no one had a better track record. They were fast. They were reliable. They were also no more.

  Two years had passed since Eddy had left. The remaining members of the team stayed together, working on projects around the world, but without Eddy their spirit was broken. They grew sloppy and slow and their reputations had suffered. They were like a well honed body with only half a brain.

  Eve snapped out of her daze and slowed the Jeep to a stop. A hundred feet off the road was a beige adobe home surrounded by cacti and red rock formations—an oasis hiding from the world. Eve looked at herself in the mirror, hair twisted and tangled, face covered with dust. She grinned. Eve wasn’t the perky young woman Eddy had once known, but she was far from hard on the eyes, and she knew Eddy of all people would appreciate her current physical state. The few times he had complimented her on her appearance weren’t when she was wearing makeup or tight clothes, but rather when she was working, coated in sediment, covered in scrapes and sweat. If Eddy was attracted to women at all, it was when they were dirty.

  Eve plucked a twig from her hair and pulled the Jeep into the sandy driveway at the side of the small ranch house. She cut the engine and stepped out of the vehicle, adjusting her beige shorts. After working her way across the winding path of stones that led to the front door, she rang the doorbell and waited. Nothing. She looked through the window for movement and saw nothing but books and empty beer cans. She knocked on the solid wood door.

  Maybe he isn’t home.

  Eve headed back to the driveway and stopped by her Jeep, listening. A light rhythmic sound tapped through the air. She recognized the pulse. Eyes squinting with suspicion, Eve headed toward the back of the home, following the barren driveway that wrapped around the side of the structure.

  As Eve rounded the rear corner of the home, the full sound of the music struck her; recognition was instantaneous: “Love Her Madly” by The Doors. Jim Morrison at his best, she thought.

  The music came from an old radio propped up on a shelf next to a red convertible 1969 Mustang. The hood was open and Eddy was leaning inside. Eve took him in. Worn-out, oil-stained blue jeans and a dirty white T-shirt. If not for the piercing intelligence emanating through his brown eyes, he would have made a convincing run-of-the-mill mechanic.

  Eddy grunted as he pulled on a tight bolt with a wrench—a very old wrench from the looks of it. His shoulder muscles twitched and his back flexed. Eve raised her eyebrows. Eddy was still in shape…that was good.

  “You know, a good torque wrench would take care of that,” Eve said, as though this was just another casual meeting of friends—like she stopped by every day.

  Eddy froze and the slightest smile crept onto his face, but he remained hovering over the engine, pulling on the bolt. “Just trying to work on a car from the past with a tool from the past.”

  “An honest experience?”

  “An honest attempt.”

  Eve leaned against the wall of the garage, which was more like an old shack. “At least that hasn’t changed about you.”

  Eddy stopped pulling. He stood up straight and looked Eve in the eyes for the first time. “What has changed about me?”

  Eve’s breath escaped her. His eyes were still captivating, squeezing her chest. He looked as though he hadn’t shaved in weeks and was covered with dirt and grime, but that didn’t
matter in the slightest. She’d missed her closest friend and did all she could to resist throwing herself in his arms and squeezing him tight. For now, she’d play it cool.

  “Look around you,” Eve said. “Take your pick.”

  Eddy looked at his house: caramel colored, adobe…boring. “What? You don’t like my house?”

  He knew she didn’t. Hell, she knew he didn’t like it, either.

  “You’ve gone from exploring the past to hiding from it,” Eve said. “This isn’t you.”

  Eve had always been honest with Eddy, about most things, anyway, and he had apparently forgotten that. His face flattened. “It is now.”

  Eddy twisted a knob on the radio, silencing Jim.

  “I didn’t come all they way out here to argue with you, Eddy.”

  Eddy dropped the heavy wrench into a toolbox. “That’s nice of you.”

  Eve twisted her foot in the dirt. She wasn’t sure how this was going to go over. “I came to offer you a job.”

  Eddy paused. He looked hurt.

  “Two years. It’s been two years, and the only reason you’ve come out here is to offer me a job?” Eddy sighed and looked at the ground. “You’re wasting your time.”

  What was this? Of all the possible scenarios that Eve had played out in her head, of all the variable futures that existed, this was one she hadn’t considered. Eddy, the machine, was acting like a teenager who’d just been crushed by a girl. This wasn’t the way she expected things to play out at all; this was far better!

  After wiping off his hands on a cloth that was easily as dirty as he was, Eddy walked past Eve and went straight for the house. She snapped out of her astonishment and gave chase.

  “The rest of us didn’t quit. We’re still together. Kevin, Steve, Paul, all the guys are still on the team.” Eve tried to soften him with memories of his old friends. It didn’t seem to have any impact at all.