The Dig

[Four Days Left]

"Donna!" Michael shouted over the drill into the radio. "Donna, I think we've got something down here, hurry up!"

[Back Seven Days Left]

"Another cave-in! Damn, I thought these caves were stable!" Donna was working herself into a fine red-headed Irish rage.

Michael just stood back and watched, well away from any danger. "Of all the damned luck! This couldn't have happened at a worse time! Not only do we have a week left, not only is the government threatening not to let us come back, now I have to worry about this damn site caving in on top of us!" She pushed against the stone wall, trying desperately to relieve some of her own tectonic pressure.

"Donna, listen," Michael walked closer to her. "It happened in a chamber without any support beams, no one was hurt, and no equipment was lost. Just calm down before you bring these walls crashing down on top of us." He laughed, trying to relax her.

"All right, all right. Listen," she turned around to him, illuminating his face with her headlamp, "I want additional support beams around the primary and secondary tunnels. No one is to go exploring without explicit instructions." She walked in a circle around the cave with Michael as the center. "Make sure everyone understands and that they keep their ears open to any instructions over the radio, just in case." She patted him on the shoulder and knelt back to where she had been working.

After Michael left, she slumped her shoulders and let all the problems come crashing down on her. Six weeks gone by and nothing to show for it. The topside world was going insane with the depression. The government was pushing for them to close up shop as soon as possible so that they could get an excavation team down here to mine for precious metals.

It was a simple case of money. She didn't have enough left over to pay for an extension on their permits, and the board of trustees had no desire to keep throwing funds into a never-ending hole of failure. She pounded her fists into the dirt. "Damn it." she said as she rose to her feet and walked out of the cave.

[Six Days Left]

Douglas, a smallish man of twenty-three years, was walking near the ruins of the cave-in when he heard something shifting inside the rubble. Moving the light that came from his headlamp, he walked slowly toward the sound. His light showed the pile of rocks and dirt that was once a small, open chamber, and it was inside that pile that something moved.

"Hey Mike," he said into the radio, "We've got some rock movement down here in C-7."

"What the hell are you doing down there?" Mike shouted.

"Just snooping around. Wait a second--could you come down here. I think... Whoa!" Static came through the radio.

"Doug? Doug? What happened? Are you all right?" No answer came. "Listen up," Mike shouted through the radio. "Man down in corridor seven!" He sprinted through the corridors. "We need medkit and rope there. Now, Move! Move! Hurry up!" When he arrived at the corridor, dust was still billowing outward. Squinting hard, hoping to find Doug, Michael saw a large round hole in the cave floor.

Not wanting to cause another collapse, Michael eased himself to the lip of the hole. "Doug?" he yelled toward the hole. The dust started to settle where he was, but beneath the hole, the dust was still quite thick. "Doug," he yelled again. No answer. The hole was about ten feet in diameter and as the dust dissipated, Michael could see that the drop was well over fifteen feet. If Doug was down there, he would be in need of medical attention quickly. "Where in the hell is everyone?" he thought to himself. "Mike!" Donna yelled from behind him.

"Doug's down there," he said, turning to the wall closest to the hole. Others were coming to the area as he fired a piton in the wall with his piton gun. "Rope!" he said to one of the interns, who threw the coil of rope to him.

After Mike secured the rope to the piton, another intern helped him strap on the medkit. "Listen," Donna said to him, "be careful, I don't need two of you down there in need of help."

"All right," he winked at her as he walked to the hole. Two people grabbed the rope to steady it. "Two tugs and I found him, pull us up slowly and call for the emergency crews." He nodded to the two men holding the rope and started his descent.

At first, he thought his headlamp was either malfunctioning or it was burnt out, because all he saw was blackness. It wasn't until his eyes began to burn that he figured it was dust. He became thankful for the fact that he had placed his respirator on early in the descent. Otherwise, he would be choking in the dust cloud. By increasing the brightness of his light, he could see around him, and what he saw did not bode well for Douglas. The drop seemed to go on for more than fifty feet. If he had fallen all the way to the bottom, then he most likely would be dead.

Michael felt a need--a need to get out of this hole. Insane ideas grasped at his mind. Ideas like, maybe this hole went on without end, yes, and maybe Doug's dead? Doug's dead, and there's no point in going down any farther. Just yell, tell them so that they can bring you up. His heart thudded harder in his chest.

He felt as if he was no longer in control of his body, as if he were just a passenger on this trip into the unknown. There was only one other time in his life when he had felt so alone. Pictures of times long ago, when he was a child in Missouri. Pictures of himself lying on his bed at night, waiting for the monsters to come. Monsters that dressed like little men that would come and take him away. They weren't men. They had cold, round, dead eyes. Those were the monsters that came for him in the night. Monsters that appeared out of the blackness to make him scream and cry. They would hold him down, do unspeakable things to him. They would cut him open, touch his head with long instruments. His heart pounded in his chest like a hammer as the memories came back. Tears dripped down his cheeks. "Stop please," he squeaked, as if the memory wasn't a memory at all.

[Five Days Left]

Doug was airlifted out of the area late last night. He landed on an outcropping, stopping his fall at only forty feet. However, he broke his collar bone, two ribs, and his left leg. Considering everything, he got off easy. The cave- in apparently had weakened the floor of the chamber, and it was just blind chance that it fell apart when it did. After Michael returned from the depths with the unconscious body of Doug slung over his shoulder, all he could say was, "Amazing."

Amazing, Donna thought, that's all he could say. "You should get the understatement award of the year!" she yelled up to Michael as he finished coming down the rope ladder. Turning around, Donna felt like one of the fictional explorers in A Voyage To The Center Of The Earth.The walls were covered with a green lichen, which gave off luminescence.

"Get pictures of this area," Michael pointed to the interns, who then went to work taking snapshots of the walls and floor. Donna, in the meantime, walked around the rubble that had once been the ceiling above. "When you came up, it looked like you had been crying," she said to Michael.

"Maybe it was the dust," he calmly answered. "Everything went smooth enough, no problems." He stopped himself from touching the lichen on the walls. Something important happened to me, he thought. What was it? It was right there in the back of his mind when someone interrupted his train of thought.

"We just found another chamber, and you'll never guess what's in it," an intern said. He led them to the back of a small depression in the cavern. "We would have overlooked it if the camera flash hadn't lit up that tunnel in the ceiling." He pointed up into the depression where, sure enough, there was a small, five foot chute leading up into another chamber.

[Four Days Left]

Donna loved it when there was a find, especially when the morale of a team had reached an all-time low. After almost six weeks of digging, they had finally uncovered something. Several eggs littered the chamber that they had found while exploring the cavern. More than that, there were numerous small bones and other chambers that had yet to yield their secrets.

With so little time left to them, Donna decided to form several groups of two to three people so that they could get enough information for the local government to authorize a return trip. Even with the groups working in several caves and tunnels, too many tunnels would remain unexplored and unmapped. It made her angry that she couldn't even get an extension on their permits. So what if one faction of one religion was fighting another faction of another religion in some desert town hundreds of miles away? That shouldn't make it necessary for the government to become super paranoid about the safety of her team.

She had two days of actual work before she and her team had to pack up and get shipped out of here. Already, they had found several nests with twenty or thirty eggs in each of them, perfectly preserved. That was unusual, but not unknown in subterranean caves such as these. Unfortunately, the other teams had found little or no other evidence that life once inhabited these caves. Michael, on the other hand, seemed possessed with the idea that he would find something in the original cavern with the green lichen. He had spent all of last night and today removing rocks from one outcropping near a wall.

Turning her mind back to the matter at hand, she gently rolled one of the eggs in her palm. It was about the size of a softball, and it had spike-like protrusions all over it-- almost like a sea urchin. One of these eggs could be placed on the ground in any way, and the spikes would protect it. It was all just amazing. Funny how "amazing" kept coming to her mind. Amazing. It would be even more amazing if she could find remains of the animal that could hatch from such an egg. "Donna!" the radio blared again.

She reached over to her radio with one hand while turning the spiked egg in another. "What is it, Mike?"

"I think we might have just found Momma."

"Are you serious?" she said into the radio.

"Come down and see for yourself," came the reply.

Donna ran to the end of the egg chamber and slid down the chute to where Mike was waiting for her. Covered in dust and grime, he looked like a some sort of miner. Even so, he gleamed with thrilled excitement. She walked with him to the area he had just been working on and saw what excited him.

It was in a kneeling position facing the wall, its arms flattened against the wall above its head. She could not see the rest of the skeleton because of the stone still surrounding it. "What is it?" she asked him.

"I don't know." He laughed with tears streaming down his face. "I just don't know."

[Three Days, Seventeen Hours Left]

Mel proved to be an even greater mystery than they had originally believed. Not only was it humanoid, with its two arms and two legs, but it was reptilian. Proof of this came from scales found in the sedimentary rock surrounding the skeleton. Nowhere in the fossil record was there another discovery like this. Unfortunately, only Michael and two other interns could work on the find, as the rest of the group began clean-up operations. With any luck, however, they would be back.

In the meantime, Michael gave Donna a probable description of how Mel looked sixty million years ago, in her tent on the surface. "He's a swimmer and he likes his fish," he told her as he sat on a chair.

"So she's a carnivore," she smiled at him before she rubbed her face with a cloth.

"Yes, he is," he smiled back.

"She is," Donna walked over to the table he was sitting on and grabbed a package of dehydrated fruit.

"Whatever," he pulled the fruit away from her. "Whether Mel is a boy or a girl, it doesn't matter. All that matters is that it is the find of the millennium, and if we could find another skeleton, then we could disprove any theory that it's some sort of genetic mutation." He pushed the package back to her. "We could prove that there might have been at one time an entire tribe, maybe even an entire school of 'em." He chuckled as he left the tent.

"Where are you off to?" she smiled as she began eating the dried fruit, already knowing the answer.

[Three Days, Twelve Hours Left.]

He was all alone in the cavern, kneeling next to Mel, staring into its face. The face seemed so alien, so inhuman, and yet so familiar to him. He touched its face, feeling the coarse sediment still attached to the skull. He felt that he should clean the bones, make them like new.

Something in the back of his mind screamed out that something was wrong. Michael turned around and watched as part of the cavern wall moved in on itself. Someone told him in a melodic feminine voice, "Don't run away. Stay with her."

"Yes," he said and turned back around to the skeleton.

[Three Days, Eleven Hours Left]

"Donna." the radio said.

"Yeah, Mike, what's up?" she said as she finished packing a crate full of picks and shovels.

"I need to show you something down here. Please come down."

"Okay, I'll be right there, hold on. Hey guys," she shouted to the crew, "I'll be back in a few minutes. Give me a call if the locals ring."

[Three Days, Ten Hours, Forty-Five Minutes Left]

She finished the climb down the rope ladder and saw Michael sitting next to Mel. The way the green light illuminated his face, it looked wholly alien. "I wonder what he wants," she thought to herself, "What is that smell? Methane maybe, or sulfur." Something smelled rotten to her-- something like dead fish. She walked to him very slowly. "Mike, how can you stand the stink. Mike? Mike? What are you doing? Oh God, Mike!"

Mike's eyes were entirely white. There was no pupil, no iris; his eyes appeard to be completely sightless. She ran to him and shook him violently, trying to force him to move, to scream, to do anything. He just stood there in his catatonia.

"Donna," a soothing masculine voice said to her. She turned her head, sweat beginning to drip into her eyes, stinging them. There was a little man with big eyes walking toward her. Behind him were several other little people moving from the chute to a hole in the wall. Each of them carried two small spiky eggs with it as it went. "The eggs? Where did they get the eggs? We got all of the eggs," she thought to herself, but she could see that these eggs were different. They were clear and there was something moving inside of each--something small and scaly.

"Donna," Michael said behind her as he grasped her, restraining her. She tried to scream, but no sound came out of her throat. She cried, "Michael, let me go. Dear God let me go."

A large reptilian creature limped over to her. With each exhale, the beast released a foul humidity, while a long, snake-like tongue lashed across its green scaled lips. As it came closer, she understood what Michael had meant. He was right, they were carnivores; you can tell by the shape of the teeth and by the way the teeth could tear into flesh. Dear God, did it have teeth.

[Two Days Left]

Thank you for watching the International News Channel. My name is Tom Whiler,and here's what is happening in the world. Late yesterday in the Yucatan, a group of archeologists met up with disaster when a cave-in occurred, leaving two people on the missing persons list. A team of rescue workers went to the site and are working to find these two missing scientists, but with little hope of finding anyone alive.

Also in the news, the Mexican government declared martial law in the town of Chaparral. Fighting continues in that besieged town as an armored regiment makes its way there. The British Parliament said today that the sinking of the vessel....

END