The Doom Stone (The Zone Unknown) Read online

  “Jeez,” Jackson said, feeling adrenaline pulse through him and his face flush. It took him another second to realize it was a skull sitting on top of a telephone table.

  “That’s Pithecus,” his aunt explained. “It’s short for Australopithecus africanus—one of man’s earliest relatives, about three million years old. I don’t think you’ve ever met him before.”

  “No.”

  “He’s part of what we’ve got to talk about,” she said pointedly. She took his suitcase from him and put it in the room on the left. “You’ve got your own room and bath in the apartment, but we share the sitting room.”

  Jackson looked at a long table covered with his aunt’s books and sketches. Skulls and jawbones of several other prehistoric humans and primates lay on top of plastic bubble wrap and shipping crates.

  “Most of these specimens came in today from my friends at the British Museum,” Dr. Cawley said. She placed a chair at the table for Jackson in front of a tray containing a bowl of soup, a sandwich, and a glass of chocolate milk.

  “What I saw tonight at Stonehenge has something to do with these teeth and skulls, doesn’t it?” Jackson said. “That’s why the army chopper’s coming—to search while the trail’s still hot?”

  “All you have to do is rest up from the trip.”

  “I slept on the plane,” Jackson protested. “I want to go with you on the chopper.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Jackson took a bite of the sandwich and chewed as he talked. He described how the young man with the ponytail ran out from the circle of stones with the shadow racing after him like a jungle animal. “What was the guy doing at Stonehenge anyway?” he asked.

  “He was probably one of what I call New Age hippies,” his aunt said. “Stonehenge is like their Woodstock. Some of them think it’s a magical place, that they’ll renew their identity and spirit there. That it’s not something the government should be allowed to sell tickets for. The young man you saw could have been from the top of Scotland. There probably won’t be a missing persons report on him for months.”

  Jackson wiped a milk mustache from his mouth and stared at Pithecus. “Aunt Sarah, why did the army hire you? What do they want with an anthropologist?”

  Dr. Cawley poured herself a glass of wine and pulled a chair up next to him. “During the last few months, there have been some…” She hesitated. “There have been mutilations.”

  “What kind of mutilations?”

  “Local farmers found animals at first. A cow. A few sheep. They appeared to have been mauled and half eaten by some kind of large animal. Last month the number of attacks increased. As you know, I’ve got a lot of friends and colleagues in Britain—and when they couldn’t figure it out, they told the army to call me. I listened to what they had to say, then told them to check for an escaped circus animal or someone’s wild pet that had gotten too big to handle. That’s what it usually turns out to be when there are killings like these. It spells large bear or big cat like a lion or tiger—none of which is, to say the least, indigenous to this countryside. The mutilations were occurring over a one-hundred-twenty-square-mile area, roughly the hunting territory needed by a mature grizzly. Last week a couple of creepy things happened that made the army decide to spend the big bucks and fly me in.”

  “What?”

  “The animal killed a soldier, a young kid on patrol at a top-secret biochemical lab up near Alton Down. His skull was crushed. I examined the wounds with a military coroner.” Dr. Cawley stood up.

  She walked around the table to a specimen covered by a damp towel. “We took measurements of the neck wounds and made molds. Then I constructed a mockup of the animal’s jaws from its bite.”

  Dr. Cawley lifted the towel.

  Jackson swallowed hard.

  Glistening clay jaws, thick and low slung, supported a startling spray of immense, twisted fangs—the kind that could easily crack bone and tear raw meat.

  Dr. Cawley pointed to molars behind the fangs. “These,” she said, “are teeth identical to those of a hominid.”

  “What’s a hominid?”

  “A human, or a member of the human family.”

  Jackson stopped chewing. “You think this thing is human?”

  “To be truthful,” Dr. Cawley said, “at this point I don’t know what to think.”

  The phone rang and Dr. Cawley answered it. When she hung up, she turned back to Jackson. “That was Tillman in the lobby,” she said, tossing back the rest of her wine. “The helicopter’s here.”

  3

  THE STALKING

  You didn’t say anything about bringing a kid,” Lieutenant Rath snapped from the copilot seat as Tillman helped Jackson board the helicopter. Dr. Cawley pulled her raincoat tightly about herself and motioned Jackson to slide along the backseat.

  “Jackson’s my assistant,” Dr. Cawley said, giving her nephew a wink. “Besides, he’s seen what we’re looking for.”

  Lieutenant Rath’s eyes narrowed like a cat’s under his puffy lids. “I thought all he saw was a shadow?”

  “A big shadow,” Jackson said.

  Rath glared at Dr. Cawley, his face gaunt in the light from the chopper’s control panel. “Next time check with me.”

  Jackson’s knees squashed up against the cold of the cockpit fire extinguisher as his aunt climbed in next to him, followed by Tillman. Captain Richards, a blocky, bearded sharpshooter, sat across from Tillman on a jump seat. They both held high-powered rifles with scopes.

  “Let’s go,” Lieutenant Rath ordered the pilot.

  The top rotor’s spin made a scraping sound like metal sliding upon metal. When the full power kicked in, the roar was deafening.

  “Too noisy,” Dr. Cawley complained, leaning forward away from the vibrating wall of the cabin. The pilot adjusted his earphones and pencil mike.

  “Use Stalk Mode,” Rath commanded. The pilot reached out to the control console and hit a switch. The roar of the engines dropped into a low, whooshing sound as the chopper lifted into the air.

  Jackson knew from the moment he had seen the army chopper that it was a heavily modified recon model. A searchlight, fuel pods, and exterior-mounted cameras made it look like a huge black wasp waiting on the pad behind Langford’s. As his aunt had predicted, the rain had stopped and there was a near-full moon in the sky.

  “We start at the stones,” Lieutenant Rath told Dr. Cawley.

  “All right,” she said.

  The helicopter had a massive center island of electronic equipment, and a sliding door that opened like a minivan’s. If they spotted anything, Tillman and Richards could open the right section of the craft and have a clear line of fire.

  Dr. Cawley pointed below. “That’s the Avon River. Stay low and follow it.”

  The pilot looked to Lieutenant Rath.

  “Why the river?”Rath asked.

  “We know what we’re looking for kills at night,” she said. “If it feeds, it’ll drink. That spells river to me.”

  Rath nodded an okay, and the pilot traced the Avon as far as West Amesbury, then headed west. The smooth, low flight of the helicopter as it closed on Stonehenge made Jackson feel that he was flying in a dream.

  The chopper slowed and hovered above the center of the circle. Tillman and Richards, clutching their rifles, slid open the door. Without a word, they took the releases off their weapons.

  “It’s cold,” Dr. Cawley complained as the wall of night air moved into the cockpit.

  Lieutenant Rath hit another switch and the island of electronic equipment leaped to life. A single large, horizontally mounted TV screen in the center lit up like a flickering wizard’s table.

  Rath asked Jackson, “Where did you see the attack?” He threw on the exterior searchlight and cameras. The monitor registered a bird’s-eye view of the stones.

  “Here,” Jackson said, leaning over to point out the spot on the screen.

  Rath pressed a button, and the area under Jackson’s finger enlarged
to fill the entire screen. “The cams have a four-hundred-to-one zoom ratio,” he said. Jackson indicated where he’d seen the fleeing young man race to the fence.

  “How would you know if the animal’s still down there?” Jackson asked.

  Rath hit another button, and the picture on the screen was replaced by amorphous colored patterns. “Thermal images,” he explained. One speck looked hot, red, and moving. “That’s the only thing alive.” He touched the controls, and the zoom enlarged the heat image. It was that of a rodent. “If we want, we can hear it,” he said. He threw a switch controlling the exterior directional mikes. A faint squeaking and scratching noise came across the interior speakers— but another series of sounds intruded.

  WHIR CLICK WHIR

  The heat cam refocused on the roadway several hundred feet away. The image was that of a warm engine in a parked landrover.

  WHIR CLICK

  The camera moved again. Appearing on the monitor was an eerie heat image of a large mammal moving on the ground toward the stones. Rath motioned the pilot to reposition the chopper, as Tillman and Richards kept their eyes glued to the sights of their rifles. A second hot image joined the first, and Rath switched the screen back to standard imaging.

  “Hold your fire,” Rath ordered, as he saw a pair of military police. One of the soldiers was broadcasting to the chopper pilot via a portable radio. The pilot relayed the message to Rath: “They haven’t seen anything.”

  “Tell them to return to camp,” Rath said. “We’ll head west toward Warminster.”

  “No,” Dr. Cawley said. “Too populated. Any wild animal worth its salt would head north or northeast.”

  Rath signaled the pilot. The chopper started north.

  “We’ll check Black Heath, then cross to Netheravon,” Dr. Cawley elaborated, trying not to threaten Lieutenant Rath’s command of the search. “The most likely hiding place during daylight would be an area once known as Savernake Forest. There’s tree cover. Abandoned quarries.”

  The pilot looked to Rath. “She’s talking forty to fifty kilometers.”

  “The distance works in our behalf,” Dr. Cawley said. She checked her watch. “The attack was an hour ago. Whatever this carnivore is, it’s still out here on the plain.”

  “Then we’ll find it,” Lieutenant Rath said, motioning the pilot on.

  Clusters of mounds rose from the farmlands as the chopper continued to fly silent and low. Jackson whispered to his aunt, “Are those what I think they are?”

  Dr. Cawley looked down to where Jackson was pointing. “You wanted to see burial mounds,” she said, “you got burial grounds.”

  “Each one is filled with bodies?”

  “Mostly cremated. Some have crockery and stones along with the ashes,” Dr. Cawley said. “From the early Bronze Age. They were into all kinds of mass burials.”

  WHIR CLICK WHIR

  Lieutenant Rath switched the screen back to the thermal imaging mode. A heat image made Rath sit up, alert. “Target at eleven o’clock.”

  “It’s moving,” Richards said.

  Jackson laughed. “It’s a cow.”

  Rath glared at him. “What?”

  “I see a herd of cows. Looks like a couple hundred of them,” Jackson said.

  “He’s right,” the pilot confirmed.

  “What we’re looking for isn’t around here, or these animals wouldn’t be this calm,” Dr. Cawley said as the screen filled with the image of the herd.

  Near Black Heath they flew over several large estates edging Salisbury Plain. Toward Netheravon the countryside was planted farmland, and the light from the moon so bright that livestock could be spotted by eye. The thermal images clicked in on wildlife. There were two puzzling heat images. One turned out to be a hot spring. The second was a heated swimming pool on a horse farm.

  “What’s that barking?” Dr. Cawley asked as the helicopter neared the Avon at a point where it snaked below the town of Netheravon.

  The pilot banked the chopper. Ahead, the fingers of a night fog crawled out of the river and reached into the plain.

  Rath punched up the power of the directional mikes and locked the pilot’s guide screen onto the source of the barking dog. Appearing on the monitor were the heat images of two large structures and a tract of small rectangular shapes. Rath hit the zoom.

  “It’s a cemetery,” he said.

  Jackson looked out the window. He was the first to see the two figures standing at the edge of the graveyard. One was a young girl with long straw-colored hair that fell to her waist. She looked ghostly in a white nightgown. The dog at her side was a giant shaggy Irish wolfhound barking at something down near the river. The girl looked up and waved to the chopper as it made a low pass.

  “Why is that girl out there at this hour?” Dr. Cawley asked. She leaned forward to check the heat images on the screen. “What’s that on the bank of the river?”

  Tillman checked out his right window. “An old gristmill.”

  The mill appeared abandoned, with gaping holes in its thatched roof. Its waterwheel was still turning, water from the river cascading down from wide, fragmented slats.

  Rath gave the pilot the signal to hover and hit a switch on the thermal imaging control.

  WHIR CLICK

  A heat map of the interior of the mill came up on the screen.

  “You didn’t tell us this thing could see through walls,” Dr. Cawley said.

  “It’s not the kind of P.R. we want,” Rath said.

  “Locals wouldn’t care for it if they knew we could look into their bedrooms.”

  The scan locked onto a strong red glow.

  “Set us down,” Rath ordered. The pilot circled back and landed in a clearing between the mill and the girl with the barking dog.

  “Keep the rotors going,” Rath ordered, holding the heat scan locked on the mill.

  Tillman and Richards hit the muddy ground, running toward the mill and the river with their rifles ready. Tillman carried a flashlight, keeping it trained on the path ahead. Rath went out after his men as Dr. Cawley slid across the seat toward the open door.

  “That girl shouldn’t be out here at this hour,” Dr. Cawley said. “I’m going to tell her to go home.”

  Jackson said, “I’ll go with you.”

  “No,” Dr. Cawley said. “Stay here.”

  Dr. Cawley stepped down out of the chopper. She clasped her raincoat close about her until she was well clear of the spinning rotors, then started back through the mist toward the cemetery. Jackson was grateful to be able to stretch his legs away from the cold, rigid cylinder of the fire extinguisher. He kept one eye on the monitor as its automatic scan swept the mill section by section.

  Suddenly the bright glow on the screen became a weaker one.

  “It looks like there’s a horizontal form near the roof,” Jackson said. Like a disgruntled creep, the pilot ignored him and began busily writing in the chopper’s flight log.

  Tillman and Richards reached the entrance to the mill. The front door was cracked and broken, hanging open from a single hinge. Tillman shone the light inside. Richards moved in to the bottom of a staircase. He crouched, with both hands on his gun ready to fire. Tillman followed, directing the flashlight up the stairs.

  “I’m going,” Richards said, then rushed up the steps three at a time. He took cover behind a crate. Tillman did a slow count to three and went up after him, freezing next to a barrel. Half of the room was a pile of broken beams and thatch that had long ago crashed in from the rotting roof.

  Richards pointed to a pair of naked legs protruding beyond a web of planking and vines that had invaded near the chimney.

  “Wake up!” Tillman shouted.

  There was no response.

  Richards took up a barrel slat from the floor and prodded the legs. “British army here!” Tillman said loudly.

  Again, nothing.

  Tillman rolled the barrel over next to a crate at the edge of the heap. Richards raised his rifle as Tillman cli
mbed up. There was a slithering movement, a fat snake crawling along a wedge of dank collapsed thatch. Slowly, Tillman straightened up and swung the light onto the youthful body of a man. The young man’s plaid shirt was wet and muddied, his arms and legs extended as though he had been crucified.

  “What’s happening?” Richards asked.

  Tillman shone the light onto the figure’s head. It struck the face at a sharp angle, and he saw the open mouth frozen into a death scream. There was a wound at the base of the skull, a cluster of dried blood mixed with scattered hair—hair long enough to have been easily worn in a ponytail.

  Tillman knew the dead body was not the bright red glows he’d seen on the thermograph screen.

  “Follow me,” he told Richards, and they started down toward the grinding room.

  4

  ENCOUNTER

  Ithink they found a dead body,” Jackson told the pilot as he watched the bright heat images of Tillman and Richards leave the weaker glow and descend to the bottom of the mill.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” the pilot muttered, continuing to write in the flight log.

  Rath waited, gun drawn, at the top of the path to the mill. Jackson checked out the open door of the chopper back toward the mist-filled cemetery. He could barely see his aunt talking to the strange girl with the wolfhound.

  “How come the heat scan doesn’t pick up images in the river ?” Jackson asked the pilot.

  “Water blocks the transmission.”

  “Like lead blocks X rays?”

  “Sort of.”

  WHIR CLICK

  The automatic scan zeroed in on a new, bright glow far to the right of the heat images of Tillman and Richards in the grinding room. It was a strange sliver coming from behind what looked to be a large, old water tank.

  “You’d better look at this,” Jackson said.

  The pilot grunted, didn’t look up.

  CLICK

  The scanner locked tighter on the heat image. It was stronger, clearer now.

  Jackson had watched Rath, knew which switch controlled the zoom—and he hit it.