The 6th Extinction (2 page)

So was it any wonder that all of their imaginations were lit on fire when one of the Fuegians, a bony-limbed elder, presented an astounding gift to the newly arrived crew of the
Beagle
? The ship had been anchored near Woolya Cove, where the good Reverend Richard Matthews had established a mission, converting many of the savages and teaching them rudimentary English. And though the elder who presented the gift didn’t speak the king’s tongue, what he offered needed no words.

It was a crude map, drawn on a piece of bleached sealskin, depicting the coastline of that continent to the south. That alone was intriguing enough, but the stories that accompanied the presentation only served to magnify all their interests.

One of the Fuegians—who had been baptized with the anglicized name of Jemmy Button—explained the Yaghan people’s history. He claimed their tribes had lived among the islands of this archipelago for over seven thousand years, an astounding span of time that strained credulity. Furthermore, Jemmy had praised his people’s nautical skills, which required less distrust, as Charles had indeed noted several of their larger sailing vessels in the cove. Though crude, they were clearly seaworthy.

Jemmy explained that the map was the culmination of thousands of years of Yaghan people’s exploration of the great continent to the south, a map passed from generation to generation, refined and redrawn over the centuries as more knowledge was gleaned of that mysterious land. He also shared tales of that lost continent, of great beasts and strange treasures, of mountains on fire and lands of infinite ice.

The most astounding claim echoed back to Charles now. He recorded those words in his journal, hearing Jemmy’s voice in his head:
In times long into shadows, our ancestors say that the ice was gone from the valleys and mountains. Forests grew tall and the hunting was good, but demons also haunted the dark, ready to eat out the hearts of the unwary—

A sharp scream cut through from the deck above, causing Charles to scrawl ink down the remainder of the page. He bit back a curse, but there was no mistaking the terror and pain in that single piercing note. It drew him to his feet.

The last of the crew must have returned from that dread shore.

Abandoning his journal and pen, he rushed to his cabin’s door and down the short hall to the chaos atop the deck.

“Careful with him!” FitzRoy hollered. The captain stood at the starboard rail with his coat unbuttoned, his cheeks red above his dark frosted beard.

Stepping out onto the middeck, Charles blinked away the glare of the southern hemisphere’s midsummer sun. Still, the bitter cold bit at his nose and filled his lungs. A freezing fog hugged the black seas around the anchored ship, while rime ice coated the riggings and rails. Puffs of panicked white blew from the faces of the crew as they labored to obey their captain.

Charles rushed starboard to help the others haul a crewman up from a whaleboat tethered amidships. The injured man was wrapped head to toe in sailcloth and drawn up by ropes. Moans accompanied his plight. Charles helped lift the poor fellow over the rail and to the deck.

It was Robert Rensfry, the ship’s boatswain.

FitzRoy shouted for the ship’s surgeon, but the doctor was belowdecks, ministering to the two men from the first excursion to shore. Neither was likely to see another sunrise, not after sustaining such gruesome wounds.

But what of this fellow?

Charles knelt beside the stricken man. Others clambered up from the boat. The last was Jemmy Button, looking both ashen and angry. The Fuegian had tried to warn them not to come here, but his fears were dismissed as native superstitions.

“Is it done?” FitzRoy asked his second-in-command as he helped Jemmy back aboard.

“Aye, captain. All three barrels of black powder. Left at the entrance.”

“Good man. Once the whaleboat’s secure, bring the
Beagle
around. Ready the portside guns.” FitzRoy turned his worried gaze upon the injured crewman at Charles’s knees. “Where’s that damned Bynoe?”

As if summoned by this curse, the gaunt form of the ship’s surgeon, Benjamin Bynoe, climbed out from below and rushed forward. He was bloody to both elbows, his apron just as fouled.

Charles caught the silent exchange between captain and doctor. The surgeon shook his head twice.

The other two men must have died.

Charles stood and made room.

“Unwrap him!” Bynoe demanded. “Let me see his injuries!”

Charles backed to the rail, joining FitzRoy. The captain stood silently, staring landward, a spyglass at his eye. As the moans of the wounded man grew sharper, FitzRoy passed Charles the glass.

He took it, and after some effort, he focused on the neighboring coast. Walls of blue ice framed the narrow cove where they were anchored. At its thickest point, fog obscured the shore, but it was not the same frozen mist that hugged the seas and wrapped the surrounding bergs of ice. It was a sulfurous steam, a breath from Hades, rising out from a land as wondrous as it was monstrous.

A gust of wind blew the view momentarily clear, revealing a waterfall of blood coursing down that cliff of ice. It flowed along in crimson rivulets and streams, seeming to seep out of the haunted depths beneath the frozen surface.

Charles knew it wasn’t in fact blood, but some alchemy of chemicals and minerals exhaled from the tunnels below.

Still, we should have heeded that ominous warning
, he thought again.
We should never have trespassed into that tunnel
.

He focused the spyglass on the cave opening, noting the three oil-soaked barrels planted at the entrance. Despite all the recent horrors that threatened one’s sanity, he remained a man of science, a seeker of knowledge, and while he should have perhaps railed against what was to come, he kept silent.

Jemmy joined him at the side, whispering under his breath in his native tongue, plainly resorting to pagan prayers. The reformed savage stood only chest-high to the Englishman at his side, but he exuded a strength of will that belied his small frame. The Fuegian had repeatedly tried to warn the crew, but no one would listen. Still, the stalwart native had accompanied the British to their foolish doom.

Charles found his fingers grasping the darker hand beside his own on the rail. The crew’s hubris and greed had cost them not only their own men but one of Jemmy’s tribesmen as well.

We should never have come here
.

Yet foolishly they had—allowing themselves to be drawn south from their planned route by the wild stories of this lost continent. But what had mostly tempted them was a symbol found on that ancient Fuegian map. It marked this cove with a grove of trees, a promise of life. Intending to discover this lost garden amid the icy shores, the
Beagle
had set out, all in the hopes of claiming new virgin territory for the Crown.

Only too late had they come to understand the true meaning of the map’s markings. In the end, the whole venture had ended in horror and bloodshed, a journey that, by necessity, would be stricken from the records by mutual consent of all.

None must ever return here
.

And if anyone dared try, the captain intended that they would find nothing. What was hidden here must never reach the larger world.

With the anchor freed, the ship slowly turned with a great cracking of ice from the rigging and a shiver of frost from the sails. FitzRoy had already gone off to see to the ship’s battery of guns. The HMS
Beagle
was a
Cherokee
-class sloop of the Royal Navy, outfitted originally with ten guns. And though the warship had been converted into an exploration vessel, it still carried six cannons.

Another scream drew Charles’s attention back to the deck, to the crewman writhing amid a nest of sailcloth.

“Hold him down!” the ship’s surgeon shouted.

Charles went to the doctor’s aid, joining the others to grasp a shoulder and help pin Rensfry in place. He made the mistake of catching the boatswain’s eyes. He read the pain and pleading there.

Lips moved as a moan pushed out words. “. . . get it out . . .”

The surgeon had finished freeing Rensfry’s heavy coat and split the man’s shirt with a blade, exposing a belly full of blood and a fist-sized wound. As Charles stared, a thick ripple passed through the abdomen, like a snake under sand.

Rensfry bucked under all their weights, his back arching in agony. A screech burst from his clenched throat, repeating his demand.

“
Get it out!
”

Bynoe did not hesitate. He shoved his hand into the wound, into the steaming depths of the man’s belly. He pushed deeper yet again, past his wrist and forearm. Despite the frigid cold, beads of sweat rolled down the doctor’s face. Elbow-deep now, he sought his prey.

A loud boom shook through the ship, shaking more frost atop them.

Then another and another.

Distantly, echoing from shore, came a much louder retort.

To either side, massive crags of ice broke from the cove’s coastline and crashed into the sea. Still, more of the ship’s guns boomed out their destruction of fiery grapeshot and heated cannonballs.

Captain FitzRoy was taking no chances.

“Too late,” Bynoe finally said, withdrawing his arm from the wound. “We’re too late.”

Only now did Charles note the boatswain’s body lay limp under his grasp. Dead eyes stared toward the blue skies.

Sitting back, he remembered Jemmy’s earlier words about this accursed continent:
Demons also haunted its dark depths, ready to eat the hearts of the living . . .

“What about the body?” one of the crewmen asked.

Bynoe looked to the rail, toward the roiling ice-choked sea. “Make his grave here, along with whatever lies inside him.”

Charles had seen enough. As the sea rocked and guns exploded, he retreated while the others lifted Rensfry’s body. He slunk cowardly back to his cabin without bearing witness to the boatswain’s watery burial.

Once below, he found the small fire in the oven was almost out, but after the cold, the room’s heat stifled his breaths. He crossed to his journal, ripped out the pages he had been working on, and fed them to those meager flames. He watched the pages curl, blacken, and turn to ash.

Only then did he return to the chart desk, to the maps still there—including the ancient Fuegian map. He picked it up and stared again at the cursed grove of trees marking this cove. His gaze shifted to the freshly fed flames.

He took a step toward the hearth, then stopped.

With cold fingers, he rolled the map and clenched it hard in both fists.

I’m still a scientist
.

With a heavy heart, he turned from the fire and hid the map among his personal belongings—but not before one last unscientific thought.

God help me . . .

FIRST

DARK GENESIS

Σ

1

April 27, 6:55
P
.
M
. PDT
Mono Lake, California

“Looks like the surface of Mars.”

Jenna Beck smiled to herself at hearing this most common description of Mono Lake from yet another tourist. As the day’s last group of visitors took their final snapshots, she waited beside her white Ford F-150 pickup, the truck’s front doors emblazoned with the star of the California State Park Rangers.

Tugging the stiff brim of her hat lower, she stared toward the sun. Though nightfall was an hour away, the slanting light had transformed the lake into a pearlescent mirror of blues and greens. Towering stalagmites of craggy limestone, called tufa, spread outward like a petrified forest along this southern edge of the lake and out into the waters.

It certainly appeared to be an otherworldly landscape—but definitely not Mars. She slapped at her arm, squashing a mosquito, proving life still thrived despite the barren beauty of the basin.

At the noise, the group’s tour guide—an older woman named Hattie—glanced in her direction and offered a sympathetic smile, but she also clearly took this as a signal to wind up her talk. Hattie was native Kutzadika’a, of the northern Paiute people. In her mid-seventies, she knew more about the lake and its history than anyone in the basin.

“The lake,” Hattie continued, “is said to be 760,000 years old, but some scientists believe it might be as old as three million, making it one of the oldest lakes in the United States. And while the lake is seventy square miles in area, at its deepest it is barely over a hundred feet deep. It’s fed by a handful of bubbling springs and creeks, but it has no outflow, relying only on evaporation during the hot summer days. That’s why the lake is three times as salty as the ocean and has a pH of 10, almost as alkaline as household lye.”

A Spanish tourist grimaced and asked in halting English. “Does anything live in this
lago
. . . in this lake?”

“No fish, if that’s what you were thinking, but there is life.” Hattie motioned to Jenna, knowing such knowledge was her specialty.

Jenna cleared her throat and crossed through the cluster of a dozen tourists: half Americans, the others a mix of Europeans. Situated between Yosemite National Park and the neighboring ghost towns of Bodie State Historic Park, the lake drew a surprising number of foreign visitors.

“Life always finds a way to fill any environmental niche,” Jenna began. “And Mono Lake is no exception. Despite its inhospitable chemistry of chlorides, sulfates, and arsenic, it has a very rich and complex ecosystem, one that we are trying to preserve through our conservation efforts here.”

Jenna knelt at the shoreline. “Life at the lake starts with the winter bloom of a unique brine-tolerant algae. In fact, if you’d come here in March, you’d have found the lake as green as pea soup.”

“Why isn’t it green now?” a young father asked, resting a hand on his daughter’s shoulder.