PART ONE
PUERTO CHICXULUB
1
Chava woke up earlier than usual that day, just before the
sun rose. His mother and sister were still asleep. His father
was gone, traveling again. When the boy asked him where
he went, he was always evasive, and Chava had learned
not to ask further. He took a ladleful of water from the
bucket and drank it, careful not to wake his sister. He
poured another into the basin and washed his face and
hands and arms before quietly slopping the rest onto the
dirt floor.
He was still sleepy. He watched his sister move
restlessly, giving a little moan. Why had he woken up early?
He had been in the middle of a frightening dream. There
was something chasing him. A strange, stumbling creature,
something that moved in lurches and starts, something that
seemed at once alive and dead. He shook his head,
wondering how something could be both alive and dead.
He slipped into his clothes and left the shack, careful to
stop the piece of aluminum that served as a makeshift door
from clacking behind him. Outside, he could smell the salt
in the air, could see, a few hundred meters away, the slate
gray waves. The tide was out, the waves gentle now, hard
to hear from this distance.
Something lingered in his head, a noise, a strange
sound: a whispering. It was saying words but in a language
he couldn’t understand, so softly that he couldn’t even tell
where one word stopped and another started. He tried to
force the sound out, but though it receded, it didn’t go away.
It just hid itself somewhere deep in the back of his skull,
nagging at him.
His dream rushed forward to fill the space. The creature
had been large, just a little bigger than a man. He was
watching it from behind. In the dream, at first he had thought
it was a man, but when it turned, he saw that it was missing
part of its face, the jaw. There was something wrong with its
arms as well, but the dream was blurry and he couldn’t
make out what it was exactly. It watched him with eyes as
blank and inhuman as the eyes of a fish. And then, in a
single bound, hissing, it had been on him, its slavering half
jaw trying to sink broken teeth into his throat.
He was wandering, not really aware of where he was going,
trying to fight off the bits of dream playing out in his
semiconscious mind. He was surprised to find himself
down at the shoreline. To the left, the coast was empty.
Down the coast to his right, far in the distance, were two or
three fishermen, standing in the surf, trying to pull
something in. Whatever it was, the boy knew, would almost
certainly be deformed and taste of oil. It would be a
challenge to choke down. It was no longer safe to fish. The
sea here was polluted and starting to die, and similar
problems were working their way inland as well.
He’d heard his father talking angrily about it. Crops that
even a few years back had been healthy and strong now
came up stunted if they came up at all. The only supposedly
safe food was the patented foods grown in controlled
environments by mega-corporations, food that few could
afford. So the choice, his father said, was either to eat food
that slowly killed you or go broke on food you couldn’t
afford, while everyone went on destroying the world.
He started walking toward the fishermen, but something
hindered his steps, slowly turning him. He began moving
down the beach in the other direction, where it was
deserted.
Or almost deserted; there was something there,
something rolling in the surf.
A fish maybe, he thought at first, but as he walked
forward, it seemed too large to be a fish. And the shape
was wrong. A corpse maybe, a drowned man? But when it
flopped back and forth in the tide, he knew he was wrong.
That it was wrong.
The hair started to stand on the back of Chava’s neck.
He walked toward the thing, trying not to listen to the rising
cacophony of whispers taking over his head.
2
Michael Altman rubbed his eyes and looked away from his
holoscreen. He was a tall man in his early forties, with dark
hair going just a little gray at the temples and lively blue
green eyes. Normally, he had a keenly intelligent gaze, but
today his face was a little drawn, a little weary. He hadn’t
slept well the night before. He’d had bad dreams, visceral
stuff—all death, blood, and gore. Nothing he wanted to
remember.
“That’s odd,” said James Field, the geophysicist whose
lab he shared. Field ran stubby fingers through his thinning
white hair and leaned back, his chair creaking beneath him,
as he stared across the room at Altman. “Altman, did you
get these same readings?”
“What readings?” Altman asked.
Field spun a copy of his holoscreen Altman’s way. It
showed a Bouguer/Salvo gravity map of the 110-mile
diameter of Chicxulub crater. The crater had been left when
a ten-kilometer bolide had struck the earth 65 million years
ago.
James Field, now in his late fifties, had spent most of his
career micromapping the crater for the state-owned Central
American Sector Resource Corporation (CASRC). He
focused mainly inland along the perimeter of the trough,
where small concentrations of key minerals might be found
and quickly extracted. Since people had already been
doing the same for hundreds of years, this mainly meant
going back for quantities small enough that earlier teams,
before the resource crisis, had deemed them unworthy of
retrieval. It was slow, tedious work, as close to being an
accountant as you could get and still be a geophysicist.
That Field actually seemed to enjoy this job told Altman
more than he wanted to know about him.
Altman, on the other hand, had been in Chicxulub only a
year. His girlfriend, Ada Chavez, an anthropologist, had
gotten funding to study the contemporary role of Yucatec
Mayan folktales and myths. He’d managed to pull just
enough strings and call in enough favors to get a small
grant so he could follow her to Mexico. He was supposed to
be profiling the underwater portion of the crater, providing a
map of likely geological structures beneath the half mile or
so of sea muck by gathering data from both satellite
imaging and underwater probes. It was, in theory, a strictly
scientific project, but he knew that whatever information he
gathered the university would sell to an extraction company.
He tried not to think about that. The work was slow and not
very rewarding, but he tried to tell himself it wasn’t quite as
pointless as what Field was doing.
He looked at Field’s holoscreen carefully. It looked
normal to him, the gravity readings typical.
“What am I looking for?” asked Altman.
Field furrowed his brow. “I forget you’re new,” he said. “I’ll
zoom in on the center.”
The center of the crater was in deep water, about a half
dozen miles from their laboratory. Altman leaned toward the
monitor, squinted. A darkness at the heart of the crater
revealed a gravitational anomaly.
“Here’s what it looked like a month ago,” said Field.
“See?”
He flashed up another profile. In this one, the darkness in
the center wasn’t there, Altman saw. He checked the first
profile. The readings everywhere but the center were the
same.
“How’s that possible?” he asked.
“It doesn’t make sense, does it?” said Field. “It wouldn’t
just change like that.”
“Probably just an equipment malfunction,” said Altman.
“I’ve been working here a long time,” said Field. “I know
an equipment failure when I see one. This isn’t one. The
anomaly appears both on the satellite images and the
underwater scans, so it can’t be.”
“But how could it change?” asked Altman. “Maybe a
volcanic eruption?”
Field shook his head. “That wouldn’t give this sort of
anomaly. Plus, the other instruments would have sensed it. I
can’t explain it. There’s something wrong,” he said, already
reaching for his phone.
3
As he got closer, Chava became more and more nervous.
It wasn’t a fish or anything like it. It wasn’t a sea turtle or a
dog or a jaguar. He thought maybe it was a monkey, but it
was too big to be a monkey. He crossed himself and then
crossed two fingers for protection, but kept moving forward.
Even before he could see it clearly, he could hear it
breathing. It was making a strange huffing noise, like
someone trying to retch up something he was choking on.
A wave pounded in and for a moment the huffing stopped,
the creature swallowed up by the water and foam. Then the
water ebbed and left it panting on the damp sand. It flopped
over and swiveled something like a head in his direction.
It was like the creature in his dream, but much worse. It
was not human, but seemed as though it once had been
human. Its neck looked like it had been flayed free of skin,
the reddish pith underneath flecked with white splotches,
oozing slowly. What looked to be eyes were only empty
sockets covered with veined, opaque membranes. The
jawbone seemed to have vanished entirely, leaving only a
flap of loose skin and a hole where the mouth should have
been. The huffing noise came from that opening, along with
a bitter, acrid smell that made Chava cough.
The creature was hunched over, its fingers webbed, a
thin leathery membrane running between its elbow and hip
like a bat’s wing. It tried to stand, then fell back again into
the damp sand. There were two large red lumps bigger
than his fists on its back. They were growing.
Mother of God, thought Chava.
The creature gave a sound like a groan, the lumps on its
back pulsing. The bones in its arms cracked, the arms
themselves twisting, becoming less human. It coughed up a
milky liquid that hung in strands from the hole in its face.
The back split open with a loud cracking sound, spraying
blood, and exposing spongy gray sacs that filled and
deflated; filled and deflated.
Chava was unable to move. The creature suddenly
swiveled its head, staring at him with its eyeless face. Its
muscles tightened and the gaping hole pulled back into a
poor imitation of a smile.
Chava turned on his heel and began to run.
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