Chapter 10: Ruins

White stretched to the horizon. At first glance, it felt like standing among the clouds. During the coldest months of the year, even the rocks and trees wore a coating of white frost. In this wilderness battered by wind and snow, a small wooden cabin could just be made out on a hillside, half buried in snow.

Inside, Old Rohl sat beside the fireplace, wiping down the hunting rifle in his hands, his most faithful and familiar companion. He had kept hunting dogs when he was young, but a dog's life was far too short to keep its master company for long. His wife had died young, and his son and daughter-in-law had been killed for joining a resistance organization. Only this rifle remained to keep him company in his old age.

The irony was that a hunting trip a year ago had left him blind in his right eye, turning the rifle into little more than an ornament. A crack shot who had spent his whole life closing his left eye to aim could now barely hit a target within twenty meters.

Fortunately, Charles had inherited the Rohl family's unerring aim. The boy had astonishing talent. His grandson, all right. The old man often indulged in these smug little thoughts, though he rarely praised Gunsmith to his face.

A sudden knock came at the door. The old man put down the rifle and went to open it, naturally assuming that Gunsmith was back from hunting. Sometimes the boy had his hands too full to turn the handle.

A wooden bar lay across the back of the door to keep out the wind and snow. The old man lifted it off and opened the door, only to find something he hadn't expected.

“Achoo!” John sneezed so loudly he sounded as though he were trying to blast his lungs out.

The sneeze woke Gunsmith. He shook his head to clear away the dream, then sat up and looked around. As his vision cleared, he was startled by what he saw.

He and John were in a room with four black metal walls. Numerous murals and inscriptions shone blue-green from within the walls.

“Where are we?” Gunsmith asked.

John was standing by one wall, studying the writing on it. “No idea. I haven't been awake long either.” He paused, apparently to finish reading the passage before him. “When I first woke up, I thought aliens had captured me. But after reading some of the writing on these walls, I'm fairly sure this was built by a human civilization.”

Gunsmith recalled what had happened just before he lost consciousness, then suddenly understood. “That's right! The underground ruins!” he exclaimed.

John turned. “What did you say? Ruins?”

Gunsmith told him about the ground rising and the pyramid tip he had unearthed, then explained how the bone gun worked and what had happened when its shot struck the unknown metal shell.

Before John could digest all this, Gunsmith continued, “The river wasn't very deep, so a whirlpool was unlikely. When I saw it, I wondered whether something unusual had happened on the riverbed. I didn't think of underground ruins then either. With so little time to think, all I could imagine was some kind of device on the bottom creating the whirlpool, so I fired…” He stood up. “Now I get it. The ruins must have been affecting the river, and the bone gun punched through their metal exterior. The whirlpool got bigger, and we ended up inside.”

John stared for a few seconds, then asked, “That can't be right… If this place is directly beneath the riverbed, and it rose out of the ground and affected the river like you said, where did all the water go? The river water that came in with us, the silt, the pieces of the raft—where did they all go? Besides, this room is only a few dozen cubic meters. If water really came pouring in, a space this small would fill up in no time. How could it keep producing a whirlpool?”

Gunsmith looked up and replied, “The ceiling's intact. There's no sign of a hole from the bone gun, so this clearly isn't where we first came in.” He thought as he spoke. “Hmm… Maybe after the current swept us into the ruins, some force moved us again and brought us to this room.”

John spread his hands. “All right, then… A mermaid? Or some kind of drainage filter designed specifically for living things?”

Gunsmith chuckled at the joke. “Heh… You can hang on to both theories until we find out the truth.”

John went back to studying the murals. “That machete you just made is gone again. Do you still have the things you were carrying?”

Gunsmith checked. Everything he had kept on his person was still there, but the bone gun he had been holding when he lost consciousness was gone. “This isn't good. I've lost my gun. Making another won't be easy.”

John said, “Have you got anything else useful?”

“Of course. Provided you can find a machine here that takes credit cards.” Gunsmith really was at a loss. His wallet, utterly useless in their present circumstances, had stayed with him the whole time.

“I have to say, things look pretty bad, Charles. We've got no food or water, and we're boxed in by iron on all six sides. Even if you can use your ability to punch a hole through, we don't know what's on the other side. Water might come flooding in, or there might be nothing but earth outside, with us buried hundreds of meters underground,” John said.

Gunsmith was more optimistic. “Hmph… If there's a way in, there has to be a way out. There must be some kind of mechanism here.” He had already begun feeling along the walls as he spoke. “To be honest, I'm not even sure these are ruins. When I dug up that pyramid tip, I thought there'd be a huge structure underground. But now that I'm in this room, I can breathe freely, the temperature's comfortable, it's very dry, and there's light. For all we know, this is some resistance organization's underground base, or a secret Imperial research facility in the jungle.”

John added, “Or a military installation aliens buried underground tens of millions of years ago, waiting for the day they can come up and wipe us out with this stuff.”

“Isn't that a movie?”

“Yes. I like that movie. Know why? Because the main character is still alive at the end.”

Gunsmith had made it halfway around the room. “Have you figured anything out from that writing?”

He had expected more idle nonsense from John, but to his surprise, John suddenly answered in complete seriousness. “Yes. These really are ancient ruins. They belong to the Olmec civilization.”

Gunsmith turned. “You really can read the writing on the walls?”

John said, “There's something I want to confess. My expedition team isn't the sort that climbs mountains, treks through forests, takes a few pictures and brings home some local souvenirs. Our work is more focused on archaeology.”

Gunsmith shrugged. “Why not just say you rob tombs?” He showed little reaction, but inwardly he was quite surprised.

Gunsmith suddenly realized that you really couldn't trust people too readily. He had known John for less than two days, but he had saved the man's life, after all. He had done more than enough for him throughout their struggle to survive and had shared quite a lot of what he knew. Yet John, who had been on the verge of falling apart several times, had been hiding his true identity and purpose all along.

“So… You came here looking for this whatever-mec?” Gunsmith asked.

John shook his head. “No, this wasn't our original objective. The Olmec civilization was supposed to be in Central America. I'm surprised to find this writing here, under these circumstances, too. In fact, I can't fully decipher it either. I just happened to read a paper once by some professor at the University of Florida that mentioned the relationship between Mayan writing and the Olmec.

“Leaving that aside, even if a branch of their civilization really did reach this deep into the South American jungle, as far as I know, the Olmec civilization dates back to more than a thousand years BC and is the oldest known civilization in the Americas. All the ruins and artifacts discovered so far suggest that their civilization never advanced beyond the Stone Age. So this room we're in…”

Gunsmith finished for him. “You're saying aliens built it?”

John said, “I'm only proposing a theory.”

Gunsmith said, “If your theory holds up, you can give up tomb robbing. Go home, publish a paper, piece together a convincing story about what happened thousands of years ago, and use the same theory to explain the later Mayans' achievements in astronomy while you're at it. I reckon if you bring back a few things from here as evidence, you'll get a Nobel Prize as soon as the paper comes out.” He suddenly froze, then added, “Uh-oh…”

At that “uh-oh,” John immediately knew something was about to go wrong. Gunsmith must have triggered some mechanism. “What happened?” he asked hurriedly.

Before Gunsmith could answer, the floor beneath them lit up, and blue-green light swallowed the entire room…