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.