Chapter 1 (Rough Draft)

The sun was insanely hot that day, and David was silently cursing himself for being talked into this. He could be back in Moab, sitting at home and playing his Playstation. Instead he was trudging through the backcountry of Eastern Utah, looking for bones. Or rather, helping his cousin Joshua look, because quite honestly, he didn't know what he was looking for.

"I don't think we're going to find anything over here, this area seems to be pretty well picked over. Let's hike back to the car, and check further up 151."

"It's too hot, why don't we check back later. Aren't we supposed to wait until after it's rained, or something like that?" David took his cousin's discouragement to try to talk him into going back to town. "If you just need cash, I can lend you some."

"It's not that, I got a tip that there was something I wanted to see in a cave, or depression or something near here, the guy seemed a bit crazy, but I got a feeling, you know."

"Hell, why didn't you say so, there's a cave back a ways, down the canyon". David had been regretting not stopping, and taking shelter in the cave the moment he walked past it, it had been nearly all he thought about.

"Well, I'm not finding anything here, let's go back and look." The fact of the matter, Josh did need the money, and for him, a decent haul of tourist-quality fossils was a quick way to make some cash. In any case, it was better than working, and Josh had always had good luck when going out hunting for them. Up until now, today had been one of those days. They had left Moab very early in the morning, the idea being to get as much of the hard hiking in before the afternoon heat wave. Instead, they had found nothing; so here they were, miles from the truck trudging through backcountry with nothing to show for it except mild heat exhaustion.

Still, as soon as they re-entered the canyon, Joshua began to feel better, as they descended the steep-sided canyon, they were quickly shaded from the sun, and the temperature dropped ten degrees. The floor of the canyon was mostly dried mud, with drifts of fine sand and other debris left during last-season's periodic flash floods. Josh always liked hiking the canyons the best. This part of Utah was mostly made of of sedimentary and metamorphic rock, with intricate layered patterns that became visible when the rock was cut by canyons. The flash flooding scoured and polished the canyon sides, turning them into natural sculptures.

As they descended further down the canyon, Joshua began to get that feeling he always got when he was fossil-hunting, the slight dizzy, tingling sensation, like he stood up too fast.

"The cave is around here, isn't it?", Joshua asked, despite already knowing the answer.

"Yeah, it is. If you saw it coming in, why didn't you stop then?"

"I didn't see it, I've just got a feeling right now"

As they rounded particularly sharp turn in the canyon, Joshua saw it. It was obvious why he missed it coming in the first time, it was half buried with boulders, obscuring the entrance unless you looked at it from just the right angle. As they neared the entrance, something was wrong. The boulders didn't match the walls of the canyon, in fact, they didn't match any of the rocks in Eastern Utah.

"That's weird"

"What's wrong? Is this the wrong cave or something." David had a sinking feeling, God, we're going to have to go back, and keep hiking. "If this isn't it, I'm going home. I can hear Madden calling to me from here."

"No it's not that, these rocks are granitic, they must have come from the mountains somewhere."

"So?"

"So, they're huge. The only way they could have been brought here would be in a massive flood, which I think we would have heard about, as Moab would likely have been under water for months." Joshua didn't understand it, the only other option was a glacial erratic, a boulder transported from the mountain eons ago by a glacier when the area was covered in miles of ice. The problem was that the last time Eastern Utah had been under a glacier had been during the XXX Ice Age XXX years ago. These boulders didn't show any of the weathering that you would see in an erratic that old.

"Couldn't they have been buried, and then exposed last spring? Don't they look embedded into the canyon wall?"

"I guess, still that doesn't seem right."

David shrugged his shoulders and began scrambling up, over, and around the boulders, until he was in front of the cave entrance. "Whatever, let's check this cave out." David took one last jump, and then disappeared into the entrance.

"Hold up, I'm coming, just wait a minute!" Joshua was careful to leave a large red handkerchief weighed down in plain site. If they got stuck, or something worse happened, when Sam came looking for them, she'd be sure to see it. He then followed David's path over the boulders and hopped down to the cave entrance.

Although he hadn't brought much safety gear (he had intended this to be a scouting mission, and not to go too far into the cave system), Josh had been careful to bring a couple of headlamps, and some basic climbing gear. He fitted the lamp's elastic band around his head, and snapped it on.

The cave walls were high, probably 20 or 25 feet at least, and the walls were surprisingly narrow. If he held out both hands, he could touch both sides. The cave travelled back at an angle from the entrance, then appeared to stop about 25 paces back.

"David!" Joshua couldn't see him anywhere, he seemed to have disappeared completely.

"What?" David poked his head around a wall at the far end. The cave didn't stop, but took a sharp turn deeper into the side of the canyon.

"You want a headlamp? I brought one for each of us"

"Sweet! I can't see a thing back here."

Joshua caught up to his friend then offered him the other lamp. While David was putting it on, Josh continued deeper into the cave. The cave took a perfect right angle from the cave entrance, then the floor dipped down.

"What the... David take a look at this."

David turned around, to see what his friend was pointing at.

"Tell me those aren't stairs."

"So what, someone had obviously been here before, didn't you say some crazy guy told you about this place?" David was puzzled, but didn't think much of it.

"Well, yeah, but I don't see how he could have made these."

"Maybe we're in a top secret bunker that's been disguised to look as a cave from the outside. We're probably being watched in Langley right now, any minute black helicopters are going to land outside and we'll be whisked away, never to be seen again. And that crazy guy is an escaped test subject for their diabolic mind control experiments."

"Very funny." Joshua pushed past David, and started down the stairs, or whatever they were.

As he continued down, things got even weirder. At the entrance, the cave looked like any other cave, the walls and floor had the light sheen of mineral deposits left by millennia of water trickling down the sides. However, deeper in the cave the walls were perfectly flat, with a polished texture.

"Is it me, or are these walls concrete?" Joshua knew the answer before he asked it. They were. Someone must have built a weird kind of bunker out here in the middle of nowhere. Joshua didn't like it. Ok, why would there be bunker out here? Not any nearby missile silos that I know of, the Air Force Academy is in Colorado Springs, maybe uranium? There were uranium mines all over the area. One of the biggest had been shut down in the 80s. The newspapers were always full of doom and gloom stories about the irradiated mining tailings and other refuse that had be left behind. The clean-up process was still going on, with no end in sight. Still, they were quite far from the area of uranium deposits. Joshua had hiked this area for years, there had never been any mines here as far as he knew. There would have been roads, signs, fences, and likely guard posts as well. Even the mines that had shut down were kept closed off to make sure no one got ahold of any of the uranium that remained. Still, he wasn't sure. "You don't think this could be an old uranium mine, or something?"

"No way, if it was, we wouldn't have been able to get anywhere near it."

"I guess you're right, just keep an eye out for any signs or anything that might tell us what this is."

Joshua and David continued creeping down the hallway. Slowly the air changed in quality, nearer the entrance, it had the traditional, damp, cool feeling of the caves in the area, but as they continued down, the air became drier, and more dusty, closer to the smell of an old wine cellar, or a disused attic. The hallway continued for some distance, the same blank walls slowly disappearing into darkness.

After a few minutes of running in a straight line, the hallway took another hard right, and descended another flight of steps. This time there was no hallway however, instead they saw something they hadn't expected. The stairs ended at short landing that continued a short distance, then stopped dead at a huge metal door. There no visible handles, but it was clearly a door. Three huge hinges hinted at the incredible weight they must carry. The whole piece was so well fitted to the frame it was almost impossible to make out the joints between the door and the frame, but it was definitely a door.

Joshua and David didn't see this however, not at first. Instead they were stopped short by something more unexpected, and much more interesting. Huddled at the base of the door was a skeleton. Or two skeletons, actually; two skulls could clearly be seen, one looked to be a child's by its size compared to the other. Whatever they had been wearing had long since decayed away, leaving only scattered buttons, and other unidentifiable scraps.

"Holy..."

"Jeez, what the hell?" The first instinct Joshua had was that they had stumbled on some sort of burial chamber. He knew the Anaszi had lived in the area, and they often built their homes into cliff faces. Almost immediately he knew that was wrong, although their name means "Ancient Ones" in Navajo, they hadn't moved into the area until 400 AD, and then left around 1400 when climatic changes made their form of agriculture less productive. These bodies seemed much older than that. The cold, dry conditions had partially mummified the bodies, still they had almost completely decomposed. The skin was highly desiccated, and stretched tightly across the rib cage.

While Joshua was pondering the age of the skeletons, David appeared to answer that question immediately. "We'd better call the cops."

"Why? More an anthropologist, these skeletons are ancient"

"No they're not. Look at the buttons, these are modern. In fact what's this, some kind of cell phone?" A few feet away, David picked up some kind of small hand-held device. It was black, and quite obviously made from plastic, although heavy for its size. It didn't have any obvious face, buttons or other markings, just smooth, polished plastic on both sides.

"What the hell is this?" Joshua bent over the skeletons and retrieved a small object that looked to be a toy water gun for all intents and purposes. It definitely was a gun, it had an obvious handle and a trigger right where one should be. It fit perfectly in Joshua's hand, and his hand felt warmer and tingled slightly just holding it.

"This is weird, there's no cavity in the barrel, it's just solid."

"So it's a toy gun, big deal"

"No, it's way too heavy to be a toy gun, and I don't know, it just feels a bit... funny"

"Funny? What do you mean fu..."

Joshua fiddled with the gun, pointing it at the door and pulling the trigger. There was a huge flash, and ear-splitting boom. A cloud of dusk exploded around them. Their headlamps sparked, then went out, and Joshua and David were plunged into darkness, blind and choking back a cloud of dust.

Prologue (Rough Draft)

It was a box. Just a box like any other box. It was larger than most boxes, but it was definitely a box. It had eight corners, a top and bottom, and four sides, with peeling tape holding the whole contraption together. In fact, it looked so worn and feeble that it was impossible to believe what was inside. Inside was the perfectly preserved skull of an Utahraptor. For the fossil hunters who found it, that alone was enough. It was perfectly preserved, and fully intact, except for two smallish holes below the right eye. Those holes brought this group of people together. Those holes changed the skull from a simple, albeit perfect Utahraptor specimen, into something new, something wonderful, something dangerous. Stephen Brett was the paleontologist, and expert in carnivores of the Cedar Mountain Formation, where the skull was found. Andrea Austin was his graduate student and assistant. Maurice Tenbrink, carbonate stratigrapher & sedimentologist. Fossil Expert, Radiological Dating Expert, Artist, Forensic Expert. If it wasn't for those two holes, the forensic expert wouldn't have been needed. Those two holes were unnatural, those two holes shouldn't have been there, to all trained eyes, those two holes looked like bullet holes.

"Shall we open it?"

"I'm sure she was wrong."

"Susan has very rarely been wrong."

"But what she's saying is impossible."

"We all know it's impossible, but I've never known her to be wrong."

"She is now."

"Yeah."

It was no longer a box. The tenderly clinging tape had been cut back, the box had been unfolded, revealing a core of grey foam. Inside that cold block was what they were all here to see, they held their breath, simultaneously wishing to pull the foam away, simultaneously wishing they had never seen the box before. Here they were, all of them, having to see if it was possible, and yet knowing that it was a fool's errand, their reputations would be damaged if not ruined. Their funding would dry up, their colleagues would shun them, those without tenure would lose their teaching positions, and quite possibly those with tenure as well. And yet they were here. Here to see the box opened up to reveal the grey block of foam, and the grey block of foam split and opened to reveal the perfect Utahraptor skull. Perfect, except for two small holes.