Torrent(77)

“What are you looking for?” Temi asked.
Remembering my original purpose, I leaned in with my flashlight and inspected his teeth. They were white, straight, and uncrowded in his mouth. He had flawless skin as well, aside from a few scars that, as with the first body, appeared to have come in battle.
“Answers,” I said, “but all I have is more questions.”
“About his teeth?” Temi raised her eyebrows.
I sat back on my heels. “I thought that if he had some cavities, it’d be a clue that he was a modern dude dressed to look like a primitive dude. You didn’t see much of that before sugars and processed foods were introduced to cultures around the world.”
“But he doesn’t have any?”
“Nope. Perfect teeth with a jaw large enough to let all his wisdom teeth come in without trouble. Lots of theories on the why, but that’s getting rarer these days.”
“Guys?” Simon said from the end of the chamber where he was staring into the last alcove. He had his hand flat against... nothing. It was as if there were a window there, but I didn’t see any glass. Maybe it was simply too clean and perfect to see from where I stood. The stone columns framing that alcove hadn’t been smashed. “I think these are stasis chambers,” Simon said.
“They’re what?” I asked. “And if the words star or trek come up in your explanation, I’m going to thump you over the head with that big shield.”
Simon had his mouth open, about to launch into his answer, but he closed it and glowered at me before starting again. “In Space Seed, an episode of an excellent but at the time under appreciated space-based adventure show—” I rolled my eyes, but he pressed on, “—a team of genetically engineered super men who’d tried to take over the planet were cryonically frozen and placed into stasis chambers inside a ship that was launched into space. These superior beings were revived by the crew of the Enterprise before the captain realized what they were dealing with.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen it. These guys weren’t frozen though.” I rubbed my fingers at the memory of the lingering warmth of the dead man’s lips.
“That’s just what happened in the story,” Simon said. “Maybe these chambers used some other kind of technology to keep their specimens alive. Alive but in a biologically suspended state.”
“Swords, glowing relics, advanced technology, and robot monsters,” I muttered. “Someone want to let me know whether we’re wandering through a fantasy movie or a science fiction one, because I’m getting mixed messages here?”
Simon shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“I want to know whether we should be looking for a warlock to help us build a magical artifact of doom to destroy the evil wizard behind this or a scientist to construct an electromagnetic field generator to wipe out the nefarious aliens’ super technology.”
This statement earned me blank looks from Temi and Simon. Apparently they weren’t impressed with my tendency to get sarcastic and cranky when the world wasn’t working right.#p#分页标题#e#
Shaking my head, I walked past more destroyed alcoves on my way to look at the undamaged one in front of Simon. I passed three more bodies along the way. One wore the dark garb of a ninja, one had the headdress and jade axe of a Mayan warrior, and one was clad in the helmet and armor of a Roman centurion.
“They’re all from different time periods,” I told Simon. “They couldn’t have been snatched up and frozen here at the same time. Not to mention that they’re all here, thousands of miles from where they’re from. Who would have brought them to Arizona? And for what purpose? I think it’s more likely that...” I rubbed my face. “Ugh, this is sounding more science fiction-y all the time, but maybe someone found samples of DNA and grew them from scratch.”
“Oh, like Jurassic Park,” Simon said.
“Is everything a movie or TV show for you?”
“No... that one was a book. It was a book first, anyway.”
“Maybe if we keep hunting around, we’ll stumble across the secret lab where it was all done,” I said. Not exactly the archaeological find I’d hoped to make down here, but nothing about this day—or week—was going as planned, so I don’t know why I’d expected something different from these caves.
“Oh,” Simon said again, this time with an enthusiastic bounce, “maybe the monster was the scientist’s first creation, and the reason it’s back here destroying everything is because—”
One of the rocks half burying the Roman centurion shifted and tumbled down the pile. I jumped a yard.