Free Threshold by Jeremy Robinson

attack had begun, the valley had fallen silent.
    Bishop sniffed. “I smell the fire.”
    Knight pointed to a wisp of smoke filtering up over the red rock. “I think it’s been put out.”
    Sudden movement brought their weapons to the ready. Both men had opted for small, light UMP submachine guns over their usual specialized weapons. Without the rest of the team in tow, Knight’s sniper rifle and Bishop’s machine gun made a bad combination for standard combat. With fingers on triggers, both men nearly shot the small black-flanked rock wallaby as it hopped from the valley, its eyes wide. The small marsupial paid no attention to the two men it would normally flee from, hopping between them and into the desert beyond.
    Knight took a step forward, but was stopped by Deep Blue’s voice. “Knight, Bishop, you read?”
    “Go ahead,” Knight said.
    “I’m patching Queen through.”
    “Knight, Bish…” Queen was uncharacteristically out of breath. “We arrived too late. Our targets are down.”
    Knight and Bishop both keenly remembered the strength and ferocity of the Neanderthal hybrids and their mothers. “Seriously?” Knight said, keeping his eyes on the valley ahead.
    “Looks like they didn’t stand a chance. Listen, just—” A muffled boom sounded over the headset, followed by Queen’s voice saying Rook’s name. Then she was gone.
    “I’ll try to get her back,” Deep Blue said. “The valley is in shadow with the sun rising so we’re not seeing anything on the visual scan.”
    “Infrared?” Bishop asked.
    “That’s the thing,” Deep Blue said. “I’m not seeing anything other than embers from the fire. Either everyone is gone, or…”
    “Everyone is dead,” Knight finished. “We’re on it.”
    Knight and Bishop crept into the valley, weapons ready. They focused on every crag and shadow where someone could hide. A series of petroglyphs caught Knight’s eye. He looked at the ancient pictographs. Some depicted ancient peoples and animals and others were simple swirling circles that he knew represented a watering hole. His eyes followed a streak of black algae that had grown in a water channel. Halfway up, the dry black surface became wet.
    And red.
    A small trickle of thick blood rolled down the stone and dripped at his feet. “Bishop!”
    He followed the blood trail up and found a dark-skinned arm protruding from beneath a large boulder. It appeared the boulder had fallen on the person, but there were no cliff faces above it.
    Bishop stepped farther into the valley as Knight continued looking at the crushed arm. “That stone must weigh a ton, Bishop. How—”
    “Knight.” Bishop’s voice was quiet, but full of dread, which was an unusual inflection for a man who could not be injured or killed short of decapitation. Sensing the danger had passed, he lowered his weapon.
    Knight joined him at a curve in the valley, which opened up into a large atrium. The back wall, covered in petroglyphs, rose up and hung over a large watering hole. It was fringed by adder’s-tongue ferns and mulga and bloodwood trees. A small clearing held a circle of crushed, smoldering ash. But none of this held their attention. It was impossible to see the beauty of the place amid the sheer carnage.
    Counting the bodies was impossible because many were torn apart and intermingled. Several were squashed, like roadkill—bodies bent, faces twisted in disgust, entrails burst from stomachs. Others lay beneath massive stones, as though they’d fallen from the sky. And one man hung upside down from a tree, twenty feet above the valley floor, his legs bent at impossible angles. Several piles of sandstone dust, now scattering in the breeze rolling down Ayers Rock, were spread among the dead.
    The attack had only lasted a few minutes, but had been brutally efficient, leaving only a single wallaby as an eyewitness.
    Bishop bent down to a severed head and rolled it over with the barrel of his UMP. Ignoring the look of horror