by Glynn James
Rav’s eyes shot open. He stared out at the metal bars running the length of the car. Some had leather straps fixed to the bars, and in other places, they were missing. The inside of the car was as dark as it was when he fell asleep. Sunlight filtered in through the old broken windows but not enough for him to determine whether it was day or night. Rav drew a deep breath and put his nose in the air. He could not smell the Valk. Their stench had become so identifiable to him in the tunnels that he was certain they were nowhere nearby.
His stomach grumbled, and Rav sat up on the old, moldy mattress. He yawned, unable to tell if he felt rested or not. But he knew he would have given anything for some northern apples and a flask.
“Lots of valuable treasure out there,” he said. “I don’t see why I can’t take me some time to go through it today.”
Rav thought that if others had been close and heard him talking to himself that they would consider him crazy. But then again, Rav never cared for what other people thought.
The Valk ahead of him could turn back, and the Valk behind him could catch up. He could not remember seeing a cross tunnel on his way to this underground cavern. Staying here for any length of time would be risky. Or would it?
Rav used one of the metal bars to pull himself to his feet. He walked to the end of the car, put a hand on the doorframe, and went down the three steps and through the exit. He turned, looking at the other cars parked next to his and the piles of debris spreading into the darkness as far as he could see. Any number of things could be living in there, and Rav knew that one misstep could cost him his life. And still, the mounds of junk beckoned to him. Each artifact told a story, every item part of someone’s life. When they had been assembling the carts to block the pass, Rav had spent countless hours going through what had been left behind. He picked up items, brushed them off, smelled them. He held them up to the sunlight, turning the item over until a story emerged inside of his head. He created faces, names, and fictional lives. Sometimes he shared the stories with the men around the fire, but unless the tales involved spearing fish or women, they had no interest. So, more times than not, Rav kept those stories inside his head.
And now there he stood, on the threshold of thousands of untold stories. He smiled and felt a flutter in his chest. The drama, the mystery, the adventure, all of these story elements, lay buried beneath the rubble of a past age. Now it belonged to him and him alone.
Rav walked alongside the car and deeper into the cavern. He noticed that his car was the first of four that sat connected front to back. He bent down and brushed away some trash to reveal wheels that sat upon the ancient steel tracks. He closed his eyes, caught a whiff of motor oil, and thought about the men who had affixed these tracks to the ground. Where had they found the steel? How had they got it down there? What had they used to nail it to the earth?
His mind raced with all of the possibilities. Questions he could never answer, and yet, the lure of the search for that knowledge was as powerful as the shine in a flask.
Rav kept walking, the thin lines of light above casting enough of a glow for him to see a little way ahead. He could not see the far end of the cavern but the noises he made reverberated throughout the space, giving him the sense that it extended for hundreds of yards. He looked to his left and his right and saw the hulking steel shells of more cars lined up next to his. This place must have been a storage unit for the cars, and yet it had to have been built at least a hundred feet below the surface. Rav shook his head and kept walking, unable to fathom a construction project of that magnitude.
He looked down at items strewn at his feet. Although covered in dust, the junk had survived the centuries, unlike the artifacts left to wither on the cold bare earth above. Rav bent down and picked up a doll. Its arms and legs were missing but a smiling face sat atop a pink plastic torso. He held it up in the air to get a better look at the toy when a slight sound caught his ear. He held his breath, paused, and turned his head from left to right.
There it was again.
The noise was more pronounced this time. It sounded like a branch scraping on the edge of a tin roof in the wind. The air inside the cavern had not changed, and Rav had not detected heavier movements such as those coming from the boots of the Valk.
He dropped the doll and started walking back to his car. He laughed to himself, thinking how comical it was that he had already claimed this relic as his own.
As he approached the steps and climbed back into the car, the scratching noise intensified. What had started out sounding like a single branch now sounded like several. Rav sniffed three times, catching the hint of an odor that hadn’t been there before. He opened his mouth and stuck his tongue out, trying to taste the air. Beneath the bitter tang of limestone dust was the reek of wet fur.
Rav stepped up into the car and turned right to enter the next. His eyes darted around the space, noticing piles of metal stacked on each side of the aisle. He walked faster now, scanning the junk for something he could use as a weapon. At the far end of the car, on the right side, he noticed a long thin metal bar leaning against the door. Rav ran to it and gripped the cold steel in his hands. The bar was about three feet long, and he guessed it had been one of the many thousands of pieces of metal used to assemble the car. It was three inches wide with a dull edge on both sides, but it felt heavy in his hands. If he were to bring this up against the side of someone’s face, it would almost certainly crack their skull.
He looked through a broken window, and for the first time, had a sense of the mysterious force in the darkness responsible for the sounds. He saw a set of beady red eyes moving across a pile of junk on the other side of the car window.
“Fucking sewer rats.”
He knew them better than he cared to admit. During some of the harshest winters, the hunters would leave the pass and come home with skinned carcasses on their belts. They didn’t need to tell Rav that those were not rabbits or squirrels, and the hungry people of his clan never asked. The rumble in his stomach returned, and Rav licked his upper lip.
He ran back to the end of the car and jumped down the steps, running around the front to the other side where he had seen the rodent. He gripped the metal bar and stepped into the darkness.
“Honey, dinner is ready.”
Squealing now accompanied the scratching noises. Rav took a step back as dozens and dozens of red eyes appeared in the gloom. The rats closest to him crawled down from the piles of junk and bared their teeth, hissing. Rav felt the chill of the cart’s metal skin at his back. The stench of wet fur and shit filled his nostrils and made him gag.
He gripped the metal bar until the edges dug into his fingers. The rats surrounding him were as big as coyotes, and when the first few creatures came closer, getting bolder, the others followed.
Within a matter of seconds, Rav was surrounded by a sea of shrieking, hungry rats.
“Fuck me raw. I survive a tumble into the hole and now I’m going to get eaten by a bunch of filthy rats.”
Rav cut the air twice with his metal bar, gritting his teeth against the pain that shot across his chest and his shoulder—his collarbone screaming in protest—but still the rats did not pull back. They inched closer, several now nipping at his boots. He kicked at one, knocking it into the darkness, and three more took its place. The odor was so strong that it brought tears to his eyes. There had to have been hundreds—possibly thousands—of rodents in the cavern.
He was about to turn and run up the steps to take his chances inside the cart when a light cut through the darkness with the intensity of the blazing sun. Rav brought his arm up to his face, squinting and trying to see what was happening. A flaming arrow had lodged in the ground at the base of the steps, and the rats backed away, squealing as if in pain.
A whooshing sound filled the air and another flaming arrow struck the ground. Even the largest of the rats began to retreat into the darkness.
When the third flaming arrow struck the ground several feet from the base of the step
s, Rav smiled. If those had been meant for him, he would be dead and smoldering by now.
Chapter 17
Rav ducked as the fire exploded above his head. Instinctively, he turned his face from the flames and felt the rush of heat on his back. He rolled through the dirt until his elbow struck the steel rail of the cart above him. He blinked twice, rubbing the smoke and dust from his eyes.
“Get up.”
He saw the silhouette of a man through watery eyes. The fire had disappeared, but tiny balls of flame danced across the ground. The arrows continued to smoke, but the man made no attempt to retrieve them.
“I said get up.”
Rav chuckled and then coughed. He looked around and noticed that the rats were gone. “Many thanks, kind sir.”
The man stepped from the shadows. The brilliant whites of his eyes stuck out on a face covered in black soot. Rags hung from his thin body in long, stringy tatters. He gripped a bow in his hands and quiver rested on his back.
“If I have to tell you one more time, I’m going to put an arrow in your heart.”
Rav stood up, brushed off the dirt, and straightened his shoulders. He cocked his head to one side and smiled.
“Now, turn and walk in whatever direction you were headed.”
“Hey, hey. I just want to thank you for chasing away those rodents. I’ve never seen so many fucking rats in all my life. How in the hell are you making fire down here?”
The man lowered his bow. Slightly. “You can’t stay here.”
“So, this is yours?”
“Mine?” The man shook his head and shifted his weight onto his right foot. “It belongs to them. And if you don’t leave now, you’ll belong to them too.”
“Okay,” Rav said. “This ain’t no place for a human to live anyway. How long have you been down here?”
The man’s bow now pointed at the ground, and some of the hardness in his eyes softened. He cleared his throat and opened his mouth slightly, as if it had been so long since he had spoken to another person that he needed time to retrieve the words.
“Long enough.”
“The grumbles. Not sure if you felt it down here or not, but it opened a big-ass breach up on the surface. I fell. When I woke up, I was surrounded by even bigger rats. The Valk.”
The man took a step towards Rav and leaned in. He dropped his voice to a ragged whisper. “You mean the flesh eaters?”
“Yeah,” said Rav. “The pale, creepy, motherfuckers that like to eat other people. The Valk.”
The man looked over one shoulder towards the steel doors at the front of the underground cavern. “Are they following you?” he asked.
“It’s possible. There was a group moving through the tunnels ahead of me and another coming up from behind. I’m pretty sure I stayed ahead of them, but who knows where they’re headed. Maybe they’re hungry for some rat.”
A little hiss came from the darkness followed by some scratching. The man shook his head.
“They smelled you—the rats, and probably the flesh eaters, too. You had to stop. You had to sleep on the mattress. Now I’m going to be dealing with rats for weeks. I think you should leave. Right now.”
Rav looked at the piles of refuse stacked between and around the cars. The sea of rodents had dampened his enthusiasm, but he still felt the strong pull of curiosity. His eyes moved from one dusty, rusted artifact to another. There could be untold treasures here, things that hadn’t been touched by human hands for hundreds of years.
“Maybe I don’t want to. Maybe I want to explore this place a little more.”
“You seem to be doing so well on your own,” said the man. “The rats are just waiting for me to leave. I’m sure you know that. You have a plan for when they return?”
Rav cursed under his breath and put his hands on his hips. “Are you part of a clan? Do you live down here alone?”
The man took another step closer to Rav. His hair swam around his head in a dirty, tangled mess. He smelled of body odor and onion.
“You are from one of the clans on the surface. I don’t know which one, and I don’t care. I have not seen others like you down here, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more coming. I’ve been able to survive below ground. I don’t need anyone’s help. But you do. I don’t want to be wasting my fire on rats for the next three weeks because you’ve gone and rubbed your scent all over the place. So I’m going to make you a deal, because I don’t like to kill other men.”
Rav frowned but let the man continue.
“I will give you information that will almost certainly save your life, and it could save the lives of everyone in your clan. In return, you walk across the tracks and out of the door on the other side of the terminal without turning around. Without coming back for any reason whatsoever.”
The forgotten items scattered through the space began to whisper to Rav inside his head. He felt a magnetic desire to turn his back on Jonah and everything that was taking place in his world. He could be happy down here, exploring for the rest of his days. Even if it meant fighting off the rats, now and then.
“You will die. I see the look in your eye. This place already has a hold on you. I should put an arrow in your chest right now and be done with it.”
Rav shook his head. He looked up to the gray lines of light cutting across the ceiling. Jonah and the rest were somewhere on the other side. They were fighting Cygoa and possibly the Valk. They needed him. They needed what he knew, or at least what he was about to find out.
“Okay. I will leave right now. Tell me.”
The hissing intensified, and the scratching sounds inched closer. The man pulled a leather pouch from beneath his cloak and opened it. He looked inside, using his finger to determine how much of the black powder he had left. The man looked into the darkness and shook his head before turning back to face Rav.
“They’re coming back. And I’m not wasting any more powder on you. Shut your mouth and listen to what I have to say. And when I’m done, you’d better be running for the other side.”
Rav’s tongue stuck to the side of his mouth and his heart fluttered in his chest as a bead of sweat broke on his forehead despite the cool damp air of the cavern. He nodded.
“For some reason, of which I have no knowledge, the flesh eaters have decided to make a play for this world. They are no longer hiding in the shadows or sneaking out at night to steal the corpses of warriors. They are coming, using all the subterranean tunnels that existed before the Dustfall and the ones they created after. Over the past several days, I’ve seen an increasing number of them passing through. Even the rats hide from them.
“Whatever chieftain owns your loyalty, or whatever clan you call your own, it doesn’t matter. The flesh eaters have numbers beyond your comprehension, and they are bringing a dark reckoning upon this world. What I’ve told you probably won’t save your life, and it won’t save the lives of your people. But if you leave right now, and you get out of the tunnels as quickly as you can, maybe you can warn the chiefs of your world and they can run, and keep running. Or they will hold their ground like fools and fall to the flesh eaters. You’d better hope they choose the first. It’s about the only hope they have.”
Rav looked to his left, where the beady red eyes had returned. He reached down and picked up his piece of metal, now a seemingly inadequate piece of protection.
“What if—“
“We had a deal. Leave, right now.”
Rav glanced at the rats and when he turned back around, the man was gone. The hissing grew louder and with it came the stench of wet fur. He ran past the cars, through the piles of junk that would now remain untouched, and toward the exit submerged in darkness at the other side. Maybe one day he could return here. If the treasures of this place had been left alone for this long, they may still be here years from now, but he would not be food for rats or the Valk, and an arrow in his chest was also not an option he wanted to take.
Chapter 18
Rav wondered if maybe his collarb
one wasn’t broken after all. It hurt like a son of a bitch and the skin at the base of his neck had turned purple and black. Some of the other scrapes and bruises had begun to heal, while some remained sore and painful. Rav’s aching muscles reminded him that he wasn’t a young man anymore.
Rav couldn’t remember if two sunsets or three had passed since he had left the mysterious man and the underground rodent colony. The first day after he accepted the stranger’s offer, or during what Rav thought was a 24-hour period, had been spent walking through the utter blackness of the tunnel. His eyes hurt from holding them open; the dust in the tunnel made them red and sore. He stumbled across rocks and into stone walls more times than he could remember. His finger-tips bled from raking them across the ragged rock in a bid to find his way through the darkness.
Rav would not have been able to eat something even if he could see it. Whatever those vile creatures ate, he wanted none of it. At times during his journey, he had caught a whiff of their stench. He knew the contingent of the Valk that were ahead of him in the tunnel had kept moving, and apparently, they had not found any source of food either. Sporadic and light air currents pushed through the tunnel, leading Rav to believe he was close to the surface. But each time the low whistle of the wind subsided, he was left with nothing but his thoughts and fears.