S79 The Horror in the Swamp

by Brett Schumacher

  Standing stock-still, his brain fetched around for the best way to deal with the situation. The snake remained ready to strike if he moved. Its shadow danced on the wall behind it, looking as large as Robert’s thigh. He swallowed nervously and his throat made a little dry clicking sound. The snake turned its head and Robert could see the shape of its head. It was definitely poisonous, but he didn’t know what type of snake it was, Cottonmouth was his first guess, but he didn’t care to know; he only wanted away from it.

  He stretched his lantern hand out to the side very slowly, and the snake’s head swayed as it watched Robert move. He raised the axe, hoping like hell he wouldn’t have to swing it at the snake, and bobbed the lantern to keep its attention fixed.

  It wasn’t his normal practice to back into rooms, but he couldn’t tear his gaze from the huge reptile. No wonder the damn rat darted under the door, he thought, noting the two large bulges near the center of the snake’s coil.

  Thankfully, the door moved easily as his butt made contact. He kept the lantern bobbing gently as he stepped backward. Unfortunately his foot landed on a dead rat, causing him to roll his ankle and stumble. His lantern hand jostled wildly upward as he fought for balance. The snake struck out at the moving lamp. The jolt nearly knocked it from Robert’s grasp.

  The immense and terrifying weight of the snake hit his side, finishing off his balance, and he sprawled backward, the snake partially across his body. Without thinking, he shoved the snake off him and fought to stand, bringing the axe up as the vile creature coiled for another strike.

  The world ceased to matter. That he might be trapped in the building with some military manufactured monster also ceased to matter. Swinging the axe down with all the force he could muster, he hit the snake as it struck again, catching it a foot below the head. The metal plate at the end of the weapon took the brunt of the force and clanged as it hit concrete.

  The snake’s body writhed crazily, causing the nearly severed portion to flip and flap. The body rolled, twisted and coiled in a dying frenzy of self-preservation. Robert brought the axe up again, meaning to finish the job, but the thing would not stop moving. As the footlong portion with the head still attached finally came loose from the body, it rolled to within an inch of his foot, the mouth opening and closing.

  Startled and disgusted, he brought his heel down on the head, screaming as he did so. He kicked the head into the pile of coils, which reacted by enveloping it.

  A violent shudder ran through him. He knew the snake was dead, but it kept moving and that freaked him out and set a dark pall over his expectations for his escape. With things like that running around in the darkness, ready to take him out without warning, he might not survive long enough to ever see the blue skies of Louisiana again.

  Darting back to the overturned lantern, he picked it up and held it aloft. The stench of death was viscous in the room. The smell was so strong it burned his sinuses and his eyes. At the back of the room, under a hip-high counter lay the rotted remains of an alligator. Robert gagged as rats climbed out of its open decaying mouth.

  The belly had been ripped open and then guts were strewn a few feet into the room. The carcass sprawled at an awkward angle as if the spine had been broken. The alligator seemed to vibrate as Robert backed up. For one horrible moment, he expected it to move as the snake had after its head went missing. Instead, a small horde of black, gore-slicked rats exited from its gut and scattered in different directions.

  Bile rose in his throat, choking him, and he fled from the room. Through the door that had stuck open, he could still make out the constant coiling and uncoiling of the snake’s body. As the door’s weight pulled it loose from whatever it had been stuck on, it swung out into the hall, toward him, and in its wake that puke-inducing smell of rotten alligator engulfed him.

  Cursing between dry heaves, he let the axe dangle precariously from his right arm as he moved swiftly down the hall. The dry scraping noise it made as it jangled against the blocks was bad, but he refused to slow down long enough to alter its position.

  The dry heaves subsided, and his stomach haltingly crawled back down to its normal place. He had forgotten about the twine tied at his back until he heard the chittering noise enter the hallway. He turned and the line pulled taut for a split second, and he panicked, swatting at it, grunting loudly. His overheated brain had assured him another snake was at his back.

  The other sound varied in intensity and he couldn’t tell how close the creature was. The chittering escalated to a mind-numbing shriek that hurt his head. He ducked into a room as he doused the lantern flame. He shut the door and fumbled with the lock, feeling a bit better as he heard the click. The shriek faded and his ears rang loudly in the ensuing silence.

  A low whimpering drifted to his ears. It was in the room with him. He looked about in the pitch but saw nothing. It took a few seconds for him to realize the sound was coming from him. Exerting great effort, he choked off the sound and forced his breathing under control. Another truism from his father had been that panic would get him killed, and a calm, level head would see him safely through anything.

  The roll of twine was pinned between his lower back and the wall beside the door. Something tugged the line, pulling it tight and then the rough cord bit into the tender flesh of his side. The tension dropped. He took the ball of twine in hand, set down the lantern, and was turning the axe blade to cut the cord when it pulled tight again. He held it. Something was testing the line the way a fish will test the line before taking the bait. Only, he didn’t want the thing out there to take the bait. The only thing tied to the end of the line was him.

  The axe handle was too long and with his hand still through the loop, he couldn’t maneuver it to do the job. He had to prop the axe against the wall and take out his hand. As he bent to grasp the handle farther down, the line pulled tight again. Heart racing, he grabbed the axe but the follow up yank on the line caught him off balance and he crashed into the door. The ball of twine spun in his hand and the shriek came again.

  Letting go of the ball, he fished out his lighter and set the flame to the knot at the front of his makeshift belt. The cord fell to the floor and immediately spun toward the door, caught, and the line snapped.

  He stood in the dark, afraid to move. The last shriek had been just outside the locked door. Through the small diamond-shaped window, he saw a faint, greenish glow that changed to yellow and back to the green.

  As it passed the door, he tiptoed and got a decent look at the thing. At first, he thought it was walking back toward him, then he realized that it had two heads. Two very human-looking heads. One faced front and the other faced back. It turned sideways to look into an open doorway, and he saw the heads were fused together.

  His jaw went slack and a low humming droned through his head. The creature had two sets of arms, fully articulated, human-looking, and very long. The first set extended from shoulders at the top of the torso exactly where a human’s shoulders would be; the second set of shoulders sprouted from its sides at the bottom of the ribs.

  The long, reptilian tail reached several feet behind it and seemed to float mere inches above the floor, moving back and forth, reminding him of the snake’s movements as it watched the flame of his lantern.

  The greenish-yellowish glow seemed to be coming from just under the skin. Lines ran between joints connecting them with the mutable colors. The face that searched the hallway in his direction was also in constant motion, as if myriad emotions played around with the expression, never settling. At the distance, the eyes looked only like black voids amidst pallid flesh. He couldn’t move without the risk of it seeing him.

  When it stood straight, he gauged the height to be no less than eight feet. The hands were tipped with very long black, shiny nails. Its feet looked like a man’s feet except they had only three large toes protruding.

  The scurrying sounds of claws had to have come from
the hands of the monster. He had no doubt that it could run like an alligator using its deformed feet and two sets of muscular arms. The image of that in his brain was somehow more terrifying than what he was looing at through the window.

  Chapter 7

  It Stares

  With measured strength, he turned the lock and then the knob, pulling the door inward. The abomination had stepped into a room farther down the hall. Robert understood he had to get out of that hallway, or the thing would find him. A close encounter with something so horrifying would drive him insane if he lived through it.

  Without light, he moved more slowly than he wanted, but didn’t want to make any unnecessary noise. High-pitched twittering bounced off the concrete and blocks. Echolocation, he thought, ducking into a room at random.

  The door was off its hinges but there were two large desks. He crawled into the knee hole of the first desk, laid the axe on the floor, and pulled the chair close, hoping it would keep him hidden.

  The scratching of claws lightly caressing metal let him know it was entering the room. He braced, determined not to scream or jump no matter what happened. It stalked to the back of the room and turned. Moving to the other desk, it bumped it. The legs squealed unpleasantly against the floor. He wasn’t sure if it bumped the desk by accident, or intentionally.

  With a growling scream, it shoved the desk violently back and forth. Robert gritted his teeth together and tried to squeeze his eyes shut, but they refused to cooperate. Whatever happened, his body was going to make sure he saw it.

  Something crashed against the back wall and then the creature dragged its nails across the top of Robert’s desk. Then the nails were at his side, scraping down the ultra-thin sheet of metal at the back of the knee hole. He could feel the vibration of the nails on his skin. He pulled gently away from the metal, to keep it from possibly discerning his body heat against the otherwise cold metal.

  There was a brief moment of complete silence and then the desk was being jerked side to side frantically. Balling up, he put his head on his knees and prayed the thing didn’t decide to overturn the desk. Although he held to the chair, in the violence of the attack, the desk hit it. It skittered sideways on broken casters. The desk stopped moving and the creature pounced onto the desk, seizing on the movement of the chair.

  Clamping his hands over his ears, Robert watched as the chair was ripped to shreds. The monster panted for breath when it was finished. He saw it nudge the wreckage with its foot as it chittered. The next time he heard its call, it sounded far off down the hallway and away from the hub room.

  Sneaking out was less difficult than he had imagined. The creature seemed to be frenzied in another room. He wondered if it was attacking another chair. It attacked the movement, just like a damn snake, he noted. It has colors and glows like a deep-sea creature, uses echolocation like a bat, and looks like a badly conjoined set of Siamese twins with an alligator tail.

  He stepped into the hub room and realized he had left his lantern in one of the rooms as he narrowly escaped the monster. Sliding the strap of the duffel over his head, he placed it against the wall near the next set of double doors. He did not tie a line. So far, the halls had proved to be pretty straightforward and there had been no way to really get lost. He didn’t want that thing to be able to trace the line to him.

  Using his trusty Zippo for light again, he moved down the hallway. It veered steadily to the right for a long way and then took a sharp left. From there, doorways lined the wide hall. All the rooms had large windows that faced to the hall. He wasn’t interested in lingering, so he passed up all the doorways and concentrated on finding the end of the hall, where there might be a way out of the hellhole.

  As he moved forward, he realized he could see without the Zippo. Flipping it shut, he looked ahead. A very faint light filtered from above. His heart skipped. He knew it had to be a way out, or at least a way to the upper level. Jogging toward the light, he looked up. Dust motes danced in the beam of illumination. He stepped onto the rubble of broken, crushed concrete and iron bars.

  The floor above had crumbled, falling through the sub-floor’s gridwork of rebar and angle-iron. Though some of the rebar had broken away, leaving gaps in the grid, none were large enough for him to fit through, and the sub-flooring was too high for him to reach.

  He paced a few feet from the rubble and then back to it, looking up each time he neared the light. The angle-iron, to the best of his estimation, was ten or twelve feet high. He paced again, clenching and relaxing his hand.

  After several minutes, he decided to check the rooms for anything he could move, stack or pile under the hole that would lift him high enough to grab hold of the angle-iron. He stepped to the first door. It was twice as thick as the other doors, made of reinforced steel, and painted stark white. He peeked through the window, saw no movement, and pushed open the door.

  The room lay outside the meager circle of light from the hallway, but it filtered in and was enough for him to see that there was only a small, cheaply made set of waiting room chairs. The vinyl and stuffing had been ruined and the springs stuck out of the seats.

  He moved to the next door, took out his Zippo, and opened it carefully. There was a large metal desk against one wall. It would lift him about three feet off the floor. He would still need something to put on top of it.

  Stretching his arms out, he measured the width, and moved to the doorway. It was too wide to simply pull into the hallway. He would have to tip it onto its side and angle it to get it out of the room. That would be too noisy, he feared. The creature seemed to be attracted to noise and movement.

  The next room contained several tall filing cabinets. They were the sturdy kind made of thick metal. Robert grinned and pointed to the cabinets. “You are beautiful,” he whispered excitedly. “Daddy’s getting out of here soon.” He looked up to the ceiling, steepled his fingers, and whispered a thanks to a God he did not believe in.

  The floors in those rooms had been tiled over, as had the walls. Whoever had worked in them had been farther up in the hierarchy than those who had worked in the offices with the rows of desks.

  Only a few broken tiles and mortar dust decorated the tops of the file cabinets. There were no leftover vestiges of the workers in these rooms, either. No potted plants, no files of papers lying out as if someone had been working when the evacuation happened, no coffee mugs or snacks. The rooms were, for lack of a better word, sterile. At one time, at the height of operations, the rooms had also been blindingly white; furniture, tiles, desks, and even the file cabinets were all white. He imagined it might have been due to the lack of natural lighting. The white rooms would have been easier to illuminate as the light reflected from the pale surfaces.

  Setting his lighter on the narrow windowsill, he hurried to the row of cabinets and opened the top drawer. It was empty save a few dead insects. All the drawers had been emptied. It’s my lucky day, I guess, he thought wryly, taking hold of the cabinet.

  H tilted it back to test its weight. Much lighter than he had expected. Dragging it out into the floor, he looked back to gauge the distance to the doorway. He bear hugged the tall cabinet, lifted it and walked it into the hall. Each time he took a step, there was a low, hollow thud as his leg made light contact with the hollow cabinet.

  He had to move slowly to keep the noise to a minimum. The next obstacle would be where to set the cabinet. The pile of rubble prevented placing it directly under the hole in the ceiling. Moving the broken pieces of concrete would take forever, and he didn’t know how long he had before the monster came searching for him in that hallway.

  He glared angrily up at the hole. Salvation so close, yet so very, very far out of reach. He wondered how many more obstacles would be thrown his way. Pissed off, he turned and stalked toward the room to retrieve his lighter. The lighter fluid was running low and he didn’t want to waste any unnecessarily.

  Holding t
o the door jamb, he leaned in and flipped the lid closed and pivoted back out into the hallway facing the lone, out of place cabinet near the light shaft. The paleness of the light led him to believe it was just before sunrise. There was a peachy glow to the light and that meant it came from the sun. He had seen it many times in the predawn hour while on hunting trips with his father. The light from the moon always looked colder and had a silvery cast to it.

  He meandered back to the pile of debris, resolved to the task of moving just enough to allow the cabinet to stand under the opening. Here goes nothing, he thought. Bending to pick up the first piece of broken concrete, he heard stealthy movement in the hallway behind him.

  His stomach knotted and his palms sweated as his ears pricked to the odd sound. He didn’t move. He didn’t dare. The light from above washing over him like a mild spotlight suddenly felt dangerous. He was exposed standing there bent at the waist.

  The sound came again, almost too quiet to be heard. A claw trailing along cinderblock walls. It was the creature. The sweat on his skin turned icy and his lungs burned. Adrenaline dumped into his system as he slowly turned only his head to see.

  He caught the tip of the tail sliding around the doorway into the room of file cabinets. Not realizing he even meant to move, Robert panicked as he realized he was running full tilt toward that room. He could see the faint glowing outline of the creature. The backward facing head made eye contact with him as he executed a lunge inside the room to grab the doorknob.

  The thing’s eyes grew round and it opened its mouth, showing a full compliment of sharp teeth. The scream it let out was ear-shattering. Robert leaped back into the hallway, slamming the door shut.

  The monster turned, all four arms outspread, fingers curled into hooks. It flung itself into the glass and Robert screamed, shielding his face with his arms. It hit the glass again and a crack started in the top right corner. Thanking the engineers who invented the glass with wire inside, he let his arms fall to his sides. The creature stopped pummeling the glass and let its arms fall to its sides, too, imitating Robert’s posture.