Primal Fear

by Boucher, Brad

His eyes opened again, this time showing a spark of awareness, finally coming to rest on Harry. At first there didn’t seem to be any sign of recognition, just a numb stare, as if everything he’d ever known and learned had been taken from him. But then, as Harry watched, he saw the sharpness returning to the young man’s gaze.

  “Mahuk . . .”

  John spoke slowly, softly, as if testing the fragile connection he’d shared with the old man and confirming it had been severed. “Mahuk is dead.”

  Harry nodded. “You were, too, for a few seconds there.”

  John reached out, grasping Harry’s shoulder. “Help me up,” he muttered, grunting with the effort as Harry complied.

  “Are you sure you should—”

  “There’s no time. We have to find Wyh-heah Qui Waq. We have to . . . find it right now.”

  “Charlie’s in trouble. I have to go back and help him.” He steadied John against the cavern wall, moving quickly to pick up the radio.

  “Charlie? You there?” He made his way back in the direction of the hole in the floor as he waited for a response. The seconds stretched on, but still Charlie didn’t answer. He was about to try again when the sound of a gunshot echoed through the cavern. A second quickly followed, a third coming four or five beats later.

  “Charlie, what’s going on down there? Come in!” He squeezed the radio, as if willing it to respond. The opening in the floor loomed a quarter of a mile away now, and Harry made his way towards it as quickly as he dared. He looked back once to see John calling out to him, trying to wave him back.

  “What do you want me to do?” Harry shouted. “Leave him alone down there?”

  “We have to go on.” John’s voice was hoarse, tinged with resignation and exhaustion. It was clear that he was in bad shape, maybe even on the verge of another collapse. But he was not about to give up. “It’s trying to stop us,” he warned. “We can’t let it.”

  Harry turned away and broke into a run, no longer concerned with the rough terrain, only worried now about reaching Charlie in time.

  He reached the hole in the cavern floor just in time to see the shivering beam of a flashlight flicker past the opening from below, swinging wildly around in the lower chamber.

  “Charlie!” he shouted. “Are you okay?” He dropped to his knees, swung his flashlight down into the chamber. He could make out the silent circle of children below, but nothing else.

  “Charlie?”

  Charlie stepped into view. His face was perfectly white, and he was shivering uncontrollably, his gun still clutched tightly in his right hand. Harry could see blood on his neck and hands, and the front of Charlie’s jacket was torn in too many places to count.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I think so. I think my coat took the worst of it. But . . . it’s gone now. It just . . . disappeared.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know, Chief. It came . . .”

  He swallowed, struggling to get the words out. “It came out of one of the kids. That one.” He pointed towards one of the bodies, the one closest to the back of the chamber.

  “But what was it? What did it look like?”

  Charlie just shook his head. “It was white, like . . . like smoke, and it came straight out of her chest. Straight through the skin.”

  Harry flashed his light on the body. “There’s no wound. There’s nothing.”

  “It was there. I saw it.” Charlie looked straight up at Harry, his eyes glassy, wide with shock. When he spoke again, his voice sounded flat, his tone slow and even. “What is this shit we’re doing? What’s going on here, Harry?”

  “More than I have time to explain,” Harry said, sorry he’d ever involved his deputy in any of this. “Come on. We have to keep moving.”

  He reached down, offering Charlie his hand. “I’ll help you up. And I’ll try to fill you in as we go.”

  Charlie extended his arm, about to grasp Harry’s hand, but something seemed to lure his attention back toward the children.

  “Harry,” he said quietly. “Listen . . .”

  “Let’s go. We don’t have time—”

  “I hear it. It’s happening again.” Charlie took a step backward, away from the hole, away from Harry’s outstretched hand. “Oh, good lord . . .”

  “Take my hand,” Harry ordered, but then he heard it, too, the dry rustling of leaves, a soft rattle of movement.

  He lowered the flashlight again, centering it on the circle of children.

  The flashlight’s beam revealed nothing, only managing to illuminate the five tiny bodies of the children. In the glare of his light, with the shadows playing grotesquely across their pale faces, they looked like they’d been made up, as if someone had applied garish amounts of cosmetics to each of them. For all Harry knew, they could be pretending, playing dead for their own twisted, childish entertainment.

  But no, he’d seen them. He’d seen their faces. Their expressions, slack and lifeless . . .

  The sound came again, from within their circle, or perhaps even from its center. Either way, he couldn’t make out its source from his position in the chamber’s ceiling.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and climbed down through the hole, dropping to his feet on the chamber’s floor.

  Charlie backed off again, taking another step away from Harry and the children. He raised his gun in one shaking fist. “No. Oh no.”

  Harry tried to ignore him, switching the flashlight to his left hand to draw his own weapon with his right. His eyes never left the circle of children, the beam of his light held steadily upon them, hoping to pinpoint whatever lurked in their midst.

  “Charlie, talk to me. Is this the same thing? Is this what happened before?”

  “Yeah,” Charlie confirmed. “Another one is coming.”

  Harry edged closer to the children, trying not to look into their eyes, peering instead at the ground between them. He sensed no movement now, nothing out of the ordinary. But he’d heard something a moment ago. He couldn’t argue with that.

  But now there was nothing.

  Only his own tense breathing, the beating of his heart. He sighed, ready to turn back to find Charlie, his nerves already beginning to relax.

  And this time it was the act of motion itself that caught his attention, not merely the sound of it.

  His gaze was snagged by something moving upon the chest of the child directly opposite him. He leaned toward her, examining the movement more closely, unable to make out anything at all that might be crawling over her.

  The movement came again and he stepped back in shock and revulsion.

  It was the flesh itself that was moving, rippling under some unseen touch, as if an invisible hand had reached out to caress her icy skin. He watched in sick fascination as her flesh continued to writhe, the area of motion spreading outward, growing slowly larger.

  “What the . . .”

  He brought his flashlight to bear on the child, his eyes fastened to her chest. His head moved from side to side in mute denial, a tremor of fear running through his limbs.

  Whatever this was, he tried to tell himself it couldn’t be happening. The girl was dead, had been that way for quite a while, from the look of her. So then how could—

  He remembered Marty Slater’s body. That had been dead, too, and it had still raised itself up and come after him.

  The child’s flesh began to bulge outward, tentatively at first, as if whatever lay beneath was testing the limits of its confines. It expanded more steadily now, the pressure behind it increasing, and Harry became certain it would burst at any moment.

  And for one brief moment the girl’s skin was stretched so taut he could make out the shape of what lay beneath it. His mind revolted at the sight, his thoughts already beginning to deny it, but there was no use in denouncing what his eyes told him was already there.

  It was a tiny hand that pushed against the flesh, one that appeared to have only four fingers, each one unnaturally longer than it should hav
e been. Seconds later the notion was confirmed as the hand forced its way through, puncturing the flesh in an invisible wound, one that refused to bleed. The girl’s skin settled back into its original position, its surface unbroken, not even marked, as if whatever was slowly reaching out of her chest had suddenly become immune to the laws of solid matter.

  It continued to reach slowly outward, a long thin arm so white that it seemed to glow in the beam of the flashlight. Its fingers clawed at the air, as if hoping to speed the process of its own birth, hungry to be free of the child’s flesh. The arm terminated at a bulbous shoulder, emerging from the girl’s body at the same slow pace. Its white skin slid grotesquely upon its emaciated frame, and Harry felt bile rising in his throat as he realized that he could see through the creature’s arm, that he could make out the floor of the cavern beyond the thin veil of its flesh.

  It was almost as if the thing’s skin had somehow been composed of smoke, just as Charlie had said, pulled impossibly into solid form and yet still retaining its inherent translucence. And now, as it continued to rise out of the girl’s chest, Harry could indeed believe it was a sort of living smoke, slowly taking form before his eyes.

  He sensed new movement to the left and looked in that direction just in time to see the flesh of another child beginning to ripple. Within seconds, his worst fears were verified as he found similar signs of motion upon each of the remaining children. All of them were taking part in this strange birthing, each in a different stage of the process.

  His eyes flicked back to the first body, where the beginnings of a face were rising from the rippling flesh. At first its features were barely discernible, little more than a malformed arrangement of flesh and bone that seemed to resemble the basic shape and construction of a human face. But the more it freed itself from the body of its host, the more distinct its features became, until it finally bore a passable resemblance to the child who had given life to it. Each of the facial characteristics was grossly deformed, however; the mouth far too wide for the lower half of the face; the eyes set too far apart, one barely half the size of its gaping twin; the nose nothing more than a twisted clump of withered flesh in the center of its face.

  And all of it was completely white, a perfectly colorless pallor that looked more dead than alive.

  The eyes locked onto Harry, twin pools of blackness that regarded him with a glare of pure malice, pure hatred.

  It was all Harry could take. The sight of those eyes, impossibly alive, impossibly human, snapped him out of his paralysis. He began to back away, holding his gun steadily out in front of him.

  “Up into the hole, Charlie. Nice and slow, and we’ll be all right.”

  But Charlie refused, stepping even further away from the hole in the ceiling. “Jesus, Harry, what’s going on here?” His words came together in a frightened rush as panic began to take hold of him.

  The first creature had almost freed itself completely from its host, its eyes never leaving Harry, never even blinking. It watched him the way a predator watches its prey just before it strikes. One of its legs emerged, a sickly white limb that was jointed backwards at the knee, its foot a shrunken mass of dead flesh.

  Harry inched closer to the hole. He pushed the handle of the flashlight up under the arm that held the gun, its barrel still trained on the creature. His free hand slid slowly into his jacket and tugged out the radio.

  “John, are you there? Come in . . .”

  He waited for a reply, counting off the seconds until he’d be directly beneath the hole and up into the empty darkness of the tunnel.

  If it let him get that far.

  The first creature passed completely out of the child’s body. It stood in the center of the circle, its body hunched and deformed, its black eyes staring up at Harry with a frightening glint of intelligence. Its legs were tensed, its long arms hanging still at its sides, fingers raking the air silently.

  Harry froze, his gun still pointed toward the creature. He didn’t want to alarm the thing, didn’t want to trigger an attack with any sudden movements. And just before he clicked off the safety, the creature made its move. It lunged up from its spot on the cavern floor, catching Harry in the middle of his chest, just below his outstretched gun hand.

  Already, he could feel its claws tearing into him . . .

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Harry tried to shove the thing off of him, repulsed by its touch, by the way his own fingers seemed to sink into its white, slick flesh. Its skin writhed beneath his fingers, slick and wet like rotting meat, but he held on. And slowly, very slowly, he began to pull the thing off.

  It screeched in his grip, a high-pitched, unearthly squeal of rage, and it took every bit of Harry’s strength to finally push it away from him. It hit the cavern floor beside him, lost its footing and stumbled for a moment, long enough for Harry to roll clear of it.

  He scrambled to his feet, risking a glance toward the bodies of the children. Three more of the creatures were emerging, one from each of the remaining children. The awful process of birthing was a slow one, and Harry realized his only hope was to exploit that weakness.

  He had to move fast, had to get back up into the hole in the ceiling before the other three creatures were free. Sighting the first one as it turned towards him once again, Harry leveled his gun and squeezed the trigger.

  The shot went wide, screaming off of a rock to the creature’s right, and the thing changed its strategy. It charged Charlie instead, its body a sudden blur of motion, moving much too quickly for Harry to draw a bead on it.

  “Charlie, watch out!”

  But it was too late. The creature leaped at his deputy, catching him by the throat and bringing him down hard in the middle of the chamber’s opening. He struggled against it, screaming in panic, his legs flailing wildly on the cold stone floor.

  Harry eyed the other three creatures, checking the progress of their birth. Two of them were more than halfway out, the third just starting to free its bulbous head. He weighed his chances, understanding that if he crossed the chamber to come to Charlie’s aid, then neither of them would make it back into the upper cavern to help John.

  Holding his position, he dropped to one knee, aiming as carefully as he could, the gun held firmly in a two-handed grip.

  “Get its head up!” he shouted.

  Charlie tried to comply, his arms shaking with the strain of the creature’s strength.

  Harry peered through the gloom, waiting for the moment when he could take the shot without the risk of hitting his deputy.

  The struggle went on for another thirty seconds, and finally, rolling himself over onto his belly, Charlie gained the upper hand. Trapped beneath him, the thing squealed in pain, digging its claws deeply into the soft flesh of Charlie’s hands, raking bloody furrows into his skin.

  But Charlie never let up. Holding the thing firmly by the throat, he picked up a chunk of rock with his free hand and brought it down with all his strength onto the creature’s head. It screamed in agony, but its attack didn’t seem to slacken at all.

  Charlie lifted the rock, brought it down again and again, until finally the creature wasn’t moving at all. He struggled to his feet, dropping the rock onto the lifeless carcass.

  And when he turned, holding his bloody hands out in front of him, his eyes grew wide again. “They’re coming out, Harry,” he moaned. “Oh shit, they’re almost out.”

  Harry turned, his eyes sweeping over the children’s bodies, confirming Charlie’s warning. The first two creatures were nearly free. The third was halfway there already. It would only be a matter of time before they attacked as well.

  “Come on, Charlie. Let’s go. Up through the hole.”

  “I can’t . . .”

  “It’s our only chance. If we can catch up with John, he’ll know what to do.”

  “Harry, I can’t.” Charlie retreated another three steps, his eyes wide, never leaving the circle of children. He stepped on his gun and almost stumbled. Recovering quickly,
he bent to retrieve his weapon. “I have to . . . have to get out of here.”

  “I can’t go with you,” Harry told him, moving into position underneath the hole. “You know that.”

  “I know, I know. I just . . . I can’t.”

  “Then head back to the surface, fast as you can. Stay in touch over the radio. Get back in the Jeep to stay warm and keep trying to raise the station. I have to find John.” Harry threw one more glance at the creatures and then holstered his gun for the climb.

  “What if—”

  “Give us an hour,” Harry ordered. “If we’re not back by then, get back to the station and fill them in.”

  Charlie nodded, but Harry wasn’t sure if he’d heard everything. Finally, with no time left to lose, Harry started to climb up into the hole, willing Charlie to just turn tail and run like hell.

  He’d only been in the tunnel two minutes when another series of shots rang out from below. He cursed, knowing he couldn’t go back, that he had to find John and try to put an end to this for good. Still on the move, he was already reaching for his radio when Charlie’s voice came through in a sudden burst of static.

  “Harry! You there? Harry, I—”

  “I thought I told you to get back up to the surface. What the hell are you doing?”

  “Harry, listen, I got one. I got another one of them. Christ, they’re like . . . like ghosts. Spirits or something, I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it. One minute, when they’re moving, they’re like smoke . . . And then when they get hold of you, they’re like . . . oh, Jesus . . . What are these things?”

  “Charlie, slow down. Listen to me. You have to get—”

  “They came out of the bodies, Harry. I don’t know how they could, but—”

  “Charlie, damn it, I’m telling you to listen to me. Snap out of it. Just get the hell out of there. That’s an order.”

  Ten seconds passed in silence. And then Charlie spoke again, more quietly this time. “I don’t know where those other two are gone to. The way they move, they could be anywhere by—”