Mairead narrowed her eyes, staring at the Manhattan skyline. Copperheads bustled over the cityscape. A few of the starfighters were taking off, others landing.
A spaceport.
A new plan formed.
I'll steal a Copperhead. I'll fly that sucker into the air. I'll discover what tower Xerka is hiding in—and bomb the bloody thing from the air.
Of course, before she could infiltrate the spaceport, she had to enter the city. That would not be trivial.
Mairead kept walking across the wastelands until she reached the Hudson. In the old photographs, the river had been blue enough—perhaps not pristine, but possible to swim across. No more. Today filth clogged the river. It was barely water at all. It was mostly floating trash and bubbling ooze. If Mairead tried swimming in this chemical sludge, she'd likely climb out with an extra arm.
Every once in a while, a creature rose from the water and roared, revealing jaws that could bite off a dinosaur's leg. Mairead wasn't sure if they were aliens or mutants. She doubted it mattered. The beasts filled the water, chomping, hissing, eying Mairead hungrily.
Yep, swimming is definitely out, she thought.
A few kilometers north, Mairead saw an old suspension bridge. It was rusty, falling apart, and swarming with basilisks. The serpents covered the bridge's towers, wrapping around the metal rods. Crossing that bridge was out too. There were more basilisks there than Mairead had bullets.
She checked her minicom. The tracker was flashing on her screen, moving closer to the city. The red dot appeared to be underwater now, moving beneath the river.
"Are you swimming, Naja?" Mairead said.
The tracker was a kilometer south from here. Mairead walked along the riverbank. Night was falling, and the grass rose to her shoulders. She moved hidden in shadows. She held her minicom in one hand, her pistol in the other. Every once in a while, she heard stirring in the grass, a nearby hiss, and she froze and waited for a basilisk to move by. Then she walked onward. Since crashing in the wilderness, she had learned fast, could now move like a ghost.
A kilometer south, she stopped and turned toward the Hudson.
There she saw it. A shiver ran through her.
The gaping entrance to a tunnel.
The black pit loomed like the maw of a hungry beast. Chains dangled from its upper lip like strings of saliva, encrusted with old blood. Bones lay strewn around the entrance, overgrown with mold. Darkness lurked inside. A cold wind blew from within the abyss, moaning, and ruffled Mairead's hair. The tunnel was breathing. Whispering. Beckoning her.
Mairead aimed her pistol at the darkness. Cold sweat trickled down her back. The more she stared at the abyss, the more it seemed like a living being. A creature of darkness, staring at her, peeling back her clothes and skin and flesh, gazing into her soul.
The tracker on her minicom flashed. The dot of light was moving. Naja had crossed the river, was now entering the city. He had taken this tunnel.
Mairead took a deep breath.
"Bloody hell, Firebug," she told herself. "You fought Ra damn scorpion armadas. You don't have to fear a mucking tunnel."
She stepped forward. The closer she got to the opening, the colder it became. The wind from the tunnel moaned louder, sounding almost human. Almost in pain. As Mairead approached, her boots scattered bones. She knocked over a skull, and a centipede fled the eye socket. The skull seemed to leer, to laugh, to mock her.
The wind whispered.
Come inside … come …
Mairead gritted her teeth, tightened her grip on her gun, and stepped into the tunnel.
The darkness enveloped her, as thick and crushing as a basilisk's embrace. Her flashlight had shattered during her crash. She pulled out her flare. For a long time, she had preserved the flare, hoping to see a Firebird overhead, maybe Ramses or Leona searching for her. To hell with that. Mairead didn't need anyone's help. She lit the flare. It crackled in her hand like a torch, casting flickering light across the tunnel.
The tunnel stretched before her. According to her map, it was nearly three kilometers long. Two miles of shadow. Mairead could see only a few steps ahead.
She walked deeper. The tunnel sloped, delving under the river. The temperature plummeted. At first, Mairead thought that the basilisks had carved this tunnel. After all, the serpents lived underground. But soon she passed by graffiti on the walls. The colors were faded. Years of grime had hidden most of the lettering. But she recognized some of those letters. It was ancient English.
Humans had built this tunnel thousands of years ago, Mairead realized. Here was an original relic of ancient New York City, of the lost golden age of humanity.
Her boots scattered more bones. She looked down at the skeleton of a child.
How many humans hid here when the Hydrians attacked? she wondered. How many perished here during the fall?
"I'll come back for you," she vowed to the bones. "I'll bury you. Every single one."
As she continued walking, she saw rusty ancient cars. They were barely more than ravaged shells, most of the metal corroded away. Some still had skeletons inside. Men. Women. Children. Aboveground, the centuries had withered the old civilization to dust. The Hydrians had butchered billions of humans. The skeletons on the surface were gone, returned into the soil and wind. Here were the last relics of that ancient, lost generation.
A giant skeleton draped across one car. Mairead paused to look at it. The skeleton had a huge spiky skull, as large as a human ribcage. Eight legs clutched the rusty car, the bones connected with many joints.
A Hydrian, Mairead realized.
She had never seen one. Those cruel aliens had gone extinct centuries ago. She had heard them called squids, but these were no soft mollusks. The bones were thick, their spikes cruel. This one must have died two thousand years ago. But it still made Mairead shiver.
So much of Earth is like this now, she thought. Not the beautiful countryside of Canada, where Leona had founded Port Addison. Not even the southern wilderness, with its mosquitoes and forests. It was places like this—ruins filled with death and memory.
A shriek sounded ahead.
Mairead spun away from the skeleton, facing forward.
She aimed her pistol, standing frozen and tense.
She saw nothing ahead. Only a few meters away, her flare's glow gave way to darkness.
The shriek echoed, soon fading.
That had not been a basilisk's cry. Mairead had never heard such a shriek. It had sounded almost human. But twisted. Filled with raw hatred and evil.
A sudden instinct to flee leaped into Mairead. To leave this tunnel. Why had she come here? She was no creature of the underground. She was a space warrior, a pilot, a woman of the endless vastness. This tunnel was like a coffin. Burying her. Closing in. The terrors lurking, and—
Enough! She sneered. Enough cowardice. Onward, soldier! Onward to Xerka. You have a mission. Kill the bitch. End this war. Onward!
She kept walking.
She glanced behind her once. The riverside was too far to see now. Mairead shivered, steeled herself, and faced forward again.
No looking back. Keep going. Onward.
She walked for a long time, passing between the rusty cars, around the skeletons. She must have been walking for half an hour now, maybe longer. Why was she still underground? She should have reached Manhattan by now. Should at least be sloping upward. Yet the tunnel was still descending, plunging into the cold depths. Mairead had never been so cold.
Cobwebs hung from the ceiling. Several old skeletons hung from chains—perhaps ancient suicides, perhaps the victims of Hydrian violence. As Mairead walked, bony toes jabbed her, snagged in her hair. Other skeletons hung lower, leering at her, their jaws hanging loosely. She parted the skeletons like curtains, and they swung, clattering, mocking her.
She realized that her boots were no longer scattering bones. A dense, foul material covered the floor. This malodorous carpet became thicker as she walked, piling up higher. On
ly the roofs of the rusty old cars were now visible, peeking like cobblestones from the muck. It looked like bat guano, thousands of years of the stuff. Mairead grimaced.
Am I walking on a giant carpet of bat shit?
Another shriek sounded—much louder and closer this time. Twisted. Monstrous—yet oddly human.
Muck this shit, Mairead thought, her hand shaking around her gun.
She should never have come this way. This was a tunnel to Hell. Naja could not have come this way. Or he was luring her into a trap. Mairead had to leave. To turn back. She would take the bridge or build a raft and row across the river. Or just get the hell out of Dodge, make her way to Canada, and come back with an army.
She had never run from a fight. But she would run now.
She turned around, prepared to march back to New Jersey.
She found herself facing a monster.
A pale face twisted in hatred. Rotten teeth thrust out from a bony jaw. Human teeth. Pale blue eyes stared. Human eyes. Deranged eyes. Veined wings flapped, and bony fingers reached out, yellow fingernails scrabbled, and a spine creaked, and Mairead screamed and fell back and fired her gun.
The boom echoed through the tunnel, deafening.
The creature flew forward, and Mairead ducked. It overshot her, vanishing into shadows, and its shriek rose again, louder now, filled with agony.
A human cry.
Mairead spun around, heart pounding. It clung to the wall. Leathern wings stretched over thin bones. A stubby tail like a hook. Hands that gripped the stone, and the face of a young woman. Rotting away. Pale gray. But human. Young. Filled with hatred.
"What are you?" Mairead whispered.
The creature howled. The tunnel reverberated with the sound. The beast lunged again, and it had a human spine, ending with a tailbone, but the ribs were gone, the legs were gone, and the arms stretched out. Human arms. Skin stretched between them and the tailbone like sails, lined with veins.
It flew back toward Mairead, jaws opened wide. It bit down hard. Those rotten teeth sank into her shoulder.
Mairead screamed and pistol-whipped the head, knocking the creature back.
"What are you?" she screamed. "Are you an alien?"
The creature fell to the floor. It looked up at her. No, not it. The creature was a she. A woman.
Mairead saw it now. The stitches. There were nipples on the wings. Somebody had torn out this woman's ribs. Had stretched the loose skin to her hands, down to her tailbone, removing the rest of the skeleton. Sewing. Creating. A dweller of the underground. A nightmarish bat.
"Help … me …" the woman whispered. "Help …"
Mairead trembled. A sob racked her body. She fired her gun. She knew this twisted monster was human, or had been human. Deformed. Barely alive. A mockery of life. And she fired again and again, perforating it with bullets, but the strange bat did not die. The woman cried out with pain, flapped those wings, and rose to the tunnel's ceiling.
Mairead looked up.
No. Oh Ra. No.
Dozens of the creatures covered the tunnel's ceiling.
The spines twisted like bony serpents. The wings stretched out, translucent and veined, stitched onto the bones. The faces were ashen. The eyes sunken. Staring at Mairead. Filled with a mixture of hatred and pleading.
With shrieks, they swooped.
Mairead ran. They scratched her, fingernails yellow and cracked. Bit her, teeth rotten. But mostly they stared, and their eyes were still human, still so filled with pain. Their cries of hunger sounded so much like voices begging for merciful death.
They herded her deeper into the tunnel. Mairead ran onward, not even bothering to fire her gun. One of the bats landed on her arm and bit, and the flare hit the floor and guttered out. Darkness fell. Mairead ran blindly. The shrieks rolled around her, and broken fingernails tore at her skin.
In Hell. I'm in Hell.
She stumbled, crashed onto bones, and cried out as the bats attacked, tore at her clothes, tugged her hair. She flipped onto her back, screaming, and fired her pistol. With every pull of the trigger, her muzzle lit the darkness, revealing rotting teeth, mad eyes, scraggly hair, creatures deformed and twisted with unholy hatred.
In Hell.
Mairead screamed, tears in her eyes. She had seen terrors in space. She had seen the gulocks. The scorpion halls. The nightmares in the darkness. But here on Earth, she had found true terror. Here on her homeworld, she had found the ravages of humanity, the disease that lurked within.
But I was always afraid. I was always filled with shadows.
A memory: Herself as a child. Barely more than a toddler. Watching as the scorpions tore her mother and brothers apart.
Herself as a woman. Weeping over the corpse of Doctor Duncan McQueen, her beloved father.
Trudging through killing fields, a cigar in her mouth, a smirk on her lips. Her—Mairead "Firebug" McQueen, always strutting with confidence, chin held high, eyes mocking. A bluff. Just a poker bluff, another game, another cheat.
And always inside—the monsters. Always deep in her shadows—such terror.
Here she had come face to face with these demons. Here, below New York City, Mairead could no longer hide. Somebody had stripped these beings around her of humanity, removing organs and bones. And they had stripped Mairead of her mask, of her armor, revealing the girl within.
"That's enough, my darlings!"
A deep, raspy voice from behind.
A red light.
Metal clattered and scales chinked. A shadow loomed, and the voice spoke again.
"Let her be. You've tasted enough blood for tonight."
The bats fluttered away and clung to the ceiling and walls, still staring with baleful eyes.
Mairead rose to her feet, gasping for air, trembling with pain. She turned toward the depths. And there she saw him.
"Naja," she said.
The basilisk prince grinned, revealing several rows of fangs. The teeth lined his gullet like the spikes in an iron maiden. His helmet hid everything but that thrusting jaw, covering even the eyes, assuming the creature even had eyes. Yet Mairead could feel Naja staring. Knew he could see her. The beast slithered closer and reared, and the spikes on his iron helmet scraped the ceiling. The creature was twice, maybe three times the size of a normal basilisk.
Mairead stared at the monster, curbing an instinct to take a step back. She would not show fear. With sheer force of will, she managed to keep her hands steady, to light a cigar and take a puff.
"You're a big one," she said to the basilisk. "That's good. I like killing big aliens. You make a big boom when you fall."
Naja laughed—a sound like cracking bones. He raised one of his long, dark arms. In his claws, he held the hellwolf's tracker.
"Were you looking for this, ape?" the basilisk general hissed. "Yes, I saw you hiding like a coward in that tree. I knew you would dispatch my underlings. And that you would follow me here." He licked his chops. "Did you truly think I would lead you to my mistress's lair? No, ape. I lured you here. To this dark place. Behold your destiny!"
Naja slithered aside, sweeping his arms toward an alcove in the tunnel. A fluorescent light flickered to life, illuminating what looked like a torture chamber. Blood stained a heavy oak table. Scalpels, hammers, and cleavers hung on the brick wall, encrusted with dry blood. Human bats crouched in cages. As the light hit them, they shrieked and banged against the bars. These ones had only recently been transformed; their stitches were still fresh and oozing.
Mairead had seen enough.
She fired her pistol.
Her bullets slammed into Naja, but they glanced off his armor. She aimed for his mouth, but the creature closed his jaws, and the bullets shattered against his scales. Mairead screamed, firing again and again, emptying her magazine, loading more, firing again. But nothing could hurt the beast.
When she had emptied her last magazine, Naja smiled toothily.
"Grab her," he said.
Bats swooped from th
e ceiling. Mairead screamed, punched, bit. But the creatures outnumbered her. They grabbed her arms, her legs, her neck. Their fingernails tore her skin. Their wings of skin wrapped around her, trapping her.
Naja drew closer. He leaned down and licked Mairead's face. The tongue was thin and forked, longer than her arm, and his breath stank of decay.
"Do you like my pets?" he hissed. "Soon you will be one of them. My most prized harpy. An officer of the human army—transformed into a beautiful beast, a queen of the damned! You will hunt apes!"
Her heart pounded. Cold sweat drenched her. She trembled in the grip of the creatures. They were whispering in her ear, licking her, welcoming her.
"Soon you will be one of us … One of us …"
Mairead howled. She spat on Naja's face.
"I'm going to kill you, asshole!"
The beast chuckled, a sound like tumbling stones.
"And how will you do that, my darling?"
Mairead panted and managed to smile shakily. "I've always loved flying. The feeling of freedom in space. The starlight around me … I've always felt so free up there. Floating through beauty." Tears ran down her cheeks. "But I've always had another passion." Her smile widened, shaking, caustic. "Explosives. I always carry them with me. And I placed an explosive on that tracker, Naja. The one you're holding. Hidden inside its mechanism. And the trigger is voice activated. I was hoping you'd bring it to Xerka. Just in case I could get close enough to set off the bomb. But you'll do fine."
Naja sneered. "You lie! You—"
"Boom," Mairead whispered.
In her pocket, her minicom picked up the word. Code activated, triggering the explosive in the tracker.
Mairead closed her eyes.
Heat bathed her. The sound of the explosion washed over her. Even through her closed eyelids, she saw the flaring white light.
Over the ringing in her ears, she heard Naja scream.
The Song of Earth (Children of Earthrise Book 5) Page 10