Bad Glass

by Richard E. Gropp

  It was dark, predawn. The sky overhead was clotted with clouds—the stars hidden, the moon long since crashed beneath the horizon. The rain had stopped, but the grass and trees were still dripping wet, and it was freakishly quiet. There were no animals rustling in the leaves and not a whisper of wind. If there were wolves here, stalking us through the night, they were being very quiet.

  I had a baseball bat clenched in my hand, scavenged from the house’s garage. Floyd had a kitchen knife. Charlie had a longhandled shovel.

  I also had my camera. I hadn’t even thought about it, just automatically dropping it around my neck after we finished looking at Mac’s horrible photograph. It was a comfort, having it there. The camera had always been a comfort for me, a wall to hide behind, a distance to place between myself and the subject of my eye. I was seeing that now for the first time. The camera was my way of escaping from the world.

  I gave Danny a couple of minutes. The tension grew with each passing second as my imagination ran wild: Mac, dragging Taylor through the tunnels, hurting her; wolves and spiders, stalking through the dark; buried limbs and faces; the gigantic hand of God, entombed somewhere beneath the city, dead and drained of blood. When it got to be too much, I gathered up all my strength and headed toward the dark opening in the grassy hill.

  “Wait, wait!” Floyd called, the first syllable loud before his voice dropped into a scared whisper. “Shouldn’t we wait for Danny? And the soldiers?” Then, after a brief pause, “Shouldn’t we wait for guns?”

  “You can wait if you want,” I said, trying to sound stronger, more confident than I actually felt. “But I can’t do it. I can’t wait … not while he’s got her in there, not while she’s in danger.”

  I headed toward the tunnel, making a show of not looking back. Maybe this feigned nonchalance came across as confidence, but really, I just didn’t want Charlie and Floyd to see my pleading, desperate eyes. I wanted to be strong … but I wasn’t. I was scared. And that fear—a fear of paralysis, a fear of loss—was what got me moving.

  After a moment, I heard Floyd let out a string of expletives. Then he and Charlie followed me into the tunnel’s gaping maw.

  Photograph. Undated. Danny:

  The room is small and dark. Concrete walls, underground. Dirty and wet, every surface glistening with moisture. There’s a road flare burning on the far side of the room. A violet-red bloom—weak, but strong enough to illuminate the enclosed space in an eerie crimson glow.

  There’s a body on the floor—a male body, fairly young—lying supine in the middle of the room. It is illuminated in the light of a half dozen flashlight beams.

  The body is that of a soldier dressed in fatigues. Probably dead. Lying on his back with his head craned toward the wall behind him. He’s clawed open his shirt, but his arms are thrown to the side, one hand inches away from a fallen flashlight.

  There is pain on his face, a frozen mask of terror and open-eyed agony.

  From the taut flesh in the middle of his chest, an arm sprouts, reaching up and bent at the elbow. The soldier is impaled all the way up to the arm’s bicep. There are small rivulets of blood stretching the length of the arm—from taut, pointing fingers, past the elbow, all the way down to the soldier’s chest, where the thin streams pool and spill off into his shirt.

  The fingers are blurred slightly, the shutter speed too slow to freeze them in motion.

  I took the first left inside the tunnel. This was the way Mac had gone during our first exploration. This was the dead end into which he’d disappeared.

  But there was no dead end this time. The tunnel continued on, tilting down, farther into the dark earth. I looked for wires in the tunnel walls but didn’t find any. Not here.

  There were paw prints on the floor, though.

  And, here and there, footprints.

  The ceiling dripped wet mud onto our heads as we advanced. I jumped in surprise each time a drop hit the back of my neck.

  “Fuck, Dean,” Floyd hissed as our flashlights stabbed into the dark, picking out nothing but tunnel and more tunnel. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this one fucking bit!”

  I didn’t like it, either, but I didn’t say anything. There was no point; I wasn’t about to turn around, not without Taylor. Charlie remained silent as well. I don’t think the teenager had said a single word since we left the house. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself.

  A sound up ahead startled us to a halt. “Do you hear that?” I asked. They both nodded.

  Muffled shouting. Shrill, frantic voices. And then the sharp crack of gunfire.

  I jolted into a run, surging down the length of the tunnel. The mud slid beneath my feet, but I caught myself and continued on.

  Gunfire in the tunnels. That couldn’t be good. Is it Mac? I wondered. Is Taylor already …?

  After a hundred yards the tunnel deposited us into a small hub, a circular room with five new tunnels branching out into the space ahead. Floyd and Charlie slid into the room behind me. Floyd fell on his ass as he tried to avoid running into my back. “Fuck,” he muttered. For a moment he just sat there, shaking mud off of his arms, then Charlie helped him to his feet.

  “How could this be mushrooms?” Charlie asked, finally breaking his silence. His words were tiny, as if the dirt were trying to steal his voice, absorbing its strength and leaving behind nothing but a hushed whisper. “The tunnels—how do spores explain any of this?”

  I shrugged. They didn’t.

  “Or are we hallucinating?” he continued. “Are we still in the house, collapsed on the floor, muttering and dreaming together? Or maybe passed out in the park while Mac and Taylor get farther and farther away?”

  The thought was horrifying. I shook my head, and the room slid back and forth around me, continuing to move for a moment even after my head stopped. The light dimmed for a couple of seconds, then it returned to normal. “We can’t think about that,” I said. “They’re in here, and so are we, and we’ve got to find them.”

  Right then, a shout sounded in the distance—indecipherable, but shrill and desperate. It didn’t sound like a woman’s voice. I turned my head, trying to locate the source. After a moment, both Charlie and Floyd pointed to the tunnel on the far left. I ran on ahead.

  There were things in this tunnel. Objects. At first, it was just chunks of rock and wood breaking up the endless stretches of mud. Then a milk crate and an empty vodka bottle. Then there were planks beneath my feet, forming a makeshift floor. We came into another hub and found a geometric asterisk laid out in the dirt, narrow lengths of flooring that reached out into five new tunnels. There was a wooden chair set up against the wall, with an unlit lantern perched on its seat.

  I swung my flashlight from tunnel to tunnel, looking for something new, something to point me in the right direction.

  “Dean—” Floyd started, but I let out a hiss and he fell silent.

  “Turn off your lights,” I said, hitting the button on mine. “Shut them off. Maybe we can see …”

  Charlie clicked his off. Then, after fumbling for a moment, Floyd did the same.

  The tunnel dropped into darkness. It was a deep and claustrophobic black, and as soon as my eyes lost input, I got dizzy. I thought I was falling, toppling forward into the void. Without vision, without that point of reference, I lost all track of the world. The Vicodin, I thought. The alcohol, the plank upside my head. It wasn’t the world doing this, I assured myself. It wasn’t the spores or the speed of light. It was the things I’d done to myself, and the things I’d let happen.

  I reached out to catch myself against the floor, keeping the flashlight and baseball bat clenched tightly in my hands, but the floor didn’t come. I just continued spinning through the void.

  “Dean …” It was Floyd, terrified, keening in the dark. “I hear him …” And I wondered at the “him.” Mac? Floyd’s dead brother?

  I blinked, still toppling forward, spinning down into the pit under the city, plummeting toward the heart of t
he world.

  “Dean!” It was still Floyd, but more frantic this time. I could hear feet clumping against wood, a terrified stutter step.

  I blinked again and realized that the darkness wasn’t complete. There was the dimmest of lights off to my left, sitting there, stationary, in the corner of my eye, even as I continued to spin through space.

  I flicked my flashlight back on and found myself still standing in the middle of the hub. Not falling. I spun around, panning the flashlight across the room. Charlie had a confused look on his face, but there was no fear there, just a strangely distant interest, like he was buried in his own thoughts, trying to work out a complex problem. Floyd was different. He had his hand up against his chest, clutching at his heart. There were tears on his cheeks, and his mouth was moving, quivering open and shut without making a sound.

  “Left,” I said, pointing toward the tunnel down which I’d seen the light. “We’re getting somewhere,” I added, trying to sound reassuring.

  I continued on, leading the way forward.

  The tunnel ended at a concrete wall. There was a hole there, punched through the concrete, leading into a dark basement. I stuck my head through and panned the flashlight left and then right. It was a large multiroom basement, something you’d find beneath an office building, not a private residence.

  I had no idea where we were. We should have hit the river long before we reached any type of large building. Had we somehow made it downtown?

  There was the sound of scuffling up ahead in one of the adjoining rooms—feet scraping against concrete, spinning on a heel. Then the loud crack of rifle fire. “To the left!” someone called. There was another crack.

  A quiet hiss: “Got it!”

  And then, frantic: “Is that it? Are we done?”

  I moved into the basement, and Floyd and Charlie followed, staying a couple of steps back. The room was damp, smelling of mildew and rot. Charlie shone his flashlight toward the door on the far side of the room. There was a faint red light in the gap at its foot. The sound was coming from behind the door.

  I shut off my flashlight and gestured for Floyd and Charlie to do the same. Then I made my way to the door. Slowly, I turned the knob and pushed it open, afraid of what I might find on the other side.

  “Shit!”

  There was a blur of motion as a soldier in the middle of the room raised a rifle and pointed it at my chest. Then a collision of limbs, and a bullet snapped into the wall at my side.

  “Don’t!” Danny cried, after straight-arming the soldier’s rifle. “Fucking stand down, man!”

  My heart stuttered inside my chest. I glanced to the wall at my side; concrete dust rained down from a neat hole punched at just about heart level. The soldier with the smoking gun stood still for a long moment, his eyes wide in terror at the lethal mistake he’d almost made.

  There were two other soldiers in the room, in addition to Danny and the terrified gunman. The four of them were standing back to back to back to back in its center, each covering a different corner. There was a road flare burning near a door on the far side of the room. It illuminated the concrete walls in flickering red light.

  For a time, everyone was silent, stunned, not quite sure how to react.

  I glanced around the room. There were dinner-plate-size gaps in each of the four walls—large, unnatural boreholes, at least a dozen of them—up near the ceiling and down at knee level. There were piles of dead spiders on the floor beneath each hole—drifts of huge twitching limbs torn apart by rifle fire. Some of them were deformed. I didn’t look too closely, but I’m sure I saw human features mixed in with the battered arachnid bits. And not just fingers. A nose and an open mouth. A lolling tongue without lips. A whole fucking hand.

  Danny gestured toward us frantically, and his soldiers broke formation, starting toward the door at our backs.

  “We’ve been down here for almost an hour,” Danny started. (An hour? I thought. That didn’t seem possible.) A hint of a smile appeared on his lips as he crossed the room. “What took you so fucking—?” Then his foot caught on something. His arms cart-wheeled in the air for a moment, and he toppled over backward. He landed flat on his back. His flashlight and rifle clattered from his hands and a loud whomp of breath exploded from his lungs.

  I started forward, ready to help him to his feet, but he began to move on his own, twitching on the floor. I froze in shock.

  “Danny?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

  He didn’t respond. Instead, his eyes rolled back inside his head. He arched his ass off the floor, keeping his shoulder blades and upper back flat against the concrete. Then he started to make a loud gurgling sound—almost a liquid growl—and thick, foamy strings of saliva spilled from his lips. I pulled back.

  “Unnnnghh!”

  His quivering hands made their way up to the line of buttons on his shirt. He grasped and pulled the drab fatigues apart, revealing the pale white skin underneath. Then his eyes—until now completely rolled back inside their sockets—slowly spun forward, and he looked down in terror as his fingernails continued with their ripping motion, now working away at his flesh. It was like he was trying to pull his skin apart, trying to open up his chest and reach inside. His fingernails left behind beveled lines filled with crimson.

  “Danny!” I managed, my voice choked with shock and confusion.

  And then the hand broke through.

  It should have torn him apart, it should have pushed him wide open, but it barely made a wound: no displaced mass, no tectonic movement inside his bones and flesh. Just a hand, reaching up from his heart, sprouting from his skin like a grotesque tree.

  First fingers, then wrist. Then forearm. Then elbow. All the way up to a thin, unexercised bicep. Pale, subterranean skin, streaked with thin streams of blood.

  The hand swiveled on its wrist—a graceful, artistic movement—and blood spilled from its open palm. It froze in that position, palm open and cupped—not as a statue would freeze, motionless, but rather as a human would freeze, complete with tiny muscular tremors.

  Floyd, Charlie, and the soldiers all stumbled back as one, and I heard the sound of retching behind me—a violent dry heave—but I stayed perfectly still. Despite their terror, they all kept their flashlights fixed on Danny’s grotesque, broken form. Some of the beams were shaking, and I heard Floyd give voice to a tiny little sob.

  Danny quivered for a moment—the last vestiges of life fleeing his body—then his lower back collapsed to the ground and all of his muscles fell slack. His bladder released, and the room filled with the stench of urine. I thought I heard the sound of his last breath rattling out in a violent heave, but that might have just been my imagination, my need to put some type of punctuation at the end of this horrific statement.

  It was a gruesome sight. Absolutely horrible.

  Slowly, reflexively, I popped the lens cap off my camera, raised it to my eye, and started taking pictures.

  The soldiers ran away as soon as they got the chance. They retreated back the way we had come, leaving behind a stream of choked obscenities. I think Floyd would have run, too, if I hadn’t been there to stop him. And Charlie … I don’t know what Charlie would have done. His face was calm despite startled, wide-open eyes.

  “C’mon,” I said, pointing to a door in the left-hand wall. “Taylor’s still out there. We’ve got to find her.”

  “But … but Danny,” Floyd said, his voice searching, desperate. His eyes remained fixed on the dead body. His face had gone paper-white. “What happened to Danny?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, omitting all the stuff I did know, all the stuff I’d seen—Weasel’s fingers, Taylor’s father, merged flesh and broken form—that might shed light on the situation. “The city. The city happened.” It was a statement I’d made before, and it still seemed to hold true.

  Unless it’s me and not the city. Unless I happened. My presence, my being here—melting Danny, punching out his heart.

  Then I grabbed Floyd’
s forearm and pulled him across the room. I cut a wide berth around Danny’s broken form and steered us clear of the piles of twitching spider parts.

  Charlie followed.

  We crossed through two more rooms, then back through the maw of an earthen tunnel. Once again heading down.

  There were wires in the walls here, poking intermittently from the dirt. Not neat, straight lines like the ones we’d found beneath our neighbor’s house, but branching and skewed, like veins in the walls of an organ, as if they’d developed here over time to push blood through the bowels of the earth.

  I headed straight through an intersection, then turned left through another hub. More passages followed. I was moving at random, stopping every now and then to listen for sound in the dark, looking for something to guide me through this maze. But there was nothing, and I just kept moving. No sound. No hint. No clue.

  Once I looked back and saw Charlie drawing an arrow in the wall with the blade of his shovel. Marking our path.

  Then we were in another hub. There was a lantern perched atop a folding metal chair here; it was lit, supporting a tiny guttering flame. The walls danced in flickering light.

  I was ready to plunge forward through the mouth of another tunnel, but Floyd grabbed my arm and pointed toward something on the floor, half buried in the dirt. He dropped to his knees and started clearing away some of the muck. It was a messenger bag—tan canvas smeared with mud, a ripped and reknotted shoulder strap.

  “This is Sabine’s,” Floyd said, a hint of awe in his voice as he brushed aside dirt, revealing a large rectangular patch sewn into the fabric. The patch read: ART SAVES! I remembered my last glimpse of this bag—on the screen of the video camera, draped over Sabine’s shoulder as she disappeared into the shattered wall. It had caught on the edge of the hole. She’d had to reach back to set it free.

  Floyd’s hands were shaking as he upended the bag, sending loose paper, pens, and a can of spray paint spilling to the floor. “What happened to her?” he asked. “You said she was with Mama Cass.” This was the lie I’d told Taylor back at the house. She must have passed it on. “But if this is here … where’d she go?”