by Jacob Rayne
He pressed on, spying Craggs fighting off one of the creatures with his bare hands.
Though he fought with heart and had landed some vicious blows on the creature’s head, it was clear to Duggan that his friend wasn’t going to win.
He slammed his shotgun butt into the back of the creature’s head and dragged Craggs forward.
The light at the other side of the room suddenly became brighter and both men simultaneously stepped off the edge of the rock and fell into deeper water.
Both of them let out a cry of alarm when they realised their feet no longer touched the bottom.
The fog rolled around them as they both treaded water and tried to see through the gloom.
Duggan looked down, seeing a dark shape below him. Craggs had seen it too. It swam back and forth, many feet below them.
It was huge.
‘What do we do?’ Craggs said. ‘Swim out or stay here?’
‘No idea. I don’t want anything to do with that thing but it looks like the only way over there.’
While they thought about it, one of the creatures poked its head out over the edge. It hissed when it saw them.
An unspoken thought passed between the two men and they both grabbed its arms and hauled it forwards into the water.
It let out cries of utter panic, thrashing its arms and legs in a desperate attempt to keep its head out of the water.
The look on its face was so pitiful that both men felt sorry for it for the merest hint of a second. Then they grabbed it and ducked it under until the bubbles and the thrashing stopped.
While they’d been doing that, the dark shape below them became gigantic.
‘It’s coming,’ Craggs said.
‘I noticed. Get back to the rock.’
They swam as fast as they could. Suddenly a huge head broke the surface, throwing water everywhere.
‘It’s fucking huge,’ Duggan panted.
Duggan helped Craggs out of the water. The giant head slammed into the rock next to where he had been a second ago.
Duggan was staggered by the sheer size of it. The head alone was bigger than he was. The thick neck that protruded from the water was probably ten feet in circumference.
Duggan squeezed off a few shots as the head slammed into the rock at their feet. The giant mouth opened and let out a bone-chilling scream. The air that came out from the mouth cleared a little of the fog in front of the creature’s face.
Duggan saw smooth grey skin. The creature’s mouth gaped, big and bloody, full of murderously sharp teeth. Its nostrils were long slits in its skin, moving slightly, as though sniffing out the two men. The rest of its head was smooth skin. It had no eyes or ears, well none that Duggan could see anyway.
It looked like a seal but grown to epic proportions. He saw a tell-tale bulge at the back of its head and wondered if the psychotic bastards responsible for the mutations had put the moths into living animals as well as humans.
He was torn from these thoughts by the creature’s roar, the sound loud enough to shake rocks loose from the ceiling. The creature’s head scanned back and forth, searching for them.
‘I’ll lead it off to the right,’ Craggs said. ‘You go left.’
‘It’ll eat you alive, Jack.’
‘Risk I’m prepared to take. You’re the important one here, Jim. We all knew that coming in. Besides, I reckon I can get to that bulge on the back of its head.’
‘You’ve got some balls on you, Jack,’ Duggan laughed.
‘You too, Sir. It’s been a pleasure. Good luck. Kill some of those scaly bastards for me.’
They shook hands.
‘You sure about this?’ Duggan asked.
‘Yeah. Now get ready. You won’t have much time.’
‘Thanks, Jack.’
‘Let’s go.’
Duggan ran and dived into the water. Craggs climbed out and began making a hell of a racket.
The creatures on the land began to come for him, but that was what he wanted.
Duggan swam as fast as he could, not wanting Craggs’s sacrifice to be in vain.
The creature wasn’t far behind Craggs, its head peering out above the fog, moving around as if trying to sense him. It roared and shot out of the fog towards him.
Just as it did, one of the other creatures went for Craggs. He spun fast, throwing it over his hip and into the water.
The elated monster darted for it, not realising it was one of its own kind.
The crunching sounds and pained screams of the smaller creature filled the fog-filled room.
Duggan pressed on. In the thick fog he saw very little, just the water. He heard splashing noises coming from his right, but couldn’t see what was causing them.
The creature started to turn away from Craggs. He knew he couldn’t let that happen so he fired on it. Snarling, it turned towards him, shrugging off the shotgun blast as if it had been no more than a pinprick.
He moved out of the way, but put himself off balance doing so. The head came across, sweeping him off his feet and sending him crashing into the water with a force that wrenched the breath from his lungs and sent his senses into total disarray.
Blood seeped from the split in his tongue, turning the water crimson drop by drop.
He realised he had fucked up big style.
‘Go, Duggan. It’s coming for me,’ he bellowed.
As a last act of defiance he emptied his shotgun into its open mouth.
The creature towered over him, seeming to savour the terror on his face. Its head flew at him, its teeth piercing his legs and chest. He let out a cry of rage and began flailing with his fists. By the third blow, the powerful jaws had cleaved him clean in half.
Duggan heard the bloodcurdling scream and turned to look through the fog. He may as well have been blindfolded.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when Craggs’s upper body landed with a huge splash in the water in front of him.
The water around Craggs was already dark with blood. Jack’s eyes stared up at Duggan, seemingly to blame him for his part in his death. He closed his bulging eyes with a deft flick of his hand and kissed his forehead before leaving him where he lay.
He pressed on. The rock became an upward incline, towards the light. He smiled in spite of his apprehension when he saw that the light was coming from an opening in the wall that looked distinctly manmade.
His smile soon disappeared when he saw the dozens of mangled bodies on the concrete floor.
Brad rubbed some of the cold water into his face. The impact of the rock crashing into the tunnel had thrown him into the water.
It was lucky the stone was blocking the gap as he’d have been swept away in seconds. Instead he was alive. Battered, bleeding and bemused, but alive.
He looked around, trying to remember what had happened. His eyes saw one of the terrifying arachnoid creatures bobbing slowly up and down in the water.
He backed away, not daring to take his eyes from it.
Screaming, he fell backwards and threw his arms over his head to protect it from whatever attack it was about to make.
His brow furrowed when he saw that there was nothing standing over him. As he stood up, he saw the creature was still in the river, unmoving.
‘It’s dead, you fucking idiot,’ he laughed.
The sound echoed ominously round the cavern as though it was the laugh of an evil twin concealed somewhere in the dark.
He was grateful to turn his back on the creature, as the sight of the thing made his skin crawl.
He moved to his left, finding a couple of brown rocks to climb up on to the stone bowl.
His eye caught something in the water. The crossbow that Abbott had been carrying was caught up against where the stone had dammed the river. He bent and picked it up, muttering, ‘Abbott,’ as he did so.
The words were no sooner out of his mouth than he saw a limp, drenched figure moving down the river. Abbott didn’t look conscious – hell, he didn’t even look alive – but he had t
o try and get him.
Without thinking about what he was doing – knowing that was usually a good way of talking yourself out of doing something crazy – he reached out into the water.
His hands grabbed Abbott’s arms. The current almost pulled him into the water but his grip held at the last moment. He began to drag him out of the water.
Abbott was a dead weight and he knew that thinking he was alive was hopelessly optimistic but the Marine had already saved Brad’s life on more than one occasion so he deserved his efforts.
Brad put him on the rock, noting the way his eyes were rolled back in his skull, exposing glassy whites that seemed to bulge out. The ribbon of blood that ran down from the small dent on the back of his head was cause for concern, as was the waxy pallor of his skin.
Just as he was about to start giving mouth to mouth, Abbott sat bolt upright and coughed, spewing a seemingly never-ending fountain of foul-smelling water, then he turned and stared at him blankly for a few seconds. His throat made vile retching sounds.
‘Thank Christ,’ he smiled.
‘I gotta save you at least once,’ Brad beamed. ‘You’ve been saving my ass since the moment we met.’
Abbott grinned, coughed up one more lungful of reeking river water then they set off on foot along the bank.
‘At least I got here,’ Duggan said.
He drew his handgun as he kicked each of the bodies over, searching for the omnipresent bulge in the back of the head. None of the men had it, they all seemed to have been guarding the facility, no doubt torn limb from limb by the creatures as the floodgates opened.
He pulled a shock stick from a guard’s hand, which, he noticed with grim relish, had been pulled right off his body.
He tested the weight in his hands a little and pulled the trigger.
‘Nice,’ he said, turning the pulsing weapon over and over in his hands, admiring the sleek design.
After a second of thought, he took all of the shock sticks and put them down the back of his jacket.
He consulted the map he’d printed out from Blake’s document.
It was a rabbit warren, by the look of the map.
He could hear low noises in the background, they didn’t sound like the creatures, or human, but he was still unnerved. The fact that they were coming from this lab was not a good sign.
He moved in, his eyes adjusted to the flashing emergency red lights in the corridors.
More bodies lined the floor at his feet. Not one of them belonged to the creatures, he noted with a frown.
His eyes widened at the scale of the destruction. Scientists and guards alike had been torn apart in a feeding frenzy. Heads and limbs had been wrenched from bodies, forming a pile of butchered humanity so twisted and broken it was impossible to tell where one body ended and the next began.
His eyes filled with tears a little, at the thought of how helpless and frightening their final moments must have been.
It was a relief to be over the carpet of corpses and he did not look back once he had passed.
Some things ended up branded into your mind’s eye and he knew he would forever recall this particular atrocity without ever needing to see it again.
Around the next corner were more bodies, decorated with gleaming shards of glass from the labs next to them. Their lab coats were stained crimson in more places than they were white.
Bulging eyes and screaming mouths were everywhere he looked. He forced himself not to look at them, glancing at the map on his phone instead.
There was the sound again, like low, pained breathing.
He poked his head around a door and saw dozens of what looked like dentist’s chairs lined up in strict rows. In each of the chairs was an emaciated person, tubes entering and exiting their bodies through seemingly every spare inch of skin. Electrodes were taped to their foreheads and bare chests.
Modesty had no place in here. Distended, vein-covered breasts were bared alongside flaccid, shrunken genitalia. Duggan’s brow furrowed as he tried to figure out the purpose of the room.
He tried to blot out the sheer scale of the operation or experiment or whatever the hell it was, and focus in on one of the sorry-looking motherfuckers in the chairs.
The main thing he noticed was the red flowing through the tubes, in stark contrast to the pale flesh on display.
‘They’re doing something with the blood,’ he muttered, pulling out his phone to check the document for details.
While he was searching, he heard voices from the corridor.
Towards the end of the river the lights faded.
‘They were some kind of creatures,’ Abbott said. ‘They mustn’t be as prevalent around here.’
Brad nodded. The darkness unsettled him, especially after what they’d found hiding in the dark back at the bowl’s original location.
It felt like there were eyes on them. They knew this was probably being paranoid, but the feeling remained. He didn’t voice his thoughts to Abbott, but he seemed subdued.
It could just have been the near death experience, but he was sure he felt the eyes on them too. It was almost like they were leaving trails on their skin.
‘Get down,’ Abbott shouted, suddenly wide awake and alert.
A hail of bullets raked their position, sending chips of rock flying into the air, drawing blood as they struck their faces.
‘Dirty cocksuckers,’ Abbott bellowed into the darkness. The echo of his voice coming back to them made him sound utterly insane.
He stood on unsteady legs and fired off a few shots of his magnum.
A hollow scream greeted their ears and a guard dropped from above them, his hands clasped to his gut, thick streams of gore pouring through his fingers. He hit the water with a thud, a pool of blood quickly forming around him in the water.
‘Who’s fucking next?’ Abbott roared, firing a wild shot into the air in an attempt at frightening his enemies.
A second hail of machine gun fire came over.
Brad grinned as he realised that Abbott was taunting them to get them to fire and reveal their position. There were two shooters he could see, no doubt the veteran Marine had already scoped them out. When their gunfire stopped, Abbott stood and fired two quick shots.
Two more screams followed and the shooters hit the water, both of them missing fist-sized portions of their heads.
Abbott grinned and blew the smoke from the barrel like a Wild West gunslinger.
‘Who’s next?’ Abbott shouted and fired another wild shot.
There was no reply so they scrambled over to the wall and began to climb up the ladder that was set into the rock.
Duggan turned from the abhorrent spectacle of the room, his hand tight around the butt of his gun.
A man in a blood-smeared lab coat stood in the middle of the corridor.
‘It’s down there,’ he told one of the men with him. They were all heavily built, private militia written all over them. He reckoned they were something to do with Jeffries. ‘Make sure you get all of them out, case someone else comes looking for them.’
Duggan watched him turn away.
He was about to creep out and get some answers when he saw one of the men approaching the door. Cursing, he pressed himself against the wall.
The man’s breathing was heavy as he came in, and Duggan was sure he was getting some sort of pleasure from watching the obscenities being carried out in the room.
‘Hey, get outta there,’ the heavyset scientist called out. ‘You’ll freak them out staring at them like that.’
The man came out, a little reluctantly. Duggan watched them go, and followed, keen to see what they were upto. He had a feeling that they were there for the same reason as he was, but hoped this was not the case.
‘The world’s taking the fast-track to hell,’ the scientist said. ‘We gotta make sure no one is gonna take the cure for themselves.’
‘Come on, man, no one knows about this place,’ one of his henchmen said.
‘Ah sure they d
o, that prick Blake sent off a global email about our life’s work. Every Tom, Dick and Harry’ll be hunting this place out looking for that formula.’
As Duggan tried to listen in further, the big man’s words were obliterated by the sound of gunfire.
He peered out to see one of the reptile creatures lying on the floor, its blood sprayed up the wall. There were huge holes in its flesh, bigger than any gun could cause. Duggan’s eyes widened.
He squinted to see what type of gun the big man had used, but it just looked like a regular weapon.
‘See?’ the big man said. ‘Who wouldn’t want a weapon that would do that to these scaly motherfuckers?’
His colleague shrugged.
I’ve got to get this, Duggan thought.
‘Anyway, it’s time to get rid of this place,’ the big man said. ‘Case Uncle fucking Sam comes sniffing around.’
‘I wouldn’t be worrying about that,’ Duggan said. ‘World’s fucked now anyway. Ain’t no Uncle Sam no more.’
The big man didn’t look surprised when he was staring down the barrel of Duggan’s gun.
‘Told ya there’d be some dickhead found his way here,’ the big man casually said to his colleague. The gun in his face didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.
‘What did you do to that creature?’ Duggan asked.
‘Secret between me and my men,’ the big man said. ‘I ain’t telling you shit.’
Duggan’s peripheral vision picked up one of the men going for his gun. He sprayed the contents of their head up the wall. It was nice to be able to kill with a bullet for a change.
‘I’ll do the same to you motherfuckers too, if you even think about going for your guns,’ Duggan said. ‘Drop ’em and kick ’em over to me.’
They reluctantly did so.
‘Now, you gents gonna tell me what you’re so goddamned secretive about?’
Duggan was still no further forward after almost five minutes of threats. He had come to the reluctant conclusion that neither of them were going to tell him anything without a little persuasion.