Ixibas led his group through the winding streets. Tusque lumbered behind him still favoring his damaged leg, and Pateros and Hollander moved to the far side of the street, using the soft shadows for cover. With the sun still hanging in the sky they didn’t expect much interference from the Seques, who spent the day in hibernation. The short days on the planet left them little time to escape before night returned; bringing with it the monsters that brutalized their group.
Keeping his natural form, Ixibas extended his claws until they jutted nearly one foot from his fingertips. He regretted not carrying his rifle as did the other three. During the night he was fine using his natural weapons, but during the day he felt exposed and unarmed.
Their march through the city took longer than anticipated. Getting Tusque to his feet and moving despite the nearly unbearable pain in his body took most of the morning. Moving through the maze of intersecting streets, they saw the sun starting to dip past high noon and drift lazily toward setting. The closer it came to the horizon, the more they felt their time slipping away.
Many of the roads ended in dead ends. Buildings had been intentionally collapsed across narrow streets, making natural chokepoints. They climbed the first two only to find themselves, after fifteen minutes of wasted time, facing yet another collapsed building or pile of furniture. To their chagrin, they found themselves following a preordained path through the city. It cost them extra time but led, in a roundabout fashion, to the edge of the city.
Reaching a main thoroughfare, Ixibas halted the group. He peered around the corner not expecting to see movement, and he wasn’t disappointed. Though he was sure the Seques wouldn’t come out during the daytime, a heightened sense of danger kept him on edge.
As he scanned the rest of the road ahead, he was surprised to see no obvious obstructions. Aside from crushed cars and shattered glass, the way was clear. In the distance, still a decent walk away, green hills and crop fields rose from the city limits.
Though his featureless face betrayed no emotion, his gravelly voice contained excitement. “It looks like we may’ve found a way out. It looks clear ahead.”
“Then what are we waiting for, Boss?” Pain flared in Tusque’s back. He, more than the others, was eager to leave the city and find proper medical care. He started to step onto the street when a glossy black hand fell on his chest.
“Wait,” Ixibas said.
“Why?” Hollander caught the excitement emanating from Tusque. “We’re this close. We can see the way out of the city. Why not take it while the sun’s still up.”
“The Seques are intelligent. Are we in agreement about that?”
They nodded.
“Knowing they have a limitation about being exposed to sunlight, don’t you think they’d come up with a way to keep us in the city even when they were asleep? Don’t you think they expect us to make a run for it?”
“I’m looking down the street,” Pateros said, looking around the corner. “I don’t see anything. There are no barricades to climb over. They don’t even have a barrier at the end of the road like when we first entered the city. Maybe they didn’t expect us to choose this route for an exit.”
“They funneled us here,” Ixibas hissed in frustration. “Of course they expected us to come this way.”
“Sorry, Boss, but I can’t wait.” Tusque stepped into the open street. “I’m hurting and I don’t know how much more running my body can handle. Either we get out of the city now, or you’ll do it without ol’ Tusque.” He walked down the road toward the city’s edge.
Without a backward glance, Hollander and Pateros fell in step behind their limping teammate.
Ixibas shook his head in irritation. “Stupid.” He stepped into the street. “Wait up. I’m coming too. I want you to remember that I said this was a bad idea.”
“Duly noted.” Hollander scanned the sides of the road for an ambush or trap. No one knew what to expect. Though they were eager to leave the city, they couldn’t ignore the fact that Ixibas was right. It was too easy.
They walked in silence for half a mile to the edge of the city before Tusque started rambling, to himself as much as anyone else. “I wonder how we’re going to let the ship know we’re alive and ready for pickup.”
Ixibas shrugged and scanned the road ahead. His eyes fell on the destruction around them—broken windows, smashed vehicles, and cracks in the pavement.
Looking closer, he saw a series of cracks to their left extended just over a foot on the ground before stopping. A few feet beyond, another pair of cracks extended a similar distance and stopped. The ground was undamaged.
Slowly turning in a circle, he scanned the rest of the road. In a concentric circle around them, cracks emanated no more than a foot before disappearing, as they approached the foci on which the group stood.
“Nobody move!” His growled words startled the others. “It’s a….”
Tusque stepped heavily as he stopped his forward momentum. Beneath their feet, the ground shook from the impact as if an earthquake was centralized beneath them. Hollander and Pateros spread their stance, trying to balance against the shaking.
Ixibas watched in horror as Tusque stumbled and backpedaled toward the other three. As he stepped heavily on his wounded leg, it buckled under him. He fell backward into the middle of the group like a collapsing mountain.
As he crashed to the road, the fake covering broke loose and fell inward. The faux stone covering shattered as fabric enclosed all four of them. Together, enclosed by shards of stone and gray cloth, they fell nearly twenty feet into a dark pit.
They landed on the packed dirt floor with a heavy thud, their limbs entangled and buried in the heavy tarp. Ixibas dug his claws into the tarp and tore a hole through it to emerge in a dark passage. Above, light fell down to spotlight them, casting a faint glow in the tunnel that extended in both directions.
“…trap,” he said, finishing his sentence far too late.
The others, emerging from the tarp, looked around. Aside from pillars of light from above, the tunnel disappeared into the darkness beyond where they stood.
“Where are we?” Hollander shook concrete dust from his hair.
“We’re in their home.” Ixibas walked to the nearest wall and ran his clawed hand over the surface, tracing long claw marks with his own sharp fingers. “They dug this.”
The rest of them looked at the mostly rounded tunnel. Nearly twenty feet overhead, the walls curved toward the ceiling. The tunnel ran parallel to the street, punctured with what they assumed were multiple false floors. The intense heat in the tunnel amplified the warmth of the setting sun, making the stuffy air thick to breathe.
“They were waiting for us to do something stupid like this,” Pateros said. “We were herded like….” He stopped, because the phrase would normally have been completed with the word Seques.
“They played us,” Ixibas said. “We were more than obliging.”
Tusque muscled his way from under the tarp and turned on his light. The beam cast a dim glow down the hallway. “Why build a tunnel like this, Boss? It goes on forever. Was this just to catch us?”
“No.” Ixibas’ voice sounded like rocks rubbing together. “I think capturing us was a secondary part of their plan. These tunnels are how the Seque disappear during the day.”
“You’re saying we’re in the middle of their home?” Fear crept into Hollander’s voice. “We’ve fallen into their nest?”
“We aren’t in the middle of their home yet, but we will be once the sun sets. Once they’re active again, they’ll flood the tunnels and find us. If we expect to survive, we need a way out.”
“Which way is out, Boss?” Tusque turned his broad flashlight back and forth, illuminating both stretches of the hall.
“I say we continue toward the edge of the city limits,” Pateros offered. “I’d rather not turn around and head back the way we came.”
Ixibas followed their flashlight beams in the direction they’d been going on the surface. The lights fell s
hort of reaching the end of the tunnel but he shook his head. They walked for less than ten minutes before the tunnel dead-ended. Pateros and Tusque looked for weak points without finding anything. There was no hope of escape that way.
Hollander approached Ixibas, who remained deeper in the tunnel. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you?” Bony protrusions along his face glistened with sweat.
Even Ixibas’ glossy exoskeleton shone brighter in the tunnel’s warmth. “I had my suspicions. After all we’ve been through I found it hard to believe they’d just let us go. If we want to escape their clutches, we need to head back into the city.”
Hollander shivered, knowing escape had been so close. “I say we move now and fast. The sun won’t last much longer.”
The group moved faster than before, nearly running over the tunnel’s uneven floor. The sticky air soaked their bodies with sweat, which poured into their eyes as they hurried. Though they ran for some time the tunnel never changed, except that it sloped deeper into the earth.
Hope fled as they moved deeper into the dark tunnel. Three beams of light barely illuminated the slowly widening space. What began as a twenty-foot tunnel grew to thirty and forty feet as they continued on.
The darkness became oppressive and shadows seemed to move around them. The group turned left and right, trying to catch the fleeting movement at the edge of their vision. Fearing the darkness they pushed on, hoping for an exit.
Instead of an exit, the floor sloped suddenly as their wide tunnel emptied into a spherical room. Pateros, leading the way, was caught by surprise and stepped over the lip of the room before realizing his mistake. His light vanished over the edge. He slid and fell down the sloping wall into the room.
With his weapon tumbling free of his hands, his light harmlessly illuminated the wall to the right, exposing nothing of the room ahead. A wave of rotten meat assaulted their nostrils, making them gag as the three stood on the precipice.
The wall of the round room went in a gentle slope before them to the floor thirty feet below. Lost in darkness, they heard the Wyndgaart groaning below from the numerous cuts and bruises he received during his fall.
Hollander and Tusque lowered their lights until they saw the tanned Wyndgaart on his back, one leg crumpled awkwardly under him. It looked broken and he made no effort to stand. His feet rested inches from a dark underground lake that dominated the floor. Though the three wanted to save him, the smell of rot rolled over them again.
“What’s that awful smell?” Hollander covered his nose and mouth with his free hand.
“It smells terrible.” Tusque waved his hand before his face. “What makes the smell, Ixibas?” He turned to Ixibas, whose dark oval face focused on the room beyond.
“Ixibas?” Tusque asked.
“Shine your light into the room,” he said softly, his voice taking on a worried edge Tusque hadn’t heard before.
The Oterian kept his eyes on the Lithid, looking away only when his broad light was aimed into the darkness beyond.
Their breath caught in their throat. Though the beam couldn’t reach the far wall, it showed the dominant pile in the center of the rounded chamber. Bloated bodies, swollen from heat and rot, were piled on each other. Empty, staring eyes looked down from thousands of faces that watched unseeing from the pile. Heads, mouths open and tongues lolling, emerged from the mound of corpses. Their faces were permanently locked in the looks of horror that were captured when they died.
Hands reached down in claws, rigor mortis having twisted the muscles and pulled on their ashen skin. Thick blood poured over the pile, some congealed and some still running free, from dismembered limbs and free-falling organs that spilled from torn, half-eaten bodies. Cascading down the tiers of corpses to the floor, it pooled into a lake of dark red blood.
Tusque and Hollander panned their lights up to expose the peak of the bodies nearly fifty feet above the floor. Dozens of freshly dismembered figures were tossed haphazardly onto the pile, their dark body armor visible.
“It’s every person from the city,” Hollander breathed.
“And our own friends.” Tusque stared at the torn, bloodied, armored soldiers atop the pile.
“We need to leave here now,” Ixibas hissed, his heart racing.
“We can’t,” Hollander replied. “Pateros is down there. I won’t leave one of our own after all we’ve been through.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Ixibas’ voice took on a hard edge. “It’s already too late.”
Around the room red eyes emerged from unseen tunnels and behind the pile of corpses. First, a couple dozen sets of eyes appeared, but the number grew as the noise of combined growls of anger filled the room. Seques crawled from their cubbies, awakened from their sleep by intruding lights and voices. Hundreds of them awoke and entered the central chamber, seeing four helpless soldiers on the far side. Having just woken, their hunger for fresh meat was great.
“There are so many of them,” Hollander said, stunned.
“We can’t fight that many,” Tusque said meekly. “We’re going to die, aren’t we, Boss?”
“If we are,” Ixibas growled, “let’s make sure we kill as many of these bastards as we can before we go. Kill them all!”
The sound of gunfire and howls of rage filled the tunnels under the city.
Burden of Sisyphus (Brink of Distinction book #1) Page 26