My fist connected just underneath the bag’s chin with enough force to flip over a car. The impact drove his teeth clean through the extended tentacles and shattered his jaw.
Black blood erupted from the bag’s mouth as it went rigid with shock. I could see its throat bulge and warp as the worm thrashed and twisted in pain.
It was stunned and it was close to me. Game over. I took the baton in both hands, wound up, and swung for the fences with everything I had. The headless corpse fell to the ground.
Nearby, a diesel engine roared to life. The prison bus lurched forward with a painful grinding of gears. Through the windshield I could see an insanely grinning Chuck behind the wheel. Anne stood right next to him, white-knuckled and swaying as she clutched the safety bar next to him. They were alive. The tightness in my chest that I hadn’t been aware of relaxed and let me breathe.
The bus missed the group of captives on the ground by inches as Chuck swerved closer to the edge of the quarry in order to avoid them.
The armored bag watched the bus bear down on it, unable or unwilling to drop the captive he was holding over his head.
There was a sickening thud as the bag disappeared under the bumper, only to encounter the forty-two-inch-tall, foot-wide bus tire coming up behind it. The captive flew over the hood and smashed into the windshield, caving it in.
The impact tore the pale tube out of his throat. That must have been fairly painful for the Mother as well, as she jerked up and back, spilling clear mucus swimming with tiny worms from the torn off end of the tube.
As soon as the bus made contact with the bag, Chuck locked up the brakes, throwing up a cloud of white dust and slamming the bus to a halt between the Mother and the captives. Trapped between the locked wheel of an eighteen-ton bus and the stony ground of the quarry, the bag simply peeled apart like rotten fruit.
Enraged, the Mother wrapped one massive tentacle across the front of the bus, crushing it. The sounds of shattering glass accompanied the squeal of tires as the Mother began to drag the entire bus into the lake.
I raced for the bus as it slid towards the water. The front wheels slipped off of the quarry and the bus chassis dropped onto the ground, scraping and grinding on the rocky ledge.
I arrived just as the back of the bus rose up over my head. The rear emergency door popped open and Anne looked out at me, clutching the bottom edge of the door as the floor of the bus tilted towards the sky.
She held my gaze as she rose into the air. Seconds later, the nose hit the water with a booming splash. The entire bus plunged vertically into the lake.
43
I dove into the water as the rear of the bus slipped out of sight. Faint light filtered down past the surface of the cold water, just enough to paint everything with wavering ripples of silver and shadow.
Anne and Chuck floated out of the rear door and swam for the surface. Behind them the Mother’s tentacles uncurled from the bus like a grotesque flower opening up.
We gasped and coughed as our heads burst into the open air. I grabbed Anne’s waist and shoved her upwards onto the granite ledge that surrounded the lake, pushing myself underwater as I did so. Chuck was already halfway out. I tried not to think of the Mother reaching up through the black water towards me.
I scraped my palms on the rough stone as I hauled myself out of the lake as fast as I could, throwing myself onto the ground to lay on my back, panting. Water hissed and rained down as something huge broke the surface of the water.
“Get up! Get up! We need to get moving!” Anne’s face appeared above me, silhouetted against the clouds, eyes wide as she yanked on my shoulders. Drops fell on my cheeks and lips from the flying ends of her wet hair and also from the tips of the Mother’s mouth tentacles hanging in the air above her, giving her a halo of undulating gray ropes against the churning sea-green backdrop of the sky.
I forced myself to my feet and tried to focus on my surroundings as we ran. I heard cars. A lot of them.
Engines roaring, tires growling against the rocky ground, and slamming car doors all filtered in. Looking back over my shoulder, I could see a steady flow of vehicles piling into the parking lot, mostly just crunching into the nearest stopped vehicle and disgorging its occupants while still running. All of the arrivals seemed to be bags, anything from a single driver to a packed minivan full.
Chuck led us towards the second flight of a rusty iron staircase embedded in the granite face of the quarry, leading up to the working face that loomed high over the water-filled pit below.
“That shrieking that the Mother did earlier?” yelled Anne as we ran. “That wasn’t just for our benefit. She was calling her children home.”
“How many?” We reached the bottom of the stairs and started pounding upwards.
“I don’t know, but from the number of cars I’m guessing that she could be heard for a couple of miles at least.”
We stopped at the top of the quarry face, which was really the crest of a huge granite hill. Two cranes were mounted on the edge up here, one on a sliding track and another, heavier one on a swivel mount bolted into the rock.
Both were scabrous with ancient yellow paint turned dull and pale, flaking off in large brittle chips, revealing patches of dark red rust that wept long streaks down the iron structures.
Hanging from the larger crane was a massive chain with a hook at the end. The chain ran down the center of the latticed arm into a drum attached to a diesel engine. There was no operator’s panel as such, just a long lever to spin the cable drum and a T-shaped handle on a cord to hand start the motor.
Beyond the cranes was a single-story metal building with no windows and a single door, which was secured with a big corroded padlock. More crane drums wrapped with various sizes of chain sat on rotten pallets of wood at crazy angles, the bases sagging through the collapsed wooden slats to rest on the ground beneath.
Below, a sea of enraged bags surged and eddied in the parking lot, each of them clutching a favorite implement, be it a butcher knife, ice pick, or humble wood chisel. They were frantic, like ants after their nest had been kicked over. As we watched, they swarmed over the bound captives and massacred them.
Chuck stared at the carnage with wild eyes. “We’re not going to make it. We can’t fight that many.”
“Maybe not, but for right now, we’re okay.”
“We’re okay? Are you shitting me? There are at least fifty of those things down there looking for us. We’re trapped up here and as soon as they notice us, we’re going to die.”
“Chuck. Hey. Listen to me. We’re not going to die. The Army sent me and my team out against all kinds of nightmare things I can’t begin to describe to you, and we came back every time. That’s what I do. I fight and I win and I will be goddamned if a bunch of fishbait motherfuckers with kitchen knives are going to do me in now. Got it?”
“And the building-sized monster in the lake?”
“Is up next. Now, let’s check the shed and see what we have to work with.”
The blocky padlock bleeding rust turned out to be more robust than the door it was guarding. The shackle was completely jammed in the body of the lock by corrosion, so when I yanked on it trying to break the lock, the entire latch fell out of the tin door.
I tossed the whole mess aside and peeled the door open as gingerly as possible, since any squealing would give us away, and I didn’t want to give the mob below a target just yet. The hinges chirped a little as I shifted the door, so I stopped when there was just enough of a gap to squeeze through.
The inside of the shed smelled like fuel, rusted metal, and rock dust. A wooden bench ran across the back wall, covered in black grime, heaps of decomposing hand tools, and lengths of chain. In one corner sat a fifty-five-gallon drum with a peeling paper label on it that had the word DIESEL stenciled across it, the opposite corner had welding supplies but no rig, and the floor was littered with quart cans of turpentine and machine oil.
My eyes were drawn to the lengths of cord with T-handles attached to t
he end hanging from hooks on the wall, but when I touched one of them, the cord crumbled between my fingers. Dry rot. The one in the crane engine was probably in the same shape.
“Help me find a thin cable, or a piece of chain in here no bigger around than a finger.”
Anne wrinkled her nose as she began pawing through the dirty, oily mess on the bench. “What for?”
“Just find me some cable. And hurry. I’ll be checking out that crane engine outside.”
I grabbed a couple of wood-handled screwdrivers off of the bench and stepped outside, turning sideways to squeeze through the door so as to avoid moving the rusted hinges any more than I had to.
I knelt down next to the small motor and tugged gently on the T-handle. It came off in my hand as I had expected. The metal shroud that covered the starter pulley was attached with screws that were rusted in place, so of course I ended up stripping the heads out instead of budging them.
“Here, I found this.” Anne crouched down next to me and passed over a length of thin metal cable that looked pretty good under the thick coat of grime. The grease on it had probably kept the worst of the rust away.
“Perfect. The only problem I have now is that in order to use it, I have to get this cover off, and the screws are stripped. That means tearing the thing off, and the instant I do that, our friends in the parking lot are going to know that we’re up here.”
Chuck tapped me on the shoulder. “Too late.” He pointed over the edge.
The Mother was still swaying high over the crowd below, but now the tips of her mouth-tentacles were all pointed directly at us. And so were a couple hundred pairs of glassy, fevered eyes.
44
As if released by a starter pistol that only they could hear, the entire mass of bags began surging towards us. The stairway up the side of the quarry was one continuous jointed ramp with no switchbacks that cut deep into the granite face. It was made up of three sections, the top and bottom at a fairly shallow angle, and the middle section at a steeper, forty-five-degree slope.
The steps themselves were stone with metal faces, and if there had ever been a handrail, it was long gone. We had less than a minute before the fastest sprinters in the mob reached us.
Chuck eyed the approaching crowd and patted his gun. “Wish I had more bullets. What now?”
I ripped the cover off of the crane engine with a loud crack. “We do what we came to do. Kill the Mother. If I’m right, all of her offspring will go down when she dies. Hand me that cable.”
He passed it to me without comment and I struggled for a moment getting it wrapped it around the starter pulley. I held my breath and hoped that there was still fuel in the tank and spark in the plugs, and then I opened the choke and yanked.
The engine growled and sputtered, releasing a puff of black smoke before dying. Sparing a glance at the stairwell, I could see that the leading edge of the mob had made it onto the bottom segment of the ramp. I used up more precious seconds re-winding the cable and yanked again. This time there was a longer sputter and more smoke, but it died out just the same.
A group of three bags had pulled away from the pack and were already nearing the top of the stairs. Gunfire echoed off of the quarry walls as Chuck and Anne took them out. Bodies tumbled from the stairs and into the lake far below. Satisfyingly tall geysers erupted from the surface when they hit.
There were plenty more on the bottom third of the staircase, but their charge faltered as heads swiveled down towards the water to see what happened. I dropped the cable and ran to the crushed pallets full of chain spools, grabbed a large one, and duck-walked it over to the top of the stairs.
I dropped it on the edge of the top step, leaving the spool perched vertically like a round-topped table, then ran back and did it again four more times, until there was stack of two-hundred-pound spools taller than my head.
Then I took three more spools and stacked them next to the shed, a single one next to two stacked ones, making a little two-step staircase next to the tin wall.
“Okay, here’s the plan. I’m going to deal with the Mother. Your job, the both of you, is to survive longer than she does. Wait until the crowd gets about halfway up the last flight, and then push this stack over onto them. That should clear a good part of the stairway and buy you some time. If I’m still not done, run up those spools over there and get on the roof of the shack. It’s a good ten feet off the ground, so you can probably hold them off for a couple of minutes as they try to climb up after you.”
“And if you’re still fighting, or more likely, being digested?” asked Chuck.
Anne shot him a look. “Then we finish what Abe started.”
“It won’t come to that. One more thing. Chuck, which way lets out the chain on this thing?”
“Pull towards you to reel it in, push it forward to let it out.”
“When I yell, somebody needs to haul ass to the crane and pull that lever to reel in the chain. Now keep an eye on the stairs and wish me luck.”
Turning my back on those stairs was like turning my back on friends who were standing in front of an oncoming train. I knew in my head that they’d get out of the way, but my gut screamed that I was leaving them to die. I bit down on the urge to stand with them and focused on the crane engine.
The cable was stiff and greasy and kept wanting to jump off the starter pulley, so I had to jam my knee against the pulley to keep it from turning, and use both hands to keep pressure on the cable as I wound it. My hands trembled as I raced against the clock.
After an eternity I got it wound, slapped open the choke on the engine and yanked it again. This time it caught with a stuttering growl that quickly built into a solid roar.
I could feel the vibration through the soles of my feet as it settled into a steady idle. I closed the choke and then slowly pushed the handle away from me. The roar pitched down to a rumble as it began to work.
The spool started turning with a squeal and a shower of black dust and grit. The chain dangling from the tip of the crane lengthened, slowly reaching for the surface of the water far below. When the hook broke the surface, I tried to keep track of how much chain was under water as I watched the links slide out of sight. When I thought I had what I needed, I pulled the lever back to neutral and the spool stopped turning.
Done with the first part of my plan, I stepped away from the control panel.
Just in time for one of the Mother’s tentacle’s to whip down and yank me into the sky. In a split-second I was fifty feet up in the air and moving fast.
45
Inch long teeth sawed into my leg as I dangled over a deep well of wetly rippling purple flesh. I’m going to blame panic for what I did next, because that sounds better than stupidity.
I hunched upward and grabbed the end of the tentacle holding me with both hands and yanked. The closed loop of muscle came open and I dropped straight down towards the gulping orifice below me.
The Mother snatched at me in the air and managed to knock me enough to the side that I hit the edge of her mouth between the bases of two of her five pillar-like tentacles, instead of dropping straight into her maw. I heaved off even as I slammed into the ridged muscle, narrowly avoiding being pinned as the tentacles closed like two huge fingers gripping a cigarette.
I tumbled through the air for five stories and slammed into the frigid black water. The impact was like being hit by a car, stunning me. By the time I was able to focus I was much farther down than I expected. The rippling glass ceiling of the surface glowed far above me. Unseen things in the water bumped into me with blunt noses before sliding over and around me.
I pulled hard for the surface with my arms, since my booted feet slipped through the water with little resistance as I kicked. I should have pulled them off, but I didn’t like the idea of having bare feet while hungry things swam up from below.
It was hard to tell if the surface was getting closer. Something much larger than before shoved me in the leg, pushing forcefully past me. A few seconds
later it hit me again, this time in the back, and hard enough to bruise me. I lost some of my precious air with the impact.
A long shadow crossed between me and the surface, long and thick like a fire hose, but frayed at the front end. There were several of them in the water around me. I could feel the currents of their passage as they shot past, inches from my skin.
They let me get within about ten feet of the surface, just to the point where I could make out the rubbery stretching and contracting images of the crane arms hanging over the quarry, when my calf was gripped in the fist of a pissed-off giant, squeezing for all he was worth.
The worm jerked savagely, and dozens of needle-sharp teeth popped through my jeans and into my leg. I tucked into a ball and clawed at the rubbery thing, but I couldn’t get a grip on its slick hide. It jerked again, and the surface jumped away as it pulled me down.
I could see whorls of inky shadow above my head as it dragged me back through the expanding cloud of my own blood. Terror was making my heart race, burning up my oxygen and pushing me towards panic as I desperately fought against the need to inhale.
I reached down, grabbed my foot with both hands, and pulled it up towards my face until I could feel the slick tentacles that were wrapped around my calf against my lips. I bit down as hard as I could.
It was like trying to bite through a snake without the scales, all sliding, contracting muscles with a core of bone joints down the center. I dug in and shook my head like a dog until my teeth touched bone.
The worm let me go like I was on fire and bolted away. I clawed for the surface with everything I had, spots drifting across my vision.
I broke into clear air and gulped air and lake water in equal amounts, wasting precious moments coughing and catching my breath. As soon as I was able, I got my bearings and spotted the chain hanging down into the water a few feet to my left.
I grabbed the rusty, coarse links and started pulling it up hand over hand looking for the hook at the end. My fingers finally found it, so I hooked it into the waistband of my jeans and swam towards the Mother.
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