When he found himself cutting a wide swath to avoid a slab caster with a face full of sharp edges he pushed the thought from his mind.
In the distance, a single ladder led up and into darkness.
Buck stopped and motioned toward it, his face set. “That’s where we’re headed.”
“How do you know?” Tig asked him.
Buck turned back just long enough to catch his eye. There wasn’t a touch of humor in Buck’s face anymore. “It’s up there. In the dark. Waiting. I can feel it.”
Tig grew quiet, his eyes tracing the ladder’s dim edges.
Allan stopped and propped his hands on his knees in a half-sitting position.
“You all right, big fella?” Tommy asked him.
Allan nodded, but there was nothing convincing about it.
“I’ll go first,” Tommy offered. The pain was flaring in his shoulder again and from his bandage, blood trickled out in long red fingers. But it wasn’t the pain that worried Tommy as much as the blood.
They stood at the foot of the ladder. Buck shifted the weight of the heavy bag and listened. A thin scratching noise, like the skittering of tiny feet, drifted down from the darkness above.
“Rats,” Buck offered. Each of them took a moment to digest the explanation. One by one they nodded their agreement, knowing full well the chances were better than none that not a single rat was left within a mile of the place.
They were maybe halfway up, Allan huffing like he was on the last leg of the Boston marathon, when the metal rung supporting Tommy gave way. It was rusted and weak, like most everything in this dump, and perhaps in his growing eagerness to escape the vulnerable position they now found themselves in, Tommy had yanked a little too hard. The sound of snapping metal rang sharply in his ears. He screamed and scrambled for purchase. Rusted flakes of metal stabbed his hands as he slid directly into Allan whose weight saved Tommy from falling to his death. The twisted rung spiraled past them in slow motion, heading for a large metal drum below. Buck snapped his hand out to grab it, and for a moment, his fingers actually touched it, or at least he thought they did, but the bar skittered away from him…
The ear crushing racket the rung made when it hit the metal drum made Tommy cringe. Sounded to Tommy like the gong used to summon King Kong in the old black and white movie. The men remained still, Tommy panting, praying, but more importantly, listening for the scratching.
They all listened.
The scratching was gone.
Then the swooping came. Whoomp, Whoomp, Whoomp. Tig and Allan searched vainly through the darkness. “Sounds so big,” Tig said and his voice sounded panicky. Bringing up the rear he had reason to be worried.
“Everyone to the top! Fast!” Buck shouted.
The men began scrambling, their arms and legs pumping like the pistons of a V8 engine. A huge gust of foul wind swept past them and the force of it sent the hair on Tommy’s head whipping into his eyes. They were so terribly vulnerable right now…
Stay cool, Tommy told himself.
He grabbed for the next rung and saw himself miss it. Saw himself falling backwards, his arms flailing. The world turned upside down. He felt the wind in his hair, cool against the back of his neck, slick with sweat, and everything went quiet. He wanted to look back and see what he was falling into, but a part of him was resigned to his fate.
Snap out of it! There are worse things than falling, he told himself. Like being plucked up and carried away.
And if that happened there would be no snapping of claws this time, not from this high up. A blur of movement registered from the corner of his eye. He turned his head enough to see the creature swooping down on them from the shadows, its wings drawn out like a hawk going for a squirrel. It shrieked and Tommy wanted so badly to cover his ears. Instead he reached into the band of his jeans and pulled out the.45. Inside the building, the beast was little more than a blur, but it was a big blur and he aimed for the middle of it and squeezed off a round.
Nothing.
He fired again. And again. It was twenty feet away now, and closing fast. The guys below were shouting for him to move. He shoved the gun under his belt and raced for the landing that was surely not much further. He hoped their movement might make them a difficult target. And in part Tommy was right. It would help.
There was another rush of air and this time, Tommy was nudged by the leathery membrane of a wing. From below, Buck shouted. The beast had tried to grab him and missed, knocking the blue duffel bag from Buck’s hands in the process. Tig leaned a wiry arm out and caught hold of it. The bag was heavy and nearly peeled the skinny man off the ladder. Tig stabilized and then swung it over his shoulder. Buck was about to congratulate his friend when Tig began to shriek. The monster was back and the claws on its feet were curled around Tig’s rib cage. Tig was reaching for the Winchester slung around his back, but the bag was in the way. It was holding him between its feet the way a monkey might hold a ball and in the gloom Tommy watched them both free-fall before a thrust from the creature’s powerful wings carried them off. There was something else that Tommy saw just then. In spite of his friend’s screams, and the unbelievable pain, Tig’s hand was reaching behind him, his index finger searching for the Winchester’s trigger hole. He found it at last and his hand jerked. The gun kicked back and a spray of blood and bone exploded from the back of his head and the creature’s abdomen. It screamed that horrible woman’s scream and let Tig go. His body spinning lifelessly through the air before it landed on the ground with a muffled thump.
The three of them stared for what felt like an eternity. Then the beast circled back.
Not far above him, Tommy swore he could see a hatch. He was climbing again with renewed enthusiasm. He came to it so fast he bumped the top of his head. His hand pressed against the trap door. A current of cool air tickled his palm. Thin lines of light marked the edges. He gave it a push and as he did he heard Buck’s voice: “It’s coming back, Tommy. Hurry!”
But the door wouldn’t budge. Then he saw the lock, smiling back at him gleefully.
“Motherfucker!”
“Tommy!” It was Buck again and this time Allan had joined him.
Tommy pulled the.45 out and turned away. “Watch out,” he told them and then fired at the lock. The creature shrieked. When he looked back, the lock was gone. He shoved the door and then pulled himself up onto the landing. Hunched over the hole, he reached down and grasped Allan by the back of his pants and heaved the fat man up. Buck was last and no sooner did Tommy have him in hand than the creature crashed into the ladder. The entire room shuddered. The creature folded its wings and ambled up after them.
Buck and Allan collapsed in exhaustion.
“Close the hatch!” Tommy screamed at them.
The beast’s flattened head was already halfway into the room when they sprang to their feet. Its glowing red eyes skittered across the room and found Buck. Buck seized the hatch and swung it with everything he had. Tommy pulled out his.45. Allan stood immobilized, his Springfield prone at his feet.
The hatch buckled as it hit the creature in the head and then slammed shut,
silencing the animal’s cry. There was a pile of cinderblocks in the corner and Tommy brought one over and placed it on the hatch cover.
“Pile them up so he can’t get through,” Buck said.
“We coulda had him,” Tommy said, heaving another cinderblock. “One shot to the temple and he woulda been a dog’s dinner.”
Allan’s face looked like a wet rag. He staggered toward the trap door and the pile of cinderblocks. “We gotta see if Tig’s alri—”
Buck blocked his way. “Were you napping back there? Tig’s deader than President Grant. Killed himself so he wouldn’t be taken ali—”
Allan’s face was bright red. “Tig isn’t dead.” Spittle flew from his lips. “What about all those people who can’t open their parachutes and live? It happens.”
Buck’s eyes never wavered. Both men stood toe to toe glaring at one
another. “I know what I saw, Allan, and no amount of your denial’s gonna change that.”
Tommy slid in between them. “Now Allan, I know you and Tig go way back. I know you loved him like a brother. But Tig’s dead. You saw it yourself. No amount of risking our skin down there’s gonna bring him back.” He pointed over to Allan’s Springfield, lying against a rotted mattress. “Now pick up your gun.”
Allan’s eyes fell to the hatch and wouldn’t let go. Tommy slapped the man’s fleshy cheek. Allan’s eyes flashed with anger. “Snap out of it, will ya?” Tommy shouted. “We need you whole right now. What happened to Tig was bad, but we gotta put the bad behind us and do what it was we came here to do.”
Tommy caught sight of Buck and an expression on the old man’s face he couldn’t immediately place. An expression that worried him. Before long he recognized the shadow he saw forming behind his friend’s eyes. Obsession.
Tommy went to the old mattress and fell into it, sending a puff of dust into the air. He removed his.45 and reached into his pant pocket for shells. Allan sat on the ground, his frantic eyes scanning the room, his lips quivering every so slightly.
The room in which they now found themselves looked like a foreman’s office. In the corner were the remnants of an old desk, now an overturned heap of crumpled wood. Buck went to an old water cooler and flipped the lever uselessly. Tommy was loading bullets into the clip of his pistol when the noise came. The scratching was back, this time louder. Like a thousand tiny feet scuttling about.
“Mommy’s home,” Buck chimed in. And at once, all three men had nearly the identical thought. She’s brought dinner. But none of them had the nerve to undo their barricade of cinder blocks and check to see if Tig’s body was still lying on the dusty patch of ground by one of the great smelting machines. Although each of them was more that positive it wasn’t.
For Buck it was the loss of the dynamite that was his gravest concern right now. He moved to the doorway, shotgun in hand. “All right, let’s go.”
Tommy took point. Buck followed up the rear. They headed down a narrow hallway, doors on either side, dust and shadows before them. They were searching for the source of the scratching; at least that was the unspoken understanding. Find what’s making that noise, Buck had said, and you find what needs to be killed.
Part IV
‘End Game’
The mining helmets cast a long ghostly beam before them. Buck pointed to the door on their left. They approached it, Allan now behind them. Tommy bent forward and pressed his ear flat against the door.
The room sounded empty.
Tommy turned the knob slowly and then threw the door open. Yellow light cut through the shadow revealing more ruined desks, two old typewriters, a white board, but not much else.
There was a disappointed look on Buck’s face, like he’d expected to find something.
“Uh, guys,” Allan whispered from the hallway. “Guys?”
“What is it, Allan?” Buck shot in that same reproachful tone reserved for children who are wearing thin on the nerves.
“Should there be a breeze in here?”
Buck and Tommy exchanged a puzzled glance.
“You two better get out here.”
They did, and were met by one of Allan’s cherubic fingers pointing down the hallway. Their eyes followed it. The beams from their helmets crawled along the corridor, illuminating a door some thirty feet away swaying lazily on its hinges back and forth, as though a gentle breeze were nudging it about.
One of the few remaining scraps of Buck’s hair kept the beat.
Buck approached it at a brisk walk, Tommy in tow. When the latter turned back, he saw that Allan was still rooted in place looking like some bronzed version of the Hamburgler.
“Allan! Front and center,” Tommy hissed.
Allan didn’t move.
“You stay behind, one of those things is gonna grind you up for mush and use you as baby food.”
For a moment, Allan’s eyes lost that glazed, stupid look.
“For Tig,” Tommy said finally. “We don’t set this right then he died for nothing.”
Allan’s lips were pursed. He nodded and swung the butt of his Springfield up and caught the stalk with his free hand.
“For Tig,” he said.
“Yes, for Tig,” Tommy whispered, “and everyone else these things will get unless…”
When Tommy turned back, Buck was gone. He hurried for the swaying door and pulled it open. Inside was Buck, looking more than a little frustrated. Despite the promise, the room seemed to hold nothing new. Buck and Allan stooped down to investigate a bundle of bloodied jeans and t-shirts tossed haphazardly on the floor. Just then something cold slid down and brushed against Tommy’s left cheek. Tommy brought his fingers to his cheek and then held them under the yellow light of his helmet. The substance was thick and slimy.
Tommy’s eyes traced up the wall toward the ceiling and what he saw there sucked all the wind out of him. A hole in the ceiling, maybe five feet in diameter; not enormous, but wide enough for the biggest of those things to squeeze through. The edges were soft and worn, giving him the immediate sensation that he was standing underneath some great, black bowel. For a second, Tommy managed to tear his eyes away and saw that Buck and Allan had found it too. This would be their way in. Only problem was, it was a healthy ten feet from the floor to the ceiling.
Tommy began dragging over a sagging desk and centered it underneath the hole.
“If we pile up enough of this crap, we may be able to crawl in—”
Allan’s face looked like a man who’d spent the last twenty minutes in the spin cycle.
“No goddamn way am I going up there! Ain’t no way!”
Tommy was dragging an old file-cabinet toward the center of the room. When the pile was over five feet high, Tommy grabbed hold of a desk leg as he attempted to scramble up.
“Gimme a hand, will ya?” Tommy asked Buck, his legs wobbling, feeling like a child learning to walk for the first time.
Buck placed a hand on Tommy’s back to stabilize him. Buck looked doubtful. “This ain’t gonna hold us. Specially not Allan with all that extra baggage he’s carrying.”
“I-I juh-just told you,” Allan stammered. “I’m not going up there.”
Tommy teetered at the top of the pile and stretched a hand up, his heart pounding in his chest. He had seen what those things could do to a man’s face.
There was a sudden moan as the pile beneath him began to shift. Tommy struggled to keep his balance. Just then his foot tore through a section of rotten wood planking, swallowing his leg to the knee. Tommy bit down as the pain stung him. A thick splinter of wood bit into his calf, tearing through his pant leg.
Buck jumped up and yanked him free. A trail of blood followed them. All three men stared at the wound, and then at the hole in the ceiling. Bleak faced. Fearful.
“This is not good,” Buck said gravely.
“Tie it off quickly,” Allan pleaded, “before they start coming.”
Buck caught Allan’s eyes. “Go get some of those cinder blocks. We’ll pile ‘em. It’s the only way we’ll get up there.”
Allan nodded, happy to be away from that hole in the ceiling. Buck tied off Tommy’s wound and helped him to his feet.
“Buck, I really fucked up this time, didn’t I?”
“You’ve done plenty worse,” he said smiling.
“Ah, thanks.”
“How’s the leg?”
Tommy stood, wavered for a moment and then hobbled around the room, moving with the grace of a man with a rock in his shoe.
“I’ll be fine, really. Don’t worry about me.” But despite the bravado, Tommy was worried. Mostly about the thing that had been worrying him since he’d first seen Buck’s mangled hand: the blood. Tommy could feel it saturating his pant leg and knew it was the equivalent of ringing a dinner bell. Buck knew it too, but neither man said a word. They did the only thing they could under the circumstances. They helped Al
lan move cinderblocks.
• • •
That the walls of the narrow passageway were slick and syrupy didn’t bother Tommy all that much. Crawling through the goo that had collected on the floor did. He could feel the strange substance mingling with the open wounds on his shoulder and he wondered what medical problems he would discover if he ever made it out alive. Allan had refused to follow them inside, perhaps because the idea of getting stuck in a hole like a pig in a blanket frightened him more than the prospect of taking his chances alone. The beam from their helmets cut through the darkness. Not far ahead they could see the tunnel opened into a larger chamber.
Where we might finally be able to stand up, Tommy thought hopefully.
Tommy was in front of Buck and when he came to the mouth of the larger room, he froze.
“What’s wrong?” Buck barked from the rear.
Tommy slid forward on his elbows. As the two men stood, their jaws slackened, their breathing became ragged and greedy, like two fish plucked from a half-gallon bowl. To Tommy, the room looked like it might once have been a cafeteria or an assembly hall. Now it looked like a morgue. Laid out neatly around them were dozens of bodies. Men, women, and children alike. But morgue wasn’t exactly right since these people were alive. At least, they seemed alive. Their bodies wiggled ever so slightly.
No, they’re not wiggling, Tommy amended.
Beneath their clothing, their skin rippled like waves at the beach on a blustery day. Except these waves had the unique characteristic of being slow and purposeful. There was another similarity that struck Tommy as odd. They were all obese. Buck and Tommy approached a bloated man with blond curly hair. His eyes were closed, his enormous belly ebbing and flowing. Buck bent down and slid a hand beneath the man’s head.
“Buddy, wake up! We’re gonna take you outta here!”
The wriggling stopped. Then the man’s mouth opened. He was about to speak. Buck moved closer to hear. Now the man’s face began to distort and stretch. His mouth gaped open so wide his lips were splitting apart.
Tommy grabbed Buck to pull him away, but it was too late. A fleshy appendage sprang from the man’s broken face and latched onto Buck’s neck. Blood spurted in a straight and powerful arc and Buck screamed, his arms thrashing about. Tommy fumbled for his gun, dropping it onto the man’s deflated torso. Buck grabbed the creature with his bare hands and squeezed. The tips and then the entire length of his fingers disappeared into the creature’s pink, blood spattered flesh. Thick white puss began running down Buck’s arms as he struggled with what looked like a fat worm with needles for teeth. At last Tommy got a hold of his Colt, brought it to the creature’s head, not two inches from Buck’s lower jaw and pulled the trigger. Buck’s face was splashed with more of the creature’s bone white blood. The worm collapsed to the floor and lay still. Buck held a hand up to his neck. Blood trickled between his fingers. Tommy ripped the left sleeve off his shirt and tied it around Buck’s neck.
Bird of Prey: A Horror Novella Page 3