“What in hell was that?” Tommy cried. “What is this place?”
Buck scanned the room. He was thinking about his neck and wondering how long it would take the rest of them to smell the blood. “Looks like we found the nursery,” he said finally. And as he spoke, Tommy noticed that the flowing movement along the floor had ceased. The bodies had grown still and for a second he thought that they almost looked human again. Then all around mouths were opening. Dozens of mouths, like the fat man with the big belly and the curly blond hair.
“Run!” Buck shouted.
There was a hallway up ahead, maybe twenty paces. They bolted, weaving between the deflating bodies. From Buck’s right, a larva with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth sprang at them from its host. Buck leveled his shotgun and pulled the trigger. There was an echoing boom. The shotgun gave a mighty kick and the worm’s head disintegrated before them. Its body flopped to the ground, convulsing.
“Wait,” Tommy shouted.
Buck skidded to a stop and turned.
Tommy was waiving him over. “It’s Tig!”
Tig’s shattered body looked like someone had broken it on the rack. His right leg sat at a queer ninety degree angle, and his neck was cocked so far to one side it had to be broken. Buck reached down, grabbed the blue duffel bag and shouted. “Let’s go!”
“We can’t just leave him! Those things…”
Buck caught movement behind Tommy.
“Get down!” Buck screamed. Instinctively, Tommy dropped. There was a deafening bang and then a warm spray on Tommy’s face.
“This whole place’ll just be a memory in another ten minutes,” Buck said coldly. “We can’t take him with us. Now come on!”
Tommy was limping madly. In front of him, Buck, wheezing hard, was blasting a path for them with his shotgun.
The hallway was narrow, ending in a set of stairs. Behind them larvae were filing into the corridor. “These things don’t give up, do they?” Tommy said. “Let’s just set the dynamite and get out of here.”
Buck’s eyes were scanning the hallway and the approaching worms. “We have to be sure.”
“Sure… sure of what?”
“That big bitch, she’s what we’re after. I’m certain of it. Maybe I made a mistake coming here in the first place, setting all this off. Or maybe it was gonna happen anyway. Regardless, if we blow this place then we gotta be sure she goes with it.”
Tommy’s heart sank. The idea made the pain in his shoulder scream out with blinding agony. It wasn’t so long ago that that thing had sent him careening through the air and he wasn’t in any hurry to repeat the maneuver.
The larvae were still coming. Squirming mindlessly over one another with the single pulsating instinct to feed driving them forward.
“We better hope we’re heading in the right direction,” Tommy said. He turned to Buck, but Buck was already gone.
When Tommy caught up to him, Buck had rounded the staircase and was starting down an impossibly long hallway.
As they made their way along, the only sound was the muffled, rhythmic clunk of their heavy boots on the concrete floor. Clunk clunk, clunk clunk. “Those things were eating those people…” Tommy began. He was shaking his head, trying to find the words to match his incredulity.
“Blowflies,” Buck answered enigmatically.
“Eh?”
“Blowflies spend their lives looking for dead things to lay their eggs in.” He was reloading his shotgun, counting the number of shells he had left, trying not to look worried. “When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the body from the inside until they’re old enough to get food on their own.”
Tommy let out a dry, nervous laugh. “I doubt those things were having much of a hard time getting food on their own.”
Clunk clunk, clunk clunk, scrape.
Tommy was about to say something else when he heard the sound of tiny claws scurrying about. He regulated his breathing, straining to listen. No, it didn’t sound like it was above them this time. Ahead of them was an old rusted metal door. Could they be on the other side of it? he wondered anxiously. Or are they behind us? He felt icy fingers crawling up his spine and shook the feeling away.
“Stop for a moment, will ya?” Tommy called out.
Buck stopped.
“You hear that?”
Buck seemed to concentrate, then shook his head.
And he was right. The noise wasn’t there anymore. Was he cracking up? After watching that grotesque worm, dripping with some guys innards, latch onto Buck’s neck anything was possible. Buck was walking away now. Tommy sped after him, a quickness in his staggered step.
Clunk clunk, clunk clunk.
Scrape scrape.
Tommy’s headlamp dimmed just as the noise came back and then went out completely. The scratching was getting louder, he realized, and the character of it was also changing. It sounded dull, almost like claws scuttling along the ground. No, not almost, it sounded exactly like scrapping claws. Tommy spun around and saw blackness. He smacked the side of his helmet. The light flicked and then died, but in that instant he had seen enough to nearly turn the hair on his head milky white. Not ten yards behind them, dozens of red glowing eyes were staring back at him, their bird-like bodies ambling stealthily down the hallway. The last thing Tommy saw before his light dimmed and faded forever was the creatures breaking into a mad dash, clawing at the walls to get at them.
“Oh my God, they’re right behind us, Buck!”
Buck turned to look at Tommy and his eyes became saucers.
“Move your ass!” Tommy shouted, staggering past him, bad leg and all.
They were screaming now, those things behind them. They were getting closer and they could smell the blood. Maybe even taste it.
Buck’s light bobbed and cast a sick shadow against the door at the end of the hall. If it was locked, he thought, they were doomed. There were too many of them to kill. Not enough time to reload. Frantic, Tommy promised himself he would keep a single bullet, just in case.
They came to the metal door and to Tommy’s great horror, it wouldn’t open. He tried the handle and rattled it back and forth, but to no avail. The knob had no key hole, so how could it be locked? He wanted to scream.
Buck spun on his heels, leveled his shotgun and almost deafened Tommy with the concussion from its blast. There was an explosion of fur and blood. Two creatures fell and were promptly stampeded by those behind them.
“Jeeeesus,” Buck whispered. “Didn’t even slow ‘em down. Ten more seconds before those things make chicken feed out of us, Tommy. Do something!”
Tommy scanned the doorframe anxiously and that’s when he saw it: a thick metal slide-latch protruding from the overhead arch. He yanked it down, the muscles in his great forearms bulging as they contracted. At first nothing happened, then came the glorious sound of screeching metal as the latch—no doubt older than either of them—broke free. Tommy turned the knob, kicked the door with his good foot and disappeared inside. Buck was tight on his heels. They slammed the door together and not a second later felt it shudder under the weight of the creatures on the other side. Tommy could hear their nails scraping in the darkness, but otherwise they were quiet. Perhaps those things knew something they didn’t. Tommy and Buck remained with their backs braced against the door. Barely a moment later the sound from the hallway was gone.
Buck raked the area with the light from his helmet. They were in an enormous cathedral-like chamber. In the distance was the sound of dripping water. The damp smell of ammonia was almost overpowering.
“You think they left?” Tommy whispered.
Buck gave him a look. “You feel like takin’ a peek?” he whispered back.
Tommy shook his head and was tempted to tell Buck to go fuck himself. He was quiet for a moment, almost pensive. “Why are we whispering?”
“I’m not sure.”
Tommy’s nerves almost made him explode into laughter but he held it inside.
“We got to find someth
ing to prop against this door,” Buck told him.
There was an old dusty vending machine near a pile of broken furniture. Tommy stuck a hand underneath it and began dragging it over. The sound of screeching metal was awful. Tommy was breathing hard, rocking it back and forth. When he arrived, Buck helped him move it into place.
“There,” Buck said finally, brushing rusty particles off his hands and admiring their work. “That should hold ‘em.”
Tommy couldn’t hide the concern on his face.
“What’s wrong?”
“You think Allan’s all right?”
“That fat ol’ bastard?” Buck said, trying to sound hard, but realizing his own unease was probably showing. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
Just then, something soft landed on Tommy’s head and slide down his face. It almost felt like a clump of warm mud. Buck saw it and doubled over. The stench of it made Tommy gag. He scrapped it off his face with a cupped hand. The floor was wet with puddled water and he went to clean himself. But the minute he brought his cupped hand to his face he knew something was terribly wrong. This puddle on the floor wasn’t water. And that stuff hadn’t been mud.
He looked up at Buck. Buck was leaning on the vending machine, fighting off insane spasms of laughter, his great barrel chest heaving up and down.
“Buck,” Tommy said faintly, pointing toward the ceiling.
That made Buck laugh all the more, tears were rolling down his cheeks. It was almost a full minute before Buck regained his composure. That there wasn’t an ounce of humor in Tommy’s eyes had helped. Slowly, ever so slowly, Buck traced the light from his helmet up the edge of the wall and onto the high gambrel ceiling. The ceiling was sloped—both men beginning to feel as though they were standing inside the biggest barn on earth. The beam from Buck’s helmet dissipated to a faint glow as it reached the ceiling. Something up there in the shadows was moving. Lots of somethings.
Then Tommy saw what was there, what that movement belonged to and he was sure his eyes had to be playing tricks on him. He looked at Buck and whatever hope he had of being delusional evaporated like a patch of watery ground in the Sahara. The old man’s face visibly blanched.
Above them, negotiating the ceiling with sublime ease, were what had to be a hundred creatures, their wings fluttering now and again, some of them scrambling over one another, angling for a better place. They seemed to be in some kind of rest cycle, but even so the ceiling was filled with such movement it hardly seemed believable. A cold vulnerable fear was running through Tommy as he remembered wrestling that vending machine. The way it squeaked and groaned. His gut tightened with the thought of how close he had come to waking a hundred eating machines.
“She’s up there,” Buck whispered. There was good reason to whisper now. “You see’er?”
Tommy strained, fighting the gnawing urge to run.
“The big one near the middle.” Buck motioned with his hand and that’s when Tommy saw her, near the center of the great insectile mass.
“Look at ‘er, sitting there, cool as a cucumber while the others scurry around her.”
“Her children,” Tommy said.
Buck’s eyes met his. “That’s right.”
The strange, obsessive quality in Buck’s eyes ignited something deep within Tommy’s memory. Years ago, in junior high, he had read a story—the very remembrance of which felt so distant from this moment, that it might as well have been another life. Distant or not, the rough edges of the tale had come back to him with shocking suddenness. It was the story of how a man’s obsession with killing a mythical white whale had proven his undoing. It had become something personal for the guy in the book, a sort of payback, and it was that same kind of look that Buck wore now. The dangerous look of a man coming unhinged.
They were bound somehow, these two. Buck and this beast.
Buck extended an arm and let the handles of the blue duffel bag slide down into the palm of his hand. He pulled the zipper, reached inside and removed ten sticks of dynamite. They were bound together with duck tape, and in the center was a small round-faced clock, multi-colored wires pouring out of it.
Tommy eyed the contraption with reverence.
“We got ourselves a problem,” Buck said quietly.
“Problem?” Tommy whispered.
Buck pointed with the dim light from his helmet. “Y’see that port hole up there?”
Up close to where the two halves of the roof met was a dark hole, a nook. The kind of place where a bird might set up a nest.
“What of it?” Tommy asked.
“That must be how they’re coming and going.”
“So?”
“So if we set these sticks too low, we might not get ‘em all, especially if some of ‘em manage to escape onto the roof.”
“So what are you saying?” But Tommy thought he knew perfectly well what Buck was saying. Over by a peeling worker safety board was the mouth of what appeared to be an old service elevator. “Buck, I don’t know about this. That thing hasn’t been powered in years.”
Buck’s eyes were dim. “I’m not taking any elevator ride, Tommy,” he said. “Shafts like these always have a ladder inside ‘em. May even connect with that hole they made. I’ll set the timer for ten minutes, that should be enough. Then I’ll slam dunk ‘em with it!” Buck’s face lit up. “I can be up and back in six minutes.” His gaze met Tommy’s. “If I don’t return in five, you start outta here like it ain’t nobody’s business.”
“Buck, let me go, I can be back sooner.”
Buck waved him away. “With that bum leg of yours? I started this and you can bet your ass I’m gonna finish it. Those things are gonna wish they’d kept hybernatin’ another hundred years.”
Buck grabbed Tommy’s shoulders and pulled him close, squeezing him. Before Tommy could say another word, Buck had let go, slung the shotgun and the blue duffel bag over his shoulder and was gone.
Buck’s headlamp bobbed and gradually faded in the distance when Tommy grasped what was really happening. The weight of it hit him so hard that for a moment he felt the breath seize in his lungs. The old man hadn’t gone off to face them alone; he’d gone off to die. The six minutes there and back had been a bluff. He had no intention of returning. He was going to climb that ladder, plant the explosives and open up on the ‘queen bee’ in a hail of gore and glory. He was gonna take her with him. Tommy started toward the elevator. Toward the sound of flapping wings overhead. No way was he going to let the old man off that easy.
When he came to the elevator, the doors were open, but the hatch that led into the shaft and was locked.
Damnit! Tommy thought. The old bastard knew I’d come after him.
He remembered reading an article in Maxim magazine about escaping from stuck elevators and how some of them had side doors for that very purpose. Tommy pulled the Zippo from his pocket, flipped the lid and struck it against his jeans. The walls of the car wavered in an orange glow. He was looking for a vertical edge or at least a hinge of some sort and he was so concentrated on the task he didn’t hear the flapping of wings or the sound of clawed hands landing in the shallow puddles outside.
“There we go,” Tommy said triumphantly as his hand slipped beneath the wood paneling and hit upon what felt like a steel handle. It was at approximately the same time that his nose wrinkled at the pungent odor of rotting flesh. Accompanying that odor was the overwhelming sensation he was being watched. He turned quickly, stabbing a hand into the seat of his pants for his Colt. He was going to swing the gun out and lay waste to whatever it was that had come sneaking up behind him. He was quick, very quick, but the beast was quicker. It was young, just old enough to fly perhaps, its skin pallid and wormlike. Still too young to have any real sense of caution, it lunged through the open elevator doors with incredible speed, knocking both gun and lighter to the floor. Standing face to face, it grasped Tommy’s ankles with its powerful lower claws and held his arms with its stubby upper limbs. The beast was trying to wrestle him
to the ground, pin him down where gravity would push its gnashing jaws onto his face. He outweighed it, but the muscles in the creature’s body were compact and powerful. It was a fine specimen and he might have found room to admire it were it not trying to rip his face off. Then it did something amazing; the edge of its wings reached out and seized the walls of the elevator car: it was trying to stabilize itself in an effort to force Tommy to the ground. For the first time Tommy felt a hot stinging panic. It would soon be on top of him, where it would feed. Its fangs sinking into the soft flesh under his chin, coming away greedily with his Adam’s apple. It would all be over soon. Outside he could hear another set of leathery wings folding in place and a set of clawed feet splashing down. They were starting to land.
What took you sons a bitches so long? he thought sickly.
The flame from his lighter was dancing off the barrel of his Colt not two feet from his arm. He was in a supine position now, the creature lashing out at him desperately with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. Tommy knew he stood no chance, lying as he was. The other creature was approaching now, curious. In desperation, Tommy began rocking the animal from side to side, shifting his weight in an effort to unbalance it. He could see his own fearful face reflected in the bulge of its great insectile eyes. Then he gave a final thrust and sent it crashing to the ground. The creature braced itself using the edge of its wing. Its mouth opened to swallow his face, but all it found was the barrel of his.45. Three muffled shots rang out and the bird-creature slumped to the ground. Its eyes staring at nothing.
Bird of Prey: A Horror Novella Page 4