SNAFU: Unnatural Selection

by Christopher Golden

  Something moved out on the ledge, slithering, rolling.

  Demidov didn’t even look up at it. She knew. They weren’t coming one a time anymore.

  Gun still in her right hand, she snatched up the grenade again, pulled the pin with her teeth and held on tightly. The second she let it go, the countdown would begin.

  Taking a breath, she looked up.

  The tumbler dangling from the ceiling dropped to the floor of the tunnel, dead, just as the others rushed in. She saw two, then realized there were three, maybe even four, their glowing tendrils churning together and filling the tunnel mouth. Demidov fired half a dozen shots, bullets punching through the roiling mass, but she knew her time had come.

  She dropped the grenade, turned, and bolted to her feet.

  Bent over, she hurtled down the tunnel, firing blindly back the way she’d come. The countdown ticked by in her head as she ran. In the dimming light offered by the blood soaked into her clothing, she saw the tunnel turning and followed it around a corner. The ceiling dropped and the walls closed in and she feared that she'd found a dead end, except there was no sign of—

  “Kristina!” she screamed. “Take cover, if you’re here! Take—“

  The grenade blew, the sound funneling toward her, pounding her eardrums as the blast threw her forward. She crashed to the floor, skidding along rough stone as bits of the ceiling showered down onto her, dust and rock chips. A crack splintered across the stone overhead and she stared up at it, lying there bruised and bloody, and waited for it to fall.

  Nothing.

  She took a dust-laden breath and realized she was alive. She'd dropped the gun when the grenade blew her off her feet. She looked around, ears pounding, but in that near darkness the weapon was lost.

  She heard footfalls coming her way, reached for her knife, realized that the tumblers had no feet. The narrow beam of Yelagin’s flashlight appeared, along with the remaining glow of the tumblers’ blood on the woman’s uniform.

  “You’re alive!” Yelagin said, more in relief than surprise. She didn’t want to be alone, and Demidov didn’t blame her.

  “Seems we both are,” Demidov said, sitting up and brushing dust off her clothes. “For all the good it will do us. We’ll starve to death in here, if we don’t suffocate first.”

  Yelagin knelt beside her. “We may die yet,” she said, “but it won’t be in this tunnel.”

  Demidov frowned, glancing at her, refusing to hope.

  “Come on,” Yelagin said, helping her to stand. “There’s a way out.”

  “A way up?” Demidov asked.

  Yelagin would not meet her gaze. “A way out,” she repeated. “That’s all I can promise for now.”

  A fresh spark of hope ignited inside Demidov and once again she allowed herself to think of Vasily. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe he was still alive.

  All she and Yelagin had were knives, but for the moment they were still alive. They would fight to stay that way.

  * * *

  The tunnel sloped downward. Demidov’s ears were still ringing, all sounds muffled thanks to her proximity to the grenade’s explosion. Her head pounded but she took deep breaths and kept her arms outstretched, tracing her fingers along the tunnels walls as she tried to keep her wits about her. There were ridges and striations along the rock that were quite different from what she’d been able to make out on the side of the massive hole. If that sinkhole had been bored up from below by an enormous methane explosion, as Vasily and his team believed, then this side tunnel had been created by some other means.

  Something had carved it out.

  Several minutes passed in relative silence, with Demidov following Yelagin, the two women doing their best not to slip. The twists in the tunnel often led to a sudden steep section, and a wrong step might have led to a broken neck.

  The luminescent blood they’d been splashed with faded with each passing minute, and soon Yelagin’s flashlight was their primary source of illumination. The air moved gently around them, not so much a breeze as a kind of subterranean respiration, the tunnels breathing, evidence there were openings somewhere ahead and below.

  Noises came to them, quiet whispers of motion followed by what sounded like thousands of tons of rock and earth shifting, but they remained very much alone in the tunnel. Demidov exhaled in relief when the tunnel flattened out and she found she could stand fully upright. Yelagin picked up their pace, and soon they were hustling along in a quick jog. The thumping of her heart, the familiar cadence of their steps, lent Demidov calm and confidence that allowed her to gather her thoughts. Find the source of the air flow, she told herself. See if we can climb. Track down the tumblers and try to ascertain the status of the science team – dead or alive?

  “There’s a glow—“ Yelagin started to say.

  Then she swore, stumbled, and hurled herself forward in the tunnel. Demidov pulled back, reaching for her knife, ready for a fight. Her backpedaling saved her. Just in front of her, Yelagin scrabbled her hands to get a grip to keep from falling into a hole in the tunnel floor, an opening that seemed to drop away into nothing. Air flowed steadily up from the hole.

  “Kristina!” Demidov called, glancing around, trying to figure out how she could help.

  Yelagin had already managed to drag one leg up, prop her knee on the edge of the abyss, and now she hauled herself to safety on the other side of the five-foot gap. She’d seen the glow, but had been moving too fast to stop, so instead she’d jumped. And almost not made it at all.

  They stared at each other across the gap, neither of them wanting to be left alone. Yelagin used her torch to search the edges of the hole, and it looked to Demidov as if she would be able to get around it – if she was extremely careful – without falling to her death. She lay flat on her belly and dragged herself to the edge to stare down into the depths, drawn by the soft glow that emanated from within. On the other side, Yelagin did the same.

  Demidov went numb.

  It was Yelagin who spoke first. “Is that...? Is it a kind of... city, do you think?”

  Far below, perhaps hundreds of feet, were loops and whorls of stone, a kind of labyrinth of strange tracks and bowls and twisting towers. From those strange spires of rock hung innumerable tendriled things, either asleep or simply static, dreaming their subterranean dreams or contemplating the labyrinth of their underground world, and perhaps the new world they had discovered above them.

  “Oh, my God,” Demidov whispered.

  “Captain,” Yelagin said quietly.

  Demidov looked up and saw that Private Yelagin had risen to her knees. Now the woman took to her feet, braced herself against the wall, and reached out across the gap. The message did not require words – get up, don’t look, don’t think, and let’s get the hell out of here. Demidov ought to have been the one in command, but in that moment she was quite happy to let Yelagin guide her.

  She glanced one more time at the sprawling, glowing city-nest below and then she stood, never wanting to see it again. Taking a deep breath, she put one foot on the bit of stone jutting out from one side of the hole, and then she shook her head.

  “No,” she told Yelagin. “Back up.”

  “Captain…”

  “Back up, Private.”

  Yelagin withdrew her hand, hesitated a moment, and then backed away, giving her plenty of room to make the leap. Demidov got a running start and flung herself across the gap. She landed on the ball of her left foot, arms flailing, and then stumbled straight into Yelagin, who caught her with open arms.

  For a moment they stood like that, then Demidov took a single breath and nodded. “Lead the way.”

  They followed the beam of Yelagin’s light, passing several places where the tunnel branched off in various directions, until they found one that sloped up. Demidov paused to feel the flow of air and then gestured for Yelagin to continue upward. They’d been moving for only a minute or two, Demidov staring over Yelagin’s shoulder, when she realized she could see more details
of the tunnel ahead than ought to have been possible. Her breath caught in her throat and she reached out, grabbing a fistful of Yelagin’s jacket.

  “Stop,” she hissed into the other woman’s ear. “Quietly.”

  For long seconds they stood in the tunnel, just listening. Demidov felt her heart thumping hard in her chest as she stared ahead. Sensing the trouble, Yelagin clicked off her flashlight, confirming what Demidov had feared. Not only did the tunnel ahead gleam with the weird photoluminescence of the tumblers, but the glow was becoming steadily brighter. They could hear the slither of tendrils against rock.

  Part of Demidov wanted to just forge ahead. But she remembered all too well the glimpse she’d had of the tumblers killing Zhukov, and she thought perhaps they ought to retreat, find a side tunnel, and wait for this wave of creatures to pass them by.

  Demidov took Yelagin’s arm and turned to retrace their steps.

  The same glow lit the tunnel behind them.

  “No,” Yelagin said quietly.

  Demidov slipped out her knife. They had no other weapons and nowhere to run. A numb resignation spread through her, but her fingers opened and closed on the hilt of the knife, ready to fight no matter the odds.

  The tumblers sprawled and rolled and slunk along the tunnel, arriving first from one direction and then the other. Some slipped along the ceiling or walls, filling the tube of the tunnel with their undulating tendrils and their unearthly glow until it looked like some kind of undersea nightmare.

  “Captain,” Yelagin whispered. “Look at the little ones.”

  Demidov had seen them, miniature tumblers about the size of her thumb, maybe even smaller. They clung to the others and moved swiftly amongst them. The little ones seemed to cleave more to the ceiling, creating a kind of mossy mat of shifting, impossible life. The tumblers flowed in until the only bare rock was the small circle where Demidov and Yelagin stood.

  And then the smothering carpet of creatures parted and a pair of dark silhouettes emerged, like ghosts against the creatures' strange light.

  Demidov could not breathe. For a moment, she could not speak, and then she managed only to rasp out a single word.

  “Vasily?”

  As Yelagin swore, frozen in shock, Demidov lowered her knife. Vasily Glazkov – her lover and best friend – came to a halt just a few feet away, with Amanda Hart behind him. The small tumblers clung to their clothes and flesh. Hart’s face seemed to bulge around her left eye, as if something shifted beneath the skin, near the orbit. Demidov wanted to look at Vasily, but that bulbous pulsing thing in Hart’s face made her stare.

  “Hello, Anna,” Vasily said. His voice seemed different, somehow both muffled and echoing. The tunnel turned it into a dozen voices. He looked sad, and sounded sadder.

  "Vasily, you're..." She didn't know what he was.

  "It's such a shame," he said. "So many dead."

  "We're all that's left," she said. But when he next spoke, she thought perhaps Vasily wasn't talking about the soldiers who had died.

  “You must understand that they are no different from us.”

  “What?” Yelagin said, shaking her head in confusion. “They’re nothing but different from us.”

  Vasily did not so much as glance at her. He focused on Demidov. “There's beauty here. A whole world of wonder. When the shaft opened above them, they went up to explore, just as we came down. They're studying us, beginning to learn about our world. Already they have touched us deeply. Amanda suffered a terrible injury and they have repaired her, strengthened her.”

  Things moved beneath the skin of Hart’s neck, and something twitched under her scalp, her hair waving on its own. Demidov stared at Vasily, gorge rising in her throat, hoping she would not see the thing she feared more than anything. Was that his cheek bulging, just a bit? Where his temple pulsed, was that merely blood rushing through a vein or did something else curl and stretch his skin?

  “Who's speaking now?” she asked.

  Vasily frowned. “Anna, my love, you must listen. There's so much we can learn.”

  She could not find her voice, did not dare ask who Vasily meant by we.

  “Dr Glazkov,” Yelagin said, shifting nervously as the small tumblers skittered above her head. “Whatever there is to learn, we'll find time for that. But some of our team has died and I don’t see Professor Brune with you. Captain Demidov and I have to report in. You know this. Can you get us to the surface? Whatever these things are, whatever you’ve discovered, our superiors will want to know. We need to—“

  “Stop, Kristina,” Demidov said.

  Yelagin flinched, stared at her as if she’d lost her mind.

  “This isn’t Vasily talking," Demidov said. "Not anymore.”

  Vasily smiled. Tiny tendrils emerged from the corners of his mouth, like cracks across his lips. “The truth is the truth, regardless of who speaks it.”

  Demidov raised her knife.

  They swept over her.

  Yelagin screamed and they both fought, but there were simply too many of the creatures, binding them, twisting them like puppets.

  Dragging them down, deeper than ever before.

  * * *

  It made her think of what drowning must be like. Tendrils gripped and caressed her, surging forward, one creature passing her to another like the ebb and flow of ocean currents. Sometimes tendrils covered her eyes and other times she could see, but the eerie phosphorescence of their limbs – so bright and so near – cast the subterranean labyrinth into deeper shadow. It was difficult to make out anything but crenellations in the wall or the silhouettes of Vasily and Hart. The sea of tumblers brought her up on a wave and then dragged her under again, carrying her onward. Demidov caught a glimpse of Yelagin, and felt some measure of relief knowing that whatever might happen now, they were together.

  She tried not to think about Vasily, tried to focus just on her own beating heart and the desperate gasping of her lungs. Had it been Vasily speaking, lit up with the epiphanies of discovery? Or had these things been masquerading as her man, recruiting for their cause, attempting to find the proper mouthpiece through which to communicate with the hostiles they’d encounter aboveground?

  The image of the things twisting beneath the skin of Hart’s face made her want to scream. Only her focus on surviving gave her the strength to remain silent. Every moment she still lived was another moment in which she might figure out how to stay alive.

  The ocean of tumblers surged in one last wave, dumped her on an uneven stone floor, then withdrew. She blinked, trying to get her bearings. Glancing upward, she saw they had brought her to the bottom of the original vast sinkhole. Demidov stared up the shaft, the gray daylight a small circle far overhead, just as beautiful and unreachable as the full moon on a winter’s night.

  Not unreachable, she told herself. You could climb it if you had to.

  But she’d never make it. For fifty feet in every direction, the glowing tumblers shifted and churned, rolling on top of one another, piled as high as her shoulders. Demidov didn’t know what they wanted of her, but she had no doubt she was their prisoner. The tumblers parted to allow Vasily and Hart to approach her once more.

  “Anna,” Vasily began. “They need an emissary. There is so much—“

  “Where's Kristina?” Demidov demanded. “Private Yelagin. Where is she?”

  With a ripple, the ocean of tumblers disgorged Yelagin onto the ground beside Demidov, choking and spitting, tears staining her face. Demidov took her arm, helped her to stand. In the weird phosphorescence she looked like a ghost.

  Yelagin whipped around to face her, madness in her eyes. “I saw Budanov! He’s down here with us!”

  “Budanov is dead.”

  “No!” Yelagin shook her head. “I swear to you, I saw him clearly, just a few feet away.” She swept her arm toward the mass of writhing tumblers. “He’s in there somewhere. They’ve got him!”

  Demidov stared at Vasily, or whatever sentience spoke through him. “Give him to me
.”

  Vasily and Hart exchanged a silent look. Things shifted beneath Hart’s skin, bulging from her left cheek. A tiny bunch of tendrils sprouted from her ear for a moment, before drawing back in like the legs of a hermit crab.

  “He is injured,” Vasily said. “They can help him. Heal him.”

  Demidov heard the hesitation in his voice, the momentary lag between thought and speech, and she knew this wasn’t Vasily speaking. Not really. Not by choice.

  “Give him to me,” she demanded, “and I’ll carry your message to the surface.”

  The things pulling Hart’s strings used her face to smile.

  Vasily nodded once and the mass of tumblers churned. Like some hideous birth, Budanov spilled from their pulsing mass. One of his arms had been shattered and twisted behind him at an impossible angle. Broken bone jutted from his lower leg, torn right through the fabric of his uniform. His face had been bloodied and gashed, but it was his eyes that drew Demidov’s focus. The fear in those eyes.

  “Private—“ she began.

  “No, listen!” Budanov said, lying on the stone floor, full of madness and lunatic desperation as he glared up at Demidov and Yelagin. “There’s an airstrike coming! Any minute now… Fuck, any second now! They’re going to—“

  Demidov stared up at that pale circle so high above.

  She could hear them now – the MiGs arriving – the familiar moaning whistle of their approach. They had seconds. A terrible sadness gripped her, a sorrow she had never known. She looked at Vasily, feeling a hole opening up inside her where the rest of their lives ought to have been. He gazed back at her, mirroring her grief. Then she saw the twitch beneath his right eye.

  “All the things we could have taught them,” he said, and she wasn't sure whether it was her Vasily talking about them, or them talking about everyone else.

  The scream of bombs falling. The roar of an explosion high above – a miss. A shower of rock cracking off the walls of the shaft.