There was a brief crackle of static on her comms, but then she heard the pilot’s voice. “Eagle here. Still tracking.”
“You might need to make a pick up in the valley later.”
“At this point, why not?” the pilot said. Just as she’d expected. He might have called in their diversion from the mission already, but until someone came to shut them down, Eagle wasn’t going to abandon Wolf. Not a chance.
They started across the hard-packed snow toward the hole. Even from a distance, the darkness of it yawned, as if it had a gravity all its own, drawing them in.
“I’m going to be moaning along with Vasnev in a moment,” Yelagin said. “I don’t know I’ve ever been this cold.” Her teeth chattered.
“Kristina, you’re Spetsnaz,” Demidov said curtly. But they both knew she meant something else. It wasn’t about their training, their elite status, their special operations. It was about being a woman in a field dominated be testosterone-fueled men who waved their guns around like they were showing off their cocks. They had to be tougher, she and Yelagin did. Especially Demidov, the woman running the show.
“I’ll bear your disappointment,” Yelagin said. “My nipples are going to snap off like icicles.”
That got a laugh, breaking the tension, and suddenly Demidov felt grateful to her. Their closeness had started to fray a little, but now they were a team again.
“Captain,” Vasnev said cautiously, lagging behind.
“I swear I will fucking shoot you,” Budanov reminded him.
Then Corporal Zhukov echoed Vasnev. “Captain.”
His voice gave her pause and made her turn. Vasnev had knelt in the snow. Zhukov stood over him, face as gray as the Siberian sky.
Vasnev looked up. “We’ve been moving parallel to some markings I couldn’t make out, like someone dragged branches through here to obscure animal tracks.”
“You didn’t mention the tracks themselves,” Zhukov said.
“Bear,” Vasnev said. “And I saw some wolf tracks, too, up on the ridge. Same weird markings there, brushing the snow. But something happened right here, on this spot.”
Demidov didn’t like the hesitation in his voice. It sounded a bit like fear. Vasnev might have been a malingerer and a moaner, but he’d never been a coward.
“What ‘something?’”
Zhukov answered for him. “The bear tracks stop. Whatever made those brush marks, it picked up the bear. Carried it off.”
Vasnev stood, pointed at the hole. “It goes that way.”
Demidov stood at the edge of the hole, a few feet back, not trusting the rim to hold her up. Sinkholes had appeared in many places in the area but she didn’t think any of those on record had ever been this big. The hole seemed carved down into the permafrost and the rock and earth below. No telling how deep it went without doing a sounding. They had nothing to gauge the depth except two long coils of rope they’d found in the science team’s base. That seemed unlikely to help them.
“Do you not just want to shout down, see if you get a response?” Kristina Yelagin said, standing at her shoulder.
Budanov snickered. “Yes, let’s do that.”
Yelagin shot him a death stare, but he ignored her, wrapped up in his own efforts. He had taken out the comms unit attached to his belt and begun searching through channels for any kind of beacon or signal. On each frequency, he’d broadcast the same message. “Research Unit one-one-three, please come in. Research Unit one-one-three, do you read me?” A few seconds, then again. With no answer, he’d move on.
They were getting nowhere. Vasnev had stopped whining, but the cold had gotten down into Demidov’s bones. Come here, Anna, I’ll warm you, Vasily would have said. And she’d have let him, as she had so many times before. Where are you, my darling? The loving part of her felt lost, but Demidov had spent a lifetime training to charge forward when anyone else would flee.
Zhukov glanced around, nervous and on guard. He’d been more unsettled than any of them, and that concerned Demidov. If the Mountain worried, they all should.
“I don’t hear a thing but the wind.” Zhukov shifted, boots crunching snow. “Don’t see a thing. Not so much as a bird.”
“Enough,” Demidov said. “Private Yelagin, get those ropes out. There were a few pitons with them.”
“We don’t have enough climbing gear for all of us,” Yelagin said. “Shall I radio Eagle, have them bring more equipment from the base?”
Demidov wanted to tell her to follow orders. Do what she was fucking told. The woman made sense, but the problem was that it would delay their descent, and a delay would be costly if Eagle had really radioed the situation back to command.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “Meanwhile, get those ropes out and—“
“Captain,” Zhukov said.
“Fuck me, what the hell is that?” Vasnev whispered.
Demidov narrowed her eyes. Her balaclava had slipped a bit and she tugged it away from her face. The others had begun swearing, lifting their weapons, taking aim. Demidov blinked to clear her vision, thinking somehow that in spite of her team’s reactions she must just be seeing something. Spots in her eyes. The things moving across the valley toward them couldn’t possibly be real.
But they were moving nearer, coming into focus, and in moments she could no longer doubt. They weren’t spots in her eyes or the product of her imagination. They moved like some strange combination of tumbleweed and sea anemone, their flesh such a pale nothing hue that they blended almost too well against the snowy ground. Had they only stopped and kept still, they’d have been almost invisible at a distance. But they weren’t stopping.
“Holy shit,” someone said. Demidov thought she recognized her own voice. Maybe she’d said it.
They weren’t stopping at all. They came from all directions, perhaps ten or twelve in all, rolling or slithering or some combination thereof, and they did not come without burden. They seemed nothing but a mass of tendrils, but each of them dragged something else behind them—something more familiar. Animals, some struggling and some limp, some broken, some bleeding. A musk deer, some squirrels, a leopard. One of the things had wrapped itself around a wolf. The beast could not extricate itself but it continued to fight, clawing, attempting to escape. It snarled and howled, as if trapped between the sister urges to fight and to scream in sorrow.
“Captain,” Zhukov said, his voice gone cold. That was when the Mountain turned most dangerous. The deader his voice, the more she knew he must be feeling. The Mountain didn’t like to be made to feel. “Give me an order please, captain.”
In the distance, Demidov saw something big and brown amongst a squalling twist of those white tendrils. Three or four of the things had surrounded a moose—a fucking moose—and were dragging it back toward the hole. A knot of dread twisted in her gut as it finally hit Demidov. Stupid, she thought. So goddamn stupid. Should have seen it instantly, should have understood. If they could drag down a moose, a trio of curious, unarmed scientists would be no problem at all.
Feeling sick and jittery and wanting to roar out her fear for her mate, Demidov clicked off the safety on her Kalashnikov AK-12.
“Weapons free. Don’t let these things get anywhere near us.”
“Weapons free,” Zhukov confirmed.
Instinctively they spread into a defensive circle, edging thirty yards away from the hole and using trees and rocks as cover. Demidov glanced around at her squad, already knowing what she'd see––professionalism, preparedness, and calm in the face of these strange, unknown odds. Her senses were alert and alight, sharpened on the fear she felt for Vasily.
Whatever the hell these things were––
"Incoming, my eleven," Yelagin said.
The creature carrying the wolf had diverted from its route towards the hole and now moved towards them. The wolf still whined and howled, snapping at tendrils that seemed to arc easily away from its teeth. The creature seemed almost unaware of its burden.
; It paused twenty meters away, half-hidden behind a tree.
Almost as if it was looking at them.
"Another this side," Zhukov said. "They're paused, as if––"
The creature slipped past the tree and came towards them across the snow, leaping rocks, compressing beneath a fallen tree and dragging the wolf through the narrow gap.
Demidov's finger caressed the trigger, and she experienced a moment of doubt.
Then Vasnev opened fire. He shot the struggling, crying wolf from sixty yards out, its blood spattering the snow and bits of its fur and flesh scattering across the stark whiteness. The tumbleweed creature twitched and whipped backward, bullets tearing at its tendrils as it dropped the dead wolf. But then it drew itself up and began to slide toward them once more, skimming the surface of the snow, moving quicker as it came on.
“It’s not…the bullets aren’t…” Vasnev couldn’t get the words out.
“Don’t just stand there!” Yelagin moved up next to him and unleashed a barrage from her AK-12, took the tumbler mid-center, and blew it apart. It splashed across the snow a dozen steps from them, insides steaming as they sank into a drift. “Keep shooting till it’s dead.”
“Center mass!” Demidov said. “Blow them to hell.”
Hunkered down behind a rock, she braced her AK-12 against her shoulder and zeroed in on the thing dragging the musk deer. Then she opened up. Bullets ripped it apart, stitching the dead deer and scattering the tumbler's twisted, pale tendrils across the snow. Several of them slapped against a tree and remained there, held in place by the sticky goo that must have been its blood. The fear that had coiled into her heart calmed itself.
They could be stopped.
They could be killed.
The feel of the recoil, the stench of gunpowder, the reports smashing into her ears were all familiar to her, and she kept her calm amid the chaos. They all did. That was why they made a good team, and why they had never faced a situation they could not handle.
Not ever.
Budanov and Zhukov were on her immediate right and were both better marksmen. They twitched their weapons left and right, letting off short bursts and then adjusting their aim, anticipating the creatures' movements. All around them, bullets impacted trees and showers of snow drifted down. Visibility was reduced. The creatures took advantage and rushed them, but the soldiers chose their targets and kept firing.
"Ammo!" Zhukov shouted, and the others covered his field of fire as he reloaded.
"How many?" Yelagin shouted.
"Don't know," Demidov replied. She saw movement ahead of her, a pale shape slinking from cover behind a rock, and she concentrated a burst of fire. The shape thrashed and spun, tendrils or tentacles whipping up a snowstorm. One more burst and it grew still. "One less."
For a few more long seconds, the hills all around them threw back brutal gunfire echoes. And then it was done.
Demidov's eardrums throbbed in the silent aftermath. She breathed in, let it out, finger still on the trigger.
"Clear," she breathed, and the others repeated the word in turn. She stood slowly from behind her covering rock and stood in the center of their defensive circle, turning slowly to survey the scene. It can't have been more than a minute, but the area around them had taken on the appearance of a bloody battlefield.
Trees were scarred and splintered from the gunfire. The animals being carried by the tumblers were all dead, their demise signed across the snow in blood, bodies steaming, one or two still twitching their last. The other creatures––Whatever the fuck they are, Demidov thought––also lay dead, tendrils splayed across the snow's crispy surface and, here and there, melting down into it where their sickly pale blood had been spilled.
Hot-blooded, she thought. Hot enough to melt snow. But what the fuck has blood that color?
"Holy shit," Vasnev said. "What just happened?"
"Something from down there," Zhukov said. "Subterranean. Pale skin, no eyes..."
“What do we do, Captain?” Budanov said. “You want me to call this in?”
“Call it in,” she agreed. “But I’m not waiting. We all know Vasily and the others must be down there. Somebody’s got to stay up here and wait, but I’m—“
Zhukov and Yelagin called out that there was movement, the two of them shouting almost in the same voice. Demidov swore and lifted her weapon again, scanning the landscape all around. Between them and the sheer drop into that vast hole she saw motion down close to the ground, a slithering undulation, perfectly camouflaged but moving in.
"How many?" she asked.
"Can't tell," Zhukov said. "They're moving differently."
"Almost like they're under the snow," Yelagin said.
"Watch your ammo!" she shouted, then they opened fire again.
Snow flicked up and bullets ricocheted from scattered rocks. One creature erupted from a deep snowdrift and came apart beneath a sustained burst of fire, innards spattered down, those thin, tendril limbs whipping through the air.
Demidov's weapon clicked on an empty magazine. She ejected the empty, reached inside her jacket to grab another, smashed it into place and raised the AK-12 again––
––just as Budanov screamed to her right.
She turned just in time to see his head jerked hard to one side, tendrils across his face, skin stretching where they touched, tugged by some adhesive on those tendrils, or by octopus-like suckers. Even as she brought her gun to bear, blood sprayed from Budanov's mouth. He fell to the ground and the tumbler flowed onto his back, tendrils wrapping tight around his neck and skull.
"No!" Zhukov shouted, as he and the others opened fire. Their onslaught blew the creature apart. The thick white paste, its blood, splashed down across Budanov's back, mixing with his own in a sickly pink hue.
"Form up!" Demidov shouted. "Close in! We've got to get back to the base."
"Up that hill?" Yelagin asked. And she was right. They'd descended into the valley down a steep slope, almost climbing at times. To retreat up there with these things on their tail would be suicide.
They had to hold out down here.
"Mark your targets!" she said. The matter of ammunition was already worrying her. They'd come equipped for a simple in-and-out, an extraction that might not even have involved a firefight. As such they'd come light, bringing only the bare minimum of spare ammunition. Four mags each, if that, and she was already on her second. Three more shots and––
She ejected, reloaded, marked a new target and fired.
The chaos of battle had always remained outside for Demidov. Inside, her mind worked quick and calm, always able to place an enemy and work out the various strategies and logistics that would enable their success.
Now, everything was different. This was like no fight she'd ever fought, and already she could see its terrible, eventual conclusion.
"Grenade!" Yelagin said, lobbing one and ducking down. The detonation was dulled by the deep snow, the gray sky made momentarily light by sprayed snow and pale body parts.
More came. More and more, and as she loaded her final magazine, Zhukov was taken down.
Three of them wrapped around the big man's legs, throat and right arm, and a wave of tentacles ripped the weapon from his hands. Demidov twisted around and took aim, but she was thinking the same as the others––Do I pull the trigger? They could not fire without hitting Zhukov.
The decision was snatched from them. Tendrils punched in through Zhukov’s eyes, and he screamed. A creature leapt onto his back and plunged its limbs around and into his open mouth. His throat bulged with the pressures inside, and as he fell he was already dead.
Demidov felt a surge of unreality wash over her. Zhukov had saved her life several times, and years ago before Vasily, the two of them had enjoyed a brief, passionate affair. It had ended quickly, because involvement like that would have put their squad in jeopardy. But the affection for each other had remained.
"No," she whispered, and started shooting. Her bullets ripped thro
ugh the fallen man and the thing on his back, tearing them both apart.
"Too many!" Vasnev shouted, turning as his machine-gun ran out of ammo, swinging it like a club, falling beneath a couple of tumblers as they surged from the snow.
Yelagin dashed to Demidov's side and turned back-to-back with her captain, and both of them continued firing for as long as they could.
When Demidov's weapon ran out she drew her sidearm with her left hand. But too late.
Yelagin was plucked from behind her and thrown against a tree, several of the pale, grotesque creatures surging across her and driving her down into the snow.
By then, Demidov understood.
They weren’t coming from across the valley anymore. A fresh wave had come up from the sinkhole. Dozens of them.
As they crawled over her, wrapped around her throat, tore the useless Kalashnikov from her hands, she raised her pistol. Too late. Her legs were tugged out from under her. Tendrils covered her mouth, pulled her arms wide, and she thought they might just rip her apart, that she’d be drawn and quartered by these impossible things, these tumbleweeds.
But whatever they intended for her, it wasn't instant death.
She felt herself sliding through the snow as they dragged her back toward the hole. They were warm where they touched her, and they smelled something like cut grass on a summer day. It was a curious, jarring scent. She tried to raise her head to see what was happening and whether she was alone. Am I the only one left alive? she wondered. But the tumblers were strong, and for the first time she sensed something in them other than animalistic fury.
There was intelligence. They kept her head back so she couldn't see, and when she struggled she felt a slick, warm tentacle drape itself across her eyes, then pull tight.
Seconds later she felt the world drop from beneath her. She gasped in a breath and prepared for the fall, but she felt herself jerked up and down as the creatures descended into the hole. They must have been using their strange limbs to grab onto the sheer sides. Maybe they stuck like flies, or crawled like spiders.
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