"Heard what?"
The lieutenant glanced aside. Frowned. One of his soldiers ran across and stood close, muttering something into his ear.
"Everyone, back to the chopper!"
"But we're––" one of the scientists said. He was hunched closer to the hole, examining something hidden in the snow. One of them, Budanov thought, and he wondered whether it was one he'd shot earlier.
"Do as I fucking say!" the lieutenant said. He looked rattled.
"What is it?" Budanov asked. Bullets were his only answer.
The KA52 that had been circling the site dropped low over the hole and opened up with its big cannons, tracer rounds flashing into the darkness and impacting the wall. The explosions were so powerful that Budanov felt their vibrations through the solid ground, and snow drifted down from trees as if startled awake.
"But we don't know––" one of the civilians shouted.
"We do know," Budanov said. He stood, and just for a moment he fought every instinct that was telling him to flee.
I can't just run, he thought. I have to help. They'd do the same for me.
He turned his back on the helicopter and sprinted into the trees. No one called him back; either they didn't see him going, or they didn't really care. That lieutenant had been scared, and he'd had more on his mind than capturing an AWOL soldier.
Skirting around where Zhukov's body had been marked with a red flag, he saw a heavy white rucksack, dropped by one of the civilians. Coiled around its handles was a thin nylon climbing rope. He ripped it open, and inside were various devices and sample jars, and a radio.
As the cacophony of gunfire from the KA52 ceased, the radio hissed into life.
"...leaving in three minutes!" It was the lieutenant's voice. "Ground Cleanse commencing eight minutes after that. You do not want to be here when the MiGs arrive."
Oh Jesus, they're going to blast the hole to hell!
Budanov crouched and ran closer to the wound in the land, tied the rope around a sturdy tree, and wondered just what the fuck he was doing as he threw the coiled mass over the edge and started to abseil into the darkness.
He descended nearly a hundred feet before pausing on a ledge, taking advantage of the glow from far below. From his pack he drew a couple of pitons and hammered one into the rock face as quickly as possible. Tying it off, he set his heels at the corner of the ledge and prepared to drop deeper. The seconds were ticking by in his head. How long since he’d heard the transmission? How many minutes remaining before MIGs started bombing the shit out of this hole in the frozen heart of the world?
The smell of methane lingered and he wondered if he was being slowly poisoned to death. Funny way to go, with bombs on the way.
To hell with it, he thought, and kicked off the ledge, shooting downward at reckless speed.
As he swung toward the wall again, boots shoving off for another rapid descent, he heard gunshots echoing up to him from below. He kicked off again, glanced down into the darkness…only it wasn’t truly dark at all. Far below, a pale white glow rippled and undulated like a strange ocean. Closer, on the opposite wall, the same glow shifted and crawled and slid along the rock, and now he saw them on his side as well. Slowing his descent, Budanov's breath caught in his throat.
He hung on the rope and saw the glowing, many-tendriled creatures coming for him, racing up the rock wall of the hole. He shot a single glance skyward, calculating how long it would take him to reach the top from here, and realized he would be dead soon. In reality, Budanov had known this from the moment he had snatched the coils of rope and run for the methane-cored hole, but now he truly understood what he had done.
Down was his only chance.
“Captain!” he screamed. “Kristina! Vasnev!”
Budanov kicked away from the wall and let the rope slide through his hands, nearly in free-fall. He rocketed downward, and the tumblers raced up at him. All of his choices had been made, now. From this point onward, there were only consequences.
Demidov slid backward, the jagged rock floor of the tunnel snagging at her pants. The blood of two tumblers cast a ghostly pale illumination in the tunnel mouth. The pistol was warm in her hand as she waited, heart pounding. One of the tumblers she’d killed had fallen backward off the ledge but the other lay twitching just a few feet from the soles of her boots. She dug her heel into the rock and shoved backward again, gaining a few more inches of distance from the dead thing and the ledge beyond it.
It hissed as it bled. That might’ve been the sound of it dying or just the noise of its warm blood staining the cool rock floor of the tunnel, like the ticking of a car engine after it’s been shut down. She whispered small prayers, her voice echoing in that cramped space, and she listened for Yelagin’s return. How would they get back to the surface? If they kept themselves alive long enough, help might come, but what about Vasily and his science team? The hard little bitch she thought of as her conscience told her the man she loved had to be dead, but Demidov wouldn’t listen. She told herself Vasily had to be alive.
Maybe it would have been better if she could imagine him dead. If she could imagine that he no longer needed her, that she could simply surrender to fate, give herself over to the death that even now crawled toward her.
The dead tumbler twitched and Demidov jerked backward, taking aim. She blinked, staring as she realized it was not the dead thing that moved but a new arrival. Behind the cooling, dimming corpse, another tumbler had crept over the ledge and slithered toward her, camouflaged behind its dead brother. They were getting sneaky now, and that terrified her more than anything.
They weren’t just cruel, they were clever.
“I see you,” she whispered.
It froze, as if it understood.
Demidov lifted the gun, still clutching the grenade in her left hand. The tumbler whipped to the right and raced along the wall and then onto the ceiling, clinging to the bare rock. Tendrils whipped toward her face and Demidov back-pedaled hard, sliding backward along the tunnel as she pulled the trigger. Bullets pinged and cracked and ricocheted off the walls, sending shards of rock flying. Two caught the tumbler at its core, splashing luminescent blood across the tunnel floor. Tendrils snagged her ankles from above, others tangled in her hair, and she screamed as one of them curled around her left hand—where she held the grenade.
Should have pulled the pin. Should have just thrown it. Should have—
She shot it again, center mass. Three more bullets and the gun clicked empty.
The tumbler dangled from the ceiling, its tendrils still sticking to the rock overhead. Demidov tried to catch her breath, to calm her thundering heart. Setting the grenade into the cloth nest of the crotch of her pants, she patted her pockets and checked her belt. She still had her knife, but needed ammunition…and found it. One magazine. She ejected the spent one and jammed the fresh magazine home.
Something moved out on the ledge, slithering, rolling.
Demidov didn’t even look up at it. She knew. They weren’t coming one at 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, exce
pt 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 had blown her off her feet. She looked around, ears pounding, but in that near darkness the weapon was lost.
She heard footfalls coming her way and reached for her knife before remembering 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 that 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 maze 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 r
esignation 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.
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