by Unknown
He says, “Do you see something?”
Then he’s gone.
In the space between blinks of her dark-adapted eye, Eve sees the flying thing.
It’s like a person with a flowing cloak. It’s flying, or maybe rappelling down from a height, from a crane or some other support. Eve doesn’t know. She just knows what she saw: A flying thing, shaped like a human but thinner, paler, sharper, scooping Durgin up in its long bony arms and sweeping him off the staircase, over the railing, into the big black empty.
In the split second it takes the creature to drag Durgin over the rail, Eve sees it illuminated in the blaze of Durgin’s gun-light: naked, shriveled, sexless, sharp with bones jutting through starved pink papery flesh.
Durgin’s face goes horror-distorted so clearly that even an Agarthan understands it. Durgin gropes and fumbles after his shotgun. His chest expands in the fragment of a second it takes his mouth to open wide as a human mouth can open.
He’s going to scream.
He never gets to.
Before he can, the creature’s long fingers slither across Durgin’s face and jerk his head violently to the side.
A big mouth opens: red with sharp white teeth. It takes Durgin’s throat; Eve sees his body jerk and twitch in midair and then his shotgun, with its forestock tactical light, spins free and falls.
The blazing light rakes her face. Ten million lumens: Eve is blind. She stumbles back against the far railing. She lands on her ass. She gropes at her scalded eyes. Eve tries to scream. She’s not made for it. That part’s been bred out of her, as it’s been taken from all Agarthans. She tries anyway. Her mouth opens like Durgin’s. All that comes out is a soft sickly retch.
Eve stares up into light-scoured blackness.
Someone says, “Durgin?”
Eve tries to say something; she can’t. She waves her hands. Nobody notices.
Someone else says, “Durgin, where are you?”
Then the chattering starts, and Eve rocks back and forth.
Someone says, “What the hell happened?”
Someone says, “Dr. Mojica! Did you see it?”
Someone says, “Dr. Mojica! What happened to Durgin?”
Someone says, “Dr. Mojica! What did you see?”
A few seconds later, they wish they hadn’t asked.
Gaardner listens patiently, and then declares a verdict. “I don’t think so, Doctor. Durgin slipped and went over the edge.”
Ondrusek says, “Captain … did you hear what Doctor Mojica just said?”
Gaardner replies crisply, “No offense, Doctor, but I think you’re imagining things.”
Eve says: “We don’t really do that.”
He says, “Well you did. I think Durgin slipped over the edge. That’s tragic.” He addresses all of them. “Don’t let the next one be you, all right? We’ll say some words in memory of him when we get to the next landing. Let’s keep moving.”
Eve says: “We don’t imagine things.”
No one notices.
The landing between Levels 101/2 hovers in a stretch of natural cavern, surrounded by big empty silence with the walls far away — a hundred meters in places, two hundred in others. The carbon-fiber strands and struts that support the landing and the spiral stairway alike extend almost entirely up and down; there is only minimal contact with the walls at strategic points.
As the expedition rests on the landing, some of the Frosties lower their lights.
By the time Gaardner realizes the lapse, it’s happened.
Something brushes Eve’s face. Wind hisses around her.
Someone’s boots hit the railing very close to her.
Eve sees it again, closer this time: A swirl of white shrouded in black: an emaciated human form with what seems like a great black set of wings, allowing it to fly, which Eve knows should be impossible but isn’t, based on what she sees. If it can’t fly, how did it swoop down out of thin air and snatch a 200-pound soldier?
Again, it moves too quickly for Eve to get a really good look at it. But she sees more than enough. She sees the peeled-back, desiccated white lips of the thing. Eve sees the mask of sheer terror on the face of the Frosty — whose name she doesn’t remember — a huge pale man of Northern European descent, blonde hair cropped close, face and neck and upper body lightly stippled from freezerburn and crisscrossed with war-era scars.
Eve again sees the long bony fingers of the creature fold over the soldier’s mouth and across his big lantern-jaw, holding his head cocked at a soon-to-break angle. As that happens, a pale face, crazy with hunger, spreads wide around a big red-black hole; the mouth is red and wrinkled; the teeth are white and appear very sharp.
There is the wet, sickly, predatory sound of the mouth closing around the throat. There is the crack of the neck. The soldier blossoms at the throat, with the faint crunch of flesh and carotid and ruined, ravished trachea as the creature bites down.
Then more creatures flood in, like birds flocking. That’s when the Frosties see them. They turn; someone screams, “What the fuck is that?”
Bony fingers tear in midair at the nameless soldier’s clothes. Eve sees faces with paper-thin skin shot through with blue spiderwebs. She sees five or six red mouths open, sharp teeth tearing through military-strength fabric and into thighs, both sides of the throat, both sides of the belly—
Blood sprays freely.
Then Gaardner howls, “Lights around! Do a sweep! Head count!”
Lights sweep. Eve is blinded. She tries to scream. She gropes for something to lean against.
She hears a keening wail of blind terror coming from her own mouth.
Tangled in her lungs’ fear-choked tributaries, her scream can’t make it out. All it does for a moment is claw at her throat, and erupt as a vomiting sound.
Then a face comes out of the darkness for her.
Eve screams and hurls herself back; she doesn’t know if she’s falling or dying, and she doesn’t care, because in that instant there’s no room for anything but fear inside her. She may have gone over the railing; all she knows is she is screaming.
Eve gropes for the carbon-fiber floor and finds nothing.
She sees the face above her: masked with anger, furious: lips peeled back, teeth white, blood coming to his visage in great pulsing throbs. Gaardner reaches for Eve and screams, “Kill them!”
Screams burst all around Eve — everywhere.
Only then are there gunshots.
Gaardner throws himself on Eve, howling.
It all goes dark.
The caves are empty for a time; the space around Eve, beyond the spiral staircase yawns black.
Eve knows she’s dreamed of faces in the darkness, white and bloodless. But she’s not sure when the dreaming stopped; she’s even less sure where it started.
Eve awakes and shivers herself upright with a start.
Gaardner’s in front of her, sitting boots-apart, pistol in hand. Dazed, he stares at nothing, eyes wide and empty, mouth open: frozen in time.
The slide of Gaardner’s pistol is locked open; smoke pours out. Bright brass cartridges litter the platform, alongside the empty brass-and-red-wax cylinders of spent 12-gauge rounds. There are also black pistol magazines, dropped shotguns, dropped lights, dropped pistols, dropped submachine guns. Many of the weapons have apparently not been fired.
Streams of white pour haphazardly from discarded flashlights. Bodies stretch on their backs, writhing. Eve realizes there aren’t enough bodies. What began as twenty-four Frosties is now — maybe — eight. No, Eve counts nine of them.
With their respirators smashed or lost in the scuffle, the Frosties have to fight to catch their breath. The survivors haul themselves to their feet or their knees or to sitting positions. None of the dead are anywhere to be seen.
Her scream has left her throat raw; she doesn’t like it. It didn’t make her feel any better; she just didn’t have a choice. Now a new sensation hits her. It’s a desperate choking in her chest. It feels li
ke she’s about to vomit while being strangled.
She begins weeping. It’s her first time.
Eve sobs: “Captain. What happened?”
He looks at Eve, obviously surprised to find her crying. “So you do have a soul?”
Eve sobs: “I’m sorry, Captain. I don’t understand your question. Can you be more direct?”
He says, “I’m sorry. That was rude. Forget I said anything.”
He ignores Eve and circuits the pistol through the envelope of darkness, stabbing bloody laser-sunrises into gunsmoky nothing.
Gaardner yells, “Head count!”
Eve has seen them do this before. It is useful when they are scattered up and down the stairway, because the matte black carbon-fiber structure twists in such a way that Gaardner can’t see who’s where.
They Frosties call out:
“Dentino.”
“Hagler.”
“Hunsley.”
“Ondrusek.”
“Verbasco.”
“Tillett.”
Eve’s heard them do it a dozen times.
They always say them in alphabetical order.
There are always way more names — and no awkward silences between them while they wait for the names that never came: Dillard, Graleski, Haseman, Heiskel, Lintz, Menendez, Michalski, Weatherly, Yasso…
Gaardner says numbly, “Six. There are six of you left.”
The sobs come at Eve hard. They take over her body. She can’t control them. She doesn’t like it. She screams: “I counted nine a few seconds ago!”
Gaardner growls, “Dr. Mojica? When did you count nine?”
“A few seconds ago!”
Gaardner pushes her away, turns around, sweeps the dark with his flashlight. Carelessly, he blinds Eve, which makes her sob harder.
“Where’s Hagler?”
Five blank faces stare at him.
Ondrusek says, “She just called her name! I heard her!”
Gaardner snaps: “Anyone else?” He shouts. “Did you all hear Hagler’s name a minute ago?”
Scattered nods answer him.
“Well, then, where the hell is she?”
No one answers him.
He loses it. “Keep your damn lights up! Keep your lights up! They’re still out there!”
Someone, outraged, shouts, “They?”
Sobbing, Eve fumbles in the piles of spent cartridges. She finds an unfired pistol. She holds it and aims it into the dark.
Gaardner says, “We’re aborting.” He points and says, “We’re going up, people. Up. Fast!”
Eve gets tired less quickly than the soldiers. She has less bulk to pull, and her lungs are made for low-oxygen subterranean environments.
The Frosties are all breathing hard, but Eve’s not, when the seven of them cross the landing between Levels 93/4. That’s when the light erupts. A bright flash from far overhead.
Everyone hits the deck.
The thundering burst is deafening.
Dust and gravel rains down around them accompanied by a wave of heat.
There’s a big tortured sound like metal being ripped.
There’s a hiss and a whistle.
Something sweeps past. Something big.
It is a very long time before Eve hears a scream, then a Smack! that echoes through the vast canyon.
More tremors, more dust, more gravel.
Gaardner yells, “Up! Up! Up! Go! Go! Go!”
He’s cursing by the time they reach the jagged ends of the stairway.
The carbon-fiber steps have been sheared off by explosives at the landing between Levels 88/9.
Dentino is the one with the submachine gun and the field glasses. She looks through the latter and says, “Five levels at least.”
Gaardner asks, “Damaged?”
“Gone.”
“That’s impossible, Dentino! It’s reinforced carbon fiber composite with an anti-brittling agent! They’d need high explosives!”
Dentino says, “Looks like they got ‘em.”
Someone howls, “They!?”
Gaardner says weakly, like a prayer, “It’s carbon fiber! Carbon fiber!”
He looks at Eve blankly.
Eve makes eye contact, something incredibly weird for her.
He turns to his soldiers. “People, I need intel here. Tell me what you think you saw.”
It explodes out of the five remaining grunts in delirious bursts while they wave their lights. Eve is totally blinded as she listens intently to the Frosties chatter:
“monsters—”
“—humans, but pale, flying—”
“—flying!”
“That wasn’t rappelling, that was flying!”
“—Mothman or something—”
“—like demons—”
“—like the Devil!”
“—yeah, the Devil! Like medieval paintings—”
“I know I shot — ten, maybe? Twelve?”
“I shot some too! I know I hit them!”
“My shotgun hit one point blank. It didn’t go down!”
“I saw them drag Dillard away in the air and—”
“I saw them feed.”
“Oh, God, Eve saw that too? I think they — I saw them open his throat—”
“—her carotid—”
“—his femoral—”
“—this huge big gout of blood—”
“—teeth like knives—”
“Sucking blood. Sucking blood!”
Dentino shrieks, “Vampires!”
Everyone stops.
Someone says, “Dentino, are you high?”
Eve says: “What’s a vampire?”
Everyone looks at her.
Eve doesn’t feel the least bit gratified that she finally recognizes their expressions. They think Eve is crazy. She’s getting used to that, but she’ll never get used to being blinded, so she screams at the top of her lungs: “Get those fucking lights out of my face and tell me what the fuck a vampire is!”
They shy away from her as if slapped.
Dentino says, “You really don’t know, Doctor? Don’t you have vampires in Agartha?”
Eve howls: “How the hell should I know? What the hell are vampires?” She adds desperately: “Are they real?”
There’s a big silence.
Someone says, “No.”
Someone says, “Maybe…”
Someone says, “No…”
Someone says, “Then what the fuck were those?”
Someone says, “She’s the scientist. Could they be real?”
Dentino shouts, “No! They’re not. Vampires aren’t real. They’re characters from stories. Monsters.”
Eve asks warily, like she has a hidden agenda — something Agarthans never, ever have: “What do the stories say vampires are?”
Everyone has something to add to the answer to that question. All of it comes in multi-voiced hysteria with the emphatic waves of a half-dozen ten-million-lumen flashlights.
Someone says, “Vampires are dead people.”
Someone says, “They get bit by other vampires.”
Someone says, “Then they turn into vampires.”
Someone says, “And they live forever.”
Someone says, “But they can’t be killed.”
Someone says, “They can be killed by sunlight, but not by bullets.”
Someone says, “They feed on human blood.”
Someone says, “On our blood.”
Someone says, “On our souls.”
Someone says, “Souls?”
Someone says, “Souls. That’s how I heard it.”
Someone says, “Dentino, are you trying to scare the doctor to death?”
Eve says: “They feed on your souls?”
“Well, they’re fictional characters, so it depends who you — wait, Doctor. Did you say your souls?”
Eve looks at Gaardner, who sits, dazed and staring.
Eve says: “I don’t have one, remember?”
Gaardner s
ays, “I’m sorry, I didn’t really mean that.” He adds, “I guess you’re learning about irony.”
Someone says, “I always heard blood,” but nobody wants to talk about it anymore.
Gaardner asks Eve, “Doctor, can we be rescued? By a rope ladder, crane, something from above where they sheared the stairway? Level 80, maybe, the last load-bearing entry point with granite?”
Eve says: “Of course. If we get the seeds.”
“If we get the seeds?”
“If we get to the seed bank, I can send an ELF — extremely low frequency — transmission through the ground. If we have the seeds, they’ll come rescue us.”
Someone says, “We’re closer to the top. We should go up, not down. We can send up flares.”
Then, to Eve, someone says, “They’ll come down and get us, right?”
Eve says: “Of course not. If we don’t have the seeds, it wouldn’t be worth the resources.”
Someone, outraged, snaps, “Resources?”
Eve says: “Without the seeds, we’re irrelevant to Agartha’s survival.”
Ondrusek says, “Great. So they’d just abandon us?”
Eve says: “I don’t understand your question.”
Dentino says, “Just like that? No guilt, and you think that’s reasonable, Doctor?”
Eve says: “I don’t understand what your question is.”
Dentino growls viciously, “Does that bother you, Doctor?”
Eve says: “God damn it, I don’t understand what you keep asking me!”
Eve is getting the hang of using profanity to indicate displeasure with their behavior; whenever she does it, it seems to shut them up quickly.
Ondrusek pushes through out of the blaze of five hot suns. She steamrollers over Eve and grabs Gaardner’s shoulders. She asks, “Captain, what the hell are these things?”
In the darkness past the railing, something flutters.
Everyone backs away from the railing.
Everyone hoists weapons and aims at the dark — even Eve.
Her heart is pounding.
She doesn’t like being scared; she hasn’t been bred for it.
Blinded by the lights, she can’t see much.
But she sees enough.
They move beyond the railings. Eve sees hints of them — cloaks, shrouds, robes, wings.
Then they’re gone.