by DA Chaney
Poor Guliana. His heart ached for her, having to have die in such a horrible way. Knowing that she’d been torn apart by these monsters made him grieve deeply in spite of his physical pain. He tried to vomit because the sensation to do so wouldn’t be abated. He dry heaved instead, his already spent body bucking and hacking as he rolled in his own mess.
The creature moved forward, slinking along the wall and sniffing at him. It poked his leg beneath his trousers and Conor howled at it, trying to jerk his leg from its reach.
“I’m going to kill you if it’s the last thing I ever do in this world,” Conor vowed.
He felt the validity of his words in his heart. He never felt more certain of anything else in his life, but even as he felt the conviction of his words, he was not completely sure of his capability to do the deed. Weakly he pushed himself over. He stared at the hole in the wall. If he could make it there, he could swim and get out. He’d go and get his brothers and weapons and wipe the whole bloody place out. Death to them all. He preferred they died slowly, but really any death would do. Invigorated by his need for justice, he began crawling toward it as fat streams of drool rolled from his bottom lip. Oblivious to the drooling problem he grunted, splattering thick drops along the floor with each slow and determined movement. The creature snickered behind him as if something was funny.
Fevered face aflame with anger he continued to drag himself across the floor with his forearms and the toes of his boots. His ears zeroed in on the creature as he picked up the sounds of it following him as he moved. He wasn’t surprised when he felt the thing poke at his calves as if to communicate the idea of reaching the pool was just a dream. Everything Conor knew about this type of creature suggested it received tremendous enjoyment from taunting its victims. Victim. The word sounded like he was giving up on himself when it crossed his mind. Maybe he was. Blinking away the eye wetness, he concentrated on the pool entrance.
Unbeknownst to him, his sweat and struggled actions just made the creature more excited at the thought of eating him. Had Conor known, it probably wouldn’t have mattered because there wasn’t a single thing in which he could do to stop it. His body was burning up and the sweat rolled off him like it was dew from morning’s grass. Even as ill as he was, he wasn’t going to just lie there on the floor without trying to avoid being eaten alive.
The creature took the opportunity of Conor’s struggles to leap onto his back. Conor had expected it, but he hadn’t fully expected his own inability to maneuver the attack into something that he could use for himself. He basically lay there in a sweaty, disgusting heap, and let a monster jump onto his back. He took the brunt of the action hard and his breath expelled heavily against the floor and then sucked in dirt. He tried to cough, to dislodge it, but he was having a difficult time with the creature on his back as he half-heaved and gagged pitifully on the floor. A sense of humiliation overtook him. If his brothers could see him now, they’d be so ashamed. He hadn’t saved Guliana, and now he couldn’t even save his own endangered life. It was only a matter of time now, he knew, before he died. He felt heavy grief in his chest as he realized that his family would never even know what had happened to him.
The creature took Conor’s sweat streaked long hair, threading its spindly digits through it and yanked his head back. Stars danced in front of his eyes and he wondered how much more he could take. It leaned over him, its feet digging into the muscles of Conor’s buttocks, its knees digging into his back as it bent his spine at an uncomfortable angle. It sniffed Conor’s hair and licked a rough tongue along the side of his neck, tasting the salty wetness peppered with dirt as it went. Disgusted, Conor tucked an arm close to his rib cage and drove it back into the creature hoping to hit something good enough to make it lose its grip on him.
The elbow connected with the creature’s ribs taking it by complete surprise. It howled and let go of Conor’s head, but it continued to thrash up and down on his back, wailing. Mid-leap, Conor pushed up with his arms and dislodged his unwanted passenger. Frantically he pushed his knees up underneath him and scrambled as quickly as he could toward the hole in the wall.
Conor stared frantically at the light beyond the hole; and he might have made it if a deep, gut-wrenching pain hadn’t made him scream out in agony and collapse. It was involuntary and there was nothing he could do. Something new inside him seemed to have burst and an intense sizzling burn erupted within his belly feeling as if he’d been stabbed with a hot poker. He could do nothing but weakly sob against the pain and rock himself, his mind, reaching out and trying to urge his body forward, trying to tell himself that he didn’t have much further to go. But his body would not listen. It could not. It was fighting an internal battle of its own as another enemy force was stealing his life away from the inside.
The creature, unaware of the torment going on inside its intended feast, rushed at the food on the ground with savage intent. It griped the food by its arms and looked into its odd looking, dirty, wet face.
As Conor stared back, he thought he could recognize humanlike features, but whatever the creature was, it was too far-gone to have been a civilized human being. “You. Are. Not. Going. To. Eat. Me,” he vowed, with each word painfully uttered into the face of his attacker.
Beyond thinking of anything but inflicting pain on it, Conor held his breath and forced his face forward and plunged his teeth under the jaw of the creature and began to tear at the flesh there. If Conor was going to die, and his mind told him there was little hope otherwise, he’d choose how. And he intended to take his bastard attacker with him.
Once the creature was dead, Conor would struggle to get to the pool. He knew he wouldn’t make it out now. He doubted he’d be able to hold his breath long enough to explore to get out. The burn in his stomach was getting worse, and it felt as though his insides were being churned up in a kitchen for a stew. No, he might not get out of the pool, but he could stick his head in the water and drown rather than wait to be found by another one of these creatures to be eaten like a common stock animal; or be slowly consumed by the liquid fire erupting in his belly.
The creature above him howled in its own pain and shock. Conor held on, tasting a thick substance that his brain told him was blood. The flesh between his lips tasted oddly like cold, uncooked fish, and not a particularly tasty one at that. Greasy and grainy at the same time, it tasted soft and sour in his mouth, and he wanted to gag against it. Regardless, he held on, pulling at the skin and opening his jaws to take more to ravage a bigger hole open. His counterattack became an avenue of revenge as he tore at the creature’s neck above him.
Another spasm rocked his body and he felt as though something was now bursting in his chest. Finally, he let go of the creature and fell back shouting as his body jerked. In his chest he could feel his heart struggling to pump. All the sound died out around him, and a buzzing filled his ears as he stared, blinking slowly and urging his heart to continue to keep beating. He saw the bucking creature above him moving in a slow speed as black blood spilled from the hole.
Shrieking above its food, the creature sensed its advantage, but it was having a hard time focusing on it. Lashing out with its sharp fingertips, it caught the flesh of Conor’s throat, slicing it into thick ribbons of flesh, spraying blood, and exposing bone.
He’d almost made it. The thought echoed in his mind as his gaze fell on the ceiling. He watched with a dreamlike quality at way the water ripples reflected on the ceiling over the creature’s shoulder. The effect was hypnotic to him as his neck was being torn out. He barely even felt the gouges and his blood gush from him. It puddled around him as he choked and gasped, staring up at the patterns that the water made. He could look nowhere else.
Above him, in his own dying panic, the creature dug into the foods chest, finding the rib cage easily and digging in to grasp it. He didn’t have the strength to peel the ribs back to gorge at the treats inside like he wanted to; so he raked his sharp fingers through the food’s abdomen, spilling open its guts.
He did not notice that the insides had somehow burst already, thick with tainted blood draining from the cavity. The creature did not know to think such a thing could have happened. It might have cared if it’d known.
The creature finally fell, weak and dizzy from blood loss and spread out, gasping next to its victim. He stared at the dead face of his own murderer. The glassy eyes of the food would have made a tasty snack if the creature hadn’t made a mistake in underestimating the food source. As the creature stared at the mess that had once been Conor, it wondered for a brief moment where the food thought it had been going.
A fever began to burn in the creature just before its own death, though it did not notice. When the cold sweat broke out, it didn’t know any difference between sickness or oncoming death. It twitched and found itself captivated by the patterns that the pool made. It had never noticed that before. But then, the pool was forbidden. It was dangerous. No one ever went there. It wasn’t a safe place.
Part 2
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1
Lock’s Landing outskirts, English countryside, 1804
Something hungry squatted in the bushes and watched the figures as they worked in the dark.
She could smell their sweat, and the thought of bashing their heads in and slurping the runny insides excited her. Her enlarged eyes glittered like black gems in the sparse light and a sticky trail of drool escaped her engorged lips.
Many centuries ago, her kind had been similar to the humans that she was spying on. Hatred, discrimination, and fear had driven their odd ways underground by others who did not understand them. They lived like moles now, finding succulent sustenance in meat from the surface. They were an inbred species, once believing that their blood was the purest. As their numbers dwindled year by year due to lack of females to breed, it became even more usual for females to mate with sons or fathers to reproduce. They could no longer mate with humans if they wanted to. Their sole purpose for inbreeding had been lost to a purpose they could no longer remember as a species. Now, it was just a part of life. Over time they had grown to adapt to all of the conditions that it took to live underground. Slimmer, faster, muscled, though a bit dumber and less able to communicate verbally with each generation.
They were spread out through England’s underground in shabby quantities, unbeknownst to the mass groups of humans who traveled so confidently above it. The humans believed they knew every danger to them and could see it coming from a distance. While they pranced around with the most wicked of delectable scents, below their very feet, keen senses stalked them like a herd of wild animals ready for slaughter on a daily basis.
It was regrettable that time had changed so much for her people. A great sadness could be felt among them as they felt the strain of loss and hunger every day. There was a time when the people had been ripe with numbers that would have plundered entire cities into the ground, allowing rivers of blood to soak the topside, but things had begun to change for them. As more of her kind were killed off or became dead shells, they had begun to spread out further and beyond their normal borders. Their hunting was more selective and intermittent because of the relentless invader that always followed close behind them.
Undead abominations that were once were held to the bosom as brethren, now roamed rotten and voraciously starving under the soil. In their tunnels. Through their homes. Scattering the remnants of her people farther and wider apart. Their undead husks lurking within the dark pockets of old dug out hollows waiting and hunting them. Abandoning their homes hadn’t been easy and the hard lost battle had cost them many lives.
Her kind did not fear much, but they had learned to avoid the ones that would not die. War had been declared on them, but each passing year, the undead things claimed more pockets in the earth…and more of her kind. Some of her race had broken off from the main group, never to be seen again. Whether they had survived elsewhere or had been killed off, it was not known.
Tonight, the female was not thinking of her kind or the undead creatures beneath the earth. She was single-minded in her purpose.
She scratched an open sore absently, quietly waiting for her moment to strike. Blood and puss ran freely down her arm, largely ignored because it didn’t matter to her. She rubbed the hard mound of her belly with a rough palm, careful not to rake her long nails against the tough but vulnerable flesh there. She needed food for the youngling in her stomach. Nothing else mattered.
With as much patience as she could muster, nails kneading the soil, she waited crouched behind a thick cropping of bushes until it was the right time to strike.
It was late. The only night in a solid cluster of days that the skies hadn’t opened up and drowned the land with rain. Moonless, with a blanket of darkness above them that blotted out the stars, a pair of naughty opportunists worked quickly, completely unaware that they were being watched by something that plotted to eat them alive.
The backbreaking work had already cost them twenty minutes. One of them glanced up at the sky, blew out a hot stream of air, wiped their sweaty face, and then resumed their work. In their line of employment, it was always best to operate quick and have the cover of night hide their illegal actions. It was even better to be toiling in dry conditions instead of drenched ones, considering that wet rot had begun to nibble persistently at their boots.
The second one looked around to make sure the authorities weren’t closing in on them. If they were caught, it meant a hangman’s noose. Though, it was fair to say that everything seemed to be a hanging offense these days. It was said that the jailhouses were overflowing and there was hardly room for the criminals in them. The over abundance meant that public hangings were up and were in popular demand. Being jailed was far from anyone’s mind. It was hangings in the public market or go home disappointed these days.
Death by dangling from the end of a rope was not a dignified way to go. Children and women alike would watch as sentenced criminals kicked, bucked, and shat their pants in the streets. Laughter could be expected if the mess trickled out the bottom of their pants while they were still alive, struggling against the end of the rope. There were few things more humiliating in the life of a thief than dying by the end of a rope; especially if they’d only knicked some food to survive. No one wanted to die, but times were tough. They reasoned that if there were enough food to go around, they wouldn’t have to steal. So in some ways, society made them the criminals. Seemed like a fair way to explain it to themselves.
Neither of these particular thieves wanted to find out about death either, but everyone had a tolerance to which they could take no more. Hunger drove many people to lengths that they didn’t think possible of themselves before the deed was done. So the thieving was done in the name of empty bellies and they did what they could to try and escape being caught. The cover of night itself was a far cry from a guarantee, but the faster the work was done under the cover of darkness, the better.
Winded and sore, the two figures pulled dirt loose from the widening hole in the ground. The twin wooden bladed shovels moved quickly and quietly, kicking up dirt and musk into the brisk air. The special blades allowed them to dig through the earth much more quietly than with metal. Moving with practiced haste, they deposited the loose stolen dirt onto the large cloth that was stretched out on the grass ready to catch it.
The work was tough and their bodies ached at the labor involved, but the rewards would justify the means in the end. Wiping a hand over his brow, Brock grunted and sucked in a breath as he felt muscles pull hard in his back, sending rays of pain shooting up to his shoulders. It was to be expected that a lifetime of hard manual labor, dishonest or not, created an avenue for many bodily injuries and it seemed as of late that he was collecting more in the name of getting paid. He cursed under his breath, mouth puckering like a caught fish on a line as he rotated a shoulder trying to stretch out the network of muscles through his back.
“I’m getting old,” he moaned, not for the first time.
Age was a
funny thing that he didn’t understand completely. He couldn’t remember a time that his body wasn’t weighed down with some kind of burden. It was just the way things were, and he’d been content enough to deal with his lot in life. Not that he’d had much choice. He’d been born to parents who died when he was young and he’d taught himself to survive from an early age. Such was the kind of life many had, though the details changed a bit depending on who did the telling. Lately, it seemed to have caught up with him because he’d begun to notice that it took a lot less time for pains to shove off the way they used to. He wondered when exactly the tide had turned when he hadn’t been paying attention. At some point, he’d crossed that invisible line where old age snuck up on him and he hadn’t even caught wind of it before it struck.
His companion, a skinny young kid named Ed, sighed and stabbed at the ground while glaring in Brock’s direction, determined not to lose pace, but annoyed just the same. “If this is some way of getting me to do all the work so that you can sit back and relax, you can plumb forget it. I’m tired of hearing you bellow like a rutting pig about ‘age’, truth be told.”
“Oh, what do you know about it?” Brock complained making a rude noise. Glaring back, he threw a heavy-handed punch at Ed’s shoulder, to which the boy dodged. His cap fell off with the movement revealing his stock of long mousy brown hair that looked black in the night. He shook his head and held up a small fist in mock defiance. Brock snorted and spat on the ground and began to dig once more.