Blood, Bones and Bullets

by Tim Curran

  Yes, Boyd knew these things.

  Just as he knew they’d be safe if they did not try to leave her. If they stayed, they would be fine, but if they panicked and threatened to entomb her with the mummified relics of her age, she would kill them. He could not know what she was or by what insane circumstances she had survived. But she had. Again, he thought that somehow she must have woken when air rushed into the Permian underworld. Dormant, perhaps, locked in some unbelievable hibernation. That had to be it, unless she had actually been awake down here the entire time. Aware of the passage of millions of years, that awful dead train of time. What would that be like? Trapped in this place, alone in a world turned to stone, alone in the darkness while your mind went to a screaming stew of waste? If that were the case, she would be deranged beyond imagining.

  No, I can’t conceive of that, Boyd told himself. Such a thing could not be possible. She must have wakened when the air broke the seal of her tomb. It has to be something like that. She woke down here in the darkness, alone, frightened, confused and probably quite mad.

  If such a thing as her could know madness.

  She probably wasn’t dangerous, really, as long as they didn’t threaten her with another eternity of solitude. Somehow, they had to communicate with her, give her the company she needed.

  Jurgens stood up, shining his flashlight in every direction. “Keep away from us, you hear me? Whatever in the fuck you are, you better keep away from us! You come by us again and we’ll kill you! Do you understand? Do you fucking understand me?”

  “Don’t,” Boyd told him. “Don’t do that…don’t threaten her.”

  “BREEEEEEEEEEED!” came the wailing voice. “MEEEEK—NAAAAAAR!”

  Maki was sobbing under his breath. “It’s a ghost,” he was saying. “We’re trapped down here with a ghost.”

  Boyd was going to tell him he was wrong, but maybe he wasn’t. There was no way you could catalog that thing. Maybe it was alive and maybe it wasn’t. Either way, Maki was right: she was a shadow, a wraith from antiquity.

  The chittering rose up again and it was very close now.

  Jurgens moved in a circle. “Get the fuck away from us!”

  Maki was with him now, brandishing his flashlight like a weapon.

  “Don’t,” Boyd said. “Dear Christ, don’t do that…”

  What seemed mere feet away, she let out a whining, pathetic shriek of utter agony and desolation and loneliness. The sound terrified Boyd and mainly because he heard the desperation in her voice, the cold cawing of millions of years that had scraped her mind raw. But Jurgens and Maki did not understand that. She was just a monster and they planned to deal with her as men had always dealt with monsters.

  They ran at the direction of her voice and it was the worse thing they could have done. Maybe she did not understand the hateful things they called out to her or the threats they made, not in words, but she understood the tone. She knew she was threatened and she responded accordingly.

  Boyd saw it happen and was powerless to stop it.

  Something incredibly fast and unseen hit Jurgens. Hit him hard, tearing his throat out with a spray of meat and blood that splashed against the petrified trees and struck Boyd in the face, hot and steaming. Before Maki could utter so much as a cry of surprise, she took him, too. Boyd heard something thud into him and he was yanked high up into the air like a meat hook had caught him between the shoulder blades. Boyd heard him scream from the tops of those trees. A scream that was silenced by something wet shoved into his mouth. And then—

  Boyd saw a blur of moment and Maki’s corpse landed not four feet from him, its face threaded with blood, eyes wide and staring, mouth yawning wide, unnaturally so, as if something had been forced in there that dislocated his jaws.

  Boyd heard himself begin to sob.

  Jurgen’s corpse was up there somewhere and Boyd could hear blood dripping earthward like a gentle rain. Plop, plop, plop. The light of the lantern illuminated the forest to about twenty feet up and he could see the glistening red drops rolling down the trunk of a petrified seed fern. He was hearing other sounds, too.

  The sound of chewing.

  And wet sucking sounds.

  He felt his mind go. It vacated his brain with nary a scream or a mad peal of laughter. It just went and he was content with that.

  He heard her coming down the trunk of a tree with the skittering sound of dozens of legs. She paused on the log that had broken his leg, not five feet away. He could hear her breathing.

  But he could not see her.

  In that same scraping, almost metallic squeal of a voice, she said, “Booooooyyyyyd?”

  He was looking right through her, looking at something that cast no image, something invisible and ancient and lonely. She uttered a cooing sound that made his flesh crawl.

  “It’s okay,” he said, cold sweat running down his face. “I won’t hurt you…I won’t leave you…”

  She moved forward, cooing.

  Yes, she was coming for him now.

  And he knew she wasn’t going to kill him. She had responded to him right from the first and he knew it. He heard her crawl atop Maki’s corpse. She smelled ancient and dry, like hay stored in a closed-up barn. Maki’s head was lifted up and something stabbed into his throat. There was a sucking, slurping noise.

  “Oh no,” Boyd whispered under his breath. “Oh Jesus…”

  That slurping sound continued and he saw blood…a stream of blood being sucked from Maki’s throat with gulping sounds like a thirsty man downing a beer. The stream of blood was sucked into the air, probably into her mouth, then it diffused into several rivulets and filled several kidney-shaped sacs that must have been her stomachs…all three of them.

  Boyd watched.

  He heard her make smacking sounds as she finished up.

  He was shaking, and moaning deep in his throat and that wasn’t from what he had just seen, but from what she was doing: stroking his arm with something like a spurred finger. And cooing in his ear.

  18

  Boyd opened his eyes.

  It was pitch black.

  He did not know how much time had passed. It might have been six days or six months as far as he was concerned, because his mind was lost in a white fog of madness. He was inside one of the cells in the ancient honeycombed trees, a cell near the very top. This is where she had brought him. Where she kept him and cared for him.

  His leg had become infected the second day and he submerged into a mire of fever dreams, calling out to people who were not there and remembering a reality that no longer existed for him. The infection would have spread and killed him eventually, but she would not have it. Devoted and kind and heartsick for company, any company, she had tended to him. She had sucked the poison from his legs and cooled him with water she sprayed onto his face.

  When he woke from the fever, he screamed.

  And she cooed her love for him.

  He lay there, trying to remember the world before the cell, but it was all becoming rapidly grainy and indistinct. A dream-world, a pleasant fantasy slipping from his grasp. The lanterns and flashlights were gone, but no matter, their batteries would have been long exhausted by now.

  The darkness was forever.

  But he was never alone in it.

  He recalled when she had first come for him, how she had been almost shy. She had sat at his feet for some time, cooing and clicking, sometimes making a low and haunting musical sort of piping. But he had held out his hand and she had come, hungry for companionship, shattered by an eternity of ungodly isolation. It had not been easy at first getting used to her, the feel of her touch or the squeal of her voice. All those clicking, spidery limbs like tangled, knotty bamboo, the bony rungs of her body that were set with spiny hairs. Her fetid breath, the stink of age and corruption, a sickly warm miasma flavored by what she had been eating.

  He did not know what she was.

  She was not a spider exactly, but maybe something like one. Something with a con
voluted, glossy exoskeleton and countless whispering stick-like limbs. Her flesh felt oily and damp like wet seal skin. But she was no insect or arachnid. She had a head. A long, narrow head and something like a face. A head draped with a mop of greasy, webby hair that undulated like worms when you touched it and a face set with no less than three oval mouths. Sometimes, she would lie next to him and lick him with her tongues, cleaning him and keeping him healthy.

  At first, he’d wanted to scream, but even that had passed. He even got used to the food she chewed for him into a fine, moist pulp and regurgitated into his mouth. He did not like to think of what the food was, being that there was only one possible source of meat in the cavern.

  It took some getting used to, just as it took getting used to the way she called his name, that rusty, scraping wail that was like the agonized mewling of a cat wailing in the dead of night. “Boooooyyyd,” she would shriek with that pathetic childlike screech that was so lonely, so destitute like the squall of a terrified child. “Booooooyyyyd….”

  Yes, he had even gotten used to that.

  It was amazing what you could get used to, given time.

  He could not know what she was or what her race had been. Only that she had known a terrible, wasting loneliness that ripped open her mind. She had waited in stark, hopeless, solitary desertion as her kind had died out. As the continents shifted and the great reptiles gave way to the megafauna, as the great Permian age was devastated by mass extinction and the Mesozoic seas became deserts, as mammals claimed the land and men learned to walk and then run, filling the lands above like racing white ants.

  How many days?

  How many fucking days had it been?

  He had read somewhere once that the average human mind will crack after three or four days of absolute darkness. The lack of sensory stimulation makes the mind turn back upon itself and submerge. Boyd could not be sure if he was insane or not. All he could do was wait in the cell. Wait for her to return because she always did.

  Listen.

  Yes, he heard her. She was coming. Ticka-ticka-ticka. She entered the cell and squatted at his feet. He had not seen her for many hours, maybe days. She smelled different. That’s how he began to judge her moods, by the smell she extruded. Today it was very sweet like the odor of cherries. He had never smelled that before. When she was scared it was an odor like dry straw. When she was angry it was the smell of pale green bogs. But this…this was new.

  He spoke to her but she did not respond.

  She waited there at his feet.

  It seemed to go on for many hours.

  When Boyd opened his eyes, she was still there. She was making a high singing sort of noise and just beneath it, something else: a fleshy, moist sort of sound like ripe juicy tomatoes were sliding out of her.

  And the smell…black, diseased, horrid.

  That’s when he knew. That’s when he understood.

  That’s when it all began to make a curious and revolting sort of sense.

  As she had hibernated through countless ages, a flat dormancy had brooded within her. She had carried a secret from the Permian, she had carried the seed of her kind which waited within her, gestating through the eons.

  She was a female.

  It was only natural that she give birth.

  When it was done and he was whimpering under his breath, she sidled up next to him.

  She wanted him to touch her.

  At first, Boyd was offended as he felt them clustering on her back, squirming and writhing, but soon he learned to accept. And as they accepted him and ran over him like tiny, mewling rodents, he actually knew he would come to care for them. They flooded over him in a swarm of leggy young, nipping and licking at him. Down there in the dank subterranean blackness, he could remember that once he had been married to a woman named Linda and that she had carried his child.

  He had been a father once.

  And now he was a father again.

  A father with hundreds of children that crawled and skittered and nipped.

  He was a lot of things, but he certainly was not lonely.

  But as the hours passed, he knew she was growing edgy, tense. She was feeling threatened and he smelled it on her. And sometime later, he knew why: the rumbling. The rock-crushing rumble of a drill. They were digging him out. They were coming to get him.

  Oh no, he thought. Don’t do that.

  You don’t understand.

  She’s very jealous…

  19

  It took them a week to open the spider hole back up and three more days to clear out the stope leading to the cavern that Jurgens had told them about over the radio. It was hard going every step of the way, but as the nation held its breath and CNN and NBC camped out at the Hobart Mine and the families waited patiently, they made it to the cavern.

  The only thing separating it from them was a wall of rock.

  Sonar readings told them it was some five feet deep. They could go through it in a matter of hours.

  “Get that drill down here,” Russo told them, looking about ten years older than he had when this whole business began. “I want a bore hole into that cavern.”

  It took about an hour to punch a hole through the rock.

  A dry, sucking blast of air blew out at them.

  They tried calling out to the men through the pilot hole but got nothing. Thermal imaging cameras were brought in and everyone cheered when they picked up living signatures on the other side.

  “Bring in that reamer,” Russo said. “Let’s open this mother up.”

  As the crew got to work, Corey aimed a lightweight parabolic microphone into the pilot hole. He handed the headphones to Russo.

  “Do you hear it?” Corey said.

  “Yes,” Russo said. “Yes…”

  Somebody was trying to communicate with them.

  There was no mistaking the sound from inside the cavern: Click, click, click…

  FEAR ME

  1

  Soon as Romero saw the new meat, he knew there was going to be trouble. He felt it down in his guts, something cold and inexplicable that just started chewing through him. You were sitting on ten years hard time and wouldn’t see parole for another three, you got real good at spotting trouble. Knowing how it smelled, how it walked, and how it talked.

  The sergeant hack, Jorgensen, brought the new meat in, said, “Here you go, Romero, we got you a new cellmate. He’s young and pure, don’t go dirtying him up.” Jorgensen thought that was funny, took the kid by the arm and pushed him at Romero. “He’s all yours now, don’t break him.”

  Then Jorgensen stepped out and the cell door slid closed. He went on his merry way, twirling his stick, laughing with the other hacks, looking for cons to hassle and heads to crack.

  Romero just stood there, giving the new meat the look. You did enough time, you got real good at “the look.” This was Romero’s second stretch. He’d already done five years at Brickhaven for grand theft and an illegal weapons charge when he was twenty. Now he was forty, doing a dime for aggravated assault and battery of a police officer, staring down the long tunnel at the light flickering at the end. Romero wanted to feel that light on him real bad, on his face and hands, making things glow inside him where there had only been darkness for too long.

  What he didn’t need was this skinny little boy fucking things up for him.

  “You got a name, Cherry?” Romero put to him, crossing his muscular forearms over his chest, letting the kid see the jailhouse tats on them. Letting him know right off that he was a ballbuster, a hardtimer that would bite out your eyes and fuck your skull if you got in his way.

  “Danny, Danny Palmquist,” the kid said.

  Romero shook his head. Candy-ass name like that. Palmquist. Damn, the cons were going to eat that up with their bare hands. “Good, Danny, I’ll call you Cherry. You got a problem with that, Cherry?”

  Little shit didn’t have anything to say to that. Just stood there in the corner, that lost puppy hang-dog look on his face.
But then, Romero knew, that’s what guys like Danny Palmquist were: hang-dog puppies.

  Jesus, look at the kid.

  Not more than 5’6, 5’7, maybe 140 pounds, more meat on a taco than this one. The cons were probably already arm-wrestling to see who got to pop his puppy ass first. Sickening. Just a skinny little nothing. Size didn’t always matter—some of the meanest pricks behind those walls were little guys with shivs and acid attitudes—but you could see that Danny Palmquist was a zero. He wouldn’t be able to defend himself, which made him prey. Within 48 hours, he was going to be somebody’s punk old lady.

  Romero was hard.

  Before he took this fall, he’d worked the streets, pushed coke and junk, stole cars, busted skulls, even had himself a few bodies out there. A life like that made a guy ready for the joint. Made him lean, mean, ready to bust if you looked at him the wrong way. But this kid? No, he didn’t have any streets on him. He was small town, junior glee-club material. Probably pissed himself when the local bully gave him a shove. There was just nowhere for a guy like that in a maximum security joint. Blacks would sniff out his sugar-ass. If they didn’t, spics would take him. Shit, cons his own color—bikers and Aryan Brothers—they’d be all over him, be selling his ass first thing you knew.

  He needed somebody to watch over him, protect him.

  But he wasn’t tough enough for the ABs, Skinheads, or redneck whiteboy traffickers. No gang would touch a cherry like that. And Romero? He had his own problems.

  He sat on his bunk, lit a cigarette. “You’re on top, Cherry.”

  But the kid didn’t move. “What you in for?” he asked.

  Stupid little peckerwood. What you in for? Kid saw too many prison movies, James Cagney and shit. “Like I said,” Romero told him. “You’re on top.”

  “I guess you don’t like to talk much.”