by John Ringo
The student was back against the wall, his eyes wide and unseeing. A line of drool was hanging from his open mouth and the only noise he was making was a faint mewing of terror.
“Well, Freya does get involved, as it turns out,” Barb said, flicking the swords to clear them of ichor.
“How?” Janea said, somewhat bitterly.
“You’re not totally insane,” Barb said, gesturing at the student. “That makes three bodies we’re going to have to extract.”
“You’re really going to try to go up there after the girl?” Janea asked.
“Of course,” Barb said, looking at her in surprise. “How else? I’m also going to have to get the professor.”
As she said that, Lazarus came out of the far opening a bit sheepishly.
“Welcome back,” Barb said. “And next time I’m going to listen to you.”
“Barb,” Janea said, eyeing the hole. “Look, let’s try to drag Thane back then get some more professionals. I’m not even sure I can find the way out.”
“There’s a li…” Barb looked towards the exit and stopped. “Where’s the line?”
“Cedar took it with him,” Janea said, shaking her head. “I’m really unsure about finding our way out.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Barb said, sliding over to the opening. “I’m gonna need a push. Oh, and I suppose we need to tie me off in case I get stuck.”
“Aaaruck!” Barb snarled as she finally cleared her hips from the hole. “That felt like being born again.”
“Should work fine for you,” Janea said.
“Christian jokes,” Barb muttered, rubbing her hip. It turned out that bringing the pistol in a holster was impossible. She’d ended up sticking it in her belt on her front. She’d had a wakizashi in either hand, though. One up, one down, unsheathed and being very careful. “It’s more open up here.”
The cavern was a chute climbing upwards at about a sixty-degree angle to the north. At about six feet wide and more than ten feet high, it was one of the more open areas they’d passed through. She could see where it leveled off again about twenty feet up, and possibly an even more open area at the top. Getting up it was going to be a chore, though. The floor was slick with slime, ichor and blood.
“Professor’s not here,” Barb said. “Safety first,” she added, sheathing the swords.
She got down on all fours and tried to climb up the chute, but she kept sliding down. The second time, her leg slid into the hole to the lower chamber, nearly breaking it.
“This is impossible,” she said, sitting down. Then she noticed that the rope that ascended up the chute. Presumably still tied to the professor’s ankle, it was tucked to one side in a slight cleft that ran along the chute.
She pulled it out and flicked it to the side, trying her weight on it. Wherever the professor was now, he seemed to be solidly stuck.
“This is a bit morbid,” she said, pulling on the rope, then carefully climbing up the chute hand-over-hand. About halfway she slipped and fell on her face, bruising her chin, but she was able to get enough purchase with her feet to make it to the top.
As she neared the top, she stopped and sniffed and listened. The smell of ichor was overwhelming but there was no sound from the chamber beyond.
“How’s it going?” Janea shouted.
The voice boomed through the cavern and Barb suppressed an ungodly curse.
“Quiet,” she hissed, listening again. Still nothing.
She pulled herself over the opening and drew her pistol, triggering the SureFire flashlight on it in addition to her helmet light and quickly shining both around.
The cave was, for once, high and wide with the traditional stalactites and stalagmites. It was still dark with the slime mold, and in places there were deep pools of ichor. It definitely looked like the creature’s lair.
She followed the rope to a crack between two of the stalagmites where the professor’s body was wedged. All the body except the head.
“That explains the blood,” Barb said, pointing her pistol around until she spotted the head. It had apparently rolled into a corner of the cave. “Okay, that’s the professor.”
But search as she might, she couldn’t find the kidnap victim.
“That’s odd,” she muttered, getting down on her knees and shining the light into every crevice.
By dint of much searching she found three openings off of the cave. All of them had signs of being used by the creature but none of them had traces of the victim.
“Ssssh…sugar,” she muttered.
She went back over to the entrance and called down.
“Janea. Found the professor. No sign of the victim. Three exits, all used. At this point, we need to call it.”
“Got it,” Janea said.
“I’m going to try to stuff the professor down the chute,” Barb said. “I’ll roll you his head first.”
Lazarus walked out of the cave and then over to a patch of brush, and started rolling in the leaves as if trying to rub something off his fur.
Barb pulled herself out of the opening, then pulled the body of professor Argyll through. She’d gotten good at that over the last few hours.
“You’d think there’d be somebody waiting for us,” Barb said, shaking her head. “Give me Thane’s hand.”
Getting out of the cave had been nearly as much of a nightmare as fighting the thing in it. Fortunately, every time the two agents got lost, Lazarus had directed them to the right course. The major problem had been maneuvering the stiffening body of the professor and Thane. Thane could and would perform minimal functions-would crawl when they told him to crawl-but getting him through the restrictions had been a special pain. And any time the light started to go away, such as the one time Janea’s helmet-light battery had given out, he would start to howl.
As the student exited the cave he started to mutter, a precursor to a howl. Night had fallen by the time they exited the cave and apparently the light from Barb’s helmet wasn’t enough.
“It’s okay, Thane,” Barb said, pulling him to his feet. The FBI was still clearly investigating the area around the trailer, and there were Klieg lights set up. “Go to the light, Thane. It’s okay, I’ll be with you.”
Randell looked up as a tall figure stumbled into the light and collapsed right on top of an evidence marker.
“Watch where you’re…” he said before recognizing the lost caver. “Holy shit!”
“Watch your language, Special Agent,” Barb said, holstering her pistol as she walked into the light around the trailer. She was dragging the body of the professor by one wrist. His body had stiffened into a slight U, which had actually helped with most of the restrictions. “Area’s cleared but we couldn’t find the girl.”
“Trying to give a cat a bath in the shower is a baaad idea,” Barb said, toweling her hair as she walked out of the bathroom. Lazarus darted past her, yowling.
The agents had wanted to question them immediately but they’d given in to the argument that both needed a shower badly. So the foursome had returned to Barb and Janea’s hotel. Barb and Janea had driven in a different car by mutual agreement with the agents. Their rental car now smelled like rotting skunks.
“Cedar said you were all dead,” Randell said. “At least what we could get out of him. He’s nearly as bad as Thane. All he’d do was scream about blackness and repeat that you were all dead.”
“Which was why there wasn’t a welcoming committee,” Janea said. “O ye of little faith. Actually, that’s exactly what ye are.”
“So what was it?” Graham asked.
“Not sure,” Barb said.
“It wasn’t a Shambler,” Janea said. “Underestimated the threat again. It didn’t respond to the Jagana spell or the Jugu powder, which a Shambler would have. And Shamblers don’t have those eyes. I’m going to have to call a researcher at the Foundation to see if they have a clue. But the good news is, it’s dead. Which, I suppose, explains why you got the Calling. If I’d gone in there exp
ecting a Shambler we all would be dead.”
“The professor is,” Barb said, shaking her head. “I should have listened to Lazarus.”
“No sign of the girl?” Randell asked.
“There were three openings off of the lair,” Barb said, tightly. “All used. We had a dead team member, one who was catatonic, and neither Janea nor I were cave experts. I turned the penetration at that point.”
“In case it sounds like we’re being ungrateful,” Graham said, looking at Randell sharply, “good job on taking out whatever that thing was. And thank you for recovering the professor and Th-” He paused as his phone beeped, looked at it, and flipped it open.
“Agent Graham… Yes, sir. You’re sure. Yes, sir, right away.”
He closed the phone and looked at Barb with a flat expression.
“You’re sure this thing is dead?”
“All are not dead that sleeping lie,” Janea said, her brow furrowing. “But it’s as dead as anything like that can be. Why?”
“We’ve had another attack.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Your creature has been identified,” Augustus said over the video link.
Janea had sent a report to FLUF before heading to bed, and the next morning she and Barb had headed back to the FBI forward base after a brief stop to drop off the rental car and pick up a new one.
Graham had headed to the site of the new attack, so it was Barb, Janea and Randell receiving the call.
“The creature is a skru-gnon.”
“A child of foulness?” Janea said, her eyes wide. “Oh, no, no, no…”
“And what is a… skru…” Barb asked. “That’s Tibetan again, right?”
“A skru-gnon is an unholy mating of human and Old One,” Germaine said. “It is a way for Old Ones to enter into the world.”
“And more,” Janea said, her eyes closed. “The children of the foul are…” She paused and opened her eyes, slitting them slightly. “The children of the foul are the children of gar gyi dbang phyug ma, the mother of all demons.”
“Tiamat again?” Barb asked, exasperated. “Doesn’t she ever learn?”
“No, gar gyi dbang phyug ma is not Tiamat,” Janea said, shaking her head. “It was assumed at one time that they were the same but they’re not. The Gar is an Old One, not an Old God. It was said that it was banished-or vanished, the translation is tricky-from this plane before the first civilization of man arose. It was the creator of the Shamblers, they were of its essence but separate…” She paused as she saw the looks Randell and Barb were giving her.
“Okay, look, this is pre-science,” she said. “And it’s all legend. Tibetan and Incan and some from Basque, of all places. But this is the best guess on the part of the researchers. The Old Ones do not reproduce sexually. Most of them don’t reproduce, period. The Gar, though, can. It mostly reproduces asexually, fissioning off creatures like Shamblers. But the Shamblers cannot reproduce. All of the remaining Shamblers that haven’t been destroyed were created from the essence of the Gar.”
“So what’s a skru…” Barb asked.
“ Skru-gnon,” Janea said. “A child of foulness. The Gar can, somehow, induce reproduction in human females. Only humans, not animals. Through them it can produce a mixture of Old One and human, an unholy union, as Augustus said. They are much more powerful than Shamblers or any of the other creatures it produces by fission. They may be the souls of Old Ones brought to this plane.”
“So that…thing,” Barb said, closing her eyes.
“Was born out of the body of a woman,” Janea said, her face firm. “The worst possible sort of rape, the highest violation of the credo of my goddess. If Freya had a fraction of the power of the White God, she’d be turning up in person to kill this Old One.”
“The worst part is that they can, in turn, reproduce,” Germaine said. “They can only reproduce by…the term means ‘breaking selves,’ which is assumed to be fission. But that means they are able to once again flood the planet with their minions. And the skru-gnon are, of themselves, powerful and fell creatures. However, there has not been a child of foulness found on earth since the very dawn of history. There are indications that, yes, the Old Gods battled the Old Ones for power on this planet and won in the very dawn of man. Gods versus the Titans is the most commonly known myth. If so, there should be no skru-gnon on earth: they would have never allowed them to remain. But now there appear to be at least two.”
“Which means that someone has managed to bring the Gar back,” Janea said. “And if so, we are all in serious trouble. That means that the stars have aligned: the Old Ones are returning.”
“We need to figure out where these things are being produced,” Barb said.
“That’s pretty tough,” Randell replied, thoughtfully. “Okay, I’m trying not to get totally weirded out by the conversation, but here goes. Let’s say that this was your run-of-the-mill serial killer.”
“We could wish,” Janea said.
“They’re bad enough,” Randell replied, darkly. “But this is about that sort of investigation. We’d look for specific clues as to the person’s identity. DNA, trace materials like fibers, car tracks.”
“Well, the thing makes tracks,” Barb said. “Problem being, you have to follow it through caves. I’m not sure how many more cave teams I want to lose.”
“At one level, I’m thinking as many as it takes,” Randell said. “But that’s not the point. The point is, there would be clues as to where they came from. Who they are. Where they live.”
“But with these things…” Janea said.
“Yeah,” Randell said. “They don’t have fingerprints. They don’t have ID. They don’t use cars. I think we’re just going to have to go through as many cave teams as necessary to find the lair.”
“Maybe not,” Barb said. “Look, Janea, what do we know about the Gar?”
“Not much,” Janea said. “And I’m working off of rusty memory. I’ll get Chao Lin to send me a full download on it. But…It’s large. I mean really big. The size of a mansion or maybe even a factory. It’s going to be noticeable if it’s above ground.”
“Does it eat?” Barb asked. “Drink? Defecate?”
“I’m not sure if it defecates,” Janea said, smiling slightly. “But it eats. That’s one of the things that is mentioned. It was mostly fed captives but it is generally carnivorous. Very carnivorous. One of its alternate titles translates as something like the Stomach That Walks.”
“So it has to be getting food from somewhere,” Barb said, musingly. “How did it get here?”
“That’s a puzzler,” Janea said, shrugging. “There’s a summoning spell in De Voco Turpis, but I know it doesn’t work. It’s been tried, trust me.”
“Who would try to summon something like this?” Randell asked, angrily.
“Who would kill a dozen, a hundred, women?” Janea asked. “The Gar gives its earthly acolytes power. Power over others, money, you name it. Anyone crazy enough and ambitious enough. And smart enough. There have been attempts to summon the Gar for centuries. Someone finally managed.”
“They’d have to have some pretty serious occult knowledge,” Barb said, crossing her arms and looking at the far wall. “That’s the point. The Gar doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It was summoned by someone with serious occult knowledge and access to some pretty obscure texts, at a guess. That’s the first point. Second, they’ve got to be somewhere in the vicinity. These things didn’t travel here from California. Third, it has to eat. A lot of food, probably meat, is going to nowhere.”
“Okay,” Randell said, nodding. “Now we’re cooking. You’re getting to our meat, if you don’t mind the pun. So we need to start looking for large food stocks going nowhere, who has been accessing obscure occult texts in this area and who in this area, has that sort of occult knowledge.”
“And I’m thinking that the ichor might tell us something,” Janea said, musingly. “I mean, it’s biological trace material. There’s all sorts of things you gu
ys do with that these days. Right?”
“True,” Randell said, then frowned. “The good news is, I know who the samples got sent to. We’ve got our own local lab, which isn’t normally the case. And our blood sample guy is a real wizard at anything along the lines of biological samples.”
“Your body language is screaming that there’s bad news,” Janea said, smiling.
“Yeah,” Randell said, grimacing. “The bad news is, it’s Stan.”
“Stan, tell me you have something,” Randell said as the threesome walked into the lab.
Most FBI offices, even regional offices, which Knoxville was, do not have a major forensics department. Knoxville was unusual for two reasons. The first had to do with its proximity to Oak Ridge. During WWII, keeping German spies away from the Manhattan Project was a major priority for the FBI. And during the Cold War the priority was nearly as high.
With the thawing of the Cold War, it would have only made sense to dial back on some of the facilities in Knoxville. However, a combination of bureaucratic finesse and long-term congressmen had kept the Knoxville office at nearly the level of its heyday.
The second reason was less political and much more mundane. The University of Tennessee, also based in Knoxville, had one of the premier forensics departments in the United States. The Knoxville office could, therefore, draw upon top-flight students from the UT department and worked as a cross-pollination point with UT forensics.
The Knoxville FBI forensics department was, therefore, second only to Quantico in its level of knowledge and skill. And it arguably had a slight advantage in pure biologicals.
Unfortunately for the field members of the local office, the advantage rested mostly on the slightly stooped shoulders of one Stan Robertson, PhD.
“What complete moron sent this foul stuff to my lab?” the lab tech shouted, waving a vial in the air. “Blood, yes! Epithelials, of course! Saliva, urine, body parts, naturally! But it would take a moronic Republican-oh, sorry, oxymoron!-It would take a Republican to send this idiotic hodge-podge to me! And I note that the sample bag is signed by one Special, as in ‘I took the short bus to school, Agent Randell Smith!’ So you would be the moron, ey?”