by James Axler
“Of course I believe in coamers. I’ve seen their red eyes glowin’ in brush outside camp with the firelight myself. You don’t really think those stupe bastards from the outlands had anything to do with the killings, do you? At least not until this feeb Wymie had to go and stir them up?”
The man fell silent. Conn’s brow furrowed. He could tolerate doubt among his own bodyguard far less than he could tolerate intramural violence within it. He looked to Potar.
“No worries, Mr. Conn,” the giant said. “Liam’s solid as they come.”
Conn nodded once, briskly.
Potar opened a huge hand toward the still-unconscious Wymie.
“It time, boss?” he asked.
Conn lowered his chest to his collarbone and creased his brow in thought. For a fact, things had not broken this night as he’d anticipated. He’d sent off his number-one adviser, Frank, because the tall dark scarecrow still had a conscience, one that Conn did not care to encumber by making him a witness if he had to take stern measures. But mostly he’d had Potar ensure only his most trusted bully-boys were anywhere nearby as a precaution. And in case the troublesome Wymea Berdone needed to be persuaded.
But things had powered right past that point. So be it, Conn thought.
He raised his head and smiled at Potar. He thought he saw the barest flicker of fear in the man’s boar-hog eyes.
“Yes, Potar,” he said gently. “It’s time.”
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Five
“‘We found Watts and Dorkins partially dismembered and devoured, their bones gnawed,’” Ricky read out loud.
Krysty could clearly hear the youth panting as he spoke. They were all winded, after their sprint through the cave network, up and away from the terrible rushing roar that pursued them. But they seemed to have lost it, or at least put some distance between them and its vengeful fury. For now.
At the higher end of a huge cavern, Ryan had called a halt to drink and catch their wind. A stream of cold, freshwater, relatively sweet-tasting, ran from a crack high up in one wall, through a well-defined channel it had cut in the floor, to vanish into the echoing but impenetrably dark depths beyond a shoulder-high opening in the farther wall. Ricky had shouted into it from a few feet, which got him barked at by Ryan for taking the risk that whatever was chasing them might hear. None of them had felt like venturing closer.
They had not been there before, but the notches the coamers had struck by the entrances showed which direction was which, and that was enough for Ryan and Jak to orient themselves. Or so they said, and neither was of a frame of mind to shade the truth to humor the others.
“‘It can only be McComb’s albino monsters, with their blood-colored eyes and horrid dog faces. She’s let them off the leash and set them on us for certain. And now the time has come to put an end to this threat and this perversion of science. I have ordered an all-out attack…’”
Ricky looked up. He had shadows under his eyes, and his dark brown eyes were large in his face. Despite the fact the big chamber showed little sign of alteration for use by the coamers, there was enough recently charged glow-moss available for him to do the trick of stuffing a clump in his shirt for light to read by. He seemed almost obsessed by the task.
“There’s just one more entry,” he said.
“Well, don’t tease us,” Mildred grumped. “Read the damn thing.”
Ricky looked at Ryan, who nodded.
“What?” Mildred prodded, clearly feeling out of sorts. She was, as she frequently pointed out, built for comfort, not speed, with her short legs and generous hips. She wasn’t fat; years of tramping over the same countless miles of Deathlands and beyond had melted pretty much all of them to muscle and bone. She was just sturdily built. “How many magazines will hearing that last bit load for us, anyway?”
“Back up off the trigger of the blaster, Mildred,” Ryan growled. He was sitting on a rounded stump of stalagmite. Krysty hated how haggard he looked, and not just from exertion. “I’ve got curiosity, too. I’m not made of stone.”
“Sometimes it’s kind of hard to tell.”
“Well?” Ryan said to Ricky. “Get on with it, kid.”
“‘I am the last,’ Foxton writes. ‘I am wounded and bleeding and out of ammunition, and my time is near. I know. I write this final entry by the shine of clumps of some manner of self-luminous moss or fungus, clearly developed by the madwoman McComb’s labs.
“‘I must hide this account for future generations, if anyone survives the cold and the dark outside to reproduce. Has the world fallen to these naked Morlocks? I cannot know. But in spite of all, I can hope. Yes, and pray.
“‘I hear them now, closing in. My right leg will not carry me another step. They’re com—’”
Ricky shut the book with a reverence Doc did not think the evil whitecoat author deserved.
“That’s how it ends. Guess he made his last stand right by the place where I found this.”
Ryan sighed. “At least we’ve got some idea of what we’re facing,” he said. “Both sides—the cannies and the creature. I don’t know how much it’ll help, but I know it feels better than knowing nothing.”
“So what now?” Krysty asked. She hated to put any weight back on her lover’s overburdened shoulders, but she felt no less responsible for the survival of her companions than he did. She knew time pressed. And she was eager to know.
“Perhaps the monster’s wrath has cooled off, and it has forgotten all about us,” Doc suggested. “I doubt its vast size houses any commensurate mentality.”
“Like we’re ever that lucky,” J.B. said with a dry chuckle.
“As the great, and presumably long-late, Samuel L. Jackson said in the movie The Long Kiss Goodnight,” Mildred said, “‘When you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you—and umption!’”
Krysty looked blankly at her friend. So did all the others.
“No, Millie,” J.B. explained patiently, “it’s ‘when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.’”
“I know that,” she said. “It was a joke way of putting it. That was the point. It was a movie. You know what? Never mind.”
“I for one am eager to hear an answer to the estimable Krysty’s question,” Doc said.
Ryan was rubbing his chin, the way he did when he got thoughtful.
“Jak, J.B.,” he said. “Gather round. You still got a working pen on you, Ricky?”
“I have a pencil. Those usually don’t stop working no matter—”
“Shut it. How many empty pages left in that diary?”
Ricky thumbed through the warped pages of the cracked-covered book. “About half,” he said. Then he raised his face to give Ryan a stricken look. “But you can’t mean to write in this! It’s a priceless artifact.”
“Nuke that,” Ryan said. “What’s priceless to me is my own personal ass. Yours, too. At least in comparison to a bunch of water-soaked pages written by some long-chilled coldheart of a whitecoat. Though don’t go getting cocky, because that’s relative.”
Chagrined, Ricky handed over the book when the one-eyed man stuck out a palm. When Ryan had his face turned where the boy couldn’t, he flashed a quick wink at Krysty.
“Ace,” he said. “We’ve got sketch maps of some of the places we’ve been. Let’s bring those out.”
Doc and the Armorer dutifully produced their own notebooks.
“Of course we had no opportunity to map the ways we took to get here,” Doc pointed out, “being in somewhat of a hurry as we were.”
“That’s why we’re going to pool our memories and fill in the blanks,” Ryan said. “Especially where we found the magma ducts.”
“Mildred and I will keep watch,” Krysty said. “You got a plan, lover?”
He showed her his wolf grin.
“Not yet,” he said. “But I got some ideas. We—”
Krysty frowned as something jarred the cavern floor.
With no more warning than that, the cave floor f
ifty yards away, toward the far end of the chamber, erupted. With a cataclysmic roar, a giant, elongated shape shot upward until it struck the actual ceiling of the cave, shattering massive stalagmites as it went.
Showering dust and rock splinters as it did, the creature turned its head down to look at them. Or at least, turned its forward end down to point at them. Krysty could see no eyes, just a round, perpetually open mouth big enough to swallow a predark sedan, ringed with sharp, inward-pointing teeth. Their bases, it turn, were fringed with what could only be stone-cutters: still pointed, but wider than they were long, looking impossibly sturdy.
Only when she could tear her eyes away from the swaying, crumbled-stone-drooling maw did Krysty fully realize what the creature was: a kind of immense worm, as big around as a railway car or more.
“Well, that’s not something you see every day,” Mildred said.
“It’s hunting for us,” J.B. said softly. “It doesn’t see us.”
“Why didn’t we hear it digging up through the floor?” Mildred asked quietly.
“No doubt the roof of the chamber beneath is especially thin,” Doc said. “It presumably can sense such things, though how it senses anything at all is entirely beyond me—”
“Here it comes!” Ricky shouted.
There was clearly no reason to keep their voices down any longer. Whether it had actually spotted them or not, it was launching itself to the attack. Fortunately, a creature that size took a while to get moving.
“Run!” Krysty yelled, just because it felt as if someone had to.
They ran.
She started scrambling over a litter of columns and stalactites that had broken free of the ceiling somehow and fallen among some low stalagmites. As she did, she couldn’t help looking back over her shoulder.
The creature’s head smashed down on the cave floor not ten yards behind them. The shock might have thrown her off her feet had she been upright. As it was, she was knocked sideways, banging her right knee painfully against a stalagmite stub.
Rock exploded away from the impact. The creature kept on going—down through the rock floor.
They were making for a large exit with a flattened floor, but Ryan shouted, “No! Right! Go now!” He led off at an abrupt angle toward a passage mouth that looked like barely more than a crack in the chamber wall.
For a moment Krysty doubted her lover’s judgment. As brilliant a tactician, a survivor and a man as Ryan Cawdor was, he was not infallible. She knew it; he never tried to hide it. He was human, not a god.
Her whole body burned with the urge to flee that unspeakable atrocity, as far and fast as possible. Yet here her lover was, turning them away from the highest-speed route available, so tantalizingly near to hand, to move a greater, obstacle-strewed distance toward a passageway that itself might not even be passable to them at all.
“Come on, Krysty!” Mildred shouted, grabbing her left elbow and towing her forward like the stocky tugboat she rather resembled. “No time to commune with your Earth Mother now!”
That snapped her out of it. Of all of her companions, her best friend Mildred was by far the most inclined to be skeptical of Ryan’s choices—and to voice that skepticism. That she was obeying and following without question told Krysty it was likely her mistake to doubt him.
Of course they all might be wrong. But Krysty started to run. Mildred let her arm go as soon as she felt the taller woman start to move of her own accord.
Ahead and to their left, Doc caught a toe beneath a fallen chunk of limestone cylinder and took a header, sprawling dangerously close to some thin and pointy knee-high baby stalagmites that jutted like spikes. Mildred broke wider left, Krysty right. They came up either side of the tall, thin man even as he came up on all fours.
He waved a long arm after Ryan and the others as they scrambled into the crack. They were clearly having a hard time navigating into it with their packs on their backs, but they were motivated.
“Go on!” Doc shouted. “Leave me! I’ve had my run!”
“Oh, bullshit,” Mildred said.
Both of them quite strong to start with, and their bodies pulsing with adrenaline, the two women picked him up bodily, yanked him upright and hauled him toward the crevice. He had just started to get his feet beneath him and helping to move him forward when they propelled him into the narrow black opening in the tan-and-yellow-striated wall.
Krysty felt the shaking commence again, up through her feet and her legs. “Go ahead!” she yelled at Mildred.
The black woman started to talk back. Krysty pushed her into the crevice ahead of her. Then she sprang over the projections that fanged the very entrance, praying she didn’t land on something that would break her leg, or even twist her ankle. Anything that slowed her now would as good as chill her.
She plunged into darkness. Her left foot landed on a rock and she lurched that way, slamming into the unseen wall of the crevice. Fortunately it wasn’t far enough away to build up momentum.
Ahead of her yellow light appeared as someone struck a lighter. She felt a strong hand grab her right arm and begin to pull. She made out the distinctive curve of Mildred’s forehead by the feeble gleam.
The Digging Leviathan shattered its way through the cave floor not sixty feet shy of the crevice. It plunged its eternal toothy gape of death toward the crack down which its presumptuous prey was trying to flee.
It seemed the whole Earth shook at the impact as the monster tried to ram its head down an opening far less than half as wide.
And it seemed the universe shook to the whistling scream of frustrated fury that vented from the monster.
The light expanded into lantern gleam. As the grinding teeth began to work at the rock around the crevice with an ear-torturing squeal, she heard Ryan shout, “Don’t just stand there admiring the view, Krysty. Move your ass!”
She did.
* * *
WHY IS MY NOSE in the dirt? Wymie wondered.
She had awakened lying on her belly, she quickly realized. A light rain was falling on her back. She opened her eyes to see that it was nighttime. Enough moonlight filtered through the clouds so that she could see the serviceberry bushes, branches heavy with new fruit, fringing the arc of the edge of the clearing before her eyes, and dense woods beyond.
She tried to put her hands down to hoist herself off the cool earth. Her flannel shirt had soaked through, and she could feel that wet had soaked into the crack of her butt through her jeans. She was liable to get chafed down there something fierce if she didn’t do something fast.
But she couldn’t move her hands. They were held behind her back by an unyielding pressure. It flexed slightly when she tried to pull loose, but it showed no sign of loosening, much less letting go.
Wymie tried pulling her right knee under her, but her ankles were held together, too. She realized she was tied. The smells of green grass and wet dirt were heady in her nostrils.
She rolled over. The rain caressed her face. She blinked at it.
Motion caught her eye.
The black-haired young woman craned her head back, rolled her eyes up. Was that a branch quivering? Perhaps it was the rain doing that.
But the other branches around it weren’t moving.
She heard a soft rustle from somewhere past her left boot. With a wrench of effort she sat up. She had reason to be thankful a lifetime of hard work chopping and hauling had strengthened her back and belly muscles, and kept them strong.
Nothing. She looked around.
Flitting motion continued to snatch at the corners of her vision. She turned her head rapidly this way and that, trying to see what was moving in the darkness around her.
The rain grew heavier, beginning to hit so hard she felt it on her scalp through her heavy hair.
And then they were there, appearing within the tiny glade, all around her, as if suddenly coming into being.
They were staring at her with hypnotic fixation. In the gloom their eyes looked black, but she knew them.
Those strange distorted faces, the skin beyond chill-pale. The long and matted white hair.
“Coamers!” she gasped aloud, as they advanced slowly on her. “But that can’t be true! You ain’t real! I know what I saw!”
They pounced on her, grabbing her hair and wrenching her head back, tearing her durable work clothes from her bound and helpless body as if they were rotten cheesecloth.
And then her world became a final infinity of yellow fangs, black claws and pain.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Six
Feeling as alone as he ever had at any point in his eventful life—which seemed longer than it had really been, but also shorter than he wanted it to be—Ryan descended the steeply ramped passageway by himself.
Below him the screams had ceased. They had been what drew the companions’ attention this way to begin with. The coamer marking system indicated it was a workers’ dorm. That system managed to be both simple and remarkably sophisticated, they’d discovered. Mildred, who was familiar with the specialized disciplines of her time, reckoned McComb had to have employed the services of anthropologists, linguists and even cryptographers to create it for her home-brewed race of man-eating subhuman troglodytes. Doc had assured them from personal experience that the top secret Totality Concept leadership could command specialists of any kind, in any number.
Now Ryan heard a sound that he could only compare to munching and a curious deep gurgling that had to be the Digging Leviathan digesting its prey.
The one-eyed man was moving light. No pack or coat, just his weapons, holstered and slung. And the objects he carried in his hands.
In the time since they had encountered the monstrous worm, they had been scrupulously pussyfooting around and talking in soft murmurs. They already by long practice employed good noise discipline, with no random buckles or other dangly metal bits to clink at inopportune moments and give them away to the bad guys. Or worse, monsters. Krysty intuited that the Digging Leviathan had to be sensitive to vibrations, especially through the cave rock. They had to stay constantly alert to avoid tipping off the monster to their locations.