by Tom Holt
To make matters worse, when I scouted round a bit more, I found out that there was a blood trail leading down the third tunnel. That really fazed me, till I figured out that it must’ve run down one tunnel, stopped, come back and gone off down another. What it meant in practice was that instead of a fifty-fifty chance of guessing the right direction, I was down to one in three. Fucking marvellous.
Well, in a situation like that, what do you do? It’s like there’s an audience you can’t see sat watching you, stuffing their fists in their mouths so you can’t hear them laughing. In other words, this time I panicked. I couldn’t have moved even if I wanted to. I sat with my back to a wall, knees drawn up under my chin, my useless left arm just flopped by my side — I could feel my knuckles on the cold tiles, but it hurt too much to even think about trying to move my left hand or anything brave and heroic like that.
I was shaking all over, my guts felt like some joker had tied a big knot in them, and after a minute or so I realised that the warm, wet pool I was sitting in was my own piss. Really, you can’t get lower than that and still be alive.
Just as well, then, that nothing came bothering me while I was in that state. If it had, there, wasn’t anything I could’ve done about it. I wouldn’t have tried to fight or anything, I was too scared and sick and sorry for myself. No idea how long I stayed squatting there. Time’s s different in the dark, anyhow. I just sat and let it take its course. I think I may have dropped off to sleep, even.
But there came a time when I thought, The hell with this, I can’t just stay here for ever. Then I got to thinking. The people who built these tunnels, the giants of old or whoever the fuck they were, they must’ve built them for a reason, and surely there was a good chance they built them with more than one entrance — in which case, even if I chose the wrong direction, surely it wasn’t impossible I’d come out into the light again somewhere, eventually. And maybe there was a whole nest of Them down there, but maybe there was just the one, and I’d killed it, or at least hurt it so bad it wouldn’t want to tangle with me any more. So I hadn’t got a clue which way to go. So what? Think about it. The only stone-cold certainty was that if I stayed put where I was, bleeding into a pool of my own piss, I was definitely going to die. All the other choices I could make stood me in some chance of getting out. Really, I had nothing to lose, did I?
So I stood up. Not a good idea, because my knees folded up and I landed back on my bum in the pool of piss, and when I tried getting up again my feet slid in it, and that was just humiliating. So I crawled for a bit until I felt able to stand up straight, and after that I took it nice and slowly, counting twenty-five steps, then stopping to rest and listen and sniff.
The smells that had drowned everything else out back at the junction were starting to fade. I could make out blood, still, and sweat that wasn’t my own. I went on further, and if anything the smells got stronger. After a bit I stopped and thought about it, and I reckoned it must mean I wasn’t going back the way I’d come. Instead, I was following the way it had taken, running away from me.
I nearly turned round and went back, but I thought, No, screw that. If I go back, I’ll only come to the junction again, and I don’t suppose I’ve got all the time in the world for figuring it out by trial and error. Besides, I was so horribly tired, I couldn’t face the thought of that long trek back. Press on, I told myself, and see what happens. It sounds stupid, making a choice like that basically out of laziness, but at the time it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
I’d have felt so much better if I’d still had the knife. Stupid, really, how one small thing, one possession, can mean so much when you haven’t got it. After all, it’s only a short, flat metal stick. If I’d been back at the Board offices, I could’ve gone and seen the stores clerk and explained how I’d lost my knife, and he’d have given me a new one, or maybe two or three if he happened to be in a good mood. He’d have thought nothing of it, and neither would I.
In the dark, though, I understood a really important thing, about people, about the human race. In this world, I realised, there’s two sorts of people. There’s people with knives, and they survive; and there’s people without, and they die. It’s a pretty simple proposition, doesn’t take a great deal of intelligence to figure out how it works, but there’s nothing in the world that matters nearly as much as that one basic fact. And the bastard part of it is, you only figure it out when you’ve lost your knife and can’t get another one.
But I kept going anyhow, because I had a feeling that if I stopped, I wouldn’t be able to get started again, and that’d be it. I walked and I walked, until my knees ached and my back hurt and my feet were killing me. Don’t ever let anybody kid you into believing you can’t be bored stiff and scared stiff at the same time. It’s a funny feeling, though. There’s nothing on earth you’d like more than to sag down to the ground and lie there, but you know it’s the one thing you daren’t do. Oh, and I was thirsty as hell into the bargain, so bad I could hardly swallow, and the pain in my shoulder was getting worse all the time. I’ve felt better, and that’s no lie.
I kept going, though, because I couldn’t stop. By this point I was pretty light-headed, what with losing blood and getting bashed about so much, so I couldn’t really trust what my ears and nose were telling me. Even so, I got the impression that there was something following me. Each time I stopped to listen, I couldn’t hear anything, but when I started walking again, I was sure I could hear footsteps, just a fraction of a second later than my own.
At first I told myself it was just an echo, which was a safe enough guess in the tunnels. The thing was, though, it didn’t sound like an echo. It was a different kind of footstep. It wasn’t the grating of my heavy boot-soles on the smooth tiles, more like something soft. I thought of the pads on the soles of Their feet, and I began to feel seriously worried.
If I’d had the knife, I’d have tried to force a fight. I’d have stopped, or maybe even turned round and run back up the tunnel. With no knife and only one good arm, though, the last thing I wanted was any sort of fighting. So I tried to think it through. Couldn’t be the bastard creature who’d bitten off my shoulder, I told myself. Of course I had no way of knowing exactly how much damage I’d done it, but it stood to reason it had to be in worse shape than me, so I found it hard to believe it’d want to fight it out with me. On the other hand, it now had my knife, and it knew I was empty-handed.
Perhaps it didn’t know how badly it had hurt me. In that case, it could still think I was actively hunting it, and it could’ve made up its mind that the only way it was ever going to be rid of me was to kill me and get it over with. Or maybe it figured it was dying anyhow, so it might as well try and take me with it, to stop me huffing any more of its kind. Maybe it was just very, very angry, and didn’t care. It hardly mattered. The only thing that counted for anything was that it was behind me, following me, taking great care not to be heard — stopping when I stopped — and that it was armed and I wasn’t.
There’s probably a very deep and significant point in there somewhere, about tables being turned, and the hunter hunted. If so, you’re welcome to it. I was more concerned with trying to get out of those bloody tunnels. I knew I couldn’t run, I just didn’t have the strength. As far as I could judge, it was happy just matching me step for step, trailing along behind me like a tired dog after a long walk. By the sound of it, I was still a respectable distance ahead.
It was a bit like that proverb, holding a wolf by the ears — you can’t hold it too long but you daren’t let it go. Same with me, sort of. I couldn’t go fast enough to get away from it, I couldn’t stop dead in my tracks and risk facing it. All I could do was keep going, keep my distance, until it made up its mind whether it wanted to attack or not.
Stupid things go through your head at times like that. I tried to think about the woman it had killed, and the man upstairs in the house, but I couldn’t get pictures of them in my mind. It was as though I’d only dreamed them, and yo
u know how a dream just fades away the moment you wake up. I tried to think of other humans I’d seen killed by Them, but I couldn’t. Instead, I kept seeing the one I’d killed earlier, crouching up on top of the junk-pile, watching me. That didn’t help. I thought about predators, what it means to depend on killing other living things in order to keep alive yourself. That was what They did — I mean, I never heard of them being able to eat grass or plants or anything else but fresh meat — and of course it was what I did too, as a professional.
You know why I got into this line of work in the first place? Bloody stupid reason. My dad was a carpenter — very good one, too. He could saw a straight line lengthways through a three-inch-thick oak board without even scribing a line. All done by eye. Of course, everyone expected I’d join him in the workshop as soon as I was old enough. But I can’t saw straight or plane or cut a mortice to save my life. He used to say, It’s just practice, give the boy time and he’ll get the hang of it. No chance. All I ever did was ruin good, expensive timber, until finally he got so mad at me he told me to get out of the workshop and stay out. After that, he talked to friends of his in other trades, but they all had sons and nephews of their own, they couldn’t take on an apprentice.
Then one day one of Them came hunting round our way. It was only a young one, no more than three or four years old, and it hadn’t got a clue — same as me, you see, no aptitude for the trade it was born into — but everybody down our street was scared shitless, because most of them had never seen one before, and those that had had lost family or friends to Them. And there I was, sixteen years old and fighting mad with the world.
I grabbed a chisel off the bench and went looking for the bastard thing, and it didn’t take much finding. It was scrabbling away at someone’s back door, like a dog wanting to come in out of the rain. It didn’t hear me till I was right up close behind it, and before it could do anything I’d stuck the chisel into its neck, just behind the ear. It dropped like an apple off a tree. I jumped back, pulling the chisel out, but not quick enough to keep from getting blood squirted all over me. I didn’t mind that. I remember standing over it watching it twitch —it curled up in a ball like a kitten sleeping, and its arms and legs flailed about for a bit, and then it sort of relaxed, like it had come home from a busy day.
Well, a minute or so later people started coming out of the houses, and when they saw what had happened they were cheering and hugging me, kicking it where it lay, you never saw such a fuss. I liked that, after all those years of being the useless kid in the neighbourhood, but it wasn’t that I enjoyed most of all. What really pleased me was the feeling of having won.
Anyhow, not long after that I joined the Board, and it’s been my trade ever since. Whatever pleasure there may have been in it wore off long ago, like it does with anything you do every day, for a living. It turned into just another day at work, something you forgot all about as soon as you got home and kicked your boots off. But thinking about it — like I was doing then, down the tunnel with my shoulder in shreds and no knife — I decided I must be some kind of predator too, by nature. Partly because I’ve got a gift for it, for want of a better word, but mostly because there wasn’t anything else I could do to earn a living.
And I’m not going to kid you. I’m not going to pretend that there were days when I asked myself, Why am I doing this? Is it because I want to save people from Them, or is it because I like killing things? I never asked myself that, because I know the reason isn’t really either of those two things. I hate it when I see what They do to people. You couldn’t be human and not hate sights like that. But I don’t fight to protect my fellow man. The people They kill are just strangers, after all, not anybody I know. I’m not a hero. I don’t suppose I’d risk my life to save a stranger from a burning house. And I don’t do it because I like to kill. Maybe that first time there was pleasure in it, but day in, day out, as a job — no. I do it because it’s my living — my trade, same as Dad was a carpenter. Same as hunting us is Their trade.
Seems to me, there aren’t any things in life that are always right or always wrong, not even killing Them, or any sort of killing. What makes it right or wrong is the side you happen to be on, whether it’s you and your lot who are killing or getting killed.
CHAPTER FIVE
I SMELT IT A long way off. It’s a smell you can’t mistake for anything else, and it’s always the same. It chokes you, no matter how used to it you are. The most you can ever do is ignore it. When you can’t see or hear anything, and smell’s your only link with the outside world, you can’t even do that.
It was the smell of something that had been dead for a while — not too long, because it fades after about five days. My guess was, this was about three days old. I didn’t like it, obviously, but I thought, Anything as dead as that isn’t going to be able to hurt me. It’s the live one behind me I need to worry about. So I kept on going.
I found it in the end. I walked into it. First thing I thought as the bones clattered under my feet was, Oh shit, the noise, but it was too late to worry about that, and besides, the bastard thing knew perfectly well where I was, it’d been tracking me for God knows how long.
In order to get round it without making any more of a row, I had to find it, and that meant groping about with my hands. Didn’t take much searching, and I knew straight away what I’d found. The predator’s larder, where it stashed the leftovers. I felt an arm, soft and wet, quite small — could’ve been a young woman, or a kid, I felt what I guessed was a shoulder, and a knee, and there was a head as well, I had no trouble identifying that. Long hair, which fitted in with it being a girl. In the dark, of course, I didn’t have much to go on. But at least it made me angry.
I’m not sure why, though. Hadn’t I just been thinking how it and I had so much in common — animals that kill to live, predators who need to take prey or else starve to death themselves? But that didn’t seem to enter into it, somehow. I got angry because the bastard thing had gone up into the daylight, caught and killed one of us, dragged the dead meat back down into the dark and put it carefully away for later, when it fancied a snack. It had won, and somehow that meant I’d lost, it had beaten me, or us.
I couldn’t help thinking that if I died down there, I’d be another item of stores in its larder. I ran my fingers over the soft, pulpy skin of the dead face. I was buggered if I was going to let it have me too.
A betting man wouldn’t have fancied my chances, though. My left arm was pretty much useless by that point — I could just about flex my fingers, but it hurt like hell — and I was getting very weak and woozy. I felt sore all over, and I was really, really tired. I wanted to keep going, but a little voice in my head told me it was just plain stupid, when all I had to do was sit down and soon it’d all be over. I told myself I’d just go a few more yards, get clear of the filthy stench, and then I’d sit down, for a minute or two.
I hadn’t gone far when I heard a clatter, back behind me. It’d tripped over the dead body, same as I’d done. So it was still there, after all, and still following me. Somehow I’d hoped it might have packed it in and gone away, but I knew that wasn’t likely. It had invested too much effort, pain and trouble in me to give up, and it had to know it was winning. And it had my knife.
The thought of that — my knife in its hand —made me go a bit faster, and I came to a bend in the tunnel, a sharp one. I felt my way round it with my fingertips, and suddenly I saw light.
It was as though someone had lit a fire inside my head. I shut my eyes, but the flare was still there, blotting and smudging everything into one great big white glow. To begin with I couldn’t think what the hell it could be. Then I thought, God, I’ve made it, I’ve reached the end of the tunnel. I opened my eyes again (it hurt so much, but I made myself look) and slowly the flare got smaller, like it was soaking away, and I realised that what I was looking at was a single beam of light coming down from the roof of the tunnel.
I ran forward — it was incredible to be able to
see, like I’d been blind all my life. I could see green stuff, moss or something of the kind, growing on the tunnel floor. I could see the colour of the tiles — they were a sort of greyish white, and green mould was growing up between them. It was all so beautiful, so much detail. I stopped and looked up at the place where the light was coming from, and I saw a shaft going straight up, twenty feet or more. At the top, so small I had trouble figuring out what it was, I saw a grating, like bars put up to keep an animal from escaping, or getting in.
I wanted to scream and yell, because for a few seconds I’d believed I was safe. But there was no way in hell I could’ve climbed up that shaft, not even with two good arms. It was enough to make you burst into tears. Like dying of thirst and seeing a lake twenty miles away, and knowing you’ll never live to get there.
Even so, I was thinking, If I stay here in the light, it won’t dare come near me. They’re scared of the light, aren’t they? I knew it wasn’t true, of course. They come out into the light every day in order to feed. If I stayed there, sooner or later I’d pass out, and while I was asleep, it’d creep up and finish me off. Finding the light hadn’t solved anything. All it had done was make my head hurt.
Thinking about it now, I suppose that was the moment when I came the closest to giving up. I had’ this stupid idea going round in my head:
Well, if you’ve got to die, you might as well die in the light. Mostly, I guess, I didn’t want to go back into the dark. In the little pool of light under that grating — I guess it was an old ventilation shaft, or something of the kind — I could see again. I could almost kid myself into believing that I was safe, that I was out, that I was home. A few steps down the tunnel would take me back into a world that hated me, where humans were never meant to be.