by Jeremy Bates
After a brief glance at me, she turned her attention to the tools before her. “They did this to me too, Will,” she said.
“Did what?”
“An autopsy. You’d think they’d know what killed me. I’d been at the bottom of the lake all night. But they still had to open me up and look inside. The good thing about being dead is that nothing hurts.”
“I’m not dead!”
Max picked up a pair of scissors and cut open my shirt. She exchanged the scissors for a scalpel.
“Max! Stop it!”
She made a Y-shaped incision into my flesh, extending from my armpits to the bottom of my sternum, then down to my lower abdomen.
Blood pooled out from it, black and thick as syrup.
“Look, Max! I’m bleeding. I’m not dead.”
She frowned. “They told me you were.”
“Who?”
“Them.”
“I need to get out of here.”
“You can’t.”
The restraints, however, had vanished, and I was able to sit up. My head and bladder throbbed dully. I pressed a hand to my stomach to prevent my guts from spilling out.
“Where am I, Max? Where are my friends?”
“You shouldn’t have come down here.”
“Where, Max?”
“You shouldn’t have come down here.”
“Stop saying that.”
“You shouldn’t have come down here.”
“Stop it, Max!” I was suddenly incensed at her. Not for her I-told-you-so advice. But for dying on me. For leaving me. For blaming me for her death.
“You shouldn’t—”
I leapt at her, squeezing her throat. She plunged the scalpel into my left ear. I screamed and fell to the floor, where I rocked back and forth, back and forth, rocking, rocking, rocking…
I jerked awake. I was curled in a fetal position, perspiring, short of breath. Relief flooded me as I realized I had been dreaming. Then everything else came crashing back in a whirlwind of images—the tunnel, Rob yelling, the mutant swinging the bone—and for a bewildered moment I thought this all must be a dream too. But when the all-encompassing blackness didn’t relent—in fact, it only became more oppressive—I understood it was real.
I tried to sit up. My hands, I discovered, were cuffed behind my back, and I toppled to my side. The abrupt movement shot a lightning bolt of pain through the left side of my skull where I had been struck by the bone. The throbbing escalated, an alternating current of fire and ice. I squeezed my eyes shut. My mouth gaped open against the cold dirt floor. Moaning, waiting for the excruciating pain to subside, I became aware of my protesting bladder. It felt as if it might burst.
I shoved myself to my knees, wobbling but keeping my balance, then to my feet. I swayed but didn’t fall.
My bladder.
Fuck. Oh fuck.
I couldn’t hold out any longer. Hot urine splashed down my inner thighs and calves. The first second was orgasmic, the relief so great. I pissed myself for what must have been a full minute.
“Ugh,” I grunted when I’d finished, partly in disgust, but mostly because of the pain still stampeding inside my head like a herd of elephants.
I stumbled forward, not knowing where I was going in the dark, only wanting to get clear of the acrid puddle pooled around me.
I took one step, then another—then metal clacked and the cuffs dug into the skin around my wrists.
I was not only bound; I was anchored to something, like a dog leashed to a pole.
The primal alarm of imprisonment thudded in my chest, and I jerked my arms in frustration. The cuffs bit deeper.
“Fuck,” I said.
I glanced about me.
Blackness.
I blinked.
Blackness.
“Fuck,” I said.
Where was Danièle? Where was Rob? Pascal? Was I alone? Or were they right next to me?
“Danièle?”
No answer.
“Rob?”
No reply.
“Fuck,” I said.
I squashed the fear running wild inside me and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. I closed my eyes to concentrate, though this changed nothing, the blackness was the same, it was simple habit, and visualized my attacker. A flash of white skin. Two piggish air holes for a nose. A permanently grinning set of gums and teeth for a mouth.
Had this…abomination...been real? Or had it been a person wearing a mask? The Painted Devil? I kept coming back to him, but for good reason. He was a showman—a sick, reckless showman who had a proclivity for theater and got a thrill out of terrorizing cataphiles. So was it a stretch to conclude he swapped the SS uniform for a Halloween mask, knocked us all unconscious, and tied us up as prisoners?
No, maybe not. Except what I saw wasn’t a mask.
I was reasonably sure of that. I might have only seen the face for a moment, but it had been a heated moment, and my mind had been exceptionally clear, my perception sharp.
And then there was that nauseating stench. The only time I had ever smelled something so foul had been when, as a kid, I’d discovered our family cat in the back of the our little-used garage, where it had gone to die, and where it had been half consumed by a blanket of squiggling white maggots. And although it was conceivable the Painted Devil might swap costumes, it was absurd to suggest he would go so far as to alter his scent.
Which meant whoever had attacked me was indeed gruesomely deformed. But who had disfigured him, and why? And what did he want with us? And how had he snuck up on me? There was no way he could have seen Danièle and me in the blackness. Not even with a pair of night vision goggles; there wasn’t a sliver of ambient light in the catacombs.
Moreover, it wasn’t him; it was them. Because there had been at least two of them, one behind us, in the cat hole, and one in front of us—
From the darkness, nearby, came a sob.
Chapter 39
DANIÈLE
Danièle realized someone—or something—shared the dark with her. She heard movement, scuffling, maybe ten feet away, maybe twenty, it was impossible to ascertain for certain. Then a moan followed.
It was Will.
Nevertheless, she didn’t call out to him. Her body was in too much pain, her throat too sore. Besides, what would talking to him accomplish? He was a prisoner, like her. Like Rob and Pascal, if they shared this room also. He couldn’t free any of them. He couldn’t do anything.
None of them could.
She heard a harsh patter, and it took her a moment to realize he was peeing. She didn’t need to urinate or defecate, but when the urge came, she knew she would have no choice but to soil herself. Then she would have to sit there and sleep there in her own filth, with no light and no food and no water.
Tears welled in her eyes. Her lower lip quivered. She bit down hard on it, drawing blood.
Will began to move again. Danièle wondered what was running through his head. Had he seen the thing that had struck him? Even if he hadn’t, he knew that something had attacked them in the cat hole, knew that it had gotten Rob. Knew it had hunted them like prey.
So why wasn’t he screaming like she had when she came around, screaming in despair and terror at the unjustness of this incarceration, screaming until his throat went raw and he couldn’t scream anymore?
He called her name. His voice was thick, urgent.
Danièle opened her mouth, closed it.
She was too tired, too injured, too depleted.
She drifted into semi-consciousness, floating, spinning, forgetting. Then a single thought: Dev. Dev knows about the video camera, the lost woman, the expedition! So when Rob doesn’t return home today, and she can’t get ahold of me or Pascal, she’ll conclude that something happened to us. She’ll contact the police.
And they would…do nothing.
Danièle’s hope nosedived.
Like she’d told Will earlier, it wasn’t the police’s job to hunt down cataphiles who got the
mselves lost in the catacombs; it was their job to hand out fines and meet quotas. Yes, they would visit the Beach and Room Z and some of the other popular areas, they would question the cataphiles they caught. But that would be all. There would be no extensive manhunt.
If only they knew the truth! she thought. That…that what? What were those things that had attacked us and brought us here? Zombies?
This sounded so farcical, so bad-TV-movie, but the thing Danièle had seen had no nose or lips, as if they had rotted off its face, and after it had knocked Will out, it had chased her, caught her, pinned her against the wall, rubbed its hands over her face, sniffed her, licked her, as if it was possessed of an urge, not sexual in nature, it hadn’t been interested in her body, not right then, but of something more primal than sex, a hunger, as if it wanted to tear her apart and consume her then and there.
But it didn’t. It held back. It reigned in its impulse, which indicated control. Were zombies capable of self-control? And then it threw her to the ground and beat her unconscious instead.
But why?
Sea turtles.
Sea turtles?
Giant sea turtles. They could survive for months without food or water. Sailors used to store them in the ship’s hold during long voyages.
A fresh food source.
Danièle opened her mouth to scream again, but all that came out was a miserable sob.
Chapter 40
“Danièle?” I whispered hoarsely. “Danièle? It’s me, Will.”
Another wrenching sob, then another. They sounded as if they were being torn from her body by a barbed fist.
“Danièle? Are you okay?” I moved toward her until my chain snapped taut. I grunted. The pain in my head flared. “Danièle?”
“Yes…”
Her voice was soft, cracked, barely there.
“Come toward me.”
No reply.
“Danièle?”
“Can’t.”
“You can’t move?”
“Can’t.”
My heart was pounding.
What was wrong with her?
How badly was she hurt?
I said, “Are you bleeding?”
“No.”
“What did they do to you?”
No reply.
I wanted to hold her, touch her, help her. I yanked at my restraints in frustration.
I said, “We have to get out of here.”
No reply.
“We’re going to get out of here.”
I wondered how long we had been here. Hours? Or days? I didn’t feel hungry. I was thirsty though. God, I wished I hadn’t thought of that. My tongue suddenly felt twice its normal size. I moved it around inside my mouth, which was dry and sticky.
“Will…?”
“Yeah?”
“So…scared.”
“We’ll be okay.”
“What…they do to us?”
“Don’t think about that.”
“I think…”
“It’s going to be okay.”
“I think…they eat us.”
The fear inside me hardened to ice as I stared into the blackness.
Now it was my turn to fall silent.
I followed the length of the chain attached to my manacles and discovered it was attached to an iron ring bolted into the wall at a corner of the room. I worked at the ring, trying to pry it free from the rock, until my fingernails bled and I gave up.
I fanned away from the corner, feeling with my feet for a stone or something I could potentially use as a hammer. I came across nothing but hard-packed mud.
I slumped to my butt, trying to ignore the wet denim sucking against my legs and the itchy sensation it caused.
If I could somehow surprise one of our captors, I thought, I might find something on him I could use to free myself. But how would I accomplish this? Play dead when he approached? Kick him in the face when he stooped to examine me? Could I perform this cleanly, without an alarm being raised?
I wanted to tell myself that this was all a big mistake, that we would soon be released, but that was bullshit. The iron ring installed in the wall and the handy chains and manacles suggested our captors had kidnapped others before. They had an agenda.
So what was that? To use us as slave labor? To play out sick torture fantasies on us? Or, as Danièle suggested, to fucking eat us?
I shoved myself to my feet decisively, breathed deeply. I wasn’t going to go down that path. I wasn’t going to give in to despair.
I started to pace. I wanted to channel my frustration and fear onto Danièle and Pascal; I wanted to blame them for the predicament we were in. But that wouldn’t be fair. They’d had no idea what awaited us down here.
No, the only person I could blame was myself. I had accepted Danièle’s invitation to search for the lost woman. Nobody put a gun to my head.
And now I was going to pay for that stupidity.
No, not just me, I realized. Everybody close to me. My parents especially—for when their emails and phone calls to me went unanswered, they would suspect something was amiss and get the French authorities to investigate. When I didn’t turn up in a hospital somewhere, or a jail cell, or wherever else…they would conclude what? The last person I had spoken to had been Bridgette. She had told me she had gotten married and was pregnant…
Shit, I didn’t want them to think that.
Not fucking suicide.
Would they be able to cope with the loss of both Maxine and me? My father probably. He was like my grandfather had been, as hard as the knocks life threw at him. If you didn’t know better, you would have said he had been none the different after Max died—but I did know better. I saw the chinks in his armor. The weariness that crept into his voice. The cynicism not so much in his eyes but in the crow’s feet around them. The stoop in his walk that had never been there before. Yeah, the chinks were there, but I think he still could hold it together even if something happened to me too. My mother, no way. There was little left to hold together anyway. At my wedding reception she had been a healthy fifty-two-year-old woman with full chestnut hair and glowing skin and an easy smile. At the airport when I left for London, her hair was gray with streaks of white, she was twenty pounds underweight, and worst of all, the light inside her had been switched off. She never went back to her job at the library, and I wasn’t sure what she did around the house all day. I had a horrible picture of her sitting on the settee on the front porch for hours on end, a book open in her lap, staring at the page but not seeing the words.
I jerked at my restraints for the hundredth time. The cuffs seared my already abraded skin. I jerked again and again, grunting each time.
“Will…?” It was Danièle, groggy, still out of it.
I kept yanking at the restraints. Slimy blood lubricated my wrists.
“Will?” Panicked now. “What are you doing? Stop it.”
I wasn’t listening. I tugged and tugged, unable to control myself. Danièle was shouting at me, though she seemed distant, unimportant.
Then abruptly, jarringly, a noise cut through my bubbling madness.
A rooster crow.
Chapter 41
DANIÈLE
Danièle thought she must be dreaming, or hallucinating. A rooster in the catacombs? But then it cock-a-doodle-dooed again.
She tried pushing herself to her knees and failed. Her right arm was useless, maybe fractured. She had raised it to protect her head when the zombie-man had rained blows down on her with his bone-weapon.
She moved her left arm under her chest and propped herself onto her elbow. Rotating onto her hip, she was able to sit up.
The movement, however, caused dagger-sharp pain to lance through her skull. She remained still, praying for the agony to subside.
Then: “Danièle! Look!” It was Will.
Look? she thought. Look where? It was permanent night, black everywhere…only it wasn’t, not anymore. From an indeterminable distance away, a faint light appeared.
Someone was coming.
Chapter 42
It was a girl, or a woman, I couldn’t tell from this distance. She wore charcoal tights and a too-big sweater that went nearly to her knees. Her hair was long, dark, flowing around her head. In her left hand she held a candle with a small flame.
She stopped at the entrance to our room, and in the fluttering light I could see the surroundings for the first time—
“Rob!” Danièle cried huskily. “Pascal!”
To the left of the girl, in the corner, lay Rob. He was on his stomach, unmoving. His hands were cuffed behind his back, a chain snaking from the manacles to an iron ring in the wall. To the right, in the adjacent corner, lay Pascal, unconscious and bound as well.
I glanced in Danièle’s direction. The light didn’t reach this side of the room, and I could see little but her silhouette against an almost equally black background. She seemed to be propped up with one arm while the other one dangled lamely.
I returned my attention to the girl.
Was there something wrong with her face? Or was that the play of shadows?
“Comment allez-vous?” Danièle said. “Est-ce que vous parlez français?”
The girl didn’t speak.
“Quel âge avez-vous? Pouvez-vous m’aider… S’il vous plaît?”
No reply.
“Do you speak English?” I tried, though I couldn’t fathom why she would.
Nothing.
“Why are we here?” I said. “What’s going to happen to us?”
She turned to leave.
“Wait!”
Danièle and I yelled after her to stop, to come back, but then she was gone from sight and the blackness returned and we were blind once more.
Chapter 43
DANIÈLE
Hours passed. Maybe two, maybe five, Danièle couldn’t tell. However many, it felt like an eternity. She and Will said little to one another. Occasionally they would call Rob’s name, or Pascal’s. There was never an answer. She tried not to think about them. She and Will were lucky in the sense that they had both regained consciousness, but what if Rob and Pascal never did?