by Joey Ruff
We dropped down and found the mouth of a tunnel set in the broken, concrete wall, burrowed out and uneven. While its opening was large enough to walk through, the tunnel gradually narrowed, and we eventually found ourselves crawling on our stomachs, commando-style. I held Glory in both hands and used my knees and elbows to crawl across the ground, stopping every few minutes to shine the light up ahead. As I moved, I felt like a spy in some bad film, moving through the ventilation ducts of an office complex, my elbows bumping the walls.
For ten, fifteen minutes we lumbered on in the darkness before the tunnel turned and then a short ways later, turned again. As we crawled, Nadia made small, involuntary sounds. Maybe due to the confined space, maybe regrets on crawling through the dirt in her nice clothes. Maybe she was worried about rats, I don’t know.
I didn’t use my glasses in favor of the light attached to Glory, but because of the way I held her, her light was never steady, and after what seemed like an hour, I realized that the tunnel up ahead seemed to drop away.
“Hang on,” I called.
I went forward alone and used my light to search the area, seeing that the tunnel opened into a much larger room, and there was a two-foot drop to the floor.
I turned my head back and called, “Tunnel ends here. There’s a bit of a drop to the floor.”
Carefully, I crawled out of the tunnel and looked around. A room with grey brick walls, dirtied and weathered from age and disuse. We’d crawled into the basement of another building. It was empty, but in the opposite wall was a heavy, metal security door, modern compared to the rest of the room, installed within the last decade. Beyond it, I could hear the faint sound of running water.
“God, what is that smell?” Nadia asked. She’d pulled herself free of the tunnel.
“It’s sewage.”
“Gross.” She shone her flashlight around and said, “There’s a door.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s beyond it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see through lead.”
“It’s not lead,” Ape said. He slid from the tunnel as easy as from a sleeping bag. “Beyond it is the sewer. That’s the sound and smell.”
Nadia sighed. “Really?! First dirt and now the sewer?”
“You should have dressed for a mission,” I said.
“Like I’m supposed to know what that means.”
The door wasn’t locked, but it was heavy as bollocks and took a combined effort to open. Once we did, we stepped onto the raised walkway of an orange-brick sewer tunnel, greenish-brown water flowing in the recessed channel. The air was cooler here, but it smelled like diarrhea.
“Why are we in the sewer?” Nadia asked.
“It’s all interwoven,” Ape said. “The underground and the sewer tunnels. Not originally, but whatever dug that tunnel was bound to hit something eventually.”
We stood there for a moment, staring down into the darkness that yawned away from us in either direction. “How do we know which way to go?” she asked.
Finnegan took a few steps away, played his light across the walls. His beam fixed upon something on the path. “Guys?”
A bloodied, bare footprint, no telling how old, was dried against the grimy stone walk. I knelt to examine it. “Is it human?”
“My guess is pre-Wendigo,” Ape said, kneeling beside me.
“Is that what we’re calling them now?”
He shrugged. “You got a better name?”
“How ‘bout child-fuckers. How about evil-sons-of-bitches.”
“They weren’t all that way,” Ape said quietly. “At least, not at first.”
I stood, started moving forward. “Looks like it was heading this way then. I guess we do, too.” I held Glory higher, poised and ready, one finger on her trigger and another on the safety.
As we walked, we saw rats: whole, swollen fat rodents with large bites taken out of them. Their cold, vacant eyes watched us, their gaping, toothy grins smiled as we passed. Often, only pieces of rats were left, maybe a discarded limb, an earth-worm-like tail. Sometimes, a fresh pile of bones and hair.
I didn’t know how long we walked, but found myself watching the water, thinking that – despite the probable shallow depths – something might spring out at us. Then I noticed the helmet, carried along on the current like a giant egg. As it came into the beam of the flashlight, it became apparent that the visor bore the word Police in white stenciled letters and a dark splatter of blood covered one side of it.
“What is that doing down here?” Nadia asked.
“That’s…ominous,” Ape said reverently, and somehow I knew. We were too late.
I heard the barking coughs of a Glock twenty-two and started to run.
In the echoing darkness it was impossible to tell where the gunfire was coming from, but as we kept moving forward, we heard other things, aggravated animal noises and strange garbled hissing. The next bend in the tunnel lit up with flashes that could only be muzzle fire.
Then we saw them: the mutated, fucking bastardchildren of Brom.
They looked like lepers. Skin flaked off in patchwork sections, and they were so emaciated and frail, it was as if someone stretched pale canvas over a pile of carcasses and wound them up like tin soldiers.
They were swarming over the entrance to a small tunnel, but tangled all together, clawing at and over each other to get inside and their collective scrambling caused a jam.
Scattered on the floor around them were severed fingers, discarded patches of tissue, some still with hair. Blood pooled thickly on the floor, splattered the walls and the ceiling. Shell casings littered the tunnel floor. Discarded rifles and shotguns were bent in half like boomerangs, and attached to the grip of one, finger still on the trigger, was a hand. A boot bobbed in the water.
I brought Glory up and let her sing. She carved through the clustered mass like a fucking Christmas goose. Finnegan had his pistols barking, and Nadia pumped her shotgun. Ape didn’t believe in guns, but as some of the fuckers on the fringe noticed us and began to break away from the pack, moving woodenly and robotically toward us, he had his sword at the ready, carving violet arcs of light through the darkness.
Above the swarm, flashes of muzzle light danced on the small tunnel’s ceiling, and I knew someone was trapped inside: fresh meat caught in a den of wolves.
“Nadia!” I screamed loud enough to be heard over the rifle. “Make an opening!” I pointed to the mass of limbs.
Nadia threw her hand forward, and the amethyst around her neck sparkled in the gloom and her eyes glimmered with emerald light. For an instant, the tangle of bodies was enflamed in green light, and then they erupted, a dozen or more exploding out in all directions like confetti, rebounding off of the ceiling and into the stagnant water.
Before I could get to the tunnel they’d been blocking, three uniformed police officers stepped out clutching flashlights and pistols. They were followed by Detective Anderson, Stone’s partner, What’shisname, and Detective Barnes, who was clutching his bloody side and using a shotgun as a walking cane.
33
The Children of Brom didn’t stay down and didn’t stop to wonder what happened.
They charged.
Anderson sounded confused as he said, “Swyftt? What the hell is going on?”
“Not now,” I said, and Glory tore wet chunks from the feral staccato of hands and cold, vacant eyes that approached us.
The officers next to me fired as well, their hands trembling, most of their bullets falling far off their mark. Ape and the others had joined us, and the violet light of the sword coupled together with the deafening violence of gunfire dropped the remaining creatures with little effort.
When we had a moment to breathe, I asked, “What the hell is going on?”
“Two officers were attacked,” Anderson said, “Nutton and Kane. Kane was hurt pretty bad and Nutton called for back-up. The perp was holed up in an abandoned warehouse.”
“That’s what I saw,” Nadia said.
“We had SWAT, the whole nine,” added What’shisname. “Stone stayed out to direct the charge, and I led the frontal assault. The perp escaped, but not before we recovered that Wright boy. He had a few bumps and bruises, but he’s okay. We chased the perp down here, and …this. Holy fuck.”
“Good,” Nadia said. “Let’s radio Stone and tell her to send some more back-up.”
“Can’t,” the agent said. “I lost my walkie.”
“Great,” I said. “Anyone else have one?”
“I did,” said one of the officers. Her nametag said Peters.
“You’re a woman,” I said. She eyed me curiously. “Sorry, I just hadn’t noticed that before. You still have it?”
She shook her head.
“What the fuck are those things?” the FBI agent asked.
“It’s what’s been taking the kids,” I said. “Remember the bum from the house? These are more evolved forms of him. They’re a mottled collection of vagrants and tramps, mostly.”
Anderson’s face was white, and his hands shook. He looked spooked. They all did. “I think what Charles is asking,” Anderson said, “is what happened to them and why are they down here?”
So that’s what his name was: Charles.
“It’s complicated,” Finnegan said, stepping forward.
“Holy shit, you’re a priest,” Chuck said.
“That’s complicated, too,” Finnegan said.
“When you said Underground ring of bums, I didn’t think it would be so literal,” Anderson said, his voice strained and weak.
“We can’t stay here,” Ape said. “We have to move. There will be more of those things.”
Nadia whimpered, and maybe one of the officers as well.
I looked at Barnes. “Is he gonna make it?” I asked Anderson.
“I’m okay,” Barnes said.
“You’re bleeding pretty good,” Finnegan said. “They might be attracted to the smell. We’ll have to move quickly.”
“What the fuck are those things?” one of the officers asked. His nametag read Dotson. “Vampires?”
“Is this some bullshit movie?” I asked. “They’re not fucking vampires.”
“Zombies?” asked another officer, Vaughn.
“That’s a little closer,” Finnegan said.
“Jono?” Ape prompted. “You coming?” He and Nadia had already moved past the rest of us further down the tunnel.
“Look, all you need to know is that to them, you’re dinner,” I said. “We gonna stand around chatting all fucking day or are we gonna get someplace safer?”
Darkness covered us like cloying fog. There was no conversation, and silence made the darkness more threatening, which only added to the oppressive atmosphere.
Nadia gasped. I stopped, glanced back. She met my eyes sheepishly and said, “I heard something.”
“I heard it, too,” Barnes said. He was shaking.
I looked at Anderson who stood nearby, but he shook his head.
“Nadia, what was it?”
“In the water,” she said. “It sounded like a splash.”
Several lights scanned across the muddy stream, passed over the walls.
“Shit!” Anderson said in a deep, gruff voice. Then he laughed in nervous relief and said, “Sorry. Thought I saw something on the ceiling.”
We pressed forward, Ape and Finnegan in the rear once more, their lights making regular sweeps across the tunnel behind us, and Nadia, who stood behind me, swept her beam back and forth ahead of us. Glory’s light stayed true and steady, illuminating the path ahead.
Around the next bend, we hit a wall, and it looked like a dead-end until I noticed an open doorway on the raised walkway opposite us. “We need to cross,” I said.
Before I could take a step, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Officer Dotson. “There’s another one.”
His flashlight beam had stopped on the far wall and the crumpled, broken frame that sprawled limply near the door we needed. While the others had looked mostly like people, this one was too far gone. The skin was pale and grayish, more like rubber. Its bald head hung low over its chest, and its sunken eyes were closed. From what I could see, there were no ears, no lips, and the nose had smoothed and flattened until it was nothing but a small lump in the middle of its face with two small nostril holes the size of Tic-Tacs. Its jaws hung slack and limp, and most of its teeth had fallen away. Where the gums were exposed, there were little white barbs poking through the grayish-pink – what looked like new teeth coming in, but already looking like they should belong in the mouth of a shark.
Its arms hung at its sides. The fingers on both hands had been sharpened into talons, the skin peeling away from the tips like the roll of a condom and at the ends, rather than finger nails, were sharpened points of bone.
“Holy shit,” Chuck stammered. “What the fuck happened to that guy?”
“The Dark Communion,” Finnegan said flatly. “The body was starting to change, but for some reason, he never made it into his chrysalis.”
“Gross,” Nadia said, but her eyes fixed intently on the figure just the same.
“Poor bastard,” Anderson breathed.
Ape and Finnegan dropped in to the shit water and waded across to the figure. As they examined him more closely, I maintained my distance but held my light steady so they could see.
Ape stooped down in front of the figure and put two fingers against the thing’s neck. The moment Ape touched the thing’s skin, the eyes shot open, and Ape startled, fell backward against the priest’s legs, landing on his arse.
“He’s alive,” Finnegan said, “but he can’t move.”
There was a low rumbling from the thing’s throat, and Ape leaned in closer for some reason. I would have fucking stomped his skull like a spider and tossed the body in to the stink-water, but not Ape.
In the tunnel behind us, there was a loud grunt, followed by an unmistakable splash, and three of Brom’s children charged us: one in the water, one climbing along the side of the wall like fucking Spiderman and the third dangling from the ceiling.
I’m sure Ape and Finnegan saw them, but what followed happened too quickly for them to react.
The one in the water sprang at Nadia like a leopard, baring rows of wicked fangs like a piranha, taloned claws out before it. Anyone else would have been splattered against the back wall into an obscure finger-painting of gore and tissue, but Nadia was fast, instinctively snapping her right arm out to the side, grabbed a faint red glow that hadn’t been there a moment before. She threw her arm forward, and a red disc caught the creature under the chin.
A blank look swept across the creature’s face, and it dropped like an anvil, arms locked before it. Its bottom jaw shattered against the edge of the stone walk.
Chuck stood beside Nadia, and as the thing fell, raised his shotgun, aimed and pulled the trigger. The creature’s head exploded like an overripe fruit with a firecracker before the rest of it hit the water.
I pulled Glory up and fired four rounds at the thing on the ceiling, at least two of them connected and the other two sparked against the brick. Before I could get another round off, it dropped to the walkway between Peters and Chuck.
With his shotgun going off, Chuck didn’t hear the thing that landed beside him and was startled by the deafening roar next to his ear as Peters’ twelve-gauge sprayed him with the warmth and red of the creature’s insides. Its body hit the water just after the first.
Anderson screamed. The thing on the wall threw a claw across his arm, swept his gun against the wall as it discharged and sprayed mortar and powdered brick into the air.
He staggered to the side, and Barnes stepped forward, took a deep breath as he lifted the shotgun he’d been leaning on and fired into the thing’s neck and chest. It wobbled and frothed at the mouth.
Barnes turned to look at Anderson. The creature took a half-step back and sprang forward. “Look out!” Anderson called.
But it was too late. The creature hit
Barnes square in the chest with both hands, knocked him to the ground.
Barnes screamed as teeth and claws tore at him, and blood gushed from his neck and shoulder. Nadia was closest, pulled her shotgun up to fire. The creature struck her in the stomach, and she doubled over.
Anderson threw himself forward in a growl, put his shotgun between himself and the creature, and collided into it. The creature’s bloodied head went back and bounced forward to look at him, howling in a spray of blood. He lifted his arm effortlessly and threw the detective off of him, sending Anderson into the pool of stagnant water.
Chuck and I stepped forward, triggers pumping, guns barking in heat and light, and the thing that rode Barnes shook and writhed as the lead and steel riddled its ragged flesh until it couldn’t move anymore.
Chuck leapt into the water after Anderson while Peters and Vaughn dropped to Barnes. Looking at what was left of him, it wasn’t hard to diagnose.
“He’s dead,” Peters said.
Chuck’s voice came next. “Anderson? Anderson?” There was a flurry of splashing, and then Anderson surfaced from the shallow water, sputtering and coughing.
“I’m okay,” the detective said. “He cut me but I’m okay.”
“Don’t get too comfortable,” came Ape’s voice.
I looked over at him and noticed that both he and Finnegan were gazing back down the tunnel in the direction we’d come, their eyes wide, their faces blank.
I turned Glory’s light to meet Ape’s. It wasn’t what the lights caught that made my blood run cold but what lurked and trembled in the fringes of the beams with arachnid motions across the floor, the walls, the ceiling. There were at least a dozen of them, maybe more, and they were so close together that the heat signatures that registered in the red lenses looked more like a fucking storm front on a Doppler radar screen, all oranges and reds and yellows. And it was coming straight for us.
“Holy fuck,” I breathed.
“We’ve got company,” Ape said.