by Mark Wheaton
This was met with incredulity. Celek continued.
“If there is somebody down there, we’d have to at least try to get word to them before the whole place goes up anyway,” he suggested. “Since this was my idea, I’ll lead the car that’s going down that shaft.”
Though a couple of Rangers suggested this had even less of an exit strategy than the first plan, acceptance of the inevitable came relatively quickly and the soldiers moved to finish loading the flat cars with the last remaining explosives, now enough to blow the top of nearby Blue Knob Mountain if need be. Romeo then gave everyone a quick lesson in the application of blasting caps and the use of civilian trigger detonators as the six mobile bombs were lined up and readied for departure in front of their respective shafts.
“I’m coming with you, if that’s all right.” Sgt. Holt nodded at Sgt. Celek. “You and Bones are still a package deal, right?”
“I’m game if he is,” replied Celek, glancing over at Bones.
The shepherd didn’t look back, if he had even heard his name. Ever since he’d returned from the northwest mine shaft with Thor and Sgt. Moore, he’d stared at its black maw, as if hypnotized by the scent of the dark machinery that lay below.
IX
It was established that each team would trigger their explosives precisely ten minutes after their descent into the mines, as it was felt that communication would be impossible once they were “under.” After a grim round of “good lucks” and a synchronizing of watches, the six teams of two descended into their assigned mine shafts, Thor riding shotgun with Sgt. Moore and Cpl. Romeo, Holt with Celek and Bones, and the other four platforms divided up amongst the surviving Rangers.
By now, Bones was tired but more importantly, thirsty and a little hungry. Sgt. Celek had given him some water, but his canteen had been practically dry when he poured what little liquid remained into the cap to offer it to the shepherd. Once they were in the mine, Bones located a few rivulets of water snaking down the inner walls of the shaft and lapped at them in passing, but had to keep breaking away to keep up with his two human companions and the flat car they were manually wheeling down the long, iron track. Celek’s hand stayed firmly on the brake as he and Holt pushed from behind, though gravity did much of the work. They were illuminated only by a dim tinted light at the tip of a metal pole attached to the side of the car, which cast everything in the shaft in an eerie green glow.
Bones’s nose was beginning to recover from the cordite, and he inhaled the scent of cool rocks, the sweat of workmen, the oiled wheels of the mine cars and coal dust, which didn’t so much have a smell as it did work its way into Bones’s nostrils and lungs, making it increasingly difficult to breathe. Bones was able to continue drawing in new smells, however, and kept his nose ahead, constantly on the hunt for the now-familiar scent of the multipedes.
Confirming Sgt. Moore’s claim, as soon as the trio had gone five steps into the shaft, they could hear the distant sound of breaking rocks and moving earth. The only thing was, as they got even a little closer to the source, it was obvious to both Celek and Holt that the noise wasn’t coming from anything remotely man-made.
“Way too big to be a machine,” whispered Sgt. Holt as they descended deeper and deeper into the mine shaft, a sign they passed reporting that they were passing the point of “200 Feet.” “But no way those are multipedes.”
Sgt. Celek silently agreed.
Though he was still sniffing around for water sources, Bones’s ears were also picking up the sound from below as it increased in volume. It wasn’t long before all kinds of new smells began reaching his nose and he moved ahead of the two MPs.
“Look at Bones,” Sgt. Holt whispered, hand reaching for the manual brake.
In the green haze of the flat-car light, Sgt. Celek looked at the shepherd, whose ears were now straight up and down like radar antennae, his eyes peering ahead and his nose squarely facing front. He held that pose for a moment but then crept forward, head still held high but the rest of his body a little lower to the ground. Sgt. Holt set the car’s parking brake, and she and Sgt. Celek quietly followed after Bones from just a few yards behind.
As Bones moved forward, the air grew decidedly cooler, the ground wetter. A breeze blew past the shepherd as he neared the source of the great sound up ahead. As his eyes peered into the darkness, Bones could see that the floor, walls, and ceiling of the mine shaft he was padding down were quickly coming to an end, replaced by a wide open black space that seemed to go on forever. The source of the great sound was somewhere in that hollowed-out space.
Two more steps, and the mine track ended along with the rest of the shaft, the iron ends bent down as if snapped by some great force that had crashed through the tunnel from above, smashing everything in its path like a giant cannonball crashing through the earth.
Which is precisely what had happened.
“Oh, my God.”
Sgt. Holt’s words were almost lost in the wind as she and Celek joined Bones at the edge of the cliff created by the destruction of the mine shaft. The cacophony, tremendous and foreboding, was coming from directly in front of them in the darkness, though they had no idea how far away it might be. The distant sound of rocks crumbling out of the walls and crashing to a rocky base far, far below could be heard, but any sense of size or scale was absent.
With a trembling hand, Celek reached into his belt and extracted a flare and a flare gun that he’d taken from the explosives shed. Sgt. Holt’s heart skipped a beat, knowing that as soon as he lit it, they would not only see whatever great monstrosity was making the sound, but it would also—assuredly—see them. She still had the remote detonator in her hand and, without alerting Celek, armed it with the flick of a thumb switch. Just in case. No light came on, no sound emerged from the flat car a few yards back, but Holt had felt the quick vibration within the trigger that announced an electrical current now on the move and ready to send a signal back to the network of blasting caps on the dynamite if she so much as flinched. She turned to Celek and nodded.
Celek jammed the flare into the flare gun, twisting the cap to arm it and aimed it skyward. He hesitated one last second before firing it into the darkness, sparks belching out of the muzzle. The flare arced high into what was obviously a truly massive space, dribbling white phosphorus behind it as it went before it finally exploded in a hail of stars.
At first, they could see nothing as their eyes needed a moment to adjust to the light. But then, the flare began to halo out its illumination, revealing a great, cylindrical cavern literally a few miles across in diameter and easily twice that in depth, a space large enough to hold all the skyscrapers of Manhattan like french fries in a cardboard cone. But the trio on the cliff’s edge were hardly interested in the dimensions of the newly created cave, no matter how impressive. No, their eyes were fixed squarely on the thing in its center that had obviously created the cavern and was continuing to expand it straight down.
From one glance, it was clear to the two soldiers that what they were looking at was a giant sea anemone. The fact that it was the size and even somewhat the shape of the Astrodome didn’t sink in immediately, so entranced were they by how the light from the flare played through the translucent blue and white skin of the anemone’s body and attendant segmented tentacles, of which there were easily a hundred, each the length of a football field. Within the tentacles were much thicker finger-like creatures that appeared to be a different species altogether, though it was grafted on to the anemone. These wormy protrusions were of a different color (off-white with thick red bands around its body, giving it the appearance of a necktie or candy cane), but instead of coming to a finger-like tip at the end like the tentacles, these each had great mouths that were currently being plunged into the rocks below the anemone, where they used row upon row of teeth to drill.
As the flare began to fade, its arcing descent bringing it closer and closer to the area being tunneled, Sgt. Celek felt Sgt. Holt reach over and take his hand.
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br /> “I can’t believe what I’m looking at,” she whispered.
Sgt. Celek couldn’t, either. It didn’t look monstrous in the slightest, not like anything they’d seen throughout the day at all. In fact, it was quite beautiful, just simply out of scale, like seeing a sugar ant poised to fight a giant tarantula. It was also absurd, like coming around the corner of a zoo to find the woolly mammoth enclosure (Mammuthus primigenius). It just didn’t compute. Celek didn’t understand how it had gotten there or what it was trying to accomplish, much less why it existed in the first place.
Just as the flare faded away for good, he caught sight of one of the anemone’s tentacles and managed to get a good look at just how they were segmented, much the same way as the multipedes. That’s when it hit him, the sheer enormity of the events of the past thirty-six hours or so. This creature was made out of the combined flesh of literally tens of thousands of human beings fused together by an out-of-control, multi-stage mutation that had created a whole new organism. There had never been anything like it in the history of the planet, but as with anything else, it had always been a possibility lying dormant.
This was when Bones started barking.
At first, the two MPs didn’t compute what they were hearing. But then Bones’s thunderous alarm started echoing across the vast cavern inhabited by the anemone and they both blanched.
“Quiet Bones!” Sgt. Celek bellowed.
The shepherd quickly silenced himself and turned to the two MPs. The two humans held their breath.
“Do you think they…it heard?” asked Sgt. Holt, scanning the darkness.
“I don’t know,” Celek replied, his breathing accelerating as adrenaline raced through his body. The pair waited in silence, Celek’s hand firmly on Bones’s collar. The sergeants’ eyes peered out into the cavern in hopes of detecting any kind of movement but got nothing except a cool breeze.
“It didn’t seem to see the light, so maybe it can’t hear, either,” suggested Sgt. Holt, allowing a modicum of optimism to infiltrate her voice.
On cue, they felt a sudden change in the breeze, something rushing through the darkness towards them and, half a second later, one of the giant tube worms had plunged its mouth—over twelve feet across—onto the end of the mine shaft, its teeth drilling in a circle a mere few inches from the MPs’ faces. It churned rocks and dirt from the surrounding rock walls, blasting it in towards the soldiers and dog with gale-force intensity.
“Run!” screamed Sgt. Celek, who stumbled backward but was grabbed by Holt, who kept him on his feet. Bones let out a few terrified barks at the worm and bent down on his forepaws as if trying to convince the thing he only wanted to play. After getting struck by a couple of rocks, the dog did a quick 180 and sprinted after the MPs as the ground, ceiling and walls around them began to quake, showering them with pulverized shale.
Bones’s nose went into overdrive as silt and coal dust clouded into it, now pouring down from the crumbling ceiling like a heavy rain. What would’ve been most curious to Bones if he could have such a thought was that the tube worm and its symbiotic anemone gave off no smell whatsoever, despite its earlier stages carrying with them such distinctive, cadaverous scents. No sooner had he and his party gotten just past the flat car, about twenty feet up the shaft, than the downpour of dirt became a hail of rocks and the tunnel caved in all around them, burying them under hundreds of pounds of earth.
• • •
Back in the cavern, the symbiotic tube worm, detecting no more heat from the targeted mine shaft, returned to its task, drilling deep down into the earth. Like the anemone and the other worms, the nerve endings on this worm detected a very faint, yet incredibly intense heat signature coming from below the earth’s surface, the greatest heat it could fathom. The worm kept digging, churning up black and red shale, sand and limestone as it got closer to its destination, a few hundred feet a minute, down, down, down.
Deep into the earth.
• • •
It was only a few minutes before Bones woke up, covered from head to toe in rocks and dirt. His sides hurt, his head hurt, his paws hurt. But the good news was, he could move. Sure, the ceiling of the mine shaft had collapsed, but above that was hard, solid (for now) rock that hadn’t been affected by the attack of the giant tube worm. Though the exit was now blocked, Bones had managed to find himself in a small open pocket during the cave-in.
A little tentative still, Bones staggered to his feet, shook off as much of the dust and dirt as he could, then looked around. The dim light of the flat car could still be seen glowing through layers of collapsed rock, still at the shattered mouth of the mine shaft but virtually unreachable. Bones put his nose to the ground and began sniffing around, the smells of the tunnel now hanging heavy with death.
“Booones,” came a voice from nearby.
Bones trotted over, recognizing the scent of Sgt. Holt, though mixed with the harsh smells of blood and human shit. Bones leaned his nose down to her hand and gave it a couple of quick licks. It was already starting to get cold. Bones caught the faint scent of Sgt. Celek as well, but it came from deep under a solid mountain of rocks.
“Bones,” Sgt. Holt said, her voice weak and barely audible. “Help me…”
Bones saw her arm move and could tell that she was trying to dig herself out from under the dirt. Bones’s training kicked in, and he began digging around her arm until it was completely free. Feeling ambitious, Holt then tried to move the rest of her body, only to shriek in agony. It took her a couple of moments to recover her breath after this attempt, but then she turned back to the shepherd.
“I’m paralyzed,” she said, more to herself than the dog. “But I can almost reach the detonator switch.”
She pointed out to the small, gray trigger that had tumbled clear of her during the cave-in, now sitting just a few feet away. Bones continued to dig around her torso with his claws, but in doing so caused more dirt and rocks to rain down over her.
“Guuuhhh!!” she groaned as pebbles slipped into wounds opened up on her back and neck, bouncing against shredded muscle and nerve tissue. Tears exploded up into her eyes. “Bones. Please…”
She pointed at the trigger. Bones looked at her oddly for a moment, but then she pointed again.
“Bones,” she said, attempting a sharp tone in her voice. “There. Retrieve. Bring that to me. Come on…get it!”
Bones glanced over at the trigger, then back at Sgt. Holt, who waved her hand in the direction of the detonator, making Bones look back at it again.
“Get it, Bones,” she tried. “Bring it to me. Wait, how about this one: fetch.”
This was, in fact, one of Bones’s commands. He turned, walked over to the detonator, picked it up in his jaws, and brought it back to her, though he dropped it just beyond her reach. As it fell, Sgt. Holt gasped, afraid it might set off the explosives, but then it clattered harmlessly to the mine shaft floor just beyond her fingers.
“Jesus, Bones,” Sgt. Holt sighed, a little relieved that somehow it hadn’t blown them up, though on some level she knew she’d be dead soon, whether it came from the explosion or her own life’s blood draining away through her wounds.
She stretched out her fingers until they just touched the detonator. It took a couple of agonizing tries, but she finally managed to slide it close enough to pick up.
“That’s a good boy, Bones,” she said to the dog, who padded around, looking worried. “You’re a good boy.”
Sgt. Holt looked up at Bones and knew that the dog had no idea what was coming next. She also knew that, after all he’d been through, he didn’t deserve it, either. She craned her neck around but saw that the mine shaft leading back up to the surface was completely blocked off with no way out. She then looked back towards the dull light on the flat car and could hear the ongoing work of the monstrosity in the cavern. That’s when she knew she was going to have to die alone.
“Go, Bones,” she cried, pointing as best she could towards the light. “Get out of he
re. Go!”
When she flicked her wrist one more time, Bones flipped backwards, as if expecting to see that she’d lobbed something for him to retrieve, another game of fetch, but she hadn’t, and he turned back to her, confused. That gave the sergeant an idea. She picked up a rock and threw it, albeit weakly, at Bones’s head. It lightly connected, causing Bones to snort and back away.
“Go!” she screamed as loud as she possibly could. “Get out of here!”
She picked up a second rock and threw it at Bones, this time hitting him in his injured shoulder. Bones let out a woof this go-round, still thinking it was playtime. Sgt. Holt gave up on the rocks and simply tried another gesture.
“Come on, Bones,” she said, waving him away. “Just go…”
For some reason, this did the trick. Bones, mouth still open in a pant, wheeled around and climbed over the rubble leading to the flat car. As he did so, his hind legs started a small avalanche that dropped a handful of rocks over the opening he’d just used, effectively sealing Sgt. Holt in, all alone.
She stared at the space where the dull light had come in from only a second before but then grasped the detonator in her hand. Taking a deep breath, she checked the switch to make sure it was still armed and then gently pressed the trigger.
“One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi…,” she began.
• • •
On the other side of the collapse, Bones made his way to the flat car, which had been knocked over and half-buried in the tube-worm attack. He gave it a quick sniff-around but then walked to the gnarled edge of the mine shaft and sniffed out into the darkness. He could hear the gigantic beast out in front of him but couldn’t see a thing. The lack of smell didn’t help, which only confused the shepherd. But then, like a miracle, he picked up another smell nearby. It was the rich, dry soil he’d smelled earlier in the day, both during the underground multipede attack but also as he’d just descended into the mine. It represented the layer of earth that was near enough to the surface that any scent of it this far underground must have been coming in courtesy of another mine shaft, one that represented a way out.