There was another huge splash as an another alligator erupted from the water, its jaws snapping at Diego. He dodged as well as he could on the narrow walkway, moving closer to Meat. The alligator's bite missed him, but its body came down from its lunge right on him, knocking him to the ground. Its jaws snapped again, closing on the hem of his jeans.
Now I got a Bad Feeling. The hot flash ripped across me, my scar throbbing. I twisted to the left, wildly jabbing my finger in that direction and gasping out something that might be a warning. I knew that an alligator was going to try to feast upon Szandor and Delilah. I just too damn incapacitated by the Bad Feeling to do more.
True to my vision, the alligator lunged out of darkness in a spray of dirty water, its red eyes blazing, its jaw ready to snap down on the flesh of my friends.
Poor alligator.
In another situation, the alligator would have had greater success. But not in this case. Not with my brother. The alligator was the third on the match - so we were ready. I had grunted some form of warning. And then the alligator had to deal with my brother. While it is a matter of public record that Szandor is piss poor at aiming a gun at any target more than ten feet away, his reflexes have never been in question. He already had the spear gun out and clutched tightly. So when the alligator erupted from the water right in front of him, he fired without thinking. It was reflex. His arm jerked and the spear shot out.
He didn't kill the alligator, but he might as well have. The jaw of the creature had been open and would have taken a piece out of him if things had gone well for the alligator. Instead, his spear had been first. It pierced the alligator's lower jaw... and somehow went straight through to pierce the upper jaw too. The spear lacked the momentum to penetrate the alligator completely, it was stuck in the alligator. The spear did have the inadvertent effect of yanking the creature's lower jaw into the upper, where it stayed due to the perforation of the spear. In a comically unlikely series of events, Szandor had somehow stapled the alligator's jaw shut.
The alligator now basically disarmed (declawed? dejawed? let's go with neutralized), it let itself fall back into the water. But before it could escape, I shot it with my own spear gun. It still tried submerging, but I expected after one spear through the mouth and another in its head, it was not going to live long.
I looked over to the others. The alligator was still trying to chomp down on Jericho's leg, but other than having a solid grip, it wasn't getting anywhere. Jericho had jabbed the harpoon into its neck and was now twisting the spear. Fala had her knives out, but Jericho needed no assistance.
The alligator that had attacked Diego was halfway on the cement pathway. It had a spear from Meat sticking out of it. Diego had a long knife out and was jabbing it into the side of the alligator's thrashing head, but he hadn't gotten a good wound on it. The alligator was snapping at Diego's face but so far had not connected.
Behind him, Meat calmly stepped forward, pulled a pistol from his vest, lowered it to the alligator's head and fired. It was a deafening sound of a gunshot that echoed all through the room. The pistol hadn't been suppressed. It was also fired not more than two feet from Diego's head.
"God fucking dammit!" said Diego, his hand going to his ears. "Are you fucking crazy?"
The dead alligator slid off of Diego back into the water.
There was an ugly noise as Jericho pulled his harpoon out of his alligator. Then he slowly got himself back to his feet. Fala tried to help but he waved her off. His pant leg was now heavily shredded. The alligator had foolishly clamped down on his left leg, the prosthetic. If there were any who had not known, it was obvious now. I'd like to say like it looked like a cool cybernetic leg like out of Robocop or a scifi movie, heavily armored with blinking lights and striated muscle-like mecha parts. However, this was more humanlike than expected. It was made entirely of Avalon brass. The joints appeared to have gaps in the metal where it could simulate the range of movement. Other than that, I had no idea how it worked, other than it did.
There was silence for a moment as we all looked at this grim reminder of Jericho's loss. He turned away from us, looking at the carnage. His alligator was bleeding out, half on the cement. Meat and Diego's was bleeding into the water. Ours was ten feet away, floating belly up.
Meat put away his pistol and held out a hand to help Diego up. First Diego scowled at the help, his ears still ringing, but then he nodded and grabbed Meat's hand. He then took out a handkerchief and wiped some of the blood off him.
"Are you fucking crazy?" said Delilah. "That shot could be heard for miles down here. Everything knows we're here now."
Meat shrugged. "I know the risks as well as you do. But if I didn't step in, Diego was going to have his face bitten off."
"Don't jeopardize the mission," said Jericho coldly.
"I'm not letting us lose one of our own because we might have alerted some monsters to our presence," said Meat.
Jericho shook his head and turned away.
Diego shook Meat's hand while rubbing his ringing ear. "Thanks for that, really."
Delilah nodded. "I'm sorry. You're right. I just wish you had found a way that wasn't so loud."
Meat shrugged and put away his pistol.
"I can't believe it," said Szandor. "You were right, Mikkel, actual sewer gators! I thought they were an urban myth!" This had been something we had talked about many times before. I had sworn I had seen gator like creatures in the water and we had heard maintenance workers mention them, but we had never gotten good evidence. Szandor had never seen any and thought it was bullshit.
"Well, we're a bit lower than the sewers," I said, rubbing the skin around my scar to get some of the tingling to go away.
"Not only sewer gators, but albino alligators," said Diego, who had heard us with his good ear even as he rubbed the other one. "That's a rarity on its own. It's like a cryptozoological merit badge. Even I'll admit I hadn't seen some before." He looked down to the rip in his jeans, which was nothing compared to Jericho's clothing malfunction. "At least I'll remember how close I came to them killing me."
"Jagherherawagh sends his minions for us," said Fala. "He knows we invade upon his Underworld. Yet he remains in his place of power."
I looked to the dead alligators. I admit, with their white coloring and red eyes, there might be an argument made for them being mini-Jabberwock Jacks. But minions?
"I'm still not buying into the spiritual stuff," said Diego. "You're not going to convince me that Jack somehow sent these to us. They're just predators thinking we were an easy meal."
"The spirits work mysteriously," said Fala.
"So mysteriously that you can use that excuse to explain anything," said Diego.
"Enough," said Jericho, though he still did not look at any of us. "Retrieve what you can and let's get going."
Unless we were going to dive in, the spears Szandor and I had fired were too far away. Meat retrieved his from the nearby carcass and then bent down to quickly rinse the blood off in the water.
"So let's assume they're just predators," said Szandor. "What do these things eat down here?"
"Rats?" suggested Diego. "There's gotta be something down here or they wouldn't be here."
"What do the rats eat?" said Szandor.
"I'm not going to figure out the whole ecosystem for you," said Diego. "As a tracker, I have one main concern about food and haven't figured it out. What's Jack eating?"
Delilah had been right. After the fight with the albino alligators, there was a lot more unity among the team. It's like they started taking everything deathly seriously instead of treating the hunt like a high school field trip. Of course, even with this newfound cooperation, time was taking its toll on us. Even the greatest team building event couldn't bond exhausted hunters.
"How long have we been down here?" I said to Delilah. I felt tired and exhausted, but I had no idea if that was due to the stress of darkness or if we really had been at this a long time. I technically had my phone in an ai
rtight ziploc bag in my jacket, but since it had no signal, I didn't trust the time.
Del looked at her GPS tracker. It had a built in clock that was accurate to the nanosecond or some such claim that mattered only to people who were very particular. For my purposes if it was accurate to the second, hell, even to just the minute, it was good enough for me.
"We've been down here... ugh... about eight hours," she said.
I sighed. Okay, it wasn't just me. We had been down here far too long. "Maybe we should make camp." I said that uncomfortably. I didn't like the idea of making camp down here.
Delilah shook her head. "I doubt you'll convince Meat or Jericho of that. Jericho wanted to get far closer to the katana's last known coordinates before camping. And Meat won't let us camp until we find a nice defensible camp site." She paused. "I actually agree with that last part. It will be hard enough sleeping down here. We need to feel safe. And I guess it's like they say about real estate. Location, location, location."
I nodded and rubbed my eyes. This just might be the day that never ends.
The room with the cement walkway across the alligator feeding tank led out to a more familiar style of tunnel. This was a lot like the above passageways in the Sewers, except this was a lot bigger. Like the sewer tunnels, this had a central trough or indentation where water travelled and there were cement walkways on either side. It also had plenty of pipes that fed into it or spilled out their contents from above. What was different was the scale. The ceiling was very high and the tunnel was amazingly wide. The tunnels in the Sewers seemed claustrophobic compared this gigantic tunnel. We also found that periodically this tunnel opened into large areas with a vast pool of water in the middle and the cement walkway curving around the edges. Once again it boggled my mind when I tried to figure out exactly what all these massive tunnels were for.
There was an immediate decision to be made. According to the GPS, to reach my katana's last known location we would need to go straight forward from the last room. But that wasn't an option. This large tunnel went either left or right, both directions perpendicular to where we wanted to go. We'd have to travel one way and hope for a worthwhile side tunnel or an intersection with another large hallway.
I'll spare you the stupid conversation over whether to go left or right based on zero knowledge and lots of feelings. Those feelings got hurt, voices were raised, more feelings were hurt, then there were some apologies. We eventually went right. Jericho's executive decision and more burned bridges.
Though we periodically shined our lights on the water, looking for more alligators, the bigger and sort of familiar looking tunnel calmed us at least a little bit. Though the water gurgled along, it was neither as still as in the last large room nor a rushing river, like when we first arrived in the Undersystem.
"What's this?" said Diego, shining his light on one of the walls. Made of pieces of Avalon Brass nailed directly into the stone, there hung a strange symbol. Not quite Japanese or Chinese, not quite Norse runes, these symbols were something Szandor and I were familiar with, even if we didn't understand them or their purpose. This particular one was something like the pi symbol with a bunch more marks added to it.
"Oh, that occult crap," said Szandor. "We see this all the time. Roger Carmichael, the guy who designed these sewers, put all these weird symbols in random places. He's also the one responsible for all this and why it's so big and confusing. Some call him a genius, others say he was a crazy fucker. That look-a-like they had on the news back a few months seemed the crazy type."
"I've seen symbols like this before. I just can't remember where. Cairo? Russia? Ravenfall?" Diego shook his head.
"White man's magic," said Fala. "It has no place here."
Szandor rolled his eyes. "It has as much place as anything else down here. Jack doesn't belong here either. He seems to have just gotten stuck down here."
"You shouldn't question the ways of the spirits," said Fala.
"Fuck it, I'm sorry, I completely forgot. It's the spirits!" said Szandor. "How can I be so blind? The fucking spirits have mysterious ways and we shouldn't question that! That's stupid. Have you forgotten? We're here to kill one of your goddamn spirits!"
"Szandor, relax," I said. Fala was giving him a death stare, her crazy face now looking murderously crazy.
My brother stopped talking. Giving no response, Fala simply shook her head and walked back to Jericho, I guess in search of a crowd that believed more of what she was putting out. I admit that my brother had a point. We were here to kill Jack. Why was she acting like we should be respecting him?
"Watch out she doesn't shank you in your sleep," said Diego.
"That assumes we actually get to sleep at some point," said Szandor tiredly.
We continued down the long hallway. Besides our exhaustion, there was one other thing on our minds. If there was anything else down here in the nearby area, it had heard us. Not just the bickering. When Meat killed the alligator, he had used an unsuppressed pistol. That was loud. Far louder than most noises in these depths. Monsters tend to take note of those things. We didn't know what, if anything besides alligators, was down here, but we wanted to avoid anything other than Jack.
"Do you have anything that actually would work as an early warning system?" I said to Delilah. "I know you said no motion detector, but is there anything that might give us a leg up? Either for the camp or in these tunnels?"
She shook her head. "Nothing like you're thinking. When we know we're getting close to Jack we can change to thermals. I expect whoever's on watch when we camp will want to do that too. But staying on those for too long will have our eyes hurting. Could you imagine if we had just spent the last eight hours in just night vision?"
I shook my head. "I'd have a migraine." Sometimes just short periods with our goggles hurt my eyes. But we weren't exactly using the highest in tech. We were using goggles that were sent to us anonymously. Usually thermal goggles were much bulkier and very expensive.
"Maybe if we -" she began, but she was cut off with a shhh from ahead. I noticed everyone had slowed and now crouched. All the flashlights were out, but our personal LEDs were still on. Delilah and I switched off our flashlights to match. Someone had heard something. I noticed Diego and Meat both cock their heads to see if they could hear better.
Diego's head shifted suddenly. He raised his flashlight and clicked it on, sweeping it up to a specific location. I watched the beam as it took a slow route down the tunnel. First there was nothing... nothing... nothing... nothing... crap.
The beam came to rest on a humanoid form fifty feet in front of us. Also crouched, it was nearly naked, wearing just a tattered loincloth that thankfully concealed its junk. The ghoul's skin was pale, the body emaciated. Its gangly arms ended in human hands that held long sharp claws. The face was also humanlike, just feral and thin. Eyes better suited for darkness squinted in the light. From a mouth full of rot and sharpened teeth erupted a hiss.
It was a ghoul.
A quick recap: ghouls are found in various places in the New Avalon area. Light adverse, they are consummate underground dwellers. They're the real life CHUDs. We've found they typically run in small packs or nests of about half a dozen. They will eat any dead or living creature they can overpower, including humans. My brother and I had dealt with ghoul nests a few times, typically following up a lead of a disappearance of a few people, one at a time, over a period of months. Up until recently, we thought they were mostly feral, no smarter than animals. But then we saw more ghouls than we had ever seen in one location worshipping a suit of armor. Now we didn't know what to think of them.
The ghoul hadn't moved yet. Maybe it was evaluating its position, as it was clearly outnumbered. But if I were a ghoul and was outnumbered by any prey, especially well-armed prey far below the surface, I'd run as my first reaction. Why wasn't it running? Something felt wrong here.
More flashlights clicked on. We shined them on the lone ghoul, who shielded its eyes from the additional lig
ht. We paused, the beams of light moving up and down the ghoul. Then we began shining the flashlights in the darkness. Diego held his flashlight on the ghoul, so our six other beams travelled the rest of the area. That's when fear really started crawling up my spine. Our beams passed over shadowy forms before we homed in on them. First one. And then another. And even more. Our beams travelled the length of a host of still figures. Many figures. More ghouls.
I had only seen so many ghouls once before, and that was the collection of ghouls worshipping the armor, which had thankfully not even been aware of our presence. These ghouls were definitely aware of us, their eyes squinting beyond our beams, easily seeing us with our LED lights.
There must have been at least thirty ghouls. And they were different than I was used to. You might think that if you'd seen one pale, flesh eating, humanoid, underground dweller, you'd seen them all. But when you have to kill them, you get to see the details - sometimes details are the difference between life and death in a fight. So when I saw these ghouls in the light, I picked up on how they were different. The ghouls in the Sewers closer to the surface were animalistic, which is probably why we thought them unintelligent. Those ghouls were often naked. Occasionally we'd see rags or maybe a loincloth - which made the first ghoul we saw here a member of high fashion for our usual ghouls. They didn't carry weapons, relying on their claws. The most elaborate weapon I had ever seen a ghoul carry was a femur which he used as a club, like the Szandor Troll did.
These ghouls seemed, for the lack of any better term, more civilized. That first ghoul we saw was the worst dressed of the bunch. Most still wore loin cloths, but some wore shirts, some pants, some even wore jackets. One ghoul wore a discarded set of football shoulder pads. The female ghouls of the bunch seemed to have even picked their clothes to be modest of their breasts. Many of them wore necklaces. And these ghouls were armed. Nearly every ghoul carried at least a sharpened stick, but most carried spears. I couldn't tell if the spears were wood and bone or even metal, but they looked lethal either way. These ghouls were far more dangerous than the usual ghoul. My brother and I relied on ghouls trying to pounce on us for hand-to-claw attacks, typically using the reach of our weapons to maintain our advantage. But if ghouls had spears, they could keep us at a distance.
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