They looked over the rest of debris, particularly Diego. He was looking for a trail or a sign. It was a strange collection of objects. There was a broken phone, a ripped handbag, a splintered spear, torn scraps of clothes, a broken spear, parts of a leather biker jacket, a nearly intact boot, and some crunched up bones. Diego shook his head in dismay. He knew what this all was.
"These are the remains of the dead," said Diego. "The left over bits and pieces after they were devoured."
Szandor had been holding the phone, but hearing this he dropped it as if the broken piece of electronics might bite him. "From ghouls?"
Diego shook his head. "There are ghoul remains here. I'm guessing..."
"Jack," said Meat.
Diego nodded.
"At least we know his diet isn't exclusively human," said Meat.
"Then where is Jack?" asked Szandor. "Can you track him?"
"I don't need to," said Diego. "I already know where he is."
"Where?" said Szandor.
"Breathe deep," said Diego.
Szandor had been on edge since he came into the room and more so since they identified the remains. He had noticed the foul murky smell when he came into the chamber, but his shallow breaths since then hadn't given him any new scents. Now he stood straight and let his lungs take in a deep breath. Here in front of the crevice, he could easily smell what he had overlooked. It was a pungent stink that wafted up from that crevice. It was a mix of decayed fish, mold, polluted water, and curdled blood. The stench seemed to slowly gush out of crack like an invisible mist, the scent significantly stronger with every step closer to the crevice. After noticing the stink, Szandor looked at the crack in the wall and floor with a renewed respect. As he stared at it along with his silent companions, he began to notice a faint growling. Not particularly loud, but an ever present background noise that rolled through the space. He tensed immediately, but a firm hand on his shoulder from Diego stilled him. My brother looked back to the crevice, noticing that the growl was rhythmic - it rose and fell regularly.
"I think he's sleeping," said Diego softly, his eyes still locked on that black crevice.
"Fuck, what are we going to do?" whispered Szandor.
"Tread very carefully," said Meat. "We need to report back to the others. We need full force and a plan."
"Yeah, let's get the fuck out of here," said Szandor.
The three of them began a slow and silent walk back to the chamber entrance. Fala, however, had other ideas. Behind them, the three heard a hiss, but not of a snake or serpent. Turning back caused them to turn away, the brightness of what Fala was holding too much for their thermals. As they pulled their goggles off, they looked back to see why Fala was holding a flare in the space in front of the crevice.
In a very loud voice, she shouted into the cracked chasm.
"Hear me, Jagherherawagh! I call upon you!"
Danger Line
Sometimes you're part of it all when things go very bad. You're right there in the middle of it, feeling things go from bad to worse, flailing and failing miserably to stop it.
Sometimes you're outside of it, watching it all go bad with not a damn thing you can do.
We looked down through the grate at the room below. I heard Fala calling out to Jack loudly. A chill went through me.
"What's she doing?" asked Delilah.
"I... I don't know," said Jericho, honestly shocked.
"We need this grate open!" I said urgently. My brother was down there and things were about to go really bad. I reached for the grate, finding the bolts covered in grime and hard to get a grip on with my fingers. "We need your power drill!"
"It's too loud!" said Delilah. "It'd bring everything anywhere around here straight to us!"
I cursed. Shaking my head, I started grabbing at the bolts and twisting them. My fingers kept slipping off, but I was getting at least a little traction. I was actually turning them, just slowly and painfully. I felt someone near me as Jericho crouched next to me, twisting at some of the bolts himself.
"Jagherherawagh, spirit of the river and the deep, hear me!"
Fala dropped her flare and then lit another. The growling breathing was louder but still rhythmic.
"What the fuck is she doing?" said Szandor.
"Getting us killed," said Diego. "Let's get out of here!"
Meat walked over to Fala and put a hand on her shoulder as he looked at the crevice for some sign of Jack. "You need to stop that. You're going to wake him up." His voice was level but stern. Maybe he was thinking of her as childish as she sometimes portrayed herself as. I couldn't tell if he was laying his hand on her shoulder to be calming or to show the force he could exert on her.
In one movement, Fala shrugged off Meat's arm and drew one of her long knives, pointing it at his throat. "Don't touch me," she said icily.
Meat put his hands in front of him defensively. "I just want you to think about what you're doing."
"What I am doing?" said Fala with a laugh. "I know exactly what I'm doing."
"I just think that..." Meat trailed off as he looked past Fala. He had noticed the growling breathing had stopped. Now there was movement in the darkness.
The flickering flare provided some light to the room, but not as good illumination as flashlights or LEDs. So they couldn't see the thing before them very well. It was more of a dark shape highlighted with light and features. But no one could miss that it was enormous. That horrid stench now pervaded the room, even reaching us through the grate. I could vaguely see the bulk rise up and then lean forward.
In that meager illumination, Meat saw an enormous red eye, a ruby red that caught the light. A single vertical pupil swam in that vast redness, almost more like a cat's eye. With an agonizing slowness the eye and the rest of the monster's head pushed forward into the flickering light. Before we had just seen flashes of it, but now Jack's features were clear.
Jack's head was massive, bigger than both Meat and Fala put together. His skin was rough and white, marred only by dirt and dried blood. The head had a long snout like an alligator or perhaps a dragon. Jack's mouth hung open, huge drops of saliva hanging from long and impossibly sharp teeth. That one gigantic eye held court in Jack's left socket. The other eye socket was covered with an ugly mess of white scar tissue. That one wound told us two things. One, this impossible, awe inspiring, and unfathomably dangerous creature could be hurt. Second, Jericho had not lied about his own tangle with Jack.
Meat's own jaw dropped, while Fala smiled and called out to Jack.
"Jagherherawagh! Great spirit of the water! As an inheritor of the Appaquagh tribe you so long protected, a tribe you owe debt to, I ask for your favor! Long have we suffered at the hands of invaders, of interlopers! Our people have been scattered from our lands, broken, beaten down while others have spoiled the ground, killed the game, and polluted the air!"
"What the fuck does she think she's doing?" said Szandor.
"Now is the time, Jagherherawagh!" she cried, almost rapturously. "Now is the time for revenge! You and I can take back what was stolen from the Appaquagh, from what the current tribe leaders ignore in their decadence and subservience to the white men! Together we can destroy what these invaders have wrought! We can bring back the Appaquagh and their reverence for you!
"But first, as a show of good faith, Jagherherawagh, I offer you a gift!" She spread her arms at Meat, Szandor, and Diego. "I offer you the lives of these white men as a sacrifice!"
"Oh, fuck no," said Szandor, backing up toward the entrance to chamber.
"Bitch, I'm not even white!" said Diego, bring his hunting rifle up to aim.
Jabberwock Jack's head turned, scanning the room, taking in all its occupants. Then it opened its mouth in a screeching roar, the foul smell in the room becoming exponentially worse. Szandor braced for the attack. He had been about to run, but he wasn't going to leave Diego and Meat in the room. Diego braced his rifle on his shoulder, trying to find the kill shot. Meat lifted his spear gun.
>
And then with amazing speed, Jack lunged, closing his mouth around his prey.
That prey was Fala.
She was there and a second later, she was gone. No one expected it or even tracked the movement except for Meat. Somehow he saw Jack's intended move. He had grabbed at Fala's arm to drag her from danger, protecting human life even amidst betrayal. But he was too slow. Instead his movement put him too close to Jack's lunge. The force of Jack's movement threw Meat aside, the big man tumbling to the ground unconscious.
"We need this grate open now!" I shouted, having barely gotten a single bolt unscrewed. "I don't care about the noise!"
Delilah nodded, scrambling to get the drill out of her bag.
Below, Diego fired a round from his hunting rifle. The bullet hit Jack in the head, dark blood spurting from the wound. Jack reared back in pain and let out a piercing scream, but the monster was by no means dead.
Diego was reloading, slowly walking back to the entrance, only a foot or two away from Szandor, who was crouched at the entry way. With a screeching roar, Jack lunged forward, his long body darting through the flickering flare light. Diego saw that Jack was coming for him, deciding to drop his rifle and dive out of the way.
But it wasn't enough. Jack's jaws closed around Diego. Unlike Fala, he wasn't swallowed completely. That split second of Diego's panicked evasion meant Jack closed his mouth too early. He closed his mouth around the lower half of Diego.
It was a sound I will always remember. I won't claim that I had never seen or heard a man die before this, but I will always remember Diego's scream. He looked toward Szandor, Diego's face a shocked grimace, blood spilling from his mouth. The Jack began to pull his head and Diego back.
My brother has a history of fighting tooth and nail against futility. He wasn't going to give up. Instead of running, my brother jumped forward. Grabbing Diego's shoulders he began pulling. Diego groaned. I'm not sure what Szandor expected - was he going to be able to pull Diego out without Jack's teeth goring him? Did my brother see something the rest of us didn't?
Szandor kept pulling, shouting curses at Jack, tears welling in his eyes. But it wasn't enough. Jack reared his head back, pulling Diego's body up... and Szandor, who would not let go. Jack knew that he had bitten off more than he could chew. He had half of Diego's body outside of his mouth and the dangling, screaming form of Szandor.
"I need this grate open now!" I screamed over the whirr of Delilah's power drill. I started kicking at the grate, trying to force it open with a few bolts removed, uncaring of whether this was making Delilah's job harder. I was frantic and I needed to kick and push - those were the only actions that made sense to me. My brother needed me and I was stuck just watching. This was one of my worst nightmares.
Jack decided the solution to his issue just like I've seen dogs and other animals do. Brute force. Swinging his head back and forth, Jack hoped to dislodge Szandor. But my brother still stubbornly and stupidly held on. To be fair, he was now high in the air, so maybe he just didn't want to fall with great force on the stone floor or the stalagmites. When his swinging wasn't enough to dislodge my brother, Jack resorted to bashing his head against the walls of the chamber, which also crushed Szandor into the rock. While Jack was also hitting his own body against the stone, his thick skin was probably better defense than Szandor's. My brother was being beaten against the walls in the chamber. No man could survive much of that, not even Szandor.
I finally kicked the grate out and hopped down into the chamber as my brother fell unconscious from the beast's mouth, at this point only about fifteen feet in the air.
"Szandor!" I shouted.
With a battle cry, I pulled the trigger on my spear gun. The long shaft of the spear embedded itself halfway in Jack's body, in the long snake-like neck not far under his head. Delilah had hopped down after me. She loosed a few rounds from her P90, the roar of the suppressed weapon filling the chamber. Jack's body burst with dark blood where each of Delilah's bullets struck. Jericho came last. He shouted his own cry and rushed at Jack, his wicked harpoon held aloft, ready to finally end their decades of vengeance.
But it was too late for Jericho. After my spear and the burst fire of Delilah's bullets, Jack roared in pain. His long form slid backward, retreating into that dark crevice, Diego's body pulled with him.
Jericho stopped short at the edge of the crevice, peering down into the darkness. For all his vengeance and bravado, he stopped at that dark chasm. He knew it was death to go down into that cramped space alone and he was too shaken by betrayal and the death of our allies. While there was blood all over the room, there was definitely a strong trail that disappeared down into the crevice that we could see even in the meager light. Diego's blood.
I ran to my brother. His limp body was unflatteringly splayed on the ground, his hand bleeding into a pool of water next to him. He was bruised, bleeding, and unconscious. I used my very limited medical knowledge to check his vitals. He was alive, but his pulse was erratic.
"Help him!" I screamed.
Delilah ran to me, pulling the first aid kit out of her pack. She began bandaging him to staunch the bleeding, but we all knew it was bad. Meat groggily sat up. He was bruised and a had a terrible headache, but otherwise seemed okay.
"We're going back up!" I shouted, mostly at Jericho, who stood staring into the dark crack.
Delilah and Meat nodded, but they weren't the ones I wanted to acknowledge my demand.
"We're going back up, we need to get my brother to a hospital!" I shouted again. "Do you hear me?"
Jericho said nothing, not turning from the crevice.
This was more than I could take. I pulled myself up and threw myself at Jericho. He wasn't expecting it, so I grabbed him by his shirt and pulled him to me. His typical stern and intense expression was gone. Now he looked shocked and disoriented.
"We're going up now. We're getting my brother to the hospital. Do you have a problem with that?" I snarled the last sentence to him.
Finally he shook his head and I let him go. I looked down to where Delilah was doing what she could for Szandor. We had to move him, even though that's typically considered a bad thing with the wounded. But there was no point in leaving him here. Was time an issue here? We were so deep down, I wondered if we could get him topside in time to save his life.
Sole Survivor
Too long. That's how long it took to reach the surface. My frantic panic had first slowed to a post-adrenaline worry as we were working on actually doing something. But then it edged back up to full-on panic when it took us longer and longer to get back to the surface. In the back of my head, I checked off every minute, every moment as the one which was too far, after which there was nothing to be done, after which the doctor would throw up his hands and say, "Sorry, nothing we can do."
Three hours.
That's how long it actually took to get back to the surface. We were in the Undersystem, so we needed to find a way to get back up into the regular system of either Sewers or train tunnels and then from there discover an exit up to the surface. Getting up to the surface from the higher tunnels was easy. They were made for maintenance. Getting out of the Undersystem was the real problem. The largeness of all the tunnels and chambers made getting anywhere take a long time and access to the above tunnels was both less often and harder to find. We had come down here a day's journey from where we faced Jack. So we needed to discover a way back up we hadn't known before. Szandor wouldn't survive a whole day's march back.
I carried my brother what in my panic felt like a few miles through that Undersystem until we found a long ladder up. With the help of rope and climbing hooks, we got him up into the Sewers. From there, we climbed out of a manhole in an alley Southend, four filthy spelunkers and one unconscious body.
Not caring about anything else, I grabbed my brother in my arms and took off in a run, leaving my companions behind without a word. I ran out of the alley into the rain, seeing a busy street. Without a pause I ran out into
the street, practically throwing myself in front of the first cab I saw to get them to stop. I didn't care about the screech of tires which could have ended my own life. All I cared was that the cab stopped. The driver's eyes were wide at me and the injured body I carried. My voice was too loud and too quick as I explained my brother had been in an accident. He quickly agreed to take us to the hospital. He even did it free of charge, which was a rare moment of compassion for New Avalon cab drivers. The only concession was that my brother couldn't bleed on the seats. Since Szandor was bandaged, we only had to contend with wounds opened from moving him. I did my best for the cab driver's sake.
I ran into the Emergency Room of South Avalon General Hospital, my brother in my arms. I came to a stop in the middle of the ER, filthy, wet, and stinking, my brother's limp body held tight. In a throaty voice thick with sadness, I shouted, "My brother needs help!"
Many stared at me strangely, and help didn't come to me as quickly as I wanted. But eventually two overworked and tired nurses came to me to find out what was wrong. A gurney was swiftly rushed out to me and they gently put Szandor on it.
"What happened?" they asked.
"He fell," I said.
The closest nurse, a cute but tired one with her brown curly hair tied back, looked down at Szandor's wounds, some which had already been bandaged. She raised her eyebrow at me. "Fell?"
I walked the story back, still knowing I need to lie. "He likes going down in the Sewers. I know, it's dangerous. But I hadn't heard from him in hours, so I went down to find him. He was there, unconscious at the bottom of some tunnel. I think he fell." Not bad for on-the-spot lying. It was sort of true, maybe if there had been a gigantic sea serpent that tripped him.
The nurse shook her head, still probably believing that this was a poor version of the truth and handed me a clipboard. My brother was taken away through those swinging doors in every medical drama. I had seen them enough times to know if I tried to follow, some huge orderly would force me back or some dramatic but important nurse would tell me doctors only and to chill the fuck out. I knew this all but the pain in my heart and the worry in my bones wouldn't go away. I sat down in a chair with the clipboard, trying to fill out as much as possible. There was a six year old boy next to me who had come with his mother and his brother who had broken his arm.
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