by Tim Curran
Iversen aimed the flare in their direction and they backed away, but others rose up behind him. He kept turning this way and that, jabbing the flare at distorted fetal faces, but each time they were closer and each time there were more of them. Then they leaped and six or seven were hanging from him, placing suckering mouths against his bare arms, his neck, and face. They were blubbery and flaccid things like newborn maggots.
One of them bit into his wrist and he dropped the flare. He tore and beat at them, feeling them coming apart under his fists, but there were always more and they fastened themselves to him like blood-swollen ticks.
He screamed as their little fingers dug into him, as nubby teeth pierced his skin. He felt his own ribs crack as they were yanked on and he cried out in agony as their talons sheared his face from the bone beneath and he choked on his own blood. Before he sank into the pool of thrashing water, he felt one of them jump on his head and sink fangs like ice tongs through his skull and into his brain.
35
Kenney wasn’t sure where he was.
The mutants—because that’s what they were—seemed to come in waves and he emptied his riot gun into advancing hordes of them, just managing to stay free of their clutching fingers.
He tried his handpack radio again and again, but all he was getting now was static. The mutants had been corralling him, he realized. It seemed insane, but that’s exactly what they were doing. Attacking from every side, pushing him into side passages and low, sloping tunnels and doing it to get him more confused and more lost.
Maybe they’re not human, but they sure as hell are smart.
Trying to keep from panicking, hoping that Hyder would send a relief party down when he could not be reached, Kenney entered another chamber that was huge and echoing. The walls were made of fungus, draperies of the stuff, greasy and pink and pulsating. It trailed into the water and hung in loops from the ceiling overhead.
That’s when he saw a figure come splashing in his direction.
He brought up his riot gun and only hesitated from firing when a light found him and he heard a voice crying out, “KENNEY! KENNEY! DON’T SHOOT! DON’T SHOOT!”
It was Beck.
He was torn up pretty good. He still had his riot gun, but his gas mask was gone, his tac vest and waders torn, his face scratched with bleeding rents. “They came from everywhere…they got Godfrey…I barely got away.” He leaned up against Kenney. “I barely got away.”
Kenney nodded. “They got St. Aubin. I don’t know about Iversen. Right now, we have to worry about ourselves and get the hell out of here. How many rounds you got?”
“Five or six. No more.”
“I only have a couple myself. Let’s go.”
They moved on into the tunnel Kenney had come out of. They had to find that main passage, he knew, or they could wander down here for weeks. It was a fucking labyrinth and he didn’t want to be thinking about how far it went on for.
The tunnel snaked this way and that, the water coming up past their hips now. It was turgid and viscous, equal parts clay and water and slime. They were tense, anxious.
A ripple passed through the muck.
“Hold it,” Beck said, shining his light around, the ripples fading away. “Something…there’s something in the water, something in the water with us.”
And he was right.
Whatever it was, maybe it knew the game was up for it came erupting from that putrid brown water like a monstrous worm. It hit Beck and took him down before he could even think of firing. In the arc of his flashlight, it looked reptilian, boneless, a fluid and pulsing thing.
Kenney stumbled back and fell, coming up just in time to see Beck burst from the water, spraying mud from his mouth.
Something was on his back, riding him.
A mutant that was fat and heaving like a slug. Its mouth was at his throat making obscene sucking sounds. He screamed and fell back into the muck.
Kenney didn’t waste a second.
He reached in there and took hold of something oily, something slippery and bloated, yanked on it with all his strength until it came up and twisted around, hitting him hard. He fell against the wall, that brown and muddy thing making first a shrill bleating sound, then a squealing like a pissed-off hog. He could see its mouth snapping at him, blunt teeth wanting to dig into his face. He had a tight grip on its throat and he wasn’t letting go. The creature, he realized, was a woman of sorts but misshapen and hideously deformed. Her hands were like huge, flattened spades, the individual fingers webbed together. There was a row of pulsating sacs down her torso like pendulous teats. They swayed like water balloons as she writhed and fought and tore into him. Her back and head were covered in short, rubbery bristles and her mouth was a piglike snout, squealing and chomping and breathing a hot, fetid air in his face.
She was incredibly strong and moment by moment, she forced Kenney down until the slopping water was to his throat. He screamed and raged, something in him refusing the idea of death…and then there was a resounding explosion and the pig-woman was blown free of him.
Beck, bloody but unbowed, stood there with his riot gun. He had stuck the barrel of it right up to the pig-woman’s side and pulled the trigger.
The pig-woman herself…or itself…was roiling in the mud, her blood swirling in with the brown and yellow muck. Her guts were hanging out, bleached and distended like jellyfish washed up on a beach. They trailed behind her as she tried to crawl away.
When she died, she simply sank like a log in quicksand.
Kenney was out of breath, his muscles aching, his head full of a shrieking white noise. The pig-woman’s spade hands had torn through his coat and shirt, ripping bleeding gashes into his belly and chest.
He turned to Beck. “I owe you one,” he said.
36
They had Godfrey right where they wanted him and he knew it.
He’d fought free of them for a time but they had him cornered now and he realized with a sinking feeling in his chest that he’d only gotten away because they’d allowed him to. He’d been backing away from them deeper into the tunnels and now he was in some kind of cocoon of fungi. It was like a pocket of the stuff. There was no way out. The mutants were ringed around the opening, just waiting, just watching for what would happen next. They grinned with pulpy faces, making whispering sounds.
The fungi cocoon was vaguely pulsating and to Godfrey it felt like the beat of some great heart.
Yes, because this isn’t some accidental mutation, it’s on purpose. You’re in a womb of the stuff.
He realized then the relationship between the fungus and the descendants of Clavitt Fields. They had merged and become one. Elena had it right, at least some of it. She told them a very, very old story of a meteorite falling from the sky—a huge flaming stone…a piece of star…fell from the sky many centuries ago—and burying itself in the earth and how the people of Clavitt Fields had biologically degenerated, becoming these things he was looking upon now. He remembered Kenney mentioning radiation and that seemed a good, if far-fetched, bet at the time. And maybe there was radioactivity involved, but it was more than that because there had been something living in that piece of falling star, something that crawled down into the ground and blighted the entire area, maybe gradually remaking the inhabitants of Clavitt Fields into things more like itself. Elena had spoken of some old drunk many years ago seeing something made of eyes and crawling lights coming out of the Ezren well, something that blinded him permanently just looking on it.
It was still here.
It still lived.
The mutants were part of it, they had achieved some morbid symbiosis with it.
And Godfrey was trapped not in a cocoon of fungi, but in a cocoon of its flesh…this entire underworld was infested by the thing.
And these were the revelations that occurred to him in his final moments as he looked the gorgon in the face and prepared for his end.
The pink cocoon was much like the mutants themselves, made
of some gelid, spongy material, but while they were bleached and bloodless things in some advanced stage of abiotrophic decline, the cocoon itself was pink and juicy and unnaturally healthy. He could see an elaborate system of veins or arteries branching out just beneath its surface. It was sticky and unpleasant and he knew if he stayed in one position long, he would be glued to it.
It began to move.
The mutants began to murmur excitedly.
It began to move around him, vibrating and pulsing. Tiny flaccid ripples passed through its mass as it seemed to contract and expand in peristaltic waves. That’s what Godfrey felt right before it began consuming him, right before it put out tiny wire-thin filaments that were bloodred and glistening and he shrieked in agony as they crawled up his pant legs and punctured his skin, sliding beneath his fingernails and entering his ass and sliding up the shaft of his penis and drilling in through his navel. Within seconds, he was securely webbed and securely impaled, a thrashing figure whose screaming mouth ejected a mist of blood.
The thing had him and it was ingesting him.
His flesh began to liquefy, his face coming apart in dripping ribbons, oozing from the skull beneath like snot. Now it was not just those filaments working on him, but creepers of gray jelly big around as a thumb. They emerged from the cocoon mass, coiling and constricting and pushing their way beneath his dissolving skin and he continued to scream, his mouth dripping now like hot tallow.
Godfrey was barely human by this point, some writhing and animate puppet rooted to the cocoon. He was wound in creepers. They fed from his eyes and mouth and fingertips. With one last burst of strength and survival instinct, he tried to fight free and it sounded like weeds being pulled from the earth.
The cocoon let out a high, piping cry.
Great white rootlets pierced him now, pulling him back down into the fleshy bed of his own biologic ruin.
He was human in form only, the alien tissue owning him, snaking and wriggling within and without him. Every time the hole of his mouth attempted to open, jellied tendrils spread from it in a blossoming congestion like rootlets of woodrot. White and looping fingers of fungi undulated like whips from his fingertips, tasting the air and seeking new flesh to despoil, which was only his own.
This was communion with the mother organism.
And the most appalling part of it was that he was not dead.
37
Chipney had been taken and dragged off into the depths, deposited here in this womb of fungus that seemed to breathe around him with barely audible susurrations. When he opened his eyes, he was sluggish and tired as if he had just consumed a very large meal. And, oddly, he felt that way—overfed. But that was insane because he had not eaten. He had been dumped here and he lost consciousness. He had vague recollections of one dream piled on top of another, all of them so weirdly hallucinogenic and surreal they were almost psychedelic.
The last time he had dreamed with such almost organic vibrancy was when he had taken Chantix to quit smoking five years before and he had dreamed so much he actually woke up feeling exhausted as if he had run a marathon or plowed through War and Peace in a single sitting. The only other time he had experienced anything remotely similar was when he had dropped acid in college.
It’s the gases down here, it must be the gases, he told himself with a sleepy voice that fumbled over the words, they’re making you loopy.
The good thing was, he was alone.
Absolutely alone.
The mutant things had left.
His riot gun was gone, of course, and he had no light to see by, but he could remember the way he had been brought into this place. God, the floor, the walls…living tissue. It was disgusting. He felt around for the passage and was amazed when he found it in the darkness.
Keep moving, keep going. Let your instincts get you out of here. It’s all you have now.
The tunnel was set with countless passageways and channels and, though he was completely lost, he listened to the internal voice that told him to keep moving up and up and whenever he found an opening above, he did just that.
He was crawling through an extremely cramped, dripping tunnel now that seem to be collapsing in sodden heaps of muck. There were things above him that he kept bumping his head into, hard things, and his fingers more than once explored them and found them to be made of some rotting wood. But it meant nothing to him, not the undersides of slabs he encountered or the swollen tree roots he fought through. Nor even the other things he began to find, things that could be nothing other than mushy, bloated corpses that he clawed his way over and through, fingers digging ruts in ruined faces and valleys in jellied abdomens.
The stench was black and odious, an invasive aura that wound him and held him in fingers of putrefaction.
But he refused to think about it or even acknowledge it. That stuff was for later. Now there was just survival and it was enough for his taxed brain that kept urging him to lie down and close his eyes.
He worked and slid like an eel through rot and decay and then his fingers were reaching into empty air. He propelled himself forward and landed hard on a stone floor that was wet and cold. But smooth, even.
Concrete?
He pulled himself through puddles and began frantically digging in his waders, beneath to his shirt pocket where he kept his cigarettes, his lighter.
He hadn’t dared light it before…all those gases…but now in this wide-open space, why not?
Sanity began to seep back into his mind now that there was the possibility of escape. His lighter was wet and it took a few moments of frenetic action of striking the wheel until finally it began to spark out of sheer friction and dry itself and then, yes, a flame, bright, blinding, a million suns exploding before him.
He opened his eyes into slits and saw.
He was in a mausoleum, a burial vault. The sweating stone walls were set with funerary inscriptions and black cavities into which caskets could be pushed. But they weren’t, of course. They had been torn from their sepulchral berths and scattered over the floor, shattered, their contents taken away. Everywhere there were splinters of wood and tarnished brass handles, shattered lids and shredded streamers of casket silk like party confetti…but no bones.
Not a single sign of remains.
Except for what was laid across the framework of a bier. He saw the brown uniform, the badge, the yellow department logo and knew it was Riegan…Riegan, who’d disappeared out in the field that night.
He was being tenderized in this wormy, palpable dampness.
Chipney found a set of steps and clawed up them. They were covered with a spongy yellow moss. Before him was a rusted metal door and he beat his fists against it until they were raw and bleeding and the lighter burned his fingers and went out.
I’m this close, you idiots! Get me out of here! Don’t let me die now!
“Not now,” he said under his breath. “Oh dear God, not now…”
Then below, the sound of motion, of creeping and rustling as the things swarmed through the hole and into the crypt, filling it with their ravenous, fleshy forms.
38
“There’s movement up ahead,” Kenney said as he waded through the filthy waters with Beck. “I thought I saw something.”
Beck hadn’t seen it. All he cared about was getting out and nothing else seemed to matter. He was ready to kill anything or anyone that got in the way of that. They were in the main passage now and if things worked out, they could be to the ladder in fifteen minutes or less. This drove him and it was enough.
He saw a ripple in the murky slop and slowed a bit.
He tasted a sour sweetness in his mouth. Was that the taste of fear? Of adrenaline? A mixture of both? He didn’t know. He pushed forward with a bravado and a confidence that surprised even him.
I’m getting the fuck out of here and that’s all there is to it. I won’t take no for an answer.
This was like some kind of mantra playing in his head.
Behind him, Kenney tried
the radio again with no luck. Soon, maybe, they were bound to pick up something. He told himself this, amazed at his own optimism.
And then hell broke loose.
He saw the folly of being hopeful.
A half dozen of the mutants came vaulting out of the water, dragging their sloughing skins behind them. With a broken cry, Beck started shooting, blasting away wildly. He used up all his shot within seconds and he could not even be sure he had hit any of them. The riot gun was slapped from his hands by a woman who wore her flesh like a badly fitting garment…it was a tarp that flowed around her, pale and jellied set with pink boils and knotted growths that dripped a foul milk.
She reached for him with gnarled hands like twisted tree roots, black talons streaking at his eyes.
She barely missed him. He struck out and felt his fist sink into spongy tissue, making him stumble backwards with revulsion. He nearly went into the muddy water, but she caught him and wouldn’t let him go.
He heard Kenney shouting as he blasted away, but little else.
One of her clawed hands stabbed forward, ripping his larynx out, and with such force it dislodged muscles in his neck that dislocated his jaw in one fell swoop. He shrieked but she slapped a gummy hand over his mouth and he gagged on the juice that squeezed from it.
Kenney couldn’t help him.
He was batting them away with his riot gun, trying to beat a hasty retreat to get out of harm’s way. In the strobing light of the jiggling riot gun, he thought he saw two or three of them seize Beck and tear him quite neatly in half like a paper doll.