by JE Gurley
“What are you singing about?” he asked.
“I sing for the gods to protect me and to keep my aim true during the hunt.”
“The hunt?”
“Yes, all life is a hunt, is it not? We seek that which we desire or need and use our skills to obtain it. Each man’s skills are different, as are his desires, but all men hunt. My people hunt for food or for ways to prove their manhood. Your people hunt for fame, fortune, and the good life.” He shrugged. “Both are the same. How we use our skill makes us what we are. If we use them wisely and correctly and with honor, we will obtain our goals. If we squander them or cheat others, the gods will keep our desires from us. I pray for wisdom and a true eye.”
Vince hadn’t expected such profound and perceptive wisdom from a security guard. “That’s deep,” he replied.
“Deep?” Masowe asked, not understanding. “Yes, we are.”
Vince chuckled. “I meant, what you said was very wise.”
Masowe nodded, but his gaze remained fixed on a point down the lava tube as he spoke. “There is something here. I can sense it.” He grimaced. “It is evil.”
Vince looked at Masowe and imagined him naked, wearing paint and ostrich feathers, sitting by the fire before a hunt, the years of civilization stripped away; or carrying a short assagi stabbing spear and stretched cowhide isihlangu battle shield, running across the veldt. Just such a Zulu warrior, Shaka Zulu, had almost defeated the British army in the late 19th Century. He shook his head. Masowe was spooking him.
“Let’s douse the lights and get some sleep. In a few hours, everyone will be down here, and it’ll be a long, hectic day.”
Masowe turned off the battery-powered lantern, plunging the entire shaft into pitch-black darkness. No, not complete darkness, Vince observed. Large areas of the wall were glowing softly. Bioluminescent bacteria or lichen, he thought. Very interesting. I’ll have to check it out, later.
From the near darkness, Masowe said, “It is like the stars above my village at night when I sit outside my family’s kraal. It is beautiful. You sleep. I will keep watch. The lion comes soon.”
Lion, Vince thought. It was hardly likely they’d find a lion down here. He watched the patches of luminescence twinkle, as he slowly drifted off to sleep.
* * * *
Vince awoke with a large hand clamped over his mouth squeezing gently but firmly. “Do not speak,” Masowe whispered in his ear. “Intulo comes.” Then he disappeared.
He sat up slowly. He heard nothing, but by the dim bioluminescent light, he saw Masowe crouched beside a pile of rocks with his revolver drawn. He sensed no fear in the Zulu, only wariness, and perhaps a trace of excitement. He strained his ears to hear what Masowe heard, but they were not as acute as the Zulu security guard’s.
A soft clink reached him as a chunk of brittle rock fell from the roof and shattered. He relaxed. So that’s what got Masowe so wired up, a piece of the lava tube breaking off. He started to chide Masowe for his nervousness when the sound of running feet broke the silence, many feet. What the hell could be down here?
He crawled over to Masowe’s side. The Zulu was staring down the tunnel with the intensity of a laser beam, his eyes unblinking. In the scant light, Vince could see nothing but layer upon layer of shadows, but he was certain the Zulu could see something more, something that frightened him.
“What are they?” he asked quietly.
“Intulo – Devils.”
“Devils?”
“Yes. Their smell is unknown to me, but I sense their evil, their hunger.”
Without taking his eyes off the tunnel, Masowe reached into his belt, pulled out his long, bone-handled knife, and handed it to Vince. No, not bone, Vince realized as he grasped the smooth handle, polished ivory. The knife was heavy in his hand but perfectly balanced.
“Use it well. I count six of them.”
“Six what? Are they rats?”
He had seen rats in the mineshafts, some as large as cat. The miners used them as canaries, noting their ability to detect minute shifts in the rock preceding cave-ins and following them from the tunnels. As he said it, he knew rats wouldn’t be so deep underground. Masowe was beginning to frighten him. Masowe said nothing. He simply stared down the lava pipe.
Vince realized that they were off camera. No one in the Shack could see them. “I’m going to try to call in,” he said.
Masowe placed his hand on his shoulder to stop him. “If you raise your voice, they will attack,” he warned. “They are scouting us now.”
“What about the lights?”
“We will be blinded for a few seconds as the lights come on. That would leave us vulnerable. I do not know if the light will blind them or not. It is best not to find out.”
They sat for several minutes, as the slight scuffle in the rocks grew louder and bolder. And closer. Occasionally, Vince heard a scraping sound like metal on stone; then, a cacophony of loud hisses filled the air, coming from several different points of the tunnel. To him, it sounded like hunters calling out to one another, signaling that they were in position.
“They come,” Masowe announced.
Masowe’s calm voice didn’t lessen Vince’s apprehension. Vince stared into the darkness, but in the dim light saw only shadows dancing in and out of even deeper shadows along the wall. Masowe fired his pistol twice, startling Vince, and one of the shadows fell. The report of the gun almost deafened him. The blinding muzzle flash lit up the tunnel for a few seconds, but revealed nothing. The sounds died away down the tunnel slowly. The flash reminded Vince of something he needed to tell the Zulu, but he couldn’t remember what, something about the gun. Masowe began crawling over the rocks. Vince pulled at him.
“Where are you going?” he demanded.
“I killed one,” Masowe said, smiling with pride. “I must examine it.” “Don’t be a fool. We don’t know what these things are.”
Masowe ignored him, pulled away, and scrambled over the pile of boulders. “All the more reason to examine it,” he called back. “I have only four more bullets.”
“Then let’s get the hell out of here,” he yelled into the shadows, but there was no answer from the security guard turned hunter. He peered into the darkness, and thought he could see Masowe’s outline as he swept from one pile of rock to another in careful movements like the stealthy hunter he was. More shadows were moving around him.
“Masowe,” he yelled. “There are more of them.” He knew Masowe probably saw them before he did, but he couldn’t keep silent. A deep, guttural scream erupted from the darkness, a shriek that chilled his blood. He had never heard such a horrific cry except on television. It went on and on, the horrible sound reverberating down the lava tube until drowned out by two quick shots from the pistol. Immediately, a blast of fire erupted from beyond the rock berm, sweeping back toward the Cerberus. Vince fell flat on his face and hugged the ground with his hands over the back of his head, as the flames swept over him.
The gunfire had ignited a pocket of methane. That was what he was trying to remember. Increased oxygen levels and high temperatures lowered the LEL, the Lower Explosive Level of methane. Even a small concentration of methane became combustible under those conditions. He should have remembered earlier, but the extra oxygen in the air had made him euphoric and giddy.
More chirps and whistles and the sound of scuffling erupted beyond the rocks. The hell with this, he thought. I need to see what’s out there. He scrambled back to the Cerberus to switch on the lights. Bright light immediately flooded the tunnel, and just as Masowe had predicted, the brightness momentarily blinded him. At a sound just behind him, he turned.
“Masowe?” he asked. Instead of the security guard, he caught a quick glimpse of something razor sharp slashing down at his head. He held up his hands in a reflex action and felt searing pain explode as the object broke his radius, ripped deep into his flesh, and knocked the knife from his grip. He turned to the phone on the side of the Cerberus, but before he could lift it fr
om its cradle, claws ripped into his right shoulder and spun him around. In intense agony, he fought the urge to pass out to get a glimpse of his unknown assailant. His fear of the unknown paled to the horror of the known.
His last vision was of two large, multi-faceted red eyes set on each side of an enormous maw and a pair of mandibles red with blood. His blood, he thought numbly. His last thought was, “What next, a Mahar?”
As its companions dragged Vince’s corpse away to feed, two of the creatures slipped through the narrow opening between the Cerberus and the tunnel wall and scurried down the tunnel, seeking escape from the dark, hidden world that had been their home for millions of years. They became a part of the shadows as they sought the source of the tantalizing odors coming from the warren of tunnels, a smell and taste with which they were now familiar – human flesh.
5
July 5, 2016, 1:00 a.m. Ngomo Mine, 66 Level –
Judith Ainsley checked the wiring inside the electrical panel in Shaft B106West on 66 Level. The high humidity played hell with the connections, creating dangerous short-circuits that plagued the lights, plunging the shaft into darkness with alarming frequency. Though the shaft was no longer in operation, the inspector had written the lights up on his last report, and as an electrician, one of the few female technicians in the mine, it was her job to fix it. She would rather be home in bed. She was nearing the end of a long double shift and eager to go topside.
“Hand me that brush,” she said to her assistant, Dylan Pitt. He was a young man ten years her junior, but she often caught his gaze straying to her ass. She didn’t mind. Her husband was a slob, and a tumble with the strapping eighteen year old might be fun. So far, he hadn’t made any advances, and she was reluctant to. The company frowned on dalliances between employees.
Pitt handed her a wire brush. She double-checked the wires with her current meter to make sure the power was off before scrubbing the rust from the connecting strip. The shadows cast by her helmet light made the job difficult. Finally, satisfied it was as clean as she could get it, she attached the wire for the lights and tightened the connection; then, she sprayed waterproof coating over the strip to seal it.
“That should do it,” she said and threw the switch. The lights flickered for a moment before settling down to a steady glow.
“You do good work, Judy,” Pitt said.
“I’m the best,” she retorted. “I’ve been doing it for fifteen years.”
“Good, I want to learn from the best.”
“Just stick with me and … What was that?” Something had caught her attention.
Pitt glanced behind them. “What?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I thought I saw something.”
“Rats,” he said.
“It was bigger than a rat.” She couldn’t think of anything else in the mines. An animal could have ventured down the skip elevator two levels above them, but most didn’t like the heat or the noise. She laughed. “Only we humans are stupid enough to come down here. It must have been a shadow.”
“Or a mine ghost,” Pitt said, smiling
She handed Pitt her tools. He returned them to her tool bag, carefully wiping each one and storing it in its proper place. She smiled at his thoroughness. She had been caught in the dark too many times to fumble around for the proper tool when she needed it. Though he had been her assistant for only three months, he was a fast learner. He picked up her bag and slung it over his shoulder.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here. I could use a bit of sunshine and some lunch.”
“It’s after midnight,” he reminded her.
“Then a midnight snack will have to do.”
As they approached one of the ventilator shafts, she noticed the screen bent outward from the half-meter-diameter opening. She stopped and knelt in front of it, enjoying the cooler air blowing from it. “I didn’t notice this on the way down. Oh well, I had better fix it while I’m here. No reason to write it up and send a maintenance person back down.”
“I’ll do it,” Pitt volunteered.
“My, aren’t you eager. Okay. Have at it.”
She stood back to watch as Pitt pulled a hammer, a battery-powered drill, and a handful of screws from the tool bag. He knelt in front of the opening and drilled new holes in the wooden frame. Just as he began pushing the wire screen back into place, something almost as dark as the shadows within the opening reached out, grabbed his head, and yanked him inside. His scream was short-lived, but the sound of his body banging against the sides of the shaft as it fell the hundred meters to the ventilator fan below sickened her. She had seen what the fan’s meter-long blades could do to flesh, after once removing a mutilated bat from a stalled fan in the upper levels. She had barely recognized the mangled mess.
The horror of the manner of her assistant’s death paled in comparison to the reason for it. He hadn’t fallen. Something had pulled him inside. There was no ladder, so it couldn’t be human.
She picked up the hammer and raised it in the air; then, she inched closer to the opening. She was so intent on discovering what was within the opening that she forgot about the shadow she thought she had seen earlier. A scuttling sound above her head distracted her. She glanced up at the row of bleeder pipes running along the wall near the roof. Sitting atop one of the pipes was a creature from one of her worst nightmares. The meter-and-a half-long, eight-legged cross between a scorpion and an ant lion stared down at her with two pairs of multi-faceted insect eyes. The monster was as black as a funeral dress and had vicious claws as long as her arm.
“What the fuck?” she whispered.
She swung the hammer at the creature’s head. It was like hitting a stone wall as the hammer bounced off the creature’s hard carapace. It clacked its mouthparts together rapidly. As she prepared for a second swing, its companion from the airshaft clamped down on her leg with its claws. The pain was excruciating, a raging inferno that swept up her leg and into her chest. She dropped the hammer and glanced down. White bone was visible through the deep gash in her leg. As she bent over to staunch the bleeding with her hand, the creature on the pipe slashed at her head, slicing away her right ear and cheek, exposing her jawbone.
Her panic turned to terror. She began screaming, swinging her arms wildly to fight off the creatures from hell. She fell to the floor. She picked up the drill and drove its ten-centimeter bit into the nearest creature, feeling a rush of satisfaction when the bit pierced the hard carapace and struck softer flesh beneath. Yellow ichor oozed through the small wound. The creature emitted a keening sound and tried to crawl back into the airshaft. She clung to the drill until it pinned her hand against the frame before letting go.
The second giant insect fell on her from its perch. She had no time to defend herself. It sank its stinger into her chest. Instantly, she felt the venom spreading through her lungs. Each breath became a battle she knew she could not win. The claws closed around her neck with more pressure than she would have thought possible, choking her. Her vision swam. Gradually, the pain receded. Where once she felt fire, a numbing cold crept through her body.
Is this what it feels like to die? she thought.
She heard disgusting wet crunching sounds and suspected it was the creature devouring her, but she no longer cared. She was drifting away like a feather on a breeze, no longer attached to her useless body.
This isn’t so bad. I thought it would be much worse.
Then, pain exploded in her entire being, and she knew what death really felt like.
6
July 5, 2016 1:00 a.m. Ngomo Mine, Klerksdorp, South Africa –
When Alan rushed into the Shack, he found Bill pale and trembling, quite a change from his usual imperturbable demeanor. “I called Van Gotts’ security,” Bill said. “They should be here any minute.”
“What happened?” Alan was breathless after his sprint from the parking lot to the trailer.
Bill tried to remain calm and professional as he deliver
ed his report, but Alan detected the underlying current of uneasiness in his voice. “Vince failed to report in on schedule. The phone was out, but I could see him on the camera holding up his laptop with the message ‘Taking a break’. I assumed we lost the audio connection. It’s been a little quirky all day. He doused the lights and everything went dark. I didn’t think anything of it. We were going down to join him in few hours. Later, I noticed that the lights were back on. I began to pan the camera and found this.”
Alan watched the monitor. The Cerberus’ lights were on, bathing the end of the tunnel in bright light, but there was no sign of Vince or the guard; then, he noticed the irregular opening in the rock face. “What’s that?”
“It looks like Vince busted through a void.”
Alan’s apprehension backed down a notch. Vince’s curiosity had gotten the better of him, and he had entered the opening. It even explained the sudden surge of speed at the end of the Cerberus’ run. “He’s probably looking for Pellucidar, and the guard went with him,” Alan said. “It was a dumb move but typically Vince.”
Bill shook his head. “Not the opening. This.”
Alan peered more intently at the screen but couldn’t see what Bill meant until he zoomed in on an object lying on the ground and slid a control to sharpen the image. It was a long knife, its white handle smeared with blood. Alan’s heart began pounding, and he had difficulty swallowing.
“I’m going down there,” he told Bill.