Sam Gladstone said, “There’s no one behind me, Sarge.”
“What?”
“He was bringing up the rear, but he’s not there.”
Coulthard spat a curse. “Beaumont!” he called out in a harsh whisper. “Fuck, surely he hasn’t panicked and run back.”
“Wouldn’t I have heard, Sarge?” Gladstone asked.
“I don’t know. Would you? Spencer, leave your tablet here and double time back up the tunnel. If you don’t catch up to him in a few hundred yards, we’ll have to let him go and I’ll kick his fucking ass when we get back.”
“Righto, Sarge.”
Spencer put down his gear and jogged away. They stood in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes.
“Nervous kid,” Brown said eventually. “First tour.”
“Don’t make excuses for him,” Coulthard said. “He’s a fucking soldier.”
Spencer walked back towards them, holding something out. “We need to get the fuck out of here,” he said. Hanging from his fingers was a chain with two dog tags.
“The fuck?” Dillman whispered.
“Beaumont’s?” Coulthard asked in a tight voice.
“He’s a fucking skeleton just like the insurgent fuckers we found. Nothing left but buckles and weapons and shit. He’s just fucking bones, Sarge!”
Dillman began muttering and shone his helmet lamp frantically in every direction. The mood of the squad began to fracture.
Coulthard swatted Dillman’s lamp off. “Stow that shit! Everyone stay calm.”
“Calm, Sarge?” Gladstone asked. “Seriously, we’re in deep shit here.”
“Stay. Calm. Spencer, did you recover Beaumont’s weapon.”
Spencer shook his head. “Left it there. The strap is gone, too hard to carry. But I took his clips.”
“Fair enough. Now, we need to reassess what we’re doing here.”
“I think we should leave, Sarge,” Brown said. He tried to keep his voice calm, but heard and felt the quaver in it.
“It ain’t that simple.”
“It must be,” Dillman said. “Fuck those guys, if they’re even still alive down there. Whatever got Beaumont can get them. We’ll wait outside the caves and pick off any who comes out.”
Coulthard held up a hand, a pale green wave in their night vision goggles. “Chill, everyone. It ain’t as simple as leaving. I’m with you. In any other circumstances I would absolutely call an abort. But whatever took Beaumont, it took him from the back.”
“Which means it’s behind us,” Brown said, realisation like an icy wave through his gut. “Or there’s more than one, ahead and behind.”
“Exactly.”
“Does that mean we should carry on though?” Gladstone asked. “Maybe it’s only gonna get worse.”
“Maybe. Or maybe there’s another way out.” Coulthard picked up Spencer’s tablet, checked the display. “We’ve still got a bunch of sensors, yeah?”
Spencer dropped Beaumont’s tags into a pocket. “Yeah, plenty.”
“Okay. We carry on for another kilometre and see if it leads to any branches in the tunnel, any other way out. If it does, we can maybe go around whatever’s in here. If not, we turn around and risk facing it. Spencer, it’s unlikely but do we have any signal down here?”
The corporal pulled out his gear and spent a moment trying to get a response from Base. Then he went wide band, looking for any transmissions. He found none and no one responded to open hails. “Nothing, Sarge.”
“I didn’t think so. Okay, Brown, you stay in the middle. Me and Spencer will take point. I want Gladstone and Dillman on rear guard, but you two walk backwards. We move slow and you don’t take your eyes off the tunnel behind us. Let’s go.”
They moved slowly on again. Brown felt more than a little useless in the middle of the group, but he knew what Coulthard was doing. Protect the guy with the best chance of helping any wounded. Except it looked like whatever was in these caves didn’t leave any wounded. He heard a gasp from Gladstone and turned to look.
“See that?” Gladstone whispered to Dillman.
“Yeah. There!”
Brown saw it too. He lifted his goggles to see with unfiltered eyes. A movement, more a shift of light across the darkness, like a ripple of wan blue luminescence. He caught part of a smooth, glassy sphere, a glimpse of something globular, but it pressed into the wall and vanished.
The others had stopped to watch. All five of them stared hard, but the tunnel was black as death and still.
“Keep moving,” Coulthard said.
Brown walked backwards as well, eyes trying to scan every inch of the tunnel behind them.
“There!” Gladstone said sharply.
He’d seen it too. A glassy flex of movement on the ceiling about thirty metres back. Closer than before. Almost as if a giant water droplet had begun to swell and hang, only to be quickly sucked back up.
“It’s fucking following us,” Dillman hissed and snapped on his helmet light again.
“But what is it?” Spencer demanded. “Is it even alive? Doc?”
Brown jumped as he was directly addressed. “I’m no expert here,” he said. “Whatever it is…”
His words were drowned out by Gladstone’s screams and Dillman’s shouts of fright as the torchlight reflected back off a huge slithering mass across the ceiling right above them. It ran and undulated like an upside down river across the rock then expanded, long and pendulous, extruding from the tunnel roof like a clear jelly waterfall. The huge, gelatinous blob unfurled itself and dropped.
Dillman leapt to one side, the deafening bark and muzzle flash of his weapon filling the tunnel as Gladstone tried to run backwards, but skidded and fell. He knocked Brown back, who dropped onto his rump in surprise and scrambled away, scrabbling for his weapon as Coulthard and Spencer aimed theirs above his head and let rip.
Gladstone’s screams were bloodcurdling as the thing landed across his legs. Brown tried to see through the bursts of muzzle fire and caught staccato images like through a strobe light. Gladstone’s legs, clothing and flesh alike, melted away inside the transparent blob in an instant, leaving only bones. He tried to batter it off with his hands only to raise fleshless, stark white fingerbones in horror that fell and scattered across his lap. The meat of his arms was gone to his elbows in a second. Tenticular appendages lashed forward from the globular mass and retracted like a frantic sea anemone as it filled the tunnel with its bulk. Hails of bullets from Dillman, Spencer and Coulthard slapped and sputtered into the thing with little effect. It seemed to flinch and flex away from the bullets, then surge forward again, relentless. Only Dillman’s torch beam seemed to really hold it up. Gladstone’s screams cut abruptly short as it reached his torso and then Brown was up and running.
He pounded down the tunnel and realised the others were with him. At least, Spencer and Coulthard were. They panted as they ran, intent only on putting distance between themselves and that foetid horror. He didn’t dare look back for fear the thing was bulging along behind them, for fear he’d see Gladstone finished off or Dillman caught. He stumbled and nearly fell sprawling at one point as the tunnel floor became broken rock and one wall half-fallen, almost blocking the way. The result of the grenade they had heard earlier. Bones scattered as he kicked unwittingly through another skeleton.
A brighter glow began to fill the tunnel ahead and he pounded for it, heedless to any danger before them compared to the certain death behind.
They burst out into a dizzyingly huge cavern, skidding to a halt on a rock ledge that protruded into space hundreds of metres above the cave floor. The ceiling was lost in swirling mists far above, but a soft blue glow leaked through. The walls of the gigantic space were streaked with the strange lichen and the entire place swam in a surreal glow, almost like wan daylight leaking through tropical waters, incongruous several kilometres underground. Filling the floor and rising high into the wisps of mist was a structure clearly constructed by intelligent design – a huge sp
iralling tower, hundreds of metres high, with a base at least a kilometre across. Curving buttresses met smaller towers in a circle around it. Monumental, the organic-looking structure appeared to have been painstakingly carved from the rock itself. From their ledge, a mammoth stairway led down to the building’s lowest levels and the cave floor. Each stair was around two-metres high and a similar width; hundreds of the giant steps leading down into haze. The air was colder and damp, smelled metallic and ancient. Everything about the sight emanated age beyond any span of history. Geological age.
“Fuck me,” Spencer said, lifting his goggles. His voice held the taint of madness.
They jumped and spun at a scuffing, puffing sound from behind. Dillman staggered from the tunnel mouth, moaning in agony. His left arm was nothing but useless, dangling bone, his hand gone. Half his face was missing, teeth grinning from the exposed skull where the bubbling, bleeding skin still retracted. “Saaarrrge,” he slurred, reaching out with his good hand as he fell to one knee.
Spencer staggered backwards and turned; vomited noisily. Brown hurried forward, his medical training taking over, pushing shock and horror aside for the moment. But he didn’t dare touch the poor bastard. He looked closely, trying to ascertain where the damage ended. Dillman’s shoulder was eaten away and still melting. The cartilage holding the whole joint together disintegrated as Brown watched and Dillman’s arm bones fell to the rock with a clatter. The flesh of his neck liquefied and blood pulsed from the exposed carotid artery.
Dillman scrabbled at Brown one-handed as the medic gaped, at a total loss, even as the creep of disintegration slowed to a stop. But the damage was irreversibly done and Dillman’s lifeblood pumped out. Coulthard’s barrel slid into Brown’s vision, pressed up against Dillman’s forehead, and barked. The poor bastard flew backwards as the back of his head exploded out across the cave wall.
Spencer continued to empty the contents of his stomach as Brown sank to his knees and shook, mind flat-lining. Coulthard moved to the mouth of the tunnel from which they’d emerged and stared into the darkness. He flicked on his helmet torch and the beam pierced the black. He played it over the walls and ceiling.
As Spencer finally stopped puking, gasping short, shuddering breaths, Coulthard said, “Doesn’t seem to be following us. Maybe it just guards the tunnels.”
“Guards?” Brown managed.
Coulthard gestured at the impossible subterranean structure. “I don’t think anyone is supposed to find that, do you?”
“But what is it?” Brown asked. “What manner of creature…?”
“Best not try to figure it out,” Coulthard said. “Ours are soldier minds. That kind of question is for scientists.”
“I can’t believe it didn’t get all of us,” Spencer said.
“Out of practice maybe,” Brown wondered. “It’s not that quick, for all its deadliness. We only saw four insurgent bodies too. So four more got past it. It didn’t like our lights, though they only slowed it.”
“The flashlights were more use than the gunfire,” Spencer said.
“Maybe too bright out here,” Coulthard said, staring out into the wan blue glow of the cavern.
“Look.”
Coulthard and Brown turned to see where Spencer pointed. Several giant staircases like the one in front of them led from the cavern floor up to various ledges around the walls. Their ledge covered a hundred metres with another staircase leading down from the far end. On that stairway, four tiny figures were clambering resolutely down. They moved as if exhausted, sitting on the edge of each high step before slipping onto the one below. One of them was being helped by the others, clearly wounded.
“Fuckers,” Coulthard said. He went to Dillman’s corpse, unslung the man’s sniper rifle and fitted a telescopic sight. Moving to the edge of their own top stair he dropped onto his belly and unfolded the supports beneath the rifle’s barrel to aim across and down.
“Seriously, Sarge?” Brown asked, incredulous.
“We have a fucking job to do, gentlemen. I’ll see that done properly, at least.”
He squeezed the trigger and one insurgent’s head burst with a spray of blood they could see from afar, even with the naked eye. The others became frantic, scrambling like frightened ants. Coulthard fired again and a second man went down as his chest burst open. Another shot and the wounded insurgent was hit in the shoulder and spun around to drop to the rock and crawl into the lee of a huge step out of sight. They had finally realised where the fire was coming from and the other man scrambled into cover as well.
“Fuckers,” Coulthard said again. He kept his eye to the sight and lay still, breathing gently.
Spencer sank to curl up against the wall at the back of the rock shelf. His arms wrapped around his head as he rocked gently.
“Spencer’s lost it,” Brown whispered to Coulthard.
“I know,” the sergeant said without taking his eye away from the telescopic sight. “Give him some time and see if he comes around.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Who knows? Right now, that fucking thing isn’t coming out of the tunnel and I’m certainly not going back in. There’s one unhurt insurgent bastard down there and one with a shoulder wound of unknown severity. For now, I plan to wait them out and give Spencer a chance to get his shit together. I suggest you have a rest.”
His tone brooked no further discussion. Brown moved well away from the tunnel mouth and sat down against the stone. It was cold on his back. Clearly Coulthard had lost it too, only he was dealing with it in a typically old-school military way. The big, musclebound sergeant had seen more action than the rest of them put together and he let all that training take over. Maybe it was a good strategy. If the man could divorce himself from his emotion and let his experience run him like a robot, perhaps that would actually see him out of this alive.
Time ticked by. Brown began to worry about more mundane matters like where they might sleep, how much they had left in the way of rations and water, whether there was any way out other than the way they had come in. And he certainly wasn’t keen to go back up the tunnel either.
He jumped as Coulthard’s rifle boomed.
“I knew I could outwait him,” the sergeant said with a smile in his voice.
“Did you get him?”
“Yep. He didn’t think I’d wait on a scope all that time. I’ve sat for longer than ten minutes, you murderous insurgent motherfucker. You’re a fucking amateur, you had to peek. A dead fucking amateur now.” He stood and slung the rifle over his shoulder. “All dead except the shoulder wound and I reckon he’ll bleed out if nothing else. Let’s go and see.”
Brown stood, brow knitted in confusion. “Go and see?”
“Yep. What else is there to do?”
Brown thought hard but came up empty. The sergeant had a point. They at least needed to look around if they didn’t plan to go back up the tunnel, so they might as well finish the job while they searched. It was pragmatism taken to the max, but it made a cold sense.
Coulthard went and crouched beside Spencer. “How you doing, soldier?”
“Not good, Sarge.”
“Me either. But we gotta move, okay?”
Spencer looked up, his narrow face white as bone under his brown crewcut. “I got a little boy at home, Sarge. He’s gonna be two next month. I’m due home in time for his birthday. I missed his first.”
Coulthard patted Spencer’s shoulder. “We’ll get out and get you on a transport home just when you’re supposed to be.”
“We won’t, Sarge. None of us are getting out.” He pointed at the spires and tower filling the cavern. “What the fuck even is that, Sarge? We’re gonna die here.” He sounded perfectly calm about it.
“We’re getting out,” Coulthard said firmly.
“My wife always worried I’d come home with no legs from an IED. ‘You won’t get killed,’ she said one night when we’d been drinking. ‘I can feel that.’ She was always what she called spiritual. Thoug
ht she was fucking psychic, you know? But it was harmless. ‘You won’t get killed,’ she said, ‘but I have a terrible feeling you’re going to be maimed by a mine.’ Great fucking prophecy, eh, Sarge? For all her spirituality, she certainly didn’t foresee this shit!”
Coulthard laughed. “I don’t think anyone foresaw this shit.”
“I was supposed to go home in two weeks, Sarge.” Spencer’s eyes brimmed with tears.
Brown gaped as Coulthard did something he would never have anticipated. The sergeant gathered Spencer into a tight hug and held the man against his chest.
“Let it out, solider,” Coulthard said, and Spencer sobbed.
Brown stood uncomfortably off to one side for a good minute while Spencer bawled. The medic wondered why he felt so calm, so cold inside, and realised he had his terror, his panic, locked up in his chest. His true self and all the emotions it harboured was in a sealed box inside him and at some point he would have to unlock that box. It frightened him to think what might happen when he did, but for now, it stopped him falling to pieces. Did that make him a better soldier than Spencer? A worse human being? For all the atrocities he’d seen, all the wounds and trauma he’d become accustomed to, surely this day’s experiences should break him. He had no wife or kids like Spencer to yearn for. But the sergeant did and he was holding it together too. Maybe Spencer had just lost control of his locked box for now.
Coulthard pushed the man away. “Right. Now on your feet, son. Feel better.”
“Sorry, Sarge, I just…”
“Fuck sorry, Spencer, it’s all done. You ready to move out?”
“Yes, Sarge.” Spencer’s voice still quavered, but there was some confidence back in it.
“Brown?”
The medic nodded, shook himself. “Yes, Sarge.” At least, he thought, as ready as I possibly can be.
Coulthard sniffed and settled his pack. “Well, I am certainly not going back the way we came. That thing in the tunnel, whatever it is, seems to want to stay there, so we’ll leave it well alone. There must be another way out. Nothing that size,” he pointed at the monumental structure filling the cave, “can possibly only have one tiny tunnel leading in. Let’s go.”
SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest Page 10