“Seriously, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to clock you,” Robbie said. “You’re as crazy as they are, getting riled up over King Tut’s curse or whatever. This isn’t a fucking movie—”
Barr was talking, and Robbie shut up so he could hear. Gaines cocked his head toward the crack, his eyes too big behind his smudgy glasses.
“...was very specific, but obviously the phonetics are a crap shoot,” the lieutenant said. “There are alternates for every sound, these are just ranked by probability.”
“What’s this part?” Pruitt asked.
“Let’s see...ah-nee-suh ay-yah ook, c’thy oth sai nah-ee oh kuh.”
The k sounds were thick, like Barr was clearing his throat. The captain repeated the nonsense several times, smoothing the syllables into words. “Anisaiauk, c’thioth sinaio’k.”
They went through the process a couple of times, the captain apparently pointing at words, Barr sounding them out, Pruitt repeating them. The language sounded primitive and weird... And were the shadows in the cave growing? No, of course not. Although, if the generator went out suddenly, Robbie thought he might shit himself.
Gaines was making little groaning, anxious panting noises, like he was about to hurl. Robbie stared straight ahead, getting more and more irritated with Gaines because now he had a bad feeling, and it was Gaines’ fault, and being annoyed was infinitely better than the deep dread that was sitting in his guts like a rotten meal.
“All right, let’s do this,” Pruitt said, finally.
“Recording at 0304.”
The captain started to speak, his voice clear and calm, powering through the foreign language. Gaines had taken a few steps back from the crack and seemed to be trying not to hyperventilate as the ugly sounds of the ancient words whispered up the dead corridor.
A hoarse cry echoed through the tunnels.
For a second Robbie thought horrible things, but the shout turned into words, stop, you have to stop! Safar. Running footsteps filled the tunnel, the man’s hysterical cries getting louder, Washington shouting after him to halt or he was going to fire.
Goddamn, the Arab lost his shit! Had he gotten hold of a weapon? Robbie raised his M4, gaze straining at the dark, his heart pounding. The captain’s voice was getting louder, too, belting out the words like he’d been born speaking them.
“Sethiu’k’atas, esa naiu’shu t’na’k, aiu hath iutho—”
“Captain Pruitt!” Gaines shouted at the crack, voice high and desperate. “Sirs, we might have a situation, maybe you should stop now!”
The captain raised his voice to shout over Gaines, the words thundering, too loud, like a bullhorn had suddenly come into play. Safar was still coming, still yelling, but his shouts were lost beneath the captain’s booming incantation.
Safar ran into the top of the tunnel, a smudge of shadow barreling down the slope, no flashlight but clear enough to make out. Robbie trained for center mass—
—and a beam swept into the tunnel behind the running professor.
Fuck!
“Washington, get back!” Robbie called, but the soldier was gaining on the Arab, had slung his rifle and was going in for a tackle.
“Anaiu thi’k’thi lu esa—” The Captain’s words were impossibly louder.
“Stop him!” Safar shrieked, close enough that Robbie could make out the black hole of his open mouth and then Washington dove and they both crashed to the tunnel floor. Safar flailed and kicked, punching wildly.
Robbie ran toward them, their struggle drowned out by the captain’s recitation. Gaines ran at Robbie’s side, deathly pale, his M4 hugged to his chest.
Washington was on top of Safar, delivering a beat down, spitting curses. Safar had stopped fighting back, only tried to cover his head, shouting weakly, incoherently.
“Hey, hey!” Robbie called, and Washington looked up, panting.
“As ethiu’k ah na! Ak na!” Pruitt screamed the final words almost triumphantly, and then Barr cried out, a shriek of absolute terror—
—and the ground shook and rumbled and shifted, and then Robbie was going sideways, plowing into Gaines who crashed to the tunnel floor. Dust rained down, the motes brilliantly lit by a deep, sickly purple light that suddenly poured into the tunnel from the crack at the bottom.
“Run!” Gaines shrieked, stumbling to his feet and then tearing up the slope. Robbie took off after him.
The captain’s Sig fired and something screamed, drowning out the blast of the nine millimeter.
Fuckfuckfuck!
Robbie was running flat out, but that scream got him running faster. It was a massive, guttural bellow that shook his bones and made his guts turn to water, the roar of a bull gator the size of a Cadillac. He outpaced Gaines, but Washington had joined them and was faster, pounding past Robbie, kicking up dust.
Captain Pruitt’s shriek of agony was cut off cold, the echo chased by an unearthly trumpeting, like an elephant with a wet bone in its throat. Rocks shattered in an explosion of sound and the tunnel in front of them lit up with alien light.
Washington looked back, his bared teeth and the whites of his eyes glowing purple. Whatever he saw sent him diving sideways, toward the unlit dead-end with the covered cess bucket on the tunnel’s east side.
Robbie didn’t look back. He ran into the narrow passage after Washington, Gaines piling in behind him. Gaines tripped and crashed to his knees, knocking Robbie off balance.
“Help me!” Safar screamed. Robbie swung his rifle up and stepped around Gaines. He darted a look around the edge of the passage.
Safar was stumbling up the slope, blood pouring from his nose—and behind him, a fast-moving wall of slick gray flesh puckered with circles of thick, translucent hooks, curved like claws. The misshapen wall pulsed, morphing appendages at the edges pulling it up the tunnel.
The silent mass swept over Safar, dropping on him like a heavy wet blanket, and Robbie saw a dozen slits in the monster’s back, black and shining, the smallest the size of a man’s fist. They opened and closed as the thing clenched itself, and Safar’s muffled shriek faded to nothing.
Eyes.
The thing’s skin started to bubble like mud and change color, darkening. Robbie pulled his head back inside—but not before an entirely different monstrosity crawled through the smashed rocks at the bottom, something with too many legs. More alien screams and howls poured up from the broken chamber.
“I told you, I fucking told you,” Gaines said.
“It’s what they were saying,” Washington gasped. “The end of the world!”
“Shut up,” Robbie said, because he couldn’t call bullshit. Fucking Christ, what the fuck?
Horrible noises swelled from the chamber, thumps and slithers and wet slaps, moving into the wide tunnel. Robbie backed up, Gaines and Washington making room, all of them crammed behind the chemical bucket at the short passage’s dead end. The shadows of their narrow shelter were smudged by that sickly purple, the light flickering as things moved in front of it. Something chuckled, a deep, humorless clatter that rose and fell.
The light was blocked out completely as the first thing moved past their hiding hole, a smell like gangrene and blood washing over them. It moved quickly for something so big, blocking the light completely for the space of a breath before it was past. Robbie only got a vague sense of its form, a giant, bubbling slab of meat.
Robbie didn’t fire, nor did Washington or Gaines. Maybe, like him, they weren’t so sure it was a good idea to attract any attention. A second creature the size of a young bull ran after the first on spiders’ legs as thick as tree trunks, set wide in its heavy body. It was headless, its yawning mouth on its back, long needles of pale teeth cross-hatched along the spine. The mouth, if that’s what it was, was big enough to chomp a man in half, easy. Three bulbous eye-stalks or antennae stuck up from its stumpy rear, the appendages ducking and swiveling as it skittered past, grit crunching beneath its wide, stick-like feet.
The chuckling monster rolled past
behind the spider-thing on a trail of glistening slime, a warty, black slug as big as a walrus with thick, wiry hairs protruding from its back. It smelled like old puke, the odor so bad that Robbie felt spit curdle in the back of his throat. He thought he heard Gaines make a choking noise, but it was hard to tell over the clatter of the monster’s undulating chuckle, or the deep bellow that spilled up from the shattered Rosetta Room. Robbie pictured a giant alligator down there, but it was probably way worse.
“They’re heading for camp,” Washington whispered, his voice crackling in Robbie’s helmet.
“No shit,” Robbie whispered back. He froze as a fourth monster wriggled past, sliding tendrils of flesh hissing over the rocks at their hideout’s entrance. It looked like a rolling knot of eels, hundreds of them. The limbs that snaked into their small tunnel were close enough that Robbie could have taken a single step forward and touched the crepey, murky-green of pocked flesh. It smelled like meat dropped in a fire.
It slithered past them, following the others.
“What do we do?” Gaines asked.
The M4s each held thirty. “Anyone got extra rounds, second mag?” Robbie asked.
Unhappy negatives all around. They were on guard duty where the biggest threat was supposed to be pissy college students.
Ninety rounds between them, and a fifth monster stalked past their hiding place, a membranous mass of bizarre angles that hurt to look at. It reminded Robbie of layers of bat wings, and it crawled like a bat, on bony joints draped with stretched skin. The thing slipped on the mucilaginous slime left by the slug and trumpeted from an unseen orifice, its high bray so loud that Robbie’s ears went numb.
“We gotta get out of here,” Washington said, as the thing moved past.
“Yeah, how?” Robbie asked. “Join the parade? We wait here; we shoot anything that tries to come in.”
“What the fuck are we waiting for?” Washington said.
“For these things to clear out,” Robbie said. “We leave when they stop coming through.”
“What makes you think they’re going to stop?” Gaines said. “We don’t even know where they’re coming from. There could be hundreds. Thousands.”
“Everyone’s asleep,” Washington said. “They’re gonna get slaughtered.”
“No way,” Robbie said. “We got grenade launchers out there. Sarge’ll kick these things asses.” Assuming he woke up. Assuming everyone woke up and didn’t freak the fuck out.
Assuming these things can die.
“If they fire at the tunnel, it’s going to cave in,” Gaines said. “We’ll be trapped down here in the dark, with them.”
“Jesus, will you shut up?” Robbie wished he could see to smack Gaines, but the other men were only blurs in the purple-tinged dark. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Listen!” Gaines whispered.
There was something moving below in the room, something wet but maybe not that big... And there was a hum, a thin, reedy pitch, high, wavering. Distant. What was that? It sounded like... Robbie didn’t know.
The primordial gator-thing roared again from down in the room. The sound was so deep it was a vibration, so loud that the tunnels roared back. As the echoes died, Robbie heard the high sound again. It had thickened, lower sounds joining the swelling noise.
“We have to destroy the altar,” Gaines said.
“What? No! Why?” Robbie asked.
“Can’t you hear them?” Gaines asked. “They’re all coming.”
Robbie’s terror spiked at Gaines’ desolate pronouncement. It sounded exactly like a million screaming monsters at the end of a long, empty valley, charging across. He could see them, broken lines of lurching, leaping horrors running through a vast dark, running toward a pinpoint of purple light far ahead. Toward us.
“The fuck,” Washington said, miserably.
“Pruitt opened a door,” Gaines said. He sounded breathless. “We don’t close it, there’s nowhere to run. You think twenty guys with small artillery are gonna stop an army of these things?”
Robbie’s whole body clenched. He wanted out, bad, but Gaines wasn’t wrong about what good the squad would be against a thousand actual monsters.
What could anybody do? How fucked is everything, if they get out?
“Breaking the rock, that’ll close it?” Robbie asked.
“It has to,” Gaines said. “The invocation or whatever is written on the altar, right? Safar said it had power. We break it, maybe we end this.”
Shit fuck!
The wet whatever-it-was slopped closer to their tunnel. Two, three, bird-things zipped past: dark, winged blurs as big as eagles that trailed long, whipping tails. One of them went high and slammed a light on the tunnel’s roof. It hissed like a snake and Robbie saw its long, toothy snout and hooded black eyes, feathers that looked like charcoal cobwebs before it flapped out of sight.
Something screamed from the west, a howl that wound into the tunnels from outside, high and alien and malicious. The bull-spider? The living wall of hooks? Shots fired, scattered bursts of M4s and for an instant he felt hope, but the thing screamed again and was joined by the hellish cries of two others, the trumpeter and a new voice like nails on a chalkboard. They kept screaming, a hellish, feral harmony that was dropping in pitch.
That the rounds aren’t stopping.
From the Rosetta Room something grunted, an impossibly deep, animal noise. Beneath it, the sound of the encroaching army grew, screeches and roars rising out of the clamor.
“We gotta do this now,” Gaines said.
“Okay,” Robbie said.
“You’re fucking crazy,” Washington said. “You hear what’s in that room? It’s a fucking dinosaur or something!”
“We can’t stay here if there’s more coming,” Robbie said. “You want to run for the exit with a hundred more of those things behind you?”
“Oh, fuck this shit in the fucking ass,” Washington said.
“I’m in front,” Robbie said. “You’re right behind me, watching the west side of the tunnel. Gaines, cover our six. Short bursts, we go fast and stick together. We blast whatever’s in the room and break the rock, then we are fucking out of here. That’s the plan, okay?”
“Good, okay,” Gaines said.
“Motherfuckers,” Washington said, and exhaled. “Okay.”
Robbie edged toward the entrance, the other two lining up behind him. The wet-sounding thing was close, maybe twenty feet south and low to the ground. Whatever it was crept across the rocks in uneven, moist slaps, like fat fish being whacked on river stones.
Robbie ducked to look. The creature was like a thick, pale flatworm, five feet long, maybe, and two across, but barely a foot thick. More than a dozen stumpy legs stuck out of its weird body and it slapped half of them down and rolled over itself, humping its long, muscular form into an arch, more of its legs slapping down, edging the thing up the shadowy tunnel. Its corpse-skin glowed wet in the purple light.
The crack at the bottom of the slope had become a wide, jagged hole littered with rocks, the eerie light blasting from inside, staining the sane light of the tunnel’s roof strip with its otherworldly hue.
The screaming of the running horde grew louder.
Fucking do it, go!
Robbie stepped into the tunnel and pointed the short weapon at the humping flatworm, finger light on the trigger. He fired twice, two bursts of three, catching it as it reared up. The steel-topped copper slugs smacked into the strange flesh, ripping off one of the stumpy legs. The monster spasmed silently as dark ichor splattered from the curling, trembling body, flowing like chocolate syrup over its pale skin.
It flopped over and stopped moving, but there were more things coming, three dark shapes emerging from the glowing hole, loping toward them. They were four-legged and the size of large dogs, but their bodies looked flayed, all sinew and bone and dark muscle, with plates of bone rising from the front shoulders. Their heads were flat like a lizard’s, their jaws as wide as their head
s, hanging open, revealing teeth like knives. As they charged up the slope, Robbie saw that they had insect eyes, rounded clusters of glistening black orbs high on their earless skulls.
Robbie targeted the closest and strode forward, firing.
The first took three shots to its barrel chest and issued a shriek like somebody stomping on a parrot. Holes opened in its body, but no blood came out, only dust or smoke. It staggered but kept coming, still making that horrible noise.
Robbie fired again, aiming for those wide jaws. The grouping went low, tore into the thing’s short, thick neck.
The air around the monster was getting thicker, darker, as smoke or dust poured from the new wounds. Its scream turned into a choking rasp. It stumbled a few steps and then pitched forward, still jetting streams of dark gas.
Washington was firing at the one on the right. Its scream picked up where the others had died. Robbie targeted the third.
He aimed for the hanging jaw, but it jumped. The rounds snapped into the thing’s left foreleg near the shoulder and it crashed to the tunnel floor, squawking furiously, thrashing against the rocks as it tried to get up.
Washington’s target was down, smoking, the gas flowering like ink in water. Robbie walked quickly ahead and fired another burst at his target’s sleek, horrible skull. One of its compound eyes ruptured, dark slime spraying, and its stringy body went limp.
Robbie hurried past the bloody flatworm, breaking into a jog. The longer it took them to get to that altar, the more things that could come out. Washington stayed on his heels, cursing softly in a steady stream. Gaines shuffle-stepped after them, breathing heavily.
They had to go through the fog of the dog-lizards’ impossible blood, a choking, noxious smoke that burned Robbie’s nose and eyes and put a taste in his mouth like fish oil. They were all gagging before they got through the miasma. Robbie’s eyes watered, but he kept them fixed on the glowing hole, closer now. His ears rang from the stutter of the M4s.
Something spilled out of the hole, something big.
It came out in a humped crouch but unfolded itself into the tunnel, another wall of flesh like the thing that had gotten Safar—a thing that stretched its pulsing parts to the tunnel’s ceiling and one wall, pulling its unlikely body forward. Thick crescents of talon or tooth stuck out of the gray flesh, hooked like claws. It rippled toward them like some giant manta ray, shapeless blobs of flesh at its edges forming into rough clumps that shot off and grabbed the rocks of the ceiling and the west wall.
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