Max grabbed a leg and bit down hard on the bare flesh. Its owner screamed and jumped back, giving Max enough room to reach in and grab a different calf. He pulled, a second person falling as Max kicked wildly, his boots connecting with legs, with arms, heads and groins. He was a flurry of booted fury.
One of the tribespeople screamed. Whatever he’d shouted had an effect; all the tribesmen who’d been pummeling Max suddenly left him alone. They moved away fast.
“That can’t be good,” Max said around a bloody mouth of cracked teeth.
It wasn’t.
The ginormous hell snake was slithering out of the pool and headed straight for Max. The tribespeople shouted and ran, moving further into the cave, leaving Max alone with a nightmare bathed in torchlight.
The snake opened its mouth. This time, without the silt and murk of the water, Max got a clear look at the monster. Ginormous hell snake barely described the creature. Other than the mega sharks Team Grendel had fought, it was the largest single animal Max had ever seen in his life. It rose up, its body coiling back to strike.
“Well. This is how I go out,” Max said aloud.
Max waited for the strike.
Towering over Max, the snake tensed. It began to shake and shiver. Still, no strike.
Then about two meters below its head, the snake’s skin burst open in a flash of light. Blood flew everywhere, the stink of singed flesh filling the cave. The snake aimed its head towards the ceiling of the cave, its jaws opening wide, wider, and even wider until Max heard muscle tear.
The light grew brighter and a laser shot from the snake’s body, cutting deep into the cave’s wall, sending rock falling to the ground. Max scrambled out of the way, getting to his feet then leaping at the last second as the snake shuddered one last time then fell forward onto the shore.
The life was gone from the cold eyes and only torchlight flickered in the orbs as the vertical slits dilated and froze.
“Fuck me,” Max whispered as he picked himself up and carefully approached the snake.
The snake’s body shook. Max jumped back. Then light erupted from the spine and the flesh parted as a laser sliced through muscle and rib.
Shane clawed his way out of the ginormous hell snake’s corpse and rolled out onto the ground. He lay there for a moment, breathing hard then held up a thumb. “Did it,” he said. He pulled the rebreather from his face, gagged several times, then held up a second thumb. “I rock.”
“Dude, way to go.” Max hurried to get his brother clear of the snake’s corpse, dragging Shane up onto his feet. “You good?”
“Ow. Ow, ow, ow,” Shane said. He pushed his brother away. “Ow.”
“What’s broken?”
“Everything?” Shane shook his head and pointed to his chest. “Ribs. A lot of ribs.”
“That thing ate you,” Max responded.
“Too bad for it,” Shane said. “No one eats Shane Reynolds without my consent.”
“Word to that, bro,” Max said, and they high-fived.
Then Shane gasped and lowered his arm. He fell onto the ground, landing on his ass with a thud and another gasp.
“No way I’m swimming back out of here,” he said.
Max scanned the walls of the cave and found their exit. “I think I know the way out, but we probably won’t be alone when we emerge,” he said.
“Just get me away from that,” Shane said, nodding at the dead snake. “Like now, bro.”
THE TRIBESPEOPLE HAD found more bows and arrows, more spears, and some even had pistols.
“Where’d they get pistols?” Shane asked as Max helped him walk out of the cave mouth and into the filtered sunlight of the jungle.
“It’s the 21st century, dude,” Max said. “Probably ebay.”
One of the tribespeople shouted at Shane and Max. The Reynolds brothers only glared.
Bows were pulled taught, arrows and pistols aimed, spears hefted.
“Whelp. It was fun while it lasted,” Max said.
“Was it?” Shane asked.
“I think so,” Max replied.
“Cool. Just checking,” Shane said.
The brothers opened their mouths to shout at the encroaching cannibals, but whatever last words they were going to say were drowned out by rapid gunfire and the screams of the tribespeople. Max and Shane hit the deck. The adrenalized cannibals fell to the ground, ripped apart by bullets.
Max and Shane waited for the gunfire to end before they risked looking up.
Behind the piles of corpses was Vincent Throne, his M4 smoking and sweeping right to left. “You two good?” Thorne called.
“Uncle Vinny!” Max shouted. He got up and helped Shane to his feet. “Damn! Are we glad to see you!”
“The snake?” Thorne asked, all business.
“Killed it dead,” Shane said. “From the inside out because that’s how this Reynolds rolls.”
“It ate him,” Max said.
Thorne paused in his movements and fixed his gaze on Shane. “It ate you?”
“It ate me,” Shane confirmed.
“As in it swallowed you?” Thorne asked.
“Well, I didn’t enter through its butt,” Shane said.
Thorne lowered his weapon. “Why am I not surprised you were eaten by a giant snake?”
“Ginormous hell snake, Uncle Vinny,” Max said.
“Yeah, Uncle Vinny,” Shane said. “Get it right.”
Thorne opened his mouth to respond but only shook his head. “Come on,” he said at last. “Mission accomplished.”
“Except we didn’t get any DNA samples,” Max said.
“Dude, look at me,” Shane said. “I’m a walking DNA sample.”
“Oh, right, true,” Max said. “Nice.”
“Boys!” Thorne snapped. “We have six hours to get out of this jungle and to the coast before the Brazilian army homes in on us. Let’s move!” Thorne took off jogging, leaving Max and Shane to stand there.
“He’s not going to slow down because of my ribs, is he?” Shane asked.
“Nope,” Max said. “You cool?”
“I’ll make it,” Shane said. “No choice.”
“I hear that,” Max said. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Shane said.
The brothers took off, jogging after their uncle, leaving the piles of cannibal corpses, the pools of congealing blood already coated black with insects, and the memory of a ginormous hell snake, far behind.
THE TORCHLIGHT IN the cave dwindled, flickered, sputtered and was gone, plunging the space into pure darkness.
Within that pure darkness, water splashed. The surface of the pool was disturbed. Unseen, a new snake, much larger than the corpse that took up most of the pool’s shore, slithered out of the water. It paused briefly as it came in contact with its dead mate. But it was a snake and grief wasn’t part of its genetic makeup.
The new ginormous hell snake undulated over the corpse and towards the cave exit, ready for the hunt.
GHOSTS OF HYPERIA
Jessica McHugh
It smells like seawater and Aqua Velva in the underground prop room where Victoria Fell stands over her father’s coffin.
She wipes dripping blood from her chin and grits her teeth. This can’t be real. Not Harlan’s cologne, maybe not even the coffin. Certainly not the fingernails scratching the underside of the lid. But then the casket shudders, the lid lifts, and shriveled brown fingers curl over the edge.
Vic stumbles backward into a rack of moldy gowns and quickly snaps up an algae-slicked stiletto as a weapon, but the things in the dark don’t care.
It laughs. It wheezes. And it sounds exactly like Harlan Fell, especially after the hurricane. The breathing alone makes her feel like a child again, before acid reflux and Celiac Disease took hold, and fear was the only thing that swamped her gut with pain. It was the same hushed desperation she heard late at night, when her adoptive father stood outside her room, soundless yet somehow screeching for Victoria to talk to him again.
>
But she could barely look at him after the storm. She wasn’t even certain the man outside the door was Harlan Fell. Even after she left for Cornell at sixteen, part of her believed the creature in the house overlooking Fell’s Fairy Funland was an impostor.
Until Harlan Fell hung himself two years ago in her childhood bedroom. Until he was embalmed, painted up and displayed in a near-empty mortuary. It was him all along, and he died knowing his only child didn’t think he was human.
“I’d never hurt you the way you hurt me,” he says. “I love you, Vic. You’re why I did all this.” The voice is changed now. It slips around pockets of familiarity but loses all trace of her father’s melodic drawl. Even when Harlan was at his worst and sounded like Vic’s most depraved imaginings of the boogeyman, there’s no mistaking this thing for Harlan Fell. It is a hundred wet whispers, a wave of angry ghosts echoing in the utility tunnels underneath the once-legendary theme park.
She covers her ears and pain shoots through her skull. She doesn’t know the severity of her injuries, but she must be battered to hell. Such a hurricane struck Calvert Cliffs once before, but this time she left the watchtower at the onset, directing as many employees as she could to the house on the hill. But the wind was like a serpent, purposeful as it whipped and crashed through the crowd of fleeing actors. It tossed the sea as carelessly as the people dressed as fairies and forest animals, and once the bay surmounted the wall, Vic had no choice but to flee herself.
But that was before she realized the utility tunnels were still accessible. Harlan was supposed to have filled them in, out of respect for the people who died there years ago, out of respect for the teenager who almost did.
The scratching in the coffin increases so exponentially that Harlan would need at least eight arms to execute such cacophony. When the lid explodes off the coffin, Vic buries herself deeper in the dresses, grabs another stiletto and brandishes them like hatchets as the corpse’s pitted face rises above the edge. Harlan Fell’s eyes are pale gray, his skin like bleached driftwood, but there’s life in his lips. They’re theatrically red, and his teeth glimmer Borax white in the musty room.
“You can end this now, Victoria. One wish, and this can all be over.”
She shakes her head so much it nauseates her. She says, “no” until it’s just a nonsensical moan.
The corpse chuckles like a brush fire.
“Very well. More fun for us.”
With a howl, the cadaver lunges at Vic in the costume rack, but she narrowly avoids his skeletal grasp and whips around with the shoe in her fist. The stiletto heel pierces her father’s temple and the twisted things inside, and all at once, Harlan’s corpse pops like a balloon spraying hundreds of tiny opalescent crustaceans around the chamber. Vic crushes as many as she can, but the majority avoid the hammering and join like water droplets forming pearly pools in the corners of the costume room.
“Remember this,” they hiss from all angles, “we gave you the chance to save them.”
Their bodies shimmer with mimetic camouflage and they disappear into the walls and ceiling like white twinkle lights dying all around her.
“I hear her!” someone shouts. “She’s down here!”
Vic is still holding the shoes when Tiffany Law jogs into the chamber.
“Are you okay, Ms. Fell? Did you get lost?”
She shakes her head and tosses the heels aside. “I’m fine.”
The ice-blond actress screws a bloody tissue into her nostril and sniffs. “You’ve been down here for ten minutes. Is it safe or not?”
With a huff, she says, “Not,” and shoves Tiffany from the prop room. She doesn’t get far pushing her down the main corridor, however, before they collide with Rina Bestler, a former competitive figure skater, and Raymond Burke, a beefy but jittery first-time security guard who swings his flashlight beam over the scabby walls. They ask her what’s happening, what the plan is, but Vic keeps her mouth clamped shut as they pass the faded maps of the tunnel’s chambers and entrances. The drawings seemed so much bigger when she was a kid. The ladder too, stretching up into the massive watchtower at the center of the theme park built along Calvert Cliffs; it seems like a flimsy plaything now, not a gateway to the horrifying storm that struck Fell’s Fairy Funland out of the blue just one hour ago.
Planting her feet, Rina latches onto a rusted warm-up barre and forces Vic to stop. “I need you to tell me exactly where we’re going, Ms. Fell. And who the hell were you talking to down there?” She tilts her head as if the correct angle will spill her boss’ secrets, but despite the insistence in her rigid stance, her left pinkie finger twitches like a worm on a hook.
It’s the first time since they met that Rina Bestler has shown a chink in the lofty and impenetrable air she boasted as a competitive figure skater. She’s too young to have experienced Fell’s Fairy Funland in its heyday and its revival in the mid-90s, but the cast of the new and improved park often discussed the legendary storm that struck in the winter of 1991. They called it the “Ghost Hurricane” because it appeared out of nowhere, with not a single indicator that a storm would break across a clear blue sky, raise the Chesapeake Bay over the cliffs, and decimate fifty acres of Calvert Cliffs State Park. The Ghost flooded and thrashed the attractions that day, killing nearly a dozen off-season employees.
Rina only heard about it in passing, however. She didn’t get along with most of the other actors, partly because of the local celebrity’s spectacular fall from grace in an underage drunk driving accident the previous year, but also because spending most of her life in pursuit of Olympic gold left her frightfully inept in most social situations. Add in the fact that many actors would’ve preferred it if Tiffany Law were cast as Fairy Funland’s lead character, Princess Papillon, and Rina tended to keep to herself.
Vic fielded all sorts of complaints about the former figure skater’s icy attitude, but when it came down to it, Rina’s scandal was exactly the kind of publicity she needed for the grand reopening of her father’s once-revered theme park.
“I’ll explain everything once we’re safe,” she says. “But we need to get to the bridge. The water didn’t reach the house last time. It’s our only chance.”
Tiffany wails so theatrically the tissue shoots from her nose. “That’s what we came to tell you! The bridge is gone!”
She hopes Tiffany’s just being dramatic again. The girl whose mother originated the role of Princess Papillon in 1975 was certain she’d get the part for the grand reopening and was vehemently vocal about her displeasure that the focus of a scandal had stolen her legacy. Whenever Rina winced after a landing or stretched her calves longer than usual, Tiffany offered herself as an understudy, usually with a braggadocious twirl.
But Raymond’s expression confirms Tiffany reply. It’s not just drama. It’s the end of the line... again.
The security guard’s voice catches in his throat. Clearing it, he says, “There’s no path to the house anymore. The police are on their way, but we lost contact when HQ got submerged, so there’s no telling when they’ll be able to get to us, especially if we’re down here.” He takes off his glasses and wipes off dirt with his soaked shirt, which makes matters worse. “If the watchtower goes, we’ll be trapped in these tunnels for God only knows how long.” He wipes the glasses again and sets them on his nose as he squints at Ms. Fell. “Except you know, don’t you? You’ve been stuck down here before.”
“Why are we even discussing this?” Tiffany squeals. “There’s no way I’m going back out there. You saw what happened to Chelsea. To Mrs. Popper and her kid. It picked them up; it dangled them in the air—” Her voice disappears into a whimper, and she throws herself against Raymond’s chest, which seems to disturb him as much as the omnipresent thunder vibrating the tunnels.
Vic hadn’t seen Chelsea, nor Maria and Elias Popper—she’d hoped they were still out there, actually—but she knows precisely what Tiffany means. She was in the watchtower when the Ghost struck in ‘91. Though she often
had birthday parties there as a child, Harlan opened up during the off-season and paid the actors double to let her have the run of the park on Adoption Day.
“To preside over the entire fairy realm,” he said, because there was no proving the former orphan wasn’t part fairy herself.
Vic despised the reason but enjoyed the solitude. Until the storm began.
She was standing at the eastern window that day, the pane propped open and music entrancing her so completely that her ice cream started melting down her wrist. She was licking it off, her eyes fixed on the Ferris wheel, when the first bouts of lightning struck. She didn’t recognize it as lightning at the time, though. The sky brightened temporarily, but it seemed more like clouds clearing than the warning it should’ve been. The thunder came soon after, disturbingly persistent with jags of non-stop rolling and rumbling that shook the earth. And as the azure sky twinkled above, harsh and violent winds troubled the Chesapeake beyond the cliffside barrier.
Vic watched it rise. Like something out of a sci-fi movie, the churning mass climbed the rocks and broke the border trees. Even when the massive waves crashed through Fairy Funland, it didn’t seem real, especially from so high, so far, and so alone in the cloudless sky. She had sounded an alarm and closed the watchtower window, but she could still hear the screams of people tossed from the top of the Ferris wheel and impaled on twisted roller coaster rails. The waves blasted families apart, hurling them like sputtering ragdolls through the air. Some landed on rooftops, dying instantly, while some hit the rising tide and were sucked slowly underwater.
But some stopped in mid-air. As if suspended by invisible nooses, they hung in the sky, bleeding out, pissing themselves over the swamped park. As Vic beheld the catastrophic melee spread out in frothy waves before her, a security guard was snatched up by the wind and dangled just outside the watchtower window. Harlan’s voice had charged out of the speakers and ordered everyone underground, but Vic couldn’t move. The hanging man was alive. He was praying, reaching out, trying to touch the glass.
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