Inferno

by Amelia Jade

  All of that happened while she stood immobilized, the fear paralyzing her with its thickness. She felt she should be able to see it, so dense and cloying was it in its pervasiveness. Hollie wanted to scream, but all that came out was a mild whistle as she struggled to breathe.

  What the hell is going on?

  Her inability to do, well, anything, was starting to anger her. Hollie wanted to shout out, to call her team back and have them proceed back into the cavern.

  Fine, if they won’t, then I will!

  Stubborn determination—and not a small bit of curiosity as well—began to wear away at the fear gripping her and holding her tight. All it would take was the smallest of motions to break the spell, whatever it was. Perhaps there’s a gas leak of some sort? Though I’ve never heard of gas that can cause fear…

  Hollie focused on her left foot. She commanded it to lift, to pull her foot up off the ground and put it back down. Nothing happened however. She stayed frozen. Hollie tried everything she could think of. Berating herself, cracking jokes in her head, anything and everything that might chip loose the hold the fear had upon her. But nothing worked. The harder she fought against her muscles to force them to move, the more rigid her position became.

  Fine. You don’t want my muscles doing anything? Well then they aren’t going to do a damn thing.

  She snarled silently and commanded all of her muscles to go limp. Hollie didn’t really expect it to work, but she figured it was worth a try. So when her legs suddenly collapsed out from under her and she plummeted to the ground, her hands weren’t at all ready to stop her.

  “Ow,” she cursed as she hit the steel grate of the upper level of the borer control room hard. Thank goodness for her thick safety uniform. The brown material had prevented her from getting scraped up by the roughness of the metal.

  She brightened immediately though at the realization she could speak. A quick test proved her body was now responding to her controls. The fear that had been all commanding earlier was still there, but now that she was able to exert command on her limbs again, Hollie was able to ignore it. Well, perhaps not ignore it, but she could shunt it to the side, preventing it from gaining control.

  “What the hell caused this?” she muttered, slowly moving down the stairs.

  It was a ghost town. Nobody had remained. Every single one of them had fled for the surface. She wondered idly if they had stopped there, or if they’d gone all the way to their homes.

  Reaching down, she scooped up one of the dropped flashlights. This was a high-powered unit, not something normally used by homeowners. When she turned it on, the entire cavern in front of her was lit up in its beam, the white glow splashing against the far side. Swinging it back and forth and also onto the ceiling above her Hollie proceeded forward, the exact opposite direction all of her friends had gone.

  Your curiosity is going to be the end of you one of these days.

  Perhaps. But Hollie had to know what had caused such a reaction in everyone, including her.

  Flashlight in hand, she went to go find out.

  Chapter Three

  Hollie

  The cavern didn’t seem overly large. A quick swing from left to right revealed the extent of it. There were stalagmites rising up here and there from the ground, while the ceiling also had a few small stalactites hanging down from it. Off to her left what appeared to be a crashed one was scattered across the ground. Perhaps it had fallen when they’d drilled into the opening.

  Hollie was no expert on geology, but she figured that this cavern had never been exposed to the outside world before. So why were the cone-shaped deposits so small? Another question to be answered, this time by someone more qualified than herself.

  The only other thing of note in the cavern was the school bus-sized hunk of rock. The odd and lumpy formation must have fallen from the ceiling. Perhaps its fall had been enough to shake loose most of the larger stalactite formations? She shrugged. Certainly nothing that would explain the pervasive feeling of fear that had affected her entire team.

  “Odd,” she said. In the utter silence even her voice sounded loud. Much louder than the wind, that was for sure.

  Hollie froze.

  Wind? What wind? We’re two miles under the mountain. There’s no wind here.

  But sure enough, even as she listened, the audible noise of air moving through the cavern reached her ears. She swallowed nervously, and it stopped.

  Must have been a figment of my imagination.

  Just as she was about to dismiss it as her dreaming things up, it started again, though this time it sounded different. Almost like it was…

  “Breathing,” she gasped.

  There was a sound from off to her left. Hollie spun, losing her footing and going down for the second time in the span of ten minutes. She’d never been the most graceful person ever, but that was embarrassing.

  What was worse was the fact that she smashed the flashlight off one of the mini stalagmites. The bulb shattered and the cavern was plunged into darkness. The only source of light now was from the hole her borer had made. The glow wasn’t much, but it provided her with enough light to go on so that she could make it back out.

  There was another noise, this time from over near the fallen rock boulder. Hollie went still once more. When nothing else happened, she started scrambling toward the hole on all fours. But before she was twenty feet away she heard the noise again. Looking over her shoulder, she tried to pick out what it was in the darkness, but she couldn’t.

  Visions of movies where climbers and spelunkers had become trapped underground with horrifying creatures started playing out in her head, and she turned to continue running for the light of the tunnel. But it was gone.

  “Oh no,” she whispered in horror.

  The light was gone.

  Had more rock fallen that she hadn’t noticed? That had to be the answer. If not, it meant one of two things. First, that someone had shut down all the power to the borer so it couldn’t emit any light. She supposed that someone could have come back down the tunnel to investigate at last, but she felt that unlikely. The fear she’d been able to keep at bay was seeping back into her bones as the darkness grew more intense. Hollie doubted anyone would be coming back into the tunnel anytime soon. Which left her with only one other unpleasant option.

  Someone, or something was blocking the light.

  She called out. “Hello?” Swallowing nervously, she waited for a reply.

  A voice spoke in a language that she didn’t understand. The words were harsh and sibilant, reminding her of the snake language she’d heard in one of those wizard movies everyone raved about. Hollie didn’t bother trying to speak back to it. Instead, she did what any sane person would have done.

  She screamed at the top of her lungs in terror and scrambled across the cave floor on all fours, hoping she could find the exit from the cavern and escape before whatever was in there with her ate her brains. Rocks scraped her hands and knees, and at one point she barely missed a mineral outcropping, shuffling just around it. Her eyes detected a faint line of light along the cavern floor as she got closer to what she hoped was the right place. Whatever it was that was blocking her exit, it wasn’t quite complete. Somewhere above her something was moving and Hollie shuddered, moving faster. When she reached the block she reached her hand out before jerking it back in surprise.

  Where she’d expected to feel cloth or some sort of fabric that had been pulled across the front of the door, she felt a leathery membrane. Something hard and unyielding, but without the firmness of solid rock. Frowning, she backed up, gathered her legs under her, and launched herself at the barrier in an attempt to get through by sheer force of will. Hollie screamed, this time in an attempt to spur herself on to greater speeds as she flew at the barrier.

  And bounced right off it, spilling herself back onto the floor. The room echoed with what sounded like laughter.

  “Please don’t kill me!” she pleaded, somehow maintaining enough wits no
t to try and break through again. She had exactly no chance of that, it was clear now.

  “If you didn’t wish to die, then you shouldn’t have come here.”

  Hollie frowned. “Come where? I’m in the middle of a mountain. It’s not like I followed a map saying ‘Come here if you wish to die.’”

  She clapped a hand over her mouth, cursing herself. The sass that had already held her back from several promotions was resurfacing at the perfect time to get her killed. It was ridiculous! “I’m sorry,” she added. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “You should not have come here.” The voice was deep and thunderous, echoing off the chamber walls until it reverberated at her core.

  “Then let me go? I promise, I’ll leave.”

  Something that sounded suspiciously like a snort followed her words. “Yes, I suspect you would. But that’s not the issue. Now you would have to tell someone what you’ve found.”

  “What, a voice in the dark? Nobody would believe me. Hell, I don’t believe me. I’m pretty sure I’m going crazy right now. Dreaming this entire thing up! They’ll just drug me and put me in a mental institute.”

  There was a decided pause before the voice spoke again. “I…do not know what those things are. But you are not going crazy. I am real, and you are in my den.”

  She frowned. “Your den? What are you, a wolf that learned to speak English?”

  A crack shook the entire cavern and she heard rock being shattered. Hollie buttoned up her lips and stayed as absolutely still as she could manage, even keeping her eyes looking straight ahead into the darkness. Whatever it was she’d said, the creature seemed to take offense to it. The noise went on for some time until it eventually stopped. At that point she finally let herself exhale. She was still alive. That was good, right?

  “Do not compare me with those swine,” the voice spat. “Ever.”

  “Will do. But, um, since you definitely, completely, one-hundred percent aren’t one of those…uh, what are you?”

  In response a light began to glow from deeper in the cavern. It was so faint at first she thought she was imagining it, but then it grew a little brighter and stayed there, like a couple of faint stars in the sky overhead.

  “Now you see.”

  Hollie shook her head. “You’re a ball of dim light? I don’t understand.”

  The…thing…huffed in impatience. “I am not a ball of light. What is your problem?”

  “Well, all I can see is a ball of light,” she shot back. “So since that was your grand reveal, how was I supposed to know there’s more if you can’t light the place properly? That’s not my fault, jeez. Maybe you’re an alien or something. They sometimes are balls of light in the movies and such.”

  Anger thrummed through the unknown things voice. “You wish for more light? Very well. You shall have more LIGHT!”

  The room exploded into orange-yellow brightness, forcing Hollie to shade her eyes while she screamed as his voice assaulted her ears. Instinct forced her into a tight ball as she cried and prepared for the end to reach her.

  “Now you can see!” the voice continued. “What say you now?”

  But Hollie was too busy crying and cowering to look.

  “Oh for…you. Human. Look at me. I’m not going to kill you yet.”

  Nervously at first, but eventually with a bit more confidence she opened her eyes, waiting for them to adjust to the sudden change in brightness.

  The cave was awash with light that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once. But that wasn’t the craziest thing. What was crazier was that filling the room, its wings spread wide, one of them blocking the passage back to her borer, was what could only be described as something out of myth.

  “A dragon,” she whispered. “I am going crazy. Because I’m seeing a dragon. An honest to goodness, fire-breathing, winged, snouted, scale-covered dragon. Oh boy. I’m losing it.”

  The metallic bronze scales reflected the light and gleamed with brilliance. The snout was easily large enough to snap her up in one bite. The whole thing had a body almost as big as a school bus, though the tail and head made it slightly longer. Perhaps sixty feet from tail to snout, maybe a couple more, she wasn’t sure. The wings were…much larger. The cavern looked like it would be unable to support them fully spread, but if she had to guess, she might say they were—

  STOP IT! You’re in a cave with a fucking dragon! His wingspan doesn’t matter. You need to GTFO and NOW, girl. Come to your senses. He just said he was going to kill you later. Your goal is to make that much, much later, by running the fuck away. Right now. Go.

  But his wing was still blocking her passage.

  “I’m dreaming.”

  “I already told you, you aren’t dreaming,” the dragon said as the light began to dim somewhat. “I am real. I have been awakened from my slumber, and now I shall wreak a wrath on all those who have disturbed me. It would appear that my last lesson wasn’t learned. I shall have to remind your silly duke or whatever his name was that this is my mountain. Not yours.” He snorted. “I shall save you for later though. Couldn’t even wear any armor. Pathetic.”

  With that the dragon disappeared and suddenly a human was striding through the cavern. He was swiftly lost as the light disappeared, but he reappeared again walking toward her as the light from beyond spilled inside.

  “Wait!” she shouted as he was silhouetted in the opening, the lights from her borer revealing a tall, lean figure with long hair. The rest she couldn’t make out in the darkness.

  “What?”

  “Where are you going?”

  The shoulders of the dragon-man seemed to slump. “Did you not listen to my speech? About the waking me up, the wrath and the death and the destruction? The part where it’s my mountain? Did you listen to none of that?”

  “Oh,” she squeaked in a very tiny-sounding voice. “Right. That. Um…” She was at a loss for words.

  The man turned to go, stepping through the opening.

  Unsure of just what the hell she thought she was doing, Hollie climbed to her feet and raced after him. He was walking swiftly, but she easily ran up to him, past him, and planted herself in his path.

  Hollie heard herself speak, still unsure of who was in command of her body. But her voice came out clear and confident like a clarion call in the silence.

  “No.”

  Chapter Four

  Obsidian

  “No.”

  He stopped in his tracks, more out of sheer surprise at the arrogance of the human than any effect the word itself had upon him.

  “Excuse me?” He spoke in a low, dark, threatening tone, pulling himself up to his full height and looking down upon the little human, inspecting her as someone might an ant.

  She was a finger or three above five and a half feet tall, which was a little less than a foot shorter than he was. He noticed the way she carried herself, comfortable with the mass, but also aware of the muscle she had underneath it. For a human female he determined her to be stronger than the norm, though that meant little to him. If he wished it, a flick of his arm would clear her from his path. Permanently.

  But curiosity got the better of Obsidian, and even among the naturally inquisitive dragons, he’d always been more so than the rest. Besides, he couldn’t get over her hair.

  “What happened to it?” he asked bluntly, ignoring whatever it was she had been saying. Surely something inconsequential.

  “Huh?” she blinked several times before her eyes refocused on him. “What happened to what?”

  “Your hair. Did you lose it somehow? Did someone shave it and now you’re growing it back out?” He tilted his head to the side. “Fascinating, really. I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone wear their hair quite like that. And we won’t discuss your attire either.”

  The woman shook her head. “What the fuck is wrong with my hair? It’s called a pixie cut and it’s currently in style. Not to mention it works well with my helmet.” She suddenly patted her head. “Which I appear
to have left back there in your den. Damn.”

  “A pixie cut your hair? I didn’t realize they actually existed. Even to us they were considered legend.”

  The human woman cradled her head in her hand. “No, a human cut it, you metal-brained idiot. The term for the style is a pixie-cut. Sheesh. Could you be more rude?”

  He smiled. She had some fire to her, that was for sure. Perhaps he wouldn’t kill her after all. The others though…they would have to die. He hated being disturbed, and that was twice now in just a few days!

  His legs started forward again as he headed up the tunnel, wondering what the metal construct was. Some sort of statue, perhaps? He wasn’t sure.

  “I said no!” The woman stood in his way and crossed her arms.

  He reached out, grabbed her shoulders, and set her to the side like a chess piece before moving onward. Another three strides and he jerked as something bounced off the side of his head.

  Turning back, his hand flashed up as he caught the next rock thrown by the woman in midair. Then he ground it to dust in his hand, sprinkling it across the ground in front of him. Instead of being intimidated, the woman simply picked up a bigger rock and threw that at him. He batted it from the air with contemptuous ease, swatting it into the tunnel wall where it exploded.

  “You cannot stop me. You are not capable of it.”

  “You are not going to do that! You can’t do it.”

  He cocked his head at the feisty female. “Why is that?” There seemed to be little harm in humoring her before he carried out his vengeance on the would-be conquerors once more.

  “What? What the hell do you mean why? Let’s start with the fact that you can’t just walk around MURDERING PEOPLE and think it’s okay? That’s not the way it’s done, you oaf.”

  Obsidian frowned. She seemed rather adamant about that. Did she not know that that’s exactly how he did it? If they had come looking for him, he was going to kill them all as a lesson to the next group, so that in time eventually they might just leave him alone to let him keep his watch in peace.