by David Irons
'Just go, I'll get down next.'
She stared at him. A bond had been formed between the two, one unspoken. After all the problems with the other men in her life, in that moment, she felt she had finally found one she could trust again.
Breaking the gaze, she quickly made her way down the vines. Slipping, sliding, returning down to Kelly, the girl's voice below calling up like a warning siren. Making it down, half falling half climbing; immediately she was met with the grasp of the girl, Jennifer holding her tightly.
'Come on, get down!' she screamed to Matt.
For a moment he was transfixed, watching the glowing eyed beasts that had begun to break the boards to get to him. This close they were as foul as they seemed from afar. Various transformed degrees of human-like mouths dripped and hissed with sharpened inhuman fangs. He hoped when they got out of here, they could send someone back to burn these things straight out of fucking existence. The plank firmly in place — secured between the two doors — he looked away from the creatures, letting the pressure in his legs decrease as he turned to climb back down.
With a huge smashing blast, the wooden door his back was against rocked forward. The plank slipped sideways, its barricading force lessening, the gap around each door widening. Long protruding, humanoid fingers reached around the jamb behind him. Fingers, like the mouths that now looked more human after eating Alex. A terror hit him, not wanting the fingers becoming any more human than they already were by eating him. He froze as he watched the plank slowly slide free from either side, hurtling straight down, concealed in the darkness like a missile travelling through the night.
'Watch it!' he screamed.
Quickly, he sandwiched himself between the two doors, his body now the only thing keeping the giant night crawlers at bay. Sweat dripped from his brow as more fingers reached around, curling around his once polished shoes like the squeezing grip of oversized arachnids.
Jennifer and Kelly jumped backwards as the plank speared the floor, standing upright for a second before falling to one side.
'Matt, get down!' Jennifer pleaded, Kelly shrieking his name at a glass-breaking decibel.
The door behind him rocked open wider, a feeling of dread injected through his body, a knowing it was impossible to escape. Jennifer saw him try and push back with all his might. His teeth gritted as what looked like a single thin tree branch reached around the door, bending invisible joints and becoming a lone reaching giant spider's leg that lurched around towards his pale white face, slowly slithering around his neck.
'I'll bring it back up! Hang on!' Jennifer cried, stumbling with the plank, she dropped it, panicked; then reached for the vines she had to climb back up, and then dropped it again.
'It ain't gonna work,' he cried, defeated, knowing his aching body was the only thing stopping the beasts’ entrance now, '…Just go.'
'No!' She shrieked back.
With a thunderous crack the boards on the doors finally gave way, his body and legs holding what was left in position.
'I said, just go!' he cried.
For a very long time after the Keith Connors incident, Jennifer hadn't trusted men, and she didn't think she ever would again. But as she looked up into the face of a man she barely knew, giving the ultimate sacrifice to save the lives of her and the little girl; terrified tears rolled from her eyes, as she wondered why the people around her who really don't deserve to die, always did. She didn't want it to end this way. She didn't want one of them to have to sacrifice themselves to save the other.
He understood. He nodded down and quietly and peacefully said, 'Just go.'
She knew there was no other way if she wanted to keep Kelly alive. She knew that they had to keep moving; had to leave him behind and press forward alone. She grabbed Kelly and with a riveting pain drilling through her body, dragged her away.
'We have to try and...' the girl said as Jennifer harshly cut her off.
'We have to go, come on.' Silent tears gushed from Jennifer's eyes. Picking up a shovel she pulled the girl towards the door at the opposite end of the room, yanking it open and locking them both behind it as they ran further into the darkness. Jennifer tried to hold back the tears, swallowing hard as she ran full steam ahead, not wanting to hear anything from behind her: a cry, the sounds of screaming, the creatures, his fall —nothing.
Matt sat in the nook above the tunnel, the boards on either door giving way to the aggressive push of the creatures that wanted to ravage him. He remembered the bag, the C4, the connectors and detonator and fumblingly began to wire them all together. It was a simple process, one that brought a smile to his face. Another trick of the trade taught to him by old Johnny Foree. They used this stuff to blow the huge garage doors off an illegal ring of repo men, busted them wide open for the cops to see what was hidden behind so they could get paid.
How loud that explosion had been, he thought, laughing at this old memory. The stupid shit he would do for money. Gripping the hand detonator, an arming click popped inside it. He closed his eyes and cut off his senses, thinking of happier times, thinking about that comfy couch in his apartment, thinking about getting this suit off, 'Death Suit,' he grunted. A wide hole punched through the door in front of him. He opened his eyes and saw a thing peering out like some kind of bad joke. The drooling strained face of the transformed Alex Lomax. He laughed out loud. The man's head looked ridiculous to him on a mutating grub's body. Alex stared at him with eyes far too human for such an abomination.
'Son of a bitch,' Matt winked at him, as both doors finally folded in to the grabbing hands pushing against them.
He slipped downwards, the creatures piling towards him. Air rushed past as he hurtled towards the ground. He closed his eyes again, the brush of the vines whipping his body as the grasp of hands, pincers and claws of the night crawlers washed over him. He pressed the detonator, ending the creatures’ cries, ending his life, collapsing the entire tunnel downwards crushing the last of the grotesque insects and himself with the final blasting explosion he would ever hear again.
An explosion that's echo seemed to tear a hole in Jennifer's heart.
CHAPTER 33
Blasting forward, further and further into the never-ending tunnels, the group once made of seven, now consisted of two — Jennifer and Kelly.
But behind them, deeper in a place where the creatures had already passed by, another member of their group stirred. One who in their minds had been written off with the fate of death. Cocooned to the floor: mutating, changing, transmogrifying. They should have known better than to forget about her, she could always keep going, held together by a meanness that set like glue in-between her bones.
She had defied death by becoming… something else.
Slowly, she awakened, feeling herself submerged in a hot treacle-like substance that washed over her in fast heart beating pumps. Strangely there was no gagging or choking from being drowned in this thick liquid, trapped in this womb-like sac like an un-born human.
Somehow, she knew that human wasn't something that applied to her anymore. Then, another simple blurring thought came to her mind.
Kelly.
Her body shivered with a heat, a primordial instinct made her body flinch to life, opening her eyes and seeing through what could only be described as a yellowish puss filter.
Another thought shot over her synapses.
My daughter.
Her right hand, defying the restrictive thick liquid around her, lashed forward, breaking the gelatinous cocoon in a quick wet rip; letting the warm liquid around her ooze out like thick warm Jello onto the floor. Seeing her arm in that brief second, it looked different to how she knew it should. It was grey, elongated. Her nails pointed, like five sharp icicles attached to the ends of each finger.
A single word sailed through her aching mind.
Different.
She reached forward, a hand greasily covered in the gooey substance slapped against the tiled floor. Pulling free from the cocoon, crawling slowly, trying to compose her b
alance; each handprint forward left stringy streams of sludge behind.
She dragged herself through a pool of blood.
My blood.
Then past an oversized dead thing with wings, its head half missing. Then past a gaggle of its dead winged brethren.
Creatures, she thought simply.
After a few feet she rose up, standing of her own volition. Wavering slightly but moving forward, she looked up, staring into the yellow glowing pulse of the hellhole. Its slick walls shone, a slight vaporous mist growing in its depths. Here was the fallopian tube again, reaching into a dark part of the Earth’s core, a place that gave birth to unseen abominations. The beat of her heart increased, matched the cosmic glow from the hole; a heat grew inside her. She noticed movement in the vile tunnel.
More creatures.
Next to the hellhole she saw the old winch which ran by chains to its oversized iron doors, a thing as a pure blood human she was powerless to use because of her limited strength. Walking over to it, grabbing its handle she began to turn it with muscles she never knew she had. Slowly, she remembered where she was, why she was there, and what had happened earlier in this very room.
Close it, she thought, must close it, mustn't let more out.
With the rattle of chain and rotation of cog, great grinding gears closed the doors, covering the hole with a rattling metallic clump. They joined from either side, formed a sculpted giant-horned face that had been expertly forged onto them as they closed, a creature that looked on with one eye open, the other squinting like it was throwing a cocky wink at anyone foolish enough to consider entering.
Closed, she thought.
Swinging around she noticed something moving next to her. In front of her a pair of glowing eyes watched back through a web of cracks. She hissed, ready to kill any more of the hideous things, realizing in that moment she had made the same mistake as she did earlier: it was only her reflection.
Horror hit her like a sledgehammer.
Understanding that this was a broken mirror, she pulled her focus into its shattered shards.
Once, the mirror and her reflection in it had been a daily obsession. Her face, the face that was once her world — her meal ticket — was now gone. She stared at the new one that stared back, hoping the broken glass was lying. Surely this was another trick from Blitzer? But as she shook her head, the thing with the glowing crystal ball eyes reflected in front of her shook its head too.
She screamed, a deep, devilish scream. Running forward she punched every part of the mirror from existence, obliterating it, turning it to nothing but smaller glistening scintillas of light, all reflected from some hidden yellow lights in the room. She looked deep into each twinkling fragment; each of them shining back at her the understanding that those hidden lights were her eyes. She screamed again, thinking of the few things she could. Repeating them over and over in slow calculated beats.
Kelly.
Blitzer.
Kelly.
Blitzer, Blitzer… BLITZER.
'You bastard!' she roared, 'Now it begins!'
Turning, running towards the hole the humans dug through to find her. Moving speedily along the tunnel, her feet lifted from the ground, hovering. Her body instinctively used the new huge wings she had grown on her back, propelling her upwards into flight. Her senses were in overload as she found a trail of scent from…
Kelly.
My daughter.
She screeched once more, her extended bellow echoing like a warning; a murderous death call for anyone or anything that decided to get in her way.
CHAPTER 34
The night was forever a dark, cold, endless subterranean eternity. Jennifer was hungry, tired and scared, but she ran forward, nonstop. The girl by her side was barely able to keep up as they rocketed through the tunnels. The wooden doors separating each section of the catacombs became fewer and fewer until they were eventually running through long, open underground caverns that looked like a never-ending rabbit warren.
She thought back to Matt, quickly distancing herself from that memory. Then remembered how Alex died, how the thing that took his head had almost instantly absorbed his looks. What would she do if she came face to face with one of those things, looked into its eyes only to have Matt look back at her…?
The demon grins of Peter and Sarah staring through the locker’s vent clawed back into her mind.
'Night Creepers — Night Creepers, used to be a pest, now they're always with you, because you are their nest!'
She erased that thought from her mind; knowing whatever his fate back there, he didn't deserve it. Whatever happened to anyone here tonight, no matter how obnoxious, no matter how self-centred and egotistical they were, none deserved this. Kristi was a pistol, a hot head, there was more to her than what was on the surface. Beneath it all, in her own way, she did everything and anything she thought would get her daughter out of this situation. Ultimately, she paid the price for those decisions.
Alison's actions made less sense. Was she that inept that she accidentally ended up cooking herself alive? Did she really try and help them leave that room or did she have some other plan? Either way, she was gone. Dead and buried by her own design.
Jennifer could hear her own breath, a sound reduced to a raspy wheezing gag. She sucked in a mouth full of stale air and held it, trying futilely to steady her breathing, a desperate wheezing continued.
Slowing down her pace and exhaling, she realized that the sound of hyperventilation wasn't just her own. She snapped her head down to the girl next to her; Kelly was white faced, shaking, gazing up with eyes that seemed to tremble in their sockets.
Jennifer stopped and stared directly into the girl's face. 'Calm, calm, calm,' she repeated, taking deep, slow breaths, willing the little girl to copy her. 'Slowly now, just breathe, just breathe.'
The girl's eyes flickered around the dark tunnel they stood in. Jennifer knew she was looking for the things that had taken everyone. Staring into each dark corner for one of the inhuman, unspeakable insect things. A nest, she thought. That's all this is, a giant nest. The things dwelling in it, hungry insects that never came above ground were just like the things living at the depths of the ocean, unseen, mysterious things man had no understanding of. The yellow glowing hellhole, that seemed to be the nest's core. The rotten epicentre of the creature's lair, a place hidden for years, now broken open and spewing its offspring into the human world.
Hell spawn, she thought, an itching pulse carved through her tattoo.
Kelly's breathing improved but not by much, turning into a fast-paced rhythm more than the sporadic gasps she was only able to produce a few second ago.
'Do you think we will get out?' Kelly choked.
'We'll get out, somehow we'll get out,' Jennifer nodded.
She was thinking that maybe if they had kept two rounds in Matt’s gun, the click of its hammer might have been the turn of the final key to escaping this underground asylum.
No, she thought. Keep moving.
And for her sanity and the sanity of the desperate looking girl in front of her, she rose to her feet and began walking at a slower pace forward into the darkness.
The neon lights in the walls that surrounded them had become less and less the further they had come. There was now only one illuminating the way every twenty or thirty feet. They took out their phones, switching the beams of their flashlight functions on, batteries clinging to a final few percent. Suffocating black patches of oppressive darkness conjoined each port of distant light; sometimes the distance between each seemed like a bleak, blind eternity of walking in nothingness.
Coldness in the air began to rise around them, their breath becoming visible in white icy plumes. Goosebumps pattered over any exposed flesh their funeral attire failed to cover. A sound entered the air around them other than that of their feet slapping on the wet floor. A distant sound, a sound that stirred that feeling of needing to pee, a feeling Jennifer had suppressed for the past few hours. Distantly,
in echo, the sound began to make sense to them both: the rushing of flowing water.
They picked up the pace again as they came to an opening. Inside a cavernous room a deep pool of running water rippled with the gush of a four foot wide concrete pipe. The pool, a manmade thing surrounded by a two-foot high rockery of stone, glistened with white spots from a beam of light that diagonally cut from above, hitting the water and turning it into a shimmering, liquid sky of stars.
There was an offbeat tranquillity to this room; whether it was the soothing sound of water, the low radiant glow of light, or the cold draft that dried their hot sweaty skin: they felt calm.
Kelly walked over to the pool, putting her hands into the cool water that swirled around and brought a double handful of it up into her face. Standing still, watching the rippling water, its cold touch on her skin comforted her in a way nothing else had that night.
Moving towards the source of the light beam, Jennifer dropped her shovel to the ground. There, reaching up to the ceiling was another tunnel. This one was shorter than the last she'd tried to scale; only ten feet or so diagonally up. Her heart jumped into her mouth. This was another way out. This was, maybe, their last chance.
Thick clumps of rose roots hung down like vines again, all outlined by a direct beam of moonlight that fired through a huge crack in the ground above. A crack that split through what looked like a stone slab covering, something deteriorated enough to let light in, and that maybe, would let them out.
A devilish grin broke over her face, one that rivalled the inked one on her arm; the tattoo that only just today had begun to itch once again.
Kelly reached down into the water once again, dragging another double handful of cool liquid up into her face. She closed her eyes and sucked some of it up as it splashed against her skin. Holding its refreshing coldness in her mouth for a second before letting it dribble out down her chin, she stared down into the water, readjusting her gaze from its hypnotic surface to its bottom, as something unexpected caught her eye.