by Norris Black
The Boxer had much more kick than I was used to and almost flew from my hand and over my shoulder as the booming shot echoed in the underground chamber. I don't know if the bullet found a home in the monster's flesh or if it was the sound that drew its attention, but it stopped its advance on Dagda, swung around and barreled towards me. So... good?
In our exploration of the gallery we had discovered a small alcove about six feet off the ground. It only went back a few feet, not much more than an indent in the rocky wall, and only tall enough for a man to crouch in. With Dagda's help I had managed to clamber up and it was from this vantage point I watched death hurtle towards me.
"This is what we wanted. This is the plan," I said to myself, trying my best to sound convincing. I wasn't buying it. I knew myself well enough to know I couldn't be trusted.
As before, the Collector didn't slow down when it reached the wall of my little hiding spot, instead running up it like it was a flat surface. Flattening against the far end of the alcove, I winced as the crawler's teeth-filled maw blocked my view of the rest of the room. I was gambling the entrance was too small for it to fit in. I was only half right.
The Collector pulled its mouth away from the entrance and pressed its side against the hole, allowing a half-dozen of its multitude of limbs to reach in and grasp at me. I sat down and kicked out to keep them at bay. That strategy worked for a minute or so, but my luck soon ran out. A raptor's claw, as big as a man's hand, grabbed my ankle. It gripped with a crushing force and began to drag me from my shelter. I brought the Boxer around and let off the round in the second chamber. The echo in such a tight space nearly deafened me, but I was rewarded with the sight of the crawler snatching the stump of a limb back, the severed claw still wrapped tightly around my ankle. It screamed again, and I watched in horrified fascination as the injured limb withdrew inside itself, disappearing and leaving behind an unbroken patch of fleshy skin. From that patch of skin sprouted a dozen or more eyes, of all different shapes and hues. They blinked in unison and this time I was the one that screamed as I frantically reloaded the gun.
It pulled away from the opening, bringing its mouth around and slamming it into the rocky hole, trying to come in by way of brute force. Dirt and small rocks showered me from the impact. I reached into my coat pocket but as I did so a long tentacle snaked in and wrapped itself completely around my chest twice over. My arms were pinned to my side as I was helplessly dragged towards that hideous maw.
The Collector let out a high-pitched scream of triumph, I let out a high-pitched scream of terror, and Todd let out a manly roar of rage as he appeared as if by magic, severing the tentacle trapping me with a Herculean swing of his machete.
While the monster's attention was on me, Todd, that wonderful, wonderful man, must've regained consciousness and rejoined the fight. He had scaled the side of the creature, climbing it like it was the world’s most hideous tree and now hung on while slashing his machete at it over and over.
The horror let out another scream, this one of pain. Warm, moist air hit me like a heavy wind. A great deal of saliva along with several unidentified, not to mention unwelcome, bits from inside the crawler hit me as well. Another tentacle whipped out, this one grabbing Todd around the waist. The muscled ganger tried to swing the machete one more time but a limb—one that looked distressingly human—grabbed his wrist while another tore the weapon from his grasp. In a single motion the Collector ripped Todd from his perch and tossed him down its gullet. The Twist's sides contracted, and the sickly sound of snapping bones filled the room. It sounded like a heavy foot treading on a pile of dry sticks.
I had managed to fully extricate myself from the severed tentacle as the Collector returned its attention to me. By then I had managed to complete fishing the grenade out of my pocket. Merk had included two of the fantastic toys inside that second loaf of broad.
I lifted the grenade, pulled the pin and readied my arm to throw. This is where I'm supposed to say I said something clever like a total badass, right? Let me assure you, I was wasting exactly zero seconds on verbal discourse at that point. I side-arm pitched the apple-shaped explosive down the nightmarish creature's gullet with all the strength I could muster.
A few moments that felt like an eternity passed as the Collector tried to dig me out of my hole in the wall with a half-dozen of its eclectic limbs. A muffled frump sounded, and the back end of the many-limbed monstrosity blew apart, spreading blood and gore across the gallery floor.
I watched as the front half of it stilled and toppled from where it had been gripping the cavern's side, thoroughly dead, to reveal a stunned Dagda standing beyond it, shotgun at the ready. She must have come up behind it for a closer shot when the grenade went off and was now covered head to toe in blood-streaked viscera. "You've... you've got a little something on you," I called out unhelpfully.
"Thanks. What would I ever do without you?” She walked forward to examine the fallen beast. The entire back half of it was a bloody ruin. She kicked the remains, shotgun still trained on it. "I think it's dead."
"I thought I was the one who was supposed to be stating the obvious around here. I don't suppose you could give me a hand down?"
With Dagda's help I managed to clamber down to the cavern's floor without mishap.
"You're probably going to want to get rid of that," she said as she pointed her flashlight at the claw still gripping my ankle.
"For fuck's sake," I grumbled as I sat and pried it off. While I was doing that Dagda strode over to the pool and used its waters to wash as much of the monster guts off as she could.
When we were both done, we met at the edge of the pool to regroup. Dagda had recovered Todd's machete and had it thrust through her belt.
"I misjudged him, he was very brave," she said.
I grunted in response. It's easy to be brave when you're not smart enough to know when to be scared. Given the man died saving my life I kept that uncharitable thought to myself.
"Let's see about us getting the hells out of this giant tomb." I shone the flashlight around as I started walking, keeping the wall on my right. Before long, we found another tunnel leading away from the cavern. It was about the same size as the one we arrived through and the memories of that mad flight through the darkness were still fresh. "If we get out of this, I need you to remind me to never go below street level again. Nothing good ever happens underground."
With a heavy sigh I started off down the tunnel, flashlight in one hand and Boxer in the other. Dagda followed behind, checking our back trail periodically to ensure nothing was following us. We moved in silence at first, until Dagda broke it with a question that triggered my fight or flight instinct in a different, much more personal way.
"Who's Lenksy?"
It was amazing how raw my feelings were on the barest mention of the topic, even after a year had passed. I normally would've shut that line of questioning down out of the gate, but I was too tired to put up a fight. "He was a crime boss, ran the city's sixth ward. A real piece of work, even by 'crime lord' standards. I mean, you have to have a bit of a brutal streak in you to even rise to that kind of position, you know? A capacity for violence at the drop of a hat, to get the other guy before he gets you. It's the only way to keep from getting swallowed up by the other fish in the pond. But Lensky, for that son of a bitch, violence wasn't a byproduct of his operation, it was the point. He got off on it. Some of the stories of what he did to people..." I had to pause a moment to gather myself. "I'll spare you the hearing of them and me the speaking of them. Picture the worst possible thing you could do to another human being, and I assure you this was much much worse,"
"Magos... Rowe, said you killed him?"
"Oh, that I did. Him and every single member of his psychotic inner circle."
"Sounds like he deserved it." Dagda was speaking in a soft voice, the kind you'd use when trying to calm a wounded animal. In some respects, she wasn't far wrong.
"You don't know the half of it."
> "Then tell me."
Sometimes, the only way out is through. "There was this woman, her name was Jayna..." I felt my chest constrict, realizing it was the first time I had spoken her name aloud since the incident. "She was a hostess at one of Lensky's clubs. One day she comes to me for help. Lensky had taken an interest in her, and his interests were almost always unhealthy for those on the receiving end."
"She wanted you to kill him?"
"No, she wouldn't have asked for that. If she wanted him dead, she would've taken a shot at him herself and consequences be damned. Jayna was full of fire," I said, allowing myself a small smile at the memory of her.
"What then?"
"She had a kid. A boy about six years old. You see, she wasn't worried about her own safety, she was worried about his. She knew as long as they stayed in the nine wards, they wouldn't be safe. I had a connection in the outer ring and was supposed to smuggle them out."
"I take it that didn't happen."
I shook my head. "I never did learn how Lensky found out, but he did. He and his men killed them both, mother and son. Made an example of them.” Images flashed through my head. Dead eyes in a red mask of a face. A bowl of what looked like tiny bent sticks, stacked haphazardly in a stew of congealing crimson. Hooked chains, red from rust and blood, swinging as I stumbled into them. I remembered returning to my office, face wet with tears of rage and a roaring in my ears, Lensky’s smile greeting me as I opened the door. “Then he came for me."
"And you killed them."
"Every last one of them."
“Good,” was all she said.
“He also laughed at his own jokes. Can’t abide a man that does that.”
The joke died on the cavern floor and we trudged along in silence. I noticed the floor here was angled slightly downwards. We were traveling deeper into the city's bowels but turning back wasn't an option.
"Your turn," I said.
"Excuse me?"
"Mine wasn't the only bit of history Rowe dropped back there. The big man with the corner office is your dad? Were you planning on sharing this piece of info at some point?" I looked over at her as I asked the question, she kept her head straight, avoiding my eyes.
"I didn't think it was relevant."
"You didn't think it was relevant? The head honcho of the Seraph sends his only-begotten daughter to go sidekicking around the city with a good-for-nothing like me, and you didn't think it was relevant?"
She shrugged her shoulders but still wouldn't look at me. "It's probably some sort of punishment. And besides, who says I'm the sidekick?"
Secrets made me itchy, especially when they involved me, but I let it go. Whatever the reasons, Dagda wasn't ready to share them and if nothing else, she'd earned some leeway.
Before long we came to a spot where the tunnel opened up into another cavern, this time dropping down and away from us. We stood on a ledge with a sharp drop off into darkness. I nudged a loose stone out and into the void and listened as it fell. Seconds passed before the distant echo of stone striking the rocky floor came back to us. Judging by the noise the chamber we were in was massive. I shone the flashlight in the vain hope of illuminating something, but the beam of light was swallowed by the gloom surrounding us. "Looks like a dead end." I made a mental note to add 'dead end' to the list of things to never say in a situation like this.
"Gideon, over here." Dagda was shining her light off to the side, revealing a set of crude steps carved into the rock wall leading down. They were rough and narrow but looked sturdy enough.
"Why don't you go first?" I suggested. "You're better equipped to handle anything that might leap out at us, and besides, I'd rather not have you shooting that fireball maker of yours over my shoulder while I'm clinging to a tiny staircase on the side of an underground cliff."
Dagda started down the steps, the beam of her flashlight leading the way. I holstered my pistol, freeing up a hand to steady myself on the nearby wall as we descended.
"Who do you think made these stairs?" asked Dagda.
The stairs were barely wide enough to place both feet on a single one at the same time without at least part of your outside foot hanging over the abyss. Given that, I hadn't been examining them too closely beyond making sure one foot was securely planted with each step I took. I considered the question. "There's a pretty thick layer of dust on them, and no sign of any footprints other than ours, so I'd say they're old. It would've been one hell of a job chopping these out of the solid bedrock. Maybe we'll get more answers once we reach the bottom... assuming there is a bottom."
Fortunately, there was indeed a bottom, which we reached after a few more minutes of cautious descent. Unfortunately, however, that bottom didn't contain any answers, just more questions.
Our flashlight beams hit a solid wall ten feet or so from the last stair. Unlike the naturally formed walls we'd seen so far, this one was perfectly flat and smooth. Upon closer inspection it turned out we were looking at the wall of a stone building. Embedded at about waist height in the wall was a giant rusted wheel. It was as big around as a wagon wheel with metal spokes radiating out from a central hub the size of a dinner plate.
Dagda stepped up and gave it a tentative tug. It wiggled slightly and a small pattering of rust flakes fell to the ground. "It's attached to some gears back here," she said, giving it another little pull. "There’s a lot of rust but I think it'll still turn."
"Now why in the hells would we want to do that? We have no idea what that wheel does. For all we know it was designed to collapse the entire ceiling down on our heads." The longer we were down here the more I could feel the weight of all that stone hanging above us. I was quite possibly not the most rational right then.
Dagda scoffed at my dramatic suggestion. "There's no rational reason for it to do that."
"You're assuming whoever built this was rational. It's a wheel attached to a building hidden deep beneath the earth. Rational people don't build things like that in places like this."
Dagda ignored me and, bracing her feet, pulled hard on the wheel. It only moved an inch or so at first. Dagda's face went red with effort as she heaved again, leaning back, and putting all her weight into it. The wheel began to slowly turn, hidden gears squealing in protest as decades of rust broke free. Mixed in with the squeals was the sound of rushing air, quiet at first but growing louder the more the wheel turned. Without warning there was a loud whoosh sound, and we were both bathed in sudden light.
I whistled. "There's a whole gods' damned city down here," I said in a hushed tone.
City might've been an overstatement, but it was at least a small town. A wide street was illuminated by a warm glow coming from a single line of trees that appeared to be made completely from brass. Each stood close to fifteen feet in height with twisting branches stretching out over the rooftops of the buildings to either side. Where a normal tree would have leaves covering the ends of the branches, these instead had tiny jets of orange flame that, when combined, lit up the entire cavern. The buildings to either side of the ornate lamp posts were, in contrast, uniformly squat and blocky, looking like they had been shaped whole from the cavern floor. Each had a single doorway in the wall facing the street, any doors they may have had now long gone to dust. Those doorways were the only break in the otherwise smooth stone, none of the buildings having anything resembling a window.
"Any of your Seraph fairy tales cover Spookytown here?"
"None I can think of."
Upon closer inspection of the trees we could see the flames were being fed by some sort of gas running through a series of tubes inside the center of each brass giant. At the tip of each branch was a small, engraved Sigil. I pointed it out to Dagda. "Turning the wheel must've opened the gas vents and these little pieces of wychery here acted as some sort of igniter."
We walked down the narrow street, playing the beams of our flashlights through the doorways we passed. The only thing visible inside were misshapen lumps of what may have once been someone's po
ssessions. As we moved through the underground town, we passed several side streets as they branced off to either side. These were narrower than the thoroughfare we traveled, the brass trees a smaller, more stunted version.
The abandoned stone town gave me the creeps something fierce.
"I don't technically believe in ghosts, but if any place was going to have ghosts, it'd be this place," I said.
"Who do you think lived here?"
"I'm more worried about what happened to them."
"Do you think the Collector took them?"
Now there was a grim thought. I counted close to fifty buildings before we reached the far end of the street where another rock-carved stairway awaited us. This one at least was wider than the one we came down on. Attached to the last building on our left was another wheel, twin to the one Dagda had used to turn on the gas.
"We should properly shut off the vents before we go," she said. "The last thing we want is a rupture in an old pipe causing a gas explosion while we're still down here. Given the age of this place I'm actually surprised that didn't happen when the lamps first lit."
I just stared at her. "There are some thoughts you should keep to yourself, yeah?"
With my help this time we turned the wheel until the lamps, starved of fuel, winked out one by one, leaving us in the darkness again with nothing but our flashlights to guide us.
I stared up at our ascent out of this unsettling place. "Stairs, my old nemesis, we meet again."
"Who are you talking to?" Dagda's concerned expression made it clear she was wondering if I had finally snapped. Well that made two of us.
"It's nothing, let's just get out of here."
I had lost track of how long we'd been down here. The attack at Rowe's warehouse club felt like a lifetime ago. Hunger gnawed at my stomach and my throat was so dry I could spit dust and I suspect my companion wasn't any better off. Neither of us had brought supplies for an extended excursion, and if we didn't find a way upward, and soon, things were going to get dire.
As much as I go on about having an allergy to good luck, or more accurately good luck having an allergy to me, it does, on occasion, shine its sweet smile down on me. Instead of leading to another tunnel, at the top of the staircase was a small ledge with a metal ladder bolted to the wall. The ladder ran only about eight feet before ending at a round metal hatch a few feet across with a small ring inset.
