by James Hunter
I was a whirlwind of light and motion, spinning and ducking, diving and rolling, slashing and hacking, as I moved through the hordes of Little Brothers. Claiming an arm here—kesa giri—and a leg there—yoho giri. Making any Brother bold enough to come close pay a hefty price. Except I knew I couldn’t hold out like this for long, and the Brothers seemed to know it. I’d been fighting for all of a friggin’ minute, and already my arms were shaky, my breathing was ragged, and my movements were slowing. This was a war of attrition, and all they had to do was wait.
FIFTEEN:
Sewer Stink
Something bit into the back of my leg, parting my jeans and the flesh beneath in a bright, scarlet flare of pain. The wound wasn’t deep, but it hurt worse than a broken beer bottle to the noggin, and by the time I wheeled around, my attacker was already long gone. Classic pack fighting tactics. Dart in at the exposed flanks, dish out small hits, and retreat just as quick. Wear your assailant down with a thousand small wounds.
Another Brother came at me from the side. I stopped his hatchet from cleaving my chest open—yay for me—but not before another slice ran across my other leg, this one deeper. I stumbled, my leg buckling from the strain and pain.
The Brothers moved in unison at the sign of my momentary weakness, throwing themselves at me as one. I slashed wildly with my blade, making a few of the pint-sized baddies pay the piper, but a barrage of bodies still pressed into me, unhindered. My jacket, cleverly concealed body armor, prevented the blades from getting into my vital bits, but the blunt force from the blows was devastating. I dismissed the sword with a flick of my hand and groped at my belt for the Baby-Glock, concealed in the small of my back, and the K-Bar at my hip. I wrestled both free—knife in my left hand, gun in my right—and went to work. Slashing here and popping off random shots there.
The Glock ran dry faster than I would’ve believed, and as the slide locked back, I realized this was probably it for me. It wouldn’t be long before one of the Brothers got a blade across my throat, and then it’d be lights out for me. They’d drag my corpse to their lair and carve me up like a pig for the market. I only prayed that whichever asshole bought my organs would die from cancer or choke to death on all the spite and cynicism stored away in every fiber of my being.
I didn’t realize the weight and press from the bodies had let up until Ferraro yelled into my ear. “Get on your feet! We have to move!” She hauled me upright and scooted beneath one of my arms, pulling my body onto hers. I glanced around, bleary-eyed and dazed: scores of reptilian bodies covered the mill floor, while Winona’s giant frame loomed before me. The Sasquatch glanced back at us, then let out a bellowing war cry that shook the floor. She charged forward, batting away the encroaching Brothers with her club-like fists, playing linebacker for us, clearing a hole large enough for us to rush through.
Even with my head reeling and my legs aching, I knew what needed to be done. I pushed past the pain and the confusion filling my head like a foggy haze, drawing on the Vis still in my body to deaden my senses, pulling in the strength of ancient rock and steadfast, unmoving stone. Filling myself with their fortitude so I could push onward.
This was a last-ditch effort—although this kind of working sounds supremely cool, it’s little more than a shot of morphine for a wounded soldier. It didn’t fix a damned thing, but instead allowed me to ignore the damage, enabling me to work through the hurt, though likely doing more damage in the process.
Since the other option was the organ market, however, it seemed like an appropriate time and place for this kind of drastic action.
“You hurt?” Ferraro asked as we ran.
“A hospital visit in the near-future isn’t outside the realm of possibility,” I replied. We shuffled along in an awkward side embrace. “You?”
“I’ll live,” she said, but didn’t mention anything more. I shot her a look: her complexion was too pale, sweat rolled down her face in sheets, her lips trembled from the effort of holding me up, and she was favoring her left leg. Obviously she was hurt, and bad, but I couldn’t do jack shit for her right now, not until we got some cover.
We trudged along, the mill giving way to somewhere else entirely. The floor shifted from old timbers to ancient brick and stone. The wooden wall slats narrowed and seamlessly transformed into a circular brick sewer tunnel with industrial-grade miner’s lamps hanging along the left wall at fifteen-foot intervals. I spared a quick look back. The mill yawned out behind us, but forward lay only sewer. We had to be in the sewer system beneath the Hub, the sprawling, labyrinthine cesspit the Little Brothers called home.
“We cannot stop,” Winona said, struggling to breathe herself. “They are regrouping even now.” Someone had worked her over damned good.
Gashes and slices decorated her arms, torso, and legs—jagged bloody marks made by a host of different instruments. Winona was strong and fast, but she fought with her fists, which meant she fought up close and personal. It wasn’t hard to imagine how easy it would’ve been for the Brothers to sink their shears and knives and pickaxes into her. She was moving better than Ferraro or I, but one of her arms hung limply at her side, blood running down in a slow stream.
I nodded and resumed my limping walk, repositioning my body so Ferraro could lean on me instead. “Thanks,” she grunted before falling silent as we carefully threaded our way down a steep slope. After fifteen feet the floor leveled out, which made for easier going. Unfortunately, the floor happened to be covered in ankle deep, sludgy water, which sloshed as we moved.
And did I mention the smell? If you’re a fan of rotten garbage sprayed with the scent of human waste and left to fester, decompose, and rot in the sun for a month, then boy do I know where you ought to take your next vacation.
Winona ghosted along, her back hunched since the ceiling was a solid foot shorter than she was. Ferraro and I stoically pushed forward, struggling to keep the pace, and that was with Winona moving at Bigfoot gimp speed. It wasn’t long before an immense intersection reared up before us: a gray archway of old weathered stone with crude etchings carved into its surface. An ancient bas-relief.
One panel depicted a monstrous serpent-headed hydra devouring scores of terrified humans. In another, the creature lay dead, its many heads hacked away by some colossal creature sporting curling ram’s horns. In the last image, a horde of snakes slithered away from the decapitated remains. The birth of the Little Brothers, no doubt.
We scuttled through the archway and into a huge circular hub with spoke-like passageways shooting off in different directions, thirteen in all. The water around our ankles trickled into a pool positioned in the middle of the room, joined by similar streams from all the other branches. But there was also a catwalk, blessedly dry, surrounding the pool on all sides. The miner’s lamps, which had lined the way thus far, were gone, yet I had no problem seeing. Patchy, bioluminescent fungi colonies clung to the stone walls and ceiling, casting pale-green foxfire.
I pulled Ferraro up onto the concrete walkway and lowered her to the ground. She was now shivering and deathly pale; severe blood loss.
“I gotta stop the bleeding before we can go any further,” I called out to Winona, “or she’s not making it outta this tunnel. We all need a little work,” I added, appraising the Bigfoot’s wounds with a fresh eye.
“I understand.” Winona bobbed her shaggy head and moved to the rear, positioning herself at the tunnel entrance we’d just come through. “Do not worry about me—my wounds are not as severe as they appear. I will stand guard and ensure you are not disturbed.” She halted for a moment, canting her head to one side, turning an ear toward the tunnel. “It would be best if you make haste.”
“Got it,” I said.
“IFAK,” Ferraro whispered at me, motioning to her vest.
IFAK stood for an Individual First Aid Kit, an item commonly used by military personnel in active combat zones. The medical pouch was secured to her flak jacket and easy to miss if you didn’t know what you were looking at
. I undid the front snap and rummaged through the contents—what I needed was toward the back: a squeeze bottle full of iodine, a couple of pressure dressings, and a package of QuikClot combat gauze. It took me all of two seconds to find Ferraro’s wound—a nasty gash wrapped across the front of her right thigh, hooking all the way around to the outside of her leg.
The slash was deep and bloody. A real doozy. But she was actually as lucky as a leprechaun with a four-leaf clover. The wound, running up the inside of her thigh, had missed her femoral artery by about an inch—if the shifty little bastards had nicked that, she would’ve bled out like a stuck pig. I ripped back the fabric of her pants, exposing the bloody tear in all its grisly glory, then unscrewed the iodine and drenched the injury and the surrounding area, staining her skin a dirty orange. I tossed the bottle, grabbed up the QuikClot gauze, and tore open the packaging.
“This is gonna hurt worse than a bad breakup,” I said. “You ready?”
“No need to sweet-talk me,” she grunted. “Just get it over with.”
I smiled, though I felt like puking right into the sewer. “Alright, here we go.” My hand trembled as I fed the gauze into the wound, not merely covering it up like you sometimes see in the movies. I shoved that shit in deep, packing the wound, forcing more and more gauze into the slash, starting near her inner thigh and working my way out as she moaned and cussed, her leg muscles tensing under the terrible pressure of my probing fingers.
I don’t know the magic—and by magic, I mean badass science—behind combat gauze, but I do know it has to go all the way into the wound, right to the source of the hemorrhage, where it somehow triggers the clotting process. It took me thirty seconds to pack the wound good and tight, and another two minutes of steady pressure on her leg before she was ready to move. I wrapped one of the two sterile pressure dressings around the damage and cinched it down so it’d hold all the gauze in place.
I took another few seconds to poke and prod at my own injuries, which turned out to be a bunch of superficial cuts and lacerations that looked bad, but which wouldn’t kill me—nothing like what Ferraro had, thank God. I slapped some sterile gauze on the worst of the injuries and secured it in place using duct tape, because (a) what medical kit is complete without duct tape? And (b) what can’t duct tape fix? Once I finished with my immediate first aid, I pulled out my pistol, popped fresh rounds into place, and slid it back in my holster before doing the same for the Baby Glock.
As far as the Vis was concerned, I was tapped out. Even holding onto the feeble construct currently numbing my body from pain was a strain. So it’d be bullets and blades from here on out.
“That’s as good as it’s gonna get,” I said, taking one last look over my handiwork, making damn sure the bandages weren’t going anywhere. I’m not a combat medic by any stretch of the imagination—my hat’s off to Corpsmen everywhere—but to my eye it was passable. Ferraro pushed herself into a sitting position before slowly making her way upright, experimentally testing her bandaged leg.
“Not great,” she said, “but it should do.” She leaned over and grabbed my lapel, pulling me into a kiss. “I guess you’re pretty handy to have around, after all.” She hesitated for a beat, then sighed. “And I was disappointed when you didn’t call—thought I’d better just say it since we might not have another opportunity. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
Even though I felt like a bag of day-old dog shit, I couldn’t help but grin like a goofy bastard. I knew she’d missed me.
“We must move now,” Winona said. “Our assault has left the Little Brothers shaken, but they are moving now. And moving quickly.”
“Great,” I said, looking at the myriad of tunnels, trying to determine which way to go. Assuming we were in the Hub’s sewer system, we could wander for days and never find our way out. “Anyone have any idea what to do here? ’Cause I’ve got a whole helluva lot of nothing. No friggin’ idea where to go.”
Winona stared back at me, her faced screwed up in a curious expression that landed somewhere between disbelief and ridicule. “It is that way,” she said, pointing to one of the random tunnels on the left as though it should be as obvious as the nose on my face. “Can’t you smell their stink?” Her lips pulled back from her blunt teeth in a sign of revulsion.
“Gee,” I said, surveying the room with its river of flowing shit and piss. “I couldn’t pick up the scent over the smell of rotten sewer ass. So please, by all means, lead the way, Sniffy McSnifferson.”
She shrugged—the gesture oddly lopsided since one of her arms was just hanging there like a lazy sloth—then ambled forward, sticking to the catwalk as she guided us deeper into the sewers.
“The brood den is not far now, I think,” she said. “A few minutes time, moving at your human speed. We will beat the Little Brothers there.” She stopped, clearly listening for sounds of pursuit, though I heard all of jack shit. “Yes, we will beat them, but it will be a narrow victory. Come.” She pivoted and plodded onward.
The tunnel curved left in a shallow arch for a hundred meters before banking hard right in a switchback for fifty more. Winona stopped at a four-way intersection up ahead—this one plain and unadorned—sniffing at the air like a hound on a blood trail. We took the right hand path, shuffling along for a few minutes before coming upon a third intersection, this one shaped like a “T,” with forks branching off to the left and right. Once more Winona stopped briefly, pulling in a deep whiff of sewer stink before leading us down the right hand path, guiding us to our final destination … well, hopefully it would only be the final destination for the bad guys.
Winona halted abruptly about two hundred feet up the pathway. She hunched over and pressed her ear against the wall on the left.
“Here,” she said, giving us a nod.
“Hmm, it’s sort of anticlimactic,” I said, surveying the blank wall, exactly the same as all the others we’d passed by. “I guess I was kinda expecting the evil-villain lair to be more … I dunno, I guess villainish. Also, I expected there to be people.”
Winona frowned at me, then briefly shared a look with Ferraro that said, Can you believe what a child this guy is? To which Ferraro shook her head, as if to say, Yes, he is a moron—or whatever the sassy, Italian equivalent of moron was, I suppose—but you have to work with what you’ve got.
“The den is on the other side of this wall,” Winona said slowly, as though explaining a calculus equation to a kindergartner. “The prisoners will be here. Likely the exit will be here, too. Now stand back while I let us in.”
She planted her feet, took a few deep breaths, and began to slam her good fist into the wall. Thunk, thunk, thunk—the sound was an angry melody in the silent space, a jackhammer at a construction site. At first, powder and dust broke loose, a cloud of particles swirling about, whooshing to and fro as her fist displaced the air in its passing. Then bricks cracked and fractured, the mortar chipping away and raining to the walkway by her gargantuan feet.
Thunk, thunk, thunk—now the call of an approaching war drum.
The wall began to fall away in huge chunks, and the rough orange-red glow of firelight trickled through the hole from the adjoining room. I couldn’t see the room in its entirety because Winona’s torso still covered much of the growing hole, but I could make out a row of crude operating tables. Rusty metal things, covered with splotches of chromed silver and crusty dried blood. I counted four bodies—the three humans from the motorhome and, oddly enough, one of the Little Brothers—strapped in place with brown leather bindings. Next to each body sat a tray occupied by razors and hacksaws, pliers and needles, and a host of other terrifying instruments I didn’t recognize—the tools all gleaming despite the filth around them.
I heard yelling, urgent and commanding. “Grab the research, damn you all!” There was a pause as someone, or multiple someones, scrambled to comply. “I said the research first—that laptop there, you damned fool. You, get the vials. And someone fetch the Queen!” the voice roared, his frustr
ation, fear, and panic evident—oozing from his words like pus from a festering wound.
With a final roar, Winona lunged forward, one foot outstretched in a ferocious kick which resembled an old school medieval battering ram. Her fist strikes had done their work well—loosening the brick and cement barring our path—and the massive kick finished the job for good. A section of wall collapsed inward with a rush, concrete and brick tumbling in a mini rockslide.
I pulled free my revolver, holding it in my right hand, while sliding the K-Bar from its sheath and reversing my grip so the blade ran along the outside of my forearm. Time to go dish out some serious ass-kickery.
SIXTEEN:
Drama Queen
I charged in behind Winona. The jagged edges of the shattered wall grabbed at my jacket, but I ignored the snags.
The room glowed with sooty firelight emanating from half a dozen oil drums which littered the air with their greasy stink. Cages sat hunched like ghastly skeletons against the wall to my right—hulking things built of heavy-duty steel and rebar, meant to contain monstrosities far larger than mere human folk.
Toward the back was an honest to goodness laboratory, straight-up Doctor Frankenstein style. An enormous generator fed power to a host of harsh sodium lights, computers terminals, and monitoring equipment. And what was all that equipment monitoring, you ask? Why, a set of creepy glass tubes with bodies floating inside. This place was the deformed love child of a genetics lab and a torture chamber.
We’d busted our way into the operations room, and the only way out looked to be forward, though there was a minor problem on that front: the way forward was blocked by a wall of scaly flesh. Two dozen of the Little Brothers stood guard, forked tongues flicking in and out as their tails whipped lazily through the air. They were waiting for us, that much was obvious. Why they were waiting and not trying to tear our faces off was another question entirely. A very troubling one.
