Ghost Hunters

by Sam Witt

  If the blue light didn’t run out. The blue made everything seem flat and washed out, but it was better than the darkness. As she ran up the ledge, Amy realized the tunnel ahead of her was not bathed in the same flickering glow. She fumbled in her front pocket for the little LED flashlight she always carried, losing precious seconds as her hand stuck in her pocket and she had to hobble instead of rushing headlong away from her pursuers. She pinched the little light’s case, and a narrow cone of pure white chased the darkness from her path.

  Fingers scraped at her ankles as one of the freaks leaped at Amy. The contact threw her off her stride, sending her stumbling ahead. She could feel them behind her, so close it would only take one more stumble to end her life. Being so close to death pushed Amy beyond her limits, lent strength to her legs that she’d never known she had. She found herself drinking from some deep well of desperate energy that had always been inside her, hidden beneath the surface, waiting for circumstances to reveal it to her.

  As she ran, lungs pumping with practiced efficiency, flesh moving beyond the reach of pain, Amy changed. The mask she wore, all wide smiles and bright eyes, cracked and fell away to reveal a feral snarl. The thin layer of her humanity peeled away to reveal the animal within, the bestial essence of survival. Amy liked it.

  But she knew she couldn’t run forever. She had to be smarter, not just faster, than the things on her tail. She stopped holding the light on the ground ahead of her and began flicking it on the ceiling and walls, looking for some nook to duck into, a side passage to escape down. She saw it at last, a narrow defile ahead and to her left. As quick as the light hit it, she swung it away. She had to surprise the assholes on her tail if this was going to work.

  One step, two steps. She killed the light, hoping the image she held in her mind’s eye was accurate.

  Three steps, four steps. Amy lunged ahead, giving herself just that little bit more distance to put her plan into action.

  Five steps, six steps. She didn’t waste precious seconds turning into the defile, instead she threw herself sideways with all the strength she had left in her legs.

  For a moment, Amy was airborne, hurtling through the darkness away from her pursuers. Then her shoulder clipped the wall and she was biting her tongue hard enough to draw blood. She struggled to remain silent to just stay where she’d fallen, praying to whatever god was listening that the freaks would just run past her hiding spot.

  She could hear their feet padding away from her, the clicking sound that guided them on their hunts. It had worked, she’d tricked them, and now they were chasing down a dead trail. She wanted to sob with relief, but was too terrified a straggler would hear her and come finish her off. Instead, she held her face in her hands and curled tight against the stone wall, trying to calm herself enough to take the next step.

  When her breathing slowed and her pulse no longer pounded in her ears, Amy dared to use her light. She held it tight in her hand, the tip pressed tight against the webbing between her forefinger and thumb. She squeezed the light and prayed it wouldn’t be the last thing she ever did.

  Dim red light shown through the thin skin of her hand. A pale face, gaunt and hollow eyed, stared back at her. Its breath reeked of corruption, a sticky sweet scent that clung to Amy’s nostrils. She clenched her teeth against another scream and swung a punch at the face.

  Her fist plowed through rotting flesh, scraping away foul meat from the bone underneath. Amy’s hand came away covered in rot, but the face hadn’t moved. She released a deep, shuddering sigh and played the light over the corpse. It had been a cop of some kind judging by its rot-stained clothes. There was a red-rimmed bullet hole over its heart, and its legs splayed out in front of it. Amy stood and kicked it over with her foot.

  She kept the flashlight clenched in her fist so it only shed a subdued red glow. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to light her path if she moved slowly. There were more corpses here, bodies scattered around and tangled together. More importantly, she found a hunting rifle twined in the arms of another fallen deputy. The stock was slick with rot, but the barrel looked clean and straight. Amy was no marksman, but she’d worked for a couple of years as an intern on Sasquatch Stalkers and had learned the basics of operating a rifle.

  The magazine had three rounds in it; not enough to put a serious dent in the monsters if they caught up to her, but more than enough for the one monster she really wanted to hurt.

  “I’m coming for you, Dick,” she whispered to herself and crept into the darkness.

  15

  For the first time ever, Dick was glad Amy chewed so much gum. Every twenty or thirty feet, he found another of her wrappers or a wad of the pink stuff stuck to the floor or wall. It was a perfect trail to follow back to the surface. “Thank you, Amy,” he whispered to the darkness. “You fucking bitch.”

  Despite everything that had happened, Dick felt a lightness in his heart. The weight of all the secrets, of all that crushing debt, had been lifted from his shoulders. This hadn’t been his plan, it really hadn’t been his plan, but he couldn’t deny that having his whole crew wiped out had turned out to be quite a blessing. With their deaths explained away by the horde of mutants rampaging beneath the decaying mountains of Pitchfork county, most of his problems were gone. The footage, after some careful editing, would be worth a fortune. He was going to come out of this a hero. A rich hero.

  He just had to get out of here with the camera.

  Randall’s screams echoed through the tunnels, bouncing and rebounding in all directions. Dick had to trust the bubble gum trail to lead him out, because the sounds were scrambling his sense of direction. Half the time, it sounded like Randall was right up ahead of him; the other half, his voice was far behind Dick, chasing through the darkness.

  “Just watch for the gum,” Dick whispered to himself and pushed on into the darkness. “Just get back to the surface, and all your problems are over.”

  In the darkness, impossibly close, the cries of hunters echoed.

  16

  Dick ran, the camera jostling at his hip. He didn’t care what the footage of his escape looked like, he just needed the camera’s light. He needed to find the next piece of gum. He heard more howls, more ticktickticking, and knew the bat people were on his trail.

  Panic gripped his heart in a fist of barbed wire. Had he got turned around? Had he missed a turn and was now running blindly into an ambush? Everything looked the same in the bouncing beam of the camera’s light, an endless labyrinth of stone walls and gaping tunnels. He imagined the camera’s battery failing before he found the surface, the light flickering, dimming, and then nightmare-filled darkness closing in on him. He ran faster, flicking the camera from side to side, searching for the next pink glob.

  He skidded past a wad of bubble gum, and nearly fell over in his hurry to turn around. Dick caught himself before he dropped the camera or fell to the floor, and headed down the passage as fast as he dared.

  The tunnel wound and looped around on itself, tracing a much more convoluted path than Dick remembered from the trip in. He’d been so focused on what he was doing, so intent on getting the footage he needed to save himself and his crew, he’d hardly noticed the difficult terrain they’d crossed.

  Dick stopped for a moment, wiping his brow with the back of his hand and taking a deep breath. He could hear voices, but he wasn’t sure how far away they were, or what they were saying. It could have been Nancy and Liz, it could have been Amy and Randall, or it could have been scouts for the pale-faced killers. All Dick was getting were wordless whispers, a low murmuring that made his stomach tighten with fear. At this point, there was no one he wanted to meet down in the darkness. They all had a reason to want him dead.

  He crouched with his back against the wall, camera light sprayed across the floor, and waited for the voices to resolve themselves. But he couldn’t pin them down, and they weren’t getting any clearer by the time the camera began to beep.

  Dick turned the camera this way
and that, trying to figure out why the camera was chirping. On the bottom of the camera, he found his answer - the power meter was deep into the red.

  Sweat beaded across his face, and his stomach clenched. Dick had no idea how long the battery had been dying on him. He might have an hour of light left. He might have a few seconds.

  Dick bolted away from the wall, searching for blobs of pink bubble gum, praying he’d find the ladder before the battery gave out and he was plunged into impenetrable darkness.

  17

  Randall’s knee swelled inside his jeans, pumping a never-ending stream of pain directly into the center of his brain. He’d known this trip was bullshit, that it was going to go sideways, but he’d come along anyway. Not because he was stupid, but because he’d believed in Dick’s vision. Randy had worked on a lot of shows, but he’d never seen anyone so dedicated to success as Dick. “Should’ve been a warning,” he grunted, and went back to single-mindedly dragging himself across the cold stone floor. The fiends were howling behind him, but they seemed more preoccupied with Amy than with pursuing Randall. He just kept on crawling, watching as Dick turned his back and walked away. He didn’t know what else to do.

  The incline was tough for Randall. He dragged his bulk up onto the sloping stone, but with only one good leg, he couldn’t gain any ground. He’d pull with his hands then slide back down. He laid his head on his arms and pinched his eyes against a flood of hot tears. “Fuck,” he cursed, “just fuck me.”

  Snickers crackled behind Randall. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked back, a sob escaping from his lungs. A handful of the freaks were crouched behind him, filthy men and women clad in ragged pants and tattered work boots, but little else. Their bodies were covered in scars and sores, the marks of lives lived on the very edge of survival. Their faces were cast in deep shadows by the harsh blue light, wrinkles like ravines carved into their faces by years of hard living.

  But their eyes gleamed with a spark of life that Randall had never seen. They were monsters, people who had turned away from the world to become something dark and dangerous, but they were more alive than Randall had ever imagined possible.

  A woman, her hair hanging in stringy clumps over her scarred breasts, reached for his wounded leg. Randall watched as she gripped his heel and tugged, flooding him with a pain so intense it transcended his very existence. He bit back on a scream as the agony wound itself into his skull and took over. He stared down at the freak, watched as she seized his pant leg in both hands and ripped it apart at the seams. His swollen leg was dark in the strange light, a deep purple, almost black, expanse of flesh bulging over the top of his high-top tennis shoes like a popped can of biscuits. She lowered her mouth to his leg, a growled warning keeping her companions clear. If this motley group of ate-up freaks had a leader, she was it.

  Randall heaved his torso up and locked his arms down behind him. Faced with his own death, he found he was out of fear. In some way, he’d been living in the shadows his entire life. First, as the dumpy shy kid no one ever noticed, then as a cameraman who witnessed the world without ever being part of it. Now, at the end, he’d become the center of someone else’s world. Even if she was going to eat him, Randall found himself enthralled by the bat-faced woman.

  The slick sharpness of her teeth pierced the swollen flesh of his leg. The penetration released the pressure of the swelling, and blood geysered into her mouth and onto her face and chest. His skin parted around the punctures, tearing open in zigzag lines that revealed well-marbled meat.

  He’d never experienced such agony. He screamed and tried to jerk his wounded leg away, but the woman held him fast. She drank from the wound, plunging her face into it, chewing and sucking. It reminded Randall of the sound nursing babies made, the unapologetically greedy slurping of a creature that existed as a vessel for its hungers.

  A dull tingling spread from Randall’s fingers and toes, creeping up his arms and legs. His eyes fluttered, and the reality of his own end began to seep through Randall’s pain. He was dying.

  “Wait,” he gasped.

  The woman raised her mouth from his wound, blood plastering her hair into slick ropes that framed her demonic face. “We must feed,” and she turned to the gaping tear again. Her companions fidgeted around her, their eyes wide and lips wet with hunger. “We need our strength for the migration.”

  Randall nodded. A sick thought wormed its way through his blood-starved brain. “We can help each other. Take me with you.”

  The freaks shuffled from side to side and looked at one another with dubious glances. The woman pulled herself up Randall’s legs like a lizard climbing a fallen log. She straddled the bulk of his gut, and shoved her face at him. Her mouth was inches from his own, dark eyes blazing with feverish intensity. “Why would I take you, pig?”

  Randall lay still, prey instinct freezing him under the slight weight of his predator. He was afraid any wrong move, any perceived threat from him, and she’d tear his throat out without hesitation. “How long do you think I can feed you if you just take what you need every day?”

  The woman sniffed at his lips, almost touching Randall’s face with her own. “Can you walk?”

  “I can try,” Randall whispered.

  “If you fall,” she shrugged and gestured to the hungry faces behind her.

  “I won’t.” Randall looked down, afraid to meet the woman’s eyes.

  She darted at him like a snake, and her teeth bit into his lower lip. She sucked blood from his injured lip and stared into his eyes then pulled away, stretching his skin.

  Randall whimpered and stared at the woman, his eyes pleading for mercy. He saw himself reflected in her cold, pitiless gaze and realized his fate would be decided in the next few seconds. He steeled himself against the pain, clenched his teeth against his screams, and endured.

  She leaned back farther and pulled his lip between her teeth until it tore, one agonizing sliver at a time, until she held the pale, pink ruin of his lower lip between her teeth. A swift gulp, and it was gone. She licked her lips then lapped at his chin until the bleeding slowed.

  Sated, she slid off his bulging belly and scrambled down the limestone ramp. She tore a strip of denim from the bottom of Randall’s jeans and bound his wound with primitive efficiency. She motioned to her followers. “Get the pig up.”

  Two of the men came up the incline, one of them holding a chunk of burning crystal in a pair of vise grips. He shoved the stone under Randall’s nose while the other man clamped a hand over Randall’s mouth.

  He smelled burning plastic and rotting roses and days-old blood. It burned his nose like the water in a public swimming pool when he jumped off the high-dive without pinching his nostrils - a penetrating, chemical sting that felt like it was burrowing straight into his brain.

  Raw electricity jumped through his nerves, a lightning storm that had him jerking up onto his feet before he knew what had happened. His head swam with a thousand voices, a thousand screams, all urging him to come, to be one with them.

  Randall’s eyes narrowed to slits, and he felt his pupils shrinking to pinpoint holes. His mouth was dry and running with thick, foamy saliva at the same time.

  The freaks grinned at him, knowing smiles that told him they remembered their first time just as he’d always remember his. Randall limped down the incline between them, no longer a stranger, but part of the family.

  He followed them through the tunnels, no longer afraid, just glad to belong.

  18

  The blackness gave way to an organic, slimy, purple light. Amy noticed it when she began casting a shadow beyond the edges of her tiny flashlight’s occluded glow. She relaxed her grip on the little light and found she could still see. There were fat, drooping mushrooms clustered along the tunnel’s edges. Their fruiting bodies sprouted from within corpses that were now reduced to bones and slick patches of putrefying meat.

  Amy didn’t care where the light came from. Despite its grotesque origins, it made her feel muc
h better to know she no longer had to rely on the slim LED lamp. Her cramped fingers relaxed as she walked through the tunnel.

  The first splash of graffiti gave Amy hope. It wasn’t the crazed scrawls they’d found earlier in the tunnel, but the kind of crap kids would spray paint on the walls while drinking. Crude genitalia littered the walls, surrounded by spray-painted initials, claims of the class of ‘99’s superiority, and meaningless splashes of color.

  The empty and broken bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 lifted her spirits even higher. She doubted the albinos would be drinking that shit; it was strictly the kind of thing underage kids bought because it was cheap and easy to get. The acidic fumes leaking from the old bottles reminded Amy of her own misspent youth, a gentler, stupider time that felt like a pointless waste from her current perspective. She kept on following the trail of scrawled walls and discarded booze containers, praying it would carry her back to the surface.

  Tickticktick.

  Amy froze, rifle clenched in both hands. She held her breath, waiting for the ticking to come again. When she heard nothing for a few moments, she started creeping forward again.

  The main body of the freaks was far from her - she heard their screeches and howls of frustration as faint echoes. The ticking, though, had been much closer. She kept moving, working hard to convince herself it was just her imagination.

  The tunnel dipped and then rose at a steep angle. Amy had to sling the rifle’s strap over her shoulder and creep ahead on all fours to keep moving forward. There was a gritty film coating the stone floor, a reeking black stain that smelled like cleaning supplies and rot. The filth coated Amy’s hands as she went, until her arms were black and stinking all the way up to her elbows. She yearned for another piece of bubble gum, but didn’t dare pop one in her mouth with her blackened fingers.