Pandemonium

by Warren Fahy

  “Oh, no,” Hender cried.

  “Spiger!” Kuzu growled.

  Abrams grabbed an incendiary grenade out of a pouch on the trotting mule. He took a few steps and sidearmed the grenade like a quarterback. “Fire in the hole!” he shouted.

  The grenade zipped down the tunnel and landed perfectly between the front legs of the animal that was thirty-five yards away. But the spiger launched off its tail so hard, it slid along the tiled ceiling as the grenade ignited behind it at 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

  The spiger screeched like an air-raid siren as it landed forty feet in front of them, its elaborate frill pulsating colors like a neon marquee. Its tail curled underneath it as it scuttled away from the heat source, rapidly moving toward them and raising its arms.

  Jackson ran to meet the beast, firing two AA-12 automatic shotguns and emptying both magazines of explosive ammo at close range as he shredded the creature’s manelike frill.

  “No!” Hender said. “They like noise. Don’t stand still: Move!”

  The spiger recoiled as bits were blasted off its frill and buckshot pierced its armored back. Jackson stood his ground in front of it, spraying the beast as it raised one of its spiked arms and brought it down in a blinding streak, stabbing the soldier through the faceplate of his helmet through his rib cage and pelvis into the ground. Then the monster lifted the big man’s body sideways before its widening vertical jaws.

  “Throw another grenade!” Nastia said.

  “Not at this range,” Dima said. “We’ll burn, too!”

  “Back up!” Abrams shouted.

  Nastia ran in the other direction, weeping hysterically.

  As they retreated, Abrams used his dog whistle to send in both Talon robots, which opened fire with their M249 machine guns as they rushed the spiger.

  One of the spiger’s long spike-arms turned sideways and flicked the Talons up the tunnel toward the group like a couple of corks. Revolving in the air, their machine guns fired in all directions, their rounds ricocheting off the walls. Abrams disabled their guns as the bots clattered past them, rolling for another forty yards.

  “Chyort voz’mi,” Dima cursed. “I’m hit!”

  “Where?” Bear asked.

  “The head!”

  “You’re OK, then,” Abrams said. “Must have rung your bell, though.”

  “Shit,” Dima said. “Good helmet.”

  The spiger continued to pick Jackson’s meat off its arm like a shish kebab as Bear and Kuzu advanced, firing their bows simultaneously at the beast. Bear skewered the spiger’s head between its eyestalks with an aluminum shaft. Kuzu moved in and struck its second brain between the eyes on its back. The great beast crashed to the ground.

  Kuzu strode toward it then and, as the others watched in awe, the sel placed three hands on the dying beast’s fur. He turned his head on his elastic neck to look at Hender. “Come on, Shueenair!” His commanding voice vibrated Hender’s bones.

  “What’s he doing?” Dima asked.

  “Don’t go near spiger,” Hender warned them.

  Kuzu’s fur smoldered red as millions of “symbiants” evacuated the fallen predator, pouring into his fur. They attacked like needles at first, but then radiated peacefully, spreading a pleasurable feeling like an itch being scratched over his entire body. Their millions of quick pricks stimulated glands under the hendropod’s skin that produced an ameliorating hormone. After feeling naked since the humans had exterminated the exfoliating symbiants so integral to the sels’ health, Kuzu finally felt them reestablish themselves on his body and replenish the external immune system that had made it possible to survive in their native ecosystem.

  Another two spigers lunged down the tunnel in the distance, a cloud of flying creatures following them.

  “The train station is breached!” Abrams shouted.

  “No shit!” Bear said.

  “The incendiary grenade’s still burning on the tracks behind the spiger,” Abrams said. “It should keep the rest at bay for the moment, but the heat barrier won’t last long.”

  They were trapped between the Henders predators on one side and no other place to go.

  “Throw another grenade at them!” Nastia cried.

  “No!” shouted another female voice behind them. “Come this way!”

  Thirty-five yards behind them, standing on the cement landing under the hatch they had passed, a shirtless woman waved a flashlight. “This way!” she called.

  “Who the Christ are you?” Bear said, awestruck by the vision.

  “Nell!” Hender shouted.

  “Dr. Binswanger!” Galia hailed her bashfully.

  Nell waved her arm angrily. “Come on!”

  The sels followed the humans quickly as Nell pulled Nastia up onto the landing first.

  Kuzu pulled Hender up, and Hender could feel a sprinkling of symbiants warm his arm like a pleasurable narcotic that spread momentarily on his skin before they jumped back onto Kuzu. Kuzu’s voice rumbled softly as he spoke in his own language: “I must tell you what happened in the tunnel, Shenuday.”

  “Yes.” Hender nodded.

  Nastia looked at Nell. “Is that tunnel safe?”

  “Safer than this one,” Nell answered.

  “What happened to you?” Nastia said.

  “I lost my shirt. Let’s go!”

  “OK,” said Nastia.

  Dima and Abrams judged that the mule could get through the hatch as Nastia and Nell went through first. Dima jumped on the ledge as Abrams pulled a variety of grenades from the packs on the mule’s back and, aided by the XOS suit, pitched the grenades as far as he could in both directions. Then he helped push the mule onto the landing and through the hatch. The mule gave a kick of its hind legs as it got a purchase and trotted through the tunnel behind Dima, Nastia, and Nell.

  Before bringing up the rear, Abrams fired five more gas and incendiary grenades up the tunnel and three more in the other direction. Talon-1 came charging back down the tunnel now, and Abrams reached down and lifted it onto the platform. Then he saw one of the spigers, soaring through the air in a mighty leap directly toward him. He pulled Talon-1 inside, but before he could close the hatch the spiger jammed a spike inside the crack.

  “Shit!” Abrams cursed, trying to close the door, but even the strength of the XOS suit was outmatched when both the spiger’s spikes shoved into the crack to pry it open.

  Bear looked through the lurching hatch and glimpsed the giant spiger: its head was bigger than the hatch itself. “Come on! It can’t get through anyway! Let’s go!”

  He stuck a shotgun through the crack and fired, blowing off one of the beast’s eyes, which only seemed to make it wrench the door open wider as it trumpeted like an elephant.

  Abrams and Bear ran up the corridor.

  “There are ghosts in here!” Nell called back to them as she led them forward through the passageway. “Clinging to the walls. So move fast! They’re dangerous.”

  “We know!” said Nastia.

  They rushed behind Nell as she ran. “This is one of Stalin’s escape routes,” she said. “It leads straight to his palace.”

  “I told you!” Nastia said with relief. Then, to Nell, she said more quietly, “You know you’re topless, right?”

  “Yes! I know! I’ll care about that later, OK?”

  Nastia nodded. “Just making sure!”

  06:43:22

  Geoffrey and Sasha watched through the camera outside Stalin’s secret train landing as the battle ensued in the tunnel—but they could see no sign of Nell. When the spigers arrived, Geoffrey felt his hope sink: Sector Seven had been breached.

  “Yay!” Sasha said as she saw Nell open the door and step out onto the platform, waving at the others.

  “She made it!” Geoffrey whispered.

  The others retreated into the passageway and left the train tunnel filled with smoke and fire. “Thank God,” he sighed; he had been gripping Sasha’s arm the whole time and now apologized to her as he let go.
r />   “You’re really strong, Geoffrey,” Sasha said, rubbing her arm. “Was Nell wearing a shirt?”

  “Um.… I don’t think so,” Geoffrey said, wondering what could have happened.

  06:41:08

  “Are these ‘ghosts’ related to ghost slugs?” Nastia asked.

  “What are ghost slugs?” Nell asked.

  “Carnivorous white slugs discovered in Wales a few years ago that are believed to have evolved in caves.”

  “No.” Nell shook her head and laughed darkly. “You must be a scientist, too.”

  “Yes,” Nastia said.

  “They’re mollusks, but these things have suction cups. They’re land octopuses,” Nell said.

  “Incredible!” Nastia said. “Are they from Henders Island?”

  “No! There weren’t any mollusks there!”

  Abrams checked his rearview headcam and immediately saw bad news: the spiger had somehow squeezed through the hatch behind them. Elastic diaphragms between three bony rings inside its body enabled the giant invertebrate to inchworm behind them through the tight tunnel, extending its head and snapping its jaws like double doors as it drew closer in four-foot lunges. “Heads up, that frigging thing got through!”

  “Damn!” Bear said.

  A translucent silhouette of a man reared up in the tunnel ahead.

  “A ghost!” Nell warned.

  “Oooh!” Hender trilled, disappearing as he reacted to the figure whose flesh effulged prismatic colors in the beams of their flashlights.

  Nell stopped next to the tunnel that headed east toward the city.

  “Just shoot it and let’s keep going!” Nastia said.

  “I’m out of bullets!” Nell cried, unnerved and visibly shaking.

  Dima fired at the ghost and it folded down, dropping to the ground, revealing a dozen more hanging or standing in the corridor behind it. He kept firing, revealing one after another in an infinite regress.

  Nell shone her flashlight up and saw two large ghosts peeling off the ceiling above them. “There!”

  Bear glanced behind them as the huffing and puffing spiger pushed toward them up the tunnel. “Come on, man! That thing’s coming!”

  “This tunnel should go to your honeymoon suite, I think, Nell,” Galia said.

  Nell looked back at the man who had spoken, wondering who he might be under his helmet. She remembered that Sasha had referred to their suite as Stalin’s love nest.

  “Come on!” she shouted, and darted right into the smaller tunnel that headed east, the others following.

  06:38:02

  They emerged through a hatch that opened to a hidden room behind their bridal suite on the second story of their honeymoon cottage. The mule barely squeezed through as it followed them through a second hatch that opened into their bedroom. Dima closed both hatches behind them.

  Nell looked at their unmade bed as she grabbed a T-shirt and pulled it on while the others took off their helmets, turning away. “Yeah, this was our room,” Nell said, noticing the wilted pink rose on their bedspread. She reached into her bag by the bed and pulled out some banged-up sneakers, pulling the one shoe off her foot and slipping into the new pair. “I took these to go spelunking in Hawaii,” she muttered, tying them on with trembling fingers. She looked at the faces that were now revealed around her and noticed Galia Sokolof, Maxim’s chief of operations. “Well, hello, Mr. Sokolof.” She scowled. “What brings you here?” She rose to confront him.

  “I brought them to rescue you, Dr. Binswanger,” Galia said, his deep-set eyes full of remorse.

  “We came to get you, Nell!” Hender said.

  “I’ve no doubt that you did, Hender.” Nell smiled at him, squeezing his hand and kissing his soft-whiskered cheek as he embraced her with four aquamarine arms.

  “Where is Sasha?” Galia asked.

  “She’s at the palace with Geoffrey,” Nell said.

  “Oh,” Galia said in surprise. “Thank God! And the others?”

  Nell scowled once more. “You mean Maxim? Everyone in the city is dead now. But Maxim? Well, he may still be alive, I think, Galia, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”

  “I tried to stop him.”

  “Not hard enough!” Nell shouted bitterly.

  “All right, now!” Abrams said, raising his bionic arms gently. “There’ll be time for that later.”

  “Come on,” Nell said, leading them to the split-level dining/living room of her honeymoon condo, the dining room of which viewed the city and the living room to their right the phosphorescent waterfall.

  Abrams powered down the XOS and detached its grips from his armored suit, stepping out of the machine. “Pretty swank honeymoon suite,” he quipped.

  “Yeah,” Nell said.

  Kuzu rushed to the window and looked over the city. On the street below, a stream of glowing Henders species flowed, in the same direction, flying, rolling, and leaping past the window from right to left, clockwise around the city.

  “We should be safe here,” Galia said. “The windows are bulletproof.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Abrams said.

  “We better look around and make sure no ghosts are in here, or anything else,” Nastia said.

  They all inspected the walls and ceiling carefully and finally were convinced the room was clean.

  “Turn the light off now,” Hender warned with a soft, sing-song voice.

  “Hender’s right,” Nell said.

  They doused their lights immediately and gathered behind Kuzu, who was peering through the window at the dark metropolis.

  Glowing swarms of bugs and iridescent eight-legged “rats” charged up the street, followed by giant spigers with fluorescing stripes rippling light on their frilled skulls. At several intersections in the distance, they could see spigers clashing and locked in mortal combat, causing grisly pileups like traffic accidents. Henders “trees” had already begun to sprout on the sidewalks, their palmlike branches dangling red and blue fruit over the streets.

  “Look, Shueenair,” Kuzu said.

  “Oh,” Hender sighed sadly.

  “Like home,” Kuzu said in his own language.

  The first bloom of Henders clover was visibly spreading, encrusting the streets and buildings, intermingled with patches of glowing colors that Nell recognized as rainbowfire. Great glowing patches of rainbowfire had spread across the high ceiling of the cavern, as well.

  Nastia noticed the glowing patches with alarm, remembering the phosphorescent splotches on the walls of an abandoned Soviet uranium mine she had explored a few years ago. It was the scariest place she had ever seen, until now. “Is that uranium?” She pointed at the roof of the cavern.

  “No!” Nell said. “It’s a fungus that grows here. It must like eating clover.… They were trying to get it to grow in here, but there was nothing for it to eat before.”

  “Nell,” Hender interjected, clasping her shoulder. “Andy is … gone!”

  Nell was gutted by the news, finding it difficult to believe. “No! What was he doing here?”

  “He didn’t want us to go without him,” Hender said. His fur flickered dark colors as he reached another trembling hand out to her.

  Nell gasped as Hender squeezed her hand. “How?” She looked at Galia furiously.

  “A ghost got him,” Hender said.

  Nell bowed her head, gritting her teeth from the blow of grief that punched her.

  Abrams peered through the window on the other side of the apartment overlooking the river. To the right, a waterfall of blue light bounded, formed by water that had percolated through the bedrock from the slopes of Mount Kazar from a reservoir of bioluminescent algae that fed the subterranean cascade. Nastia looked with him through the window. “That waterfall looks like the waves back home in San Diego, when the algae are blooming,” he said.

  “There must be bioluminescent organisms in the water,” Nastia said, marveling at the blue cataract.

  “It looks like we’re safe here for the time being
,” Bear said. “Let’s sit down for a second and get our bearings.”

  They sat on the leather couches around the glass coffee table that reflected the waterfall in the window. The headless mule twitched behind the couch where Nastia, Bear, and Dima sat. Nell sat across from them, exhausted and grief-stricken, her eyes glazing over as she stared at the strange machine that continuously balanced on four legs like a foal behind the couch across from her. “That thing’s a robot, right?”

  “Yeah,” Nastia said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “It gives me the creeps, too.”

  “OK.” Nell nodded.

  Abrams reached into a pack on the side of the mule and fished out a fresh Dragon Skin tunic, tossing it to Nell. “There ya go, Rambo. Put that on.”

  “Thanks.” Nell pulled on the heavy jersey. “A ghost ripped my shirt off.”

  “You did damn good for a civilian,” Abrams said.

  “Yeah.” Bear nodded. “And you saved our asses.”

  “Da.” Dima smiled. “Thanks.”

  Abrams pushed several buttons that snapped open his body armor, and he stepped out of it. “OK, we just lost four men. And it looks like we just lost our only known escape route. What’s our plan?”

  Nastia pulled out the city map and unfolded it on the coffee table between them.

  Hender sat on the couch and typed into his phone:

  The 14th Darkness

  26,439 years ago, a long night came again, and sels came together, peacefully this time, at last. Only five were left.

  “Write now?” Kuzu chided Hender as he sat beside him.

  “The Books are written to remember, when darkness comes,” Hender reminded him, and he finished typing his final entry:

  The 15th Darkness

  Today, the 15th Darkness came.

  Kuzu read it before Hender put the phone back into his belly pack.

  Nell pointed at the southwest corner of Sector Six on the blueprint. “We’re here, in the main cavern of the city.”

  “Yes. Where is Maxim Dragolovich?” Dima said.

  “Do you want to rescue him,” Nell asked. “Or kill him?”

  “I want to capture him,” Dima said. “And bring him back alive.”

  Nell laughed, weeping. “So this whole thing is partially your fault,” she said. “Maxim said the government was persecuting him.” She shook her head weakly. “Though I think he was probably insane already, too.”