by Forbes West
“Radiation is spooky,” Treena says.
You walk into the temple’s interior with Guy moving slowly at the front. You still have the nervous shakes; that damn Adderall is not helping in the slightest. All it’s done is to make you extremely wide awake and alert, and as you walk forward, you scan the entire area over and over, trying to keep everything in perspective and not miss a thing.
The walls are stone and have this sort of emergency light system that gives everything an eerie blue and orange hue, though much of the corridor is still covered in shadow. There is an unbelievably strong smell, a combination of cinnamon and rotting fruit. The walls display off-putting carvings and strange mosaics. Guy’s Geiger counter beeps a little stronger but no one seems alarmed.
Your heartbeat and the footfalls of your companions echo through the temple’s tall, wide corridor. Guy asks you to take a look at your book’s map section. You look at it again. “Look for the correct passage to the donation room.”
The map reveals that there is indeed something called a donation room, down the massive hall and upstairs to the left. You explain the directions and all follow.
“Good, otherwise we’d be wandering and wandering.” Guy says. “These buildings can be such a maze.”
You stare at the frescoes decorating the inside of the temple, amazed at their beauty and detail and the outlandish events each one depicts. In one the Storm King has the world under his feet, crushing cities of unbelievers in little mushroom clouds. Another is the view at street level of human being after human being with bright green eyes drinking the blood of babies and of regular human beings. Another image shows Ni-Perchta entertaining humans by slaughtering each other in crazed gladiator events.
One scene really catches your attention though: a depiction of a human woman fighting another human woman who looks exactly the same—same face, same features. An old man with three faces watches the fight in front of a castle, with a black beast or dog.
You and the others walk up a flight of marble stairs. Moonlight streams in from broken glass windows lining the corridor.
Red eyes flash in the darkness ahead and then disappear. A ghostly reddish form darts from one part of the hall to the other. You stumble for a second, pausing as Treena and Winniefreddie scan the area with their Schufelt rays.
“I just saw red eyes. Red eyes right there.” Your friends unload their guns into the distance and drill bullet holes into the walls. You fire your carbine too; there is a ricochet sound and then you feel something fly by your ear. You hear a snuffle of something and then a dragging noise.
“Shit,” Treena says, reloading her gun. “Shit, shit. Snuffy.”
“Oh lawds!” Winniefreddie says with a nervous giggle.
You look dumbfounded and lift up your visor. “The hell is Snuffy?”
Guy snaps out his telescoping ori-baton again and starts to envelop the whole area in front of him in a blast of flame, burning away some of the frescoes and destroying thousands-of-years-old art and furniture. The flames die out after a moment as if turned off by some unseen switch. A small spark still emits from the end of his baton.
“Mr. Snuffleupagus,” Guy whispers.
“The hell did you just say?”
“You ever see Big Bird? Sesame Street? For years they said his imaginary friend wasn’t really there, but then they found his nest or something. Same idea here— people thought it was just the imagination of a few hawks but...”
You hear a long moan somewhere in the dark maze and your blood freezes. “Here we are, with a vicious creature with a stupid nickname.” You hear a couple of odd mewling calls, like a cat that’s been struck by a car. “Christ.”
Guy flips your visor down before you can. A slight scattering of ash descends from the ceiling; more comes down with each snort and snuffle from the darkness. You almost scream when you see that your shadow on the wall is moving away without you.
“They tend to do that sometimes,” Treena mentions casually, as if was the most common thing in the world.
“Spooky, huh?” Winniefreddie waddles ahead of you before she pulls you closer to Guy. Your shadow suddenly drops back to be with you, after pausing for a moment.
At the end of the corridor, Guy finds a box—a green, glowing box with handles, ancient and high tech-looking all at once. A million wires cover it, snaking around and going inside. A couple of human skeletons are near it; one bony hand still clutches one of the handles. Guy snaps the hand off.
“Stasis box. Must’ve been trying to bring it to the shelter inside.” He checks the box and cracks his knuckles. “No lock.”
The girls cover him as he pops open the lid ever so slightly, a green glow emitting from the crack. He smiles, lifting up a baton that had been left inside. It was definitely of the ancient style-silver, with a blue-green orichalcum stone in the shape of the Taurus zodiac sign embedded into the hilt.
“Animal control ori. Some other stuff. Sarah, we just found ourselves a nice little stasis box. Can hold anything in perfect condition forever and ever. Worth, jeez, a lot. Okay. Oh-kay. This is more than good enough. Forget the donation room—there could be more Snuffies here.” He picks up one end of the box and motions for you to pick up the other end. You grab it and then immediately drop it. Six of those vampire mummies that Jaime mentioned during your train trip charge you, coming out of nowhere and rushing the group with outstretched hands that have turned into claws from years of neglected fingernails. You scream and grab at your gun. Winniefreddie opens up on two of them, shooting and setting them aflame with what you find out later to be dragon’s breath rounds. The blasts from her shotgun are huge and long, almost like fireworks shooting out the end of the gun. Two of the mummies are blasted back and the rags of their ancient clothes set on fire, their glowing green eyes turning black. Treena and Guy cut down the rest in a barrage of deafening gunfire that makes your ears ring.
“Someone must’ve popped a shelter somewhere around here. Another co-op,” Guy mutters in the lull of noise whilst he reloads.
You hear other moans from deep inside the temple and this odd scurrying sound. The Geiger beeps harshly for a moment, making your friends look around anxiously. Then it stops.
You and Guy run with the box, Treena and Winniefreddie behind you.
You look back and see that Winniefreddie appears to have changed shape—no longer a chubby girl, she’s turned into quite a fit, attractive one in a slightly oversized jumpsuit.
You and your three friends get the hell out of the temple as fast as you can, passing the stone doors and the lobby where the holograms turn back on.
Guy clicks the safety key and the stone doors close behind you with a rumble. You hear one last snuffling sound before they shut, as if the creature was right behind you the entire time. Hieroglyphics flash along the back wall.
He thumbs the little tab on the serrated floppy disk again and the hieroglyphics disappear. “Damn security came on for full lock down. That would’ve been great.”
The four of you stand there, breathing deeply. Winniefreddie is her old self again, making you think for a moment that you might have just hallucinated that last part about her changing.
“Oh God,” you say, doubling over. “Oh, God.” Your three new friends look at you like that was one big nothing.
“Damn Snuffy got us good with his ashes,” Guy says, looking over everyone’s jumpsuits. “We gotta go back and zap ‘em or else…”
“Oh, Jesus, don’t mention that. That’s crazy old man talk, that ain’t reality. Don’t tell me you’ve been raiding Treena’s Adderall supply, Guy. Come on now,” Winniefreddie says, growing upset. Guy says something you don’t catch.
“Well, let him come and chase us. I don’t care! I’d rather have that…”
“What?” you ask, taking off your helmet. “What?”
“Old wives’ tale. Forget it,” Guy says, meeting Winniefreddie’s eyes.
You walk away from the temple into the cool night air and sit down
under one of the street lights, jittery and frightened. You’re sweating like a pig and your face is smeared with ash.
Winniefreddie speaks up. “Her time of the month or what?” Treena snorts a little in laughter.
Guy shakes his head and walks over. “Come on, this isn’t normal, guys. Running into a ten thousand-year-old temple and fighting mummies and invisible monsters isn’t the most normal activity. It shakes people up a bit.”
Treena and Winniefreddie nod together in mock sadness.
Guy sits down next to you under the street light and offers you water from his canteen.
You feel a thumping in the ground.
“Oh God, are we on top of a Gug nest?” Winniefreddie says, looking down the empty and wrecked street.
Guy shakes his head and stands up slowly. “It shouldn’t be. We’re not next to open ground. Those things are huge but they can’t, you know...”
Dark, man-like shapes, five of them, emerge from wherever they were hiding, wearing ski masks and black jackets. They attack you and your friends just as the thumping increases.
Guy fires at them with his rifle, hitting one of the shapes. One of the other attackers fires a steel arrow that punches through Guy’s skull, killing him instantly.
Treena fires two shots, boom, boom. The gun sounds like a knife punching through cardboard. Red lightning shoots out from one of the figures and strikes her with such power that she flies backwards twenty feet, her jumpsuit singed and burning in places. Her eyes stare up towards the sky, unmoving. One leg has landed in a twisted jumble.
The ski-masked man-shapes march quickly towards you in a tight formation. Winniefreddie has taken off somewhere in the ruins, turning and shooting her gun once behind her without aiming.
As you run away, you are hit with a blast of lightning. You fall down behind some rubble and what remains of an old building. Barely able to crawl to a safe hiding place, half of your body numb, you try to scream but only a slight squeak of air gets past your lips. Moments pass. Your breathing calms and you have a death grip on your rifle. The ground continues to thump; you hear rumbling and shaking, too. Twenty freight trains couldn’t make that same effect. Something is coming from below you.
You slowly regain feeling in your body, though everything hurts and tingles at the same time. You hear cries in Perchta and then someone shouting orders in an English accent. Someone out there is controlling your attackers. Someone else shouts “Mathias,” and you wonder if that’s the Englishman’s name.
You peek your head out around the corner, leaning against a broken pillar for support.
It then emerges from the ground, all twenty feet of it. The thing breaks through the surface of the street in a cloud of dust and a spray of asphalt and concrete. It looks as sleek and black as a jaguar, with two red eyes as large as tires. The monster stands upright, like a person would. This thing—this twenty foot tall thing—has four claws. The thing has an over-large muscular arm on each side as long as a street lamp, and ends in two shorter forearms. The sharp, wicked-looking claws drip with a sort of resin.
The head has a mouth that opens not horizontally, like you or me, but vertically—straight up and down its face. Sharp, white teeth fill that maw. You don’t bother to stick around, running as fast as you can, and trip and fall over some rubble, banging your knees hard against the ground. The sound of horns come from somewhere—a blast of strange sounds.
The thing is two hundred yards away, one hundred yards now, its massive legs working like black pistons knocking into the ground again and again. It gets so close you can smell it. Saliva dribbles out of its vertical mouth. Its right two forearms reach towards you, about to strike you like twin vipers, when there is a blast of hot air right above your head. A Ni-Perchta in cloak and steel armor dives into the path of the creature. Flames shoot out of this Ni-Perchta’s hands, pouring out as if he has invisible twin flamethrowers. The creature yelps in pain, staggers backwards and falls onto its backside with a thump, its face in flames. It grabs the side of a building but accidentally rips through it, falling with a crumble of stone onto one of its arms.
It gets up, only to have another Ni-Perchta fling a spear into its side. The creature grabs at the spear now lodged into its mammoth-sized and noticeable rib cage with its two left forearms. The spear explodes in its side, knocking the thing to its right. A huge red hole is left in its side and the forearms on that side are reduced to mangled stumps. Another Ni-Perchta fires an AK-47, pouring shot after shot into the beast. Several rounds hit the side of its face and puncture one eye. A few empty, smoking brass casings fall near your head.
The flame-shooting Ni-Perchta puts out a hand in a stop motion and then clenches a white-gray fist. A bolt of lightning from the sky hits the creature in the back of the neck, driving it to its knees with a cry. It falls down, dead.
You breathe a sigh of relief. Then its corpse does something that is just insane in its grotesqueness. Its head detaches itself from its neck, cleanly separating from the massive dead body. Falling backwards, you land on your ass as the thing lurches towards you.
More gunfire erupts as the Ni-Perchta shoot the creature’s head dead in a full blast of automatic fire, finally killing it. The head lands next to you, and two inches from your face is one of its red tire-sized eyes, punctured and oozing, staring right into you. Blood trickles out of a hundred holes all over its face.
You stand up, shaking terribly. The Ni-Perchta who have saved you, the hunters or whatever they are, stand by and speak amongst themselves. You thank them in a mutter, dazed and shaken by what has happened, then walk away, breathing heavily. The mysterious figures that attacked you are gone. You slowly approach the bodies of Farson and Treena, calling out Winniefreddie’s name. But before you reach them, your saviors scoop the bodies into sacks and carry them quickly away from the scene before you can say anything.
You watch in a state of mute shock, unable to think or speak at that moment.
You look at the box that the four of you retrieved from the temple. Not knowing what else to do, you decide to open it and see what was worth all this trouble. As you do, it bathes you in that eerie green glow. Inside are a few odd things—a couple of large, black metallic rings with blue and white orichalcum embedded into them, a good five pounds’ worth of white orichalcum stones, cut into squares and refined, and a couple of bracers with ori that are shaded blue-orange attached. There are also triangular-shaped wine bottles and other goodies, candies you guess, and even cheeses wrapped in onion paper. A single pure silver baton with a blue and green glowing grip sits inside as well.
It starts to rain a little and you walk back inside the temple, dragging the box with you. The air becomes fragrant with that damp street smell.
You sit down on the box, hearing a commotion amongst the hunting party that came to your rescue. You thought they had left and wonder why they have come back.
There are strange tones, something not of this world, sounds that only the dead can hear, you crazily think. All around you there is a red circle that expands and contracts. It’s being generated from a projector on the temple wall.
“Oh no,” you whisper before you find yourself falling.
You fall from a great height, tumbling end over end over end towards a churning gray ocean. You crash into it hard enough to knock your breath away, then plunge ten feet under the waves. Struggling to the surface, you tread water for your life. The water is freezing. You accidentally unstrap your gun.
There are seven moons above you in the evening sky. The wind blows behind you, pushing you towards a distant shore, a beach enclosed by high rock cliffs.
Something large and traveling at an incredible speed whooshes over your head and crashes with a metallic crunch onto that beach.
The rusted-out hulks of boats and ships dot the sea all around you. It is full of this crazed wreckage—a liquid cemetery for things that once plowed through the oceans. There is no sign of life. Most of the decks are partially flooded or have caps
ized with only the barnacle-encrusted bottoms of their hulls above the waves. Life preservers, plastic bottles, Styrofoam McDonald’s containers, and pieces of flotsam bob up and down next to you. There is a smell of salt and a chemical, bleach-like stink coming from the water.
Chapter Twelve:
The Burial of the Dead
You swim for your life as hard as you can, letting the waves push you forward, trying to make it towards the distant shore. It is maybe a mile away. There are things in the water—it is clear enough to give you a sense of shape, of something alive and large. Really large.
There’s a moan, and a giant gray and white splotched neck comes out of the ocean. A head the size of a Honda Civic is at the top of this neck. It has a mouth full of dagger-sized teeth and a tongue that ends in a thousand tentacles. Spidery eyes track your desperate movements. The head makes a chattering sound that is ugly and high-pitched, and then it returns to the sea.
After what seems to be half a lifetime, you end up on the green-colored pebble beach. You lay back, unable to think, too exhausted from the swim. The body of a young woman, face down, lies very close to where you are. She has long brunette hair, just like you. You blink once, twice, and fall into unconsciousness.
When you wake up, it is night, and the seven moons are out in full as well as every star in the universe. Someone has taken the body you were lying next to. Whatever has happened, the body is missing. Or maybe there was nothing there in the first place. You shake your head, not understanding, not knowing if it was even real.
Far off, you hear the sound of drums beating away and the playing of horns. Thunder rolls somewhere in the distance, over that sea full of debris. You are not alone under this alien sky.
A splash of seawater over your hair awakens you once more to the cool night. You lean forward. Your clothes are wet again.
You begin walking, more like staggering, forward. You turn back to where the sea is. That, at least, is real. You watch all the dead hulks floating out there under the light from each of the seven different moons. “Oh god,” you moan, not knowing what to make of your surroundings. The high black rock cliffs, the sea of wreckage... It is a nightmare made real.
