Windfall

by Tempe O'Kun

  “If he found out the show was real, he’d never shut up.”

  “But these things are real!” Kylie bounced around, twisted between anger and fluster. “We saw one kill a wild deer!”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “What are you talking about?” He tapped at the frozen, oddly-lit homage of the skitter on her phone. “These things couldn’t kill a wild rabbit.”

  “It was bigger, like a person. And it wasn’t built like the skitters: more like a big predator.” She arched her body forward in imitation. “It had a black armor shell and legs growing out of its back.”

  Surprised silence spelled over the feline for a moment. “Well…nothing like that’s ever come to town.” His arms crossed over his narrow chest. “But can you see why I’ve been keeping you from this stuff?”

  “Ugh!” The otter leaned back like a bent sapling and groaned. “Can you tell me anything useful about the mines?”

  “Dunno.” He rubbed his scruff with an anxious growl. “The town’s built on them, for one. The sewer and water lines run through them. Power lines too.”

  “Power lines?”

  “Oh yeah, years ago, they ran the entire power grid through old mines running under the town. Guess they thought it’d be cheaper than digging new tunnels.”

  “That doesn’t seem weird to you?”

  “Actually, it sort of made sense.” He watched her with ears cocked. “That way, they shored up the sketchy parts. If anything is living down there, it’s probably been sealed off.”

  “What if it wasn’t?”

  The feline shrugged.

  Her whiskers straightened at a realization. “Wait, if you know about all this stuff, how have you not gone nuts?”

  His tail swished as he fixed a label. “That’s the difference between knowing about something and being obsessed with it: you have to care about something for it to make you crazy.”

  “So indifference is, what, your special gift?”

  He lifted a half-hearted fist. “Apathy power: activate or whatever.” Amusement faded from his muzzle. “You’re going to check out the mines, aren’t you?”

  A bounce traveled up the otter and emerged as words: “Of course!”

  His green eyes grew serious for a moment. “That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you about this.”

  “Which is why I’m not yelling at you.”

  “Don’t get killed.” A faint smile and a tail flick. “With my luck, the owner’ll hire one of your fans. They actually are crazy.”

  “Fine.” She pulled her keys from her pocket and headed for the exit. “But, in return, you have to give me whatever info about the town I ask for.”

  “Anytime.” The tabby shrugged. “You’re the first person who didn’t get bored with this job after three weeks and leave. I’d prefer you not die.”

  She paused in the doorway. “Aww, you care.”

  “Yeah, it’s exhausting.” He indulged in a long, languid stretch. “I can see why I don’t do it much.”

  Max watched his girlfriend bounce in the front door clutching a large shoebox. Well, large for an otter.

  She plunked down at the kitchen table, then popped open the box and crammed her feet into a pair of new hiking boots.

  His eyebrows lifted. “Finally learned your lesson?”

  “We’re serious about this now.” Her webbed fingers fumbled at the laces.

  The dog knelt down to help her into the boots. “We haven’t been until now?”

  Her heavy tail traced the floorboards behind her chair. “Shane fessed up about the monsters around town.”

  “Okay.” He cinched the last row of laces and tied it in place. “What’s this tell us that we didn’t know?”

  She crossed her arms and groused. “That he’s a jerk for not telling me sooner.”

  “Anything else?” Leaning onto the table, the husky steepled his fingers. From the pot at the center of the table, he poured her a mug.

  The otter raised the steaming cup in both paws, taking a sip. “The town runs its power lines and sewer through the mines.”

  “Tell me we’re not going in the sewer.” Max examined the pristine white fur of his paws. “I’m not as washable as you.”

  She stirred her tea, then added more sugar. “It stands to reason there’d be access somewhere.”

  “This is sounding like a sewer plan.” His voice rung resigned.

  Her eyes met his. “The creature could totally be down there.”

  “So sewer plan with a chance of monsters.” His ears sank and his massive frame slouched. “When have those episodes gone well for us?”

  “It’s our best lead.” The otter stroked her whiskers and tried to keep her nerves in check. At least she had a hunky husky for backup. “We’ve gotta go down there and try to get some evidence, monster or no monster.”

  Max heaved a canine sigh, then grabbed a small aerosol can from his pocket and tossed it to her.

  She caught the slim canister, then examined it. Pepper spray. She gave him a grim smile.

  The husky met her eyes with a confident nod.

  Before noon, they stood at the first mine entrance in a little gully near the Crystal Caverns. The flashlight beam traveled twenty feet before darkness ate it. Rotting beams creaked under the weight of the world above, eager to collapse. The canine fought back a slight whimper, not eager to charge into an unstable mine.

  Kylie held the large flashlight in her slender paws. “This plan seemed logical until just this second.”

  “And now we’re charging down an abandoned mine to find a dangerous monster.” Max took the spool of twine from his backpack and tied one end to a tree near the entrance. From what he’d read in the Windfall guidebooks, silver mines weren’t built for ease of navigation. His gaze met her hazel eyes.

  She nodded.

  Side by side, they entered the mine.

  Half an hour later, they tramped out, slathered with mud.

  “Okay, that was gross.” The otter unlaced her now-sullied boots and dumped out clods of muck. “From now on let’s stay above the water table.”

  “I thought you liked water.” The husky wrung out his tail.

  “That wasn’t water. I’m made of more water than this stuff.” She scraped a pawful of muck off her back and splatted it on the rock-strewn grass.

  The next candidate had a cave-in a few meters from the entrance.

  As they clomped along in hiking boots toward their next site, Max could see signs of frustration building in the otter in the arch of her shoulders, the set of her jaw. They picked their way around rocks in a narrow gulch. A stream hurried past them, vanishing down a pebbled slope. At the entrance, he tied the twine off again, then glanced her way.

  Brushing drying flakes of mud from her pelt, she washed her paws in the stream and steeled herself with a deep breath. Before Max’s eyes, the frustration rolled off her like so much rainwater. “Okay, let’s try this again.” She marched into the mine ahead of him, flashlight ready.

  The dog couldn’t help smiling. Pound for pound, she was tougher than anybody he’d ever met. He followed.

  A stone wall blocked their progress. The otter squawked with frustration. “Another cave-in?”

  “It’s like they just stopped digging.” Max touched the solid granite surface. “This might be a test mine that didn’t pan out.”

  “I don’t think so.” She pointed her flashlight around, down, and up, then paused. “What’s that?”

  At first, the dog saw nothing. Then he crouched. Tucked behind a rise in the ceiling clung a small white object, about the size of his thumb. The material looked familiar. He sniffed at it, but smelled only earth. “Mushroom?”

  “Not like any I’ve ever seen.” She curled a finger, gesturing him closer. “Gimme a boost.”

  He bent and let her step in his hands, then lifted her to touch the object.

  “Hey cool!” She bounced down, playing with his ears in excitement. “It’s got the same kind of etchings as the disk. You reme
mbered it, right?”

  The canine dug through his backpack, drew out a white bone disk in a zippered sandwich bag, then handed it to her.

  She held the disk up, studying it through the clear plastic. “We’re onto something here.”

  His ears rose. “What’re you going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know.” She waved it at the ceiling. “Hit the mushroom thing with it?”

  “It’s not a clam.” He tilted his head at the protrusion. “At least, I don’t think it’s a clam.”

  “I’m not gonna break it.” Her damp paws slipped over the bag as she tried to open it, but she managed to get the disk free. Faint lights flickered around its periphery, through the pinprick holes. A strange buzz hurt her teeth.

  The wall shook.

  Max grabbed the otter and shielded her with his body, ready to dash back toward the entrance.

  “Wait!” Kylie gripped his arm.

  He waited for the mine to crush them, but the only sound came from his spool of twine rolling on the uneven floor and a dry rattle like dry bones over rock.

  Before them, in the trembling beam of her flashlight, the stone changed color and texture and dilated open like a sphincter in the earth. A sizable space lay beyond, filled with organic shapes and glinting lights. The entrance stood bone-white and solid once more.

  The otter stepped from his embrace and into the newfound chamber. Its size seemed impossible to judge; if the beam of their flashlight could be trusted, it had to be at least a hundred feet across. A snarl of walkways and columns twisted in all directions, meeting and diverging, obscuring the vast blackness with their bony tangles. The floor lay concave, bulging out in all directions to support the chamber. Strange items and vessels perched on shelves and fused with walls or the floor. A steep ramp led to a central spire, which stood in the exact center of space. All these structures had been sculpted, or perhaps grown, from that same white bone.

  They trod with care down the incline to the cavern floor. Along one wall, they found a trio of egg-like sacs, translucent and yellow, braced by bone structures and fed by quivering veins. Inside, lumpy shapes pulsed, suspended in hazy gel. Max snapped a few pictures of them, then the space as a whole.

  Kylie’s gaze traveled the ovoid chamber. “What is this place?”

  Max’s booted paws tracked mud onto the lumpy floor. A sucking sound spooked him; he lifted his paws to find the grime slurping away into the floor. He surrendered a nervous chuckle. “Paranormal tourist attraction?”

  She tapped the butt of her flashlight on the bone, which gave a solid reverberation. “It’s better than anything we had on the show.”

  Max looked at a bundle of wires vining down from the ceiling, which fed into a hungry maw of bone. Some dangled, hair-thin and drifting on his breath, others chugged, pumping fluids unseen. “Laboratory? Shop? Rumpus room?”

  “More like a creature.” Her paw traced the sloping walls, the texture of which danced under her fingers just like the bone disk. The disk glinted here and there out those pinprick holes.

  “Everything does look…grown. If it’s alive, it’s not going to be happy we crawled in.” He made a sweep with his phone and recorded the surroundings. “Or maybe it will be, which is probably worse.”

  As his eyes adjusted to the dark, glimmers of light burned around him. At the chamber’s center stood the spire: conical and a meter tall. Faint lights pulsed along it in strange patterns.

  The otter climbed up the ramp and touched it. Gentle at first, then harder as she noticed its give, like a loose tooth. Twitching golden nerves writhed where it joined the floor. “This looks just like the one in town hall. Just not burned.” She turned to him, eyes glittering in the eerie light. “Maxie, I think we hit the jackpot here.”

  The husky, taking video with his phone, gestured for her to stop. “Don’t touch it.”

  She beckoned him closer. “Your knife.”

  He pulled it free and handed it to her, taking flashlight and disk in return.

  With a flick of her paws, she snapped the blade out and started sawing the ropy nerves that held the spire in place.

  “You’re totally touching it.” With a whine of worry, he sidled closer to her. “I think we should leave.”

  “We’re going to need proof.” She sawed at the connections, which hissed and bled ooze. “More proof than a frantic mobile phone video or fake-looking pictures.”

  The husky pondered this notion, happy for something concrete to distract him from the surreal space. The flashlight’s beam flared over levers and divots, worn smooth with use. He made sure to get footage of the claw-marks in the bone console. A spinning bone orrery held spheres of pale gold, though blackness blotted his vision if he looked too close. Nearby, a small trough held tiny, familiar disks; miniature copies of the device-organ in his hand, but at various stages of development. His claws tapped over them, finding one loose. He handed it to Kylie. “Looks like we found the source of your uncle’s disk. Looks like its growing more.”

  She studied it for a moment, then resumed cutting. Steam rose from the twitching nerves. The knife burned her paw, forcing her to drop it more than once. After half a minute of steady work, she sliced the last connection and raised the blade in triumph. “That should do it.”

  “Kylie? We should probably go…” He pocketed the blade and edged toward the door, though he stayed within arm’s reach of the otter. “I don’t want to leave too much of our scent around here.”

  The lutrine yanked the pillar free of its socket with a discordant symphony of wet snaps. “Got it!” She hefted the thing in her arms, staggering with the weight of it down the ramp. The severed nerves writhed like tendrils, still bleeding their yellow goo.

  A rumble shook the room. The walls shifted, flexed, and rippled. The bones clattering returned, all around them now, echoing in the swallowing space. Structures collapsed upon themselves and each other. The room drew smaller, pillars fitting together like a set of fangs.

  Kylie watched, transfixed, in awe. Then she grabbed his paw. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”

  He nodded and hurried backward, up toward the entrance, then spared a single glance back.

  Half the chamber had folded away. In the distant wall, another wall spread open. With four legs on the floor and two on the ceiling, a being issued forth into the writhing space. Its black body contorted over collapsing chunks of bone-wall as its claws worked levers with frantic abandon. Three golden eyes gleamed his way, then a mouth at their center unleashed a shriek of otherworldly fury.

  Max and Kylie ran.

  The cavern collapsed behind them, crunching atop the black being and its panicked motions. Walls folded in without hesitation on their master, fusing floor and ceiling as the pair ducked out the entrance. Behind them, the stone clenched shut, sealing the mysterious chamber, and its occupant, in merciless granite. Down the tunnel, supports flashed bone-white, then flowed like putty, collapsing the earth above. Rock and dirt tumbled off his back. His tail hid between his knees. With the entrance a meter away, Max grabbed Kylie by the vest and hauled her out of the sealing mine and into the safety of daylight. They spilled onto the rocky ground, the dog yanking his foot back as the entrance closed around it. A gout of bone-white powder roared after them. Cold blood rushed through him even as his throat burned from the dust.

  They panted and coughed at the shore of the stream, well clear of the collapsing tunnel. They glanced back to see it crumble into the hillside. Scree tumbled in a sheet and plunked into the water at their feet. They panted, covered in dust, and exchanged a glance.

  The dog looked her over. “You okay?”

  She nodded. Shaken but standing, Kylie still hugged the conical alien device to her chest, its amber connections now limp as severed intestines. Patterns of translucence still pulsed with light.

  The otter beamed.

  He wagged and put the disk in his backpack. They’d just defeated an alien monster and walked away with proof. Not a bad day.
But the way Kylie took his paw, and the gratitude and trust in her eyes as she pulled him toward home, felt like the greatest victory of all.

  Together, they tramped out of the creek bed and tried to shake the dust from their pelts. The forest around them loomed quiet, as if in reverence for the mayhem they’d just caused. Not a single bird or insect called.

  Kylie bubbled and bounced up the incline. “Soooo…” A happy chitter interrupted her as she hefted the glowing bone column. “…we have proof now. We can show this to everybody and the whole world will know my family was never crazy. Also, we’ll have discovered aliens.”

  “Yeah.” Max nodded, dust shaking from his fur with every step through the woods. “Not sure who we could show it to.”

  “Oh right. We’re famous.” The otter slumped a little. “Dang.”

  “Plus: we crushed the monster, but what if it still had an accomplice?” He met her eyes. “Might come after us for killing their buddy if we start bragging about it.”

  “Right.” She trudged up the hillside. “So we look into that, then figure out a way to tell the world.”

  He lifted a digit. “Or there could be more than one monster.”

  The otter looked alarmed for an instant, then shook her head. “The journals always say it’s unique.”

  The husky mulled over a moment of moral quandary. “Was it okay to kill that thing?”

  “That really dangerous monster that’s been making my family go nuts for generations? That was charging right at us?” She sputtered and pointed back toward the mine. “Yes, I think that was justified.”

  “Might’ve been the last of its kind.” He shrugged. “I’ve just never made a species extinct before.”

  “If it had accomplices, they’ll have no idea we did it.” Her deft paws checked that the flashlight still worked, then stuck it through a loop on her vest. “Gives us the advantage.”

  “What’ll we do when we find them?” The dog cocked an ear, then brushed some dirt from his scruff. “Can’t collapse a mine on them.”

  “I dunno; get a restraining order?” Her hand found his. “We’ll figure it out. Besides, it might have been coercing them. They might thank us.”