by James Hunter
Guy was uglier than a dried out dog turd.
The Mudman clutched a meager stack of gnarled sticks—nearly petrified with age—in one massive palm.
“Do you know how loud you two are?” he asked, his tone implying the answer: too damn loud. “The desert carries sound, you understand that, right? Need I remind you we aren’t the only things out here? Best not to draw unwanted attention to ourselves. So stop talking.”
“Whatever, Captain Killjoy,” Chuck replied, rolling over in his sleeping bag and offering his back to the fire. “I was getting tired anyway.”
“Shouldn’t we set up guard shifts or something?” Ryder asked, nervous about Chuck’s talk of mutants and radioactive cities. She did not want to end up living through an episode of the Walking Dead.
The Mudman grunted. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, but don’t worry about it. Go to sleep. I’ll keep watch.”
“All night?”
“Go to sleep,” he said in reply, before turning away.
She couldn’t decide whether or not she liked Levi. He’d saved her, no question, and seemed to have her best interest in mind, but his personality was so, so disagreeable. She’d been around lots of introverted assholes before, but Levi took the cake; hell, his abysmal bedside manner took the whole cake shop.
She pushed her feet and legs inside her own sleeping bag—a black mummy sack that seemed far too thin—then lay back, resting her head on a tiny inflatable travel pillow. “Hey, Levi,” she said.
The gargantuan Mudman pivoted, peering over one shoulder. “I told you to be quiet. What do you need?”
She wanted to pick up a rock and chuck it at his head while unleashing a string of colorful profanity as loudly as possible. Instead, she forced smile. “I wanted to say thank you. For going out of your way to help me, I mean. Thanks. Not many people would do that for a stranger.”
She watched him for a moment. He’d fallen completely still as though he didn’t know how to respond to a simple thank you. As though this kind of interaction were completely foreign to him. After a long beat of awkward quiet, he replied with a muttered “you’re welcome, now go to sleep.” Ryder chalked it up as a win, then rolled onto her side, eyes fixed on the dancing flames as she nodded off.
She comes to. Groggy, thoughts slugging through her aching head—a low throb beating out a melody behind her eye sockets, keeping pace with her pounding heart.
They’d drugged her again, though how long ago she isn’t sure. No clocks down here. No daylight. No overhead stars. Just the firelight, always burning, throwing shifting shadows against the wall. The thought of the wet, white cloth pressing over her nose and mouth makes her gag—six times so far. Six times they’d put her under. She repeats the number over and over again, cementing it into her brain. That’s the only thing she can count, the only way to track the passage of time, and she clings to it. Needs it.
Her wrists hurt, the leather bands pressing into her skin are too tight, and every time she moves they chafe and rub. Not for the first time she bucks against the restraints, both on her wrists and ankles, panic swelling inside her when she finds no give. She can breathe, there’s nothing restricting her mouth—screaming down here is pointless, she knows—but claustrophobia presses in on her all the same. She fights to slow her rapid heartbeat, jackhammering away inside her chest. Fights to resist the urge to sob or cuss, both useless wastes of strength and energy.
Eventually they’ll come for her, just like they came for the rest, so it’s best to save her strength until then.
Probably, they won’t undo her restraints, but they might. They did with a handful of other victims. If she gets the same chance, she’s going to fight. She’s been in more than a few scrapes before—nothing like this, but still, she’s not afraid to get bloody. Especially not if it means surviving. She’ll punch and kick, scratch and bite. One thing’s for sure, she isn’t going to be led like a lamb to the slaughter; they’re going to kill her anyway, so she might as well go down swinging.
The squawk of inhuman voices fills her ears, and a wild heartbeat later she catches the pitter-patter of approaching footsteps.
The panic creeps in at the edges like darkness stealing in as the sun sets behind the horizon. She doesn’t want to open her eyes, doesn’t want to see the horror chamber around her, doesn’t want to see the pile of mutilated bodies—a reminder of the fate to come—or the blue-men who are holding her captive. But she needs to see. If there’s even a small chance of escape, she needs every possible advantage she can get, and that means she needs to look for openings.
One more deep breath. She holds it for a second, then slowly exhales.
She opens her eyes. The muted firelight is harsh and painful. She looks straight up at first, staring at the rough and uneven ceiling—part of some naturally occurring cave, she’s sure. She’s underground, that much she knows. Assuming she does escape, she has no idea how she’ll find her way to the surface, but she pushes that concern away for what feels like the thousandth time. Getting free, that’s number one on the list. Everything else can get in line.
Next she turns her head, surveying the new addition to the pile of bodies in front of the grotesque altar, with its staring ruby eyes. Her breath hitches in her chest, and she shoves back a renewed wave of fear and sadness.
The woman, Sally Jensen from Newark, is dead. She doesn’t know anything else about her. The woman had screamed “I’m Sally Jensen from Newark” during a brief bout of lucidity. Ryder has no trouble remembering her, since they shared a name. Sally Jensen’s breasts are gone. Carved away. For some unfathomable reason, they’d attached a pink flamingo’s dainty legs to her belly—grafted them on over her navel. Sally Jensen from Newark had been the last victim. There’d been twenty-one in the beginning. All chained up together, drugged and tossed on the floor.
Except Ryder. She’d lain on the stone table, drugged every so often. And now … now, she’s the only one left.
The last.
Movement catches her eye, just to the right of the altar. The blue-men, as she has come to think of them, are coming. Coming for her. They’re twisted things, human-like, but obviously something different. She can’t explain them. Can’t explain what they are. Her mind keeps flashing back to a horror movie she saw once: a bunch of spelunkers stumble across some inhuman cave dwellers who hunt the friends down one by one. That’s the only reasonable explanation. Somehow, she’s been abducted by evolutionary Morlocks hiding beneath the regular human world.
That doesn’t make a damn lick of sense—she’s never been spelunking. That kind of outdoorsy shit isn’t her bag, but what other explanation fits?
The old one, the leader—bent and stooped with age, wearing his patchwork cape—creeps closer. He’s holding a stone knife in one gnarled, arthritic hand; weird symbols are carved into the blade and handle. Those symbols hurt to look at, like they were built to repel the eye.
“You’re awake,” he hisses in horrendously accented English. She’s heard the garbled speech these things use amongst themselves, and it’s nothing even remotely like English. “It’s better if you’re awake. Your pain will increase our chances of success.” He turns to another blue-man on his left, this one holding a jar filled with cloudy liquid. There’s something else inside, wriggling around in the fluid. A tiny thing, not much bigger than a goldfish. She catches a good glimpse as the creature stirs in the jar.
No bigger than a goldfish, maybe, but she quickly sees it more closely resembles the worm-like creature depicted on the wall. A chubby-grub, some kind of larva, with too many eyes and a circular mouth filled with scores and scores of miniscule teeth. An overgrown leech.
“You see the fruit of our labor,” the old creature croons. “All of these”—he waves toward the mound of corpses—“failures. But even in their failure, we have snatched out victory. And you, you will make a wonderful home.” He hefts the knife and brings it down toward the exposed skin of her belly. They don’t loosen the strap
s, but she bucks anyway, thrashing and screaming.
“Good,” the old man says, “scream.” He smiles a wicked, uneven grin filled with black stumps, rotten and reeking. He cuts, slicing into her abdomen.
FOURTEEN:
Dig Site
“Wake up,” Levi said, shaking the girl as gently as he could manage. “You’re having a nightmare, it’s alright, though, you’re safe.”
Her eyes fluttered open and she shot up, beads of perspiration running down her face in torrents, matting down her hair. One hand frantically patted at her stomach, feeling along the pink scar. It wasn’t hard to guess what she’d been dreaming about. For a second Levi pondered pressing her for details.
So far she hadn’t provided anything useful regarding her abduction or what the Kobocks had been doing to her and the others. Levi suspected she had some form of self-induced amnesia—repressing the events, blocking them from her conscious mind. At this moment, though, she probably remembered a great deal, at least until the details slipped away as dreams are wont to do.
He didn’t ask, though.
She was quivering, afraid.
He needed that info, but pressing her for such lurid specifics, even if useful, seemed too cruel. If her mind had shut those memories away it was likely for a good reason.
“It’s okay,” he said again, then scooted back a few feet, not wanting her to feel smothered by his presence. “It’s time to move.”
After another few moments she seemed to come to herself: rapid breathing leveling out, eyes adjusting to the sporadic firelight, hands ceasing their restless scan of her body.
“What?” she asked, voice groggy with sleep. “What do you mean it’s time to move? It’s dark out. I’m tired as shit.”
It was dark. Levi didn’t have a watch, but the heat retained in the ground was like a clock of its own, one Levi could read as well as any timepiece. Half an hour past 3 AM, give or take ten minutes. Quite early.
“We’re in the desert,” he replied evenly. “We no longer have a vehicle, and the day will be blistering hot. That’s not a problem for me, but you and Chuck? You two won’t fare so well. The professor’s work site should be a couple hours’ walk from here. If we leave now, we can travel during the cool part of the day and get to the site by sunup.
“We’ll look around there, hopefully find the professor, and then hunker down until it gets cool again. Then we’ll hike back toward Bradshaw Landing. Travelling at night isn’t ideal—what with the mutants and plague beasts—but better than to try to walk in the heat of the day.” He shook his head at the absurd thought. “So get dressed.”
“Can we eat first?” she asked.
“You can eat while we walk.” He moved away to pack up the camp. Chuck was already up, lethargic and quiet—a change which Levi definitely appreciated—working to roll up his sleeping bag and stow away his gear. Levi’s bag remained packed from the night before, untouched.
The Mudman did sleep, in a manner of speaking, but he could rest much less frequently than his human travelling companions. A few hours a day was all Levi required, and for him, sleeping in the sand, against the earth, was far more refreshing then shoving himself into a stuffy sack. He’d recuperated for a few hours after dinner, then stood watch for the rest of the night.
Still, there were things to be done: his gear was ready to go, but the camp itself needed to be erased. Probably, they weren’t being followed by Kobocks or anything of an even more unsavory nature, but Levi firmly believed the cautious and diligent man thrived where fools rushed in. After all, the early bird might get the worm, but it was the second mouse—cautious and diligent—who got the cheese. Levi was always the second mouse.
First he doused the fire, heaping sand over the meager flame, suffocating it. Once the blaze had burned out, he hastily dug out any unscorched wood—he’d had to search long and hard the night before for those scraps. Those sticks, little more than twigs, he attached to the outside of his hiking pack with a bungee cord.
Next he reached out with his senses, calling on the earth to obscure their presence: the sands shifted and moved with a groan, their tracks disappeared in an instant, and the makeshift fire pit was swallowed in a burble of gritty yellow. He paused, breathing deeply while he scanned the campsite. There were still minute signs of their presence and passage, but Levi was sure the blowing winds would obscure any remaining evidence in a few hours’ time, leaving no trace. Perfect.
By the time Levi was done, Chuck and Ryder were ready to move—packs on backs, both munching on granola bars. Levi nodded his blocky head, gray and massive, and set out in the direction of the professor’s work site, his ground sense leading them unerringly onward.
The sun was just beginning to peek its lazy eye over the horizon when they finally came upon their destination, which wasn’t at all what Levi had been expecting. The camp itself consisted of several large, sturdy tents. Not standard “camp” tents, these, but heavy-duty canvas things, with thick wooden poles propping the impromptu structures up into the air. The canvas was a pale green, stained a light brown in most places by the fine, powdery sand running across the ground.
Far more impressive than the research site, however, was the building lying beyond it.
A towering pyramid of terraces. Twenty stories of ancient, weathered stone shot up into the sky. The temple—and Levi was somehow sure it was a temple—looked old, ancient even, like it’d stood for years beyond numbering. Stranger still was the green foliage running along the outside of the old structure, snaking over every terrace, as though attempting to choke the life out of the building. Thick green vines with fat purple leaves and night-dark flowers blooming every few feet. Levi sincerely hoped to find the professor asleep in the camp somewhere.
The thought of venturing into the strange ruins set his teeth on edge. An unnatural place, he had no doubt.
“Holy shit,” Chuck said, standing in slack-jawed wonderment at the building scarring the horizon with its presence. “Don’t tell me we goin’ in there, ’cause I ain’t fixin’ to do it. That place is a straight-up horror movie set, and everyone knows the black dude gets it first in a horror flick.”
“Yep. I’m with Chuck on this one,” Ryder added, her skin pale and sickly looking.
“No disagreement here,” Levi replied. “Let’s check the camp, see if we can get what we’re looking for without setting foot in there—place gives me an uneasy feeling.” He paused. Though Levi always approached hunting expeditions with caution and care, such outright disquiet was unusual indeed. “We’ll only go in as a last resort,” he continued after a moment.
With a surge of ichor, he recalled his church face—the balding man with his mustache, glasses, and potbelly. No telling how a mage from the Guild of the Staff would react to something nonhuman blundering into his camp. Best to play it safe. Always prudent. Without another word he trudged forward, easing up to the work site.
“Hello?” he called as he approached the first tent, the smallest of three. “Anyone here?” He peeled back a thick canvas flap covering the entrance.
No answer.
He shoved his head in, peeking around: a Spartan room, which looked to be sleeping quarters. There was a pair of canvas folding cots lined up against the far wall with thick wooden travel trunks at the end of each. A small folding camp desk, holding an unlit oil lamp, lounged against the right wall; next to it was a collapsible stool—a backless folding thing with a strip of canvas serving as the seat. A copper washbasin as large as a porcelain tub sat in the left corner nearest the doorway, a stained white towel draped over one side.
Levi crept inside, heading for the pair of trunks by the beds. No place else to look, really. Each trunk had a spot for a lock, but neither was secured, which meant whoever was out here didn’t expect company or guests of any sort. He popped the top of the first trunk and waded into the contents. Clothes—several pairs of pants, shirts, and undergarments—and the normal assortment of hygiene items. Nothing with muc
h of a tale to tell. He shut the lid and headed for the next trunk.
More of the same—
“Oh shit, oh shit! Levi!” Chuck called, his voice thin and muted both by distance and the rustle of the wind. “We got something here. Nasty ass shit. Hurry.”
Levi shut the lid with a clap and hustled out of the entryway, ducking low through the narrow opening, and lumbered toward the largest of the tents. Ryder was outside, hunched over, with a string of clear vomit trailing from her lips.
“You okay?” he asked as he drew near.
“Fine,” she said, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, then spitting onto the ground. “Wasn’t ready for that. Just need a minute.”
The Mudman nodded and pushed his way into the tent’s interior.
The source of Ryder’s nausea became quickly apparent.
The body of a naked and recently murdered man was splayed out in the middle of the floor. He looked to be in his late thirties, and based on the state of the body, Levi guessed he’d been dead a couple of days. It was also obvious he hadn’t died quickly. Someone had driven rusty iron spikes through his hands and feet into the earth below—small pools of blood-caked sand surrounded each limb. He’d been crucified, at least in a manner of speaking. Even worse, his guts lay in a heap next to his body; a jagged, messy cut split his abdomen.
Disemboweled.
A brutal way to go, considering how long a person could live in that condition. If the torturer was careful—and, from the look of things, Levi had reason to believe he’d been an experienced hand—a person could live for hours or even days in such a state. Levi didn’t know who this man was, but he was sure it wasn’t the professor. One, he was much younger than the man he’d come looking for, and two, he was Asian. The professor was nearly two hundred, which for a mage, would’ve put him in the sixty-year age range, black, and hailed from South Africa. There’d been two cots in the other tent, so obviously this was the second occupant—likely a research assistant.
