by James Hunter
Chuck stood in the corner, one arm slung over his face, trying to block out the stink of coppery blood and voided bowels lingering in the air.
“You good here?” he asked, refusing to take his arm away from his face. “’Cause this? You didn’t pay me enough for this. Nasty-ass dead bodies and shit? Naw. I could use some fresh air, for real.”
Levi motioned toward the flap while eyeing the corpse. “You’re good. You and Ryder check the last tent for the professor, call if you find anything.” He paused, thinking. “You said there were guns in the packs?”
Chuck nodded.
“Good. I want you and Ryder armed, just in case. And stay alert. Whoever or whatever did this could still be around. Once you get done with the tent, I want you to check for a vehicle. The professor’s a mage, so it’s possible they used some sort of portal to get here, but if not, that means they had a truck to transport all this gear. Find it. And Chuck—stick with Ryder. I don’t want the two of you to split up for any reason. Understood?”
“Yeah I got you,” he said before shuffling out of the tent. Chuck’s passing let in a breeze of fresh air, for which Levi was grateful. Yes, he was a creature of death, born out of murder and charged to carry out the same, but he did have a sense of smell, and the corpse reeked. There was nothing for him to learn from the body, but the room might offer him something. Unlike the first tent, with its cots and washbasin, this was plainly a workspace. Bookcases were filled with old tomes and modern textbooks on a random assortment of topics: Astrophysics and the Dynamics of Gravitational Singularities, by Richard Townshend, PhD; Myths and Theories Regarding Atlantis, by Mage Viljo Mansikkamaa, PhD; Sumerian Conjurations and Extrapolated Applications, by Archmage Thorsten Maier, PhD; Elements of Paleolinguistics by Rachael Radcliff; The History of Cain and the Lost Peoples, by Nahman ben Hirsch; The Sprawl, a Comprehensive History, by Mage Owen Wilkie, PhD.
Levi couldn’t make heads or tails of the books. That last one, though—The Sprawl, a Comprehensive History—had been penned by the man Levi had come to find.
He moved to a series of heavy worktables and desks covered with papers, grainy photos, and artifacts likely salvaged from the temple. Maybe something would provide a few useful clues, though he wasn’t too optimistic. The papers and photos were disheveled and tossed about, as if they’d already been pored over by whoever had so brutally killed the assistant. Levi spent a few minutes scanning through the pages. Much of the material revolved around the lost city of Atlantis, which was curious.
Without more context, however, Levi wasn’t sure how any of it fit.
But, he did find a photo—this one in color—of an altar, identical to the one he’d seen in the temple beneath the Hub. And that, if nothing else, told him he was on the right track. There were still many puzzle pieces to discover, but if they could find the professor, or the people responsible for his abduction, he believed they’d find the answers they sought. He folded up the photo of the altar, shoved it into his pocket, and made for the exit. He paused just before leaving, glancing back at the crucified man pinned to the floor.
A pang of guilt rushed through him like a jolt of lightning.
What that poor man had suffered, Levi couldn’t even begin to guess at. He was sure, however, that he hadn’t earned such a cruel end. Even those murderers who deserved to taste Levi’s wrath didn’t deserve that. Death was one thing. What had been done to him was something else entirely, something not worth dwelling on. He moved back over to the man’s side and knelt down, knee just inches from the pile of guts.
Carefully, he closed the man’s eyelids and muttered a quick prayer:
“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.” He ran a thick finger across the man’s cheek. Human beings—so wonderful and so fragile. “Amen.” He whispered the last.
He transformed his right hand, fingers melting together to form a thin blade. Without a thought, he ran the knife-edged appendage across the inside of his left forearm; a line of ichor welled to the surface. The blade vanished, becoming fingers once more, which Levi gently dipped into the golden blood running over the surface of his skin.
Carefully, he splattered droplets on the body and onto the dusty floor surrounding the unfortunate casualty, then willed the earth to swallow the mutilated corpse.
The soil resisted him, fighting his efforts. Superficially it looked no different from the ground of Inworld, but Levi could feel the difference in his blood. Inworld was his mother and father, and the ground there was kin to him. The stone and sand of this place was foreign and resonated on another frequency. A pitch Levi wasn’t accustomed to. As a sculptor, Levi preferred to work with stoneware clays—gray and moist, highly plastic and effortless to model. Inworld was like that: malleable and easily shaped.
Everything in the Sprawl, though, was like kaolin clay, used for making porcelain: too dry, too stiff, too inflexible, and near impossible to work with. Levi hated the stuff. He could shape and draw from the earth and sand below, but it took ten times the effort to accomplish one-tenth of what he could manage in Inworld.
Eventually, though, the ground did groan in response, giving in with a shudder, then splitting wide and dragging the body down, burying it beneath the sands. Not a proper funeral, but better than leaving his corpse for the scavengers. A small mercy. With that done, Levi broke apart a camp stool and fashioned it into a crude cross, held together in the center with lumps of the Mudman’s clay flesh. This he drove into the ground with a thud, marking the shallow grave should anyone ever happen by this way again.
Rest in peace, the Mudman thought as he pushed his way free of the tent and into the early morning light—
He froze as he heard the distant scuffle of claws on powdery earth.
He’d been so absorbed with the dead man within, he’d failed to notice the approaching creatures. Scavengers, he thought. He pushed his earth sense into the soil, extending his awareness out in a circle, forcing it as far as it would go in every direction: a hundred feet, two hundred, three hundred. There, just on the edge of his senses. Several creatures—four or five, maybe more—were stealing toward them, likely drawn on by the pungent stink of the eviscerated body.
Levi moved, spotting Chuck and Ryder milling around by the entrance to the third tent, pistols clutched in anxious hands. Levi knew Chuck was more talker than fighter, but he had confidence the overgrown leprechaun could handle himself in a pinch—you didn’t live long in the Hub without some sort of experience and skill in combat. Outworld was an unforgiving, predatory place that consumed the weak. Ryder, he knew little about, but she seemed to have at least a passing familiarity with the weapon she held.
He broke into a jog, dropping his human façade and allowing his true form to spill out as he moved. “A vehicle? Did you find one?” he called.
Escape was their best option at this point. Drive away, wait for a day, then circle back once whatever was out there left. Scavengers wouldn’t wait around for long, not once they realized there was no more food to be had. Run and circle back. That would be best.
Chuck nodded, then promptly shook his head. “Yeah, well no. I mean, they got a truck over on the other side of the temple, big ass ancient mother, Soviet troop-carrier or something, but it’s busted to hell. Someone tore up the engine worse than that sucker in the tent. No one’s driving out in that piece.”
“And this tent’s clear,” Ryder added, pointing toward the heap of canvas on her right. “Excavation equipment. Wheelbarrows, shovels, pickaxes, lamps—”
Levi absently waved the words away, It’s not important, while reaching down with his senses, focusing his attention on the approaching hunting party. A hundred and fifty feet, now. Moving slowly, thoughtfully. Fanning out, the pack splitting apart, into three groups of two. One group broke left, another broke right—circling in from the sides—while the last group bore straight ahead. A flanking ploy. It was safe to
assume, then, that whatever was out there knew about Levi and company.
“Ryder, get a pair of picks for you and Chuck.”
She canted her head and looked a question at him.
“For when your ammo runs out,” he growled. “Chuck, get that gun ready. We’re going to have some unfriendly guests.” Ryder nodded—eyes wide, muscles suddenly tight and tense—and ducked back into the tent with the excavation equipment.
“What’d you mean, unfriendly guests?” Chuck asked, hefting his pistol.
“Sprawl wolves, I think. Not sure, but I can feel something getting closer.”
Ryder came back a heartbeat later with a pair of dusty handpicks—not nearly as big as Levi had been hoping for—tucked under her arm.
“We need to move, now,” Levi said. “Everyone back up slowly toward the temple. Don’t turn. Don’t run—that’ll only draw their attention. Calm, focused, sharp. If we can’t get to the temple before they attack, you let me handle it. You two just get into the building and hold the entrance. A good defensive funnel, you understand?”
A howl, low and choking, broke the air. A second later another howl answered the first, this from the left, followed by a third from their right.
FIFTEEN:
Sprawl Wolves
A gust of gale force wind swept in, blowing out of nowhere and pushing a brown cloud across the camp—some foreign power was at work within the unnatural scree storm. Some extension of the wolves, maybe? Not important, not now. The trio backpedaled, Levi in the center, Chuck to the right, Ryder on the left—
The wind cut off as abruptly as it came, dropping away to reveal the first pair of creatures closing in on the left side. Scavengers, as Levi suspected. Sprawl wolves: opportunistic killers with a fierce reputation and a nasty disposition. These creatures, more than any other, kept all but the most dedicated travellers from venturing into these parts.
Other than academic types like the professor, only folks bound for the Spine—an impassable range of craggy peaks—came out this way. A few intrepid souls looking to make their fortune by mining out the rich veins of precious metal and addictive Green-Charlie buried beneath the mountains to the west. The wolves, however, were a major deterrent to such prospective entrepreneurs.
The Mudman had read about them, seen pictures of them in an old leather bound volume called Beast and Curiosities of the Middle Regions. Actually seeing them was something else entirely; the Mudman could now understand why those making for the Spine might hesitate.
The two Sprawl wolves prowled forward on limbs thick with muscle and wrapped in tan scales like those of a pit viper. Though they bore the name “wolf,” there was little lupine in them, save that they moved on four limbs and hunted as a pack. Enormous bat ears protruded from the sides of their faces, and their heads twitched with every sound. A singular, cyclopean eye—milky and filmed over with a heavy cataract—filled each face. And, instead of a wolf’s tearing jaws, each had a fleshy tube of meat hanging down, ringed at the end with jagged teeth like broken glass.
Those mouths were not meant for biting, Levi recalled, but for boring in so the wolves could suck out innards—organs, bodily fluids, anything wet and edible—and blend the nutrient-rich juices into slurry.
One had bristling black quills running over its head and back, trailing down to its nubby tail—a male. The other, spike free, was female, but the more dangerous of the two. The males had poison quills, but the females used their anteater mouths to implant egg sacs—gooey bundles of red membrane, each containing a litter of their young—into any warm, wet place they could find. The host wouldn’t die right away, but rather would be eaten alive over days and weeks as the younglings hatched and ate their way out.
A brutal, appalling end.
A tense pause hung in the air as the wolves regarded them with canted heads, bat ears quivering as they waited for a sound. A gunshot rang out, a thunderclap that broke the tenuous truce. The female staggered as the round punched into her shoulder, but the damage hardly mattered; the bullet ricocheted off her scaly hide, ripping into the sand with a puff of powder.
“Run. Make for the temple!” Levi hollered, surging into action, not waiting to see if Chuck or Ryder complied. No time for babysitting.
The male wolf barreled into him, talons flashing out and slashing into his chest as its probing mouth sought his middle. A blast of angry heat flared in the Mudman’s belly, but lasted only an instant before a pleasant numbness worked its way out in a rough circle. Levi focused his ichor, pushing the golden substance to his center—the flesh over his barrel gut hardened, gray clay turning to rocky quartz far too dense for the wolf’s teeth to penetrate.
More gunshots rang out, a pair of sharp reports, coming from two separate locations. Chuck and Ryder working their weapons.
Chuck, the Mudman put out of mind—he wasn’t Levi’s responsibility—but he stole a glance toward where he’d last seen Ryder. She was making for the temple, but slowly. She crept backward toward the hulking structure, stealing a foot at a time, while keeping her eyes and gun muzzle locked on another female wolf, which had materialized on the right. Ryder held a snub-nosed revolver, her hands trembling minutely. Despite the tremble, the weapon remained level and fired again and again, bullets smashing into the creature’s whipping flesh-mouth.
The rounds hit home. A gout of bright red exploded into the air and splashed against the sand.
The creature howled, a gurgled cry, as its mouth blew apart and was left dangling by a thin tether of hide. Levi noted the creature also sported a gaping hole in one of its oversized ears, the top quarter torn away, already lost to the shifting sands. Smart girl, this one. The body may have been armored, but the central eye, the ears, the mouth? External sense organs such as those were always sensitive and vulnerable. No creature, even the most rugged and resilient, was without some weakness.
Levi grinned, proud of the girl. She would be fine. Far tougher than she looked. Maybe she didn’t have the same immovable determination Levi possessed, but she had an iron backbone that spoke of survival. He put her from mind—now he needed to see to his own survival.
Despite the fact that Levi had transformed his belly into stony armor too thick to penetrate, the stupid Sprawl wolf was still attempting to bore inward with his circular mouth. Levi’s right hand bubbled and blurred, his fingers forming a razor-edged meat cleaver. He swept the hand downward, passing it over his chest and belly as if he were brushing away a troubling spot of dirt. Halfway down, just where a patch of numbness lingered in his skin, the blade met resistance: like chopping through a thick salami. Schwick.
The creature reared back with a squee, its red blood splashing over Levi. The Mudman shed an ugly grin, then the blood began to sizzle. The grin faltered, faded. He glanced down, watching with curious fascination as his skin smoldered and sent up streamers of white smoke wherever crimson coated his skin. Acidic. Nothing about that in any of the books. Then the pain hit like a shotgun blast to the back of his skull, as pinpricks of white-hot fire ignited against his oozing ichor. Now it was Levi’s turn to fall back in a bellow of rage, his feet churning up a cloud of grit as he moved, beating uselessly at the spots of acidic blood eating into his skin.
He went to work in a heartbeat, crude fingers elongating, forming concaved razors, which he used to dig out the smoldering patches of red. He carved troughs into doughy clay, scooping out the acid-burned areas and flinging them away. The impromptu surgery was torturous, but even that agony paled in comparison to the acid burns. It took only seconds to clear away the majority of the damage, but even then the wounds still throbbed with a dull ache.
He surveyed his handiwork, inspecting the extent of the destruction: deep channels of missing meat and shallow patches of burnt clay—black and cracked in places like broken hardpan in the midday heat—littered his torso and arms. He shuddered and focused his internal reserve of power in a fitful attempt to close off the wounds. He couldn’t afford to lose so much of himself, not here, s
o far away from Earth. He could use the Sprawl to regenerate given enough time, but time was the one thing he didn’t have.
Something big hit him from the left—a shoulder hammering into his side and pitching him right. He kept his feet, though barely, his toes drawing down into the earth, pulling stability into his limbs and anchoring him fast. The beast, another black-quilled male, staggered from the blow. Probably, the creature had expected to bowl right through Levi, hoping to send the Mudman cartwheeling into the air. But Levi was no autumn leaf, some light and airy thing easily moved. No, he was a boulder, a living stone of the deep places, and it would take an earthquake to shake him.
Levi shifted his left hand, a sledgehammer taking shape in an eyeblink.
He threw his arm out, a cross-body backhand that landed in the creature’s dome like a meteor fresh in from the stratosphere. The wolf’s skull crunched and crumpled inward and the body dropped into the dirt, its face bludgeoned, but the scaly hide unbroken. No more blade attacks, Levi reasoned, means no more acidic blood. He’d stick to clubs from here on out. The beast he’d just backhanded lay in the dirt, limbs twitching mechanically, but Levi suspected the wolf was far from dead. Fazed certainly, but things in Outworld tended to be more resilient than any human would care to wager at.
A flash of movement on his right—
The creature Levi had maimed with his meat-cleaver hand, now missing his tubular mouth, was regrouping. The beast edged forward as ropy strings of skin snaked out from its wounded maw like tiny strings of ground beef. Repairing itself from the look of things. Resilient indeed. Levi moved, heeding his own advice and making for the temple, though never taking his eyes from the mangled beast. He looked left: the second wolf, Busted-Skull, clumsily gained its feet, the lopsided and distorted bones beneath its reptilian hide buckling and shifting back into their proper place.
