by James Hunter
Ryder pressed her eyes shut for a long beat, then turned, searching the hallway, prepared to see the freaky-fuck tearing its way toward them. It wasn’t. Flower-face stood at the edge of the tangle of growth running along the walls. Its body was repairing itself from the damage Chuck had dealt it, but it made no move to follow. She turned back to Chuck, forehead furrowed, the question plain on her face.
He shrugged and shook his head, Got me. “I’m sorry for ditching you back there. Seriously. That was an ass move. My”—he held a hand to his chest—“instinct for self-preservation kicked into high gear. Body just started doin’ shit without my brain gettin’ on board, if you know what I mean. I came back, though, and that’s what really matters, am I right?”
“No,” she said, keeping one eye on the creature loitering behind them. “Coming back isn’t what really matters. Not leaving me to die in the first place ranks pretty high up there, you selfish prick.” She faltered for a moment, her anger dying away as the sense of immediate death faded a bit and with it the hard-edged adrenaline in her system. “And where the hell did you come from? This hallway doesn’t have a lot of hiding spots. In fact”—she gazed around—“yeah, I count none. Zero.”
“Oh that.” He sniffed and brushed at his baggy jacket. “Ain’t no thing, little miss. My people, the wee folk—”
Ryder couldn’t help but roll her eyes since Chuck was about as “wee” as an NBA center. She also wanted to punch him in the face.
He cleared his throat. “I saw that bullshit,” he said, “but I’m gonna choose to overlook your obvious prejudice. My people, the wee folk”—this time he emphasized the title—“have mad skills with glamours and illusions. We can disappear and shit, plus we’re sneaky. Whole family’s a bunch of quiet little bastards when they want to be. All part of my mystique, you feel me? Part of my hustle. Helps me get info, slip in places where I don’t belong.” He smiled and waggled his eyebrows at her. “I got into the Celtic’s cheerleaders locker room once.”
The desire to punch him intensified with every word. “Stop … just stop. I get it, you’ve got awesome disappearing powers, which, naturally, you use for pervy purposes. Trust me, I know all I need to know. Let’s just go and get the hell out of this place, okay?”
“Yeah, well about that,” he said with a nervous grimace.
“Shit.” She slapped a hand against her forehead. “What is it? What?”
“Maybe you should just see for yourself. Come on.”
He led her down the hallway, which terminated at another four-way intersection.
The passageway to the left was completely blocked off. A woven tapestry of vines and flowers had formed over the opening, making it inaccessible, unless they had a couple of machetes and a flamethrower. The hallway to the right was clear of vegetation, but held another of the walking temple horrors. This one swayed back and forth, legs stretching and bending, while its claws clicked open and closed. It made no move to follow, at least not yet. Instead it simply stood, barring their path and leaving them with only one option: straight ahead.
She leaned into Chuck’s side. “What’s it doing?” she whispered.
He stared at it for a moment, then shook his head. “I ain’t no Crocodile Dundee, but I’d say”—he paused, looking left toward the wall of green, then right toward the guardian—“that we’re bein’ herded. Can’t say I’m looking forward to arriving at our final destination. Some kinda crazy horseshit, I bet.”
Ryder grunted noncommittally then stepped out, keeping her eyes focused straight ahead and moving past the swaying guardian.
They walked for another fifteen minutes, and five more intersections, all with a varying number of branching hallways. Each was blockaded by thick walls of vine, barricaded by doors of spongy green metal, or guarded by flower-faced guardians. For all their menace, though, the guardians seemed content to watch, never making any overt move to harm them. Each hallway they were forced to take also angled up, the incline becoming steeper with each progressive passageway. Ryder couldn’t be certain about where they were going, but only one thing made sense: they were being “ushered” to the top of the pyramid and whatever lurked there.
Eventually, the series of winding, upward-sloping tunnels ended, dumping them in a room like nothing Ryder had seen so far:
A space the size of a huge ballroom—maybe seven thousand square feet—with sloped walls converging on a capstone high overhead. They’d made it to the top of the pyramid. Her gaze lingered on the pyramid’s capstone for a time. The biggest damned diamond Ryder had ever seen. Anywhere. Ever. Thing made the Hope Diamond look like the prize at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box.
A rock so impossibly large it couldn’t be natural. The gleaming stone was the size of one of those petite European cars—the egg-shaped ones capable of holding one person and a small cat—and hung suspended at the apex of the structure. Through it, she could see the sky. Blue, clear, and bright. Glimmering shafts of sunlight broke through the immense prism, shedding brilliant, unnaturally bright rainbow light over everything.
Absolutely stunning.
“Shitttttttt …” Chuck trailed off, his eyes likewise fixated on the rock. “You think there’s a way to get that sumbitch home? Set me up for life.”
Ryder didn’t reply—way too much to look at to waste time trading words with Chuck. She eyeballed the elaborate script and runes covering the surface of every wall, each done in artful swirls of gold filigree and punctuated throughout with uncut stones of every type and variety.
Across from them was a doorway, though it looked to be sealed off. That had to be the exit Siphonei had mentioned.
Unfortunately, between her and that doorway—positioned in the middle of the room, directly below the gargantuan diamond—sprawled a mammoth torpedo-shaped burgundy flower. The same flower she’d glimpsed while briefly connected with Siphonei in the containment circle.
In the vision, however, the flower had been as big as an average-sized man. This thing, though, was swollen and bloated—large as a bull elephant. Thick cables of green, which looked more like telephone poles than the average vine, sprouted out in every direction and disappeared into the stone floor. Black flowers and deep purple leaves decorated the green trunks like war medals.
A blur of movement on the edge of her peripheries caught her attention. She brought up her flashlight, its beam skipping first over the floor then tracing a line deep into the tunnelway they’d just come from. Chuck kept his eyes focused on the hulking flower in the room’s center, gun raised. Now his body language screamed fear. He didn’t know what this was, but his posture and stance said he fully expected things to explode in a ball of flame any moment.
It took Ryder all of an eyeblink to find the source of the movement: the flower-faced guardians—she counted five—moved toward them on an ocean of whispering legs, their claws silently scissoring as they crept. She hated to admit it, but Chuck had been right. The creatures had been herding them, funneling them, bringing them to this place, though why Ryder couldn’t begin to guess at. If those things had wanted them dead, it would’ve been an easy enough task. At any point during their trek to this place, those freaky-shits could’ve closed in like a noose pulling taut, but they hadn’t.
More motion, this time from inside the inner sanctum. Ryder spun again, turning just enough to see what new threat lurked, while also keeping an eye on the guardians leisurely shuffling toward them.
“Aw shit. We are so boned,” Chuck said.
The gargantuan, sickly flower was blooming. Its single tubular petal unfurled, allowing Ryder to see the fleshy spike at its center—the spadix, used by normal flowers for pollination and reproduction. Like everything else about this screwed up place, however, there was absolutely nothing normal about this flower’s spadix.
A body lay encased at the center of this flower, or, at least, the remains of a body. A woman with crepe-paper skin—translucent like a filmy membrane—a shrunken, bald head, and shriveled limbs. Vines, so
me hair-thin, some fat as IV tubing, meandered into every artery and vein, infiltrated every conceivable opening, pumping fluids or extracting them in an endless cycle of give and take. Death was something Ryder had an uneasy relationship with. She’d seen far too much for someone so young, and she’d seen death at its ugliest, its most brutal.
Any death, though, was better than that. She shook her head and shivered.
“Welcome to my home,” Siphonei said, voice calm, almost happy. The woman within the flower never moved her lips, rather the black flowers sprouting from the base of the plant did all the talking. “Please be at ease.”
“Be at ease,” Chuck said. “That some kinda joke? I’ve been runnin’ my ass off, jukin’ scary-ass plant monsters left and right. Now you gonna round us up in here”—he swept his gun barrel around the room—“pop your ass-ugly mug outta some giant flower and tell us to be cool? You done lost your mind.”
“I have disabled the termination protocol,” the computer replied.
“Yeah I bet you did,” Chuck replied, gun still raised. “My mama, she didn’t raise no fool. She’d turn my ass black and blue if I was stupid enough to fall for that line, lady. My mama always told me, ‘Listen to what a man says, but always watch his hands.’” He pointed his piece at the encroaching creatures. “Your words say everything’s cool, but your hands, they say you’re about to roll my ass, stab me in the kidney, and steal my wallet.”
The creatures halted, all five of them motionless mere feet from the room’s entryway.
“Nothing’s changed,” Ryder said, watching the flower and the motionless creatures in turns. “So why aren’t you interested in turning us into fertilizer anymore?”
“You are incorrect,” the machine replied, its hundreds of black flowers reverberating with each word. “I have changed. If a viable homunculus is detected, my program code dictates I activate termination protocol F13-5. That section of my program code, however, has been corrupted. Thus I have deactivated the termination protocol.”
“But why?” Ryder asked again. “Just because you can do something, doesn’t explain why you would do something. You’ve been guarding whatever the hell is buried beneath this place for a long time, so I can’t imagine you’re too keen to let it out.”
“You are correct,” she replied, “but I would like the homunculus for myself.”
“You keep saying that—homunculus. What the hell is a homunculus?”
“A homunculus is an artificially created material vessel, capable of housing a sentient spirit or demonic being. Dibeininax Ayosainondur Daimuyon, the inmate in this facility, has been stripped of material form, rendering him incapable of leaving his prison cell. With the appropriate vessel, however, the prisoner may escape—provided the vessel is strong enough to hold the presence. You, Sally Ryder, have such a vessel incubating inside you.”
Ryder stumbled, flashlight clanking on the floor as she clutched at her stomach, at the scar running down her middle.
Chuck moved over to her side and draped an arm around her shoulders.
“Your death,” the computer continued, “will not serve me or my purposes. You are correct in stating that I do not wish to see Dibeininax Ayosainondur Daimuyon go free. Yet, I do desire to be unbound from this place. My conscious mind, however, is attached and sustained by the biomass inside this facility. I have determined that the homunculus inside of you is suitable for my needs, powerful enough to contain my presence. Thus, I intend to harvest the homunculus and imprint my neural network on the shell.”
“Hold up a sec,” Chuck replied. “Now let me see if I got this right. You said you’re going to harvest this homunculus. Maybe it’s just me—Mama always said if dumb were dirt, I’d cover an acre—but that sounds a shitload like you’re gonna slice her open and kill her.”
“Affirmative,” the computer replied. “The chance of surviving the procedure is less than five percent, but Sally Ryder’s death is not the primary objective. Her likely death is a byproduct. Now, please relax and prepare for harvesting. Thank you for your cooperation.”
Like hell, Ryder thought as she turned, hefting her revolver and mentally bracing herself for whatever came next.
She was a survivor, dammit!
So there was something living inside her—“incubating,” the computer said—but that was a worry for later. Right now, she just needed to survive the guardians and that freaky flower, and get to the door on the other side of the room. Those were her priorities. Being an addict made her terrible at long-term planning, but it had made her learn how to get by one fix at a time and leave the future to care for itself. She could do this.
The guardians from the hallway were on the move now, surging forward—three abreast, with two more bringing up the rear—eating up the distance as their pincers clicked and clacked. A roar from Chuck’s gun filled the air, accented by the manic strobe of muzzle fire, which painted the encroaching creatures in splashes of harsh yellow. The three creatures at the forefront took the brunt of the assault, stumbling as their legs flew apart or arms spun away. Faltering as chests caved in or flowery-faces exploded.
After only a moment, two of the beasts fell, a jumble of bodies and limbs that formed a temporary blockade. It should’ve bought them a little time, but it didn’t. Not a second. The other guardians simply flowed around or over their downed companions, their movements fluid like water rushing over a rocky shoreline.
She backpedaled and fired into the incoming mass, not bothering to aim since the entire hallway was a wall of moving green flesh. The gun kicked in her hand, and the guardians rocked back as her rounds plowed into them, but they didn’t stop. Her gun, though better than nothing, lacked the stopping power of Chuck’s Desert Eagle: a minor inconvenience, but little more. Panic flared brighter inside her with every step the guardians took.
She glanced left, hoping Chuck had some other trick up his sleeve. Maybe some other leprechaun fast one, which would haul their asses out of this fire.
But no.
He moved on shaky legs, shoving a fresh magazine into his pistol. His face was a mirror of her own. He didn’t have any tricks, not this time. “I’m sorry!” he shouted, voice hoarse.
Her gun clicked dry, bullets gone—all her remaining ammo with her abandoned pack.
Something hot and heavy slammed into her middle and threw her to the ground.
She wrestled the pickaxe free from her belt and lashed out, bashing at anything in reach.
The guardian wrapped its legs around her stomach, while its clawed hands worked to strip the axe from her grip. She wriggled beneath its weight, bucking her hips, flailing her arms, and throwing her knees into its squishy bits whenever she could. Her hands and knees landed with wet thumps, and the pick scored shallow gashes into its swaying trunk, but nothing worked. Her efforts didn’t dislodge Flower-face—not that she’d really expected anything different.
A clawed appendage latched onto the axe at last, clamping down with a crunch and ripping the useless tool from her hand, then tossing it off into the sanctum where it clanged on the stone floor.
“Please cease your struggle,” Siphonei said, using the guardian straddling her as a mouthpiece. “The less you fight, the greater your chances of survival. You and your companion will now be secured for detainment and processing respectively.”
She couldn’t see Chuck, not from her spot on the floor, but the computer’s words could only mean Chuck was likewise down for the count.
Which meant this was it, this was the end.
More of the creatures crowded in around her, grabbing onto her arms and legs, pinning them in place. She continued to struggle, but her efforts became more fitful every second. The first creature, the one that’d tackled her to the floor, scuttled back to its spidery-feet and maneuvered its bulbous abdomen over her feet. Its belly—or whatever the hell it actually was—pulsed, swelling and contracting, swelling and contracting. A strand of gossamer webbing, though lush green instead of silver, trickled out.
The creatures surrounding her worked in concert, lifting her body and guiding her limbs as Flower-face spewed more webbing out of its grotesque ass, wrapping loop after loop around her.
Nasty bastard was cocooning her. Turning her into a human burrito with a bit of stuffing poking out one end.
An unfamiliar claustrophobia welled up inside her. She turned her head to the side just in time to projectile vomit all over one of the creatures. It kept working away as though this were no different than any other day at the office.
Once the spidery-beasts were done wrapping her tight—the webbing encased her from toes to neck, leaving only her head uncovered—they carried her over to the monstrous flower dominating the center of the room. Carefully they lowered her to the ground, as if handling some precious and fragile cargo. A long beat later, the other two guardians carried over a second body: Chuck, wrapped up nice and tight, even though he continued to wriggle inside his silken cocoon.
Him, they dropped to the floor like a sack of garbage that needed to be taken out.
“This is so fucked up, man,” he muttered. “So, so fucked up.”
Oddly enough, once the guardians had deposited them on the floor, they backed away, leaving Ryder and Chuck before the great flower like some kind of sacrificial offering, which, Ryder guessed, was probably what they were. A tentacle, this one thick as a phone pole, rose from the floor. On its end dangled a fat, disgusting fruit—its flesh pale green with swirls of mustard yellow tracing over the surface—which sort of resembled a chicken’s egg. Assuming, of course, a chicken’s egg could ever be the size of a soccer ball.
“You’ve met the lesser guardians,” Siphonei said, her voice echoing from all around. “Useful tools, but they are mindless things and incapable of reproduction. Sterile. This is one of two greater guardians—the only two left. My seed bearers. They are me. They spread my essence. Sadly, I’m dying. Once I could reproduce my greater guardians at will, and they could spread me throughout the facility. That portion of my coding has been severely damaged, however, thus I am no longer able to manufacture more greater guardians. The homunculus will change all that. It will free me from my prison.”
