by Jeremy Bates
Tears welled in her eyes. Her lower lip quivered. She bit down hard on it, drawing blood.
Will began to move again. Danièle wondered what was running through his head. Had he seen the thing that had struck him? Even if he hadn’t, he knew that something had attacked them in the cat hole, knew that it had gotten Rob. Knew it had hunted them like prey.
So why wasn’t he screaming like she had when she came around, screaming in despair and terror at the unjustness of this incarceration, screaming until his throat went raw and he couldn’t scream anymore?
He called her name. His voice was thick, urgent.
Danièle opened her mouth, closed it.
She was too tired, too injured, too depleted.
She drifted into semi-consciousness, floating, spinning, forgetting. Then a single thought: Dev. Dev knows about the video camera, the lost woman, the expedition! So when Rob doesn’t return home today, and she can’t get ahold of me or Pascal, she’ll conclude that something happened to us. She’ll contact the police.
And they would…do nothing.
Danièle’s hope nosedived.
Like she’d told Will earlier, it wasn’t the police’s job to hunt down cataphiles who got themselves lost in the catacombs; it was their job to hand out fines and meet quotas. Yes, they would visit the Beach and Room Z and some of the other popular areas, they would question the cataphiles they caught. But that would be all. There would be no extensive manhunt.
If only they knew the truth! she thought. That…that what? What were those things that had attacked us and brought us here? Zombies?
This sounded so farcical, so bad-TV-movie, but the thing Danièle had seen had no nose or lips, as if they had rotted off its face, and after it had knocked Will out, it had chased her, caught her, pinned her against the wall, rubbed its hands over her face, sniffed her, licked her, as if it was possessed of an urge, not sexual in nature, it hadn’t been interested in her body, not right then, but of something more primal than sex, a hunger, as if it wanted to tear her apart and consume her then and there.
But it didn’t. It held back. It reigned in its impulse, which indicated control. Were zombies capable of self-control? And then it threw her to the ground and beat her unconscious instead.
But why?
Sea turtles.
Sea turtles?
Giant sea turtles. They could survive for months without food or water. Sailors used to store them in the ship’s hold during long voyages.
A fresh food source.
Danièle opened her mouth to scream again, but all that came out was a miserable sob.
Chapter 40
“Danièle?” I whispered hoarsely. “Danièle? It’s me, Will.”
Another wrenching sob, then another. They sounded as if they were being torn from her body by a barbed fist.
“Danièle? Are you okay?” I moved toward her until my chain snapped taut. I grunted. The pain in my head flared. “Danièle?”
“Yes…”
Her voice was soft, cracked, barely there.
“Come toward me.”
No reply.
“Danièle?”
“Can’t.”
“You can’t move?”
“Can’t.”
My heart was pounding.
What was wrong with her?
How badly was she hurt?
I said, “Are you bleeding?”
“No.”
“What did they do to you?”
No reply.
I wanted to hold her, touch her, help her. I yanked at my restraints in frustration.
I said, “We have to get out of here.”
No reply.
“We’re going to get out of here.”
I wondered how long we had been here. Hours? Or days? I didn’t feel hungry. I was thirsty though. God, I wished I hadn’t thought of that. My tongue suddenly felt twice its normal size. I moved it around inside my mouth, which was dry and sticky.
“Will…?”
“Yeah?”
“So…scared.”
“We’ll be okay.”
“What…they do to us?”
“Don’t think about that.”
“I think…”
“It’s going to be okay.”
“I think…they eat us.”
The fear inside me hardened to ice as I stared into the blackness.
Now it was my turn to fall silent.
I followed the length of the chain attached to my manacles and discovered it was attached to an iron ring bolted into the wall at a corner of the room. I worked at the ring, trying to pry it free from the rock, until my fingernails bled and I gave up.
I fanned away from the corner, feeling with my feet for a stone or something I could potentially use as a hammer. I came across nothing but hard-packed mud.
I slumped to my butt, trying to ignore the wet denim sucking against my legs and the itchy sensation it caused.
If I could somehow surprise one of our captors, I thought, I might find something on him I could use to free myself. But how would I accomplish this? Play dead when he approached? Kick him in the face when he stooped to examine me? Could I perform this cleanly, without an alarm being raised?
I wanted to tell myself that this was all a big mistake, that we would soon be released, but that was bullshit. The iron ring installed in the wall and the handy chains and manacles suggested our captors had kidnapped others before. They had an agenda.
So what was that? To use us as slave labor? To play out sick torture fantasies on us? Or, as Danièle suggested, to fucking eat us?
I shoved myself to my feet decisively, breathed deeply. I wasn’t going to go down that path. I wasn’t going to give in to despair.
I started to pace. I wanted to channel my frustration and fear onto Danièle and Pascal; I wanted to blame them for the predicament we were in. But that wouldn’t be fair. They’d had no idea what awaited us down here.
No, the only person I could blame was myself. I had accepted Danièle’s invitation to search for the lost woman. Nobody put a gun to my head.
And now I was going to pay for that stupidity.
No, not just me, I realized. Everybody close to me. My parents especially—for when their emails and phone calls to me went unanswered, they would suspect something was amiss and get the French authorities to investigate. When I didn’t turn up in a hospital somewhere, or a jail cell, or wherever else…they would conclude what? The last person I had spoken to had been Bridgette. She had told me she had gotten married and was pregnant…
Shit, I didn’t want them to think that.
Not fucking suicide.
Would they be able to cope with the loss of both Maxine and me? My father probably. He was like my grandfather had been, as hard as the knocks life threw at him. If you didn’t know better, you would have said he had been none the different after Max died—but I did know better. I saw the chinks in his armor. The weariness that crept into his voice. The cynicism not so much in his eyes but in the crow’s feet around them. The stoop in his walk that had never been there before. Yeah, the chinks were there, but I think he still could hold it together even if something happened to me too. My mother, no way. There was little left to hold together anyway. At my wedding reception she had been a healthy fifty-two-year-old woman with full chestnut hair and glowing skin and an easy smile. At the airport when I left for London, her hair was gray with streaks of white, she was twenty pounds underweight, and worst of all, the light inside her had been switched off. She never went back to her job at the library, and I wasn’t sure what she did around the house all day. I had a horrible picture of her sitting on the settee on the front porch for hours on end, a book open in her lap, staring at the page but not seeing the words.
I jerked at my restraints for the hundredth time. The cuffs seared my already abraded skin. I jerked again and again, grunting each time.
“Will…?” It was Danièle, groggy, still out of it.
I kept yanking at the re
straints. Slimy blood lubricated my wrists.
“Will?” Panicked now. “What are you doing? Stop it.”
I wasn’t listening. I tugged and tugged, unable to control myself. Danièle was shouting at me, though she seemed distant, unimportant.
Then abruptly, jarringly, a noise cut through my bubbling madness.
A rooster crow.
Chapter 41
DANIÈLE
Danièle thought she must be dreaming, or hallucinating. A rooster in the catacombs? But then it cock-a-doodle-dooed again.
She tried pushing herself to her knees and failed. Her right arm was useless, maybe fractured. She had raised it to protect her head when the zombie-man had rained blows down on her with his bone-weapon.
She moved her left arm under her chest and propped herself onto her elbow. Rotating onto her hip, she was able to sit up.
The movement, however, caused dagger-sharp pain to lance through her skull. She remained still, praying for the agony to subside.
Then: “Danièle! Look!” It was Will.
Look? she thought. Look where? It was permanent night, black everywhere…only it wasn’t, not anymore. From an indeterminable distance away, a faint light appeared.
Someone was coming.
Chapter 42
It was a girl, or a woman, I couldn’t tell from this distance. She wore charcoal tights and a too-big sweater that went nearly to her knees. Her hair was long, dark, flowing around her head. In her left hand she held a candle with a small flame.
She stopped at the entrance to our room, and in the fluttering light I could see the surroundings for the first time—
“Rob!” Danièle cried huskily. “Pascal!”
To the left of the girl, in the corner, lay Rob. He was on his stomach, unmoving. His hands were cuffed behind his back, a chain snaking from the manacles to an iron ring in the wall. To the right, in the adjacent corner, lay Pascal, unconscious and bound as well.
I glanced in Danièle’s direction. The light didn’t reach this side of the room, and I could see little but her silhouette against an almost equally black background. She seemed to be propped up with one arm while the other one dangled lamely.
I returned my attention to the girl.
Was there something wrong with her face? Or was that the play of shadows?
“Comment allez-vous?” Danièle said. “Est-ce que vous parlez français?”
The girl didn’t speak.
“Quel âge avez-vous? Pouvez-vous m’aider… S’il vous plaît?”
No reply.
“Do you speak English?” I tried, though I couldn’t fathom why she would.
Nothing.
“Why are we here?” I said. “What’s going to happen to us?”
She turned to leave.
“Wait!”
Danièle and I yelled after her to stop, to come back, but then she was gone from sight and the blackness returned and we were blind once more.
Chapter 43
DANIÈLE
Hours passed. Maybe two, maybe five, Danièle couldn’t tell. However many, it felt like an eternity. She and Will said little to one another. Occasionally they would call Rob’s name, or Pascal’s. There was never an answer. She tried not to think about them. She and Will were lucky in the sense that they had both regained consciousness, but what if Rob and Pascal never did?
What if they were dead?
No—Danièle would not let herself believe this. They couldn’t be dead. Rob was married to her sister. He had two little girls waiting at home for him. Pascal was only twenty-five. He was too young to be dead. They both were.
This was a stupid way of thinking, of course, because death didn’t care if you were young or if you had kids, it didn’t care if you were wealthy or poor, it didn’t care if you were pretty or disfigured, a king or a queen—it would strike you down when it wanted to strike you down and there was nothing you could do about it.
So had it come for Rob and Pascal then? Was this their time, premature as it may be? Was this her and Will’s time as well? Were they going to become those people who friends and acquaintances commented upon with a shake of their head and something banal like, “I can’t believe they died…it’s so tragic.”
Danièle didn’t want to think about any of this; she wanted to sink into sleep so the worrying and the pain and the fear would all disappear. But as much as she tried, her mind wouldn’t rest, wouldn’t shut off, and now it moved on to the girl who had visited them. She couldn’t imagine where the girl came from, or why she was here in this godforsaken place, wherever this was, because she wasn’t like the zombie-man. Danièle didn’t mean her face—she hadn’t seen it clearly enough to know whether it had rotted off too—she meant the girl’s manner, because while the zombie-man had been feral, vile, a base animal, she had been, well, just a girl.
Could she be a prisoner too then, only one who was allowed to roam freely? Yet if that were the case, wouldn’t she attempt to flee? And if she made the trouble to visit this chamber, to reveal herself, why not speak? Did she not understand French or English? Surely, though, she could have attempted to communicate in some other manner?
So many unknowns! Danièle’s head felt ready to explode. But as she continued to play over the “ifs” and “whats” and “whys,” turning them this way and that, looking for new possibilities, she uncovered a positive thought among the overwhelming negatives: whatever the girl’s role in all this, the fact the zombie-man hadn’t torn her apart and consumed her flesh confirmed what Danièle had suspected earlier: the zombie-man, or however many of them existed, weren’t completely mindless, they had some measure of self-restraint.
As small a relief as this seemed to be, it was a relief nonetheless, and Danièle held onto it as though it were a lifeline, afraid to let go.
Chapter 44
The man who had attacked me must be the girl’s father, I thought. He had been maimed in a horrible accident—a fire, an explosion, perhaps exposure to acid—or he had leprosy or another flesh-eating disease. Either way, his life was ruined. He couldn’t go out in public without people pointing and staring and viewing him as a monster. So he took his daughter, who loved him unconditionally, and fled to the catacombs. But over time he grew lonely. He wanted adult companionship. So he returned to the surface and recruited others with hideous deformities to join him underground, so that now there was a flourishing community of Quasimodos…
I touched my head against my knees.
A cult then? A satanic cult that practiced self-mutilation and sacrificed unwary cataphiles to their dark god? Druggies who had a bad acid trip and thought their faces were trying to eat themselves so they cut them off—?
Whoa, I thought. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Could I be under the influence of drugs? Had Rob or Danièle or even Pascal slipped me something, and I was currently riding out the mindfuck of all mindfucks? For a moment I hoped against hope that this was true, but I knew it wasn’t. I might not understand what was happening right now, but there was no doubt it was happening, no belief that it was a dream or hallucination; it was all too real. The memories, the smells, the lucidity of my thoughts—and the pain, that was real, there was no denying it, and drugs might make you see things, and hear things, and hell, maybe even smell things, but they didn’t make you feel as if you’ve been run over by a Mac truck.
“Will, there!” Danièle said abruptly, snapping me out of my musings. I blinked dazedly. It was the first time she had spoken in ages.
After a moment of disorientation I saw the light. It grew in brightness. Yet this time its arrival was accompanied by sounds as well. Snorts, hollers. Words? If so, I had never heard the language before.
I struggled to my feet. I heard Danièle doing the same.
“What should we do?” she hissed.
“Let me do the talking.”
“Talking? What are you going to say? They are animals! They do not understand!” She was near hysterics.
The torchbearer appeared first, follow
ed by eleven others, seven males and four females. An eclectic mix of clothing that spanned several decades covered their pale, cadaver-like bodies: button-down shirts, bell-bottom pants, a houndstooth jacket, cotton dresses. All of them had piggish holes for noses and lipless, skeletal grins, and all were barefoot. Because of their deformities it was hard to gauge their ages, but they ranged from young adult to ancient. Each carried a long off-white bone.
The torchbearer stopped where the girl had stopped earlier, though his torch was much brighter than the girl’s candle, and the light clearly exposed Danièle and me. The mob fell silent. Ignoring Danièle, the torchbearer came over to stand directly before me.
My blood went gravestone cold as I stared into his eyes—reptilian eyes—for the whites were yellow, the pupils the size of dimes, eclipsing the irises. His teeth, partially black with decay, stood in stark contrast to the delicate pink of his exposed gums. The cavities in the center of his face were lopsided, the left larger than the right, exposing lumpy red tissue within.
His freakish eyes held mine, and it was only with effort that I didn’t look away. He made sniffing noises through the holes in his face. I tried not to gag on his stench.
Without warning he swung his bone. It struck the side of my left knee. I dropped, landing hard on my side. I pulled my knees to my chest in expectation of another blow, but he turned away from me and shook his weapon in the air and howled. The mob responded in a cacophony of celebration. Then he leveled the bone at Pascal and barked what might have been an order.
Two males went to Pascal and heaved him to his feet. His limbs dangled lifelessly. His head was lolling from left to right.
The torchbearer crossed the room and slapped Pascal hard across the face. He peeled Pascal’s eyelids open with his thumb. Then he stepped back, lifted Pascal’s shirt, and thrust the flaming end of the torch into his stomach.
Pascal’s head snapped back and his mouth went wide in a silent shriek.
