The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “One of several, according to the room we’ve just seen. Why?”

  “One of these machines isn’t enough to repopulate the world. This one should trigger all the others.”

  “But how would that even work?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, man. I don’t know how gravity works or why bees dance or how sharks can smell blood in the water from miles away. Do you? No. It still happens.” He nodded at the slash marks across my chest. “You got lucky. But only because they were barely out of the pool. And there’s worse to come. Much worse. The things we remember as demons.”

  I remembered the pictogram by the big pool. The one that seemed to show something with short horns.

  Dylan saw the look on my face. “Oh yes. Mankind didn’t make that shit up. They’re real. We know that in our back brains. And I’m not worthy, Indy. Those guys are the hard-core cleanup crew. Hundreds of thousands of them. Millions. Flooding the world at once, killing every living animal. No way to fight. No chance of escape. Wiping the planet clean.”

  There was a distant thud, from way back in the complex. It didn’t distract Dylan, however. It was depressingly clear that he was focused on his task.

  “It doesn’t have to go this way,” I said. “Look, Molly and I…we don’t care about any of this. We just want to stay alive. Let us go, and we’ll disappear. For good.”

  He shook his head.

  “Seriously,” I said. “Who would even believe us?”

  “You’re done, Indy.”

  I saw in his eyes that even if this weren’t his job, he would have been happy to do what he was going to do.

  I heard another thudding sound, very faint this time. “Please,” I said. “Look. Kill me if you have to. But let Molly go.”

  He laughed, good and loud. “You’re not the hero in this movie, man. You don’t get to save the girl.”

  The thudding sound was a little louder now. I only needed a few seconds more.

  “There’s nothing I can do?” I said, sounding as desperate as I felt. “Nothing I can say to change your mind? Or offer you? Nothing at all?”

  He shook his head, tightening his forearm still further under Molly’s neck, pressing the gun harder into her temple.

  She was staring straight ahead. The monster had finally come for her in the dark, and she knew she wasn’t going to escape this time.

  “You’ve always thought too small, man,” he said. “Fuck the body shots. This is the knock-ou—”

  Molly blinked with both eyes. I stepped to the side and killed the light from my phone.

  And Pierre ran past me like a freight train.

  I didn’t see him slam into Dylan. I heard the guy get off a shot—his reactions were fast—and after that the grunt of a sudden impact, the scrabbling of feet, a shriek from Molly.

  When I had a bead on where most of the noise was coming from, I ran over and threw myself into it.

  At first I was probably hitting Pierre as much as Dylan, but then I worked out who was who and started punching as hard as I could. Pierre was hitting him, too, but then Dylan sank his teeth into my forearm, so I elbowed him in the face, grabbed him around the throat, and slammed his head into the ground.

  While Dylan continued to resist, punching me in the stomach again and again, Pierre grabbed Dylan’s shoulders and was helping me lift his head up and smack it back down again. We kept going until there was no resistance, no fight coming back.

  Only as we stopped, panting, did we realize that we’d both been shouting, screaming at Dylan, or each other, or something.

  Pierre fell back. I remained with my hands locked around Dylan’s throat. “Molly? Are you okay?” I said finally.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Find the phone. I dropped it.”

  I heard her shuffling around in the darkness behind me, sweeping her hands over the rock floor. “Got it.”

  She turned it on, came back to where I was. Stood over me and shone the light down.

  Dylan was dead. He was very dead. It was awful and horrifying and it was something that I had done. The hair on the top of his head—hair that I remembered noticing, about two million years ago, was starting to thin—was attached to something that now bore only passing resemblance to the shape of a human skull. One eye was half-open. The other wasn’t. They were no longer in line with each other.

  I let go of his throat. My hands ached.

  I heard an intake of breath from Molly. I assumed she’d only just caught sight of the full extent of the unpleasantness. But it wasn’t that.

  “I’m fine,” Pierre said.

  But he wasn’t. He’d been shot.

  Chapter

  52

  Molly helped me lift Dylan’s torso so I could get his shirt off. Then it took us several minutes to tear the shirt apart, yanking at it like two exhausted old people, and find a portion that wasn’t covered in gunk. Pierre tried to help but I told him to sit still and stop bleeding on us. Eventually we had something that could serve as a bandage.

  The bullet—the only one Dylan had time to fire before Pierre slammed into him—had hit Pierre in his right shoulder, then seemed to have glanced off the bone, thankfully without continuing into his rib cage. So, yeah, it could have been worse. On the other hand, it was a total mess. A bad, churned-up mess, and bleeding freely.

  And we had a long way to climb.

  Molly had done first aid at some point in the past and so I held the light and mainly let her get on with it. While she fashioned a second piece of shirt into a basic sling, I pushed myself to my feet and shone the light up the corridor. But it didn’t seem like Dylan had brought anything up here with him. No sign of a bag or even water.

  When Pierre was as bandaged as he was going to get, he stood up. He swayed a little, but rested his other hand against the wall. Caught his breath.

  Molly looked at him dubiously. “How’s it feel?”

  “Fine.”

  “Pierre,” I said.

  “Yeah, okay, it hurts. What do you want from me?”

  “Can you climb?”

  “Yes.”

  “Effectively?”

  “What the hell else am I going to do, Nolan?”

  I stood in front of him. “Listen, Pierre. You’ve just done the single bravest thing I’ve seen anyone do, ever. You saved my life. Molly’s too.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, you did. Are you serious? Dylan was done talking. I was looking that guy in the eyes and I know we were about to be only the most recent in a long line of people he’s killed. There was nothing there, Pierre. No fear, no indecision, no qualms. If you’d stayed safe, back in the darkness, like anybody else in the world would have done—like I would have done, if I’m honest—then ten seconds later we’d have been sprawled on the floor with holes in our heads. You stopped that by being ridiculously, stupidly courageous. By being dumbass brave.”

  Pierre looked away. I reached out, grabbed his chin, yanked it to face me again. “But now you’re done,” I said. “You don’t have to do it again, okay? I’m telling you not to. Because the next thing is getting down that shaft, and I’m not letting you try it if you don’t think you can. Because it’ll be dangerous to you, and dangerous to us, and I’m done losing people.”

  I had no idea I was going to shout that in his face until it had echoed flatly against the tunnel walls.

  “Okay,” he said quietly.

  He stepped back, rotated his head around his neck. Lifted his right shoulder experimentally. Winced, but did it again. Extended his elbow out, and then back.

  “Hurts like hell,” he said. “But nothing’s tearing. Or not tearing worse. Feels kind of like after a dislocation.”

  “You’ve dislocated your shoulder before?”

  “I’ve played a lot of beach volleyball, dude. It happens.”

  “So you think you can climb with it?”

  “I’m sure I can. And I’m sure of something else. It hurts plenty now, but soon it’s going to star
t hurting a lot worse. I’m good to go, Nolan. We need to do this right now.”

  My phone was down to ten percent battery and I couldn’t hold it and climb at the same time anyway. So I took the last remaining lanyard light instead. No way of telling how much power remained. No way of doing anything about it.

  We decided to have Pierre lead the way. There was an argument that Moll, as the person in least pain—and with both arms functioning properly—should go first. But Pierre was firm on the subject. He was, he pointed out, the person most likely to fall. He didn’t want anyone below him if that happened. We couldn’t argue with that logic so we helped him over the ledge into the shaft and made sure he had a solid grip on the first of the handholds with his good hand.

  “You sure about this?” Molly asked.

  He didn’t answer. He started down.

  Molly went next. When she was in the shaft, I hung the light around her neck. She looked up at me. We knew what we were leaving behind, and who, and that there wasn’t anything that could be said about it. Not now.

  I sat on the ledge for a minute to give her clearance. I could hear more thuds in the distance. The machine doing whatever it was supposed to do. Maybe they’d be heavy enough to trigger some seismological measuring system in the area and people would come investigate. Probably not.

  Most likely everything Dylan had spoken of was going to come to pass, as it had been foretold.

  Still. At least it wasn’t completely and utterly my fault.

  I don’t even know how Pierre did it. I assume he was able to use his hampered hand to at least grab a lower hold each time he moved his good one down. I heard a few grunts and a couple of times when he wasn’t able to stifle a sharp, pained intake of breath. Otherwise he just climbed. We moved quickly, maybe too quickly. Pierre evidently realized he wouldn’t be able to keep this up forever, that his good arm would tire, and there was only one possible outcome if that happened. There was a risk, also, though, that going fast would just bring this on sooner.

  Molly climbed silently and steadily in his wake.

  I descended in a cloud of if-only. I knew how dumb it was but I couldn’t stop. When the here-and-now sucks that badly, you can’t help retracing the steps that got you there. Going backward down the shaft only made it worse—as if we were retreating into a past where, had I but possessed the sense to think ahead, there might have been a different path.

  If you start unpicking the threads the garment falls apart, however, and it’s hard to tell which were the most important seams. Sure, there was the evening when I decided it’d be worth trying to find Kincaid Cavern. But before that there was not really paying attention when Ken said we had a new sponsor—just thinking, great, more kudos, and hopefully more money than the dumb books I’d been working on. Which I needed because the job I did before hadn’t worked out. Which I needed because I wasn’t with the woman I should be with. Which happened at least partly because I came out of a bar in North Hollywood—not especially drunk—and decided to go talk to Kristy’s friend about the email she’d sent. I swear to God I did not intend the evening to go the way it did, at least consciously, but there are covert machineries in our minds and souls, and they take us places we don’t know exist until we find ourselves stranded there, exhausted and aghast at ourselves.

  You can tell yourself if only, but the truth is you never know about the big things until it’s too late. It’s always the wave you don’t see coming that will knock you down.

  What the hell was I going to tell Ken’s wife?

  It was going to have to be me. I owed him that. I knew her, a little. We’d had dinner together a number of times. They met back when she had a walk-on in The Undying Dead. That had been the high point of her acting career but now she helped run an animal shelter and a homeless literacy program. She was smart and calm and a good person and I knew that Ken took her advice on most things. Or listened to it, at least. I also knew she felt he should stop fucking around with webcasts and low-rent conspiracy nuts and work harder at getting back into the movie business—and that she regarded me with suspicion, both professionally and personally (like I said, she’s smart).

  I didn’t know, because of course Ken hadn’t said, how they’d parted on the morning he’d driven the Kenmobile around to pick us all up and embark on this disaster. Had he given her a quick peck on the cheek? Or a real hug, and an “I love you”?

  No idea. But I was going to have to tell her.

  And it was my fault.

  Down and down and down and down and down.

  I gave up trying to mitigate the pain across my chest and stomach. I told myself it was merely an infection or a muscle spasm exacerbating the low-level discomfort I’d felt ever since Gemma nearly fell off the canyon wall.

  Down and down and down.

  “It can’t be far now,” Molly said. Her voice was slurred.

  “We’re going to get there.”

  I realized she’d sounded that way because she was crying, but I didn’t have anything else to say.

  And I also didn’t tell her—because it wouldn’t have helped, or made any difference to our present course of action—that for the last ten minutes I’d been pretty sure I could hear noises from above me. Not thuds this time.

  The sound of something climbing down the shaft after us.

  Climbing fast.

  Chapter

  53

  I knew we were approaching the bottom when I heard a grunt and then a crashing sound.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Pierre said faintly. “Lost my grip at the last minute. I’m okay. Just…Yes, I’m okay.”

  We heard him shuffling back out of the area at the end of the shaft. “Clear,” he said.

  Molly dropped down the last few feet. Then I followed. We stood crowded together on the rock ledge.

  “Air,” Pierre said. His voice was barely more than a croak now. Both his bandage and the sling were soaked through with blood. “Real, fresh air. I can smell it.”

  “Let’s go get it.”

  “I need a minute,” Molly said. She was panting hard.

  “No, seriously, keep going.”

  She was about to snap back at me but stopped. Cocked her head and listened. “What…is that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s been coming awhile and it’s moving a lot faster than we were.”

  Molly dropped off the ledge first. Half turned her ankle on landing, swore feebly and nearly fell over. But got herself quickly in position to help Pierre as he scrabbled down after her, letting out a yelp of pain. Then I descended, making both of them look like mountain goats.

  “Run,” I said.

  They ran. Molly in the lead, the light around her neck bouncing shadows off the rough walls. Pierre did a decent job of keeping up. I was moving at barely more than a fast shamble. My entire torso was rigid now and felt cold as ice.

  Soon I heard something arrive at the bottom of the shaft behind me. It made a noise. A low, resonant sound that echoed around the tunnel. I couldn’t tell for sure whether it was the same noise we’d heard from the things that had attacked us—and slashed me—in the bad-smelling room upstairs, but I thought it sounded different. Bigger.

  “Come on!” Molly shouted.

  They started to get ahead, to pull away from me, and that was okay. I wanted them to. They had a decent chance to escape and I could make it better.

  Another growl and now I was pretty confident it was of a different kind than the one the ogre/troll things had made in the site above. It was deep but had greater texture to it. There was more articulation in the sound, a variation in tone—as though, under the right conditions, it could be bent and twisted to render speech.

  It was loud enough this time that Molly stopped running. She turned. “Nolan!” she screamed. “Run!”

  “I can’t,” I said. “And there’s no point.”

  Even if we managed to get to the ledge, to the hole in the canyon wall, to the fresh air and the
big world outside, we were still hundreds of feet up a rock wall. You can’t climb down something like that with a thing after you. Not when you’re exhausted and in terrible pain.

  Molly gave Pierre a shove and told him to keep going. He didn’t, of course.

  They both came back for me.

  And so they were by my side when the thing finally came into the range of the light from the lanyard, twenty feet away.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Molly said.

  We saw its limbs and body first. These answered the question of why the height of the passages in most of the site was well over that required for humans.

  It was nine feet tall.

  It was naked, and its skin had a burnished quality, like a dark hairless hide. It was broad-shouldered and very powerfully built, but basically in human proportions. It had stubby horns coming out of the top of its skull but these were not neat or symmetrical—there were three of them, twisted and gnarled like winter branches. They were a weapon, something that could be thrust into the belly of another animal and then twisted to effect immediate evisceration.

  Its face was nearly human, though the jaw was massive and the features large and coarse. And there was something else about them, too.

  “No,” Pierre said. “Shit no.”

  The hair hanging down to the creature’s shoulders—bunching up as it raised its huge hands—was a dark, rusty red. That could have been natural, the way this creature was supposed to be. But the arrangement of the face…

  It wasn’t female, so it wasn’t exact or even close. But it could have been a cruel caricature of Gemma’s brother, if she’d had one, a terrible sibling the family kept hidden under the stairs and never spoke of.

  “Her DNA was in the blood in the p—”

  That’s all I got out.