by Ian Woodhead
He looked down at his rumpled clothing, wondering whether he should remove them and slip between these soft sheets to warm up the bed. It was an attractive idea but Patrick decided to leave his clothes where they were and allow Allison to pull them off him. He grinned, yawned, and felt his eyelids close.
The dim light and extreme cold shocked him awake. He looked around in complete confusion, not understanding what had happened. Patrick tentatively placed his hands on the wet, rough stone cavern wall. What the fuck was going on? He had no idea where he was. He caught his breath when he heard a sound of distant howling echoing through the narrow passages. “Oh fuck, please let this be a dream. Whatever that was, it sounded very big.
Patrick lifted one boot out of the brackish water flowing between the small stones. The foul smell coming from the crap coating the boot suggested that this wasn’t a figment of his imagination. He heard that singular howl again, a little louder and a little closer. He turned around and noticed dim light further down the tunnel. Looking behind him, Patrick saw nothing but darkness; besides, the source of that unholy noise came from that direction. He whimpered when he heard the noise again. This time, he could make out at least two voices.
“What the fuck is happening?” He scrambled over the rocks, trying not to let the panic overwhelm his already fucked up system. As he neared the light, he could make out two more figures crouched beside a large jagged rock. “Allison!” he cried. “What is going on, where are we?”
The figures rushed out from their hiding place. Patrick yelped as he saw two strangers rushing towards him. He then screamed out when he noticed the extra pair of limbs on both of them. He turned around and stumbled away, sensing them right behind him. Patrick felt something grab his ankle and he fell face down into the water, feeling the tiny sharp stones cut through his tender flesh.
They spun him around and pushed their faces close to his. “Where did you come from?” asked the female.”
“What does it matter?” replied the other one. “This is our salvation!”
Patrick screamed out in agony as the male stamped on his leg. He heard the bone snap.
“What are you doing?”
The male roughly pulled his leg to the side. Patrick screamed and felt consciousness wanting to leave him.
“There you go!” shouted the male, giggling. “The human is going nowhere now, is it? I suggest that we move it before the things that burst out of our mother detect our scent again.”
“We can’t leave the others.”
The male sighed, “They are dead, you know that. If we don’t leave right now, we’ll be joining them.”
Patrick screamed; he jerked up and found himself lying on the bed. “What the fuck was that?” he leaned over and pulled his trouser leg up, crying in relief when he saw the leg was undamaged. “Oh fucking hell,” he exclaimed. “That felt so real.” Patrick then realised that he was still alone.
“Allison?”
Patrick jumped off the bed and ran over to the open doorway. He had no idea how long he had been out. It felt like just a few seconds, but it could have been hours. He pulled open the door and look out into the empty hallway, his confused mind refusing to tell him where Allison had gone. He looked behind him, just to double check that the girl really wasn’t in bed with him.
Patrick then heard a low murmur, followed by a frightened cry. The noises came from the bathroom. The memory of Allison leaving the bedroom flooded back into his head. He ran across the hallway and pushed open the bathroom door.
The girl lay onto the floor, convulsing, her feet beating a tattoo against the ceramic tiles. “Allison!” he yelled, dropping to his knees. “Come on, baby, you have to snap out of it!”
Patrick jerked up his head at the sound of footsteps racing up the stairs. He leaned across and put his hands behind her head to stop herself from hurting the back of her head.
He looked across at the man’s frightened face and bit back a barbed remark. He gazed back at Allison, wishing this to stop. “Come on, sweetheart,” he whispered. “Wake up, just for me?”
Allison’s eyes snapped open. She looked around the room before her eyes settled on Patrick, there was no recognition in her gaze. Patrick guessed that she was still dreaming and had no idea who he was. She suddenly gasped out and flung her arms tight around his neck.
“Oh my fucking god!” she cried, sobbing. What the hell has just happened to me?” She held her hands in front of her face. “Where’s the sewer gone, and the blood, and dirt, and mud?” She looked at Patrick. “You won’t believe what I just saw.”
“Creature’s with four arms?”
She shook her head. “No, I was leaning against the sink and looking in that mirror. My eyes were closing on their own volition.” Allison sobbed into his shoulder. “Patrick, I’m so scared. It felt so real. One minute I was here and the next, I was standing in this foul smelling room.” She wrinkled her nose. “The stench of decay in there was so bad.”
“Most of Britain is like that now, Allison. It’s just something you get used to.”
Allison shook her head. “I’m aware of that, “she replied, testily. “This was different. It was fresh rot.” She swapped her gaze back to Patrick. “Do you remember that dead dolphin that got washed up on the beach a couple of months ago?”
He nodded. “Yeah, after a few days out in the summer sun, that thing got pretty ripe.”
Allison nodded. “Well imagine that but ten times worse. Despite the foul stench, I can tell that this place belonged to a woman. I saw dark coloured thick fabric draped across everything.” She shivered. “I walked over to this dressing table and picked up the corner of a thick piece of crimson material and lifted it up, expecting to see varnished wood beneath it.” Allison paused. “The foul stench almost knocked me off my feet. Somebody had used the material to cover up pieces of rotting meat. The stuff stuck to the material like dried shit. I think I screamed when a tight bundle of wriggling maggots rolled off the edge and smashed onto the carpet.”
Patrick felt his last meal wanting to make a quick exit when he reached into her mind and saw what she experienced.
“I thought I was alone until I heard the sound of a quiet gasp coming from the adjacent room. I couldn’t help myself, Patrick. I just had to look.” Allison sobbed. “Oh hell, it was just horrible! I saw what remained of this young blonde woman lying on a huge bed. These tiny things had eaten away her torso. They looked like large red beetles. I stood there and watched them crawl over her bloodied shoulders and burrow into her cheeks.” Allison jumped up, scrambled past them, ran up to the bath, and leaned her head over the edge.
Patrick placed his hands on her shoulders and gently caressed her. Are you sure that you’re okay, sweetheart? You’re not alone. I’ve just experienced one as well, but I didn’t see any giant red beetle things.”
Allison wiped the back of her hand over her mouth before turning around. He felt a warm breeze gently blow through his mind.
She sighed. “I see what you mean by four armed monsters. The blonde woman was the mother of those freaks and of the beetles.” She shivered.
“Was the woman a female hunter?”
Allison nodded. “That last of her kind. She knew I was there, Patrick, witnessing her death. I knew deep down that this abomination would have happily killed and eaten me. Even so, I still wanted to help her.”
“I still find it hard to take in that there are monsters that eat other monsters. Where did they come from?”
“Don’t you get it, Patrick? The four-armed freaks were her first set of kids. I don’t even want to think how that happened. Those beetle things were her next babies.” She gripped his arms. “Their father was one of the four-armed kids. It took them just seconds to reduce what was left of that hunter to wet bones. They are a plague and they’re going to consume everything. Oh fuck. I thought the council were making that bit up.”
“You mean they already knew about them?”
She shrugged, “Some of it
, yeah.”
“Why didn’t they tell me?”
She eased herself up, walked over to the bathroom window, and opened it. She took in a lungful of air. “Patrick, you thought you were in some kind of cave?”
He nodded, realising that she hadn’t answered his question.
Allison gasped aloud. “Oh fuck! Now I know why there’s no dead around here. They’ve been eaten. We need to get away from here, like right now! What we both experienced is happening right under this fucking house.”
Patrick heard movement outside. His mental radar went into overdrive. He pulled Allison out of the bathroom and followed the man as he ran down the stairs. The man opened the door and Patrick saw the two spider-like creatures running across the roofs on the other side of the street. He then saw the creature from Allison’s vision, and his blood turned to ice. The images that he took from her were bad enough, but these nightmarish things were fucking terrifying. They had grown to the size of small dogs already, but apart from the size, they bore no resemblance to anything he had ever seen before. All twelve of them were identical, each one possessing three thick limbs on either side of their armour plated bodies.
The humanoid creatures in the caverns were fast, but these things were much faster. Patrick watched them jump from house to house. It wouldn’t take these new things too long catch their prey. He watched Trevor try to push past him. Allison reached out and grabbed his jumper.
“No, we can’t go just yet,” she said. “We have to let them see us.”
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” he hissed. “We won’t stand a chance against those monsters!”
Allison shook her head. Patrick caught her strong thoughts and squeezed her hand tight. He wanted to run as well, and the last thing he wanted was for those abominations to know that he existed. Patrick wanted to go hide in an impenetrable metal box for a few months.
“This is what we have been sent out to do,” she said. “If we don’t lead them into the city, they will head for the next large gathering of human minds. They head for our home and eat everyone we know and love.”
“There’s only three of us. How the hell can we stop them?”
Patrick shared his fear, but there was something else that concerned him. “Wait, you said this area was clear of the dead because they’ve been eaten?”
Allison nodded. “The female hunter cleared them out and fed the dead thing’s brains to her kids.”
“So is it really such a good idea to lead them into a city full of millions of the bastards? It will be like an all you can eat buffet for them.”
Patrick’s next retort was abruptly cut off when he felt a thousand insectile legs scuttling over the surface of his mind. He fell to his knees, screaming in agony as those legs turned into hot needles and simultaneously pieced his brain.
The pain abruptly vanished, leaving him weak and disorientated. Patrick snapped open his eyes and picked himself up off the floor. He wanted to vomit. The man and Allison both grabbed his arms and pulled him back into the house.
“I don’t even want to know what happened to you two just now,” growled the man. “Can we go now?”
Allison nodded. “We’ll have a few hours before they come after us.”
The man nodded, “We’ll be in the middle of London by then. They’ll never find us.”
She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. “No, they’ll know exactly where we are. There’s no escaping from them now.”
Chapter Eight
The cascade of unfamiliar imagery running through the woman’s thoughts both shocked and delighted Raphael. He had never experienced anything like this before. It compared with the enjoyment of slipping between the sheets of a soft, warm bed, after a long bout of violent sex. Not that he had ever performed that action. He had stolen the experience of that particular pleasure from his mother.
This was Raphael’s first sleeping human mind that he had been able to experience. He wanted to take up permanent residence but, with a sigh of reluctance, he gently pulled out his mind-eye.
Raphael leaped onto the wall, scuttled up the brickwork, and settled on his ledge. His eyes gazed down at her slumped form. He hoped that putting some distance between him and her body would dissuade him from gliding all his four hands over her body. He let out a deep sigh; she was such a remarkable creature. Was she unique or were the other female members of her species just as warm and complicated, and yet so inviting and full of excitement? Raphael watched his phallus stiffen, he giggled.
There were no physical differences between this woman and his mother. That meant, at least in theory, that there would be no difficulty with copulating with the human. The idea certainly tempted him, just to discover why his brother had been so eager to die.
Raphael pulled his lust-filled eyes away from the woman’s milk-white thighs and stared up at the hazy sunlight filtering through the slot in the metal grate a few metres from his head.
Such distractions would soon lead Raphael down the path to his own demise. He needed to stay focussed. The human was just food and nothing more. The only reason she still breathed was that it seemed like the most efficient method of keeping the meat fresh.
The last bits of flesh left on the pilot’s bones now stunk and had become inedible. His latest kill was already beginning to turn bad. He had only managed to eat about a third of the carcass.
Raphael should have expected that the sweetest and most nutritious meat should also be the most delicate.
He felt all that mashed up flesh lying heavy on his stomach. It would take a little longer than he expected to digest. That was a concern; he needed to keep eating if he had any chance of him surviving past the next few hours.
The acclimatisation to his new home would have to wait. His mother had ejected the mewling beasts even sooner than he anticipated. Their imminent arrival into the world had ripped his mind-eye from him. He had involuntarily witnessed their birth and his mother’s slow death. It did astonish him to discover that while witnessing the new-births consume her, he felt no sense of loss. The subsequent destruction of his siblings also filled him with equal amounts of apathy. Raphael’s heartbeat only increased when he realised that the new-births were scrambling across the dark landscape, heading straight for his location.
Raphael had not given up hope, and unlike his now dead siblings, he was not going to run from his destiny. This was his new home, his domain. They might outnumber him, but that was not going to put him off from showing the new-births that not all the preceding generation was ready to lie on their backs in submission.
He saw through his sibling’s eyes that the new-births had increased their body mass with every kill. By the time they were ready to consume the last two, the new-births had already grown until they were now just half their size. That revelation should have terrified him; instead, he found the observation so exciting.
He held out his lower left arm in front of his eyes, gazing at the fresh muscle growth. His own bulk had increased ten-fold since he had escaped the nest. He had noticed that, compared to his other siblings, he would have dwarfed them. The runt of the family was now twice their size.
He had no fear of the new-births, not yet, anyway. Raphael would just lose them in the sewer network and kill them one by one. His plan had merit as long as they did not increase in number.
His trick of sneaking into his mother’s mind had worked just as well with the approaching killers. Through their eyes, he watched them pause to consume an unwary corpse and to practise copulating. Judging from their frustrations, they were not yet fertile. The new-births had taken out their disappointment on the three smallest in the pack, ripping off their armour and feasting on their soft insides. The new-births now numbered nine.
He intended to put an end to their existence before they did manage to procreate. He did not want to consider what their offspring would grow into. “I can’t allow that to happen,” he muttered.
It did not escape his attention that if his siblings had
stayed together instead of fleeing like frightened rats, then they might have stood a chance of defeating the new-births. He sighed, that sort of thinking required intelligence, something none of them possessed in significant amounts.
He jerked his head down towards the woman. She was beginning to stir. Raphael sent out his mind-eye, eager to share her thoughts as she awoke to find herself in this unfamiliar environment. Raphael also wished to discover if her opinion of Raphael had altered since she last saw him.
The traumatic recent events in her life sliced into her dreaming fantasies. Raphael watched the landscape constructed from half-remembered locations, meshed with the street where she grew up, change into a fortress made from fire-scorched bones.
The woman screamed herself awake. He slowly flattened his body against the damp bricks, slowed down his breathing, and watched her head dart from wall to wall. She didn’t look up. Raphael found her reaction fascinating— how the woman’s conscious mind flat out refused to acknowledge her plight. He gasped out in disbelief when he sensed her eyes shutting again. This was so unexpected. The woman still thought this sewer was part of her dream.
She suddenly snapped her head up, saw him smiling down at her, and screamed. Raphael jumped off the ledge and landed in the water directly in front of her. He so enjoyed his food better when they were full of terror.
The woman scrambled away from him, he watched the water tinge pink as she cut her legs on the sharp stones. Raphael growled, feeling drool drip down the side of his mouth. He had digested enough of his earlier meal and he knew that he had just enough room in his stomach for a few more bites.
