Instead of buzzing, I began to hear human voices; people screaming, demented weeping, the throaty whisper of rapidly-uttered prayers. There were people both in front and behind me in the tube, all being massaged along in the same direction. From time to time, I heard that same pop in the darkness as others breached the membrane to join our subterranean procession. Whatever unseen pseudopodia reached up through the melted crust of the earth, they stayed busy. I became aware of other living pipelines running alongside the one I occupied when the captives inside them squirmed or kicked. There must have been a vast network of these vessels, criss-crossing deep underground – above me, below me, and to either side. The screams of claustrophobics were the worst. The incapacity of their minds to handle their predicament was evident in their howls of insanity. They’d rather have been dead than constricted in a tube far below the surface of the earth.
The vibrations ceased but the snake-like vessels manipulated us onward through the darkness of the earth for what felt like hours. My arms remained over my head the whole time, stiffening and aching so badly I began to weep at the pain of it. I think, during those interminable hours, I’d have accepted death as a sane alternative to what I was enduring. My posture made it hard to breathe properly, too. The only positive aspects of the journey were the air – I only needed tiny breaths to keep my body oxygenated – and the temperature, a humid warmth. Arriving dead at our destination didn’t appear to be part of the plan. I noticed the cold rush of air first, chilling my ankles. Then the unsettling feeling of my suddenly-unsupported legs hanging down into space. The tube squeezed me out and for a few moments I remained on my back, bent unnaturally by gravity as the sphincter ejected me into frigid black emptiness. My arms returned to my sides with a wrench that made me scream, my shoulder joints blazing with stiffness. I continued screaming because I was falling; this time through air, not earth. That was the worst moment, even though it only lasted for a fraction of a second: freefall. Utter abandonment and detachment from everything. Total black solitude.
Except I wasn’t alone.
My scream was one of thousands that echoed all around me, from every direction. A scream cut short by the shock of being caught. Something immensely strong – an abrasive, tacky arm with the girth of a python – broke my fall. Then another such arm, and another, until I was dangled by vast, serpentine limbs, suspended in the dark like a man-puppet or a carcass in a meat locker.
***
Just as I thought: none will be spared; none left behind. The tendrils holding me now begin their rippled constrictions again and I rise.
I rise.
My guilt rises with me. It will die with me.
There’s no atoning for what I’ve done. No chance to undo it even if I could get away. I screwed up my life. I made comfortable decisions all the way through it until the day – that one single day – when I ought to have stood fast and defended the last thing of any value in my existence: my family. I chucked it all away because I was dissatisfied. The thought of it reviles me. I never grew up. I’ve never behaved as a man ought to behave, never took any real responsibility for my actions. I’d love to blame these creatures for that but I can’t. I came here on a path of my own choosing; no one else’s. No thing else’s.
I’m scared now. Can’t pretend I’m not. No memories left to take my mind off what comes next and no justification for holding a picture of Jake and Tara in my mind as a charm against my slaughter. If I’d cared about them that much, I wouldn’t have betrayed them.
I’m being swallowed upwards and the light up here is blinding. I can see nothing else but machinegun flashes of green and purple, so fast now that the rhythm, if there is one, is beyond my perception. The smell of the compost heap and rotting leaves is heavy on the air; almost choking me, it’s so thick up here. The screaming is the worst thing – incoherent, frenzied howls of people being engulfed and crushed. The screaming and the sound of living bodies compressed to bursting, the bones inside them splintering under tremendous pressure – you can’t listen to that and stay calm. You can’t stay sane.
In the furious lightshow, the tendrils show up with intense clarity. They are exactly like the tiny furled creepers I first saw in the farmhouse – so alien and so intelligently mobile. So huge now. They were repulsed by me then but not now. Size has overcome any hesitance they had before, I suppose. They were weak then; easily snapped and crushed. A single tendril could crush me now. Their rough, pallid surfaces exude a glistening mucus and this, I think, is where the smell of decaying vegetation comes from. Certainly, the stuff is like glue, perhaps similar to the exudations of a sundew. Each tiny, upward-pointing barb is like a miniscule shark’s tooth. Getting away is simply impossible. Are they plants? Animals? I still have no idea.
As far as I can tell, even though I have behaved insanely at times in the last few weeks, I have not been stricken. The Stricken become ‘part’ of these things but they use the rest of us for food. A matter of hours ago, less than a day anyway, tendrils just like this but much smaller were scared of me. Why? And why didn’t I get sick? Why didn’t any of these others? Is it planned like this or are we immune? Are we a source of nourishment or is this nothing more than an extermination project?
I don’t have long left to think about it. My head is just a few feet below the source of light. They look like jellyfish, compacted together in some kind of colony. They are attached to the ceiling of the cavern, though I’m unable to see how or by what. Inside their translucent skins, there are complex patterns of light following millions of tiny pathways in a never repeating sequence. It’s complex, and it would be beautiful if it weren’t for the bloody implosions taking place inside every vast sac.
Why, when we are asleep, are they content to touch us? Why, when we struggle, are they aroused? And yet, when I touched them back in the farmhouse, the tendrils shrank away from me, allowing me to get free? Maybe their size hasn’t given them any more confidence. Maybe it’s merely taken our confidence away.
I reach out a finger and hold the tip against the surface of a tendril near my face. The peristalsis stops. Instead of contracting, the tendril relaxes, thinning and lengthening downwards and away. I cringe, thinking I’m about to be smacked by a whip strike from below. Nothing happens. In the other tendrils that hold me, the upward squirming continues, moving me swiftly towards the bubbles of light above. My head touches the rubbery membrane above and it begins to part. I contract my neck down as far as I can but it’s no use. The tendrils push me up again. I reach for the nearest muscular appendage and stroke it. It retracts instantaneously. Doesn’t it like social contact? Can it be that simple? This tendril behaves exactly as the previous one did, unclenching and letting go of me.
Only three tendrils hold me now and they’ve slowed down – a shiver passes through them as their counterparts release me. Their discomfort appears to spread. I turn to the tendril on my right, the thickest and strongest, and I wrap my arms around it, hug it, hold it tight. It shudders and tries to release me. I squeeze it tighter.
This sends a spasm through the other two and through the bulb above me. Its lights go out. Completely.
It’s trying to hide.
The two tendrils repel me as though they’ve been jolted by electricity. I hang on to the one I’m hugging because I’ve gone from prisoner to threat in the space of a few seconds. Already, I’ve dropped a few feet and I now realise – with a fear so strong it almost paralyses me – that I am far, far above the cavern floor; as high as it’s possible to be. I’m as close to death as I was moments ago.
I wrap my legs and ankles around the slackening tendril and grip it between my thighs. But I start to slip downwards. The tendril has reversed the grain of its barbs and they now point down. The glue-like substance has changed in viscosity to become a kind of lubricant and, no matter how tightly I grasp the thing, I’m unable to hold myself up. Meanwhile, the tendril has changed in diameter from a trunk-thick, muscular limb down to the size of a small log. My ‘hug’
begins to meet me on both sides as the tendril lengthens and narrows. My speed increases, mitigated only by the sticky mucus coating the tendril.
As I descend I watch the people rising faster and faster all around me. It’s like some kind of weird adrenaline ride at a theme park. I’m going to leave all of these people behind. Have they seen me passing? Do they know what to do?
“Squeeze them!” I shout but I’m so terrified of falling that it comes out as a breathless whisper.
“Squeeze the tendrils as hard as you can,” I shout, louder this time.
I think maybe one or two faces have understood. I keep shouting all the way down. The lights from above begin to fade through their increasing remove. The farther I drop, the deeper the darkness and the fewer faces I pass. High above, I think I can hear the shouts of people passing the message on. I hope it’s that and not simple screaming, but from this distance it’s hard to tell.
The tendril continues to thin down and elongate until I’m holding onto nothing thicker than a slick vine or liana. I’m tiring, not sure my fingers can maintain their grip; not sure my arms can hold my bodyweight for much longer. I’m holding on because I know the drop will kill me. It’s a death grip but this contact is what the tendril wants so keenly to be rid of. The more I try to grasp it, the more it stretches, and the less of it there is to hang on to.
A smell rises up and hits me hard. It’s human sewage, heavy and choking with the pheromones of terror. I realise I must be near the cavern floor. Then my feet hit the ground and I collapse into the gruel of faeces and urine that covers it. The tendril draws away with a whip-like swish. The screaming is distant now, the shimmering glow from the bulbs faint as lightning on the far side of a mountain.
But I can see. A little. Enough to scramble up from the shallow sea of fresh effluent without falling over. I curse the stench and the wet filth smeared on my hands and clothes but I’m thankful for my life; for another few moments of it. Piss and shit still patter down from high above but as I begin to run, crouching as low as I can, it’s the tendrils I’m wary of. The pale hanging forest slithers and seethes above me, and I expect a group of tendrils to stretch down and snatch me back at any moment.
I don’t know which way I’m going but, judging by the shape of the pendulous tendrils and the distant light cast from above them, this cavern is far deeper than it is broad. I stumble for what I hope is the nearest side wall, my hands stretched out in front of me in the strobing gloom. The screams from above are so far away they could be in my imagination. At first the only other sound is of my own footsteps slopping through the reeking quagmire but then I hear thumps and splashes and turn to see forms rising from the cavern floor: silhouettes of humans. Some of them have heard me and no longer hang like fruit in a self-cannibalising tree. They’ve slid to their freedom like droplets from thread. I hear them patter after me but I don’t wait.
My hand touches a hard surface. Solid rock. Trailing my fingers along it as a guide, I run faster, following the length of the cavern. It strikes me that in an hour or two, I may have done nothing but expend what little strength I have left running around the entire circumference of the rift-shaped cavern without finding a way out. I don’t see the obstacle until I’ve run into it. I smack both knees and find myself bent over what feels like a broad, low wall. I don’t lie there for long. Under my fingers I feel squeaky smoothness. I know this texture: it’s polythene. There are ridges in it and below these, tiny crevices between dozens of hard cubes. I kick the base of the wall. There’s a gap there. This is a loaded wooden pallet, its cargo shrink-wrapped for storage.
I edge around it, the pain in my knees and the winding I’ve taken suddenly of no consequence. But I can’t get around it because beside it is a second, similarly-wrapped pallet. Besides that, another. I don’t want to expose myself by leaving the relative cover of the cavern wall, so I climb onto the pallet and off the other side. Here I find more of them, but their wooden bases are smashed and their contents have slipped. I pause, hoping for more flashes of light from overhead. Eventually, a couple of brighter illuminations give me a glimpse of what I’ve run into. There are hundreds of pallets and the framework they were stacked on has collapsed. The quakes must have done it. Bent sections of angled iron and splintered staging extend into the distance. It’s an obstacle course and the only way through is to navigate by the death-lights from above. I think hard about that as I pick my way through the fallen debris, trying not to waste a single instant of visibility, doing my best to commit to memory the maze-like landscape that each purple or green flash reveals.
Behind me, others are finding the ‘wall’. I hear them grunt first with shock and then with effort as they clamber along in my wake. If I thought it would make any difference at all, I’d yell back to them, give them directions. But I don’t know where each of them is and I don’t want to waste my air. The only energy I have left is for me.
I catch my shin on a section of steel, scraping the skin to the bone.
I find I have breath for curses, at least. My trousers are already wet with raw sewage and the thought of those fluids mingling with my freshly-flowing blood makes me nauseous. I’ve no choice but to keep going, though. If this was a storage space then there’s a way out of this subterranean limbo. I’m going to find it.
By a particularly bright series of phosphorescent flashes I momentarily see the whole space. Racks of pallets that were once ten levels high now lie like twisted, skeletal dominoes. To the right, there is a black hole, its edges well defined. I change direction, finding a low corridor through the metal and wood. I run, crouched to save my head from the fallen racking. I reach the space in the wall. A flash illuminates it for just an instant. I see an upward sloping tunnel containing only more blackness. A cold wind, carrying no hint of life on it, pushes out at me, warding me off.
I turn back.
“Over here!” I shout. “There’s a way out!” Then I’m running uphill.
For a long time there’s no light in the tunnel. I run with my hand touching the wall but that doesn’t prepare me for the right-angled turns that begin to spiral the tunnel upwards. After the first impact – I’ve chipped an upper incisor and when I breathe through my mouth it aches right into my forehead – I start to use my ears as well. I can tell when a wall is coming by the sound of my footsteps echoing back. I’ve stopped running and started counting my paces. The turns in the tunnel come about every hundred steps. Others are behind me, farther down. I hear their exhausted footfalls, the cries and gasps as they run into walls; all the time fearing so much worse.
I notice something up ahead, a square of the faintest grey. It takes me several stumbling paces before I realise that I’m seeing light illuminate the end of this section of tunnel. I’ve been lumbering along at an exhausted fast-walk. Now I break into a run, amazed at my body; more strength in reserve than I ever imagined I had.
Light!
The surface!
Already, I’m seeing myself breaking out from the darkness, imagining the feeling of being reborn into the natural realm. I’ll thrust my fingers into the sky and never let it go. The grey square gets larger, brightens. The light there takes on an ivory taint – the metallic yellow of a weak sun at dusk or dawn.
It’s neither, I discover as I reach it. I’m still deep underground – the tunnel spirals upwards and to the left, up and to the left again – but now it is lit by emergency bulbs, spreading a dim, jaundiced glow from the ceiling. Still, it’s better than running in darkness. But how? How can there be light here when everywhere else in the country – in the world, perhaps – has lost everything electrical?
Only the uphill slope answers me: an incline that is beginning to seem endless. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve turned left, struggled up, turned left again. Behind me, there’s no sound anymore. My adrenaline rush has pushed me far ahead of the others but now it departs, leaving me to plod and drag. I act like a man scaling a sheer rock face. Mindlessly, I push on.
; It must be a sign of how exhausted I am when I come out of the tunnel and spend several seconds looking for the next upward section. There isn’t one. I’m standing at a T-junction into a much broader corridor. Right in front of me is a forklift truck, abandoned at an angle in the wide passageway. To the left, the corridor is black – not a single working bulb. To the right, perhaps seventy percent of the emergency lighting is operating. The corridor is bisected by a central line marked on the floor in orange paint, like an underground highway. In the places where the lights aren’t working, this central line becomes luminous, marking a way through the pools of shadow.
There’s no way I’m walking into darkness again. I turn right and trudge on.
It becomes clear that I’m in a vast, well-organised bunker.
I walk past numbered doorways that, upon investigation, lead to tiny single-room dwellings, each of which can house six people. The necessities of survival have prevented me from realising that I haven’t eaten or drunk anything for a long time. Maybe as long as a couple of days. The thought, hunger, and weakness all hit me at the same time and I waver, reaching a hand to the wall of the corridor for support. People lived in these rooms; the evidence is everywhere – mostly in the form of untidiness. That meant there was food here. In the second room I enter, the built-in steel units are full of packets of food, but all of them are desiccated and require hot water to rehydrate them. On the top shelf of a tall, slim cupboard, I find energy bars. Stacks of them.
The Veil (Testaments I and II) Page 14
