by Ian Woodhead
He wanted to push Max out of the way, wrap his arms around her body, and hold Amber tight against his chest. Dave looked at her. “Okay, we’ll try this way. Help him onto my back.”
Max shook his head and looked deep into his eyes. “No, that’s not going to happen.” He whispered. “You two need to go on; just leave me here.”
“No way!” he gasped. “We can’t do that.”
The tramp nodded. “Yes, you can, Dave. If we all stay then we will all die down here.”
“What did you just say?”
“Amber, talk some sense into this idiot. He says that we have to leave him down here.”
Amber ran over to them. “We won’t abandon you, Max. Don’t ask us to do that.”
He shrugged. “I’m only being practical. This body has served its purpose. It’s already started to break down. Don’t you worry about me. My Ka will find another one. Despite him burning most of the corpses, there will be another one somewhere. Just follow these tunnels. They will lead you straight to the meat packing factory.”
“Wait, what do you mean that you just find another body? You make it sound like you’re just going to try on another fucking coat. Nobody can swap bodies.”
Max smiled at Dave before turning to Amber before sighing. “Girl, listen to me. I was wrong earlier about the powers ignoring my pleas. They have been listening, I can see that now.” He pointed to Amber’s grazed knee. “There is fresh blood in the air now. They know that their quarry is hurt. They’ll not give up. They don’t often get the opportunity to consume red meat. The locals keep the families fed, but they daren’t give them fresh flesh; they don’t want them to get used to the taste.”
Max then spun around, pushed past Dave, and sprinted in the opposite direction.
“Oh God, no, Max, come back!” Dave tried to run after him, but Amber already had her fingers dug deep into the fabric of his jumper.
“Let him go,” she shouted, pulling him back. “Come on, let’s get out of here. He’s made his choice. Don’t let him sacrifice his body for nothing. You know that we’ll see him again.”
“Oh, my God, you honestly don’t believe that mountain of bullshit that he just spun, do you?”
“Does it matter what I think, Dave? He fucking believed it.” She grabbed both his shoulders and pushed her face into his. “Time to go!”
He nodded, and then looked over his shoulder one last time. Dave finally saw what had been running them down for the last few minutes. He couldn’t see it clearly because it was still too far away, and the low flickering yellow light fucked with his perception, but he knew for a fact that it wasn’t human. It was more apelike. The thing slowed down and finally stopped moving. It crouched down and watched the tramp slowly approach. Max then stopped himself and turned around.
“Get out of here!” he screamed.
The creature jumped; it obviously wasn’t expecting the man to make any noise—unless it was just confused. Dave remembered what Max had said about them relying on sound to hunt, and he moaned in horror as the snarling creature charged and dived on the man. Dave grabbed Amber and ran. He glanced back again just once to see that a dozen more creatures had joined the ape creature. They seemed to be fighting amongst themselves; there was no sign of Max.
Dave choked back a sob, “Oh fuck,” he panted. “I still can’t believe that he went and did it.”
“They’re not following us now.”
“Not yet anyway,” muttered Dave. “I’m not sure how much more of this madness I can take.”
“You can stop feeling sorry for yourself. You told me that we’re going to Alton Towers tomorrow. Just remember that.”
Dave tried to answer and found that he just couldn’t get the words out, not without breaking down in tears. It seemed like hours ago since he had said those words to Amber. Back then, he had honestly thought that their troubles were almost over. Dave increased his speed, keeping up with her. The noises coming from those creatures were eventually dying away, but he had no illusions that this evil town had finished with them just yet. There would be something else even fucking worse around the next corner.
The tunnel then came to an abrupt end. “Oh, fuck!” he cried, falling to his knees. “This can’t be happening.” Was some fucker up there taking the piss? He didn’t mean his last thought. Dave shut his eyes, counted to three, and opened them again. It hadn’t worked; their path was still blocked.
“Now what do we do?”
Dave shrugged. He dug the torch out of his back pocket and shone the light at the rock-fall. He approached the blockage and tried to pull one of the stones free. He gave up after a few seconds; this wasn’t going to shift. He knew for a fact that they hadn’t passed any other turnings or junctions since coming down those steps. Yet there must be another way out of here; those other fuckers must have come from somewhere.
“Dave, I’m sorry, I really can’t take any more of this,” uttered Amber. She dragged herself over to a large stone by the wall and sat on it.
How could he offer any comfort to Amber when he felt exactly the fucking same as she did? Dave shone the torch along the side of the walls one last time hoping that maybe that had missed something. He sighed heavily. Who was he kidding? Why couldn’t he just admit to himself that this really was the end of the line?
“I don’t want to die down here, Dave.”
He hurried over and knelt down in front of her. “Let’s have a look at those knees,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “They don’t look so bad.” He licked the palm of his hand before gently wiping away some of the dried blood. “You have beautiful knees, Amber.”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Dave moved his hand away from her and paused. “What the fuck?” the palm of his hand cooled down. He licked his hand again and pushed it between her legs.
“Dave?”
“Bloody hell” he gasped, I think I can feel a breeze. Amber stand up” When she jumped over his arm he press his hand flat against the wall. “Oh, this is just unreal!” he giggled. He crouched down and traced his fingers along a gap between two stones, smiling when his finger went straight through. He placed his hands between the stone below, counted to three, and pushed, shouting in triumph as the stone fall forward leaving a hole.
“Oh my God, it’s a bloody opening!”
Dave nodded, trying to keep his relief in check. “Yeah, we might have just found our way out of here.”
Amber crouched down next to him and helped to clear away the loose stones. “I think there’s enough space now for us to crawl through, Dave.” She grabbed his head and kissed him. “I’m having a hot dog then an ice cream before you take me on any rides, sweetheart. I’d better warn you now, I’m not cheap.”
He pulled away from her kiss. “That sounded wrong on so many levels, Amber.” He grinned. “Not that I’m complaining.” Dave pushed his arm through the opening, shivering, cold; it was cold so on the other side of this wall. “Let me just check this out first.” He stuck his head through the gap and then swung the torch beam around, growing excited as he saw a rough path leading from the gap in the wall. He pulled the rest of his body through, then crouched down, and helped Amber through the small hole.
“I don’t get it, Dave. Why didn’t Max tell us about this hole?”
He shrugged, wondering why he hadn’t thought of that question. He started to push the fallen stones back into the gap. “To be honest, I have no idea. Perhaps he just forgot, or maybe he didn’t know about the cave in.” He shone the beam of light at the blocked up hole. It wasn’t as good as before, but he figured it would fool them as long as they didn’t inspect it too closely. “How are you holding up, sweetheart?”
She shook her head. “Don’t ask me that. I have no idea how I feel apart from very tired and feeling like my heart is about to burst out of my chest every time I hear a noise.” She put her hand over his. “I do know that if you hadn’t been with me I wouldn’t have gotten this far.”
“We’re almo
st out of it; I know we are, sweetheart. Come on, let’s see where this leads to.” He started to walk away from the blocked up opening, thankful to see that they were now going uphill. Dave went through all of Max’s conversations in his mind. Until now, his words had never truly sunk in. That man had said more than once that he’d been around for centuries. As improbable as it sounds, Dave began to wonder if there could be a grain of truth in what he said. After all, how was it any more fantastic than what he and Amber had experienced tonight?
“Amber, Max did mean every word of that, didn’t he?”
She nodded. “He knew what awaited him, sweetheart. What do you think?”
“I think that I might have been wrong, and there is a chance that we’ll meet the man again.” Dave stopped when something crunched under his foot. He shone the light onto the path and saw that he had just crushed a small bone. He didn’t want to know what animal that bone came from—if it even was an animal.
“I hope to fuck that those things back there don’t know about this tunnel. I’m not sure I’d be able to out run them if they did find out where we went. I think my body is about to fall apart.”
He turned and shone the light behind them. “I’d like to think that those creature were about as intelligent as a dog or maybe a cave dwelling ape,” he replied. “They’d probably bash a rock on your head, but I don’t think they’d be able to hide an opening with a bunch of stones.”
“Neither do I. So, who the hell did it?”
“I honestly don’t have a bloody clue. Maybe it was Max. Maybe it’s been there for decades or even longer, I don’t suppose it matters.
The roof was getting lower. Dave took off his jacket and used a sharp stone to cut the thread around the sleeves. He ripped them off and handed them to Amber. “Here, you’d best put these over your knees. I think we’ll be doing a fair bit of crawling for a bit.”
Dave kissed her. “Wait here.” He ran forward until it became impossible to stand up straight. Dave shone the torch to try and see if he could work out how long this tunnel was. It was no use; he couldn’t see more than a few feet.
“Could you see anything?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied. “I don’t think it’s that long.” He walked as far as he could before he had to drop to his knees. As he crawled, he did notice that the tunnel was getting a little lighter. Dave turned off the torch and looked behind him; he was relieved to find that he could make out her outline. “We might be close to the top, April.”
She sighed. “I don’t know. We did seem to go down very far, Dave. We haven’t been travelling upwards that long.”
The light was getting brighter; it felt wrong though. It wasn’t sunlight, it felt colder, like harsh light from a spotlight. Dave then grinned when he saw what looked like the way out. Oh yeah, as he crawled forward, the mouth of this tunnel became more definite. This tunnel led into another cavern, but this one was huge, and from where he was, Dave could see the shape of the cave; it looked exactly like the temple that they had first entered. As far as he was concerned, that must mean they were close to getting out of here.
His smile fell off his face when Dave reached the lip of the tunnel. “You have got to be fucking joking,” he whispered, gazing down at the cavern floor. The floor was full of sleeping people. At least, he guessed they were people. It was hard to be sure. They looked more human than the things they had encountered in the other tunnel but not by much. These reminded Dave of Neanderthals. He took a deep breath and looked back at Amber.
“We might have a problem here.”
Amber pushed past him and stiffened. “Shit.” She looked at him. “It looks like they are all asleep,” she whispered. “Look, we need to get past them; we have no other choice.”
Dave nodded. He gazed at them again, and he saw a pile of bones close to the edge of the sleeping men. “Wait here,” he said. Dave climbed down and quietly walked over to the bones, trying not to make a single sound. Before he bent down, Dave looked over at the bodies, listening to the snores. He guessed that there must be almost a hundred of them on the floor. Dave grabbed a skull and held it close to his face. At first, he thought it was human until he saw the ridges above the eye sockets. These must prey on the sub-humans. Oh hell, they had just crawled through their path to the human’s hunting patch. Oh shit, these fuckers were as bad as the other. He didn’t want to think how they’d react if any of them woke up to find him and Amber in the middle of them. They needed to get the fuck out of here. Dave gestured to the girl and was relieved to see her carefully picking her way towards him.
He wrapped his fingers around hers and could feel her shivering. Christ, this was just so unreal. He felt like they were tiptoeing through a minefield or a field full of sleeping lions, and jumping at every snore or unexpected noise.
Dave paused when Amber tapped him on the shoulder. He followed her pointed finger and grinned at the sight of a set of (a set of what?) leaning against the cavern wall. There was another tunnel over there. He pushed forward trying not to rush. Dave grabbed the ladder and pulled himself up onto the ledge above.
He turned and helped Amber onto her feet. For the first time since this nightmare began, Dave saw that she was actually smiling. “You okay?”
She nodded. “Look behind you,” she whispered.
Dave turned and smiled as well. There was another tunnel cut into the rock, but this one was different. Dave saw tiny ceramic tiles stuck to the four walls. It looked like an entrance to an underground railway station. What ever it was, he knew that the freaks behind them hadn’t built it.
“Time to go,” he hissed, grabbing her hand. He led her over to the entrance and into the tunnel. Unlike the other one, this wasn’t so long, even from the mouth, Dave could make out the shape of an archway cut into the wall. “I think we’re nearly there!”
Amber nodded, “Oh God, I can see a door; please tell me that’s a door.”
His excitement cooled down a little when they reached the end and noticed that they were no longer alone. He gazed down at another skeleton leaning against the wall. Unlike the others in the cavern this one was definitely human. There was a sword still gripped in one of its hands. He bent over and wrenched it out, feeling a little better now that he had a weapon.
“I think it was a Roman,” Amber whispered.
He nodded. He didn’t have a clue as to why he wasn’t all that surprised to find the skeleton of a Roman centurion down here.
Dave used the ancient sword to force the door open, and he jumped back in surprise. Of all the views that he expected to see, Dave did not expect that. “You have got to be shitting me!” He looked at Amber. “I’m not dreaming this am I?”
Amber shook her head and kissed him. “No, it’s not a dream. Come on, we can’t stay here.”
He led the girl through the door, looking in amazement at the shelves crammed with tinned food. This was somebody’s pantry or storeroom. He saw another door at the end. This one was just a plain door; one that he would expect to see in any house. Dave shut the door behind him and was not surprised to find that you could no longer see the metal door.
“Look at this, Dave.” Amber had picked a tin of beans off the shelf. “It doesn’t run out until next year.”
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s see where we are.” He took her to the other door and reached for the handle when he jerked back. “Amber,” he hissed. “I can hear someone on the other side.”
Chapter Sixteen
Jackie felt as though she’d circle. Her new hiding place was as distasteful as her spot behind the two women, only without the chains. Not that it made much difference; she couldn’t go anywhere. She looked up through the wooden floorboards a few inches from her nose, trying to breath in as much fresh air as she could. Jackie wanted to cry out; she wanted to throw up. It was just no good. No matter how much clean air she forced into her lungs, it just couldn’t obscure the stench that surrounded and threatened to suffocate her.
It should have clic
ked before she burrowed her way under this bandstand in the town’s park. The was the ideal hiding place all right, and by the looks of it, half the town already knew this little nugget of information. Jackie wasn’t alone under here but she was the only one still breathing. Dozens of decomposing animal corpses packed the narrow gap between the boards and the hard ground. Judging by the amount of dry skeletons under here, this place had been in use for decades.
The one right next to her hips wasn’t a dry skeleton. The poor doggy couldn’t have been here for more than a week. Some bastard had tied its paws together with shoelaces before torturing it. She had seen so much horror and wickedness in her time in this town, but this was just beyond evil.
Her activities after witnessing her brother’s demise had just blurred together. She felt as though she had spent hours just running and hiding from her pursuers, with no end in sight, and no way to escape this place, while wondering just how long it would be before her luck finally ran out and somebody did manage to catch her.
Jackie’s good fortune had almost come to a violent end just a few minutes ago. A group of young women had spotted her trying to break into a garage and had chased Jackie into the park. She had been able to slide her body under here before any of them had time to stop her vanishing. Their attention soon swapped from hunting her down to chasing some terrified boy around the swings. Jackie watched horrified as the women cornered the kid and just kicked him into a bloody pulp. What brought tears to her eyes was that each one of them were laughing every time they kicked the boy, yet there was nothing malicious about their giggles. It honestly sounded like they just having a fun night out, and murdering boys half their age was the best way to end a great evening.
The girls had left the park ages ago, but Jackie dare not leave here just yet. A bunch of eight young teen lads had passed by here less than two minutes ago, each lad boasting at how they were better at killing the outsider than any of the others. Like the girls, they saw the process of executing the strangers as just another part of their normal life. She knew right then that Jackie would find no sympathy with any of them; every local was intent on killing them all.
