by James Axler
They had been exploring more laterally than vertically since discovering the proximity of live magma. Ryan wanted to get some idea of where the stuff was to be found, for their own safety. Ricky wasn’t sure exactly how that was a concern, given—as Ryan himself had said—that if the stuff hadn’t flooded into the cannie’s cave system yet, it wasn’t particularly likely to now. But Ryan had gut feelings, too, and he knew to trust them.
The cannies had a system of marks notched in the walls as navigation aids. Because they clearly weren’t particularly bright, except their mother, the system was simple. The companions figured it out in short order. Ricky and J.B. took notes and sketched maps in scavvied notebooks anyway. For his part Jak claimed to know his way around anyplace they’d been, and while this was even more remote from their usual environment than a ruined city was, Ricky was inclined to believe him. He also half suspected Ryan kept a pretty fair map in his own head.
Ricky skimmed over some uninteresting sections of the diary, griping about this delay or that with the program, who was subcompetent—everybody but Foxton, apparently—and repetitive whines about McComb and her rival project, and their incessant war over resources.
“Here we go,” he said finally, as Ryan ordered an end to their break and everybody got back to their feet. He paused to pull on his pack and longblaster sling, then picked up the lantern. The oil reservoir hadn’t gone down much.
“‘We have received a full alert of possible impending global war,’” he read as he walked. “‘Totality Concept leadership informs us this is not a drill. I have ordered the evacuation of the surface facility, and all personnel have taken shelter underground.’”
He raised his head and looked around. “So where is this lab, exactly? It should’ve been right beneath us.”
“Nowhere we’ve been,” Ryan said. “They must not have located the office complex directly over the actual laboratory, which makes sense as a cover. They wouldn’t want to have a signpost right up in the open announcing We Are Here.”
“Maybe they did,” Mildred suggested. “But what we first came into down here was just an admin complex—desks, chairs, computers, separated by movable panels. It was a basic, late twentieth-century cube farm. All of which could’ve easily been looted, destroyed, or just thrown away later.”
“Where were the big labs the diary keeps going on about?” J.B. asked.
Ricky knew his mentor was thinking in terms of possible terrain advantage in case they had the need—or even the opportunity—to make some kind of defensive stand. A predark lab could offer all kinds of good cover, depending on what its function had been, and how well its equipment had stood up.
Mildred shrugged. “Somewhere else. Probably not far. But we got grabbed right off the bat, and carried off to Queen Crazy-Ass Bitch, before we had a chance to poke around and find them. So, as Ryan said, nowhere we’ve been.”
The passage widened. The light brightened. The glow-moss here was much fresher, and Ricky gratefully doused his lamp and stuffed another handful down his shirt.
I sure hope the radiation doesn’t make me grow a third nipple or a second head or anything, he thought.
“There’s an interruption of a couple of days,” he reported. “Then we get ‘Shocks of terrifying magnitude have at last subsided. If I were given to fits of irrationality, I would ascribe the fact that the caverns were not collapsed on our heads to a miracle. But we seem to have weathered the worst of the storm.’”
A growl from Ricky’s stomach interrupted him. It was loud enough that Jak, who had been showing no signs of interest in Ricky’s recitation, stopped prowling out front, looked at him sharply and grinned. If water was thankfully no concern, food was another issue. They had managed to bring with them an abundant supply of still-good canned food and even treasured self-heat MRE packs from the scavvy site. But those were still in limited supply, and the companions had been tramping these endless passageways fruitlessly for several days now.
So they were all on tight rations. Even Deathlands-hardened survivors like Ricky’s companions, used to scavenging whatever protein they could find to get by, had refrained so far from eating the variety of cave bugs and other vermin that proved fairly common even down this far, once you started to look for them. And the pink cave fish they saw in many of the underground streams they encountered looked too small to pay off the energy spent catching them, metabolically speaking.
Ricky took a deep breath, sighed it out through pursed lips and went on.
“He goes on for pages and pages complaining about how things are going to…pieces. He stops getting any communication from the outside world, not even over the Totality Concept’s supersecret setup.”
“Huge surprise,” Mildred said.
“Then, a few months after the war during skydark, we get ‘We have suffered repeated incidents of pilferage of stocks, primarily foodstuffs. I blame McComb and her twisted freaks. I know she’s started letting some of them off the leash, though she denies it.’”
He flipped some pages and stopped abruptly, then turned back a few pages. “Whoa,” he said. “Listen to this. ‘Awakened by a terrible tumult during my sleeping period. It appears the containment unit’s integrity was compromised by the series of severe earthquakes that followed the global thermonuclear exchange. The Digging Leviathan has escaped. It managed to batter and burrow its way through the reinforced walls into the caverns. We have no prospect of tracing it, far less the means of restoring it to captivity if we should locate it. This is a disaster of unprecedented proportion—’”
“Whitecoats,” Doc said, as if he’d just accidentally stepped on a dog turd.
“‘We can only hope against hope that the entity does not return here,’ Foxton says, ‘either by choice or by blind accident.’”
J.B. halted, blinked at Ricky, then took off his glasses and began polishing them with his handkerchief. Ryan called another brief halt.
“Reckon that giant digging thing of theirs could be the same as the thing we’re supposed to be hunting?” he asked.
Ryan grunted. “Be a triple-nuking huge coincidence if it wasn’t.”
As if on cue, a rumble shook its way through their boots and up their legs from the floor, accompanied by a deep roar like an angry volcano.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Four
“The monster!” Ryan heard Ricky yell over the rumble and the roar. Both went on and on until it felt as if the marrow was being rattled loose from his bones.
“Or one of the magma intrusions erupting into the cave system proper,” Doc suggested.
“I’m not loving either of those alternatives!” Mildred shouted.
“Hear screaming,” Jak called back from the far side of a cluster of short, needle-tipped stalagmites.
“Other than us?” Mildred yelled.
“Lead us to it,” Ryan called. The terrible sub-basso noise and accompanying vibrations began to dwindle, and now he could hear shrieks, tiny and thin with distance, echoing up the passageway that lay before them.
Unslinging his Steyr as he ran, he led them along a passageway with a well-worn floor. The glow-moss was sparse here, and Ryan had to bend over or risk his head to a sudden impact with a stalactite. But it had clearly been carefully cleared to the specifications of the coamers, and was easy going. That was fortunate, because the slope accelerated until running would have been tricky even without obstacles.
The screams and roaring rose to crescendos, accompanied by the crashing of splintering stone. Something big was going on, and something big was causing it.
“Cannies!” Jak yelled as he approached the barely visible entrance to another sizable room. Figures broader and even shorter than the albino scout were suddenly crowding into the tunnel and rushing at them.
“Ryan—” Krysty called.
“Hold fire!”
He saw at once those weren’t cannie warriors, but workers—mostly female, but not all, carrying white-skinned, red-eyes babies as naked as t
hey were, and all squalling up a storm. Unlike Krysty, Ryan wasn’t motivated by compassion, but by the fact they’d no doubt be needing every cartridge and every scrap of physical energy they had in one hell of a hurry. He wasn’t about to waste either on noncombatants.
“Packs on!” Ryan barked over the tumult. He left unspoken the obvious: that they might need to get out of there a lot faster than they came down.
Panicked though they were, the coamer nurses parted to go around point man Jak without touching him. Likely he looked terrifying to them, despite his skin, eyes and hair, in his camo jacket and his jeans. And the rest of his band looked even worse, such that when they reached Ryan the fleeing workers were almost rubbing the walls to both sides, almost as eager to avoid contact with these scary invaders as to get away from the bigger one below.
The bigger, louder one. Bouncing off the walls and ceiling, its roars and banging pounded on Ryan’s skull like hammers.
Jak, brave but no fool, knelt just shy of the widening of the way and peered inside. He had his big Magnum revolver in his hand.
“What do you see?” Ryan yelled, pounding up behind him.
“Not much,” Jak replied, not turning his head. “But big!”
Halting right behind him, Ryan looked into the chamber. It was wide with a floor flat and mostly free of stalagmites or columns, suggesting the coamers had cleared and leveled it.
Workers must be as fanatic as the warriors, in their way, he thought. The roof, spiked with stalactites as per usual, arched to about twenty feet at the highest. The glow-moss light was so faint it was hard to tell.
The floor was still strewed with hundred of infants, squalling in carefully constructed nests of what looked at a distance like scraps of vegetation, cave-moss of the nonluminous variety, and scavvied clothes scraps. A throng of nurse-workers was desperately trying to scoop them up and escape into one of the several tunnels leaving off it.
For a moment Ryan didn’t even see the source of all the commotion. Then some sort of shadow lunged forward and blotted out a big area of the floor. Ryan couldn’t even tell what exactly it did to a couple dozen infants and maybe a dozen nurses that it hid, but he doubted they survived. He got an impression of rounded immensity, and furious powerful motion. It heaved up and swung side to side, shattering stalactites as thick as Ryan’s torso like matchsticks as it did.
“Blast it!” he yelled.
He threw his own Scout longblaster to his shoulder, took quick aim across the sights below the Leupold scope and fired.
In the abysmal gloom the flare of the powerful 7.62 mm cartridge going off was as huge and dazzling as a nearby lightning strike. He saw yellow reflections glinting off some kind of pallid, hunched surface, getting a flash impression of vast, thick rings.
Jak added the sharp bark of his .357 Magnum blaster to the sound of J.B. cutting loose with a burst from his Uzi as Ryan jacked the action of his carbine and brought the weapon back online. The others had come up and opened fire as well. He paid them no attention; he knew they had set up to stay out of one another’s fields of fire. That was one of the lethal edges they had over their opposition, even when it greatly outnumbered him: by virtue of long practice, they fought together like parts of a perfectly designed and well-oiled machine. The combined seven muzzle-flashes still gave Ryan no clearer picture of what it was they were fighting.
They only showed him that if anything, it was bigger than he even thought.
Into one of those sudden lulls in the firing, J.B. shouted, “If that thing finds out we’re shooting it, it’s going to be hot past nuke re—”
The final d was drowned out by a shrill noise like a predark ocean liner’s steam whistle going off. It was so sharp, and not just unimaginably loud but huge, that it drove Ryan to his knees, trying to cover his ears with his hand and forearm as best he could without letting go of his longblaster.
It hardly helped. The keening noise went on and on, stabbing his eardrums like hammer-struck spikes, threatening to liquefy the very bones within him.
Then it was replaced by a colossal grinding rumble, like gravel being crushed in a gigantic machine.
Ryan was up again instantly, leveling his Steyr. He could see the dark shape’s ill-defined nearer end had turned into a passageway to his left, presenting a curve of colossal body that seemed to consist of giant ribbed segments. The tunnel seemed too small to let it in. The grinding and the cloud of dust and fragments that surrounded its fore-end—he wasn’t even sure if it had a head or not—told him it was doing something about that, in no uncertain terms.
He shot again.
“Fire it up! Keep shooting!”
“But it’s going!” Mildred cried.
“We want to keep it that way! Shoot, fireblast it!”
They did. Even the terrific clamor of seven powerful modern blasters going off close together in such a confined, stone space was not enough to drown out the monster’s rumble and squeal.
Suddenly the shadowy immensity was flowing unimpeded into the passageway. With shocking quickness, it was gone.
Ryan’s yell of “Cease fire!” wasn’t needed.
“¡Nuestra Señora!” Ricky’s exclamation sounded as if it was echoing out of a deep well twenty feet away, through Ryan’s deafening tinnitus. “What the hell was that?”
“Big,” J.B. replied. “Dark night, it was big.”
“My friends,” Doc said, pausing in the midst of reloading his giant beast of a LeMat revolver to execute an elegant bow and sweep of his long arm, “permit me to present to you the fabled Digging Leviathan!”
“Are you sure it’s—” Mildred stopped herself. “What am I saying? Of course it is.”
Ryan had the partially depleted 10-round box magazine out of the well and was swapping it out for a fresh one. He was suddenly extremely glad that they’d loaded down with as much extra ammo from the sunken offices as they could possibly carry.
Krysty shook her head. Her sentient red hair had curled itself to her head in an almost skintight cap. By the barely present illumination, Ryan couldn’t see the emerald color of her eyes, but he could see they were as wide as a startled alley cat’s.
No sign of life remained out on the floor of the ravaged nursery.
“The widening of the entrance looks surprisingly rough,” Doc commented, squinting to see through the near-darkness. “Perhaps we were mistaken about the source of the unusually uniform tunnels we’ve passed through?”
“The thing was in a bit of a hurry for close work, Doc,” J.B. observed. He straightened his fedora, which had worked itself slightly askew on his head in all the excitement.
“Do you think we hurt it?” Ricky asked.
“You’re joking, right?” Mildred said.
“Depends what you mean by hurt,” Ryan said, slamming the fresh mag home with his palm and feeling the satisfying click of the catch. “If you mean, did we do it any harm, then nuke, no. But it felt our fire, sure enough, and didn’t like it.”
“And exactly what does that mean, Ryan?” Mildred asked.
A rumble shook the walls of the passageway beneath them, and the floor beneath their feet. Frowning, Ryan stepped first toward the right-hand wall, across the passage from him, felt the cool, smooth stone with quick fingertips, then he moved back to press a palm against the other wall.
“It’s moving,” he said. “This side of us.”
As he spoke, the giant thunder-sound grew perceptibly louder.
“It means,” he said, turning back up the steep way they had just come, “that we pissed it off. And now it’s coming for us. Run!”
* * *
“SHE’S STILL BREATHIN’,” Potar said. He himself wasn’t breathing easy, bent over his profound belly as he was to examine the fallen woman with a giant paw. “Just out cold. I hit her a good one.”
“These two ain’t,” reported one of the sec men who were hunkered down beside Angus and Alfie.
Or rather their corpses, Conn reckoned.
He didn’t know either sec man’s name. They came from somewhere away off east. He didn’t know any of the detail his sec boss had handpicked for this night’s business, which had turned ugly, as Conn had instantly foreseen would happen when he heard the volatile, raven-haired rabble-rouser was on her way to see him.
He judged that for the best. He didn’t know most of Potar’s sec men, not even as casual customers of his Stenson’s Creek gaudy, and he had a good memory for faces as well as names. He thought it better that way, because he didn’t want them hanging back from doing their jobs out of sympathy for fellow Sinkhole-district locals, and so they’d fret less about possible reprisals taken against their own kin by families of men and women they’d been forced to deal with.
“I’m glad your men shot true, Potar,” Conn said with some asperity. “It would have been a nukin’ poor twist to be struck down by a ball from one of my own bodyguard’s blasters.”
With a vast grunt of effort Potar put a hand on his knee and shoved his massive torso upright. “I’ll talk to them if you want, Mr. Conn.”
“Not needful,” Conn said. He shied away from the prospect of having his enormous, bullying sec boss “talk to” one of his men the way he did to dissidents and troublemakers. Not all of them had wound up tacked to crosses by railway spikes through wrists and feet, like the taints who had got poor Wymie so worked up.
“What should we do with the chills?” asked the sec man who’d announced the woman’s two escorts were dead.
“Drag them a distance away from camp and dump them in some brambles,” Conn said. “We’ll let the coamers clean up after us.”
He shared knowing smiles with Potar. “Not for the first time.”
“Is that—is that true, Mr. Conn?” the sec man asked nervously.
“Is what true?”
“You believe in them coamers, then? I mean, my old gram used to scare me when I was a toddler and she didn’t want me to grab the cook pot off the fire with my bare hands. Said that if I didn’t do like she said the ghouls’d get me.”
