The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Having taken the rudimentary dirt road as far as they could, Ken braked the Bronco and killed the engine. “Here we are, boy and girl,” he said. “The rest of it’s on foot.”

  ***

  A cold wind whistled through the valley, kicking up billows of sand, rustling the brittlebush and the branches of mesquite and paloverde. As they approached the cave entrance again, Penny couldn’t shake a profound sensation of dread. It had been bad enough last time, when they’d gone in looking for Mick’s body and found that it had disappeared. And then she’d had that vision or whatever Hal had called it, of the gray man and the ancient Cahuilla Indians who had lived here thousands of years ago.

  But when she shone her light on the gaping maw, her blood froze and she stopped where she stood, unable to persuade her legs to take another step. The mushrooms had spread and now choked the entrance, leaking like pus from a torn blister onto the sand outside. Some of them were nearly a foot tall, and they all shared the same sickly-pale white flesh etched with seams of red.

  Hal seemed to understand her hesitation. He stopped at her shoulder, carrying the Mini-Mag from Ken’s belt. “You can do this,” he said. “You’ve done worse.”

  “Yeah,” Penny agreed, surprised that she was even able to speak. “Only I can’t remember when, just now.”

  “That’s because I’m lying to you,” Hal said. “If you’ve encountered anything worse than what we’re likely to face in there, I doubt you’d be standing here today.”

  She noticed that Ken had stopped just inside the mouth of the cave, practically standing in the mushrooms, and looked back at them. He’d mounted a light on his handgun. “You coming, or not?” he asked. “Don’t have all night here.”

  “That we know of,” Penny said under her breath. “No telling how long we have. We could lose all the magic any second.”

  Hal laid a hand on her arm, in a gesture she understood was meant to be reassuring. “Best reason there is to go in and get it done with,” he said. “Then we can go back to our regular lives, maybe.”

  “But do we really want to?” she asked him. “I mean, isn’t it better when the magic is here?”

  “Could be,” Hal said. “But you can’t count on it. It’s like pinning all your hopes on a dream.”

  “Maybe that’s what I’m good at.”

  “I’ve seen inside you, Penny. What you’re good at is suppressing your own needs to serve what you consider the greater good. You keep trying to save the world but you haven’t even taken the time to learn to enjoy living in it. Well, now you’ve got to save the world again, or a piece of it anyway. Maybe after you’re done, you’ll give it a rest and look out for yourself for a change.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” she said. “You’re pretty smart for an old guy, you know?” She tossed him a smile and then followed Ken into the cave, wincing inwardly as her feet crushed the mushrooms. They really had spread dramatically; dotting the walls and floor of the cave as far as her light’s beam could show. The fungi creeped her out, and she knew that its rapid growth was well beyond anything that could be natural. But Hal was right—what they needed to do could only be done inside the cave.

  Of course, before they could do it, they’d have to figure out what it was.

  Penny steeled herself for anything as she walked through the sudden, bizarre growth. She’d read about “sick houses,” places in which mold or fungi of some kind had taken root behind the walls, poisoning the air and causing all sorts of illnesses. No options here, though…she didn’t have a MOPP suit, like she had been issued in the Gulf in case of chemical warfare. She didn’t even know if it would make a difference if she took shallow breaths or deep ones. She settled for trying to breathe only through her nose, on the theory that the spores released as they crushed mushrooms underfoot would be filtered better that way. The smell in the cave was rich and pungent, now, instead of the dry, stale air it had contained on her first two visits. She knew that when she smelled something she was, in fact, taking minute particles of that substance into her body, and the idea that any of these unclean, unholy mushrooms were entering her in any way repulsed her.

  Still she kept on, following Ken with his gun-light, and leading Hal. The cave, familiar by now, was horrifyingly changed by the new growth. The sensation of stepping through the unbroken tide of mushrooms ankle-high or taller was not unlike wading through surf, but a surf of something thicker than mere water. Penny almost gagged at the image, and forced herself to focus on the upper sections of wall, where the mushrooms had not yet reached.

  As they neared the bend where the writing on the wall started—where she had left Mick’s body, then discovered it missing and new mushrooms growing in its place when she had brought Ken and Hal back—Penny realized that her hands were trembling uncontrollably, the light from her flashlight jumping and flitting around the cave’s walls like Tinker Bell on speed. She knew that would just be the beginning of the journey—that whatever they were here to see or do might start there, with the ancient writings, but that their path would lead them much deeper into the earth than that point. Nevertheless, that was the part she was most nervous about, that one stretch of cave where people had stopped to leave messages to whoever might come later, across the span of centuries.

  And then, there it was. Ken rounded the bend and disappeared in that section, and Penny suddenly felt an urge to catch up to him, not to let him out of her sight, particularly here, in this part of the cave. “Ken, wait!” she called.

  “What?” his voice came back. She felt reassured by that. He hadn’t fallen off the face of the planet or stepped through a rift in the space-time continuum. He had just turned a blind corner, and she’d see him when she had rounded it too.

  But it wasn’t Ken she saw when she came around the bend into that fateful stretch. It was Mick.

  “Hi, Pen,” he said.

  Penny screamed until her chest ached, then took a few gasping breaths, refilling her lungs, and screamed again.

  Behind her, Hal crowded in, playing his little flash over Mick’s form. Her own light had fallen to the ground, illuminating only the sea of mushrooms. Up ahead, Ken had turned back, and his light was partially obscured by Mick’s form, blocking the cave passage.

  Mick sounded like Mick, and the shape was certainly Mick’s. But the Mick she had known—the Mick she had killed—had been a flesh-and-blood Mick. She still had some of his blood on her shirt.

  This Mick, though, had pale, white skin mottled with red dots and veined with tiny red threads. This Mick was made of mushroom-stuff.

  ***

  Billy’s head began to throb as he wandered the Slab. Smoke from the fires filled his lungs, the crackle of the flames and the flashes of muzzle bursts stung his eyes. He’d had a plan, before—not that long ago, he thought—but he couldn’t remember what it might have been. He blinked a couple of times and looked at his surroundings as if he’d never seen them before—old trailers, broken down school buses, camper shells, scattered seemingly at random about a desert landscape as if they’d just fallen from the sky. Walls made of bald tires. Hubcaps nailed to yucca stalks. Flat concrete slabs with dirt between them, and in the dirt, seashells catching the firelight, gleaming.

  The dirt.

  Billy’s mind emptied, his focus narrowed. He had a plan again. He didn’t know where it had come from—not from within him—but he knew it was important. He ran to the dirt stretch between two concrete slabs, dropped to his knees, and started to dig, furiously, using only his hands as tools.

  ***

  Across the Slab, others did the same thing. Men who had been shooting their rifles, like Darren Cook, instead shoved the barrels of those guns into the earth, makeshift shovels to break the ground. Others came out from hiding, like Virginia Shipp, and worked at the concrete with bare fingers that quickly bloodied, trying to pry up sections of it. Carter Haynes threw himself down, and Gray Boonton, and Nick Postak, and Mikey Zee. All digging, barehanded or with whatever was within easy reach
. Lettie Bosworth tore frantically at the concrete, the flesh of her fingers shredding to the bone and bone splintering to the marrow. Jorge and Diego Alvarez left Eddie Trujillo’s trailer to paw at the dirt outside. Vic Bradford, barely conscious, moved his hands weakly against the cement slab.

  They all did this because they knew there was something beneath, something calling to them. And it needed to get out.

  Chapter Thirty

  Penny’s screams reverberated throughout the cave, hurting Hal’s ears—like his physical strength and endurance, and his mental focus and concentration, his senses had been heightened to the point that his glasses were nearly unnecessary, and his hearing was much more acute.

  So Penny’s unending scream was shattering.

  Hal stepped forward, rounding the corner and putting a hand out to touch her shoulder, hoping to reassure her, to quiet her. But as he did, his light caught the strange shape, so human-looking but yet clearly not human, that stood before her.

  That spoke to her.

  And somehow, Ken had walked right past it, as if it had only materialized when Penny showed up. At the sound of Penny’s screams, Ken had turned, and now he held his gun and light on the thing as he looked past it at Penny, questioningly, as if wondering whether or not to shoot.

  Hal heard a hitching in Penny’s voice as she tried to bring her terror under control. The mushroom man hadn’t made a move toward her, had only uttered two words. Maybe it wasn’t malevolent at all.

  But with a hand on Penny’s back, Hal could feel her quaking in mortal dread. She was scared of it, at any rate. He was too, for that matter, but maybe not scared down to his bones like she must have been. She tried to bull her way past it, but it turned, blocking the way. She pulled back from contact with it.

  “Did you miss me, Penny?” the unnatural thing asked her. “I’ve missed you.”

  Its tone was familiar, even intimate. Hal couldn’t help thinking that Penny and this person—or the person this thing represented—had been lovers. Or nearly so, anyway. Based on what Penny had told them, Mick had wanted to be, and the Mick-simulacrum was apparently still thinking along those lines.

  “You’re not even…even here,” Penny said, voice quavering. “You’re dead. I…I killed you.”

  “Yes,” the thing said. Hal noted that when it opened its mouth, there was just more of the mushroom-stuff inside. It was a Muppet’s mouth, with no oral cavity, no throat. No legitimate way for it to be speaking. “But the difference between us is that I know how to forgive.”

  Ken fired his handgun then, three times. The bullets tore through the mushroom man with almost no resistance, knocking chunks of him into the air—and releasing more spores, Hal found himself thinking—then flew down the cave, one nearly hitting Hal. Behind him, they hit the cave’s wall and ricocheted around, kicking up chips of rock and dirt.

  “Better not shoot in here,” Hal said.

  The mushroom man wasn’t even phased. “Your friends don’t like me,” it said. “But we have unfinished business, don’t we?”

  “N…no…” Penny said. “You’re dead. We have…”

  “Penny, I don’t think you understand. We have unfinished business. We need to talk some things over.” Its voice was calm, as if it had never been shot. And as Hal watched, the sections that Ken’s bullets had torn off it filled in, the mushroom-stuff growing back almost instantly.

  “No,” Ken said. His voice was firm, commanding. “Penny, just walk past it. We don’t have time to argue with it—damn thing’s most likely all in our heads anyway. Some sort of mass hallucination. A peyote dream. Air in here must be filled with hallucinogens, right?”

  “Penny,” the thing said, as if Ken and Hal weren’t even here. “A few minutes to talk. Five minutes. I think you owe me that much, right?”

  “I don’t…”

  “No, Penny,” Hal warned. “You can’t give in to it.”

  “But he’s right,” she argued. “I killed him. Maybe I can explain why.”

  “Penny—” Ken began. She cut him off.

  “You guys go on ahead. There’s no time to debate. I’ll take three minutes with him and join you.”

  “No,” Ken said.

  “Three minutes.” She sounded every bit as determined as Ken did.

  “Not a second more,” Hal said. “We’ll be back. And you’re right, there isn’t time to fool around.”

  “You heard them,” Penny said. She crossed her arms across her chest, and looked to Hal as if she were braced for anything the fungus-Mick might have in mind for her. “You have three minutes, starting now. You have anything you want to say to me, start talking.”

  Hal squeezed past Penny and pressed himself nearly flat against the cave wall so he could get past the mushroom man. When he reached Mick, both started walking, looking back over their shoulders the whole time. The mushroom man spoke to Penny in low tones, but he didn’t seem to be making any physical overtures toward her.

  A minute later the cave crooked again and Penny was out of sight.

  “That’s…” Hal began, but he didn’t know how to end his sentence.

  “Damn strange,” Ken offered.

  Hal chuckled, amused by the understatement in spite of the circumstance. Ken wasn’t a religious person, he knew, and neither was Penny. He wasn’t particularly devout himself, but he believed in something greater than themselves. Some kind of God with a capital G. A Creator. And he knew that whatever they were facing here in this cave, it was on the other side. So it had to be defeated, and there could be no reason for them to be here, imbued with what they called the magic, except to do that job. They had all been rescued, during their respective wars, by the magic, and brought to this place. There had to be some kind of intelligence operating behind that. “Yes, it is that.”

  “Didn’t even see it when I walked through that stretch. Like it was part of the mushrooms or something, and then it separated out from them after I’d gone by. Like it knew Penny was coming.”

  “I’m sure it did.”

  “Sorry about almost shooting you.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Hal said. “You probably thought the thing would stop your slugs a little better. Or slow them down, at least.”

  “That’s what I thought. I’m sure I hit it.”

  “You did,” Hal said. “I saw the impacts. They just didn’t do any damage. At least, not long-term.”

  “What I thought.” Ken continued walking for a moment. “Life sure is funny, ain’t it?”

  “Stranger than most of us could possibly imagine,” Hal agreed. They continued on, into the depths of the cave, past writing that grew older and older. Like descending into the Grand Canyon, he felt as if they were walking past a visual record of the planet itself. “Do me a favor?”

  “What’s that?” Ken asked.

  “You see anyone you’ve killed show up in here, don’t stop to chat.”

  “You’ve got my word on that,” Ken said. “No problem at all.”

  ***

  Lucy ran, breathless and exhausted, as fast as she could manage. When she approached the area she thought Eddie’s trailer was in, she began to feel heartened. Eddie would hide her. Eddie would be an ally—the first one she’d had since all this started. She could still hear the crashing of brush and thumping of feet behind her, but she allowed herself a moment of optimism.

  Which was when the bullet slammed into her left shoulder, spinning her half around and slamming her down into a creosote bush as surely as if someone had pushed her. Stiff branches clawed at her, cutting her exposed flesh, snagging her clothing and loose, wild hair.

  Damn it, she thought. So close…

  She started trying to regain her balance, to extricate herself from the greasewood, but she was too tangled up. Then she felt a strong hand on her, tugging her by the wounded shoulder. The pain was unbearable.

  The touch was worse.

  She saw the curly guy looking at her, smiling. The one she believed was Kelly William
s. He pulled her free of the bush and then let her go. Her legs gave out beneath her and she dropped to her knees.

  “You’ve run us a merry chase, bitch,” he said. “A merry Goddamn chase.”

  Lucy was breathing hard, through her mouth, trying to push the pain in her shoulder into a separate compartment of her mind where it wouldn’t interfere with thinking, with trying to find a way out of this.

  “There has never been a Dove I have so looked forward to seeing dead,” the man went on. “You have no idea of the pleasure you’re about to cause me.”

  He began to lower his gun to her head. With nothing to lose, she tried a desperate ploy.

  The knife she’d taken from Ray Dixon was still tucked between her belt and waistband, at the small of her back. With her right hand, she grabbed for it and lashed out. The blade drew a fine red line across his thigh. He screamed and wobbled on his feet, and she slashed up as she pushed herself to her own full height. This time, the knife caught his right hand, the one groping for the gun’s trigger. He screamed again.

  Behind him, the other guy, the fat one, angled for position. He looked like he wanted to shoot her but didn’t dare, for fear of hitting Williams.

  She didn’t bother to watch any longer, but ran. Behind her, she heard loud swearing and then the sounds of pursuit.

  A minute later, she plowed through the flaming brush that had been left behind when whatever it was had exploded and dripped down the weird blue bubble, and into the little clearing where Eddie had parked his trailer, next to the upside-down wreck of a Chevy Impala that always signposted his place for her, and what she saw stopped her cold.

  Her brothers, Jorge and Diego, pawing at the dirt like animals. Their hands were bleeding; the ground before them was soaked with blood, wet and black in the firelight. She gave a little, wordless shout, but they didn’t even look up.

  “What are you doing?!” she demanded. She grabbed Diego’s shoulders, bent down to get in front of his face. “Diego! Jorge! It’s me, Lucia!”