The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Diego shook her off, swatted at her like an insect.

  “Don’t do no good,” Eddie said. Now she saw him, sitting on the step of his own trailer and watching the whole scene. There was a massive gun cradled in his arms. “They’re like, loco or some shit. It’s fucked up, man.”

  “Can’t you do anything?”

  “They don’t listen, Lucy,” Eddie told her.

  She ran to him. “Eddie, there’s these guys chasing me. Trying to kill me.”

  He smiled, as if she were telling a joke. “Seems like everybody’s tryin’ to kill somebody. Except your brothers—I think they already did their killing for this week.”

  Before she could continue, though, two more figures came through the flames. Kelly and Terrance. Kelly’s walk was a half-stagger, as his right leg couldn’t support his weight. They looked at Diego and Jorge, digging like crazy people, at Eddie, and finally at Lucy. Both men looked awful, exhausted, filthy, half-mad. Kelly was splattered with blood. Probably, she thought, a lot like me.

  But Kelly’s grizzled face was split in a sinister grin, as if finding Lucy again had made everything she’d put him through worth it. “You,” he said weakly. “You cut me.”

  “Those the guys?” Eddie asked quietly.

  “What’s left of them,” Lucy replied. She snatched the big gun from his hands. “Give me that.”

  Kelly barked out a laugh, looking at her struggling to lift the big weapon with a wounded shoulder. But she made the effort, lifting the thing to her waist and tugging the trigger.

  The first burst was a quick three shots that completely missed her targets—loud but not significant enough to be heard by many people over the Slab’s apocalyptic soundtrack. She squeezed again, holding down the trigger this time, and the thunder started.

  A line of slugs cut across Kelly like stitches. Then Terrance, same thing, even as he tried to raise his own rifle. Both men fell—Kelly nearly torn in half—and still Lucy fired, bullet after bullet after bullet chewing flesh and shattering bone and spurting blood, giant brass shell casings hitting the ground around her.

  Finally, the gun fell silent. Eddie looked at her. Even her brothers had stopped digging for the moment and stared at her. Eddie was still sitting on the trailer’s step, his posture casual, a faint smile playing about his lips and eyes.

  “Guess they won’t bother you anymore,” he said.

  Diego and Jorge went back to digging.

  ***

  Ken hated the idea of leaving Penny alone with that thing, that abomination. But she was right, they needed to keep going, and if she couldn’t get past it—or if taking three minutes to converse with it would let her do so safely—then he guessed she’d made the right decision. He and Hal needed to hurry on. He couldn’t have said why, but he knew that time was becoming an issue—that no matter how much he’d come to like Penny in the last hours, her survival wasn’t as important as their task here, the sense of urgency he felt. The three minutes had come and gone and he didn’t know if she was following yet, but he wasn’t turning around to find out.

  He practically ran now, and Hal kept pace right behind him. The cave’s floor slanted more and more, and the path seemed to lead almost straight west. His assumption was that it would end more or less directly underneath the Slab. He still didn’t know what waited for them down there, but one thing was certain.

  It wasn’t good.

  As he ran, he began to wonder what Hal brought to the table. He’d always handled problems himself. He had Billy Cobb at the substation, but that was only because the Imperial County Sheriff insisted on it. If it had been up to him he’d have run the station solo, taking calls when he could. The way he did everything else in life. If you didn’t depend on other people they couldn’t let you down. They couldn’t abandon you if they weren’t there to begin with. Maybe, he thought, I should just tell Hal to go back, to stay with Penny. Keep them out of my way while I check things out.

  But Penny’s voice came to him as clearly as if he’d had a telephone held against his ear. “You can’t do everything by yourself, Ken,” she had said. She was right. He knew that. Which meant that this was just the cave—no, not the cave, but whatever was inside the cave—trying to trick him. To split them up.

  And that’s when he understood.

  It had made that person from the mushrooms in order to slow Penny down. Because they were strongest when they were together. Two of them were strong, three were, they had agreed, practically godlike.

  So it had already won, and they didn’t even know what the fight was yet. If it took three of them to beat it—and why else had the magic spared three of them, directed their lives, brought them through the years to this one specific place and time, if not because it did—and there were only two, then they’d already lost. Going back for Penny was out of the question; they’d lose too much time, and time was definitely the other factor.

  All those years, all those lives—Shannon’s life, Mindy’s life, and so many more—to bring them here. And they’d blown it.

  He stopped and let Hal catch up. He almost didn’t feel like going any farther.

  “We fucked up,” Ken said. “We shouldn’t have let Penny stay back there.”

  “Yeah,” Hal said. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  Hal reached out and touched Ken, and Ken felt the power surge through him again, recharging him. His mood elevated with his strength.

  “We go on,” Hal said. “We go down there and we stop it.”

  “We don’t even know what it is,” Ken protested, knowing even as he did that he was going to give in.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Hal said. “What matters is that we try. We don’t back down from the fight. We’ll know it when we see it.”

  “You’re right,” Ken said. “I sure wish Penny was here, though.”

  “That makes two of us,” Hal said. “Probably three of us. But that choice has been made, so we’ve got to go on without her.”

  He started walking down the sloping cave floor again, and Ken followed. The mushrooms weren’t so thick anymore, just an occasional one here and there, as if they weren’t needed down here like they were closer to the surface. The cave’s floor and walls were solid stone, floor smoothed with the passage of feet over the centuries, walls, devoid of pictures or writing now, nearly as rough as if they’d been hewn from the earth with stone axes. No timbers supported the ceiling—this had the feel of a tunnel built by human hands, though Ken was sure it wasn’t—but somehow the cave felt strong and secure just the same. Ken had no idea how deep they’d gone, but it felt like they were completely cut off from the rest of the world.

  Finally, they reached the end.

  The cave widened into a small chamber, a couple of dozen feet in diameter, almost perfectly round. The roof was lost in the darkness overhead. There were pictographs on the walls, as illegible to Ken as if they’d been Chinese or Arabic, though he suspected Penny would have been able to read them if she’d been here.

  In the middle of the room stood a small, round rock structure, looking much like the opening to an Anasazi kiva. A slab had been laid on top of its low rock walls, its surface completely covered with the same kind of pictorial language that appeared on the main walls of the cave. The slab must have weighed a ton or more, a solid piece of granite, smoothed and rounded and carefully fit to cover the top of the rock construction.

  From the cracks between the rocks, mushrooms grew. As Ken watched, they seethed through the cracks, tiny tendrils at first, growing heads that expanded as they reached away from the rocks. Ken put a hand out, caught Hal’s arm, held him back.

  “I don’t like this at all,” he said.

  “I’m sure we’re not supposed to.”

  They were still standing that way, flesh touching flesh, when the stone slab rocked and tipped back, sliding to the ground with a crash.

  Something emerged from underneath.

  Ken was pre
disposed to see him as the gray man, from Penny’s vision. Through whatever it was that linked them, Ken could see him from Hal’s perspective, and knew that to Hal, he looked like an enormous insect, vaguely cockroach-like but pale, as befitted something that never saw the sun—a huge white carapace over an insect’s thorax and abdomen, six twitching legs, long antennae on stalks protruding from its small, glistening head, clicking as it came out from underneath its rock.

  And now, looking at it, Ken understood. He knew that Hal did, too. Penny’s impression had been correct—the thing was, more or less, a personification of evil. Not the personification, because evil was everywhere, in everyone, and around all the time. But a bad thing, nonetheless.

  The knowledge raced through his mind like a movie, as he imagined it must have done for Penny when she’d been reading farther up the cave, earlier. He saw what must have been the same scene she did, on the shores of the ancient lake, water lapping at the very plateau on which they stood. Long, long ago, thousands of years ago, this presence had set upon the Cahuilla Indians, turning them against each other. They had lost many—the bodies scattered around, skulls stacked in morbid piles like cannonballs, transgressors writhing, impaled on massive stakes—testified to that.

  But they had learned to fight back, had somehow tapped into magic of their own, and had eventually beaten the thing. Penny had described that, too—shoving the gray man into a hole and sealing it with a slab of rock.

  Here, the internal movie went dark for a long time. Maybe the thing had been comatose, maybe they’d actually killed it. Impossible to tell. But eventually, there was light again, and life—as portrayed, in this movie, by water. Only this water was foul, poisoned, filled with chemicals that made it unhealthy for man and beast alike. Which made it, as it soaked into the water table and then down, and down, through the layers of rock and dirt and the very crust of the earth, perfect sustenance for the gray man. He tasted that water, and found it sweet.

  And wanted more.

  And began to hunger and thirst and look for a way out.

  But after all those centuries of death or near-death, it needed more than just the few drops of water that made their way this far down. It needed blood. It needed death and destruction, fire and fear. These things gave it strength. So it reached out. It found what it needed, as living things will.

  If it’s alive, Ken thought, it can be killed. He raised his weapon and unloaded it, one shot after another booming in the enclosed space, deafening. Bullets tore through the gray man and pinged from stone walls behind him, tearing off chunks but not seeming to injure him. When the gun was empty, Ken threw it aside.

  “Ken, don’t,” Hal said, grabbing his arm. Ken shook off the older man’s grip and charged the gray man. He swung a fist at the thing’s head and connected. It felt solid enough under his hand, but there was no response, no flinch, no indication that it felt any pain. Its eyes were blank, just more gray tissue in its monochromatic self. Ken hit it again, two shots to the gut. Finally—not as if it was hurt, but as if swatting an annoying insect—the gray man swung an arm at Ken that hit with the force of a falling tree, sweeping him back across the little chamber.

  “You tried,” Hal told him, helping him back to his feet.

  “And I’m not done,” Ken said. But before he could take another step toward his opponent, the tendrils of mushrooms that grew from the pit reached for Ken and Hal, snaking around their legs, up their torsos, and more of the mushrooms sprouted from the hole itself, following the gray man like ducklings after their mother. The gray man stalked the chamber, stretching and enjoying newfound freedom of mobility, and the mushrooms reached for the ceiling, filling nearly every square inch of space in the room except where the gray man paced. Shoots twined around Ken and Hal, twisting up in front of their faces, tendrils worming into their noses and mouths, cutting off air. Ken gagged on the pulpy mass of it as it filled his mouth, tried to bite but couldn’t even bring his teeth together. It snaked obscenely down his throat.

  Ken felt the world start to go black, feeling like the gray man must have when he’d been forced into the hole in the first place. His head swam, he felt dizzy and weak-kneed. The sad realization came to him that if the gray man got out today, he’d find a very different world—one in which the planet’s population had multiplied to a barely sustainable level, a world that was on the edge of insanity to begin with, with powerful weapons and equally powerful hatreds. A world, in other words, ideally suited to the gray man’s nature. He—or whatever it was he represented—would flourish in a world like this one.

  And there was nothing he could do to stop it. He couldn’t fill his lungs, his limbs weighed a thousand pounds each, his vision was going. At least, he thought, if I have to go now, I’m going at the side of a good man. A man who’s done bad things but made himself stop, who had done everything in his power to atone.

  But Hal gripped his right hand. Ken felt the other man’s skin, warm against his own, and some of Hal’s power and positive mental focus seeped into him.

  We have to try, Hal thought.

  Ken was at a loss. If Hal wanted to try something, he was game, but he sure didn’t know what it might be. He couldn’t speak but he thought a response back to Hal. Yeah.

  Mushrooms and evil are the same in one way, Hal sent.

  What’s that?

  They hate the light.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Penny gave Mick, or the thing that looked like him, his three minutes. And like Mick would, it used them talking. About nothing in particular, as far as she was concerned—betrayal and disappointment, mostly. Enough to make Penny believe it really was Mick, dead but not dead, in some way, because anyone else would have shut up and tried something, or at least engaged in conversation instead of monologue.

  She didn’t care. She spent the time looking at the second hand sweep the face of her watch. At three minutes, she said, “Time’s up.”

  “You can’t go down there, Penny,” it said. “I can’t let you.”

  “You’ve never been able to stop me from doing what I needed to do,” Penny replied. “You think being dead’s going to change that?”

  “I can stop you—”

  “You can’t stop dick.”

  She started past it, and it grabbed her. But Mick-shaped or not, magically animated as it was, it was still mushroom-stuff. She took its arms and yanked, shredding them in her grip. They began to grow back and she swung an arm as hard as she could, knocking its head flying. Blinded, it crashed into the wall. Its head started to grow back, too, but by then Penny was running, pushing as fast through the mushroom jungle as she was able.

  And the Mick-thing was rooted.

  She didn’t stop, didn’t slow. Eventually the mushrooms were no longer a factor and she raced through the dark, the cave just tall enough and wide enough to let her reach something approximating a reasonable speed. She didn’t seem to need the flashlight any more; she could see in the dark almost as well as if she’d had it anyway, and her vision became more and more clear as she got deeper and deeper into the cave.

  By the time she reached the end of the cave, Hal and Ken were almost completely engulfed in massive mushroom stalks. She couldn’t see through the thicket, but she felt the presence of the gray man within, growing stronger and more confident with each passing second, while Ken and Hal weakened. She was struck by a wave of gloom, a certainty that they’d all been too late to do any good, to keep the gray man down in his pit.

  But then she noticed that Hal had begun to glow.

  This wasn’t the blue glow they’d all manifested back at the Slab, to protect it from the bomb. It was a yellow glow, strengthening as she watched toward pure white light. Just looking at it gave her hope.

  She hacked with her hands at the mushroom trees that were, even now, beginning to writhe toward her. They wanted to trap her, to hold her back, but Penny wouldn’t be trapped. She kicked and hit and forced her way through the growth, until she got close enough t
o the two men. A massive mushroom trunk, as big around as an oak tree, slammed into her and knocked her to her knees.

  As she went down, she reached out and closed her hand around Ken’s left hand. And Ken, she saw, held Hal’s hand in his right.

  They were together again.

  She felt Hal’s words ring in her head like an echo, even though he’d thought them, she knew, several minutes before.

  They hate the light.

  She focused on the light, basked in it, felt it bathe her like pure, cleansing water.

  And where Hal was, the light grew. More intense, more brilliant…as if the sun itself had come into this forsaken place.

  Even as the realization struck her, a pillar of pure sunlight blasted through the rock, through the earth, through the sky above. As if Hal were its conduit, the pillar illuminated him and then obscured him, too bright to look at, too intense to see through, but it came from above and it enveloped Hal and it shot out through his right hand, which he extended through the forest of mushroom stalks and toward the gray man. And the light cut through the mushrooms, which withered as it touched them.

  The gray man tried to hide from it. Panicking, he ducked behind the slab of stone he had shoved off his own place of internment.

  But the pillar of sunlight would not be denied. It glowed through the slab as surely as it shone through the earth above them, as surely as it passed through the Slab, on the surface, where even now men and women died to feed the gray man’s terrible hunger.

  Hal had grown too hot—Ken had to let go of him, and he and Penny backed off, their hands still clasped together. It was as if Hal channeled the sun itself into the chamber. Now he had both hands raised toward the gray man, directing the streaming sunlight through himself.

  Where the light touched the gray man, he sizzled.

  Where it burned him, he screamed.

  Where it cleansed him, he shrank.

  The magic worked through them, through Penny and Ken and Hal, and the magic was stronger than the gray man, because he lost shape, lost form, lost mass. As he did, so did the mushrooms, collapsing in on themselves, shrinking, finally vanishing altogether.