Redheads

by Jonathan Moore

  Chris walked around the table stone. He kept away from the pillars and checked behind each one as he passed it. There were old bones, and behind one pillar was an entire skeleton hanging from its skull on an iron spike, its dry skin dangling in ribbons from its feet. But there was no creature hiding in the shadows.

  Westfield had passed on the other side of the table and had gone to the mound of clothing. While Chris covered the entrance to the next passage, he glanced sideways and saw Westfield use his foot to lift the wedding dress to the side.

  There was nothing beneath it but more old clothes.

  “You didn’t really think you could talk to Stark without talking to me, did you? I’ve owned him since before his grandfather was born.”

  Westfield swung around, searching with his light and his gun.

  Chris and Julissa were doing the same, the lights arcing wildly in the dark chamber. Shadows and bones. There were tunnels coming out of the ceiling, passageways leading out of the highest parts of the walls. It could be anywhere.

  “You hear that?” Julissa asked.

  “I don’t know,” Chris said. “It might’ve just been in our minds.”

  “But we all heard it, or felt it,” Westfield said.

  There was a hard metallic slam from the stairs they’d descended. It had cut them off somehow, dropped some unseen portcullis or gate. That much was clear.

  “Stark told you to come here because I told you to come here.”

  Behind Chris, Westfield fired a shot at one of the tunnels in the ceiling. The gun blast was deafening in the stone chamber, and in the ringing silence afterwards Chris could barely hear Westfield’s words.

  “Thought I saw…”

  “You saw nothing.”

  The creature’s words hadn’t lost any volume; it might have been speaking aloud, but it was also speaking directly inside Chris’s head.

  What are you? Chris thought.

  The answer rushed into his mind like a flood of dirty water.

  Hungry.

  That message must have been just for him, because neither Julissa nor Westfield reacted at all. But Chris almost fell to his knees from the force of the thing’s thought.

  “Get each other’s backs,” Julissa shouted. “Come to the center and get each other’s backs.”

  They all moved to the center of the room, just behind the table stone. They stood in a triangle, shoulder to shoulder, their lights searching the walls and ceiling.

  “Call out if you see—” Westfield trailed off and then started firing his pistol. Then he was screaming wildly.

  Chris turned to see Westfield on his back, his face bloodied. Julissa was kneeling over him. Something white ran along the far wall in a blur, disappearing into one of the tunnels before Chris even got off a second shot.

  Empty cartridge cases clinked across the stone floor.

  Westfield writhed under Julissa’s hands and screamed.

  Chris’s light searched the overhead tunnels, the stairwell, the wide passage way on the far side of the room. There were too many places to check.

  “Julissa!”

  “He’s still alive but it tried to take out his eyes—”

  Chris heard something behind him, a rustle like old leaves. He turned, raising the gun. The thing that hit him was just a blurry vacancy, a shape his eyes couldn’t see because the creature was standing there in his mind like a buzzing electric current, blocking everything.

  Later, he would remember little except for the yellow eyes.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Julissa was trying to stop the bleeding on Aaron’s neck and face, trying to keep him still. She had taken his gun from him so he wouldn’t accidentally shoot her for her efforts, and had set her own gun aside. He was screaming and the blood was flowing between her fingers, hot and too fast. She pulled off her scarf and began wrapping it around his neck, and that was when Chris started to fire his gun from behind her. She dropped the scarf and fumbled for the Uzi, bringing it around just as Chris hit the stones beside her. She fired at the first thing she saw, blasting apart the skull of the skeleton hanging from a hook behind one of the pillars. Then she looked at Chris’s face, putting her fingers on his lips. He was still breathing and was not bleeding much except for a trickle from his left temple.

  Westfield screamed again, a gargled shout that sounded like her name.

  She turned, but the thing had her from behind. It ripped the Uzi away from her with its taloned hands even as it was carrying her across the floor and up the wall. As it reached the ceiling, it slammed her head into a rock and she blacked out for a second, coming-to in time to see the scene in the room she was leaving, lit by three flashlights on the floor: Chris was struggling to sit up, Westfield was still screaming.

  Then it was dragging her down a stone tunnel by her ankles, fast.

  “They actually brought you to me,” the thing said.

  It came to a stop and seemed to hover over her. There was still a little light from the opening of the tunnel. Its eyes glowed like a pair of embers.

  “They brought you down here with nothing but some guns,” it said. “They might as well have put you on a plate.”

  She was paralyzed, either with fear or because it was immobilizing her somehow. She could feel its fingers moving over her sweatshirt, the press of its talons against her flesh. It traced a claw along the underside of her breast and found her nipple.

  “We’ll do it here. They’ll want to listen.”

  Chris screamed, from somewhere far back.

  “Julissa!”

  There was a flash of light and then it was darker again. Chris was searching the ceiling for the right tunnel and had passed it over. The leering thing above her felt all this too; it was there in her mind, dancing around the edges of her terror. And it was there between her thighs, pressing against the seam of her jeans. Hard and sharp, like the broken bones in its tunnels. If it entered her, it would rip her to pieces. When she remembered the syringe, it sensed that too.

  But it wasn’t fast enough.

  She brought up her wrist and shoved it towards the thing’s neck. It tried to back off the needle, but she had her other arm around its back, feeling the sharp ridges of bone that came out of its spine. She felt the needle sink in.

  You fucking animal, she thought. Here’s a trick right out fucking Wild Kingdom. I look like a redhead, but I’ve got a stinger.

  She flicked her wrist back, pulling the shoelace taut with her middle finger. The plunger sank all the way in, and she rode up with the creature as it bucked backwards and howled. Then it was off of her, the sharp ridges of its spine tearing her hand as it snapped around and ran down the tunnel. She could hear its leathery feet slapping the stones as it sprinted away on all fours.

  Now the howling was real and not just in her mind. An inhuman wail. Like an animal caught in a fire. She struggled to her knees and felt in her pocket for the second flashlight. It was a tiny keychain light with a single LED bulb. She pushed the button and looked around. There was a pile of bones next to her. She found a shattered femur, sharply splintered in the middle.

  What the hell.

  She stood and began to follow the thing’s screams, slowly at first. But when its howls quieted as it drew farther ahead, she broke into a run.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  “It was the middle one.”

  “What?”

  “The middle one,” Westfield said. “It took her up that one. I saw.” His good eye was bulging.

  Chris moved his light from Westfield’s bloody face and scanned the ceiling. He could hear the thing’s howls. They might have been filtering down from that tunnel, but it was impossible to say. The wall beneath the opening of the tunnel was rough enough to climb, maybe. He found Julissa’s submachine gun and slung it over his back. Then he found Westfield’s Glock and gave it to him.

  “In case it comes back.”

  “Just go, damn it. Don’t waste time on me.”

  Chris went to the
wall, put his flashlight in his mouth, and looked up. The tunnel entrance was twenty feet up. Rough stone, an iron hook jutting from the wall halfway up. Not much else. The thing roared again, the kind of sound you might hear coming out of the jungle at night. And Julissa was in there with it. That got him moving. He clawed his way up, his head throbbing from where the thing had hit him. When he got to the iron hook, he leaned his weight against it and adjusted the flashlight in his mouth so it wouldn’t drop. Then he kept climbing, knowing he was just at the edge of his limit and the only way to get up was to keep moving. If he came to a stop, that would be it. And if he fell and landed the wrong way, that would be it for all of them. He punched upwards, slicing his fingertips on the rock in search of holds. In fifteen seconds he was standing on the iron hook and moving up past it.

  When his fingers found the lip of the tunnel entrance, he hoisted himself in a smooth chin-up, kicked his legs over the side, and rolled in. The tunnel was just high enough to stand. He took the light from his mouth and brought the gun around. He didn’t look back at the chamber below to see how Westfield was doing. He just took off down the tunnel, running at a crouch with the gun out, trying to see ahead through the shadows so he wouldn’t be caught on his flank by a side passage.

  Chapter Sixty

  It was going up, leading her along with its screams.

  For five minutes she’d been running through switchbacks and stairs as the tunnel punched upwards through the rock beneath Edinburgh. She wasn’t too clear on what she’d do if she actually caught up to it. Maybe beat it with the bone she was holding, maybe stab it in the face with the sharp broken end. It was in a lot of pain, and thought it was dying. She could feel it thinking of its own death as it scuttled along the tunnel. But it still had the strength to outrun her. She’d given it a taste of something it had never known.

  Fear.

  She could feel its fear spreading through the dark tunnel in waves, could feel it as clearly as she could hear its howls. She didn’t know if it could feel her thoughts, but maybe it could. So she thought about peeling the skin off its face with a sharp rock. About using the bone in her hands to pry out its eyeballs and stomp them on their stalks with the heel of her boot. She thought about the way it would scream and twist if she and Chris impaled it on a pole and stood back to watch it die.

  Ahead of her, it screamed and ran. It tried to pull out of her mind but she clamped down on it and would not let it go. Holding on to it was like having a handful of earthworms. Filthy and squirming. But she squeezed her mind down on it anyway.

  What I shot into you, you’re as good as dead. But I’m gonna catch you first.

  It yanked in her mind and slipped away, but it left her with an image. She knew what it knew: Chris was running up the tunnel behind them, armed.

  The tunnel was narrower now, the steps finer. The stone stairs were polished, the walls were paneled with oak. She passed a locked doorway, then another. They must have been in the sub-basement of some building in Edinburgh. She could still hear the sharp slap of the thing’s hands and feet on the stone. It was a bend or two ahead of her on the stairs. And now she could hear Chris pounding his way up the stairs behind her.

  It would be a hell of a thing if he came around a corner with an automatic weapon and confused her in the shadows.

  “Chris!” she called. She was nearly breathless but the sound carried well in the tunnel. “Keep coming. But don’t shoot me in the back. I’m chasing it.”

  He called out her name, and nothing had ever sounded so good as his voice.

  Now she passed a window set in the wall. The warped leaded glass looked over a fast-running stream. Trees bent in the dawn rain, the sky a smear of gray. She kept running up, the stairs curving into a spiral. Somewhere above, she heard a door open and slam.

  “It went through a door, Chris!” she said. “Hurry!”

  The door was at the top of the stairs and was made of heavy hardwood, studded with bronze. It was locked. She listened to Chris thunder up the stairs and waited. When he rounded the last curve he saw her and kept running, and she saw the way his eyes moved from her head to her feet and back up again. Checking her, making sure she was all right.

  “Thank god,” he said.

  “Shoot it,” she said. “Shoot the lock.”

  “Stand back.”

  She stepped back onto the stair landing. Chris leveled the Uzi at the lock from a foot away and fired a long burst at it. Then he kicked the door in and it swung open in an arc of smoke and wood splinters and a clattering of broken metal. He put a new clip into the Uzi and handed it to her, taking the Glock from the waist band of his jeans.

  “Let’s go,” she said. And she didn’t wait for him, but started for the door.

  He stopped her with his hand on her shoulder.

  “What’d you do to it?”

  She held up her wrist and let the sweatshirt slide down so he could see the syringe.

  “You didn’t tell us—”

  She nodded and finished his sentence. “Because the more of us that knew, the more likely it’d find out. Let’s go.”

  They stepped through the doorway together, Julissa covering the left and Chris taking the right. The room was long with a soaring ceiling. Book shelves rose to the exposed rafters. Windows between the bookshelves looked down on the stream. At the far end of the room was a fireplace big enough to walk into. In front of the fire place was a thick Persian rug. There were a couple of leather armchairs on the rug facing the fireplace. The thing was on the rug, naked and writhing.

  They could see it easily now. It was in too much pain to play any mind tricks. It couldn’t cloud their vision. Standing, it would have been about six feet tall. It was leathery-looking, its face scrunched like a bat’s. As it flopped on the rug, Julissa saw its spine. Sharp protuberances came through the skin down the length of its back like something on an alligator. It looked up and saw them and went on writhing. There was a black mark on its neck where the needle had gone in; probably the drain cleaner had dissolved the blood vessels there and it was bleeding under its skin.

  Julissa remembered the way the drain cleaner had smoked when she spilled droplets on floor of the janitor’s closet. The thing was flopping and jerking like its blood was boiling, like something was burning holes through its heart.

  “You want me to shoot it?” Chris asked. But he sounded like he knew the answer already.

  “Only if it gets up. And then just in the gut to put it back down.”

  Julissa sat on the edge of the closer chair, her gun aimed at the thing’s stomach.

  There was a desk in one corner of the room. A computer on the desk, some papers. No telling what the rest of the house held. Coming up from the sub-basement to the top floor, she’d gotten an idea of the size of the place. At least fifty rooms, possibly more. Plus all the tunnels and chambers beneath the city. The thing must have been living in Edinburgh since the Stone Age. Maybe that’s when it found the original Stark. After it was dead they could comb through everything they wanted, go through its files, sift through it all. They could take weeks or months and put it all together. If they wanted to.

  They didn’t need it to answer any questions. They only needed one thing of it, and it was busy doing it on the carpet in front of her. It was dying.

  The thing writhed and screamed and looked at her. If nothing else, it was smart enough not to ask for mercy. Or mercy was an alien concept. Either way, it just did its thing on the rug by itself, and she watched. If she had to help it along, she would. They had to get back to Westfield and she didn’t want to make him wait all day. But the thing died in five minutes, just thrashing on the floor, its mind wheeling through images of terror that it cast all around. When it was almost over, it lay still. Julissa nodded to Chris.

  He knelt next to the thing and put the muzzle of his handgun to its temple.

  It was alive, barely, but still crashing through images. Young women, begging for their lives. She saw Allison, Cheryl and Ta
ra. A hundred others. The ice in the fjords from some long-ago time. Its mind quieted. It settled on a last image. Broken ice drifting across deep and black water. A scene of eerie peace.

  Chris pulled the trigger and the gun blast shattered all that and sent it away.

  The room was still and quiet. The thing’s final thought blinked out in Julissa’s mind, just gone. The contents of the thing’s head were splattered across the back of the fireplace. Gray and red; not so different from anything else.

  Chris stood and put the pistol back into his waistband.

  “We should see if we can find a rope or something to get Westfield up.”

  “Will he be okay?” Julissa asked.

  “He was talking when I left him. He was sitting up.”

  “Let’s hurry.”

  Chapter Sixty-One

  When he’d been alone for ten minutes, Westfield got to his feet and leaned awhile against the table stone until the rushing in his ears quieted. His right eye wasn’t working too well but he thought it might just be swollen shut. The thing had clawed him in the face but had been moving too quickly to do any real damage. At least it hadn’t gotten into him with its teeth again.