When I turn on the flashlight, I’m inside the room with my objective. Or I would be if there was anything in the room at all. One sweep of my flashlight reveals all I need to know. Bare concrete walls meet the floor in every direction. Viznir was right. My objective was a lie. I’m stuck here.
I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’ve been so close to death already or whether I’m just not processing the reality of the situation, but the empty room doesn’t bring on the despair it was likely meant to.
I heave the heavy metal latch aside and swing the door open. Deanna is curled up with the axe in the corner of the stairwell and barely looks up when I exit.
“Did you find it?” Her voice is emotionless.
“No.” I snatch up my pack and the night vision goggles and extend her my hand. “Come on. We’ve got to go.”
“There’s no point. We’re not getting out.”
“Bullshit. We’ll figure something out.” I don’t feel nearly as confident as I’m trying to sound, but Deanna takes my hand and lets me pull her to her feet anyway. We’ve made it up about half the stairs when I feel the tremor.
At first it’s just a slight vibration in the railing as my fingertips slide along it. Then there is a noise to accompany it, a deep, dull, grating sound, the friction of something rigid scraping earth. Tiny bits of debris begin to rain down the stairwell.
“What is that?” Deanna’s eyes have widened at the cascading dust that crosses the beam of my flashlight.
“I don’t know, but I don’t think we should stay here.” I pick up the pace and start taking steps three at a time. I only slow when Deanna is in danger of lagging behind. I burst back into the main road a few paces ahead of her and look around. The entire tunnel has begun to shake. Three host bodies stagger their way across the road to my left, but they pay me and my flashlight no attention. They seem fixated on getting out of the road and I watch them vanish down the first corridor they reach.
Deanna emerges from the doorway behind me with her axe raised. “I swear to God, if I get out of this place I am going straight home, last level or not. They can give me any penalty they want. I’m going home.”
“You think we’re close to the end?” I head toward the time gate and start to jog. Deanna follows.
“My dad has a friend on the committee. They said we only have nine levels in this chronothon. That means there’s only one left. Not that I could finish now anyway.”
“What happens to guides when the racer is lost?”
“You’re on your own. That’s part of the danger. It’s supposed to make teams more bonded.”
“Why did you sign up for this?” I scan the walls for the source of the trembling but see nothing.
Deanna lets out a bitter laugh. “Chronothons are glamorous. It makes you famous if you win. It’s not supposed to be like this. No one ever had to go here before. They went places like Ancient Greece and Alexandria. Nice places. I don’t understand why they’re doing this to us.”
The tremors seem to be lessening in the walls, and the grating noise fades away to nothing. We are left with an oppressive silence and the sound of our own breathing. “Whatever that was, I want to be gone before it comes back. The others should be close.”
I follow Jettison’s instructions and continue down the road. A few other tunnels diverge from the main passage, but I stay the course, and when we round the bend, I can finally see the repository. A cavernous chamber has opened up ahead that is at least fifty feet high and punctuated with stalactites. The walls are echoing with the familiar barking of a time traveling dog. I zero in on the sound and spot its source. The repository is ensconced in a tunnel opening halfway up an earthen wall on the far side of the cavern, above a set of steep stone stairs. Below the wall is a ditch teeming with Soma hosts.
The narrow stone steps only allow passage by one or two abreast, and at the top of the steps, Kara is seated with her gun, making sure none make it up at all. As I watch, she takes careful aim and obliterates the top half of a host, allowing the remains of the corpse to tumble backward down the stairs into a pile that is acting as a morbid dam at the base of the stairs. Other Soma hosts scratch and scrabble at the pile in an effort to climb over it.
Even at a distance, I catch the glow of Milo’s digital glasses at the side of the tunnel opening. He is fiddling with something on the wall. Cliff is holding a lantern aloft, lighting the steps for Kara’s gruesome chore. I hear Jonah before I see him. He gives a shout and Cliff looks up to see us on the far side of the cavern. Between him and us at least a hundred densely packed Soma hosts block the path.
“How are we going to make it through all those?” Deanna’s voice trembles.
I check the chambers on my gun and scrounge around in the pockets of my pack for more bullets. “We’ll figure something out.”
Cliff sets the lantern down and it gets hard to see what he’s doing, but a moment later he is aiming something at me. I try to make out what it is, but I get my answer when a flying anchor whizzes to a stop next to me and hovers a few feet off the ground. Genesis materializes next to it and drops to the ground. She’s holding a machete in one hand and letting a second dangle from her wrist from a lanyard. “You have the objectives?”
“Most of them. I have yours.”
Genesis retrieves the flying anchor and frowns. “Who are we short?”
“Mine and Viznir’s and whatever Preston had. Preston didn’t make it.”
Genesis turns to Deanna. “I’m so sorry.” Deanna nods slightly but doesn’t reply. Genesis considers the bracelet on her wrist, then looks back to Deanna. “I lost my guide. But if you want to come with me, I can get you through.”
Deanna looks up in surprise. “You’d do that?”
“It’s what Mayra would have wanted.”
Deanna looks at me. “What about Ben?”
Genesis hands me one of the machetes. “We think we have a plan for that. Milo’s working out the details.”
I take the offered machete and look up to the opening of the tunnel where Kara and Cliff are guarding the steps. “Was he able to slow the countdown at all?”
“No. We need to hurry.” She turns and hacks down a Soma host that has wandered over to us.
As she’s extracting her blade from the corpse’s skull, the ground beneath our feet begins to tremble again. The shaking grows more violent and the Soma hosts nearest to us begin to jitter and turn away from their assault of the stairs. More notice our presence but they seem distracted by the shaking. They moan and start to part from one another. A yell from behind us makes me turn. Jettison and Viznir race out of a side tunnel and make the turn onto the road at a dead sprint. Bozzle emerges behind them, his face a mask of determination.
“GO! GO!” Jettison is flailing an arm at us, seemingly oblivious to the dense horde of host bodies behind us. A burst of rock and earth from the opening of the tunnel behind him shows his real concern. A jagged ring of fangs thrusts out from the darkness, propelled by a dark, shifting mass of tissue. The horrifying apparition heaves itself forward and into the light of the cavern, revealing its segmented form and massive proportions. The ground is shaking with the movements of its scaled body as it writhes forward at alarming speed, a gigantic thrashing worm. Once in the open, it turns its eyeless head side to side, tasting or smelling the air with hairy appendages that fan out from around its mouth. It takes only a second to orient itself before it hurls itself onward in pursuit of its prey.
“What the hell is that?” Genesis exclaims as her brother races up to us.
“GO!” Jettison flings himself at Genesis and forcibly points her toward the back wall of the cavern by her shoulders. “No time to explain.” His hands are empty with the exception of a piece of shiny chain. As soon as Bozzle and Viznir reach our position, I raise my pistol and fire at the heaving worm. The bullet ricochets uselessly off the beast’s scaly skin.
“It won’t work!” Viznir shouts. “We tried that.”
I fire another
shot directly into the worm’s fleshy mouth, but the creature pays it no notice. It merely heaves itself closer, its mouth gaping wide and exposing more rings of teeth inside.
I spin and follow the others toward the mass of Soma hosts. The host bodies on the fringes are starting to scatter in every direction at the approach of the worm. Jettison races ahead, shoving bodies out of the way while Bozzle dispatches others with his pike. His weapon has lost its glow and the blade is slick with blood. He uses the handle as much as the blade, knocking opposition aside to make way. Even with all our aggression and the fact that the Soma are more intent on escape than eating us, we are forced to slow when we get into the dense mass. The host bodies have begun to thrash into one another in a chaotic mosh pit of confusion. Even though I recognize a few of the more mature, well-fed Soma hosts in the crowd, none seem capable of making an organized exit and are flailing about with shrieks and grunts.
I look behind me and watch the worm suck one of the unfortunate stragglers into its mouth with a single, efficient slurp. Its rows of teeth keep the victim from wriggling loose as it is sucked headfirst into the beast’s fleshy gullet. The worm arches its back in a wave of scales till its midsection almost reaches the top of the cavern, then uses the height to make a tremendous lunge forward. The ground trembles as the weighty body shoves the head across the cavern floor. Bits of rock and dirt are flung out around it from the force of its assault. Soma hosts are knocked headlong into the air, and the yawning orifice of its mouth stops mere inches behind me. That’s when I smell the stench.
The force of the worm’s movement has propelled a wave of air from its gaping throat. It brings the pungent odor of wet corpses and what I can only describe as sweaty, unwashed crotch. I flee the stench as much as the rows of teeth, shoving aside opposition with renewed vigor. I almost collide with Bozzle. He has turned around and is facing the worm. He raises his pike over his head with both arms and I briefly think he is going to hurl it at the beast, but instead of throwing the pike, he brings the tip down and buries it forcefully into the ground, leaving the long handle protruding up toward the ceiling of the cavern. I dodge around him just as he does something that makes the pike disappear. A moment later, he’s next to me, using his bare hands to knock Soma hosts out of our way.
A crunching and grating accompanies the movements of the worm as it extends its feelers again to smell for us. It must like the scent of human and Anya Morey better than the funk of the Soma infested miners because it slithers directly toward Bozzle and me. Despite Kara and Cliff blasting away from the top of the stairs to try to clear us a path, the press of bodies ahead of us is still too thick, and I come to the sickening realization that we aren’t going to make the stairs in time. Another big lunge of the worm will carry it to our position and beyond. Kara takes a shot at the worm, but the energy from her gun merely crackles around the hard scales before dissipating into an acrid smoke. My arms are exhausted from hacking and shoving through the cluster of bodies, but to my surprise, Bozzle stops and turns around. He glances once at a device in his hand and then stares down the worm’s fang-filled throat. The creature lunges forward again, its mouth opening wide to swallow us, when its motion is suddenly and violently arrested. The bottom of its jaw slams into the floor of the cavern and it lets out a shrieking hiss. It thrashes once and then again as a spurt of dark green ooze gushes from its throat. It begins to choke on its own fluids and flail its head and tail back and forth. That’s when I realize its midsection is pinned to the floor of the cavern by Bozzle’s pike. The weapon has reappeared and is now fused to the creature’s insides, anchoring the worm to the earth and no doubt causing damage with every jolt and twist of the segmented body. The worm continues to flail but can come no closer.
The tattooed alien says nothing about his victory. He merely spits once and turns back to the task of clearing the Soma.
We catch up to the others, working together to batter our way through the mess. Deanna is running out of energy and is having trouble swinging the axe, so I trade weapons with her, letting her take the lighter machete. I join Genesis at the front of the group to help bore a path through the crowd. Cliff and Kara have cleared an area around the foot of the stairs and are there to help pull us over the mass of fallen bodies.
I scale the stairs behind Genesis, dripping guts and gore. Barley stops barking when I reach the top step but doesn’t approach me. I don’t blame him. My hands are red and my clothes are soaked. I toss the axe and my pack to the ground and dial my chronometer while looking for a slightly elevated place to stand. I settle for a flat bit of rock and make the two-second jump while holding onto the wall, then step away from the puddle of muck I leave behind on the floor. I feel instantly better about myself. I hastily remove the objectives we’ve acquired from my pack, laying them gently on the floor of the tunnel, then repeat the jump process while holding the pack to get it clean, too. The others follow my example, using the same place to deposit their accumulated filth.
Once I’m clean, I get a lick on the hand from Barley and a hug from Jonah. Milo is busy working over a pile of wiring he has extracted from a conduit on the wall, but Cliff gives me a hearty handshake.
“You did good, kid.” He gestures to the pile of objectives.
“Yeah, except I’m short one. There was nothing for me this round.”
“Our boy Milo figured as much.” Cliff lifts his stubbly jaw to indicate the wall where Milo is working. “He says they’ve got this gate wired against you.”
“Any way around it?”
“We only know of one, but you’ll have to talk to Wabash about that.”
I step past Cliff and locate Harrison propped up against the tunnel wall. He has a small lantern nestled near his leg that is casting an eerie light upward at his face. He looks pale and drained. He watches my approach and I squat beside him.
“Hey, man. How are you feeling?”
“I’ve had better races. I don’t think this place is going to make my list of highlights.”
“We made the gate at least. Almost out of here.”
“Some of us.” He fumbles weakly at his shirt and tugs at a bit of string around his neck. He pulls it over his head and lets the attached bracelet dangle between us. “You need this more than I do.”
The Admiral’s race band. I watch it swing back and forth under his outstretched hand. “I can’t ask you to do that for me. You barely know me.”
“I know you well enough. And I know myself enough to know that even if I get to wherever this gate is taking us, I’ve got hours at most to enjoy it. What that creature did to me, it’s not getting undone.”
“You don’t know where we’re headed. There could be a hospital—”
“Just take it already.” He thrusts his hand out. “And don’t feel guilty. You owe me this. And you owe it to the kid. See this thing through for me and keep him safe the rest of the way. Make this shit count for something.”
I take the bracelet and he lets the string drop.
“Thank you.”
He coughs and leans his head back against the wall. “Silas was right about this place. There are some places you shouldn’t go to die. But at least I didn’t turn into one of those things down there.”
I glance back to the tunnel opening. Kara has resumed her post at the top of the stairs and has her gun resting casually on her knee. Cliff has knelt behind her and is counting shotgun shells on the ground while Jonah watches. Milo still hasn’t looked up from his efforts with the conduit. He has three tablets spread around him and is fidgeting with all of them in intervals. I don’t know what he’s up to, but he’s the most concentrated I’ve ever seen him.
“What’s he doing over there? We don’t need to slow the timer down now that we’re all here. Can’t we just use the objectives?”
“He’s reading the gate’s internal code. Says he needs to find something. He figured out your problem from looking in there. Not sure what he’s finding now.”
A few feet from t
he tunnel opening, Genesis is wrapping a bandage around Jettison’s arm while Deanna waits to cut it with a pair of scissors. I turn back to Harrison. “Did you see any sign of the others? Tad and Horacio and them?”
He points to a row of cubbyholes carved into the wall. Three of them have objectives stored already. “They were through just ahead of us. They’re what caused that horde down there. Got ’em all riled up and hungry. We only made it because of Cliff and Kara. Tough as nails, those two.”
“I’m surprised Tad and Blaine left Deanna behind.”
“I’m not surprised at all.” Harrison coughs again. “Those two are out for themselves. Not sure about the other ones. There’s some teamwork between the girl and the hairy Italian.”
“Ariella and Horacio? Yeah, I think they’re vaguely related or something. I met them together when this all started.”
“Related? I guess that could make sense. Not a close bond obviously, but I got the impression they were working together.” Harrison lets his eyes drift close.
“Their benefactor is how I got suckered into this, so if there are any racers in on the fix I’d bet—”
“Kara!” Milo’s voice is sudden and everyone stops their conversations. Milo gestures hurriedly and Kara leaves her perch on the steps to investigate. She leans over Milo’s array of tablets as he points to something on the screens. I try to listen, but Milo’s voice drops to barely a whisper. The only part of the conversation I hear is when Kara straightens back up.
In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 88
