Earthbound and Down ebook 20170826

by Shaun Meeks

  “No, but whatever it is, made Kodo run off too,” Daniels adds, but there’s no help in pointing that out either, other than the fact that maybe we should do as the dog did and get the hell out of there as fast as we can. I consider saying it, but right now my mouth is dry and tastes like shit as adrenaline pumps furiously through me.

  We all stand there. Flashlights aimed at the tunnel where the young, Asian cop was pulled, and say nothing after Daniels’ last useless statement. I know what I’m thinking; mainly that everyone should run and that Godfrey was right, but I wonder what’s going through the heads of Daniels and Platanov. They have no idea that what took their fellow officer, what they might have to face themselves is a demon. They’re totally ignorant to the fact that a monster just grabbed their co-worker and no doubt is killing the man in some horrible, disgusting way. They’re oblivious to the fact that their guns might be about as useful against the thing in there as a Band-Aid would be to a shotgun wound. Should I tell them this? Should I warn them even though there’s no way they’ll believe it?

  Why bother? They’ll see it soon enough, I’m sure.

  There are noises echoing around us and I don’t like it. It reminds me of the sound someone makes as they sloppily go to town on some very rare, extremely juice steaks; a mouth slobbering on wet, bloody meat…but there’s something else as well. I stop in the dead center of the opening, and Garcia is backing towards me, his gun pointed to where Tham is no doubt being eaten.

  “Did you see it at all?” he asks, and there are no whispers this time. “Is it what you said it was?”

  “I couldn’t see anything. Just a dark blur,” I tell him, and Platanov turns her head when I say it.

  “What does that mean? Is it what you said it was? Do you know what the fuck is going on here?”

  There’s panic in her voice and if I say yes or try to explain to her what’s going on, that panic is going to go nuclear. I say nothing instead and shrug and she forgets about the tunnel and stalks towards us, her gun at her side. I see anger in her face, something I see way too often these days, and I try and think of something, anything to say fast and easy. There has to be some way to calm this down and get the rest of us out in one piece.

  Before I can get the words out though, it’s already too late.

  From a different tunnel, one to my left, a monster is born, a second one comes from my right and jumps on top of Daniels. The cop’s gun goes off and my eardrums are ruined; the world turns into the sound of being underwater. I step back and trip. I fall ass first into the water and bounce down so hard that it shakes my head something fierce. My headache reawakens and I doubt it’s just the fall though, but instead the left overs over the concussion I suffered the other day. The mix of my ears blown out and my head pounding makes me feel sick. The smell rising from the water I’m sitting in isn’t helping all that much either. I’m covered in filth. Right now I’m so glad I didn’t wear my leather jacket.

  Through the dense muffles I hear Platanov scream as the first monster wraps its hideously gigantic jaws around her waist. Teeth that look like a burnt down village or blackened driftwood bury themselves in the side of her stomach and blood bubbles out from her mouth, gargling her scream. I look at the thing and know two things; this is an earthbound monster, and it is not a Golgotha. Not even close.

  A Golgotha is a demon made up of human waste. If that’s so, then these creatures should be slimy piles of disgusting, but they’re not. They’re beasts, solid and muscular. The monster’s head is twice the size of its body. It has a nest of red eyes covering the coarse hairs of its face and its chin melds and melts right into its chest as if it’s all one body part. The creature’s arms are dark and shiny, covered in human waste and now blood, but that’s only because of the slaughter. The arms are huge, close to the height of me—and I’m six feet tall—and nearly as thick. The creature’s back legs are smaller, looking more like a toad’s than anything that should belong on the rest of it. Parts of the skin look more like shells of a sea creature, especially running down the back where small worm-like strings dangle down. As I stare at the monsters eating Platanov and Daniels, I know these things aren’t what I thought, not what Godfrey claimed they were. These aren’t demons at all. These are something else entirely; earth-born monsters and my Tincher will do little more than piss them off and make them eat me slowly to get even.

  I stand up from the muck and run to Garcia.

  “We need to get out of here,” I tell the detective, and pull him by the arm, but he’s frozen, eyes stuck on the slaughter. I look over and see blue ropes pulled out from Daniels’ stomach. The dying man reaches out and tries to grab at them, begins a tug of war with the monster, but he’s already dead. He just doesn’t want to admit it. “Seriously, if you don’t want to end up like them, we need to go. Now!”

  “We…can’t just—”

  “We can and we will, if you want to see your kid again.”

  That snaps him out of it. He looks at me and there’s nothing left of the man I first met there, fear has swallowed his anger. He keeps saying my son over and over, and I know I need to drag him or push him out.

  A bone snaps in the direction of Platanov. From the corner of my eye I see her body split in two and gore showers from her. That’s it for me. I pull Garcia with all my force towards the tunnel we came through and then get behind him once he’s in. He doesn’t seem to want to go, but I don’t stop. He has to get going. Once those things are done with the cops, they’ll be coming after us. We’ve only gone ten steps or less and I feel his resistance let up a little. Good. He needs to run. I tell him that and he turns to me.

  “What about the child? We need to save the child.”

  “If it’s still alive, yeah, sure, but we don’t have the power to do that right now. Maybe we can—”

  “HUNTER!”

  A booming voice echoes in the tunnel and cuts me off. A cold shiver runs down my spine at the call. Those monsters shouldn’t be able to speak and even if they could, how would they know who or what I am. Earthbound beings, humans and monsters know nothing of hunters and the fact this something behind us does, makes me terrified.

  I stop pushing Garcia and chance a look back. In the dark behind us, three monsters are there. I still can’t remember what they are, but that’s not what I’m focused on. Instead of the beasts, my eyes fall on a human figure, shrouded in darkness, with arms raised out to me. This must be who called out to me.

  “You can’t run from me forever, Hunter. I know who you are. I know what you are. And in the end, you’ll be mine.”

  The man laughs and the monsters roar along with him. It’s time I just get the hell out of here. I start to push Garcia so hard, I’m afraid he’s going to fall, sure they’re coming to get me. If he does fall, I can’t even say for sure that I’ll help him up at this point. I’m actually scared. I’ve faced off with some crazy things in my time, beasts of all sorts that would make anyone’s blood run cold, yet I can usually keep a level head. Usually.

  But what I saw there, and knowing that nothing I have can hurt these monsters is something different. The person calling out to me, calling me a hunter as though he knows who I am hits me on such an irrational level that I’m starting to feel dizzy with panic. The throbbing in my head doesn’t make any of this better.

  I’ve forgotten about the bugs around me now, no worries about the floating, bloated dead rats. My only concern is getting out alive, in one piece so I can live long enough to make sense of all of this. I’m breathing heavy as my feet splash through the murky water and I’m muttering something under my breath, but I have no idea what the nonsensical words mean. Maybe I’m praying to someone or something for help.

  Through all the fear and all the panic, through the nausea and the pounding head, one thing I fail to notice was the fact that there was no sound of them giving chase. As we hit the light and fresh air of the outside world, i
t finally hits me that nothing came along after us, as though the creatures never even thought to bother with us.

  We move away from the sewer tunnel. Garcia is breathing hard and after a few steps he bends over and pukes. I almost join him. I tell him we need to get away from the opening, just in case, and he wipes his mouth and nods. We keep going, for another forty or fifty feet and then I figure that’s good enough and I collapse onto the grass.

  I’m out of breath. My head is spinning and pounding at the same time. As I stare up at the clear blue sky above me. Things feel as though they’re getting darker. What the hell is wrong with me? Is it the fear, the excursion, or the leftover effects of the blow to my head? Does it even matter?

  Beside me, I think I can hear Detective Garcia sobbing. I try and tell him it’s okay, we’re safe and that we’ll find a way to figure out what’s going on, but even as I say it out loud, I don’t really believe it. So why should he? The words fall weakly out of my mouth, trembling the way the rest of my body is. This is not the way I pictured the day turning out at all.

  “How are we going to stop them?” he asks, his voice little more than a whisper. “How do you stop anything like that?”

  “I don’t know.” This is all I can think of at the moment. I really have no idea. Until I can remember what they are, I have no way to figure this out.

  It takes a while for us to get up and moving again. Once we both calm down, Garcia realizes he has a whole new set of things to worry about. He just lost three officers and a K-9 in the sewers and now has to go try and explain it all to the higher ups. I know this won’t be easy and I tell him the only thing he needs to do is keep my name out of it. He doesn’t like that idea at all. He’s clearly one of those people who might cross the line now and again to get things done, but in the end, he’s a stickler for the rules. Keeping my name out of it all makes things easy for me, but he thinks it will make it hard for anyone to believe what he saw down there.

  “Well, then don’t tell them the whole truth,” I say, and right away he’s shaking his head. “Oh, you think it’s a good idea to be up front and honest, right? You think if you tell them there are three huge ass monsters in the sewer and someone controlling them, that’s bound to help the situation?”

  “No, but—”

  “But nothing. You tell them the truth and you’ll be locked in a padded room in no time. This isn’t even what we thought it was at first, so let me try and do something to figure it out before you get a ton of cops killed.”

  “What do you mean, not what we thought?”

  “Those things aren’t Golgotha, not by a long shot.”

  “What are they then?”

  “Damned if I know. A Golgotha’s supposed to be made of feces and piss. So you’d guess they should look more like something made of mud and debris. Those things looked like humans crossed with spiders, crabs and frogs. Nothing even close to how a Golgotha should look. And there was nothing demon-esque about them. No horns, no hellfire. These things are born of the earth, possible within the crust.”

  “But you said—”

  “Yeah, I know what I said, Detective. Godfrey saw the symbol and the muck and thought it was those things. Not that this changes much, but if we have any chance of stopping them, we need to know exactly what they are.” I don’t even bother telling him I’m more concerned about the person or thing that called out to me. I want to know who or what that was even more.

  “So what do you expect me to say about it then? These people had families, so I can’t just ignore it as though it never happened. Am I supposed to say I just lost them, or maybe that we were attacked by a wild animal or I could say a single psycho stealing kids took out three cops and made a trained dog run away while I did the exact same, coming out of this totally unscathed? Sound good?”

  Great, the angry cop is back. I take a deep breath and slowly stand up, hoping my head doesn’t suddenly explode.

  “I can’t tell you what to say, Detective. But, if you tell them what really happened down there, you’ll get one of two results. The first will be spending some time in a rubber room peeing into a diaper until you admit you’re nuts. The second is a whole bunch of cops go into the sewer and never come out. And if you mention me in all of this, let’s just say nobody will be stopping these monsters any time soon. So, I don’t care what you say, just keep me out of it. Okay?”

  Garcia says nothing to that. He just sits on the grass looking off into thin air. I can’t imagine what he’s feeling. Those were his people, officers he knew on some level and he’d watched at least two of them get eaten. I’ve never lost any friends like that before. Well, that’s not totally true. I was still around when my whole family and all my friends were been taken or wiped out, but that was war. This, well, it’s really not the same thing at all.

  “You’ll have to come up with something, Detective. I wish I could offer you more, but I can’t. All I can do is promise it’s not over.” This gets his attention and he looks up at me with hope in his eyes. “I’m not going to lie, this might end badly for us if we pursue it, but I can’t let it go. Not now.”

  “Why? Is it the kids, the monsters?”

  “That and more. Something else was there with them, and he knew who I was. Didn’t you hear him call out to me?” He shakes his head and I let it go. He was in a state when the shadowy man called out to me, so it’s no wonder he didn’t hear it. “You will have to handle this end of it while I try to find out what I can about what those things were and how we can kill them. I’m making you a promise right now that I will do everything I can to stop this, as long as you do your part, Detective.”

  “I will. I don’t know how, but I will.”

  Good, we have an understanding. Now, I need to find a way to get home and start figuring out the next step here.

  I cab it back to my place and run up the stairs with my Tincher in my hand. I don’t know why I pulled it out, other than still being afraid from what was in the sewers and cautious because of the attack here in the stairs the other day. The headache’s still pulsing like a heartbeat only serves to remind me of it and that gets me to quicken my pace. When I get to the floor where I was hit I nearly stop and check the door to make sure nothing’s there, but I’d rather get home. There’s safety there. My apartment is full of weapons, curses and hexes to offer protection. Best place to be right now is on my couch with an arsenal, my laptop, and my cellphone.

  I open the door and let out a small, sad yelp as something grabs for me. My Tincher falls from my hand as I flinch backwards and look like a fool.

  “Hey, muffin, why so jumpy?”

  “Jesus!” I gasp, and nearly feel the urge to grab my heart in case I go into cardiac arrest. I look at Rouge standing in front of me, dressed in a pair of her yoga pants and a Pantera t-shirt of mine. She looks all relaxed and cute. Clearly a rouse she’s using to sneak up and kill me. “You nearly scared what’s left of my breakfast out of me.”

  “Oh charming as ever,” she says, and then winces as she steps towards me, covering her face right away. “You sure it was nearly?”

  I didn’t even notice or think about the sewer smell that must be hanging to me. My mind has been so wrapped in what happened there and what we’re going to do about it that I all but forgot about walking through the disgusting water and falling in it. Now that I’m aware of it, the smell is one step away from the gates of Hell. Good thing the cabbie didn’t notice either.

  “Sorry, I know it smells like it, but you have no idea what I’ve just been through.”

  “Well, it smells like you were fishing for used diapers in a sewer if you want me to be honest. You, Darling, need a shower.”

  “That I do.”

  “And when you’re done, you can tell me all about it. Want me to put on some coffee or tea, a warm glass of Febreze perhaps?” she asks, and smiles, but I know when I tell her what happened the humour w
ill drain out of her, so I will wait and enjoy the smiles for now. I could use them after all.

  “Coffee would be great. Some toast too, if you don’t mind. And some Advil.”

  “Headaches again?”

  I nod and head to the bathroom. I run the water and just get in full clothed, figuring I can peel the disgusting outfit off and leave it to soak in the tub. Not the classiest thing in the world, but I’m not a very classy person. Also, it’s better than leaving the soiled and possibly ruined clothes just lying there on the floor.

  The water is hot, hotter than I usually like it, but I feel so gross. The water pooling by the drain reminds me of chocolate milk. I imagine how many different asses have made the wonder soup I’m coated in.

  I stay in the shower until the colour of water is just the colour of water again. The heat of it feels great and some of the throbbing in my head melts away with the filth. As I stand here under the flow from the showerhead, I close my eyes and can’t help but relive the day. Of course the images of the officers being killed comes back time and time again, but it’s always the voice calling out to me, yelling out the word hunter. That echoes through my mind the most.

  “You okay in there?” Rouge says, as she knocks, pulling me from my thoughts.

  “Yeah. Sorry. I’m just trying to smell better than some dirty old socks,” I tell her, trying to make light of the way I feel.

  “Well, you’ve been in there nearly an hour. I don’t think you’re going to get any cleaner, lover.”

  An hour? It didn’t feel like that long. It’s amazing how time flies when you’re worried. More so than when you’re having fun.

  I dry off and walk to the bedroom to get some clothes on. The apartment smells of fresh-ish coffee and I’m dying for a cup. I throw on some clean jeans and a Municipal Waste t-shirt and then head out to see Rouge and my caffeinated beverage. Once I have both, we sit on the couch, eating toast and drinking and I tell everything that just happened. I can see a look in her eyes as the story unfolds that tells me she is terrified and worried. I can’t really blame her. She was up in Innisfil with me not too long ago where I nearly died more than once. She was there when so many people in the town were turned into something that resembled zombies and a gaunt monster from a hellish nightmare had me seconds away from the big goodbye. Yet she looks as if she might cry when I tell her what happened there.