Hellhole

by Jonathan Maberry

They can’t save him. Can only run for their lives toward the cave opening. Gunfire behind them, Jacko’s scream as he’s eclipsed.

  And then it’s only the two of them, their numbers cut in an instant.

  Shepherd pushes her forward, covering her at the entrance, and she jumps for the hole. The darkness takes her.

  6 ‒ ENDGAME

  LIZ SCRAMBLES ACROSS razored rocks into the swallowing dark. Her knees scream. The only light comes from Shepherd’s gun barrel as he skitters in behind her, crawling backwards and sighting on the circle of light behind them.

  She looks back past him and sees a face at the entrance. It’s Austin, black-eyed, mouth covered in blood. A huge boom that shakes the fragile roof above, that nearly blows her eardrums, and Shepherd puts a hole in his forehead. The detective keels away.

  Shepherd keeps retreating, slithering back on his stomach, as the noise comes and the room beyond begins to boil with shadows. Hands claw at the lip of the tunnel, and then suddenly the gap fills with faces. He opens up and Liz can only crouch and clasp her hands to her ears, silently screaming.

  “Keep going!” Shepherd cries at her and Liz moves further crouched into the black, slapping a hand against the wall to feel her way forward. She thinks she can feel footprints in the stretches of mud beneath her own, so she knows the gang have been using the passage, but then her head gashes the roof and she has to crawl as the cave tunnel shrinks. Soon she’s on her knees again, yelping as the rock cuts into her kneecaps. The ground becomes slicked with her blood.

  Behind, the SOG commander rests on his stomach, methodically picking off targets. The light from the room begins to shut off as the bodies mount in the gap. Still they come. And come.

  “Reloading!” he yells through force of habit. But what’s she going to do, cover him with the iron bar? He slots the mag home, resumes sniping.

  The roof continues to creep down, the walls narrow. She’s forced on her own stomach now and the air is so stale, she’s having trouble drawing breath.

  Panic begins to overwhelm her. She’s going to get stuck. No one’s used this passage before. It’s just going to end and they’re not going to be able to back up. She’s going to be trapped headfirst in the tight rock. Even if the crazed residents don’t squeeze in after them and tear them apart they’ll be trapped for hours, for days. Slowly dying from lack of food and water. If they’re lucky, more quickly from no air.

  She starts to thrash, hitting the sides of the tunnel around her. She can’t escape it. There’s resistance everywhere. No room. The uncontrollable terror builds deep within and she knows if she opens her mouth the sound will never stop, that she’ll use the last of the foul air in here screaming at existence.

  “Have to...have to back up,” she forces herself to say, but she can barely hear her own rasping voice.

  “I’m running out of ammo!” Shepherd cries back. “I’m blowing it.”

  Liz’s mouth snaps shut. “No. Wait!”

  She’s able to just glance back beneath her arm. Sees Shepherd aim at the roof of the entrance. And fire.

  Bullets glance off the rock at first, casting sparks. Shepherd steadies himself. “Please,” he breathes out. He squeezes the trigger.

  A huge whump and the tunnel collapses in a great gout of dust that sweeps all the way towards her, snuffs out her air as it snuffs out the light.

  She couldn’t scream even if she tried.

  She’s going to die like this. After everything she’s fought through, all the pain, the loss. It ends like this.

  Something breaks in her. And the fear goes. Just washes out of her, sinks down through the earth beneath her.

  I’ll be with you soon, baby...

  The rocks settle, and there’s silence. Then: something coming toward her. She opens her eyes. Light flicks past her, shines on down the tunnel ahead.

  “Can’t...breathe...”

  “We’re okay,” Shepherd is saying. “There’s air ahead.”

  She looks up, focuses. Can’t see anything, but there’s a hint of cold seeping toward her. Shepherd had risked everything, but this isn’t a dead-end tunnel. It leads somewhere.

  “Don’t go to pieces on me now, Liz.” Shepherd’s just behind, his voice somehow comforting, part of her.

  She clutches the rocks beneath her shredded hands, surprises herself with movement. A strength even now. “Don’t you.” And then she pulls herself on, dragging her snaking legs deeper into the trench.

  After torturous seconds, she begins to see something ahead: a rippling reflection on the roof somewhere above. A pinhole light appears in the distance. As she scrambles on, it grows, beckons her.

  “There,” Shepherd says. “We’re almost there.”

  She pushes to her limit, the tears coming now hot and endless. Her belief in release growing by the moment until the light opens out to a room ahead. She scrabbles the last few claustrophobic numbing feet and tumbles over the end of the tunnel onto the wet clay floor of the room.

  She lies panting, sucking in air, staring up at strange rippling reflections on the roof of the cave. Someone has installed crude electric mine-style lighting in here, offering dim but the most beautiful illumination, and the walls are propped up with timeless timberwork. She doesn’t know how deep beneath the city they are, but someone once modified the ancient cave system to their own ends. And it’s saved their lives. Even at the moment she was finally prepared to let go of hers.

  Shepherd tumbles out after her, nearly rolls over her with his kit of heavy equipment. She barely registers the impact.

  They lie a moment in stunned silence, staring upwards, breathing through damaged lungs. Cold air wafts over them.

  “I didn’t think that would work,” he says.

  She cries then. Turns her face from him. She’d been so close to release. Why did she always keep fighting? Why can’t she just let go?

  “Hey. Hey! Liz. Look at me. We’re okay. We made it out.”

  Shepherd’s face is dark with mud, with his own blood and sweat. As must hers be. She nods. “I know.”

  “I need you to keep fighting.”

  “I know.” But her eyes are dead as she looks at him. She wants to scream. How, after every horrific thing he’s just seen, can he still think this world is still worth fighting for? But she can see the resolve in his face. He’ll fight to the last breath.

  And if she’s going to survive, she’ll have to do the same.

  “So...so what do we do now? We’re still trapped. They’re not going to be able to rescue us, are they?”

  Shepherd is looking past her, past the huge concrete open-air tank in the center of the thirty-foot sized cave to a door built in the opposite wall. “There’s another way in,” he says in wonder. “They joined this with the other tunnels.”

  “So what we just crawled through...”

  “A natural opening. It must have been intended as an escape route in case the bigger exit here collapsed.”

  “So we could have just walked in here? Jesus!” She only now registers the tank in front of her. “Where is here?”

  Shepherd creaks to his feet, walks up to the concrete lip three feet off the ground and peers over. His face shines with rippling light. She joins him.

  The concrete lid has been smashed on the top of the reservoir, revealing a great semi-circle of the water within. Liz stares into the inviting depths. The cold like soothing ice on her face. Her throat rattles. She wants nothing more than to dip her hands.

  “Don’t,” Shepherd says. She looks up sharply. “We don’t know if this is tainted too. It could be the source.”

  She senses now the moisture in the air, knows it could be entering them with every breath, corrupting them, taking them over. But maybe a part of her no longer cares.

  Shepherd edges around the concrete embankment, not seeing the struggle in her face, hugging the wall until he reaches the heavy door set in the far wall. There’s no obvious door handle. “The fuck?” He tries pushing it, searching for a sea
m, growing increasingly frantic until he breaks fingernails. There’s nothing.

  He sees her looking at him.

  “Give me that bar.”

  She stares down at her whitened fingers clutching the bloodied length. Her only weapon against the world. She hands it over.

  He glances at her uncertainly, takes it. He gently takes her shoulders. “I’m scared too,” he says, misreading her. “But we’ll find a way.”

  She nods. Looks away from him. To the water.

  He heads back to the door. Starts probing the edges. “I’d heard of you before this, you know,” he says, still concerned, still trying to distract her from shutting down. “I mean, you were a fairly vocal critic of the police—when it was warranted,” he cuts her off. “But I also read the piece about your daughter, the effect on you. How old was she?”

  Her voice distant: “Sixteen.” The waters dark, stretching away endlessly.

  “I know how scared you must have been. How helpless. I’ve seen the effects of drugs so many times. It’s half our job. And nothing we do seems to matter. But decriminalization isn’t the answer.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “That’s what you were going to do with this piece, right? Show how out of control everything’s become, the excessive, futile force needed to contain it. That the battle’s lost. But doesn’t this prove to you why we have to fight to stop it? Imagine if we were free to take anything we wanted. Look what it’s created. If something like Black Lung hit the streets and no one moved to stop it. It’d destroy everything. That’s why we have to get out. Because if they don’t bulldoze this place immediately, if they allow even one of these plants to get out, we’ll never stop it. And it’ll keep spreading like a virus, worse than any drug we’ve ever seen. And more...and more kids like yours will suffer.”

  “No...I saw her. I saw Kelly.”

  “What?” He’s trying to jimmy the bar into a gap, but there just isn’t one. “God damn it. I’m...there’s got to be a way. I only have nine-bangers—” He glances over. “Flash grenades. If I had a frag... I can’t let this place stand. We have to stop this.”

  There’s something about the water. Its surface moves in swirling patterns, the soft ripples like some fundamental building block of existence, like a mathematical sequence, like genetic code, like the fronds of a plant.

  “I have to go back. I...have to risk the cave. The boxes. If I can dig through the rocks, the nine-bangers could blow the lot, the whole building.” He’s ranting, eyes too bright. Knowing this is probably suicidal but needing something to do. Anything except waiting here in this crypt to die. “But I’ll grab some, bring it back. We can use it here to get out. There’ll be another way out— Wait. What are you doing?”

  She stands by the edge of the low concrete reservoir. The water beckons. Her hands dip towards the black.

  “She’s here.”

  Her hands break the cold surface, descend into the depths. Ice races up her arms, deep into her bones and up through her body. She tries to scream, but the dark flood freezes her from inside.

  And she sees everything. A clutch of the gang’s leaders dragging their rivals down the reclaimed tunnels to the pit far below of the reservoir built over its underground lake—not realizing it’s feeding their whole marijuana enterprise upstairs. Holding their screaming enemies over the water, forcing them to watch their reflections as they slit their throats into the water, then drown them in their own blood. Seeing children who’ve dared steal from the clan chopped up as fertilizer for the plants, their remaining bones scattered in the waters. Investigating police and judges and their families raped and chopped to pieces down here in the depths.

  And the infected water being used in an endless cycle to feed the hydroponic banks. Water tainted with the spirits of the dead, somehow haunting the drug itself.

  And the dead want their revenge.

  It’s not the black mold at all. That’s just an effect of the true horror at its core.

  Liz sees deep into the shadow world, her face frozen in that silent scream, even as she feels the vengeful spirits within surging up towards her, writhing and twisting over each other in hunger.

  She sees something through the masses of limbs and faces. A hand reaching for her, small, clutching not in anger but aching loneliness. Then gone.

  Despite the fear wiping her mind, Liz searches through the chaos. And there it is again, and she reaches for it through the spitting howl. Grips the sudden clasp and pulls against the darkness.

  Her daughter, face sunken and hollow with all she’s seen in death, surges free of the clutching hands. And climbs up her mother’s body, stealing one last moment from the darkness.

  And that’s enough. That was worth fighting for all this time after her daughter’s overdose, the death that robbed her of all hope in this life.

  “Liz!” Shepherd runs at her, launches to knock her back from the water.

  Liz turns to meet him. With arms like iron embraces him as if her daughter, Kelly, draws him into her. He screams into the black, never-ending voids of her eyes.

  And with the strength of the dead, she pitches them both into the water.

  GINORMOUS HELL SNAKE

  Jake Bible

  “So...we’re going in that?” Shane Reynolds stared at the murky green-brown water of the Amazon tributary. “Going into water with low to zero visibility to find a huge hole where a giant snake might be living? That’s the mission?”

  “A giant genetically engineered snake that probably doesn’t resemble its original DNA at all,” Max Reynolds said. “No, wait, a ginormous genetically engineered snake. I think if ever the word ginormous should apply, it’s right now.”

  The Reynolds brothers were nine months apart and looked almost identical, both with yellow-blond hair, green eyes, and freckles across their noses. They were classic southern California beach bums all the way. However, there was one easy way to tell the difference: Max was missing his left ear and had scar tissue running from his scalp, down his neck, and onto his shoulder, while Shane was missing his left eye which he covered with an eye patch adorned with a very prominent marijuana leaf.

  Both built like linebackers, they stood on the bank of the river in full combat gear, most of which they began to strip off as the reality of their mission hit them.

  “Uncle Vinny?” Max called into his com. “Are we sure about this?”

  “Get in the water, Max,” a gruff voice replied in Max’s right ear.

  “Wouldn’t mind a little more backup,” Shane said into his com. “Ginormous snake and all.”

  “We’re busy!” Vincent Thorne replied.

  Former commandant of the Navy SEALs BUD/S training, Vincent Thorne was leader of the private special ops team known as Grendel. He was a “by the book” man and not one to mince words or take excuses. Unfortunately for him, his nephews were neither “by the book” nor did they have a problem mincing words despite their years of experience as Navy SEAL snipers.

  Thorne blamed all the weed the two brothers smoked.

  “How busy?” Max asked. “Like gonna be a few minutes busy or gonna be—”

  Intense gunfire erupted over the comm and both brothers winced before shoving their fingers into their ears to adjust their com devices.

  “Right. That kind of busy,” Max said.

  “Carlos? Ingrid? Who do we have on the com who can assure us that these compression suits we’re wearing will protect us from this giant snake?”

  “Ginormous snake,” Max corrected.

  “Ginormous snake,” Shane echoed.

  The gunfire on the com was silenced as a new voice responded. “Uh, well,” Team Grendel’s lead tech, Carlos, replied, clearing his throat, “we cannot guarantee that the compression suits will be one hundred percent effective against the snake.”

  “Ginormous snake,” Max said.

  “Too much, bro,” Shane said.

  “Sorry,” Max replied. “It’s just fun to say.”

  “I
hear that,” Shane replied. “But, time and place, dude.”

  “Totally get that. No problem,” Max said. “I’ll let the word lie and bring it back later. Timing.”

  “Timing,” Shane agreed.

  “Do you two want to hear what I have to say or not?” Carlos snapped over the comm.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Carlos, are we inconveniencing you?” Max snapped back. “Is the fact we’re about to dive into muddy, microbe-infested water and chase down a twenty-meter snake annoying you?”

  “Thirty,” Carlos replied.

  “Excuse me, what?” Shane asked. “I thought Ballantine said it was twenty?”

  “No, Ballantine said it was twenty meters long the last time it was spotted,” Carlos replied. “He gave the files to Gunnar and Gunnar now believes the snake could be at least thirty meters long.”

  “That’s like ninety feet,” Max said. “Sorry, bro, but I have to say it: This is not only a ginormous snake, it’s a ginormous hell snake.”

  “Yeah, I’ll go along with that,” Shane said. He shook his head. “Better get to it then.” He shrugged and looked at his brother. His brother shrugged and looked at the water. Then the two of them stripped their gear off until they were down to the compression suits they wore underneath their BDUs.

  The compression suits were wet suits on steroids. Similar in look but with the ability to stabilize the pressure around the wearer. Designed to allow the wearer to handle rapid descent and ascent during ocean dives without risking the bends, the suits were also pretty much bulletproof and knife proof. Maybe on the knife-proof.

  Only, the knife-proof aspect was the specification the Reynolds brothers hoped was true. No ginormous hell snake was going to be firing an M4 at them, but the thing would have very large, very sharp teeth. Neither of the brothers enjoyed dealing with creatures that sported very large, very sharp teeth.

  Yet, that was their job and while the rest of Team Grendel fought off hyper-adrenalized cannibals in a different part of the jungle, the Reynolds had been assigned the mission of tracking (done), finding (about to be done), and killing (dear God, please) the ginormous hell snake. Short straw was an understatement.