#which are then cut into segments placed in steel barrels and buried deep in the earth | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hypnoticwinter · 3 years

Text

Down the Rabbit Hole part 22

“You come…here again?”

“I know we said we wouldn’t,” the Sergeant says slowly, putting great care into his enunciation, “but it’s important.”

“Im…por…tant?”

“Yes. We have –“

“This…many more,” the copepod says, waggling three massive fingers at him. The Sergeant is silent for a moment.

“I don’t understand,” he says finally.

“You kill…this many…more,” the copepod grunts. I can hear it breathing, vast wheezing noises like the space in between notes on a bagpipe. “This many more…since you said…you would leave.”

The Sergeant sighs. “They attacked us outside of the barrows. The ones they attacked had no choice but to defend themselves.”

“This…the…end, four-arms?”

I frown, glance over at Elena. “Four-arms?” I mutter. She leans in closer to me.

“Their word for us. They haven’t got any legs so they don’t really grasp the distinction between a leg and an arm.”

I nod, staring down at the screen on my camera. The copepod looks far too glossy but with the gloves on the suit I don’t really have the dexterity to fiddle with it and I don’t want to take them off presently, so it’ll just have to be glossy. I look over at the two copepods that had come in earlier, still lurking behind the Big Guy like statues, clinging to the wall in positions that look as though they could push off and dart at us with absolutely minimal effort.

The rest of the team seems very relaxed, though; nobody, not even Crookshank, has their rifles up to cover the copepods. “Do y’all come down here often?” I ask.

Elena shakes her head. “I’ve only been down here once before, and that was about a year ago.” Her eyes flick over to Peter. “Investigating a missing person.”

I think of several possible responses to that but bite them all back. None of them would be helpful, and at any rate my impulse to defend Peter has withered a little over the last few days. Probably just the hormones talking. Maybe if I didn’t get such a big damn case of the warm fuzzies whenever I so much as look at Elena –

“The end of what?” the Sergeant asks. The copepod gestures, a vague, open-handed, sweeping motion. It’s a terrifically human gesture and for a moment I stare, wondering, then its segmented mouthparts judder to life again and that horrible, inhuman voice issues forth from them again and some poor pattern-recognizing part of my brain gets whiplash from the disjointedness of it.

“How we…end. Many…spawnings since we…meet, four-arms, and now…there is not…enough…to eat. If we…leave…to hunt, you…kill us.”

The Sergeant starts to say something, but the copepod slams a fist into the ground. Next to me I feel Elena flinch, and on the far wall of the chamber one of the other copepods cocks its head.

“We are hungry,” it tells the Sergeant, and something about the way it says those three simple words strikes me like a lightning bolt, passing all the way through my stomach and out my tailbone. My hands are shaking lightly and part of me wants to panic, wants to be out of here right now, but I close my eyes and swallow hard and force myself to be calm.

The Sergeant, to his credit, doesn’t even blink. “We’re here to talk about that.”

The copepod is silent. It reaches up with its hand and rubs at its face lightly, in a motion that reminds me of a fly cleaning its compound eyes. “Don’t…believe you,” it wheezes eventually.

“We are. We’re planning to start bringing food down for – for your people. But we need something in return.”

I glance over at the crystal again. It’s a good thing we brought Joker; I don’t know how we would have gotten it out of here if he weren’t here to carry it.

The copepod rolls its head back and makes a strange, scratchy, rhythmic noise, that I recognize after a moment as laughter.

“You make…us starve, then…come with…solution…to problem…you made? And…you want…trade…for it?”

I hear the Sergeant sigh, watch him look up at the ceiling. I’m impressed at how well he’s doing so far, especially considering (unless I have egregiously misread him) that he’s a soldier, not a diplomat. But now the copepod has handed him a real zinger.

“We never meant to hurt you,” he says. The copepod shifts lightly, the spongy floor creaking under its ponderous bulk. “There has been a long and bloody history between us and I wish it weren’t that way. I wish that things had been different, so many years ago when the first one of us had met the first one of you. I wish we had known to leave you alone and not interfere with your way of life. But the past can’t be changed, all we can do is try to right what wrongs we can.”

“What…you want?”

The Sergeant points to the crystal. “That,” he says. The copepod looks over at it and then reaches out and drags it, one handed, using what seems to be practically no effort, out from behind the pile.

“Not…for trade.”

“Not even for regular supplies of food?”

“Not…for anything.”

“Nothing at all?”

The copepod stops and looks at us. Its eyes seem to fix on something.

“Give me…that,” it says, pointing, and we all turn and stare at Crookshank, who the Sergeant had given his rifle to and who is now carrying both of them, somewhat awkwardly, beneath his armpits. He looks perturbed for a moment before he realizes and unlimbers one of them and sets the stock of it into the floor. I can see the muscles in the great knotty bulge of the Sergeant’s jaw working before he turns back around.

“Absolutely not,” he says.

“Too…bad.”

The Sergeant very clearly doesn’t know what to say, and then after a moment throws in the towel. “Alright,” he says. “Give me a minute, I have to ask.”

Then he turns around and takes a couple of respectful steps away before reaching down to his radio and calling Makado.

“They want what?” she groans, after he’s told her the news. The rest of us, listening in over the squad link, cast glances at each other but remain silent.

“One of the slug rifles,” he repeats. “I told him that we’d bring them regular shipments of food instead but he didn’t go for it.”

I hear Makado curse under her breath.

“You told them we’d bring them food? Goddam it,” she mutters. “You didn’t have any authority to –“

“Veret,” the Sergeant snaps, his voice barely edging on civil. “We don’t have time for this –“

“You expect me,” she hisses, her voice mingling with the static, “to give you the go-ahead to give them a fucking slug rifle? Why don’t we also turn off the sonic traps and leave the seal unlocked on the way out?”

“What do you want me to do, then?”

The copepod is watching this one-sided conversation with interest. The Sergeant’s voice is low and sharp but I’m sure the copepod can still hear some of what he’s saying. Its vocabulary seems fairly good but as for how much it understands…

“You said there’s only three of them in there right now, right?” Makado asks. I see the Sergeant shake his head.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “No way.”

“Sergeant,” Makado starts. I can hear a note of steel buried somewhere deep in her voice. “We need that crystal.”

“I’m going to give him the damn gun,” he tells her. Somewhere miles above us Makado slams her hand on her desk.

“Do not –“

“I am not,” the Sergeant says, very quietly, “letting any more of my people die down here today. There are three copepods in here, and fifty within two hundred yards, and a hundred within a mile, and they all are going to come running the instant we fire one of these guns.”

Makado is silent for a moment. “Fine,” she says. Her voice is hard enough to cut glass. “One rifle, no mags.”

“Fine.”

The channel cuts out with a resounding click. Elena and I trade glances; I can tell from her face that she’s never heard Makado that angry before.

The Sergeant reaches out for Crookshank’s rifle wordlessly and Crookshank hurries forward and hands it to him. The copepods on the walls draw in a little closer. I can see them practically twitching with anticipation, waiting for one of us to make the wrong move. The Sergeant turns, the slug rifle held in one hand, the barrel toward the ceiling. The copepod reaches out for it and the Sergeant places it gently in the thing’s hand.

Next to me I feel Elena shift her grip on her own rifle. The copepod looks down at the rifle in its hand for a long while.

“You should have taken the food,” the Sergeant tells it. The copepod in turn makes a snorting, chuffing noise. Then it closes its fist over the gun and with a sound like a groan of relief it bends and breaks. The bolt pops out and whizzes off somewhere in the darkness and the slugs pour from the ruined breach of the rifle like marbles, five of them clunking dully to the fleshy floor and rolling someplace out of sight. It tosses the bent frame of the rifle aside, and it clatters into the pile of junk and detritus and causes a small avalanche. The Sergeant steps back, eyes wary.

Then the copepod reaches over and shoves the crystal towards him. Its sharp spikes stick in the floor a little and leave bloody gouges in their wake. Whatever is inside it casting that green glow shifts lightly, with a kind of exaggerated slowness to it like it were floating in oil, and I glance down at the camera, make sure it’s in focus.

“Take…it,” the Big Guy tells us, and I can see by the look on the Sergeant’s face that he has a lot of questions he wants to ask, but instead of asking them he turns and gestures to Euler and after a little bit of prodding Euler manages to walk Joker forwards and find a decent place to grasp the crystal firmly, and then it picks it up.

One of the robot’s joints groans under the strain and Euler quickly prods at the joystick and it freezes, but after a few moments for he shrugs and continues twiddling, and Joker hefts the crystal like it were nothing and marches, a little unsteadily, back to us.

The copepod, meanwhile, has turned, rolling its enormous bulk delicately past us, and, with the assistance of one of the other copepods, which puts its arms on the Big Guy’s sides and is helping push, slithers out of the room. The audience, apparently, is over.

We all look around at each other but nobody feels any need to speak. There’s nothing to say. Crookshank is looking wistfully at the rifle on the ground, the barrel twisted like a piece of straw, but as we all begin to file out of the organelle and back into the snaking outer vent that got us there, Elena squeezes my hand firmly and I believe for a moment, just a moment, that everything might work out alright.

* * *

Elena twists around sharply and stares back into the darkness, her rifle low and ready. I peer backwards anxiously, then glance at her.

“What is it?”

She shakes her head, holds a hand up to me. “Shh,” she tells me.

Behind us the rest of the group marches onwards. There’s a distinct sense of relief in the air. Many of them, I realized belatedly, had expected that we were going to our deaths, that we were going to have to try to take the crystal by force. Ellis thought so for sure; his smile is unbearably bright and the Sergeant has had to tell him to shut up multiple times on the journey out, but his enthusiasm is so overflowing that he can’t shut up, he just keeps babbling on about whatever is in his head, what he’s going to do when he gets back to the surface, how nice it’ll be to have fresh air, so on and so on.

Elena is standing there quite still, her head cocked to one side. I listen but I can’t hear anything, and I start to tug at her sleeve, thinking that –

Wait.

I thought for a moment that I might have heard something, something very far away, but it was the sort of quiet, subtle noise that is hard to notice even in dead silence, and our current environment is very far from that. Everything down here seems to make noise; it’s a little like being in a forest in the middle of a windstorm. Instead of trees creaking and groaning and leaves scattering and wind rushing, you have the tramp tramp tramp of metal-plated feet, and the corresponding squelches of cleat sticking into the floor and the equally horrible meaty slurping sound with each step as they come unstuck. Then on top of that there’s groans and moans and straining noises. If you put your ear to someone’s stomach after they’ve just eaten you might get a sense of what it’s like, except fifty times louder and without anything in the way. The hallways shift around you, little wriggles of convulsive muscle movement going through them, and the noise is concurrent with the size and force of the muscles doing the moving. But there is a difference between the shrieking of a taut muscle and the shrieking of something in pain, far off in the distance, perhaps…

Elena leans in very sharply and reaches out with a balled fist and smacks the quick-release on the side of my helmet. The visor jets up and instantly the fetid smell of the Pit assaults me. My eyes start to water. “What the fuck,” I start to blurt, but Elena puts a gloved hand over my mouth. Her eyes are very clear and very bright; she’s already popped her own helmet so she can talk to me clearly.

“Listen to me, Roan,” she says, her eyes glancing over to the side and back the way we came before flicking over to me again. “If something happens down here, you stick to me like glue. Got it?”

I start to say something but she gives me a dangerous look and I swallow hard. “Got it,” I say.

“Okay, good,” she says. She flashes me a quick grin but I can tell she’s just giving me lip service, just from the way her eyes jump like roulette balls, scanning the surroundings even as she reaches over and flips my visor back into place. I had started to ask – well, I don’t know what I was going to ask. Probably something useless, some infantile plea for assurance that we were going to be okay. Clearly we aren’t if Elena is spooked like this. I look ahead of her at the rest of the team; they’re wary but not as wary as she is.

“Elena, what’s wrong?” I ask her, taking a hold of her arm, and she looks over at me and starts to answer, and then everything goes to hell.

Behind us I hear the sound I thought I had heard before, except much louder and clearer – a chittering shriek of either pain or rage, or perhaps some of both. Something about the tone makes me think it’s a copepod. The scream is cut off halfway through, and then we hear other screams, loud gurgling ululations, echoing through the vents. Everyone is yelling, everyone’s rifles are coming up very quickly, heads are whipping around and scattering the broad angry cones of headlamp light across the wet, glistening walls. The shrieks and cries are reaching a crescendo and it seems impossible that we can’t see any copepods at the present moment.

The side of the vent bulges inward suddenly and I see a long tapered mass move by, like a throat swallowing, and I realize that it must have been a copepod, sliding past as quickly as its resin-coated carapace will allow.

Elena has her hand under my arm and is tugging me along as quickly as we can go. I am deathly afraid I’m going to trip and fall and splatter face-first into the wet, bloody floor; I’m not digging in the cleats all the way, there isn’t time to with the way she’s rushing me. I want to reach down and pull out my sidearm but I don’t trust myself to keep ahold of it if I were to.

I can see a flickering glance of Euler’s face, bringing up the rear behind us, feverishly punching buttons on the controller and working the joystick. He looks frightened and I feel suddenly and incongruously bad for Euler, because he clearly has hated this place from the second he came down here, and it’s only his job that’s making him do it, and now he, and probably all of us, are going to die because of it.

I remember Makado very seriously considering us just opening up on the Big Guy, on the king of the copepods or whatever the hell the hierarchy is down here, just because he wanted a gun instead of just giving us the crystal. The wan green light is still pressing tightly against my back from where Joker has the damn thing clenched tight in his metal hands, and I feel my lip curling and realize that maybe Elena is right, maybe Makado is out of line, maybe she’s let her – her obsession with making sure that the Pit doesn’t hurt anything and anyone else lead her to some bad decisions. Or maybe –

There’s a shriek behind us, sounding terribly close now. Elena and I look back, as does Euler, but we still can’t see anything.

I have never felt so helpless in my life. If a copepod comes out of nowhere and snatches me right now, that would be it, I’d be done for. I don’t want to even pretend that Elena would turn everyone around and get them to come charging back into certain doom to save my skinny ass. I can imagine the conversation now: “Oh yeah, El, sure we know you were getting your pussy eaten by that frail little skeleton girl from admin but no way in hell we’re risking our neck for her, capisce?”

All it would take, I figure, is for one of them to dart up from behind, where our visibility is the worst, grab my leg, and then reverse and zoom out of sight. They can move so quickly down here it doesn’t seem real. It’s like the way seals move, fluttering around on the ice on their bellies, tucked down and torpedo-shaped, their arms slicked back against their sides unless they’re reaching forward to dig in with their blunt, ichor-caked fingertips, adding momentum, whipping around hairpin turns.

A crazy thought strikes me as I stumble again and Elena wrenches me back to my feet – being a copepod must be like living in a funhouse where everything is a slide. I almost start to laugh but I shove it back down, deep down.

It happens very quickly. There is a loud chittering screech from ahead of us and we both whip around. There in front, clinging to the ceiling of the vent, is a slender copepod, slithering towards us hand over hand. When someone’s headlamp – I think it’s Fumi – strikes it in the face it shrieks and falls on him and one of the guns roars and even though my earplugs are in it is louder than loud, the flash from the muzzle is like the sun, and I think I shriek in terror and surprise and then I really do fall, but Elena, angel that she is, is there to pull me back to my feet.

While I’ve been face-down on the floor someone has shot the copepod a little off-center, and a hole as big around as my fist is half-heartedly gushing a chunky, glutinous white ichor. The copepod’s arms and fins are fluttering and we all give it a wide berth, hustling towards the exit.

It is such a long way off, though, and that copepod was only the first of many. Once we shot the first one there was no going back, and the air quickly turned smoky and foul with the cordite stench of gunfire. It’s impossible to hear anything besides rage-filled animal screeches and the great pounding thud every time someone fires off one of the guns. The pounding and the sharp crackling report melds together in my head and it sounds as though there is an idiot child pounding on a giant drum, having a temper tantrum, right next to me.

Elena tugs me onward. A copepod breaks into the center of our formation and brings its titan fist down in an arc, and though it is pinioned by rifle fire and dies twitching its fist still hurtles downwards and impacts square on Ellis’ head. He falls like a tree and there is cursing over the radio link and someone very close is screaming Ellis’ name and it takes me a moment to realize that it’s me, that I’m the one heaving out his name like it were vomit and staring back at his body, splayed spread-eagle on the ground, his visor shattered, part of his spine jutting through the thick fabric at the back of the neck of the suit. The copepod had hit him so hard that some part of him broke, and his head was forced downward, crushing his neck.

After that I consciously observe very little. It’s like my mind retreats into some dark corner of the inside of my skull and sits there in a huddle weeping while whatever animal, lizard part of me takes the reins is utterly unfazed by everything. I remember little flashes here and there, lit by gunfire; I remember copepods like enamel-white cruise missiles, darting in from barely-seen slits in the walls, their hands reaching for me, Elena slashing at them desperately with her knife; I remember Fumi’s bearded face, drawn and ashen, down on one knee slamming another magazine into his rifle and the sound it made when he pulled the bolt back was like glass shattering; I remember vast white fingers wrapping around Crookshank’s thick waist and jerking him off of his feet and whisking him away into the darkness while everyone twisted and shot haphazardly, trying not to hit him. His face I remember particularly, for it was wide and frightened and for a moment I thought I could see the little boy he’d once been, peering out at me from inside the man’s body and wordlessly begging me to save him, but of course I couldn’t. I had joined in, snatching the pistol from my waist and squeezing off every shot in the magazine back into the darkness behind us. I don’t think I hit anything, other than the walls of the vent, leaving bleeding puncture-marks and a haze of smoke. Then Elena yanked me off of my feet again in her hurry to get us out of there and I had dropped the gun. I cried out for it but there was no helping it, we were long gone.

Our numbers dwindle one by one, first Ellis then Crookshank. I don’t see Klaus get taken; he just disappears in the frantic haze of gunsmoke and flashlight blur, and everyone is calling out for him. I remember the Sergeant barking, his voice like sandpaper, that Klaus is gone, his vitals aren’t registering, just go, and us all going.

I remember seeing Joker, seeing snippets of Joker, rather, caught strobelike in the lights, battering aside a copepod, flashing a gunmetal-grey arm out to block one from reaching for Euler, the crystal set aside on the ground for a moment to give the machine a greater range of motion. I see its fingers fix around the wrist of the copepod and then twist and with a piercing cry of rage the thing draws its hand back, clutching at the bloody, spurting stump where its hand had been, the shock of it giving Joker the moment of hesitation it needed in order to bound towards the copepod and slam its metal fist through the tough but brittle exoskeleton and submerge up to its elbow in the copepod’s guts. It pulls out a handful of slime and then closes its mechanical fist and pounds the copepod in the head and silences its screeching. Then –

“Roan, we have to go!” Elena screams from next to me, but I don’t hear her, I’ve stopped, or almost stopped, turned half around, walking precariously backwards.

There is something looming in the darkness behind Joker, something decidedly not a copepod. Joker’s head whips around, some sort of sensor or scanner detecting the movement, and the floodlights built into the machine’s face illuminate the writhing, terrible bulk of the Leechman, standing there in a slump on two wormy, leech-filled feet, shiny and slick and horrible. I let out a wordless cry and Elena looks back at me and sees it too and stops, I can hear her words die in her throat.

The Leechman is enormous, its height and bulk so immense that it seems to fill the entire breadth of the vent with a solid wall of squirming leeches. Joker cocks its arm back as Euler goggles up at the monstrosity lurking, head cocked at an inquisitive angle, staring down at the metal toy in front of it.

Then before Joker can throw the punch the Leechman reaches down and envelops the machine in one massive appendage. I can see metal cracking, rivulets of rust and slime trickling down Joker’s armored legs. It manages to grab one of the leeches and crush it in its fist but then the Leechman tightens its grasp and one of Joker’s arms pops off, sparking all the way down until it thuds on the corridor floor. Elena is tugging at me but I can’t move, I can’t think, I can only watch, mute, praying the camera is getting all of this, as it scoops up Euler as well in the other arm. He tries to run but doesn’t get anywhere, the arm stretching out after him and nabbing him, tendrils of leeches knotted or grown together slipping over him. I can see them biting into him, forcing themselves into him, and when he opens his mouth to scream they pour inside and he chokes and sputters and then they close over him and he is gone.

The Leechman tosses Joker to the side and he clatters to the ground like a mannequin, the roll-bars on his ribcage bent and shattered, his head dented and compressed. He rolls once then lies still.

Then, with barely a glance in our direction – if it even has eyes, if it even has anything to sense with as I understand the word – the Leechman reaches down and picks up the crystal, and stomps off down the vent. It is such a banal, normal motion that I almost burst out laughing, but I get the feeling that if I let myself laugh I will keep laughing and laughing until everything falls out of me and I’m left empty and echoing.

Ahead of us someone shoots again and a copepod screeches. I turn to see it, darting in, fins streamlined and tucked against its body, spewing ichor from one double-fisted hole in its carapace, a grazing wound, apparently, as it tugs Peter off his feet and down beneath it. I scream his name and start to rush forward but Elena blocks me, then steadies her rifle, but before she can fire the copepod pushes off and bears him struggling into the darkness.

“Goddam it!” I shriek and start after him, but Elena tugs me back and pushes me forward so hard that I go sprawling onto my knees. I cast her a furious glance and scramble to my feet but before I can say something cutting and hurtful that I’ll probably regret, even if Peter’s just been fucking snapped up by a copepod, the Sergeant calls from ahead of us to hurry the fuck up, it’s time to leave, ladies, and I look ahead and see something that makes my jaw drop and my heart do flips in my chest – there ahead of us is the vast metal retaining wall that blocks off the barrows from the rest of the Pit, and there in the center of it is the great reinforced door, standing open and letting a flood of light pour in.

I look at Elena and take her offered hand and she has tears in her eyes but she isn’t faltering, not even for a moment, and in that instant whatever anger I could have felt at her is gone, utterly gone.

Behind us a copepod shrieks and then Fumi – oh, thank god, at least Fumi made it – fires at it, and the slug passes so close to me that I can feel the wind even through the suit, and then we, Elena and I, her arm around me urging me forward and keeping me upright, make it to the door in what feels like an instant, and once we’re through the Sergeant slams it closed and spins the wheel to lock it.

And then, having nothing else sensible to do, I fall to the ground and start to cry.

* * *

I’ve got my helmet off and my sleeves rolled up. My gloves are lying on my stomach. Elena is running her hand softly through my hair and my eyes are a little puffy and sore but I’ve stopped crying. My nose, also, is becoming a little less stuffed, but that means I can smell the Pit again, so it’s a mixed blessing.

Elena’s been crying too but somehow I think she’s pulled it off more gracefully than I have. Instead of bawling and letting it all out in one go she’s managed to keep it down to a mute trickle. Every now and then she wipes at her eyes again and I squeeze her hand tighter for a moment and she squeezes mine back.

Ten minutes ago she’d leant in and held me very tight, even at the awkward angle she could manage, there on the ground, and I could feel in her a shuddering relief, an ease of tension. The copepods had stopped banging on the door ten minutes before that, and we had heard soft slithering sounds as they had retreated, and then we were alone in the silence.

I don’t feel like I’m alive. I don’t feel like I really made it out of there, I feel like a ghost, like I’m looking down from a great height at this slim, dark-haired girl in an ugly orange suit laying on the fleshy floor, looking beat-up and tired and done with this shit but not in a determined way, more like a resigned, given-up, “okay just keep rolling over me, fucking whatever” kind of way.

The Sergeant is quietly arguing with Makado about ten feet away. I’ve turned off my radio so I can’t hear her, just him, one-sided and quietly serious, his face like an Easter Island statue. Moa? Moai? Maui? I should look up the word. I should know something like that.

“Klaus, Crookshank. Ellis is dead for sure, we saw it. Euler. Fumi is okay, Roan’s okay, Elena is okay.”

A pause, then he closes his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

I can hear a tinny scream from all the way over here, of terrible rage that turns to grief partway through, and I know from the sound of it that she’s asked about Peter. I look at Elena and she looks at me.

“Are you okay?” she mouths at me, which is a question so incredibly dumb given the situation that my immediate instinct is to roll my eyes at her. Then it strikes me how incredibly understated just rolling my eyes would be and I nearly start crying again, and she sees it on my face and immediately her whole face shifts. She leans in and the sheer amount of care there does a strange thing to me and I bite my lip hard and reach out for her and put my hand to her cheek, and she kisses my palm despite how sweaty and gross it must be and I allow myself the indulgence of one brief moment to feel utterly, stupendously, selfishly relieved that her and I both are okay.

I again want to tell her something I know I shouldn’t but I stop myself. “No,” the Sergeant is saying, meanwhile. “No, we didn’t get the crystal.”

I hear another, quieter outburst from the other end, and the Sergeant holds the radio a little further away from his ear. “Joker’s fucked,” he says patiently. “As is Euler.”

“The Leechman got the crystal,” I call. My voice is scratchy. I cough, clear my throat and then repeat myself. “I saw it,” I add.

“Me too,” Elena nods, glancing at me. “Roan’s right, it was the Leechman.”

The Sergeant glances at us for a moment, probably wondering if our judgment can be trusted at the present moment, then nods and repeats what we’ve just told him to Makado. I hear a tiny sound of something shattering as if thrown and then the radio clicks off with a screech. The Sergeant sticks it back into his belt holster with a sigh and looks over at us. Fumi hasn’t said a word since we made it through the barrier; he’s slumped against the wall with his head in his hands. He looks up and when I can see his face it’s as though he’s a different person – that aura of impenetrable cool he’d maintained so elegantly up until now is utterly shattered.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” the Sergeant tells us, and after a moment Elena nods and gets to her feet and helps me up and then we get the fuck out of there.

We make our way through Oyster’s Shame and up the Cord. It is, insanely, four in the afternoon, which seems so banal and impossible to me that I nearly start laughing when Elena tells me the time. It feels like it’s about 13 in the evening or so.

We take frequent breaks, rest our legs and our hearts. There is less of a sense of urgency now, and the Sergeant doesn’t care as much what we do as long as we all stay together. Even so we don’t talk much. There’s nothing to say, or maybe there’s too much.

When we get to the top of the Cord the Sergeant looks back at us, pausing before he opens the door. It looks like he’s going to say something, but he stops, shakes his head minutely, and throws it open. The light from the harsh fluorescents pours down on him and for a moment all I can see is a silhouette.

Then a gunshot rings out from the vent behind him and the Sergeant takes one step forward, totters and falls. He lands hard on the metal grating of the floor and doesn’t move. A red pinprick brightens in the middle of his back, just on the other side of where his heart would have been.

I hear rattling from the staircase below as Fumi somehow manages to spur himself into action and sprint down it, taking the stairs two at a time. Before Elena or I can force ourselves to move, a figure steps into view. It holds a very big revolver and it’s aimed straight at me. Elena and I glance at each other and then raise our hands shakily into the air, and the figure cocks its head lightly, and as my eyes adjust to the light I can see it grin. Then I can see more of its face and I feel my mouth drop open as I start to say its name.

“Surprise,” Erica Walken says.

Continue with Part 23

Back to Table of Contents

#mystery flesh pit #writing #writeblr #original writing #horror #novel #Michael Crichton #caving #disaster #thriller

17 notes · View notes