Randall turns and sights down a creature that’s now less than twenty feet away. It must have used the distraction to sneak within striking distance. He recognizes its face immediately, as, he’s certain, it recognizes his.
Dr. James Thompson creeps closer. The fungus grows from his forehead in a configuration reminiscent of a crown. Rather than white, the hyphae in his hollow sockets are a mold-like shade of blue.
“There are no words to express how sorry I am,” Randall says.
Thompson lowers his head, snaps his teeth, and breaks into a sprint.
Randall sights down the center of his old friend’s forehead and pulls the trigger, but the firing pin strikes an empty chamber.
Click.
Click-click-click.
“How far?” he asks Omega as Thompson closes in on him.
“A hundred and fifty feet, sir.”
“Give it everything you’ve got, Omega!”
Randall turns the empty rifle around and grabs it by the smoldering barrel. He grits his teeth and stares down the monster hurtling toward him. It lunges and he swings the weapon like a bat. Connects solidly with its head, but barely slows its momentum.
It lands on top of him and sends him skidding across the ground under its weight. He shoves its snapping jaws away from his neck as the fruiting bodies adorning its crown burst with an explosion of spores, so many he can hardly see through his mask.
“How far?”
A crack races diagonally across his face shield. The creature claws at it in an attempt to break it open.
“Two hundred feet, sir. I can only raise them so fast—”
“It’ll have to do.”
Randall unclips the incendiary grenade from his utility belt. Feels for the pin.
Another creature strikes him from the side, knocking it from his grasp. His mask shatters and shards rain onto his face. Talon-like fingertips sink into his cheeks. Through them. Pierce his gums and bone alike, making it impossible to open his mouth to cry out.
He frantically slides his palm across the ground until he finds the grenade. Slips his gloved finger through the pin.
Teeth sink into his biceps and he nearly drops it again.
The fingertips retract from his face, releasing his trapped scream.
He pulls the pin and drops the grenade as the scientist whose warning he failed to heed bites his face and tears—
A BLINDING LIGHT flashes below Rana. The earth lurches, then draws a deep breath, nearly wrenching her harness from its moorings.
She closes her eyes as a column of fire races straight up the shaft, propelling her toward the surface on a superheated current of air. Screams as the flames singe her hair and blister her cheeks. The cries of the men below her are deafening, even over the roar of the blaze.
Her head strikes one wall, then the other.
She tastes blood in her sinuses, feels it trickling down the back of her throat.
Sees darkness.
Then stars.
And, finally, nothing at all.
OMEGA RUSHES TOWARD the hole. Picks his way down the rubble-lined slope to the edge of the well, where the cable has eroded a furrow into the concrete and produces a buzzing sound as it channels even deeper. He grabs the first of them by the harness. Drags the limp body onto solid ground and unlatches it from the cable. It’s a woman. She’s severely burned, but he recognizes Dr. Rana Ratogue from the picture in his file.
Sirens wail in the distance, and beneath them, the thupping sound of the flight-for-life helicopter streaking across the sky.
Smoke billows from the plains to the west, where the ground has collapsed in upon itself, releasing the fire that spreads through the grasslands.
Omega drags Gamma from the hole next. Then Delta. Lines them up beside the seismologist. Their face shields are warped and black with soot, obscuring their features. He tears off their helmets to reveal faces covered with blood. Lowers his ear to Gamma’s lips and feels the subtle warmth of his breath. He’s still alive. As is Delta, whose eyes move beneath his closed lids.
Rana shows no signs of life, though. He can’t feel her breath against his ear, nor can he detect her carotid pulse in the side of her neck. The burns on her cheeks begin to crack and suppurate. He peels back her eyelids in hopes of eliciting a pupillary response, but the vessels burst and a skein of blood floods the sclera.
“Jesus,” he whispers.
RANA’S OTHER EYE opens and she bares her teeth. Sinks them into the soft flesh of the soldier’s neck. And drags him, kicking and screaming, down into the well.
PIT OF GHOSTS
Kirsten Cross
Knock knock…
A tapping on the walls. Echoes through the tunnels.
Knock knock…
A place where light is life and darkness is death.
Knock knock…
Welcome to the underground world of the Coblynau, deep underneath the Welsh hills where coal and sometimes even gold was hewn from the rock face by bare-chested men and carted to the surface by blackened, soot-covered ponies. Where a canary could warn of lethal gas pockets with a last, haunting song before it dropped dead to the bottom of its cage. Where men’s lives were cheap, and the mine owners regarded dead children as an everyday nuisance. The cost of cave-ins was calculated in money, not lives.
Eventually, the picks and drills fell silent. The mines closed, and the communities died.
Still, if you pushed past the wrought-iron gates, the rusty padlocks and the “DANGER! DO NOT ENTER ‒ MINE UNSTABLE” red and white signs, you could hear the distant sounds of an abandoned world.
The dripping of water.
The sound of creaking timber supports.
And occasionally, in the dead of night, ‘Knock, knock… ’
Morfa Colliery had a deeply unsettling history. With a series of disasters throughout the 19th century and hundreds of lives lost, it had earned itself the moniker, the Pit of Ghosts.
Huh.
Pit of Hell, more like.
The sweat, the tears, the broken hearts and shattered bones — they were all still down there, caked in thick, choking dust. The Earth didn’t want these miners here, but She didn’t want to give up their bones, either. It was payment. A debt due for allowing men to scavenge black coal out of the dark and silent depths. Tap, tap, tapping away with their pathetic little sticks, blasting great gashes and fractures into the rock with explosives.
Occasionally, the Earth fought back. It could happen at any second. The men knew that with every blow they could be unleashing a wall of death. The Earth was merciless. She took life after life, both underground and in the respiratory ward of the local hospital, where men gasped and choked their last breath, their lungs filled with cancer and black dust.
Then, the Earth started to claim more lives — a higher and higher payment for the black and gold riches men ripped from the darkness. The Pit of Ghosts earned its grisly name time and time again. Four men killed in 1858. A further forty in 1863. Another twenty-nine souls consigned to the ever-dark hell in 1870. Then eighty-nine men killed in the explosion of 1890, despite warnings from the pit workers just days before. The mine wasn’t safe, damn it. The men weren’t safe. You need to get them out of there, now!
Warnings were ignored. So the men died, the dust choking their lungs, the mountain’s intestines crushing their bones. Pockets of lethal gas ignited into roaring infernos that were over in a heartbeat and left nothing but scorched earth behind. The fire back-drafted down the tunnels and spewed up and out of the shafts, venting at the top of the winding pit. The flames enveloped the massive lifting wheel at the top, bringing it crashing down. Below ground, poor quality timbers used to shore up the roof crumbled like stale bread and brought thousands of tons of rocks crashing down on the remaining frail, terrified men. Their lives were snuffed out instantly, although those who found shelter from the rockfalls and pit-gas fire died slowly.