“Hey, hey!” Robbie called, and Washington looked up, panting.
“As ethiu’k ah na! Ak na!” Pruitt screamed the final words almost triumphantly, and then Barr cried out, a shriek of absolute terror—
— and the ground shook and rumbled and shifted, and then Robbie was going sideways, plowing into Gaines who crashed to the tunnel floor. Dust rained down, the motes brilliantly lit by a deep, sickly purple light that suddenly poured into the tunnel from the crack at the bottom.
“Run!” Gaines shrieked, stumbling to his feet and then tearing up the slope. Robbie took off after him.
The captain’s Sig fired and something screamed, drowning out the blast of the nine millimeter.
Fuckfuckfuck!
Robbie was running flat out, but that scream got him running faster. It was a massive, guttural bellow that shook his bones and made his guts turn to water, the roar of a bull gator the size of a Cadillac. He outpaced Gaines, but Washington had joined them and was faster, pounding past Robbie, kicking up dust.
Captain Pruitt’s shriek of agony was cut off cold, the echo chased by an unearthly trumpeting, like an elephant with a wet bone in its throat. Rocks shattered in an explosion of sound and the tunnel in front of them lit up with alien light.
Washington looked back, his bared teeth and the whites of his eyes glowing purple. Whatever he saw sent him diving sideways, toward the unlit dead-end with the covered cess bucket on the tunnel’s east side.
Robbie didn’t look back. He ran into the narrow passage after Washington, Gaines piling in behind him. Gaines tripped and crashed to his knees, knocking Robbie off balance.
“Help me!” Safar screamed. Robbie swung his rifle up and stepped around Gaines. He darted a look around the edge of the passage.
Safar was stumbling up the slope, blood pouring from his nose — and behind him, a fast-moving wall of slick gray flesh puckered with circles of thick, translucent hooks, curved like claws. The misshapen wall pulsed, morphing appendages at the edges pulling it up the tunnel.
The silent mass swept over Safar, dropping on him like a heavy wet blanket, and Robbie saw a dozen slits in the monster’s back, black and shining, the smallest the size of a man’s fist. They opened and closed as the thing clenched itself, and Safar’s muffled shriek faded to nothing.
Eyes.
The thing’s skin started to bubble like mud and change color, darkening. Robbie pulled his head back inside — but not before an entirely different monstrosity crawled through the smashed rocks at the bottom, something with too many legs. More alien screams and howls poured up from the broken chamber.
“I told you, I fucking told you,” Gaines said.
“It’s what they were saying,” Washington gasped. “The end of the world!”
“Shut up,” Robbie said, because he couldn’t call bullshit. Fucking Christ, what the fuck?
Horrible noises swelled from the chamber, thumps and slithers and wet slaps, moving into the wide tunnel. Robbie backed up, Gaines and Washington making room, all of them crammed behind the chemical bucket at the short passage’s dead end. The shadows of their narrow shelter were smudged by that sickly purple, the light flickering as things moved in front of it. Something chuckled, a deep, humorless clatter that rose and fell.
The light was blocked out completely as the first thing moved past their hiding hole, a smell like gangrene and blood washing over them. It moved quickly for something so big, blocking the light completely for the space of a breath before it was past. Robbie only got a vague sense of its form, a giant, bubbling slab of meat.
Robbie didn’t fire, nor did Washington or Gaines. Maybe, like him, they weren’t so sure it was a good idea to attract any attention. A second creature the size of a young bull ran after the first on spiders’ legs as thick as tree trunks, set wide in its heavy body. It was headless, its yawning mouth on its back, long needles of pale teeth cross-hatched along the spine. The mouth, if that’s what it was, was big enough to chomp a man in half, easy. Three bulbous eye-stalks or antennae stuck up from its stumpy rear, the appendages ducking and swiveling as it skittered past, grit crunching beneath its wide, stick-like feet.
The chuckling monster rolled past behind the spider-thing on a trail of glistening slime, a warty, black slug as big as a walrus with thick, wiry hairs protruding from its back. It smelled like old puke, the odor so bad that Robbie felt spit curdle in the back of his throat. He thought he heard Gaines make a choking noise, but it was hard to tell over the clatter of the monster’s undulating chuckle, or the deep bellow that spilled up from the shattered Rosetta Room. Robbie pictured a giant alligator down there, but it was probably way worse.
“They’re heading for camp,” Washington whispered, his voice crackling in Robbie’s helmet.
“No shit,” Robbie whispered back. He froze as a fourth monster wriggled past, sliding tendrils of flesh hissing over the rocks at their hideout’s entrance. It looked like a rolling knot of eels, hundreds of them. The limbs that snaked into their small tunnel were close enough that Robbie could have taken a single step forward and touched the crepey, murky-green of pocked flesh. It smelled like meat dropped in a fire.
It slithered past them, following the others.
“What do we do?” Gaines asked.
The M4s each held thirty. “Anyone got extra rounds, second mag?” Robbie asked.
Unhappy negatives all around. They were on guard duty where the biggest threat was supposed to be pissy college students.
Ninety rounds between them, and a fifth monster stalked past their hiding place, a membranous mass of bizarre angles that hurt to look at. It reminded Robbie of layers of bat wings, and it crawled like a bat, on bony joints draped with stretched skin. The thing slipped on the mucilaginous slime left by the slug and trumpeted from an unseen orifice, its high bray so loud that Robbie’s ears went numb.
“We gotta get out of here,” Washington said, as the thing moved past.
“Yeah, how?” Robbie asked. “Join the parade? We wait here; we shoot anything that tries to come in.”
“What the fuck are we waiting for?” Washington said.
“For these things to clear out,” Robbie said. “We leave when they stop coming through.”
“What makes you think they’re going to stop?” Gaines said. “We don’t even know where they’re coming from. There could be hundreds. Thousands.”
“Everyone’s asleep,” Washington said. “They’re gonna get slaughtered.”
“No way,” Robbie said. “We got grenade launchers out there. Sarge’ll kick these things asses.” Assuming he woke up. Assuming everyone woke up and didn’t freak the fuck out.
Assuming these things can die.
“If they fire at the tunnel, it’s going to cave in,” Gaines said. “We’ll be trapped down here in the dark, with them.”
“Jesus, will you shut up?” Robbie wished he could see to smack Gaines, but the other men were only blurs in the purple-tinged dark. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Listen!” Gaines whispered.
There was something moving below in the room, something wet but maybe not that big… And there was a hum, a thin, reedy pitch, high, wavering. Distant. What was that? It sounded like… Robbie didn’t know.
The primordial gator-thing roared again from down in the room. The sound was so deep it was a vibration, so loud that the tunnels roared back. As the echoes died, Robbie heard the high sound again. It had thickened, lower sounds joining the swelling noise.
“We have to destroy the altar,” Gaines said.
“What? No! Why?” Robbie asked.
“Can’t you hear them?” Gaines asked. “They’re all coming.”