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 seam, 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.