Neil did not know that his life was going to be far shorter than he ever imagined, and none of the next few minutes would be anything like he planned. Or imagined. Or dreamed in his worst nightmares.
When he heard the skittering he ignored it. It was down Shaft C, and Shaft C didn’t go anywhere. Shaft A and Shaft G, those were the ones he had to keep an eye on. If the place was infiltrated by terrorists, they’d come at him from Shaft A or Shaft G.
More skittering. Neil Velick put his feet on the desk in the dimly lit roundhouse of rock known as the Intersection.
It was an old wooden desk, and how it got down into this godforsaken hellhole was a mystery. Some said it was brought down a hundred years ago by the miners. If that was so, it had to have been stored in a dry place, away from the eternal seepage of the Pit. Anyway, the antique desk was now put at the intersections of the seven primary corridors, or shafts, and that’s where the guards sat, on an uncomfortable folding chair.
The skittering became constant and Neil’s curiosity was aroused. There were always rats, but this sounded like a lot of rats. Maybe a hundred of them.
Neil got to his feet and went to the rotting wooden boards that partially obscured Shaft C. The boards were older than Neil was. The paint strokes of the white Danger! warning were gray with age. Neil heard tell of some sort of unexpected drop-off down Shaft C, where lots of miners died in the old days. At least two company guys had slipped through the old boards and gone exploring, looking for forgotten gems, and didn’t come out. Talk was the company hadn’t even bothered to fish them out again—the Shaft C drop-offs went way down and the cost would have been far too high.
Neil flipped on the flashlight. The beam penetrated maybe fifty feet before getting lost in the tumbling rocks and the curvature of the corridor. Something disappeared behind a boulder. Something pale.
Cave rat. Neil had seen albino cave rats, and they weren’t pretty. Maybe he ought to try pegging a couple of them.
The company stipulated there should be no weapons fired in the subsurface except in the face of immediate threat. Violating that rule was a serious offense. A guy could get fired, Neil thought with pleasure as he switched off the safely.
He poked the assault rifle through the wooden slats and flipped on the barrel-mounted light. There was another flicker of movement, and he shot at it. The burst of fire echoed away into the shafts and corridors.
Something squealed, but it sure didn’t sound like a rat
Neil watched the corridor. “I know I shot something,” he mumbled.
Then he saw what the something was, as it came out of the rocks on wobbly legs. He saw the something fall dead in a pool of blood.
He still wasn’t too sure what that something was.
Another one appeared, sniffing, crawling along the floor, until it was sniffing at the corpse’s bullet wound.
The creature snarled with a mouth full of yellow teeth. It raised its head, sniffed the air and turned to Neil. It rotated its head as if transcribing a circle in the air, reminding Neil of a bird of some kind.
It was human, more or less. Mostly less, and its flesh was pale, like death. Its eyes were closed. No, Neil realized, its eyeballs were grown over with a transparent cover of skin, with a web of blood vessels visible beneath the translucent skin.
Neil had never seen anything more repulsive in all his life.
He was about to run, he was about to radio for help, when the cave thing did something that made it even more repulsive.
It started eating, voraciously. Huge mouthfuls of flesh were ripped off the corpse and swallowed.
Whatever that thing was, it shouldn’t be. Neil could not suffer it to live. He stitched it across the chest with a quartet of rifle rounds. It was still chewing as it died.
Then other creatures arrived and began feeding on the first two bodies, and Neil shuddered. He shouted briefly into his radio, tied into the wire-linked transceiver on the desk, then began the task of exterminating the subhuman vermin. He never doubted that he was doing the right thing as he slaughtered the creatures in Shaft C.
He had a magazine in the rifle and a spare in his belt, and both mags were emptied in two minutes. By then the shaft was a madhouse. The creatures were thrashing at one another, sniffing for wounds, scampering to and fro to escape the mysterious cause of death. And all the time they were eating, burying their razor fangs into any bloody flesh their sense of smell could locate, tearing it off with shaking heads and chewing fast. But the most horrible thing to see was the wounded victims being eaten alive. Neil would never forget that, even if he escaped this hell and lived to be a hundred.
When the gunfire stopped, the creatures calmed themselves and started sniffing the air, bobbing their heads and coming for Neil Velick.
Neil’s gun was dry. The armed response to his distress call was at least ten minutes away. He wasn’t going to last ten minutes.
‘Neil started running. He chose Shaft E, where maybe he’d meet up with the reinforcements. It was an uphill run and he ran fast.
The slapping of their feet told him the creatures were coming after him, and getting closer. He wasn’t going to outrun them! He found a crevice in the wall where he could make a stand. They were eyeless. He could hold them off with his bayonet.
As he took up the position, his sweeping light caught two or three of them in its shine, but then they were gone, into the darkness. They were just like the colorless salamanders that skittered around some of the cave pools.
Neil tried to control his heaving breath, which sounded like a rushing windstorm. He couldn’t hear the creatures anymore. Maybe they had been scared off.
One of them came out of the blackness, and Neil didn’t see it or hear it until the death-white hand closed on the barrel of his gun. It started to pull, then whimpered and let go, flesh burned by the heat of the metal.
Neil pulled the rifle closer into his coffin-sized crevice, and when the next creature came to grab his gun barrel, he gave it a shove, twisting it, and the fast-moving creature ran into the bayonet. Its gut opened up in a flash of brilliant red before it disappeared into the blackness, whimpering. A moment later there was another brief scream and the liquid, rending sound. Neil was now very familiar with that sound. It was the sound of feeding.
They came again and again for the gun, and they received more burned hands and more sliced abdomens. But there were a lot of them out there. Neil wondered how long until the electric cart arrived, and if he could really last that long.
The answer came soon enough. The next time two creatures rushed out of the blackness together and snatched the rifle, whisking it into the blackness.
Neil knew he would never see them when they came for him. He would never see anything again. He resigned himself to death, as easy as that, but he couldn’t endure the horror of being eaten alive. Far better to spill his own blood first. He wrenched the snaps off his utility knife sheath, then felt something cold take hold of his wrist.
He grabbed for the knife with his free hand, pulled it out, then felt his hand get pushed into the rock wall. Some hand bones broke and the knife fell. It clattered on the cave floor next to his foot, but it was as irretrievable as if it were a hundred miles away.
“Do it fast do it fast do it fast.”
They didn’t do it fast. They took him along, gathering their dead and feeding off them. Neil was dragged deep into Shaft G.
The creatures ate frequently, until the corpses started to stink. Even then the bodies were carried along with the band of creatures as they traveled through utter blackness, deep into the earth. The warm caverns became hot.