He sensed movement again.
Panicking, he shined the light in every direction, looking for a target, anything to take out his fear on. He heard more splashing from the pool farther down the passage. He caught a momentary glimpse of something in the light like a huge white spider skittering away. He fired. Something brushed the back of his neck. He turned and fired.
They were all around him and he knew it.
But they were so fast, so well adapted to their environment that he never stood a chance against them. He fired twice more at leaping shadows. A white hand came at him like a blur out of the darkness. Before he could even get the gun up, gnarled gray talons laid his cheek open. The skin hung open in a flap.
He needed room to fight, but the tunnel was confined and claustrophobic.
Another one of them came at him, but this time he heard it and brought the butt of the gun down on its head before it reached him. It made a squealing sound and vanished. Its head had been soft like the bell of an inky cap mushroom.
Kopecki got off another wild shot and then he was crawling through the water on his hands and knees as they closed in on him. If he could just make it to the place where he found the skeletons, he would have room to fight. But they weren’t going to allow that because he was much bigger than them and his size and strength made him dangerous on open ground where he could use these things to his advantage.
They dove on him, tearing and clawing and biting.
He felt their scabrous little hands brush his face, their pasty and reptilian-feeling bodies. He hit at them, shot at them, blindly kicked out at them, but it was just no good. One of them buried its face in his throat and bit out a chunk of bloody meat in a red spray.
He screamed.
He made a gurgling sound.
Then he dropped the light. It was waterproof and floated in the rippling water, casting a weird glow over its surface that reflected up the walls. He swung and fought, but they kept clawing him until he was laid open in a dozen locations. Then they climbed him like starving rats, biting and tearing like they wanted to dig into him. He fired off one last round, tried to get off a second as he screamed with horror and pain but he couldn’t make it happen.
In the glow of the light, he saw why.
He couldn’t pull the trigger because his fingers were gone, chewed to nubs.
Then he saw them. They were small, primeval things, naked, their flesh pallid and strangely mottled. They were albinos from living in the close darkness, spawning in it like cave rats. Their eyes were bulbous and white, set in bloodred sockets, mouths oval like those of sea lamprey, gums pink and set with crooked yellow teeth. Matted hair bleached of color hung from their scalps in twisting greasy braids like looping roundworms.
They made piping sounds as they fell on him, more coming out of the walls of the tunnel like burrowing worms.
He screamed as his blood turned the thrashing water pink around him.
He stared into their cruel, subhuman faces as they made to strike. This was the last thing he saw before they took his eyes, ripping them out by the cords of his optic nerves.
9
Above, it was no better.
Confusion became chaos and it was every man for himself.
Troopers and deputies slammed into each other and handguns were discharged and voices were shouting, screaming. Flashlight beams were dancing around, aimed at the sky, the ground, the mist. Kenney tried to pull them together, but somebody slammed into him and pitched him into the ooze and he clawed his way back up, terrified of being pulled below like Kopecki.
Something fast and blurry white took a state patrol trooper and yanked him right off his feet into the mist. Kenney could not even honestly say what it was, other than some subjective impression in his mind of a tall white ape and a shock of equally white hair that hid its face.
“WATCH IT!” he heard Hyder cry out. “WATCH IT! THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!”
Kenney spun around with his 9mm and saw more anemic hands coming up out of the muck as the things from below pulled themselves up from the brown mud like corpse worms, white and maggoty.
A deputy stumbled into him, screaming in his face.
He saw why: his scalp had nearly been peeled free, his face a red, streaming mask like a child’s runny finger painting.
Hyder was right: they were everywhere.
Kenney saw a circle of white, blurred faces; leaping, vaulting forms. A deputy got dragged into the fog by a long-armed shadow. Two more got sucked down into the mud by pale, distorted, and raggedy things. Semihuman forms came up from the muck like nightcrawlers from their holes and disappeared just as fast.
Weapons were discharged out of pure panic and it was an absolute wonder nobody was hit.
One of the things vaulted in Kenney’s direction.
He saw red nails streak at his face, and he pumped three rounds into it until it fell back and away.
Another one clawed out of the darkness and a bony white hand—knitted with pulsing, flabby flesh—took Kenney by the arm. He shrieked and struck out at a grimacing, hideous face. He heard the butt of his 9mm Browning sink into that pulpy mess with such ease he thought there could be no bones beneath it. He pulled away and then grabbed it by its arm… and it yanked away, diving into the mud sea.
And was gone.
There was nothing to mark its passing but a sheet of white flesh in his hand, flesh that wriggled and squirmed like it was filled with insect larvae.
He tossed it aside and began to run, fighting his way through the muck.
A deputy nearly bowled him over and he soon saw why. Something was clinging to him, something which he at first took to be a wildcat, maybe a lynx or a bobcat or one huge tomcat. It clung to the deputy’s neck like a leech, claws firmly entrenched in his throat. Kenney reached out to yank it free, expecting to feel his hand grasp a pelt of dirty fur, but what it got instead was rutted, swollen flesh that came apart under his fingers like a wet newspaper. When he yanked his hand away, ribbons of it were tangled in his fingers.
He heard a snarling among the confusion.
He turned and there was… a thing standing there, only it was no thing but a child or something very much like one. It was small and rawboned. Long white hair was plastered to its face with mud and drainage. It reached out for him with hooked fingers, hissing at him with absolute wrath. Something in his head told him it was no child, at least not one of this world, but some horrible little hobgoblin that had come in the night to tear his bleeding heart out by the roots.
He squeezed the trigger more out of shock than anything else.
The round punched right through it and it made a weird, trilling sort of squealing sound and fell back into the mist
Drenched, sprayed with mud, bleeding and sore and quite beyond any terror they had known before, the survivors bunched together in a defensive circle, back to back, and made ready for what might come next.
And the night went on forever.
10
The state patrol trooper Kenney saw yanked off into the mist was named Carla Sherman. She was not a local, having been born and bred in White Plains, New York, and she had no idea what the hell was going on… other than the fact that it was sheer madness.
She never saw what grabbed her.
She only felt the hands that were impossibly strong. To Sherman’s credit, she didn’t go easily. She used every trick she knew to break free. And when that didn’t work, she pulled her Glock 17 and fired three rounds into the leg of her captor. She was thrown to the ground and abandoned. Whoever or whatever held her was simply gone.
But the mist held. It was almost phosphorescent, charged with moonlight that lit up the dank, dripping world around her in subtle, wavering, and eerie light.