“Listen,” Kenney said, freezing up. There had been a sound ahead, a big sound. But now it was gone. He shook his head. “Nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing because none of them were moving now. They waited, they tensed, they listened. It seemed that the water was filled with odd, half-glimpsed shapes now.
Maybe it was their imagination.
But probably not.
The brickwork had mostly fallen away the farther they went and the walls were earthen, muddy, dropping away in chunks now. Water ran in streams from networks of reaching tree roots that dangled above. They began to bump into things in the murk, things lying beneath the surface. They had to move carefully.
Kenney knew what those things were—long, wooden boxes, but he wasn’t saying and didn’t until dozens of them started sprouting from the water like tree stumps: coffins. Most were lidless, splintered, scathed with what could only be claw marks and wormholes. Their satin linings were hanging out like viscera, faded and speckled with mildew when they were evident at all. Most of them had been gutted and shredded. They found no remains in any of them.
“A cemetery,” Iversen said in a high, whining voice. “That’s what this place is, a fucking cemetery.”
And that’s exactly what this place was, Kenney knew.
He could just imagine how the things of Clavitt Fields had tunneled through the darkness, coming up beneath that cemetery across the road from the farmhouse, pulling caskets down into their lair. It was appalling, really, but made perfect sense.
The water was scummy with bits of human anatomy—rank tissue and decayed flesh like a skim of fat. More islands of fungus appeared. It seemed to be growing right out of the coffins. They splashed ahead, trudged awkwardly. The floor of the tunnel was uneven now, lumpy and twisting and heaved up, full of holes and things that felt like boulders and sticks beneath their boots but were not boulders and sticks at all.
They had to go back. Kenney knew this now.
Everyone was trembling at the edge of lunacy here. Go back and dynamite this entire mess, that was the thing to do.
St. Aubin screamed.
He spun in a wild circle and opened up with his riot gun. And then everyone was shooting and stumbling through the water and it took a moment for Kenney to see them—the things.
The descendants of the original, depraved inhabitants of Clavitt Fields.
They were coming up out of the water and attacking now. In the arcing, glancing illumination of the flashlights, he could see very little. Just hunched, emaciated figures knitted with a colorless, rolling flesh the color of bacon grease that hung in sheets from their frames like moldering, crawling blankets. He caught glimpses of faces riddled with innumerable holes and rents, others covered in cauls and braided excrescences that seemed to wriggle like flatworms.
One of them rocketed out of the filth, its face twisted into a bubbling, fungal mask and Kenney pulled the trigger, blowing it in half. He kept shooting and so did the others, but it was hopeless. They were in a nest of them and there was no advance, no retreat. Four or five of them writhed up from the water like wriggling worms, boneless things with fungoid flesh and tumescent faces and eyeballs only a shade whiter than their mottled complexions and oily locks.
Iversen screamed as they squirmed over him and dragged him down.
St. Aubin was whimpering and crying and yelling. He stumbled into Kenney and Kenney shoved him aside and began firing again, repulsed at how the buckshot made those things literally spray apart.
Then hands as cold as dry ice and covered with a chill, quivering flesh were at his throat. He brought the butt of the shotgun back and felt it smash into something that yelped and slid away in the water and another came up right in front of him. Its face was slack and rubbery, the nose collapsed into a skullish cavern, eye sockets huge and jutting, black and gray teeth chattering like they wanted badly to bite into something.
It was all bad, of course, but what was even worse was a sluggish liquid flow of some pale yeasty material that came out of its eyes in gurgling clots and engulfed its face like it was trying to eat it.
It hissed at him like a cockroach, the spawn of witches. Its lips were nearly fused together by tiny hairlike filaments of mold.
Skeletal, knobby hands took hold of the riot gun… then it was yanked from his oily gloves and he was alone, only St. Aubin’s light behind him, bobbing and swaying as he splashed away into the distance.
Kenney ran towards him, knocking three of them out of the way and then a fourth exploded into his path and he instinctively struck out at it. His fist sank through its belly, through tissue and organ, which had the spongy consistency of wet bread. It went right through the thing as if it was made of jelly. With a shrill, maddened cry, he pulled his hand back, felt it graze rubbery bones and then the thing fell away only to be replaced by another with a head like a nodding fleshy balloon.
He could hear them coming after him, but he kept running, stumbling through the water until he found St. Aubin pressed up against a wall, moaning and whimpering and gagging. He’d stripped away his mask and was sucking in lungfuls of that corrupt, dank air. His face was wet with sweat.
Kenney took hold of him and saw he was a wreck, that he was beyond words, so he took his gun from him and—
And fell backward, screaming into that carrion soup… because he saw what was behind the deputy. The walls were punched with a series of tunnels, small ones you would have had to crawl through on your belly. Like the honeycombs of a bumblebee’s nest.
And the scream barely left his lips when a tangle of white arms covered in some shivering gelatinous secretion reached from the hole behind St. Aubin and pulled him bodily into the opening. His screams faded into the distance.
And then Kenney was alone as they came from behind him and others began to slither from those holes with smooth, snakelike undulations.
32
Iversen broke free of a mutiny of clutching, clawing hands and surfaced, battering at the mutant things with his riot gun. He was out of shot but he brandished it like a club. One of them rose up before him and he smashed it in the face with the butt and it literally came apart, spraying over the surface of the water.
Go, go, go, get away, get away.
These were the words that echoed in his head and he did not try and reason or make sense of any of it. This was survival, fight or flight, and he had to get free of this awful place.
He stumbled blindly up passages, turning into others that looked safe until he found himself in a tunnel with slick, earthen walls, the filthy water up to his waist. In his panic, he was not sure where he had gone or where he was now.
With trembling fingers, he stripped his mask off. “KENNEY!” he shouted. “ST. AUBIN! JESUS CHRIST, SOMEBODY ANSWER ME!”
But all he heard was his own voice echoing out into the darkness.
Thank God his flashlight was still working. He stabbed his beam of light up the tunnel and down the way he had come. He saw nothing but dripping walls, clots of clay dropping into the water now and again. A stagnant mist rose from the soup in lacey tendrils. Without the mask on, the stink was horrendous. Not just rot and decay and stagnant water, but a sharp odor of methane and seeping gases.
He fumbled his handpack radio and tried to get a channel but it was ruined from being submerged. He tossed it aside. He had half a dozen shells in his bag. He fed them into the riot gun and tried to think calmly, reasonably, but the idea of that, of course, was simply out of the question.
In the distance, he thought he heard a muted splashing sound.
He waited, listening intently.
Nothing.
You have to think carefully now, a voice in the back of his head told him. It has never been so important as it is now. Think. Reason. Kenney and St. Aubin are probably fucking dead and maybe Godfrey and the others are, too. You have to proceed like they are. You have to backtrack and fight your way out of here.