But then he was at it, tearing and clawing and digging through the masonry of human bones that were pitted and yellowed and gray with age. They came apart in his fingers like ancient vases and desert-dried pottery and there was a rumble and a motion and a thunder and the entire wall collapsed like a house of cards and bones rained down on him.
And on the other side was a den of the things, all of them shrieking and squealing and flaking apart, all creeping in his direction on their hands and knees like a migration of human insects and he was buried alive in their blubbery, clawing bodies.
Beck hid beneath the wall of bones that had rained down on him, finding safety and camouflage in the depths of the ossuary, hiding and trembling like a hunted rodent. He did not move. He barely breathed. A twisted voice in his head told him he could wait there for as long as it took, that he would be safe and those things would never, ever find him.
But he was wrong.
As he listened, they began to dig their way towards him, whispering and grunting and chattering their teeth. Slowly, bone by bone, he was being unearthed, his secret lair exposed. It wasn’t until their fingers brushed over him that he began to scream.
34
Searching along the slick clay walls with his dying flashlight, Iversen nearly forgot about the extra D batteries tucked into the pockets of his tactical vest. He dug them out frantically and succeeded in dropping one of them into the muddy water. Shit! He groped blindly about for it and was almost certain that he would never find it because that’s how things worked in desperate, horrible, and nightmarish situations like this.
Irony.
Yes, that was the word. It was how Fate or God or Destiny took the wind out of your sails, how it leveled the playing field and showed you just how lucky you’d been in all things and how you would be lucky no more.
He nearly started laughing at one point because in some deranged, heartbreaking, purely fucked-up sort of way, it was funny. Then his fingers found the cylinder of the battery and wiped the muddy goo off it. He unzipped his tac vest, and used what dry spots he could find to get the last moisture off it.
Okay. Good.
Do what has to be done.
He fumbled out the used-up batteries in the pitch blackness and inserted the new ones. He did this as carefully as he could under the circumstances, not daring to drop any of them. He held them so tightly his fingertips practically left indentations in them.
He clicked on the light.
It was steady, but no brighter, which meant it wasn’t the batteries at all but the flashlight itself. It was supposed to be waterproof. In fact, it was guaranteed to be 100% waterproof. So it was either a manufacturing defect or it had been damaged somehow, maybe in his falling slide, and water had leaked in.
There was no time to consider it.
His face beaded with sweat, Iversen pulled the mask back so he could see better and started working his way around the walls of the chamber looking for an opening. The idea that he would find one seemed absurd even to him, but he did find a passage. Just the one. A low and narrow crawl space, but it was better than nothing. He took it.
He crawled along on his hands and knees through the sodden tunnel, his shoulders brushing the walls and the top of his mask scraping along the ceiling. He was not claustrophobic by nature, yet he could very much feel the walls closing in. Loose globs of runny clay dropped down on the back of his neck, water dripped down his face. The stink of subterranean decay was almost overpowering.
He paused more than once thinking he heard something, but it must have been his own sounds reverberating. The tunnel twisted and turned, but thankfully went no deeper into the earth. In fact, it seemed to be steadily ascending so he was going up to… something.
He stopped.
Listen.
His skin crawling in tight waves, he heard something. It was a low, distant murmuring coming up the tunnel from behind him. Try as he might, he could not be sure what it was. He began to crawl faster and faster until sweat stung his eyes and his breath scratched in his throat. Then the passage opened and he dropped into a flooded bowl with no egress. All that fucking work and he was at a dead end.
He wanted to laugh again.
But he didn’t dare.
He heard no more sounds and that was good because he had no choice: he had to go back. He forced himself back into the tunnel and the going was much easier because he was slowly moving downwards. After a time, he saw the opening and a voice in his mind said, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and he almost laughed at that… then there was a sharp, stabbing pain at the back of his neck.
A tree root?
No, there hadn’t been any, he was sure of it.
He started moving towards the opening and something brushed against his back. He squirmed, rolling over, nearly becoming wedged in the passage, getting a face full of wet clay in the process. He could not bring the flashlight back around, but he sensed rather than saw movement.
Gripped by a suffocating fright, he clawed his way out of the opening and dropped back into the chamber. It was big in there and that was its only saving grace. The brown water slopped back and forth in lazy waves, the sound of it echoing and echoing.
The fear did not lessen, it increased.
There was something in the water with him.
He saw a humped form out of the corner of his eye and then another. Panic breaking in him, he started firing blindly at things real and things imagined and then he was out of shot. Something brushed his leg and something else brushed against his back. He let out a low, echoing cry. He swung the light around in every direction, creating echoing splashing sounds and slimy waves of muck that broke against him. The flashlight beam created immense, jumping shadows in every direction.
As he brought the light around again, he caught a glimpse of a distorted face rising from the murk.
Then it was gone.
He fell back into the water and yanked himself up and something latched onto the back of his neck. He reached back there and his fingers sank into something like cold jelly, living flesh with no more substance than the moist clay of the passages. Shrieking, he tore at it, strips of flesh coming apart in his fingers and a warm juice spraying over the back of his hands. Whatever it was, it leg go with a shrilling cry that sounded so much like that of a human infant that he nearly lost his mind.
Something hit him from the left.
He kicked out at it, spraying water against the wall… and something white like a pair of tiny doll hands grabbed the shotgun and yanked it from his sweaty fingers and pulled it under. The dark rushed in. Things moved around him. He could hear their clogged breathing.
The flares.
He grabbed one from his tac vest and twisted the cap. Flickering red-hued light filled the chamber, making everything seem to bob and weave. He saw the things in the water with him. They looked very much like some sort of fetuses from freakshow jars… bulbous-headed, limbs spindly and tiny fingers set with black claws. Their eyes were like blank white bubbles, their flesh the color and consistency of pork chop fat, but weirdly translucent and set with networks of purple and black veins, some of which were thick as worms.