Iversen aimed the flare in their direction and they backed away, but others rose up behind him. He kept turning this way and that, jabbing the flare at distorted fetal faces, but each time they were closer and each time there were more of them. Then they leaped and six or seven were hanging from him, placing suckering mouths against his bare arms, his neck, and face. They were blubbery and flaccid things like newborn maggots.
One of them bit into his wrist and he dropped the flare. He tore and beat at them, feeling them coming apart under his fists, but there were always more and they fastened themselves to him like blood-swollen ticks.
He screamed as their little fingers dug into him, as nubby teeth pierced his skin. He felt his own ribs crack as they were yanked on and he cried out in agony as their talons sheared his face from the bone beneath and he choked on his own blood. Before he sank into the pool of thrashing water, he felt one of them jump on his head and sink fangs like ice tongs through his skull and into his brain.
35
Kenney wasn’t sure where he was.
The mutants—because that’s what they were—seemed to come in waves and he emptied his riot gun into advancing hordes of them, just managing to stay free of their clutching fingers.
He tried his handpack radio again and again, but all he was getting now was static. The mutants had been corralling him, he realized. It seemed insane, but that’s exactly what they were doing. Attacking from every side, pushing him into side passages and low, sloping tunnels and doing it to get him more confused and more lost.
Maybe they’re not human, but they sure as hell are smart.
Trying to keep from panicking, hoping that Hyder would send a relief party down when he could not be reached, Kenney entered another chamber that was huge and echoing. The walls were made of fungus, draperies of the stuff, greasy and pink and pulsating. It trailed into the water and hung in loops from the ceiling overhead.
That’s when he saw a figure come splashing in his direction.
He brought up his riot gun and only hesitated from firing when a light found him and he heard a voice crying out, “KENNEY! KENNEY! DON’T SHOOT! DON’T SHOOT!”
It was Beck.
He was torn up pretty good. He still had his riot gun, but his gas mask was gone, his tac vest and waders torn, his face scratched with bleeding rents. “They came from everywhere… they got Godfrey… I barely got away.” He leaned up against Kenney. “I barely got away.”
Kenney nodded. “They got St. Aubin. I don’t know about Iversen. Right now, we have to worry about ourselves and get the hell out of here. How many rounds you got?”
“Five or six. No more.”
“I only have a couple myself. Let’s go.”
They moved on into the tunnel Kenney had come out of. They had to find that main passage, he knew, or they could wander down here for weeks. It was a fucking labyrinth and he didn’t want to be thinking about how far it went on for.
The tunnel snaked this way and that, the water coming up past their hips now. It was turgid and viscous, equal parts clay and water and slime. They were tense, anxious.
A ripple passed through the muck.
“Hold it,” Beck said, shining his light around, the ripples fading away. “Something… there’s something in the water, something in the water with us.”
And he was right.
Whatever it was, maybe it knew the game was up for it came erupting from that putrid brown water like a monstrous worm. It hit Beck and took him down before he could even think of firing. In the arc of his flashlight, it looked reptilian, boneless, a fluid and pulsing thing.
Kenney stumbled back and fell, coming up just in time to see Beck burst from the water, spraying mud from his mouth.
Something was on his back, riding him.
A mutant that was fat and heaving like a slug. Its mouth was at his throat making obscene sucking sounds. He screamed and fell back into the muck.
Kenney didn’t waste a second.
He reached in there and took hold of something oily, something slippery and bloated, yanked on it with all his strength until it came up and twisted around, hitting him hard. He fell against the wall, that brown and muddy thing making first a shrill bleating sound, then a squealing like a pissed-off hog. He could see its mouth snapping at him, blunt teeth wanting to dig into his face. He had a tight grip on its throat and he wasn’t letting go. The creature, he realized, was a woman of sorts but misshapen and hideously deformed. Her hands were like huge, flattened spades, the individual fingers webbed together. There was a row of pulsating sacs down her torso like pendulous teats. They swayed like water balloons as she writhed and fought and tore into him. Her back and head were covered in short, rubbery bristles and her mouth was a piglike snout, squealing and chomping and breathing a hot, fetid air in his face.
She was incredibly strong and moment by moment, she forced Kenney down until the slopping water was to his throat. He screamed and raged, something in him refusing the idea of death… and then there was a resounding explosion and the pig-woman was blown free of him.
Beck, bloody but unbowed, stood there with his riot gun. He had stuck the barrel of it right up to the pig-woman’s side and pulled the trigger.
The pig-woman herself… or itself… was roiling in the mud, her blood swirling in with the brown and yellow muck. Her guts were hanging out, bleached and distended like jellyfish washed up on a beach. They trailed behind her as she tried to crawl away.
When she died, she simply sank like a log in quicksand.
Kenney was out of breath, his muscles aching, his head full of a shrieking white noise. The pig-woman’s spade hands had torn through his coat and shirt, ripping bleeding gashes into his belly and chest.
He turned to Beck. “I owe you one,” he said.
36
They had Godfrey right where they wanted him and he knew it.
He’d fought free of them for a time but they had him cornered now and he realized with a sinking feeling in his chest that he’d only gotten away because they’d allowed him to. He’d been backing away from them deeper into the tunnels and now he was in some kind of cocoon of fungi. It was like a pocket of the stuff. There was no way out. The mutants were ringed around the opening, just waiting, just watching for what would happen next. They grinned with pulpy faces, making whispering sounds.
The fungi cocoon was vaguely pulsating and to Godfrey it felt like the beat of some great heart.
Yes, because this isn’t some accidental mutation, it’s on purpose. You’re in a womb of the stuff.
He realized then the relationship between the fungus and the descendants of Clavitt Fields. They had merged and become one. Elena had it right, at least some of it. She told them a very, very old story of a meteorite falling from the sky—a huge flaming stone… a piece of star… fell from the sky many centuries ago—and burying itself in the earth and how the people of Clavitt Fields had biologically degenerated, becoming these things he was looking upon now. He remembered Kenney mentioning radiation and that seemed a good, if far-fetched, bet at the time. And maybe there was radioactivity involved, but it was more than that because there had been something living in that piece of falling star, something that crawled down into the ground and blighted the entire area, maybe gradually remaking the inhabitants of Clavitt Fields into things more like itself. Elena had spoken of some old drunk many years ago seeing something made of eyes and crawling lights coming out of the Ezren well, something that blinded him permanently just looking on it.