38
“There’s movement up ahead,” Kenney said as he waded through the filthy waters with Beck. “I thought I saw something.”
Beck hadn’t seen it. All he cared about was getting out and nothing else seemed to matter. He was ready to kill anything or anyone that got in the way of that. They were in the main passage now and if things worked out, they could be to the ladder in fifteen minutes or less. This drove him and it was enough.
He saw a ripple in the murky slop and slowed a bit.
He tasted a sour sweetness in his mouth. Was that the taste of fear? Of adrenaline? A mixture of both? He didn’t know. He pushed forward with a bravado and a confidence that surprised even him.
I’m getting the fuck out of here and that’s all there is to it. I won’t take no for an answer.
This was like some kind of mantra playing in his head.
Behind him, Kenney tried the radio again with no luck. Soon, maybe, they were bound to pick up something. He told himself this, amazed at his own optimism.
And then hell broke loose.
He saw the folly of being hopeful.
A half dozen of the mutants came vaulting out of the water, dragging their sloughing skins behind them. With a broken cry, Beck started shooting, blasting away wildly. He used up all his shot within seconds and he could not even be sure he had hit any of them. The riot gun was slapped from his hands by a woman who wore her flesh like a badly fitting garment… it was a tarp that flowed around her, pale and jellied set with pink boils and knotted growths that dripped a foul milk.
She reached for him with gnarled hands like twisted tree roots, black talons streaking at his eyes.
She barely missed him. He struck out and felt his fist sink into spongy tissue, making him stumble backwards with revulsion. He nearly went into the muddy water, but she caught him and wouldn’t let him go.
He heard Kenney shouting as he blasted away, but little else.
One of her clawed hands stabbed forward, ripping his larynx out, and with such force it dislodged muscles in his neck that dislocated his jaw in one fell swoop. He shrieked but she slapped a gummy hand over his mouth and he gagged on the juice that squeezed from it.
Kenney couldn’t help him.
He was batting them away with his riot gun, trying to beat a hasty retreat to get out of harm’s way. In the strobing light of the jiggling riot gun, he thought he saw two or three of them seize Beck and tear him quite neatly in half like a paper doll.
39
St. Aubin was not dead.
Maybe not truly alive anymore in the normal sense of the word, but he was certainly not dead. His mind was some trembling yellow thing that skulked and shivered in the dim corners of his brain. Now and then sanity would rear its head and tell him in no uncertain terms the levels of madness and horror he had sunk to, but mostly he kept it locked away in a musty trunk.
But he was still a man and still had a sense of identity, even though he had trouble remembering exactly who he was or how he’d come to be in this predicament. He subsisted mostly on the raw, rough gruel of instinct. It was this that fed and filled him, kept his limbs moving and his mind focused and resilient. If it wasn’t for this atavistic drive, he would long ago have drawn into himself and slammed the door shut.
He was crawling through sloping, narrow tunnels on his belly. Tunnels so small and cramped that the sides brushed his shoulders and the roof brushed the top of his head. Caked with filth, he crawled on and on through that black, sucking mud. Like some insane mole, he was quite blind now in the absolute darkness and moved only by feel, his fingers constantly searching and divining the suffocating dimensions ahead.
Part of his brain remembered, but his conscious mind kept these memories buried.
It was important not to recall certain things.
Like those grubby, fleshy hands that had pulled him away from Kenney and dragged him down that endless, meandering tangle of pest holes, finally depositing him in some profane den where still more hands accepted him and noses sniffed him and fingers explored him. He could remember this part very well, for the uneven walls were lit by a dim illumination that radiated from what appeared to be a peculiar blue-green mold imbued with some weird bioluminescence. He could not see clearly, but well enough as in twilight or pale moonlight.
That’s when he began to put things together.
They thought he was dead.
They had tucked him into a tight, cloistered cell that had been dug out of the slick, dripping clay walls. And as they did this (and he let them do it, God yes, he had, paralyzed both physically and emotionally with terror), he saw other forms pressed into countless other cells. And knew, despite the grainy light, that those tangled, knotted things were the bodies of men and women that had been stuffed into those holes so they could soften to pulp, and decay properly before being eaten.
And he was just another one.
Yes, yes, the food is the flesh and the corpse is the meat, the blood is the wine and the unplucked, untasted cadaver is the bread to be broken by grisly hands to stuff in the mouths of ravenous ghouls. It all fits and it all works and it all makes a beautiful sort of sense, doesn’t it? Well… DOESN’T IT?
And, God, but it did, oh sweet Jesus in your lofty throne high above the charnel pits far below, it made perfect sense. Not men and women down here. Oh, no, no, no, no, perish the fucking thought, friends and neighbors. These were not men nor women nor humans exactly, just… just… obscene, debased, degenerate things that cannot walk in the light but must creep in the tomblike darkness. Worms, human maggots that feast upon the dead, sharpening their claws on coffin lids and their teeth on pitted bones.
And if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands and no one laughs when the hearse goes by… hee, hee, haw, haw.
His mind swam in and out of this self-perpetuating sea of dementia. He recalled waking and seeing that the others had left and there was only some ancient, stick-thin creature in attendance. It looked to be a woman, incredibly old, her face invisible beneath a mop of dun, colorless hair woven with sticks and clods of dirt. Her chest was writhing with some horrible podia like teats on a mother hog. She crouched there in the corner, oblivious to all and everything, nibbling at her own fingers. St. Aubin could hear the grinding of her teeth, the wet and abominable sound of her smacking lips and investigative tongue.
And it was bad enough, plenty bad enough being trapped in that hideous lair where human beings were tucked away like fat spiders in a hornet’s nest, but it got worse. For there began a bizarre, offensive melody of guttural squealing and yelping sounds. And he saw that the sounds came from the wall directly opposite his own, echoing from countless holes sunk into the clay… and in those holes, squirming, distorted, ghastly things. The old lady dragged herself across the floor and began rending something in a cell directly below St. Aubin’s. He heard a wet, pulpy snapping and something like rotting cloth being torn. He was thankful for the gloom, for he couldn’t see what she carried and what she fed the things in those grisly holes.
Maybe he couldn’t exactly remember his own name, but he knew one thing: He was in a nursery, being seasoned and softened for those appalling and toothless, infantile mouths.
He might have passed out then or crawled into some crack in the floor of his mind where it was dark, cozy, and safe. When he opened his eyes, the mold was shining brightly, revealing something that made his eyes roll in their sockets and his teeth chatter wildly until his gums ached.
That… that… that… what is that I’m seeing? What is that thing that comes out of the darkness?