“No one will take your word over mine,” said Shepler. “Just drop it and do your job.”
Tom nodded. It was Shepler’s shrine, alright. He was surprised he didn’t have a mass of ancient girlie mags back here. But there were no modern magazines. Just cigarette butts, thousands of them. He ran the flashlight over the white-gray mass of them. Many of them looked chewed. The man must be desperate to smoke.
He looked back at the magazines. 1916. That was before his grandpa had been born. And he was an old man. 1916 was a long time ago. That chill, that natural fear we all have of the ancient, of rotting tombs and dark, closed-in spaces, hit him all at once. The chill hit like a second wave from his earlier panic. The skin on the back of his neck and his scrotum crawled. Cold sweat formed beads under his arms and matted the hair that covered his forehead.
That was when Shepler screamed. It was a high-pitched, womanish scream. A cry of sheer terror, that any man would have been embarrassed to have attributed to him. The scream was followed by scrabbling noises and what sounded like a man gagging.
“John? John!” yelled Tom as he climbed back out of the alcove and struggled to slide between the boiler and the wall. There was no answer. The boiler, the junk, everything seemed to be fighting to hold him back. He grunted and ripped his pants on a twisted metal obstacle and felt a trickle of blood run down his right leg to wet the top of his socks.
His flashlight played wildly on the ceiling of the brewery basement. And then he was out. The vast cavern of the basement seemed airy and open after the alcove he had left behind. He swung the beam in an arc to cover the area that Shepler should have been in. He breathed hard and sniffed. His nose had started running because of the dust and exertion. Shepler was nowhere in sight.
“John, answer me.”
Nothing. With hands that trembled slightly, Tom immediately followed the emergency code that he had worked out during his long hours of reading fiction in a dark factory. He loaded his pistol with the live rounds from his breast pocket and to his credit he didn’t drop any. Then he switched his flashlight to his left hand and gripped his revolver firmly with his right. He immediately found comfort and a feeling of power in the weight of the weapon.
He set his jawline and straightened his spine, then warily moved toward the spot that he had left Shepler. Before he found Shepler himself, he found his blood. His right foot stepped into a puddle of it and Tom nearly slipped. He managed to catch himself before pitching forward into a carton of sharp-looking worn-out spindles. Then he brought his beam down and splashed the bright light onto the corpse that had lain so silent and still that he had nearly walked past it.
Shepler’s throat had been ripped out. Strings of bloody flesh dangled down his chest and his eyes were wide open and staring, lifeless.
Tom’s reactions were numerous and immediate. Horror and grief shook him. Mortal alarm caused him to turn quickly around, scanning for the killer. Up, down and in a circle around him. His gun barrel followed his flashlight, tracking the circle of brilliance around the room like a skeet-shooter tracking a disk across the sky. Then disgust caught up with him. A sudden bolt of nausea hit him and a stiff rod of vomit pushed up against the back of his throat. He controlled himself however, and once he was certain that the attacker was not in the immediate vicinity, he forced himself to examine the body more closely.
It was difficult to think. His mind was yelling a dozen things at him all at once. He must run. He must fight. He must somehow save Shepler, somehow bring him back to life. Would the cops think he had done it? Was he soon to be killed himself?
Examining the torn up body was enough to shock anyone into catatonia. Not only was Shepler’s (his name is John, dammit. I should have called him John more often) throat open and exposed, but he could see now that his chest and belly had been lacerated as well. Tom didn’t like the way the brilliant beam made Shepler seem so large and over-real in the dark basement. It was disrespectful to the dead to expose them in such a harsh white glare. He considered reaching up and closing Shepler’s dead eyes, but couldn’t quite do it. Let some detective do it later, he figured.
He played the beam on his hands and his heart swelled a bit with instinctive pride. There were bits of flesh, the flesh of the killer, in John’s fingers and caught underneath his nails. The killer had not gone unscathed.
Then he caught sight of what the flesh looked like, and his mind chilled. It was definitely not human. It was brownish and peeling, and there was no blood on it. It looked more like the brown mottled leather that a snake sheds than human skin.
Suddenly, Tom’s head cleared. He understood now. Before he hadn’t been sure what was going on. But now he knew. He was in a battle. He was at war, and his life was at stake. It was time to take a hike and let the big boys handle things from here on in.
He looked back toward the distant basement door. The span between where he stood over Shepler’s body and the door seemed to telescope into infinity. Would he make it back without being torn to (hamburger) shreds by whatever had attacked Shepler?
He thought of those magazines back there (1916) and a stiffness crept over his muscles. This new fear was a paralytic thing that turned the sweat on his face and drenching his fruit-of-the-loom undershirt and J.C. Penny’s briefs into a slimy slick envelope.
He took his first step toward the door, feeling the discomfort of moist clinging clothing and wondering if he would make it out of the brewery tonight. His feet dragged forward through his second and third steps. He swallowed, the dryness of his throat making it painful.
May 1916. Just how long ago was that? Had this been a brewery then or a warehouse? Or had it been a chemical plant?
Yes, he thought as his legs dragged after one another, his soaked underwear shifting and bunching around his crotch, 1916, World War One. This had been the basement of a chemical plant when that magazine had been first bought.
He made it as far as the next big chamber of the basement, the room where most of the IBM equipment and cobwebbed bottle-cap machines stood silent guard. As he entered the room, walking under the wide arched opening with his gun extended, he looked to the sides and up. Most people might not have looked up, but Tom Riley had read more science fiction and horror than most people, and had seen every bad movie on those topics Hollywood had bothered to produce.
What always finished people in most movies was the unexpected. When facing an unknown monster, actors almost never looked in unexpected directions, and that was precisely where such attacks came from. So, instead of looking ahead at the door, he beamed his flashlight upward. This unusual move extended his lifespan a few minutes further.
A thing was up there, gazing down at him. No doubt, it was just such a thing that had killed the skinny, chain-smoking Shepler. It looked like a bat, sort-of, or maybe more like a spider with leathery wings.
He squeezed off a shot almost before he had his gun up. It went wide, but did make a loud report that rang through the basement. The thing reacted, dropping from the ceiling and fluttering away like a fleshy, flying leaf. It rippled in the air as it flew, unlike any animal he’d ever seen. Then, finally, he knew what it really reminded him of. It looked like a loach, from the Great Lakes. Gruesome things that attached themselves to fish and suckled with teeth. This thing, however, was a flying loach. Not the normal swimming variety. Perhaps it was a different breed of loach. Something that had come in from the early cold this year.
He ran. He might have been screaming now, he couldn’t be sure. The wetness in his pants was at least one part piss now, he was pretty sure about that. He was pretty sure too, that this plant had made some very special chemicals in its day, back at the start of the last century. Maybe they had made mustard gas here, or worse things. Secret things. Things that might have warped a creature from the lake. Maybe something had come up to the lakeshore outside and soaked up the chemicals they had spilled into the soil down here.