Nightcrawlers

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.