Nightcrawlers

41

Kenney’s world was chaotic and unbalanced. It was a barrow pit and a madhouse, a hot-blooded nightmare and a subceller freak show. He had escaped the mutants, but they had badly battered him. His head hurt; his face and neck stung from the acidic secretions of their fingers. He was out of rounds for the riot gun, but he held on to it for the flashlight and its effectiveness as a club. He still had his service weapon—a Colt 9mm—and flares. So he was not down and out just yet.

In the darkness, hip deep in the foul brown drainage, he leaned against the wall, unable to go another inch.

Where the fuck is Hyder and those reinforcements? What the hell are they doing up there? He should have sent a rescue team down thirty minutes after we stopped checking in.

Kenney knew he had to remain calm, but with each passing second in that awful place it became harder and harder.

He was lost, he was scared, he was confused. His mind was filled with dusty cobwebs. He was so damn tired he couldn’t seem to think straight.

Keep awake. If you do nothing else, keep… awake.

But it wasn’t easy. God, no. He was so exhausted from the shock of this entire nightmare and slogging through the stygian depths of the flooded underworld and crawling through cramped tunnels that he could have slept standing up. In fact, he could have gone right out leaning against the warm, mucky wall.

But he wouldn’t allow that.

He couldn’t allow that.

By sheer force of will he made himself stand erect, chuckling hopelessly deep in his throat when a stream of water warm as piss trickled from above and ran down his cheek. It was followed by a clod of clay that oozed down the bridge of his nose like a melting turd.

He pushed on through the water, refusing to think about the fact that Chipney—Jesus, Chip—was probably dead. No marriage. No future. No nothing save a bride left at the altar, crying her eyes out over the cold corpse of her fiancé.

You could have ordered him to stay above.

Yes, that was true, but he was a cop. A damn good cop and that would have been an insult to him, a professional slap in the face from a friend and a colleague and Kenney couldn’t do something like that.

Stop thinking and push on.

Yes, that was it.

He followed the tunnel around a bend, noticing that his flashlight beam was very weak, dimming to a struggling yellow ray that reflected off the swirling gaseous mist rising from the stagnant swamp around him. There was a shelf of rock jutting from the wall just ahead. He would change the batteries there.

That’s how tired he was.

So tired he hadn’t even noticed the light was going dead. His eyes must have really been beginning to adjust to the murk and that disturbed him.

He made it over to the shelf and it was perfect: a seatlike shelf of limestone. He crawled up onto it, dangled his legs over the edge, and swapped the dying batteries for the fresh ones in his tac vest. God, the light was so bright now it was blinding. He clicked it off, conserving power.

That done, he sat there, listening.

And listening.

He could hear the sound of water dripping, bits of the walls sloughing off, a steady sound of liquid draining into the soup like a leaking pipe. It was nice. It was nearly comforting. It made him very relaxed. Too relaxed, in fact, because his eyes began to drift shut. He didn’t bother fighting the exhaustion. He let himself sink into the darkness and raft away on dreams.

Better.

Much better.

He didn’t know how long he slept, but he woke to a tugging sensation at his left hand. It was pulling, itching, and generally nagging him. There was a rush of hot, moist, and noisome air blown into his face. The reek was nauseating. It reached yellow fingers down his throat and pulled his stomach up.

He knew what it was.

Even in the darkness, he could see vague shapes clustered around him. Their smell was revolting. He forced himself not to panic. If he did, he knew very well what they could do to him with their claws.

They were hissing.

Smacking their lips.

Ignoring the pain in his left hand, Kenney slowly, very slowly, reached his right hand towards the switch on the flashlight. As he did so, he felt them touching him with hands like soft, warm mittens.

He turned on the light.

The sudden explosion of brilliance made them cry out and cover their faces, which were like bloated mushrooms. They backed away and he pulled a flare from his tac vest, igniting it. The heat scared them. The light it threw was bright as a welding arc in the darkness. It sent them scurrying, making gobbling and squealing sounds. There had to be a least a dozen of them pulling away like roaches.

Some of them, he saw, were bent over and twisted from the weight of the pink fungus growing on them in slimy mounds. Others were eaten away from it, great chasms where their faces should have been. He saw one with sagging, furry breasts that must have been a woman. She was blown up to grotesque proportions, a shivering pink mass set with yellow spines and draping ribbons of crawling fungi in place of her hair. Her hands were like oven mitts.

Then they were gone.

Kenney sat there, gasping for breath, his throat dry with the spores they had been breathing on him.

He tried to rise from the shelf, but his aching left hand was stuck to the wall… but, no, he saw in the light of the flare and flashlight with a shudder of aversion, that wasn’t it at all. Not stuck but tied with strings. Except these strings were mucid and alive, growing right out of the wall like roots and into his hand.

Nearly hysterical at the sight of it, he yanked and pulled with everything he had but the tendrils held tight.

The more strength he put to it, the more it felt like his skin would peel off as if the strings had grown deep into the bones of his hand. Still, he yanked and jerked his hand and a great quantity of the creepers emerged from the wall that seemed to be infested with them.

He took the flare and put its burning end on them.

The tendrils tried to pull away from the heat, then crisped and withered and blackened, dropping out of his hand. The others began to push almost angrily from the wall, coiling and corkscrewing.

Kenney didn’t wait around to see what they were going to do. The flare in one hand and the riot gun in the other, he fled.