could not hear what her grandmother was saying.
The cup hugirngsi stood before them, looking just as it had in the videotape, its horridly ancient baby face twisted with hate and a sickening sort of glee. The whiteness of its skin seemed suddenly phosphorescent, lit from the matetial of its substance and not from the weak beams of the flashlights.
Rich's scream spiraled upward in intensity, shifting from anger to agony, and was cut off suddenly as Sue's flashlight hand was hit with an unexpected wash of liquid warmth. The preacher had bitten into Rich's neck, into the artery, and was vainly trying to drink the spurting blood.
Rossiter and Buford pulled the screaming Wheeler off Rich's spastically convulsing body, and without a word, without a sound, without a second's hesitation, Robert stabbed the preacher through the chest, ramming in his spear as far as it would go, pushing it in farther with the weight of his body as he leaned on it. Wheeler stopped screaming, his eyes bulged, and blood pumped from the skin around the spear and from his still open lips. : This wasn't tight. This was not what was supposed to happen.
Sue faced the cup hugirngsi, spear thrust outward, dimly aware that her grandmother was doing the same. It was chaos in here, no one knew what they were doing. They were all going to die. Rossiter was shooting.
He had brought a gun, against her grandmother's specific instructions, and he was firing it at the cup hugirgsi, the reports echoing painfully in the chamber and blocking out all screams, all other sounds. The first slug tipped a hole through the monster's stomach, and for a brief millisecond there was a glimpse of red, a liquid swirling within the hole, and then the opening was gone, skin covering it up as if it had never existed. The slug immediately after it went through the monster's eye. There was a red hole, and then the eye returned. The other bullets, through the forehead and chest, created equally short-lived wounds that disap
Woods was on one knee, bending over Rich, pressing down on his convulsively jerking body.
Sue pointed her flashlight at the cp hugirngsi. Perhaps it had been playing with them. Perhaps, as her grand mother had suggested, it wanted to make its presence known to the world. Perhaps it had merely been bored and wanted a challenge. Whatever the impetus behind its decision to lure them here, it was not playing now. There was demonic purpose in its eyes, determination in its malevolent expression.
And yetw i : wit was afraid.
She knew it, knew it instantly, clearly, perfectly. It was not an insight or a revelation, not something that she discovered or that blossomed within her mind, it was simply there, in her brain, as though it was something she had always known.
D/Lo Ling Gum.
She was aware now, also, of the streams on the surface above them. She could feel the power in the twin flows of water even through the layers of dirt and rock above their heads. The streams were weak; beginning to drift at this point, but they were still there and still flowing east.
And they ran in converging paths on either side of the
The monster could move neither to the left nor to the right. It could only move toward them or away from them. It was trapped. :: Her grandmother was aware of it, too. Neither of them had spoken, but each was aware of what the other thought and felt, and it was as if they were one mind with two bodies as, willow spears extended, they stepped forward.
Sue sensed that something had been planned, that something big had been about to happen, and that they had stopped it before it started. They had thwarted the
But it was even more frightened.
The cup hug/rngs/hissed. All pretensions of humanity had fled. There was no charismatic dulcet-toned voice, no face or form borrowed from human minds, there was only this spitting, hissing thing, this ancient monster with its hate-twisted baby face and strange skinny body with its long growths of unnatural hair. Inside the terrible mouth, double rows of too many teeth chattered and clicked.
Sue felt pressure in her mind, as though her thoughts were surrounded by a wall, and something huge and powerful was butting against that wall, but it seemed surprisingly easy to keep that pressure at bay. She shoved her spear forward, tried to stab the cup hug/rgs/.
It backed away, hissed again, a sound like wind, like water.
This close, she could feel the coldness radiating from the monster, waves of increasingly arctic air that felt painful on her skin and made her want to flee, get away.
It was afraid of them.
Her grandmother stepped forward, tried to spear the cup hugirngsi, but her weapon swung on a slight arc to the left, and before she had a chance to adjust, to pull back, the creature's long, thin hand swiped toward the old woman's head.
A spear embedded itself in the cup hugirngs's upper arm, causing it to yank the arm back with a tortured scream. '
Another spear flew through the air, hit it in the face.
Rossiter,
Buord
Sue rushed forward, through the cold, the screaming wind water sound so loud that it hurt her ears, and with all of her might she shoved her sharpened branch of willow into the monster's stomach.
Blood exploded, flying outward, splashing everything, everyone. The monster's body crumpled, its form instantly losing shape, skin flapping like a deflated balloon as the crimson tide sloshed onto the ground in a truly amazing flood. There were no bones inside the body, no organs, only the blood, an astounding amount of it that continued to flow out of the sinking figure in a seemingly endless stream. It bubbled on the hard floor, boiling, percolating downward through the rock, but on Sue's body it felt cool and flat and dead, and as she glanced quickly around the chamber, she saw that the blood was not hurting or affecting anyone else either.
'He's dead,' Woods announced behind her, and for a second she thought he meant the cup hugirngsi, but then she realized he was talking about Rich. A twisting hurt ripped through her, and she wished the cup hugirngsi was alive so she could kill it again.
Had it ever been alive?
She turned toward her grandmother, threw her arms around the old woman.
She felt exhausted all of a sudden, and she needed someone to hold on to. She was dimly aware that the moment's connection the two of them had shared was gone, but she didn't really care. Tears were streaming from her eyes, coursing down her cheeks, but she was not crying. Not yet.
There was movement around her, but she seemed not to know what it was and not to care, the actions of her companions now trivial and irrelevant to her. Her grand mother pulled away from her, touched her cheek, then bent down to pick up her spear.
There was nothing left of the cup hugrngsi now but the empty formless hull of its body, and her grandmother began speaking quietly to herself in that unfamiliar dialect as she moved next to it. Pushing up the sleeves of her blouse, the old woman wrapped the leathery skin and its irregular tufts of blood-soaked albino hair around her spear until it resembled a bulging, soggy, rolled-up carpet. She held the wrapped skin in front of her, lifting it as though it weighed nothing, and Sue followed her through the chamber's narrow doorway and down the rounded runnel the way they'd come.
The others were not following, and Sue did not know what they were doing, but right now that didn't matter.
It was over.
It was done.
She followed her grandmother up the ladder and into the church. The black walls and painted windows seemed glaringly bright after the darkness underground, and the afternoon sunlight streaming through the still-open doors was painful in its intensity.
Unfazed, unhesitating, her grandmother walked through the doorway and, with a grunt and a push, threw the skin and the spear outside, into the sunlight. The skin unfurled a bit and lay on the cement for a moment before it started to hiss and steam. The long tufts of hair blackened withered; the skin began to bubble. A moment later, there was nothing left but a pool of sticky pinkish liquid on the top of the church steps.
Both she and her grandmother were sweating and soaked with still-wet blood. They looked like monsters themselves, but for the first time in a long while, Sue felt good. It would not last long, she knew. The horrors would catch up with her ore quickly than she wanted or probably could handle, but for now she felt fine. She reached out,
