“Hell if I know,” Sean told him. “Come on.”
He directed us through the heaped wreckage, pawing through cobwebbed corridors. The masonry was crumbling around us. There were rat droppings everywhere. Sean found a human skull, kicked it, and laughed when it bounced off the wall and dropped neatly into a garbage can.
“Two points,” he said.
A few bats were disturbed from their daytime sleep and winged angrily over our heads.
“Gah,” Specs said. “I really hate bats.”
“Least they’re normal bats,” Sean said. “Ain’t the size of condors and got teeth like jaguars, laugh like hyenas. Seen a colony of ‘em like that over in Detroit-Shoreway. Enough to give you fucking nightmares for a month.”
He brought us through the garage and into a smaller room just off it. The ceiling was arched, fallen masonry on the floor. It not only smelled damp and fusty, but like warm decay and the reason for that soon became apparent.
There was the corpse of a woman in there.
“Oh God,” Specs said.
The corpse was hung by the feet with rope, tied off to a beam above. It was just as white as boiled bone, looked like the blood had been drained from it drop by drop. It had been opened from belly to crotch and what had been inside was scooped free, leaving a great hollow. It looked like a side of beef in a slaughterhouse.
Sean waved the flies away from it with the barrel of his shotgun.
He stood there, nodding, intrigued by what he was seeing. He had a . 44 magnum in a green Army-style web belt at his waist. There was a big Marine K-bar knife on the other hip, as well as a big hatchet and an empty white potato sack. I didn’t want to know what that was for and he wasn’t saying.
“See here?” he said. “She’s been eaten on. Here and here. See the teeth marks?”
I saw them. The corpse was riddled with gouges and scratches. It looked like something had taken a bite out of her shoulder. Her vagina was missing.
“They like private parts, them Trogs,” Sean explained. “Don’t ask me why. Guts first, then the privates. I hung her up here yesterday morning and they must’ve went at her last night.”
“You did this?” Specs said.
“She was dead already, little man. I just used her as bait.”
It was sickening. He was obsessed with those things. The world had ground to a halt and he was carefree and happy hunting mutants. There was something very disturbing about that.
“They’re not still around, are they?” I said.
Sean told me we had nothing to worry about. He had a theory that the underdwellers only came out at night like B-movie vampires because they had been living under the streets for so long, hiding in cellars and drainage ditches and sewers, that their eyes couldn’t take the sunlight anymore. Like burrowing worms or moles or bats. It was a good theory, I thought, and it made sense. For the underdwellers-or Trogs as we called them-were essentially nocturnal like cave-dwellers, troglodytes. The radiation had started it; the darkness took care of the rest.
“They only come out at night,” he said and I had absolutely no reason to dispute what he said.
I went over closer to the body. It was as revolting as any corpse and by that point I’d seen so many- especially after working on that clean-up crew-that it took quite a bit to gross me out. It smelled pretty bad, but it wasn’t the decay I was smelling but something sharp and acrid, almost like cat pee mixed with ammonia if you can imagine that.
“Smell it, don’t ya?” Sean said. “You know what that is, brother?”
I told him I didn’t.
“That’s Trog piss. Once you get a smell of it, you never forget it. See, Trogs like eating dead things. They ain’t against taking you or me down and eating our ‘nads on a stick, but what they like is something kind of soft, rotten…seasoned up, so to speak. They mark their goodies by pissing on ‘em kind of like dogs marking territory.” He showed me his wrist. There was old scar tissue there. “See that burn? Trog piss. Had one of ‘em piss on me once. Shit burns.”
Specs wouldn’t come by the corpse. Even with working the clean-up crew, he was looking a little green. And that was mostly Sean’s talk more than anything.
“I can smell it, too,” he said. “But it’s over here.”
He was standing by a doorway. A set of steps led down into the darkness. Sean went over there right away. As ridiculous as it sounds, he went down on his hands and knees sniffing like a bluetick hound. “Yup. Trog piss. One of ‘em must have marked this spot. Bet you ten to one we got us a Trog down there in the basement. Who’s for taking a look?” He stood up. “How about you, little man?”
“Me?” Specs said.
Sean laughed. “You ain’t got the balls. I’ll go down.”
Specs stepped in front of him. “I’ll do it.”
Sean smiled. “Listen for ‘em. They breathe real loud.”
I didn’t like it. Specs was one of those guys that must have been a toilet in another life because he always took shit. But he didn’t like to be challenged. He felt the need to prove himself.
“I’ll go with,” I said.
Specs gave me a look. “I don’t need you.”
He turned on his helmet light, took out his. 357, and down he went. I told him to be careful. I didn’t like any of this. I had a cigarette and I was nervous as hell. I always looked after Specs. I didn’t like Sean pulling this macho shit on him, goading him like that.
“He’ll be all right,” Sean told me.
“He fucking better be,” I said.
Sean gave me a hard look and I gave it right back. If anything happened to Specs, I was going to kill him and I think he knew it. We watched each other.
The minutes ticked by.
8
It wasn’t long before Specs let out a scream and came jogging up the steps, his eyes wide behind his glasses, his brow beaded with sweat. There were cobwebs on his coat.
“OH GOD! OH MY FUCKING GOD!” he cried out, absolutely hysterical. “IT’S DOWN THERE! I SAW IT! IT LOOKED RIGHT FUCKING AT ME! DON’T GO
He was ready to jump out of his skin. He was shaking and gasping for breath and I held onto him until he calmed down. Sean was smiling; he thought it was funny as hell.
“They ain’t too active in the day, little man,” he said.
“Bullshit,” Specs said. “This one looked pretty fucking active.”
“I’ll take a look.”
“You better not go down there,” Specs warned him.
Sean went anyway. He clicked on his helmet lamp, racked his shotgun, and started down. He made it maybe three steps and came right back up, backing all the way. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“We got one coming up into the light.”
I felt a clammy chill run up my spine and there was good reason for it: that piss smell suddenly got stronger. Ammoniated urine and enough to ream the hairs right out of your nose.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Specs suggested.
“Not on your life, brother,” Sean told him. “I been waiting for this.”
