Hot Tamale was alone.
She did not know where Herb was or any of the others. And right then, she would have been glad to see even Tommy Kastle and his big goddamned mouth. Because she was in a real fix now. During the attack, after Herb had been separated from her, she’d run blindly, trying to escape and had ended up here, down in the cellar. She’d found a room. A small room that seemed defensible…and then the floor had given out, plunging her into the blackness below.
She had lost her shotgun.
Had nothing but some roadflares now in their waterproof containers.
She was in the cellar, she supposed, the water right up to her waist. The room was long and narrow and the only door she’d found was wedged tight, swollen in its frame, no doubt. So she waited there in the flooded darkness with a flare in her hands, the sputtering flame throwing jumping, greasy shadows in every direction.
Yes, just her.
And the beetles.
She could feel them in the water. Nipping, scratching, cold and oily. They were whipping through the air like flying gravel, seeking soft flesh and warm blood to torment. They got into her hair and worried at her throat. Only the flare drove them off.
The beetles made another run at her, buzzing and whirring. She ducked her head under, kept only the flare above the water.
She surfaced then, drenched and shivering and filthy with mud. The storm of beetles was gone. She pulled a few stragglers off her arm, searching frantically around for shelter, for an oasis, but there was none to be had. She had to get out of here. Somewhere out of the reach of the water and the beetles.
Something bumped into her and she screamed.
The drifting corpse of child.
It was dead, thankfully. She shoved it away and splashed in the other direction, not liking the idea of it being near her.
She waited then, peeling beetles off herself like ticks. They were not so offensive or aggressive when they were not swarming. It was something. She kept wondering what would happen when she used her last flare up.
Don’t think about it.
Steeling herself, she moved further into the room. More corpses. Just floating and lifeless, but offensive all the same. That’s what this room was, a river of floating debris and beetle-covered corpses now.
She felt something brush by her in the water, something undulating and smooth. She let out a cry, stumbled to the side, thinking there was a big snake in the water. And although Hot Tamale was not afraid of many things, snakes were one of them. She caught a glimpse of something that roiled the surface, something squirming and whipping. It rose up, dusky and shiny and serpentine, like the tentacle of some abyssal squid, then simply slipped back into the drink.
Hot Tamale could feel her heart in her throat, thudding like a tom tom.
Noise.
She whirled around, looking and searching and wishing to God she still had her shotgun. There was a rippling not fifteen feet behind her. The flickering yellow light from the flare reflected off the surface of the water which was black as gushing oil. The rippling became a whirlpool that grew and grew and then more of those snake-like tentacles rose up, whipping and slinking in a pulsing, busy net. They broke the surface like swamp roots. And then, from the center of that twisting helix, the form of a man rose up and up and up. He was dark and slimy like he’d been rubbed down with fat, his face utterly gray just as his eyes were utterly yellow.
Hot Tamale screamed, diving and fighting away. She found herself beneath the hole that she’d fallen through. There was no way she could get back up there. Just no way. She looked around frantically. She could hear water running, see it flowing down the walls like a waterfall. Everything as ebon and still and lifeless as some waterlogged tomb.
Jesus, what was that, what sort of thing was that?
Think, she told herself, just think now. No time for anything else.
She moved through the darkness slowly, carefully like some miner in a flooded cavern. It was so dark she couldn’t see her own hands, let alone anything else. Bobbing things, biting things, refuse and just about anything that wouldn’t sink. She located the wall, planned on following it back to the door. She had to get it to open, she just had to. She guided herself forward, things crawling across her fingers, water dripping from above and running down her face like sweat.
The doorway.
There it was.
It had to give, it just had to.
Something brushed her leg and she screamed again, falling into the water, the flare going out. She came up, pulling another one from her vest and lighting it by twisting the cap.
There. Light.
She moved forward with a half-swimming, half-falling sort of motion, the splashing water echoing like she was trapped in the bowels of a well. She found the wall again, sweaty flagstone, brushed against crates and barrels and shovels hanging from hooks. She kept going and going, moving in circles, but afraid to stand still.
Her throat felt tight and scratchy and she began to sweat. It almost seemed that the darkness was pushing in closer around her and she told herself it was the stirrings of claustrophobia and nothing more-
Then light.
It exploded in the depths of the cellar and Hot Tamale had to put a hand up over her eyes it was so bright. But then she could see that she was at the far wall, nowhere near the doorway. The light was coming from a gas lantern hanging on a peg near where she’d fallen through. It flickered with a jumping amber light.
But somebody had lit it, somebody had…
She didn’t see anyone, though. Just that filthy water sliding around her like those tar pits that drowned animals and a few ripples. Ripples that were building, surging, rolling into swells and tides and breakers. Before her, a man rose up out of the murk and she screamed because she knew it was the one that was part squid and part man and altogether something inhuman.
He stood there, that dark man, dressed in something like tanned, oily hides, dark as snakeskin, that seemed to quiver and convulse like they were connected to some arcane musculature. He wore a shroud beneath. His eyes were yellow coins, his face gray and seamed and skullish. The skin was beaded and shiny like a lizard pelt.
“Who…who the hell are you?” she managed. “What do you want?”
The dark man just stood there, the water around him busy and rippling and roiling. All those tentacles were working and bunching. He glided forward as if something below was towing him and Hot Tamale let out a cry, trying to dash away, but something tripped her up and when she fought out of the water she was less than two feet from him, those eyes burning into her head like embers as something coiled around her legs like heavy cables. The dark man towered over her, staring and staring until her bladder let go with a hot rush and her teeth chattered and something in her belly went loose like an uncoiled spring.
She dropped the flare.
The dark man’s face was covered in beetles as were his hands, they came out of his leathers and nostrils and mouth and then fell away one by one and there was a sudden spray of grume and mucus and vile blood and that face split asunder. In fact, it opened like a flower unfurling its petals so that the buds and blossoms could be marveled over. Hot Tamale saw something like a profusion of tendrils nested together and then they, too, stretched and writhed and opened and there were tentacles…three tentacles, smooth and scummed with jelly and just a bright, vibrant red like fresh spilled blood.
Hot Tamale began to understand then.
This was the Devil. This was Satan. This was what had taken command of the legions of the dead.
“The Devil,” she said, shivering and mad at the sight of him.
She began to recite the Lord’s Prayer, but the dark man just laughed.
“No, not the Devil,” he said. “My name…say it.”
“I…I don’t…”
