“ Kung Pow?” Struletz asked.
“Oh, that was minor,” Barb said, laughing. “The original was worse. And there are much, much worse martial arts movies than that.”
She shone her light down the passage and was pleasantly surprised to find that from the top, she could see for nearly sixty feet. The passage, viewed from her lofty vantage, was a series of domes covering the serpentine lower portion. There were still bends, and there were spots that the light didn’t illuminate; indeed, there were small nooks and crannies that were going to be hard to check out, but she could cover the team very well from up here. The only problem being that the irregular oval top portion she currently was standing in was short enough she was having to bend nearly double. But she’d be able to stand up in the next dome. At least if she did the whole thing with her legs spread across the passage. That was going to be unpleasant.
“I won’t say what you look like from down here,” Janea said. “But you’d better be glad you’re not wearing a skirt.”
Barb pulled both legs to one side of the passage, bracing on the far side with one hand, and held out her right.
“Toss me Lazarus,” she said.
“You’re joking,” Janea said.
“He can make his way through up here,” Barb said. “And he’s better at spotting these things than we are.”
“Okay,” Janea said, coaxing the cat over then standing up with him in her arms. “I’m not very good at throwing.”
“Let me,” Randell said, taking the cat. Lazarus was looking notably worried but he allowed himself to be manhandled. “Catch.”
Randell tossed the cat vertically, eliciting a startled “Rrow?!” but he tossed him high enough and accurately enough that Barb was able to make a fair catch.
“You’ve got point,” she said, setting Lazarus on a more-or-less flat spot. “Head on out.”
Where the domes were, the passage became, from her position, an oval tube, slightly serpentine, with a very wide crevasse in the middle. Most of the time she could make her way along in a crouch to the side of the lower passage on the slightly slanted floor. Other times she braced with one hand and moved from one side of the lower passage to the other. Sometimes she had to spread and duck-walk, especially in the short lower portions between domed areas. Those would have been the unfun portions where she couldn’t see what was awaiting her in the dark nooks to either side. But then there was Lazarus.
In a similar way, but easier because he was shorter, four-legged, and, well, a cat, Lazarus was more or less trotting down the passage, his tail flicking from side to side for balance and occasionally jumping across the crevasse when one side or the other became nonnegotiable. He was, in fact, getting very near the limit of Barb’s light.
“Slow down, Laz,” Barb said.
“Tell him to slow down?” Attie said. “ You slow down. We’re barely keeping up and we’re walking.”
“It’s clear,” Barb said, squatting on one foot and bracing across the passage with the other. She was in one of the narrower entries to a dome, and the crack to the lower passage was barely six inches wide. “This is a really strange formation.”
“The upper passage is formed when an underground river finds a portion of softer rock,” Attie said, taking a pause under her position. “That’s the upper tube. Over time, it wears away at the lower rock, again finding channels through it, until it either dies, goes to easier rock to wear away, or whatever. Generally it forms something like this. They’re fairly common.”
“First one I’ve seen,” Barb said. “Everybody good?”
“Except for the drying mud caked in my hair, ears and nose?” Janea asked. “Peachy.”
“Good,” Barb said, shining her light towards Lazarus. The cat had gone to full “Halloween cat” mode, back arched, tail straight up and bristled into a bush. “We’ve got company! IR mode!”
The Sure-Fire built into the end of the boxy weapon had a flipped-down cover. Flipping it up, the light apparently disappeared. In fact, it was now filtered entirely for infrared. As the whole team followed suit, the light in the passage disappeared entirely.
Dropping her FLIR down, Barb regained sight of the passage, the gun-light now acting as an infrared spotlight.
“Laz!” Barb yelled. “Get out of there!”
Her connection to the cat was something she barely understood. As far as she could comprehend it, they weren’t even two different individuals. The type of soul that was necessary for Barb to resurrect the cat was an indivisible part of a human being. To bring Lazarus back to life had required sharing the soul. They were now one being in two separate bodies.
She wasn’t sure what would happen if Lazarus was ever killed. But she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be pleasant. The highest probability was that she would also die.
Cats rarely obey orders but they do have a certain amount of common sense. As a tide of blackness roiled down the passageway, the cat turned and bolted for the rear, jumping lithely from side to side of the passage. However, as he passed Barb, he yowled a warning.
“We’ve got company at the rear,” Barb said, flicking the light around to look over her shoulder. More of the Old Ones were clambering down the upper passageway behind her. “Could use some help here.”
“On my way,” Randell said, starting to chimbley up the passage.
“ No time,” Barb said, opening fire on the group to the front.
The. 45-caliber frangible rounds poured into the mass of Old One spawn, blasting the two in the lead into a pile of ichor and goo. Unfortunately, that had forced her to clock out her magazine.
She dropped the mag, not even bothering to catch it for a reload, and slid another in, fumbling the replacement slightly due to the unfamiliar weapon.
The Old Ones had gotten into the domed area by then, spreading out to either side, with a couple coming across the roof. She took those out, and one of the ones on the walls then backed up so that they would have to come through the narrow portion to get her.
She could hear Randell firing from behind her and just hoped he could keep the mass to the rear off her back.
Master Sergeant Attie had moved to the opening below her and engaged the Old Ones above him in the domed area. His fire was solid and precise, the. 45-caliber rounds shredding every Old One in sight. With the narrowness of the passage overhead, there was no way that they could get to the party from above. They had to either come at them on the floor or get past Barb to the wider portion behind her.
“I’m good,” Randell said. “No more this way.” He was actually perched with his back braced to either side of the passage in a domed section, so he had a pretty good view.
“And we’re clear here,” Master Sergeant Attie said as the last Old One dropped in a splatter to the floor.
“Shamblers,” Janea said, reloading her weapon. She’d been covering the floor below Randell. “They’re easy enough with the right weapons. I’m not looking forward to running into another skru-gnon.”
“Anybody get a count?” Attie asked.
“About seven your way,” Struletz said. “Three to the rear.”
“How many of these things are there?” Randell asked angrily. He’d slid down the passage to the floor again and reloaded. He also reloaded his expended magazines.
“At a guess, it depends how long the Gar has been manifested and how much it’s had to eat,” Janea said, shrugging and starting to reload her magazines from the stores they’d brought with them. “The Gar spins these things off of its essence. If it’s been manifested for a short time and the food is limited, a few dozen. If it’s been a long time and pretty much unlimited food? Thousands?”
“We don’t have enough ammo for thousands,” Struletz pointed out.
“Catch,” Attie said, tossing Barb’s refilled magazine to her. “That hit me in the helmet, by the way.”
“Sorry,” Barb said, shrugging. “I wasn’t exactly going to try to reholster it under the circumstances.”
“Nope, we’re good,” Attie said. “Move out?”
“Let’s take an alert break,” Barb said, thoughtfully. “That little firefight is bound to have attracted some
