them.
Breed and McNair did not move.
They stood rooted to the spot, both sweating and trembling as it advanced on them. McNair’s hand was shaking on the flashlight. The beam jumped up and down, almost strobing. He had to put both fists on it to steady it and even then he was only partially successful. The beam cut into the darkness, slicing through the clouds of rock dust and that horrible dry stench became pungent and sickening in the air.
Breed could see something…an eldritch and terrible form given body by the swirling dust. He couldn’t be sure how much of it he saw and how much he imagined. It was roughly the size of man. A semi-visible hunched- over thing, a hazy apparition speckled with dust. It was creeping at them on a dozen spindly legs. He saw reaching arms, an elongated head of undulant tendrils like a nest of writhing, loathsome snakes…and a distorted face: something with clustered pods of eyes.
Then it leaped at them, howling with black hate.
It took McNair first.
It split him from crotch to throat and by the time Breed wiped the blood out of his eyes, he saw it in the glow of the lantern. It was crouched over McNair’s corpse which was bleeding out in a steaming red lagoon. It was spattered red, lapping up blood with juicy, slobbering sounds.
Then it raised its head.
Breed saw three puckering red mouths like blow holes open and shriek in his face with absolute elemental wrath.
Then he started screaming.
17
They heard it.
That same mournful, shrill piping echoing through the cavern. Right away, flashlights were in fists, beams of light searching and searching for the source of that terrible sound. But there was nothing but the honeycombed trunks and the hundreds of petrified trees rising up around them like the mineralized columns of some primal amphitheater. The lights threw a lot of long, narrow shadows around, but nothing else.
Nothing else at all.
“Ain’t nothing up there!” Maki said, his voice nearly delirious. “Not a goddamn thing! She’s there but she isn’t there!”
He was right, of course, and Boyd knew why. The thing making that sound was nowhere near them; it was with Breed and McNair now. As proof of that, they heard the first scream. It was high and wavering and fragmented and it was truly hard to say which of them made it. Only that it sounded out, a cry of absolute agony that was somehow animalistic and keening like an animal being tortured to death, then it was silenced with a wet, gurgling sound that echoed through the cavern.
Maki was crouched next to Boyd now, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, making a low moaning sound in his throat. When his voice came, it was almost a girlish whisper: “It’s killing them, Boyd! It’s killing them now! Tearing them apart and then…then it’ll come for us.”
Jurgens was on his feet, completely overwhelmed by it all. He was the man in charge. He was a leader of men…but now all that was gone and he was completely empty with its passing. His decision-making skills had been squashed flat and he did not know what to do. He moved this way, then that, cursing under his breath and breathing very hard.
Out in the darkness, there was a chittering sound.
Jurgens wiped sweat from his face. He thumbed the walkie-talkie because he had to. “Breed…McNair,” he said into the mic, his voice very low and guarded. “Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Breed! Goddammit! Answer me! Answer me!”
But there was nothing but the futile sound of his own voice echoing away, submerging into the utter blackness of the cavern.
He looked at the other two men, shook his head, and started walking off. There was a look of absolute defeat on his face as if he’d played his best card and had still lost and there was no point in pretending now.
“Jurgens!” Boyd said. “You can’t go out there! For chrissake, whatever it is, it’s trying to draw us out!”
Jurgens wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I have to do something,” he said in a calm and controlled voice.
“Let him go, Boyd,” Maki said, enjoying all this now maybe a little too much. “Let the big man go! Let him run out there and then we can listen to him die, too!”
The chittering rose and fell in regular cycles like crickets enjoying a summer’s night. Only this sound was not crickets, it was too sharp, too piercing, too loud and completely unnatural to be anything as simple as an insect.
“Listen,” Boyd said. “Listen.”
Not the chittering now, but the sound of feet running. Running in their direction. Boyd didn’t know what was out there, but he was pretty sure it did not have feet as such.
Jurgens clicked on his flashlight, put the beam out there to meet whatever was coming. They all saw a vague shape darting and stumbling through a stand of petrified trees. A big shape. Had to be Breed. He was running, looking frantically about him, making a low grunting with the exertion.
“Breed!” Jurgens called out. “Over here, over here!”
That chittering rose up again, became that same strident, inhuman piping. It grew in volume, became almost unbearable like a thousand forks scraped over a thousand blackboards. Breed fought free of the trees and something took him. Took him very fast. One moment he was coming and the next something had him, yanking him up into the air faster than Jurgens’ flashlight beam could follow. He let out a wild, whooping scream and then there was a splattering sound like he’d been broken and squeezed out.
“Jesus,” Jurgens said.
His flashlight beam could find nothing out there. But the posts of those ancient trees were sprayed red and running with blood. You could hear it dripping, landing with a slow plopping sound.
Jurgens just lost it. He tossed his walkie-talkie and started shouting: “McNair! McNair! Breed! You answer me right goddamn now, do you hear me! YOU FUCKING BETTER ANSWER ME! BREED! MCNAIR!”
There was silence for maybe ten seconds while everyone held their breath, curled up into themselves, knowing that what was out there was not only weird and scary, but lethal and devastating.
And then another sound came: that same shrill screeching rising up louder and louder, sounding not only eerie and inhuman, but positively bleak and deranged. It rose and fell and then it did the worst possibly thing. It mocked Jurgens with a scratching, almost mewling sort of sound: “Breeeeeeed! Breeeeeed!” it squealed. “Meeeek-naaaaaar!”
“Oh my Christ,” Jurgens said, going right down on his ass.
That horrible sound echoed away and then there was nothing. Nothing but the darkness gathering around them, concealing nameless things and mutant horrors that cried out in mewling, insane voices.
But Boyd had heard the caliber of it again: female. Not the voice of an adult, but the squealing voice of a little girl.
They all huddled there together in the circle of light and not a one of them thought of moving.
Boyd was thinking of Linda at home, waiting there at the kitchen table with some big breakfast she had prepared to celebrate his first graveyard shift. The eggs would be long cold by now, the pancakes mired in rubbery syrup, the bacon congealed with grease. Alone, scared, she would be waiting by the phone, eight months pregnant and expecting the very worst.
And in his mind, he said: I’m sorry, baby. I’m so fucking sorry. I had a bad feeling about this, but I didn’t get out while I could. And now…oh dear God…now you’re going to be alone and our baby will never know its father.
The tears filled his eyes, breaking hot and wet over his cheeks. His belly knotted up with frustration over it all, over the ugly, black death he was going to die down here in the womb of the earth itself. It was unfair. It was
