so goddamned unfair.
Maki uttered a low, desperate laugh. “I wonder who it’ll get first, cookie. Me or you. Maybe Jurgens.”
“Shut up.”
But Maki, being Maki, did not shut up and maybe by that point he didn’t even know how. “It’s got us where it wants us,” he breathed. “Whatever that thing is. Whatever we’ve woken up down here after a million, million years. It has us where it wants us and we’re just meat, nothing but meat now.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Boyd told him, because, by God, compound fracture or no, if that whiny, beaten, gutless little weasel did not shut his mouth and shut it soon, he was going to wrap his hands around his fucking neck and squeeze until his eyeballs popped out of his head.
“Sure, cookie. Hee, hee. I’m quiet as a mouse.”
Boyd laid there, breathless, terrified, waiting for that thing to come, knowing it had been down here all these many, many eons. A nightmare out of the Permian. Had it waited alone for 250 million years in the darkness? Was that even remotely possible? Or had it simply woken from cold dormancy when the air filled the dusty silence of the chamber and ended its 250 million year nap? He would never know and could not possibly conceive of an answer with his feverish mind. He only knew horror and absolute terror that was physical and crushing.
Just as he knew that what was out there was female.
And it was lonely.
That’s why it had killed Breed and McNair. They were trying to tunnel out, trying to leave it to the darkness again and it couldn’t have that. Not again. That’s why it had tried to communicate by tapping and knocking on the petrified trees. It wanted them to answer back, to acknowledge its presence. There was no way he could know these things, yet he was certain of them. This thing was a horror from the Permian age, something that left no fossilized prints or bones, no clue to its existence or identity for paleontologists to scratch their gray heads over. It was something from the cellar of evolution, a grotesque thing that lived in the shadows of a primeval age. Something that channeled out honeycombed warrens in the immense stumps of primordial trees.
Yes, Boyd knew these things.
Just as he knew they’d be safe if they did not try to leave her. If they stayed, they would be fine, but if they panicked and threatened to entomb her with the mummified relics of her age, she would kill them. He could not know what she was or by what insane circumstances she had survived. But she had. Again, he thought that somehow she must have woken when air rushed into the Permian underworld. Dormant, perhaps, locked in some unbelievable hibernation. That had to be it, unless she had actually been awake down here the entire time. Aware of the passage of millions of years, that awful dead train of time. What would that be like? Trapped in this place, alone in a world turned to stone, alone in the darkness while your mind went to a screaming stew of waste? If that were the case, she would be deranged beyond imagining.
No, I can’t conceive of that, Boyd told himself. Such a thing could not be possible. She must have wakened when the air broke the seal of her tomb. It has to be something like that. She woke down here in the darkness, alone, frightened, confused and probably quite mad.
If such a thing as her could know madness.
She probably wasn’t dangerous, really, as long as they didn’t threaten her with another eternity of solitude. Somehow, they had to communicate with her, give her the company she needed.
Jurgens stood up, shining his flashlight in every direction. “Keep away from us, you hear me? Whatever in the fuck you are, you better keep away from us! You come by us again and we’ll kill you! Do you understand? Do you fucking understand me?”
“Don’t,” Boyd told him. “Don’t do that…don’t threaten her.”
“Breeeeeeeeeeed!” came the wailing voice. “Meeeek-naaaaaar!”
Maki was sobbing under his breath. “It’s a ghost,” he was saying. “We’re trapped down here with a ghost.”
Boyd was going to tell him he was wrong, but maybe he wasn’t. There was no way you could catalog that thing. Maybe it was alive and maybe it wasn’t. Either way, Maki was right: she was a shadow, a wraith from antiquity.
The chittering rose up again and it was very close now.
Jurgens moved in a circle. “Get the fuck away from us!”
Maki was with him now, brandishing his flashlight like a weapon.
“Don’t,” Boyd said. “Dear Christ, don’t do that…”
What seemed mere feet away, she let out a whining, pathetic shriek of utter agony and desolation and loneliness. The sound terrified Boyd and mainly because he heard the desperation in her voice, the cold cawing of millions of years that had scraped her mind raw. But Jurgens and Maki did not understand that. She was just a monster and they planned to deal with her as men had always dealt with monsters.
They ran at the direction of her voice and it was the worse thing they could have done. Maybe she did not understand the hateful things they called out to her or the threats they made, not in words, but she understood the tone. She knew she was threatened and she responded accordingly.
Boyd saw it happen and was powerless to stop it.
Something incredibly fast and unseen hit Jurgens. Hit him hard, tearing his throat out with a spray of meat and blood that splashed against the petrified trees and struck Boyd in the face, hot and steaming. Before Maki could utter so much as a cry of surprise, she took him, too. Boyd heard something thud into him and he was yanked high up into the air like a meat hook had caught him between the shoulder blades. Boyd heard him scream from the tops of those trees. A scream that was silenced by something wet shoved into his mouth. And then Boyd saw a blur of moment and Maki’s corpse landed not four feet from him, its face threaded with blood, eyes wide and staring, mouth yawning wide, unnaturally so, as if something had been forced in there that dislocated his jaws.
Boyd heard himself begin to sob.
Jurgen’s corpse was up there somewhere and Boyd could hear blood dripping earthward like a gentle rain. Plop, plop, plop. The light of the lantern illuminated the forest to about twenty feet up and he could see the glistening red drops rolling down the trunk of a petrified seed fern. He was hearing other sounds, too.
The sound of chewing.
And wet sucking sounds.
He felt his mind go. It vacated his brain with nary a scream or a mad peal of laughter. It just went and he was content with that.
He heard her coming down the trunk of a tree with the skittering sound of dozens of legs. She paused on the log that had broken his leg, not five feet away. He could hear her breathing.
But he could not see her.
In that same scraping, almost metallic squeal of a voice, she said, “Booooooyyyyyd?”
He was looking right through her, looking at something that cast no image, something invisible and ancient and lonely. She uttered a cooing sound that made his flesh crawl.
“It’s okay,” he said, cold sweat running down his face. “I won’t hurt you…I won’t leave you…”
She moved forward, cooing.
Yes, she was coming for him now.
And he knew she wasn’t going to kill him. She had responded to him right from the first and he knew it. He heard her crawl atop Maki’s corpse. She smelled ancient and dry, like hay stored in a closed-up barn. Maki’s head was lifted up and something stabbed into his throat. There was a sucking, slurping noise.
“Oh no,” Boyd whispered under his breath. “Oh Jesus…”
That slurping sound continued and he saw blood…a stream of blood being sucked from Maki’s throat with gulping sounds like a thirsty man downing a beer. The stream of blood was sucked into the air, probably into her mouth, then it diffused into several rivulets and filled several kidney-shaped sacs that must have been her stomachs…all three of them.
Boyd watched.
He heard her make smacking sounds as she finished up.
He was shaking, and moaning deep in his throat and that wasn’t from what he had just seen, but from what she was doing: stroking his arm with something like a spurred finger. And cooing in his ear.
