harder; she already began dragging her cane in a desperate attempt to get out before whatever was about to happen did happen.
Just before they passed the glow, the wash of dim light from the real world outside, they heard a voice.
“Abby… Ethan… Come and stay with us…”
It was Madison, but her voice had been twisted and dried, baked into a raspy hiss of its original musical sparkle.
“Madison!” Abby screamed, and there she was, just beyond the daylight, standing almost timid, bleeding from many places. Her head hung from her shoulders and her normally vibrant hair lay limply across her face. She was nude except for the torn flesh yawning open to reveal the red beneath. She raised her arm toward them, it clearly broken in places, twisted and crooked.
“The Captain wants to know things…and if you tell him…he can make you feel wonderful…” Her voice trailed off in a pleasurable hiss of agony. “He really wants to talk to you, Ethan…”
Abby began to cry, screaming repeatedly, “Madison! No!”
Ethan swallowed the building surge from his belly and brought the gun up. He hovered just before the limp hair, where he was sure her head would be, and fired.
Her head exploded out the back, and she leaned forward for a moment then collapsed backwards, the young vibrant beauty now nothing more than a brutalized corpse. Abby screamed a long and mournful scream, joined by many other spiteful voices filled with hatred, a wild calling for vengeance. Ethan played his light around the room and found a large number of corpses, all long dead but their decay incomplete and their flesh dripping with the water of the horrid lake.
He shoved the still-screaming Abby into the mined passage and toward the sunlight. He turned with his revolver held out, warding him from the onrush he was sure would be there but did not find. In its place was a pair of blood red eyes, still just under the edge of the water. He lowered the revolver and saw a black segmented leg gently break the surface and come down softly on the shore. It gripped the ground with its wickedly long talons, which sank deeply into the rock.
Chapter 14
They rushed from the rough cavern, the ceiling hanging low enough they had to hunch over and move slow for final few feet, avoiding carefully the rounded protrusions of rock. The sun screamed its brilliance at them as they came free, and they stumbled down a short incline, the trees stopping their wild progress.
“I can’t believe you shot her!” Abby screamed into his face when they stopped. “How the fuck could you kill Madison, you son-of-a-bitch!” She began pummeling Ethan with both arms, trying desperately to hurt him as he had her.
“Abby! Stop, Abby! It wasn’t Madison. Didn’t you see her?”
“You don’t know that! It was her; I saw her eyes!”
Ethan grabbed her wrists and held her close from behind, both in an attempt to comfort her and stop the battering. “Whatever lives there, in that hole, it had her. She was not Madison.”
“And you know this for sure, you bastard?” she screamed into the trees.
Calmly, he responded, “Yes, I was sure.”
Abby struggled a moment more, then slumped in Ethan’s arms to continue sobbing. The freshness of the air, the warmth of the sun, the fact that they finally broke free of the horrible underground place fell on her like rushing water, and she cried her grief, her anger, and for her hard won freedom. She had proven herself strong; no matter what else may come to her, she knew this one thing with certainty.
“We can’t stay here, Abby. There was something else in the water, something I…we do not want to know about it. We need to leave.”
He released her and began to draw her down the mountain, trailing her by a reluctant arm. She began to stumble after him, not quit done crying herself out. “Where are we going now? Do you even know where we are?”
“We are on the west side of the mountain. We need to make our way back to the east, to where the car is, where Brighton can call for help.”
“Why? You killed her, remember?”
“Abby… There will be questions; we need to file a police report, get all this documented.”
“They can’t do anything now. You shot her, remember?”
Ethan did not reply, but continued to pull her along like a spoiled child mid-tantrum. He was exhausted— every fiber of his body throbbed in weariness, and his feet ached in a way he had never known. However, he knew the sun would not be in the sky much longer and he had to get them both as far away as he could before it set. For some reason, he was sure the thing that was crawling from the water was waiting for darkness.
Abby began to try to use her cane again, and Ethan eased the pace just enough to allow her. The ankle had pretty much gone numb, but it felt squishy and gritty. She was not sure what kind of damage she was doing, but abhorred the idea of being crippled. She could not imagine herself as a photojournalist with a gimp foot.
The thought shocked her. Two people, people her age had died in there, and she was still forward looking, concerned about her future. They were both dead and gone, their futures ending with them. She suddenly felt ashamed at her own selfishness.
The loss that hurt most was Madison. They had known each other for three years: Madison, the young, full- of-life girl, and Abby, the caring, ever-watchful mother figure. Madison had taught her much about living and enjoying life, and Abby taught Madison responsibility, making her study for the nonspecific classes she was taking in college.
Abby knew that Madison had been more than corrupted, she had been ruined, body and soul, and there would have been no saving her, even if she had somehow brought her out of there. Why she had attacked Ethan so, she was not sure. She did know that he was there and available for her to vent her rage, and anyone cold enough to shoot a dear friend, even in that condition was a real bastard, and as soon as they were out of here she was going to break up with him. She never wanted to see him again…or remember this horrible weekend.
The ground became more level and more wild. Trees were thick in every direction: some almost bald, others coated in fine green needles. Nevertheless, it cut their sight down to only a few yards, and they had to snake their way through the thick underbrush. Abby could feel the desperation in Ethan and began to feel the same as the sun descended toward the horizon.
Ethan led her to the left and around the base of the mountain. She was not sure why he went this way but hoped he knew what he was doing—he was the one with hiking experience, after all. She had never spent the night in the woods until they came here, more or less attempted to navigate them.
The forest floor was thick with fallen leaves, and the smell of their decay was comforting in an odd way; it was more of a proper decay than what they had so recently escaped. The refuse did manage to hide the smaller rocks, making their travel more difficult. Ethan discovered the pitfalls first and did his best to steer Abby from them.
The hidden stones and roots more than once twisted Abby’s foot painfully, but Ethan would not let up. The further the sun sank, the faster he wanted to move. Deep inside Abby, there rose a desire as strong as his, and so she did not complain or object. The sun had begun to disappear behind the horizon, just a sliver, and time was racing past them. Abby knew something awful was going to happen and like in a dream, she was helpless to escape it and helpless to give up her escape.
“What are we going to do when it is dark, Ethan? We can’t keep going in the dark, can we?”
“I don’t know, but we are going to try. Do you feel it?”
“Yeah, we are about to be hunted, aren’t we?”
“It feels like it, huh?”
The sun had almost made good its abandonment of the sky when the mountain curbed sharply to the left. Abby found it hard to catch her breath, and her ankle was demanding attention, trying to argue with her to stop and rest. Ethan, as well, was breathing heavily, but fear set his face like a mask comfortably embracing determination. Then the sun fell from sight, and the sky grew a deep, pale purple.
