Page 8 of Brought to Light
Even though I’d intended to destroy my phone, I wished like hell I still had it. Yeah, the GPS could be used to track me, but better tracked than hopelessly lost. Google Maps seemed like they belonged in another universe from this place. And my phone’s flashlight would’ve been ten times more useful than this hallucinatory piece of shit.
My time sense was pretty good, and it felt like a little more than an hour before I came to anything different: a branch in the passageway, a T-intersection, with tunnels going to the left and right. I scouted down both directions, but I couldn’t smell anything different, didn’t see any more leaves, and couldn’t find so much as a trace of Linden. There were more glowing squiggles on a few of the stones, but I’d passed quite a few others along the way, too. I hadn’t been able to discern any pattern.
Fuck. I hesitated in the intersection, taking a minute to evaluate my situation overall.
The tunnels had plenty of air. Maybe it smelled like mildew and dust, but it wasn’t stuffy. That meant there were outlets—somewhere. I didn’t have any food or water, but weirdly enough, I didn’t feel thirsty or hungry yet. That was a good sign. I’d spent eighteen hours wounded behind enemy lines in Afghanistan once without any supplies, and I’d been fine. I could handle this for at least a couple of days.
I had the flashlight, which didn’t show any signs of flagging any more than its lame baseline level. It wasn’t like the nonexistent batteries were going to run out, after all.
Fifty-fifty. Linden had gone one way or the other. Given my luck lately, I wasn’t sure I liked those odds.
I had a knife in one of my boots, so I pulled it out and marked the wall with an arrow pointing toward the intersection from the direction I’d come from. I could keep doing that; as long as I never passed an arrow pointing the wrong way, I couldn’t go back and forth along the same tunnels like an idiot. Theoretically I could’ve used the glowing symbols to remember where I’d been, but some of them repeated, and they all looked more or less the same anyway.
I hesitated a little longer. This kind of indecision wasn’t normal for me. I’d only stayed alive because I’d gotten so good at making decisions quickly, usually under fire. But the idea of getting out of here, and never knowing what had happened to Linden…it didn’t sit well with me. If he disappeared here, wherever we were, well—technically my job was done.
But if the job got done, it’d be because I’d taken care of it myself, damn it. Letting it get done by default feltwrong. As if, dead or alive, he was my responsibility. And stupid feelings aside, he might still be the key to figuring out who’d wanted him dead in the first place. Jesse was out there somewhere, on the run. I’d be on the run as soon as I had somewhere to run to other than these tunnels. If either of us wanted to live any kind of life once this was over, I needed to use Linden for any information he could provide.
I stood perfectly still and listened, even clicking off the flashlight to give my other senses a chance to compensate. A very distant dripping sound. The faint rush of my own calm breaths.
And then a jagged, horrible scream.
It echoed up and down the tunnels, but it had come from—my left. Definitely my left.
I clicked the flashlight back on and double-timed it down the passage, hoping I wouldn’t hit another junction, since I couldn’t stop to mark the wall.
Because that scream wasn’t the sort of thing you put off checking on. That was terror and pain, and I’d heard enough of both to know.
The timbre of it made me almost certain it was Linden. My heart didn’t pick up, because it never did. But my jaw clenched, and I had to fight a wave of something like fear of my own.
My boots smacked the stone, sending cascading echoes ahead of and behind me. Whoever was fucking with Linden, they’d hear me coming, but I didn’t have a choice. Another scream rang out as I ran, and I put on a fresh burst of speed. I heard something else, too, a weird growling and—slapping? Like a wet towel on concrete. It was unsettling as hell. All the hair on my arms rose, like when you were the prey, not the predator.
Fuck that. This place might be fucked-up and foreign, but that was my normal. And I was the predator everywhere.
The passage ended in another T-junction, but the growling and Linden’s cries were easy to follow, and I swung right and was on top of them.
Some—thing—had Linden pinned against the wall. He was fighting it like a madman, but he was losing. Its jaws snapped right next to his neck, its long arms almost had his pinned, and it scrabbled at him with its clawed feet, trying to gut him like a cat with a rodent.
Even though it had four limbs, its greenish, shiny, slimy surface made it look less human than even the conspiracy theorists’ little gray alien men.
The thing spun its head, showing me glistening flat-white eyes and a mouthful of curved, serrated teeth, and I lifted my hand and put a bullet right in the middle of its forehead. The impact rocked it backward, but the bullet went straight through and cracked against the wall. The deafening report of the gun hit my eardrums like a giant fist. Linden flinched, and the creature’s grip loosened. I lunged forward and caught it by the neck, my fingers sinking in like I’d grabbed a handful of Jell-O. Fuck, it was disgusting, and I flung it as far from me as I could. It hit the ground with a wet splat and didn’t move.
For a second no one moved. Linden panted, staring at me with wide eyes, a shadowy figure in the edge of my flashlight’s weak beam. I had the light trained on the thing I’d shot, and my gun trained on its chest, ready to put another few rounds into it—or through it, as the case might be—if it so much as twitched. Slowly, carefully, I got close enough to nudge it with my foot. No reaction.
It didn’t seem to have any bones, or a skull at least, but apparently a nine-millimeter round directly through the head killed just about anything, thank fuck.
“It’s dead,” Linden said, his voice hoarse.
I kept my eyes on the thing. The longer I examined it, the more bizarre it got. It looked like it was deflating, almost, like it really was made out of gelatin and only sheer willpower had kept it up and moving around. The gooey eye sockets seemed to be seeping into the eyes the longer it lay there. Its eyes weren’t white anymore. I would’ve really liked to look away, but I needed to give it another minute. Tempting to put a few more rounds through it on principle, but I had no idea where we were, how long we’d be here, and what else might be hanging around. I wasn’t going to waste ammunition I might need later.
“You know what this is?”
“Not—exactly,” Linden hedged. He cleared his throat. In my peripheral vision, he straightened up, wincing a little and patting himself down as if checking out the damage. “I knew there were things like this. But I’ve never seen one before.”
“Yeah? Well, that puts you miles ahead of what I know.” I finally stopped staring at the fucked-up oozing thing on the floor. It’d flattened out almost completely, and it was obvious that whatever ‘alive’ meant for it, that was over. I turned to Linden in time to catch another wince. Good. He ought to feel a little guilty.
Linden looked at me almost pleadingly, his eyes round. And maybe that would’ve worked if we were in a bar and he’d been trying to get laid, but right then, standing over the corpse of some monster out of a nightmare that I hadn’t even known could’ve been trying to kill me as I wandered through this Godforsaken labyrinth, it just pissed me off.
“There’s no way for me to explain any of this without making myself sound crazy, in the context of what you consider normal. I know this is so far outside of anything you can understand—I mean, there’s no way to—”
