Ghost Hunters (8 page)

F
or the first time ever, Dick was glad Amy chewed so much gum. Every twenty or thirty feet, he found another of her wrappers or a wad of the pink stuff stuck to the floor or wall. It was a perfect trail to follow back to the surface. “Thank you, Amy,” he whispered to the darkness. “You fucking bitch.”

Despite everything that had happened, Dick felt a lightness in his heart. The weight of all the secrets, of all that crushing debt, had been lifted from his shoulders. This hadn’t been his plan,
it really
hadn’t been his plan, but he couldn’t deny that having his whole crew wiped out had turned out to be quite a blessing. With their deaths explained away by the horde of mutants rampaging beneath the decaying mountains of Pitchfork county, most of his problems were gone. The footage, after some careful editing, would be worth a fortune. He was going to come out of this a hero. A
rich
hero.

He just had to get out of here with the camera.

Randall’s screams echoed through the tunnels, bouncing and rebounding in all directions. Dick had to trust the bubble gum trail to lead him out, because the sounds were scrambling his sense of direction. Half the time, it sounded like Randall was right up ahead of him; the other half, his voice was far behind Dick, chasing through the darkness.

“Just watch for the gum,” Dick whispered to himself and pushed on into the darkness. “Just get back to the surface, and all your problems are over.”

In the darkness, impossibly close, the cries of hunters echoed.

D
ick ran, the camera jostling at his hip. He didn’t care what the footage of his escape looked like, he just needed the camera’s light. He needed to find the next piece of gum. He heard more howls, more
ticktickticking
, and knew the bat people were on his trail.

Panic gripped his heart in a fist of barbed wire. Had he got turned around? Had he missed a turn and was now running blindly into an ambush? Everything looked the same in the bouncing beam of the camera’s light, an endless labyrinth of stone walls and gaping tunnels. He imagined the camera’s battery failing before he found the surface, the light flickering, dimming, and then nightmare-filled darkness closing in on him. He ran faster, flicking the camera from side to side, searching for the next pink glob.

He skidded past a wad of bubble gum, and nearly fell over in his hurry to turn around. Dick caught himself before he dropped the camera or fell to the floor, and headed down the passage as fast as he dared.

The tunnel wound and looped around on itself, tracing a much more convoluted path than Dick remembered from the trip in. He’d been so focused on what he was doing, so intent on getting the footage he needed to save himself and his crew, he’d hardly noticed the difficult terrain they’d crossed.

Dick stopped for a moment, wiping his brow with the back of his hand and taking a deep breath. He could hear voices, but he wasn’t sure how far away they were, or what they were saying. It could have been Nancy and Liz, it could have been Amy and Randall, or it could have been scouts for the pale-faced killers. All Dick was getting were wordless whispers, a low murmuring that made his stomach tighten with fear. At this point, there was no one he wanted to meet down in the darkness. They all had a reason to want him dead.

He crouched with his back against the wall, camera light sprayed across the floor, and waited for the voices to resolve themselves. But he couldn’t pin them down, and they weren’t getting any clearer by the time the camera began to beep.

Dick turned the camera this way and that, trying to figure out why the camera was chirping. On the bottom of the camera, he found his answer - the power meter was deep into the red.

Sweat beaded across his face, and his stomach clenched. Dick had no idea how long the battery had been dying on him. He might have an hour of light left. He might have a few seconds.

Dick bolted away from the wall, searching for blobs of pink bubble gum, praying he’d find the ladder before the battery gave out and he was plunged into impenetrable darkness.

R
andall’s knee swelled inside his jeans, pumping a never-ending stream of pain directly into the center of his brain. He’d known this trip was bullshit, that it was going to go sideways, but he’d come along anyway. Not because he was stupid, but because he’d believed in Dick’s vision. Randy had worked on a lot of shows, but he’d never seen anyone so dedicated to success as Dick. “Should’ve been a warning,” he grunted, and went back to single-mindedly dragging himself across the cold stone floor. The fiends were howling behind him, but they seemed more preoccupied with Amy than with pursuing Randall. He just kept on crawling, watching as Dick turned his back and walked away. He didn’t know what else to do.

The incline was tough for Randall. He dragged his bulk up onto the sloping stone, but with only one good leg, he couldn’t gain any ground. He’d pull with his hands then slide back down. He laid his head on his arms and pinched his eyes against a flood of hot tears. “Fuck,” he cursed, “just fuck me.”

Snickers crackled behind Randall. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked back, a sob escaping from his lungs. A handful of the freaks were crouched behind him, filthy men and women clad in ragged pants and tattered work boots, but little else. Their bodies were covered in scars and sores, the marks of lives lived on the very edge of survival. Their faces were cast in deep shadows by the harsh blue light, wrinkles like ravines carved into their faces by years of hard living.

But their eyes gleamed with a spark of life that Randall had never seen. They were monsters, people who had turned away from the world to become something dark and dangerous, but they were more alive than Randall had ever imagined possible.

A woman, her hair hanging in stringy clumps over her scarred breasts, reached for his wounded leg. Randall watched as she gripped his heel and tugged, flooding him with a pain so intense it transcended his very existence. He bit back on a scream as the agony wound itself into his skull and took over. He stared down at the freak, watched as she seized his pant leg in both hands and ripped it apart at the seams. His swollen leg was dark in the strange light, a deep purple, almost black, expanse of flesh bulging over the top of his high-top tennis shoes like a popped can of biscuits. She lowered her mouth to his leg, a growled warning keeping her companions clear. If this motley group of ate-up freaks had a leader, she was it.

Randall heaved his torso up and locked his arms down behind him. Faced with his own death, he found he was out of fear. In some way, he’d been living in the shadows his entire life. First, as the dumpy shy kid no one ever noticed, then as a cameraman who witnessed the world without ever being part of it. Now, at the end, he’d become the center of someone else’s world. Even if she was going to eat him, Randall found himself enthralled by the bat-faced woman.

The slick sharpness of her teeth pierced the swollen flesh of his leg. The penetration released the pressure of the swelling, and blood geysered into her mouth and onto her face and chest. His skin parted around the punctures, tearing open in zigzag lines that revealed well-marbled meat.

He’d never experienced such agony. He screamed and tried to jerk his wounded leg away, but the woman held him fast. She drank from the wound, plunging her face into it, chewing and sucking. It reminded Randall of the sound nursing babies made, the unapologetically greedy slurping of a creature that existed as a vessel for its hungers.

A dull tingling spread from Randall’s fingers and toes, creeping up his arms and legs. His eyes fluttered, and the reality of his own end began to seep through Randall’s pain. He was dying.

“Wait,” he gasped.

The woman raised her mouth from his wound, blood plastering her hair into slick ropes that framed her demonic face. “We must feed,” and she turned to the gaping tear again. Her companions fidgeted around her, their eyes wide and lips wet with hunger. “We need our strength for the migration.”

Randall nodded. A sick thought wormed its way through his blood-starved brain. “We can help each other. Take me with you.”

The freaks shuffled from side to side and looked at one another with dubious glances. The woman pulled herself up Randall’s legs like a lizard climbing a fallen log. She straddled the bulk of his gut, and shoved her face at him. Her mouth was inches from his own, dark eyes blazing with feverish intensity. “Why would I take you, pig?”

Randall lay still, prey instinct freezing him under the slight weight of his predator. He was afraid any wrong move, any perceived threat from him, and she’d tear his throat out without hesitation. “How long do you think I can feed you if you just take what you need every day?”

The woman sniffed at his lips, almost touching Randall’s face with her own. “Can you walk?”

“I can try,” Randall whispered.

“If you fall,” she shrugged and gestured to the hungry faces behind her.

“I won’t.” Randall looked down, afraid to meet the woman’s eyes.

She darted at him like a snake, and her teeth bit into his lower lip. She sucked blood from his injured lip and stared into his eyes then pulled away, stretching his skin.

Randall whimpered and stared at the woman, his eyes pleading for mercy. He saw himself reflected in her cold, pitiless gaze and realized his fate would be decided in the next few seconds. He steeled himself against the pain, clenched his teeth against his screams, and endured.

She leaned back farther and pulled his lip between her teeth until it tore, one agonizing sliver at a time, until she held the pale, pink ruin of his lower lip between her teeth. A swift gulp, and it was gone. She licked her lips then lapped at his chin until the bleeding slowed.

Sated, she slid off his bulging belly and scrambled down the limestone ramp. She tore a strip of denim from the bottom of Randall’s jeans and bound his wound with primitive efficiency. She motioned to her followers. “Get the pig up.”

Two of the men came up the incline, one of them holding a chunk of burning crystal in a pair of vise grips. He shoved the stone under Randall’s nose while the other man clamped a hand over Randall’s mouth.

He smelled burning plastic and rotting roses and days-old blood. It burned his nose like the water in a public swimming pool when he jumped off the high-dive without pinching his nostrils - a penetrating, chemical sting that felt like it was burrowing straight into his brain.

Raw electricity jumped through his nerves, a lightning storm that had him jerking up onto his feet before he knew what had happened. His head swam with a thousand voices, a thousand screams, all urging him to come, to be one with them.

Randall’s eyes narrowed to slits, and he
felt
his pupils shrinking to pinpoint holes. His mouth was dry and running with thick, foamy saliva at the same time.

The freaks grinned at him, knowing smiles that told him they remembered their first time just as he’d always remember his. Randall limped down the incline between them, no longer a stranger, but part of the family.

He followed them through the tunnels, no longer afraid, just glad to belong.

T
he blackness gave way to an organic, slimy, purple light. Amy noticed it when she began casting a shadow beyond the edges of her tiny flashlight’s occluded glow. She relaxed her grip on the little light and found she could still see. There were fat, drooping mushrooms clustered along the tunnel’s edges. Their fruiting bodies sprouted from within corpses that were now reduced to bones and slick patches of putrefying meat.

Amy didn’t care where the light came from. Despite its grotesque origins, it made her feel much better to know she no longer had to rely on the slim LED lamp. Her cramped fingers relaxed as she walked through the tunnel.

The first splash of graffiti gave Amy hope. It wasn’t the crazed scrawls they’d found earlier in the tunnel, but the kind of crap kids would spray paint on the walls while drinking. Crude genitalia littered the walls, surrounded by spray-painted initials, claims of the class of ‘99’s superiority, and meaningless splashes of color.

The empty and broken bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 lifted her spirits even higher. She doubted the albinos would be drinking that shit; it was strictly the kind of thing underage kids bought because it was cheap and easy to get. The acidic fumes leaking from the old bottles reminded Amy of her own misspent youth, a gentler, stupider time that felt like a pointless waste from her current perspective. She kept on following the trail of scrawled walls and discarded booze containers, praying it would carry her back to the surface.

Tickticktick.

Amy froze, rifle clenched in both hands. She held her breath, waiting for the ticking to come again. When she heard nothing for a few moments, she started creeping forward again.

The main body of the freaks was far from her - she heard their screeches and howls of frustration as faint echoes. The ticking, though, had been much closer. She kept moving, working hard to convince herself it was just her imagination.

The tunnel dipped and then rose at a steep angle. Amy had to sling the rifle’s strap over her shoulder and creep ahead on all fours to keep moving forward. There was a gritty film coating the stone floor, a reeking black stain that smelled like cleaning supplies and rot. The filth coated Amy’s hands as she went, until her arms were black and stinking all the way up to her elbows. She yearned for another piece of bubble gum, but didn’t dare pop one in her mouth with her blackened fingers.

Tickticktick.

The sound came from above Amy, echoing
through
the stone. She hurried, scrambling on all fours, trying to get away from whatever was making the noise. Her jeans were worn through at the knees, and the skin was torn and bruised. She imagined a hundred hideous diseases worming their way into her abraded flesh. Even if she made it out of here in one piece, with her luck, she’d come down with Dengue fever or chikun-fucking-gunya. “Goddammit,” she growled, and scrambled forward.

Tickticktick.

The slope was ending; Amy could see the tunnel leveling off up ahead, the purple glow lighting showing her the way. Once she got off this incline, she’d take off running. She’d keep the rifle over her shoulder and just tear ass down the tunnel, get some distance between her and the ticking monster.

Her hand slipped as she neared the top of the slope, and Amy lunged forward to keep from tumbling back down the stony incline. She crashed onto her belly, face smeared with greasy black slime. The wind rushed out of her lungs, leaving her gasping and dazed.

Tickticktick
.

“No,” she coughed, throat burning as she gulped air laden with an ammoniac stink. Amy knew she had to get up, had to run, but her body was cramped around her bruised stomach and aching lungs. She crawled a few feet, gulping air like a drowning woman, but couldn’t get her body to obey any further.

Tickticktick.

It was close now, over her, in the ceiling. Amy looked up, in time to see her doom falling on her.

A pale face with a smudge for a nose and a mouthful of razor blades fell out of the darkness. Hands like albino spiders shot out of the darkness and latched onto her hair and throat, dragging her off the floor. Fingers squeezed her trachea as nails dug into the soft flesh under her chin, tearing the skin away to reveal the throbbing network of veins and arteries beneath. It wrenched Amy’s head back as it dragged off her feet, the weight of her body a painful anchor. Lodged into its spider hole in the ceiling, the monster was hauling Amy into the darkness.

Blood coursed down Amy’s chest, plastering her shirt against her skin. She struggled with the rifle, hands clumsy with shock and rapid blood loss. The thing glared at the blood painting the front of her body with burning hunger, and lifted her neck to its mouth.

It sucked at her wound, and Amy felt the
pull
in her veins as the monster gulped her blood. She tasted vomit; she couldn’t go out like this, a snack for a subhuman freak. As her strength faded, she got the rifle twisted around on its strap and jammed the muzzle into the hollow just below the monster’s ear.

Amy pulled the trigger, and her world became a furious swirl of blood and thunder. The shot rang in her ears as the thing’s head burst apart. It fell out of the ceiling and dropped her to the floor, crashing on top of her. Its limbs spasmed, and its mouth jerked open and closed like the severed head of a rattlesnake.

Amy struggled under the bat-faced monster, wriggling from beneath it even as her life dripped from her ravaged throat. She got up by leaning against the wall and pushing, rifle doubling as a cane. Once back on her feet, she checked to make sure she hadn’t clogged the barrel and found its gaping black maw clean and empty. It was hot to the touch, and the outside of it was painted black with scorched blood, a nightmare of steel and death.

She walked on, pushing herself against the gauzy barrier of unconsciousness that threatened to swallow her up. Dick’s face, smug and handsome, came to her unbidden. Her rage-fueled revenge fantasies gave her the strength she needed to push on.

Ahead, she could see the mound of skulls they’d passed on their way in. She was getting close.

But she could hear the monsters coming, too. They’d heard the rifle shot and were on their way to investigate. She had to beat them. It wasn’t far now to the rope ladder. Not far at all.

She pushed on, blood painting her footsteps red.