***
I don’t know how far we went, or how long it took us to catch up to everyone else. We didn’t catch them all at once. They were starting to separate from the one big clump of stomping feet and swinging lanterns. They were sorting by who had the most energy, and who was least hurt, and who was most scared.
Carlson was straggling back. I almost kicked him for not seeing him.
He was panting and coughing, all doubled over his lantern and clutching his chest. “My heart,” he said.
When I’d stopped so sudden over Carlson, Uncle John had almost crashed up against me. He sorted himself out and said to our cousin, “Just calm down, now. Don’t get too excited, it’ll only make it worse.”
And he said it so serious that I couldn’t tell him how dumb it sounded. Just calm down? Don’t get too excited? Not five minutes before he’d been so scared he’d pissed himself, and here he was telling another man to pull himself together. Like everything else, I suppose it’s easier to say than do. I know he was only trying to help, but I almost had to laugh at him.
He bent down to Carlson and wrapped one arm underneath him, lifting the other man up to his feet. I had to give him credit. My uncle was stronger than he looked underneath that too-nice suit.
And then I thought, Well, he’s one of us after all, ain’t he?
On his way up to a standing position, Uncle John picked up Carlson’s lantern, too. Carlson didn’t look like he could hold it anyhow.
Something loud snapped in the tunnel back the way we came. I didn’t have to see it to guess what it was—one of them big columns being broke as easy as stepping on a twig. There was a clattering crash, and I didn’t see any light back there so the fire must be out.
A faint gust of air pushed past us, all around, like the cave itself was breathing.
We smelled the chicken-coop-shit again, and there was something else too. It was a smell of burning hair, or feathers. I thought the place couldn’t have stunk any worse, but I’d been wrong.
I was sure the hair was peeling right off my arms.
“It smells…like…” Carlson was talking slow, squeezing out a word or two between breaths.
“Like shit, yeah,” I told him. “No time to admire it. We’ve got to keep moving.”
“How do we slow it down?” Uncle John asked. By then, he was keeping pace with me pretty good, even though Carlson must’ve been practically dead weight.
“Why would I know?” I groused back at him. I didn’t mean to be cross, but he’d seen exactly the same thing as I had, and he knew exactly as much about it as I did—so we both knew exactly the same: nothing.
“It’s coming.” He said it all urgent but low.
“We’re going,” I told him.
And then I didn’t know where we were going, because Carlson had stopped at a fork where the passage split into three directions. I didn’t want to be in charge; I didn’t want to lead anybody anywhere, even if that meant I had two warm bodies between me and the thing that was trying to eat me.
“There,” Uncle John pointed.
And I saw, just for a twinkle, a spark of light disappearing behind a rocky wall down the far left fork.
“All right, all right.” I knocked my knees against the tough, spoke-scattered floor and wished to God for a straight stretch to run. “Watch out for that,” I twitched the lantern at a spot in the floor where the ground opened up like a pothole in a city street.
Uncle John stepped around it. He carried Carlson over it, hauling him past it and over to the other side. I put out a hand and pulled my uncle over. He was sweating and bleeding; his one hand was wholly covered and running with blood, and the scratch on his shoulder from the wayward bullet was oozing, too.
But he wasn’t bitching, and he wasn’t screaming. He’d got himself sorted out enough to act like a man.
He was even thinking straight, for all the good it did us. There was no sense in keeping too quiet—it wasn’t like the thing couldn’t hear us, anyway—so I didn’t stop him. I let him ramble in case he was going to blurt out something useful.
He said, “We have to find a safe place, or a safer place. We have to find a spot we can defend. We can’t just run forever, and if we don’t pay attention—pay attention!” he said louder, trying to make me see that I was about to hit my head on a rock curtain that swung out into the way.
I nodded my head under it and kept going.
“And if we don’t pay attention, we’re going to get lost. Are you counting the turns?”
“Counting the…what?” I didn’t know what he meant.
“Counting the turns. We came inside and went straight, then to the left, and now we’ve taken the leftmost way again.”
“We’re circling.”
“No,” he said. Carlson coughed again and I dared a glance back to see that he was slumping and almost helpless. Uncle John added, “We’re spiraling.”
I got what he meant. We were going down. “It’s going to trap us down here.”
“It’s going to try.”
Up ahead we heard a clamor and a yell. “Stay back!” somebody ordered, and I heard the cocking of more guns being brought to the ready.
“It’s us!” I announced. “Just us! It’s behind us!”
I didn’t slow down or stop, I just came on forward without my gun and without my axe up. I wanted them to see that we were dragging a body with us, and that we weren’t trying to start anything.
We caught up to them then, Jacob and Nicodemus who were huddled with their guns drawn behind a big column. But there was a vast, empty hole behind them. They hadn’t backed themselves up against anything, not even a corner.
“Where’s Titus?” I asked.
They rose up from behind their column and weren’t listening to me; they were listening to the charging, crashing, incoming monster. I couldn’t tell how much of a lead we had, but I could bet it wasn’t much.
Jacob frowned and said, “He ain’t with you?”
“He ain’t with us,” I responded. He might’ve thought Carlson was Titus, since his face was hanging down against his chest. I brought the light around as Uncle John caught up and I saw how red his cheeks were from all the running.
“We got to keep moving anyhow,” Nicodemus said.
I didn’t want to keep moving, not just yet. I wanted to know about Titus. “Where’d he go? Did you see him? Did he get split up from you?”
“I don’t know,” Nicodemus swore.
I wanted to press him for details but it was getting louder, and the echo kicked the sound all over the place.
Uncle John answered through the noise and distraction. He said, “Back at the beginning, when the…when that creature first appeared. Titus fell backwards, or maybe it grabbed him.”
I turned around fast and I stared him down, trying to make out if he was telling the truth, or telling us what he thought we ought to hear to keep us moving. But he wasn’t looking at me when he talked. He was looking somewhere else, off in the distance—into the darkness behind the column.
“Uncle John?”
“We have to keep moving. But not that way,” he said, which stopped Nicodemus in his tracks. He was about to go tearing back even farther behind that column, back into a spot so vast and so black that the edges of our lantern-lights combined couldn’t suss out its depths.
“Not that way,” John said again. He sounded calm, but a little confused for someone who was giving orders. “There’s…back there. The other way. There’s another…here.” He handed Carlson to me, like I knew what to do with him. “Take him, just for a minute. Let me look.”
“We haven’t got any minutes!” Nicodemus was shrill.
“We can’t keep up this retreat!” John shrieked back at him. “We can’t let it trap us down and—“
And I don’t know what the rest of it was going to sound like, because he got interrupted by a fearsome shriek. It was close.
No, it was right on top of us.
It leaped out of t
he wide black wall of nothing and bounced—I swear, it bounced—up over the small pit in the floor and almost into our midst, except we were already scrambling to get out of the way.
“Not that way!” John shouted, and again and again over the scuffle. “Not that way!”
Nicodemus was shouting back and his gun was going off. The report was so loud that the whole cavern shook, and the soft bits inside my ears were trembling. I wanted to cover them and duck my head but there was too much danger.
“I ain’t taking orders from no goddamned—“
And he fired again, and I wished I had my own gun handier so I could shoot him. That wasn’t too nice or fair of me, but there you have it. A horrible monster was trying to catch and kill us, and that goddamned idiot was worried about who should give directions.
Uncle John was moving, trying to wrangle the Manders into staying away from one particular corner of darkness. I was looking for someplace to drop Carlson, who was hanging off my arm—but then he pushed himself off me, letting go and falling forward. He was holding a pickaxe and I wondered where he got it, until I noticed that mine wasn’t hanging on my belt anymore.
Carlson lifted one of his lanky arms and as the creature reared up—like a horse that don’t want a bridle—my cousin chucked the axe. It spun head over handle in a perfect straight line, and it dug itself in right into the dead middle of the thing’s forehead.
Anything else would’ve dropped like a stone.
That creature did not drop.
It stopped, and swayed, and then it swung its head and knocked the axe against a stone pillar; the axe fell down to the bumpy ground with a terrible loud clatter.
It stopped, but it didn’t fall down.
We stared at it—wondering if we’d hurt it so bad that it’d die. Nicodemus emptied the last of his bullets against the creature’s body but as far as I could tell, it didn’t hardly notice.
I’d been counting his bullets and I was glad he was finished. I didn’t think I could stand listening to another round shot off inside that closed-up place.
***
We all stood still, not sure if we should run or attack. And then, outside the edge of the bubble our lanterns cast, beyond the safely seen places where our lights could reach, something else stirred.
***
The other men were watching the injured beast thrash and recoil. I kept my eyes on the movement, which was going on so close, but so deeply shadowed that I had to glare in order to see it. I reached behind my shoulder and pulled my rifle down. I aimed it and held it steady.
Uncle John saw what I was doing.
He kept his voice low, but he knew everyone could hear him. “We’re not finished. We’re going to have to run. Nicodemus? Don’t go back that way. There’s trouble back that way.”
“What’s going on?” he asked. He was starting to relax, watching the monster start to shudder on its feet. “What are you going on about?”
And then Uncle John said, all matter-of-fact and quiet, “We’re not alone here.”
“Titus!” Jacob shouted. “Titus, you hear us?”
I almost brought the rifle around to point it at him, but I held my stance. “Shut up!” I hissed instead.
“Titus!” He hollered it again.
Uncle John put his hand on my shoulder, leaving a bloody smudge there. He whispered, “Titus is dead.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw him,” my uncle said.
I thought the way he put it was kind of weird. I didn’t say anything about it, at the time. As my wife might say, ‘my attention was elsewhere.’
Jacob sneered and said, “You’re full of shit, you dumb son of a bitch. Titus!”
And all of a sudden—just like that, with a mad, pounding rush of muscle and feathers—some spot I hadn’t seen burst to life. Practically behind me, another beast blasted out of the unlit edges and clamped its beakish mouth down towards Jacob’s throat.
The curved, sharp edges of the bird-looking maw drove down fast, and if it’d landed, it would’ve snipped through muscles like a pair of scissors. But Jacob’s son jerked him out of the way and they tumbled back together away from the new threat.
Carlson bellowed and took shuffling steps towards Uncle John, not to attack him I don’t think, but to follow him. Under ordinary circumstances I don’t believe Carlson would’ve followed him to an outhouse, much less anywhere in an ink-black cave that harbored creatures that were happy to kill.
But Uncle John sounded like he knew what he was doing, sort of, so we all began to back up, as fast as we could and not with any grace at all, in the direction that my uncle was leading.
It was a chaos, a nightmare, and a pathetic scramble of men holding guns and waving picks, and swinging lanterns.
And we were climbing, not toppling. Uncle John was taking us up, but everyone knew that up might not mean out right away— not with a whole huge hill above us; and behind us, not quite below us yet, there were more lumbering shoulders covered with filth- hining feathers.
Carlson fell and I picked him up with the arm that was holding my rifle by its stock. I was under him again, and he was moving better with me now, getting used to it. We still weren’t moving none too quick.
Then, for no reason I could understand, he started to resist. He was pulling back away from me like he wanted me to let him go, so I said, “You damn fool, what are you doing?” And then I looked to see what was keeping him.
He wasn’t being ornery.
When I twisted my neck I could see his face, and it was so white with fear that even in the half-light of our wavering lanterns I could see he was giving up the ghost, right there.
His mouth was open; he was trying to shout or tell me something, but no words were coming and his feet weren’t dragging—they were being dragged.
I had no way to bring the gun up from under him. I couldn’t have fired without killing him, and maybe the kick of it would knock the gun away too, and I’d lose that as well. So I tried to pull him away, like some crazy tug-of-war.
While the rest of the men scurried up—not straight up, but leaning and lurching up an incline of jagged and wet stone—I was stuck, and being left behind in that nightmare place.
***
Carlson didn’t have any strength to hang on, and the night underground was crawling with motion, and I couldn’t make any sense of any of it but so help me, I was not going to die there alone, guarding a man whose heart was already half gone.
So I let go.
***
I didn’t hear what happened next. I couldn’t hear anything except my own heart pounding like an Indian’s drum, and my own feet slipping and scraping, struggling for purchase on the unfriendly floor at the bottom of the earth.
XV
The Dead and the Damned
Meshack scrambled to catch up with us. He was alone.
“Carlson?” I asked.
“Dead,” he answered.
Behind and below us, I heard the most terrible wet snapping noises, and the sound of thick things being torn. I heard the clatter of beaked jaws clicking together. I didn’t ask anymore about Carlson.
Instead, I asked, “How many of those things did you see?”
He said, “Three for sure. Three at least, including the one we hurt. Probably more.”
“We didn’t kill it?” I said “we” as if I’d had anything to do with it. Among them, I was the only man unarmed, and I knew that I was the least helpful from a defensive standpoint.
“Doubt it,” he replied. “But it might not follow us anymore. You said Titus was dead.” It wasn’t a question this time.
“He’s dead,” I confirmed. “He was the first one we lost.”
“And now Carlson. So it’s the four of us, then. Two Manders, and two Coys.”
I shook my head. “No, not divided that way. There’s four of us, that’s all. No us-and-them down here.”
“Easy for us to say. You convince them we’re all together, and maybe
I’ll reconsider my math.”
I slipped, and grabbed at a pointed bit of stone out of reflex—trying to steady myself; but I took it with my injured hand, and the pain was absolutely blinding. In my other fist I held another man’s lantern. Was it Carlson’s? I couldn’t recall. I remembered picking it up, but nothing else about how I’d come to hold it. It was running low on oil, either from being sloshed or simply from being burned.
“Meshack, how many candles do you have?”
“Some,” he said, which was a less precise answer than I would have preferred. “Hey Manders!” he called ahead. “Y’all still got some candles, too? Or more oil?”
The huffing, puffing, and panting up ahead slowed and Nicodemus said over his shoulder, “You running low?”
“Naw, just asking.”
“Gentlemen,” I begged. “Quiet.”
“Like they don’t know where we’re at,” Jacob complained.
He was right, of course. They were swarming up behind us, the three monsters or however many. They’d been distracted by Carlson’s body but it wouldn’t hold them long.
We caught up to the Manders, who were slowing down from exhaustion—while we were moving faster because we’d been bringing up the rear, and we had the things on our heels.
“Where are we going now?” Nicodemus asked. “Where are we trying to get to?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You’re the one who pushed us this way!”
“I know!”
“But you don’t know what to do? Then why’d you make such a fuss? You ain’t never been here before neither,” Jacob fumed.
The way widened, and Meshack and I moved side-by-side, up to overtake the Manders. “Because,” I told Jacob when I was right beside his face. “We can’t keep going down. We can’t let them bury us here. We’re going to have to outthink these things, or they’re going to pick us off one at a time, until there’s no one left to shoot or shout!”
“What happens if we get stuck? Up don’t mean out,” Jacob argued. “We can get ourselves penned up against the ceiling just as easy as the basement floor.”
“You’re right,” I said. “But…I had a feeling.”