All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (56 page)

“
Dammit.”

I
sprang to my feet, grabbed Williams by the arm and dragged him away.
The frequency and rhythm of the footsteps shaking the forest floor
increased reminding me of a scene out of
Jurassic
Park
when
the T-Rex chases everyone and then eats them. One thing in my
after-life I knew for sure: I didn’t want to end up an
ingredient in one of the steaming mountains of dung the
elephant-thing produced.

Anything’s
steaming pile of dung, really.

Williams’
feet didn’t want to cooperate with my escape efforts at first;
his lack of help nearly pulled me off balance. I stopped to
encourage him to get-the-fuck-going and saw the beast bearing down
on us.

It thundered
through the brush, galloping along on four of its six legs while
using the other two to clear a path. What brush and smaller trees it
missed with the hands it easily shouldered aside with its bulk. The
trunk-appendage snaked out on front of it and the twisted black
tusks atop its head crashed through the lower branches of trees,
splintering wood and sending a shower of dead leaves in its wake.

“
Come
on!”

I yanked the cop’s
arm and this time he got his legs moving. I forced my way through
brush and brambles, felt thorns claw my flesh; without any doubt the
plants were purposely slowing our progress. Behind us, the beast
kept coming, undeterred. We ducked under a fallen tree, swam through
a dense swath of bushes, clambered over an expanse of deadfall and
emerged onto a short plain. Thigh-high, gray grass stretched to a
sheer cliff face that went up and up forever. I glanced at it,
formulating a plan of action before the elephant-thing trampled us
or worse, and thought I saw a crack in the rock. At this distance,
it looked like it might be wide enough to allow a man passage but
too narrow for the thing hot on our heels.

Williams must have
seen it about the same time I did; he sprinted into the grass
leaving me with my mouth open, about to tell him to make a break for
the fissure.

Bastard left me
behind. See if I save him next time.

I shook the thought
from my mind and set off after him, resisting the urge to glance
back and gauge how close the thing was to overtaking me. Judging by
the quaking of the ground, it couldn’t be far behind.

I can’t
believe those fuckers sent that thing after me. They said I’d
have my freedom.

Did it really
surprise me? I was in Hell, dealing with the deposed angel-of-death
and a kid with a big attitude problem.

Maybe I’m
a little too trusting.

Kinda what got me
here in the first place.

I crashed through
the grass, narrowly avoided an obstacle lying across my path as I
saw it at the last second. I jumped it, spared it a quick glance,
and thought I made out the shape of a corpse which may or may not
have begun life as a human. It definitely smelled dead, but I’d
passed the odor before it had a chance to penetrate.

Williams was thirty
yards ahead of me, nearing the crack in the wall. About the time I
felt relief at his safety, my foot caught on another hidden
obstacle. My elbows scraped against rough grass, my shoulder struck
a rock, and my nose came to a stop an inch from another corpse.

Dead, yes. Human,
no.

The sickly-sweet
stench of rot wafted up my nostrils making me gag. Decay blackened
the thing’s head; maggot-like bugs crawled out of one hole in
its putrid flesh and into another. I rolled over and scrambled away
coming within inches of burying my hand in another corpse. I
struggled to my feet and took a step back. Bodies littered the area
near the cliff, all of them rotted beyond recognition, most of them
contorted in odd positions suggesting they’d plunged to their
deaths from the cliff top.

“
Shit.”

Williams stood at
the opening in the rock face. He didn’t speak or gesture, only
stared. I didn’t realize the elephant thing was right behind
me until I felt its breath on my neck.

“
Fuck.”

I closed my eyes.

How
did I forget about
that
?

Its snake-ish trunk
huffed another breath against the base of my skull, stirring my
hair. A glob of beast-snot slapped against my neck but I didn’t
have the time to register disgust at it before I broke into a run.

I’d never
been much of a football player but realized my opponent was faster
than me, so running straight for the fissure might not be the best
idea. Williams hadn’t moved. He didn’t so much as wave
encouragement, offering only an expression of unfathomable terror.

Thanks.

I faked left, went
right, and got one full stride in plus half of another before the
thing’s trunk slapped me in the side and sent me flying
through the air. I landed on one of the corpses and it exploded in a
cloud of black dust that adhered itself to the sweat on my forehead
and cheeks. It didn’t smell as bad as the others—must
have been dead longer—but the dust clogged my nose. I sneezed
once, twice, each time sending a puff of dead-guy into the air.

I wiped my nose on
my arm to clear it and managed to stem the sneezing—little
consolation considering I still needed to deal with the Hell-beast.
And, unlike the other creatures I’d bumped into during my
visits, I figured this thing wouldn’t stop at one bite. I
scrabbled away on hands and knees, a huge, pathetic baby desperately
dragging itself from one place to another.

Elephant-thing was
having none of it.

Its trunk coiled
around my left ankle and jerked me off the ground hard enough to
wrench my hip. I bent at the waist doing my first sit-up in years
and clawed at the snake-like appendage but my fingernails slid off
its slimy surface.

It dangled me
upside down, blood draining from my extremities and collecting in my
head, then it lifted me high into the air until my head was level
with the three bloodshot eyes lined up under the base of the trunk.
The eyes didn’t concern me as much as the mouth.

Somehow, the first
time I’d seen the beast, I didn’t notice the mouth
slashing across what passed for its face. Hard to believe about a
maw containing so many teeth. Pointy, sharp-looking teeth designed
for tearing flesh off bones.

“
Okay,
calm down, big boy. We can all just get along.”

It didn’t
agree. It gave me a shake, presumably the elephant-kind’s way
of saying ‘shut up’. I did.

It waved me around
for a minute, twisting me back and forth like a feather on a string
blown by the wind. I’d see a flash of the forest then the
expanse of dead grass, the black corpses, the cliff.

Williams no longer
stood at the crack in the rock wall.

“
Williams!”

The beast took
exception to my uttering a sound when it clearly didn’t want
me to and shook me harder, twisted me more violently. I grimaced at
the pain in my groin and wondered if the thing could shake me hard
enough for my leg to part with its socket. Some questions you don’t
want to find out the answer to, this being a prime example.

Forest, grass,
corpses, cliff, the twisting continued. Corpses, grass, forest,
person, grass, corpses.

Person?

I twisted and saw a
figure approaching through the grass. A brief flash, not enough for
recognition, so I waited for another chance.

And the beast
ceased its twisting.

I wriggled and
gyrated but couldn’t see past it. I did another sit up,
pounded my fists against the trunk. It squeezed tighter and I felt
the bones in my ankle grind together. I sucked a pained breath
through my teeth and stopped hitting it.

“
Bastard,”
I said hoping it would bring the same result as before.

It reacted as
predicted, but more violently. My leg screamed in pain, the tendons
in my groin stretched like the elastic of a slingshot. My head swam;
I concentrated on breathing and holding on to consciousness. It
twisted me, swung me. At first, I couldn’t think about looking
to see who approached. When I got my wits back, I concentrated on
looking for the figure when it swung me back toward the forest.

There.

My glimpse showed
me wasn’t Detective Williams come to my rescue—no
rumpled suit jacket, un-pressed shirt or tie pulled askew. The
person wore plain clothes of drab colors. I saw no horns or wings or
claws and decided to take a chance.

“
Hey!
Help!”

The elephant-thing
had had enough.

It whipped me over
its head, then forward, sling-shotting me to the ground. I hit with
a crack of ribs and bounced once before coming to rest in a puff of
dust. The thing may have released my ankle, but the pain enveloping
my body precluded me from noticing such details. One of its
hand-feet came to rest beside my head, but I couldn’t move my
head to see, only my eyes, and even they hurt. I felt its breath on
my face—it had circled around in front of me. Its breath was
different than before, firmer, stinkier. Mouth breath, not trunk
breath.

I forced my head to
move, pushed my eyes as far as they’d go, and peered up into
the creature’s toothy mouth.

So close. I was
so close to getting out of here.

I wanted to close
my eyes, a last gesture of surrender to the inevitable ingestion of
my head, but my eyelids fluttered and remained wide open.
Apparently, someone wanted me to bear witness to my own demise.
Again.

Nice.

The
elephant-thing’s maw edged closer, closer. Saliva spilled over
its teeth and down its slimy, gray, wrinkled chin, dripped onto the
ground by my head. Closer. Closer.

Then it stopped.

The mouth closed.
The thing pulled its face away, back to the edge of my vision, and
tilted its head like a dog does when it's listening. I listened,
too, but heard nothing.

A second passed,
two. The beast remained unmoving. I struggled to quell the pain
ringing in my ears and eventually made out a faint hum. Not the
sound of someone who forgot the words to a song, but the kind of
humming you feel as much as hear, like when you ignore the caution
signs and jump the fence into the power station.

The humming grew,
expanded. It seemed other sounds added themselves to it, voices
doubling the volume and thickness of it, trebling it.

The beast reared up
and let out a growl that transformed into a screech I wouldn’t
have expected from the creature, a sound more appropriately emitted
by a giant parakeet. I winced at the noise as it drowned out the
hum. When the beast paused to take a breath, the other sound was
still there, louder, more powerful.

Then it stopped. My
ears rang with it even after it ceased.

The elephant-thing
took a step out of my view so I felt rather than saw when it leaped
over me. I wanted to twist myself, see it happening. No chance of
that—even the thought hurt.

The ground shook
and shook again. The beast screeched and then the ground shook once
more before everything went silent. No hum, no screech, no tremors
beneath my pained chest.

I held my breath,
waiting, listening without knowing what to listen for or what to
wait on. Nothing happened for several seconds, then I felt a touch
on my back.