Primal Fear (25 page)

“John!”  Harry slapped him, got no response at all.  He felt for a pulse, holding his own breath as he waited for some sign of life.  For a full thirty seconds, he waited, and then, finally, he felt the soft pulse of John’s blood at his wrist.

He breathed a long sigh of relief, swinging the flashlight around the cavern floor until he spotted the radio.  It was lying well out of reach, but he could still hear Charlie’s voice as it spilled out of the tiny speaker.  The panic in his voice was clear, impossible to ignore.  Something had gone terribly wrong, he knew, and Charlie was clearly under some sort of attack.  But by whom?

Or what?

John’s pulse was growing stronger, but it still hadn’t reached a rate that was in the least bit reassuring.  At least not enough to leave his side, not even for a moment.

“John, wake up,” he urged, his finger pressed tightly against the other man’s jugular.  “Come on, you can’t do this to me.”

John’s face was still very pale, his head lolling awkwardly on his shoulders as Harry shook him.  His eyelids fluttered briefly and then opened, only to fall slowly closed again.  Even during the short time they’d been open, Harry had seen that there was no sign of whiteness in John’s right eye.  His link with Mahuk had finally dissolved completely.

“Goddammit, wake up!”

His eyes opened again, this time showing a spark of awareness, finally coming to rest on Harry.  At first there didn’t seem to be any sign of recognition, just a numb stare, as if everything he’d ever known and learned had been taken from him.  But then, as Harry watched, he saw the sharpness returning to the young man’s gaze.

“Mahuk . . .” 

John spoke slowly, softly, as if testing the fragile connection he’d shared with the old man and confirming it had been severed.  “Mahuk is dead.”

Harry nodded.  “You were, too, for a few seconds there.”

John reached out, grasping Harry’s shoulder.  “Help me up,” he muttered, grunting with the effort as Harry complied.

“Are you sure you should—”

“There’s no time.  We have to find Wyh-heah Qui Waq.  We have to . . . find it right now.”

“Charlie’s in trouble.  I have to go back and help him.”  He steadied John against the cavern wall, moving quickly to pick up the radio.   

“Charlie?  You there?”  He made his way back in the direction of the hole in the floor as he waited for a response.  The seconds stretched on, but still Charlie didn’t answer.  He was about to try again when the sound of a gunshot echoed through the cavern.  A second quickly followed, a third coming four or five beats later.

“Charlie, what’s going on down there?  Come in!”  He squeezed the radio, as if willing it to respond.  The opening in the floor loomed a quarter of a mile away now, and Harry made his way towards it as quickly as he dared.  He looked back once to see John calling out to him, trying to wave him back.

“What do you want me to do?” Harry shouted.  “Leave him alone down there?”

“We have to go on.”  John’s voice was hoarse, tinged with resignation and exhaustion.  It was clear that he was in bad shape, maybe even on the verge of another collapse.  But he was not about to give up.  “It’s trying to stop us,” he warned.  “We can’t let it.”

Harry turned away and broke into a run, no longer concerned with the rough terrain, only worried now about reaching Charlie in time.

He reached the hole in the cavern floor just in time to see the shivering beam of a flashlight flicker past the opening from below, swinging wildly around in the lower chamber.

“Charlie!” he shouted.  “Are you okay?”  He dropped to his knees, swung his flashlight down into the chamber.  He could make out the silent circle of children below, but nothing else.

“Charlie?”

Charlie stepped into view.  His face was perfectly white, and he was shivering uncontrollably, his gun still clutched tightly in his right hand.  Harry could see blood on his neck and hands, and the front of Charlie’s jacket was torn in too many places to count.

“Are you all right?”

“I think so.  I think my coat took the worst of it.  But . . . it’s gone now.  It just . . . disappeared.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know, Chief.  It came . . .” 

He swallowed, struggling to get the words out.  “It came out of one of the kids.  That one.”  He pointed towards one of the bodies, the one closest to the back of the chamber.

“But what was it?  What did it look like?”

Charlie just shook his head.  “It was white, like . . . like smoke, and it came straight out of her chest.  Straight through the skin.”

Harry flashed his light on the body.  “There’s no wound.  There’s nothing.”

“It was there.  I saw it.”  Charlie looked straight up at Harry, his eyes glassy, wide with shock.  When he spoke again, his voice sounded flat, his tone slow and even.  “What is this shit we’re doing?  What’s going on here, Harry?” 

“More than I have time to explain,” Harry said, sorry he’d ever involved his deputy in any of this.  “Come on.  We have to keep moving.”

He reached down, offering Charlie his hand.  “I’ll help you up.  And I’ll try to fill you in as we go.”

Charlie extended his arm, about to grasp Harry’s hand, but something seemed to lure his attention back toward the children.

“Harry,” he said quietly.  “Listen . . .”

“Let’s go.  We don’t have time—”

“I hear it.  It’s happening again.”  Charlie took a step backward, away from the hole, away from Harry’s outstretched hand.  “Oh, good lord . . .”

“Take my hand,” Harry ordered, but then he heard it, too, the dry rustling of leaves, a soft rattle of movement.

He lowered the flashlight again, centering it on the circle of children.

The flashlight’s beam revealed nothing, only managing to illuminate the five tiny bodies of the children.  In the glare of his light, with the shadows playing grotesquely across their pale faces, they looked like they’d been made up, as if someone had applied garish amounts of cosmetics to each of them.  For all Harry knew, they could be pretending, playing dead for their own twisted, childish entertainment.

But no, he’d seen them.  He’d seen their faces.  Their expressions, slack and lifeless . . .

The sound came again, from within their circle, or perhaps even from its center.  Either way, he couldn’t make out its source from his position in the chamber’s ceiling.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, and climbed down through the hole, dropping to his feet on the chamber’s floor.

Charlie backed off again, taking another step away from Harry and the children.  He raised his gun in one shaking fist.  “No.  Oh no.”

Harry tried to ignore him, switching the flashlight to his left hand to draw his own weapon with his right.  His eyes never left the circle of children, the beam of his light held steadily upon them, hoping to pinpoint whatever lurked in their midst.

“Charlie, talk to me.  Is this the same thing?  Is this what happened before?”

“Yeah,” Charlie confirmed.  “Another one is coming.”

Harry edged closer to the children, trying not to look into their eyes, peering instead at the ground between them.  He sensed no movement now, nothing out of the ordinary.  But he’d heard something a moment ago.  He couldn’t argue with that.

But now there was nothing.

Only his own tense breathing, the beating of his heart.  He sighed, ready to turn back to find Charlie, his nerves already beginning to relax.

And this time it was the act of motion itself that caught his attention, not merely the sound of it.

His gaze was snagged by something moving upon the chest of the child directly opposite him.  He leaned toward her, examining the movement more closely, unable to make out anything at all that might be crawling over her.

The movement came again and he stepped back in shock and revulsion.

It was the flesh itself that was moving, rippling under some unseen touch, as if an invisible hand had reached out to caress her icy skin.  He watched in sick fascination as her flesh continued to writhe, the area of motion spreading outward, growing slowly larger.

“What the . . .” 

He brought his flashlight to bear on the child, his eyes fastened to her chest.  His head moved from side to side in mute denial, a tremor of fear running through his limbs.

Whatever this was, he tried to tell himself it couldn’t be happening.  The girl was dead, had been that way for quite a while, from the look of her.  So then how could—

He remembered Marty Slater’s body.  That had been dead, too, and it had still raised itself up and come after him.

The child’s flesh began to bulge outward, tentatively at first, as if whatever lay beneath was testing the limits of its confines.  It expanded more steadily now, the pressure behind it increasing, and Harry became certain it would burst at any moment.

And for one brief moment the girl’s skin was stretched so taut he could make out the shape of what lay beneath it.  His mind revolted at the sight, his thoughts already beginning to deny it, but there was no use in denouncing what his eyes told him was already there.

It was a tiny hand that pushed against the flesh, one that appeared to have only four fingers, each one unnaturally longer than it should have been.  Seconds later the notion was confirmed as the hand forced its way through, puncturing the flesh in an invisible wound, one that refused to bleed.  The girl’s skin settled back into its original position, its surface unbroken, not even marked, as if whatever was slowly reaching out of her chest had suddenly become immune to the laws of solid matter.

It continued to reach slowly outward, a long thin arm so white that it seemed to glow in the beam of the flashlight.  Its fingers clawed at the air, as if hoping to speed the process of its own birth, hungry to be free of the child’s flesh.  The arm terminated at a bulbous shoulder, emerging from the girl’s body at the same slow pace.  Its white skin slid grotesquely upon its emaciated frame, and Harry felt bile rising in his throat as he realized that he could see through the creature’s arm, that he could make out the floor of the cavern beyond the thin veil of its flesh.

It was almost as if the thing’s skin had somehow been composed of smoke, just as Charlie had said, pulled impossibly into solid form and yet still retaining its inherent translucence.  And now, as it continued to rise out of the girl’s chest, Harry could indeed believe it was a sort of living smoke, slowly taking form before his eyes.

He sensed new movement to the left and looked in that direction just in time to see the flesh of another child beginning to ripple.  Within seconds, his worst fears were verified as he found similar signs of motion upon each of the remaining children.  All of them were taking part in this strange birthing, each in a different stage of the process.

His eyes flicked back to the first body, where the beginnings of a face were rising from the rippling flesh.  At first its features were barely discernible, little more than a malformed arrangement of flesh and bone that seemed to resemble the basic shape and construction of a human face.  But the more it freed itself from the body of its host, the more distinct its features became, until it finally bore a passable resemblance to the child who had given life to it.  Each of the facial characteristics was grossly deformed, however; the mouth far too wide for the lower half of the face; the eyes set too far apart, one barely half the size of its gaping twin; the nose nothing more than a twisted clump of withered flesh in the center of its face.

And all of it was completely white, a perfectly colorless pallor that looked more dead than alive.

The eyes locked onto Harry, twin pools of blackness that regarded him with a glare of pure malice, pure hatred.

It was all Harry could take.  The sight of those eyes, impossibly alive, impossibly human, snapped him out of his paralysis.  He began to back away, holding his gun steadily out in front of him.

“Up into the hole, Charlie.  Nice and slow, and we’ll be all right.”

But Charlie refused, stepping even further away from the hole in the ceiling.  “Jesus, Harry, what’s going on here?”  His words came together in a frightened rush as panic began to take hold of him.

The first creature had almost freed itself completely from its host, its eyes never leaving Harry, never even blinking.  It watched him the way a predator watches its prey just before it strikes.  One of its legs emerged, a sickly white limb that was jointed backwards at the knee, its foot a shrunken mass of dead flesh.

Harry inched closer to the hole.  He pushed the handle of the flashlight up under the arm that held the gun, its barrel still trained on the creature.  His free hand slid slowly into his jacket and tugged out the radio.

“John, are you there?  Come in . . .” 

He waited for a reply, counting off the seconds until he’d be directly beneath the hole and up into the empty darkness of the tunnel.

If it let him get that far. 

The first creature passed completely out of the child’s body.  It stood in the center of the circle, its body hunched and deformed, its black eyes staring up at Harry with a frightening glint of intelligence.  Its legs were tensed, its long arms hanging still at its sides, fingers raking the air silently.