Blood Lust: A Supernatural Horror (56 page)

I was glad Simmons was with me.
In certain ways he reminded me of Lew
, big and beefy but quick for his size
.
Like Lew, he didn’t scare easily.
The Homeland Security agent’s
dogged
determination
was a match for
mine. Together, I felt we could get the job done. Our time
, however,
was limited.
Simmons
had phoned in, refusing to disclose his location and learned that
Section One
had traced
my cell
phone
, guessed my intent
and
was
sending a live capture team into the tunnel.
We had to kill the
creature before they arrived.

We reached the now non-functioning fan.
The silence was disturbing, unnatural,
our
every
labored
breath magnified by the silence surrounding us.
A
sticky sheen of perspiration and dust
coated my body
.
The temperature
must have hovered near 1
1
0 degrees Fahrenheit.
Simmons
motioned for me to raise the hatch. He held his .357 with both hands, pointed at the hatch. I lifted the handle and stared down into darkness. I shone my light into the hole
and played it around the tunnel but
could see
nothing
through the cloud of smoke and dust
.

“Here goes,” I said as I lowered myself
through
the doorway onto the ladder.
Safely o
n the ground, I crouched and listened before calling up to
Simmons
. “
Clear
.”

Our
light
s danced
along the
tunnel
walls and ceiling
, disturbing but not erasing the shadows
that grew like folds of ebony ivy
on the wooden planks
.
As we were deciding which
direction
to go,
I heard a
scraping sound came from down the tunnel.
I
t
could have been anything, but since the rats had made a mass exodus earlier, I assumed it was the
Chupacabra
.

When the fans
shut
down, McNeil had insisted
on
shutting down
the subway system in case of a
buildup
of
heat and
toxic gases.
The absence of trains only added to the depth of silence that pressed upon us. In the dark, confined tunnel,
immersed in foul air,
it was easy to imag
ine
we were
wandering
the Stygian depths of Hades.
In this case, our
Cerberus
had only one head, but it was still dangerous enough.
I shook my head to clear
my mind of
the
decidedly unhealthy images
I was conjuring
.

“We might as well get to it,”
Simmons
growled
, reminding me why we were
t
here.

We walked side-by side, eyes darting about
,
searching the shadows for our quarry.
Our flashlights were inadequate to the task, twin narrow beams of light
crisscrossing the
inky blackness of the
tunnel
, illuminating small patches of shadow. The creature could
easily
circle us without our knowledge.

“We need more light,” I said,
daunted by the overwhelming darkness.
My flashlight
illuminated only a small patch in front of us. I felt exposed.

“How many glow sticks do you have left?”

I checked my pockets. “Two
and a flare
.”

Simmons
shook his head. “Not enough.”

I cursed myself for not bringing more.
“There’s plenty of dry wood
around
.
I could star
t another fire
,” I suggested
half in jest
.
Simmons didn’t smile.
“Let’s try the breaker box. Maybe we can rig the lights.”

Simmons
scratched his head
in thought
.
After a moment’s consideration, he said,
“
It’s worth a try.”

The gate to the storage room was charred and some of the wire mesh had melted
and run
. The odor of ozone and burnt metal was strong in the room, as was the
smell of charcoal. Smoke,
thick and
unmoving in the still air,
clouded our vision.
Surveying the damage while
Simmons
checked out the breaker box
, I marveled that that Simmons’ jury-rigged electric fence had held out so long
under the fury of the
Chupacabra
.
I stood guard
as Simmons examined the breaker box
. The circuit he had used for the gate was
useless, the old Bak
e
lite
fuse holder
burned and cracked
.
Bits of charred fuse
covered
the bottom of the breaker box.
One by one, he pulled fuses, examined them and tossed them aside. I was
rapidly
growing skeptical of our chances
at restoring the lights
.

“Here’s one,” he said
,
beaming from ear to ear
in triumph
.

He replaced the burned out
light
fuse.
I just hoped the circuit box wasn’t beyond use.

“
Cross your fingers
,
”
he cautioned.

I would have crossed my kidneys if
I thought
it would help. He threw the
main
switch with a frighteningly loud click
but nothing happened.

Simmons shrugged. “Well, it was worth a try
. There must be a break somewhere in the line
between here and the source
.
Let’s look.”

I quickly spotted the broken power line
a short distance away
, the two ends lying on the floor of the tunnel.

“It looks someone’s ripped it from the wall,” Simmons said as he eyed the damage.

I immediately thought of Joria.
She knew the creature could see in the dark and we couldn’t, but probably she had done it to protect the
Chupacabra
from the elec
trified
fence.

“Maybe I can fix it
,
”
Simmons said but he sounded doubtful.

After a few minutes, he turned to me. “The main like is
no good, but I can repair this small 110-volt one. It might give us some lights.”

I nodded. “Go for it.”

A few minutes later the
overhead lights began to flicker into life up and down the tunnel,
decidedly
fewer than before, but they looked
good to me.

“What about the fan?” I asked hopefully.

He shook his head. “The lights are
110-volts
. The fan is sixty
amps
on a 220-volt
circuit
.
Not enough juice.”

“At least we’ve got lights,” I said
with undisguised relief
.

The lights, though
mere
island oases in a
n
ocean of darkness,
fought back the fear of darkness that seems part of the human psyche.
The darkness
, once unknown and frightening,
became tolerable again, a minor inconvenience but certainly no less dangerous. We continued our march down the tunnel.
Like children playing around broken fire hydrants in the sizzling summer heat, we lingered near each light
, relishing its imagined safe harbor. In reality, the creature could be upon us almost before we could react, but even this iota of
false hope lent us strength.

We had
travelled less than half a mile
when the lights
behind
us
began to go dark one by one. I pointed this out to
Simmons.

“Yeah, I saw,” he said grimly.

“Overload?” I asked hopefully.

“No,” he replied, his jaw set firm. His grip on his pistol tightened.
Following suite,
I
raised my elephant gun and tucked it against my side.

One light down the tunnel remained
glowing
.
We
stood in the only
other
pool of light in the tunnel. As I watched,
our light
, too,
flickered
and died. We
were
once
again in the dark, our flashlights our only
source of illumination.

“Get ready,” I said, realizing immediately ho
w
inane my warning was.

A flash of gray in
the beam of
my light
and a stirring of the dust was our only warning. The creature swooped upon us silently and savagely.
We
leaped aside
in
opposite directions as the creature whipped between us. Neither of us could fire for fear of hitting the other.
I rolled to one knee and faced
the direction the creature had gone
.

“Son of a bitch,”
Simmons
moaned.

I turned to him.
My
flashlight
revealed a wound
his chest
.
The creature’s passage had not been without cost.
Three parallel
,
ragged ten-inch
long
gashes ran diagonally from
just below
his right shoulder to his
navel
. His wound was
bleeding profusely.
I continued to stare after the creature as I asked, “Deep?”

“Deep enough!
” he snapped
through gritted teeth
. “
The bastard caught me as I was dropping and raked me good.
” He stuck a finger in one gash
experimentally
,
cried out
in pain
and withdrew a bloody finger
. The finger
had gone in
passed the first
knuckle.
Laughter echoed down the tunnel.
Simmons
stared at me
astonished. “The bastard can laugh?” he asked.

I nodded. “It can speak when it feels the need.”

“Son of a bitch
!
I thought it was
just
some kind of animal.”

“Much more than that. That’s why it’s so dangerous.”

He stood
up
. His face
distorted in pain, but he managed to get to his feet. “We’ve got kill this thing.”

I looked at his wound. “We’ve got to stop the bleeding first.”

I took off my t
-shirt
,
leaving me with just my undershirt. I
doubled
my shirt
and pressed it firmly against his wound, eliciting another curse
from him
.
It
was
dirty and sweaty but could not possibly infect the wound any worse than the creature’s talons
would
.
I removed my belt and looped
across
his
chest to
hold the makeshift bandage
tight
ly in place
.

“There
,
” I said.

From
Munson I had learned that
the poison acted like a blood thinner
, damaging capillaries
. The wound would continue to bleed, but hopefully at a slower rate
now
.
I picked up
Simmons’
gun and handed it to him.
He could barely hold it
in his right hand
.