For a moment Ryan didn’t even see the source of all the commotion. Then some sort of shadow lunged forward and blotted out a big area of the floor. Ryan couldn’t even tell what exactly it did to a couple dozen infants and maybe a dozen nurses that it hid, but he doubted they survived. He got an impression of rounded immensity, and furious powerful motion. It heaved up and swung side to side, shattering stalactites as thick as Ryan’s torso like matchsticks as it did.
“Blast it!” he yelled.
He threw his own Scout longblaster to his shoulder, took quick aim across the sights below the Leupold scope and fired.
In the abysmal gloom the flare of the powerful 7.62 mm cartridge going off was as huge and dazzling as a nearby lightning strike. He saw yellow reflections
glinting off some kind of pallid, hunched surface, getting a flash impression of vast, thick rings.
Jak added the sharp bark of his .357 Magnum blaster to the sound of J.B. cutting loose with a burst from his Uzi as Ryan jacked the action of his carbine and brought the weapon back online. The others had come up and opened fire as well. He paid them no attention; he knew they had set up to stay out of one another’s fields of fire. That was one of the lethal edges they had over their opposition, even when it greatly outnumbered him: by virtue of long practice, they fought together like parts of a perfectly designed and well-oiled machine. The combined seven muzzle-flashes still gave Ryan no clearer picture of what it was they were fighting.
They only showed him that if anything, it was bigger than he even thought.
Into one of those sudden lulls in the firing, J.B. shouted, “If that thing finds out we’re shooting it, it’s going to be hot past nuke re—”
The final
d
was drowned out by a shrill noise like a predark ocean liner’s steam whistle going off. It was so sharp, and not just unimaginably loud but huge, that it drove Ryan to his knees, trying to cover his ears with his hand and forearm as best he could without letting go of his longblaster.
It hardly helped. The keening noise went on and on, stabbing his eardrums like hammer-struck spikes, threatening to liquefy the very bones within him.
Then it was replaced by a colossal grinding rumble, like gravel being crushed in a gigantic machine.
Ryan was up again instantly, leveling his Steyr. He could see the dark shape’s ill-defined nearer end had turned into a passageway to his left, presenting a curve
of colossal body that seemed to consist of giant ribbed segments. The tunnel seemed too small to let it in. The grinding and the cloud of dust and fragments that surrounded its fore-end—he wasn’t even sure if it had a head or not—told him it was doing something about that, in no uncertain terms.
He shot again.
“Fire it up! Keep shooting!”
“But it’s going!” Mildred cried.
“We want to keep it that way! Shoot, fireblast it!”
They did. Even the terrific clamor of seven powerful modern blasters going off close together in such a confined, stone space was not enough to drown out the monster’s rumble and squeal.
Suddenly the shadowy immensity was flowing unimpeded into the passageway. With shocking quickness, it was gone.
Ryan’s yell of “Cease fire!” wasn’t needed.
“¡Nuestra Señora!”
Ricky’s exclamation sounded as if it was echoing out of a deep well twenty feet away, through Ryan’s deafening tinnitus. “What the hell was
that
?”
“Big,” J.B. replied. “Dark night, it was big.”
“My friends,” Doc said, pausing in the midst of reloading his giant beast of a LeMat revolver to execute an elegant bow and sweep of his long arm, “permit me to present to you the fabled Digging Leviathan!”
“Are you sure it’s—” Mildred stopped herself. “What am I saying? Of course it is.”
Ryan had the partially depleted 10-round box magazine out of the well and was swapping it out for a fresh one. He was suddenly extremely glad that they’d loaded down with as much extra ammo from the sunken offices as they could possibly carry.
Krysty shook her head. Her sentient red hair had curled itself to her head in an almost skintight cap. By the barely present illumination, Ryan couldn’t see the emerald color of her eyes, but he could see they were as wide as a startled alley cat’s.
No sign of life remained out on the floor of the ravaged nursery.
“The widening of the entrance looks surprisingly rough,” Doc commented, squinting to see through the near-darkness. “Perhaps we were mistaken about the source of the unusually uniform tunnels we’ve passed through?”
“The thing was in a bit of a hurry for close work, Doc,” J.B. observed. He straightened his fedora, which had worked itself slightly askew on his head in all the excitement.
“Do you think we hurt it?” Ricky asked.
“You’re joking, right?” Mildred said.
“Depends what you mean by
hurt
,” Ryan said, slamming the fresh mag home with his palm and feeling the satisfying click of the catch. “If you mean, did we do it any harm, then nuke, no. But it felt our fire, sure enough, and didn’t like it.”
“And exactly what does that mean, Ryan?” Mildred asked.
A rumble shook the walls of the passageway beneath them, and the floor beneath their feet. Frowning, Ryan stepped first toward the right-hand wall, across the passage from him, felt the cool, smooth stone with quick fingertips, then he moved back to press a palm against the other wall.
“It’s moving,” he said. “This side of us.”
As he spoke, the giant thunder-sound grew perceptibly louder.
“It means,” he said, turning back up the steep way they had just come, “that we pissed it off. And now it’s coming for us.
Run!
”
* * *
“S
HE
’
S STILL BREATHIN
’,” Potar said. He himself wasn’t breathing easy, bent over his profound belly as he was to examine the fallen woman with a giant paw. “Just out cold. I hit her a good one.”
“These two ain’t,” reported one of the sec men who were hunkered down beside Angus and Alfie.
Or rather their corpses, Conn reckoned.
He didn’t know either sec man’s name. They came from somewhere away off east. He didn’t know any of the detail his sec boss had handpicked for this night’s business, which had turned ugly, as Conn had instantly foreseen would happen when he heard the volatile, raven-haired rabble-rouser was on her way to see him.
He judged that for the best. He didn’t know most of Potar’s sec men, not even as casual customers of his Stenson’s Creek gaudy, and he had a good memory for faces as well as names. He thought it better that way, because he didn’t want them hanging back from doing their jobs out of sympathy for fellow Sinkhole-district locals, and so they’d fret less about possible reprisals taken against their own kin by families of men and women they’d been forced to deal with.
“I’m glad your men shot true, Potar,” Conn said with some asperity. “It would have been a nukin’ poor twist to be struck down by a ball from one of my own bodyguard’s blasters.”
With a vast grunt of effort Potar put a hand on his knee and shoved his massive torso upright. “I’ll talk to them if you want, Mr. Conn.”
“Not needful,” Conn said. He shied away from the prospect of having his enormous, bullying sec boss “talk to” one of his men the way he did to dissidents and troublemakers. Not all of them had wound up tacked to crosses by railway spikes through wrists and feet, like the taints who had got poor Wymie so worked up.
“What should we do with the chills?” asked the sec man who’d announced the woman’s two escorts were dead.
“Drag them a distance away from camp and dump them in some brambles,” Conn said. “We’ll let the coamers clean up after us.”
He shared knowing smiles with Potar. “Not for the first time.”
“Is that—is that true, Mr. Conn?” the sec man asked nervously.
“Is what true?”
“You believe in them coamers, then? I mean, my old gram used to scare me when I was a toddler and she didn’t want me to grab the cook pot off the fire with my bare hands. Said that if I didn’t do like she said the ghouls’d get me.”
“Of course I believe in coamers. I’ve seen their red eyes glowin’ in brush outside camp with the firelight myself. You don’t really think those stupe bastards from the outlands had anything to do with the killings, do you? At least not until this feeb Wymie had to go and stir them up?”
The man fell silent. Conn’s brow furrowed. He could tolerate doubt among his own bodyguard far less than he could tolerate intramural violence within it. He looked to Potar.
“No worries, Mr. Conn,” the giant said. “Liam’s solid as they come.”
Conn nodded once, briskly.
Potar opened a huge hand toward the still-unconscious Wymie.
“It time, boss?” he asked.
Conn lowered his chest to his collarbone and creased his brow in thought. For a fact, things had not broken this night as he’d anticipated. He’d sent off his number-one adviser, Frank, because the tall dark scarecrow still had a conscience, one that Conn did not care to encumber by making him a witness if he had to take stern measures. But mostly he’d had Potar ensure only his most trusted bully-boys were anywhere nearby as a precaution. And in case the troublesome Wymea Berdone needed to be persuaded.
But things had powered right past that point. So be it, Conn thought.
He raised his head and smiled at Potar. He thought he saw the barest flicker of fear in the man’s boar-hog eyes.
“Yes, Potar,” he said gently. “It’s time.”
“‘We found Watts and Dorkins partially dismembered and devoured, their bones gnawed,’” Ricky read out loud.
Krysty could clearly hear the youth panting as he spoke. They were all winded, after their sprint through the cave network, up and away from the terrible rushing roar that pursued them. But they seemed to have lost it, or at least put some distance between them and its vengeful fury. For now.
At the higher end of a huge cavern, Ryan had called a halt to drink and catch their wind. A stream of cold, freshwater, relatively sweet-tasting, ran from a crack high up in one wall, through a well-defined channel it had cut in the floor, to vanish into the echoing but impenetrably dark depths beyond a shoulder-high opening in the farther wall. Ricky had shouted into it from a few feet, which got him barked at by Ryan for taking the risk that whatever was chasing them might hear. None of them had felt like venturing closer.
They had not been there before, but the notches the coamers had struck by the entrances showed which direction was which, and that was enough for Ryan and Jak to orient themselves. Or so they said, and neither was of a frame of mind to shade the truth to humor the others.
“‘It can only be McComb’s albino monsters, with
their blood-colored eyes and horrid dog faces. She’s let them off the leash and set them on us for certain. And now the time has come to put an end to this threat and this perversion of science. I have ordered an all-out attack…’”
Ricky looked up. He had shadows under his eyes, and his dark brown eyes were large in his face. Despite the fact the big chamber showed little sign of alteration for use by the coamers, there was enough recently charged glow-moss available for him to do the trick of stuffing a clump in his shirt for light to read by. He seemed almost obsessed by the task.
“There’s just one more entry,” he said.
“Well, don’t tease us,” Mildred grumped. “Read the damn thing.”
Ricky looked at Ryan, who nodded.
“What?” Mildred prodded, clearly feeling out of sorts. She was, as she frequently pointed out, built for comfort, not speed, with her short legs and generous hips. She wasn’t fat; years of tramping over the same countless miles of Deathlands and beyond had melted pretty much all of them to muscle and bone. She was just sturdily built. “How many magazines will hearing that last bit load for us, anyway?”
“Back up off the trigger of the blaster, Mildred,” Ryan growled. He was sitting on a rounded stump of stalagmite. Krysty hated how haggard he looked, and not just from exertion. “I’ve got curiosity, too. I’m not made of stone.”
“Sometimes it’s kind of hard to tell.”
“Well?” Ryan said to Ricky. “Get on with it, kid.”
“‘I am the last,’ Foxton writes. ‘I am wounded and bleeding and out of ammunition, and my time is near. I
know. I write this final entry by the shine of clumps of some manner of self-luminous moss or fungus, clearly developed by the madwoman McComb’s labs.
“‘I must hide this account for future generations, if anyone survives the cold and the dark outside to reproduce. Has the world fallen to these naked Morlocks? I cannot know. But in spite of all, I can hope. Yes, and pray.
“‘I hear them now, closing in. My right leg will not carry me another step. They’re com—’”
Ricky shut the book with a reverence Doc did not think the evil whitecoat author deserved.
“That’s how it ends. Guess he made his last stand right by the place where I found this.”
Ryan sighed. “At least we’ve got some idea of what we’re facing,” he said. “Both sides—the cannies and the creature. I don’t know how much it’ll help, but I know it feels better than knowing nothing.”
“So what now?” Krysty asked. She hated to put any weight back on her lover’s overburdened shoulders, but she felt no less responsible for the survival of her companions than he did. She knew time pressed. And she was eager to
know
.
“Perhaps the monster’s wrath has cooled off, and it has forgotten all about us,” Doc suggested. “I doubt its vast size houses any commensurate mentality.”
“Like we’re ever that lucky,” J.B. said with a dry chuckle.
“As the great, and presumably long-late, Samuel L. Jackson said in the movie
The Long Kiss Goodnight
,” Mildred said, “‘When you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you—and umption!’”
Krysty looked blankly at her friend. So did all the others.
“No, Millie,” J.B. explained patiently, “it’s ‘when you assume, you make an
ass
out of
u
and
me
.’”