Though it was a large target, his aim was true. Or his luck was in. Trailing fire and smoke, the projectile arced between a pair of particularly low-hanging stalactites to smash to pieces against a thick story-high stalagmite that had been cracked at the base and pushed to a fifteen-
degree angle by the blubbery-looking flank of the horror. A rooster tail of fire, shockingly bright in the faint light, sprayed right over the thing’s “head.”
With speed shocking for its freight-train size, the beast reared right up, splintering the two stalactites the Molotov had missed plus a whole lot more with its blazing head. It vented a whistling scream that seemed to shatter rock. It was so loud and intense it not only threatened to implode Ryan’s eardrums, but made it hard to breathe.
“Fireblast!” he yelled. He could barely hear the syllables conducted through the bones of his own skull for the terrible noise.
Still blinking to clear floating orange blobs of afterimage from a gloom-accustomed eye dazzled by the fire, Ryan drew his SIG P226. Pointing it with one hand but getting a flash picture over the front sight out of sheer habit, which he preferred not to mess with, he squeezed off six quick shots at the howling hulk.
“That’s right, you overgrown bastard earthworm!” he shouted, though the creature certainly couldn’t hear him over the racket of its screeching and the constant cracking and crashing of stone as it whipped its still-burning head this way and that. “Come get me!”
It might not have heard him, but it obeyed. The creature lowered its front end, cascading with rubble and still drooling the odd strand of still-burning pine oil, as if to look right at the one-eyed man. Then it lunged at him.
He stuffed the handblaster back in its holster, turned and sprinted back up the sloping passage as fast as his long, lean-muscled legs would carry him.
So much for the easy part, he told himself as he powered up the smoothed-stone ramp. Now he had two things
to concentrate on: keeping the horror following him at all costs and not dying.
He reckoned it was the second one that was going to be a problem.
He didn’t look back. That slowed a person. Also, although the stone had been smoothed flat by generations of naked coamer feet, if not patient hammering by coamers with rocks, he did not want to risk turning his ankle on some random piece of debris shaken free by the monster’s thrashing.
The rock beneath his flying feet shuddered so violently he almost took a header. He threw down a hand to keep from planting his face on stone, but fortunately he was able to lever himself upright again, without risking snapping his forearm from landing wrong. The crash of the worm hitting the tunnel mouth off-center momentarily silenced its steam-whistling of pain and fury. But it instantly reared back and squealed twice as loud as before.
He reckoned the creature wasn’t used to running into things it didn’t intend to. Having your face on fire could do that to you.
But even as he was hoping like thermonuclear hell that his eardrums wouldn’t simply shatter—if not his entire skull—it struck him that this was now a problem for him.
The whole point of this crazy exercise was for him to get the creature to follow him. Specifically, up this very tunnel, calculated by Doc, and J.B.’s myopic but experienced eyes, to be
just
wide enough to accommodate its tremendous girth. That was one of the factors that had kept them stalking the creature, while their rations ran ever lower, and they lived in constant fear of causing
some unavoidable sound or vibration that would make the monster worm turn.
They’d finally pinned down its location in a place where they could implement their scheme. And the nuking thing above all required that the Leviathan follow Ryan.
The one-eyed man stopped. He was going so hard it took a couple steps to actually arrest his upward progress. The end of his exertion made him abruptly aware of how it was making his chest pump like a bellows.
“Fuck,” he said, and actually heard it with his ears. A little. The terrible whistle had stopped, as if the monster was concentrating on trying to figure out where the little meat morsel who had so impudently caused it pain had got to. He turned back around, unslinging his Steyr Scout longblaster as he did so. It was time to bring out the big blasters. Or the biggest one he had.
Sure enough, he could see some of the creature’s pallid belly, off to his left of the tunnel mouth and arching up clear out sight. It was casting about for his scent. “This way,” he yelled as he shouldered the longblaster, punishing his poor throat even more. “I’m
here
, you triple-stupe mutie tapeworm!” Ryan punctuated his taunts with shots from the Steyr.
He didn’t think anything could make his ears ring worse than the racket the monster had made once he nuked its face, but the reports of the powerful 7.62 mm cartridges going off in this stone echo chamber proved him wrong.
He could actually see the monster’s flesh ripple away from the high-speed impacts like pond water from a rock. He wondered how it could be so blubbery yet apparently chew its way through solid stone. But
he
wasn’t one of
the army of crazy whitecoats who had genetically designed the thing to be the way it was.
He was thankful to have something to be thankful for, here and now.
The worm froze momentarily, then it bent down with what seemed like caution. Abruptly its tooth-rimmed mouth appeared at the entrance, almost filling it. Light from the glow-moss inside the passageway glinted on its teeth. Each was easily as long as one of Ryan’s arms.
He fired a shot right down its throat.
As he recovered from the recoil, chambering a fresh cartridge, he saw the body behind the head seem to swell. Then the creature lunged into the tunnel, almost to where Ryan stood. Reflexively he flung himself backward, landing on his butt. The wedge-toothed fringes of the great mouth worked angrily. Peristaltic waves surged down the fang-lined tunnel of its gullet.
Ryan sprang up, turned. At every pounding step he expected to hear the rustling rumble of the monster sliding forward, to feel the inward-slanting teeth catch him and engulf him, thrusting him into darkness and pain. But either disoriented by its leap, or not fitting the tunnel as comfortably as it expected, the monster had to wiggle its enormous bloated body in to pursue its prey.
Then Ryan did hear it sliding after him. He risked a glance back. It propelled itself forward with a curious turning motion, as if
screwing
itself up the tunnel.
The symbolism of that did not escape him. The humor of it did, at the moment. He’d laugh later. If he lived.
Hoping his memory was as sharp as he thought it was, he took a hard left, sprinted across a small chamber, along another passage. A rising thunder followed him.
He glanced back. The monster was picking up speed,
smashing aeons-old stone spikes and pillars to fragments with too little awareness to call it
contemptuous
ease.
He had gotten, somehow, roughly a forty-yard head start on the thing, but now it was rapidly making up the distance.
Another turn right into a side tunnel. Ryan heard the Digging Leviathan crash into the intersection, with what he could only think of as frustrated grumbling as it had to maneuver its way around the turn. But it was clearly not going to stop. It sensed its tormentor, however it did that, and it seemed determined to finish him.
The passage widened up to perhaps twice as wide as the worm. The air grew warm and stank of sulfur. Heat began to pound against Ryan’s sweat-flooded cheek from the wall to his right.
For just a single trip-hammer beat of Ryan’s heart the monster hesitated. Then, with a sinister sound like a hurricane blasting through a dense forest, it charged after him, picking up speed as it came.
With all the wind he could spare, Ryan began to holler, “Blow it!
Blow it!
”
* * *
“N
UKE THAT
,” J.B.
MUTTERED
, as if his best friend could hear him, fifty yards down the gently sloping chamber and running flat out, while a monster pursued him with a locomotive sound. “Dark night, you’re not going to kill yourself on my watch!”
“Go, Ryan!” Mildred yelled from behind.
“Hurry, lover!” Krysty called.
Against the Armorer’s better judgment, the others were clustered right behind where he knelt watching down the tunnel as the colossal worm ate up the distance between its toothy circular gape and Ryan, spinning
like a huge, fat drill bit. Then again, he could hardly blame them.
He
wouldn’t have missed the show for the world.
Doc and Ricky added their voices to the encouragement, cheering themselves hoarse. Ryan put on a visible burst of speed.
“Clear!” the one-eyed man roared. “Blow it, nuke you!”
But J.B. was focused on the broad stripe of pebble-sized rubble fragments strewed side to side across the wide floor. He drew in a deep breath, then let half of it out.
Ryan vaulted over the line. Grinning like a hyena. J.B. twisted the initiator plunger in his hands to unlock it, then rammed it home.
A spark shot along the high-speed fuse, and a line of C-4 charges he’d stuck along the left-hand wall—from his viewpoint—cracked off in almost a single, head-shatteringly sharp crack.
For a moment nothing happened. The worm did pause, as if startled by the blaster. Caught by the fringes, Ryan stumbled wildly toward them.
Krysty ran to meet him, and he caught her in her strong arms as he finally lost his fight with gravity and started to pitch forward on his face.
Behind him the cavern wall erupted, with a surge of glowing-red lava that shot almost to the far side of the chamber before hitting and splashing the limestone wall right in front of the corkscrewing monstrosity.
A scream pealed from the creature louder than the plas-ex charges going off. A wave of intolerable heat washed over them, instantly making J.B.’s face feel sunburned.
Ryan had his feet under him again. Hand in hand he and Krysty dashed upward, racing by the others even as they turned to flee the killing heat. The backs of their clothes and hair were smoking.
They were a hundred yards away, well up into a passageway, before it cooled down enough to be merely uncomfortable. Then they turned to view their handiwork.
The big chamber had filled side to side with orange-glowing, molten stone to just above the height of the breaches J.B.’s charges had knocked in the thin stretch of the wall that separated the caverns from the interwoven tubes where magma ran. It was still flowing, presumably rolling back down the route Ryan had traveled and various side passages. It would roll downhill, scorching and burying all it encountered at once, until it cooled enough to dam itself.
Mildred was fussing over the back of Krysty’s head. She’d doused her smoldering red hair with a full canteen of water. It had stopped smoking, but the strands were writhing in obvious pain.
“You have no idea how much that stings,” Krysty said through gritted teeth.
Ryan sprawled on his butt and elbow, with his long legs stuck out before him. He was panting like a dog, although the air was filled with sulfur, smoke and an oddly tainted barbecue tang.
“Is it dead?” Ricky asked.
“It’s seen better days,” J.B. said with quiet satisfaction. “That’s for sure.”
“Far as we know it’s chilled,” Ryan rasped. “Also, far as Mother McComb will be able to find out.”
“I wonder how many of the coamers got caught by the lava surge,” Doc said thoughtfully. “Or simply trapped
below, to die of whatever form of privation they succumb to first.”
“I know their crazy queen won’t waste any tears on them,” Ryan said. “So I don’t propose to, either. Here, give me a hand up.”
He held out his arm. He and J.B. gripped each other’s, forearm to forearm. For a moment they held that pose, grinning. Then J.B. hauled his friend to his feet. Ryan was a bigger, heavier man, but the Armorer raised him easily enough.
“So now we go collect our reward?” Ricky asked Ricky.
J.B. saw Ryan look at the kid, saw his look turn thoughtful. Then he grinned.
“First,” their leader said, “we haul our butts someplace where we can breathe without poisoning ourselves, and where we can catch our breath and rest a spell.”
He grinned.
“Then we go and pay a visit home to dear old Angela McComb.”
“I see five of you,” the Mother of All Coamers said, leaning forward on her carven-flowstone throne and squinting through the light of myriad torches. “You were seven when I sent you off.”
Through the lane left open through a vast crowd of silent cannies, crouching like coyotes and smelling no better than usual, Ryan strode boldly up to the foot of her dais. Krysty, Doc, Mildred and Ricky followed. They had their packs on their backs, and all their weapons, though stashed away. No one had raised a claw to interfere with them since they’d entered the gigantic royal chamber.
“J. B. Dix and Jak Lauren didn’t make it,” Ryan said heavily. “The worm got them.”
The cannie queen straightened in her chair. “So that is what it was. A worm.”
“A triple-big one the size of a bunch of buses strung together, with a mouth that could bite through solid rock and swallow that boulder you’re sitting on whole.”
“Impressive. And you have dispatched it?”
“We did. It’s dead.”
“And how did you accomplish this feat?”
“Decisively.”
She smiled thinly. “Do not toy with me, Mr. Cawdor,” she said. “I, the all-powerful ruler of the subterranean domain in which you find yourself, the Mother of the
Nation of Perpetual Night, have granted you the privilege of doing me a service. I believe my largess entitles me to a certain candor.”
Does this hoity-toity psycho think she can throw me off using big words? Ryan wondered.
Though the diary Ricky had read to them was written by what would turn out to be her literal mortal enemy—or rather, she turned out to be his—Ryan suspected she wasn’t too different in reality from the way she was portrayed. And that sounded like the sort of thing Angela McComb might try, for no better reason than to display her own assumed superiority.