She shuffled some more of the papers around and found a tarnished butter knife that had been sharpened to a point. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make her feel a little better. Next to the knife were some odd drawings—stick-figure diagrams of human anatomy and scenes of torture and mutilation. All had the same crude traits as the other papers. They seemed like the work of an evil, demented child.
Before she could consider them further, something coughed in the distance, the sound echoing through the tunnel that she’d already left behind. Moving quickly, she snatched up the butter knife and carefully lifted the kerosene lantern from the hook on the wall. A small knob on the base of the lamp kept the flame low. She turned it to the right, and the knob moved with a grating squeak. As she twisted, the wick rose higher and caught fire, brightening the flame inside the lantern. Thick, black smoke guttered into the lamp’s chimney.
Satisfied, Heather hurried over to the crevice at the rear of the cave. It would be a tight fit, but she had no choice. Kneeling, she crawled into the cramped space and crept forward. She found herself in another tunnel. The lantern hissed and spit as it was repeatedly jostled. The walls seemed to press in on her, and in a few places, she had to squeeze around rocks to make it through. Despite the tight quarters, she felt more at ease this time, due to the lantern and the knife. The tunnel rose steadily, and she followed it, hoping it led all the way to the surface.
She thought about the neighborhood above, and how frightening and otherworldly it had seemed as they drove through it. Now she couldn’t wait to see it again. As far as Heather was concerned, compared to her current surrounding, the ghetto was heaven.
She prayed as she continued her desperate ascent.
***
Exhausted, Kerri lay still for a long while with her eyes closed. She had no idea how long she lay there. When she snapped out of it, her head and muscles ached, and her jaw was sore from gritting her teeth. She turned over slowly and licked her lips, tasting mud. She idly wondered what she looked like right now, after wallowing in filth and blood the entire night. What would Tyler think if…
“Tyler …” Her voice cracked.
No. She didn’t have time for that. It seemed all she’d done since his death was to bounce from one emotional extreme to the other. She’d been a wreck, then a female Rambo, and then a wreck again. She wanted to sleep. Just lay there in the mud and drift away.
For a few minutes, she’d been having the most wonderful daydream—half memory and half flight of fancy. Toward the end of the last summer, she and Tyler and the gang had driven into New Jersey and made their way to Cape May one morning. The houses there were all beautiful and brightly painted, and there was a light house where they all went to the top of and took pictures. Later, when that got boring, they’d strolled along the boardwalk in Wildwood, riding the roller coasters and feeding french fries and funnel cakes to the seagulls. It had been a great day. Tyler had been in a great mood. In the arcade, he’d won her an atrociously pink stuffed gorilla with false eyelashes. She’d made him carry the oversized thing around for the next couple of hours. Somewhere at home was a picture of her, the ape, and Tyler all sitting together on the Ferris wheel, grinning like crazy, both of them sunburned to a darker red than the stuffed animal. That part of the daydream was all accurate memory.
The fantasy involved all six of them going to Wildwood again. Tyler was right there with her, holding her hand and smiling as she talked with the others about how they were going to get out of the crazy house and the tunnels underneath it. He kept smiling, and so did all of the others. They behaved like there was nothing wrong, even when the dark shapes strode out of the ocean and stalked toward them down the boardwalk, stinking of mud and blood. Noigel was in the lead, and his hammer dripped blood.
That was what had woke Kerri from her stupor.
She spat, trying to clear the mud from her mouth. Then she sat up and groaned as her stiff muscles protested. There was a strange odor in the air, dry and autumnal. It wafted down from somewhere ahead of her. The darkness was impenetrable—a solid curtain of black. She wiggled her fingers in front of her face, but couldn’t see them. That was okay as far as Kerri was concerned. As much as she feared the dark, she feared being killed by Noigel and his fucked-up friends even more. If she couldn’t see anything, then maybe nothing could see her, either.
Kerri crawled. The surface beneath her was stone, not mud, and while it was cold and felt as damp as the level above her had, there was no actual moisture beneath her hands. It was hard to tell which direction she was going in the dark, but she had a sensation of veering slowly to the right, farther and farther away from the trapdoor. She tested the floor and the walls and finally the ceiling, and discovered that the area was large enough for her to stand up. A moment later she did just that. It felt good to be walking again, even if she couldn’t see where she was going. She held her arms out in front of her, fingers stretched as far as they would go, feeling her way.
She’d gone a few more steps when something snagged her hair and pulled. Kerri screamed. Her hands fluttered to her head, slapping and clawing at the attacker. A second shriek died in her throat as she touched the impediment. She’d been expecting a hand, but what her fingers came in contact with instead was long and thin and made of wood. It didn’t fight back when she grasped it. Didn’t move at all. At first, she couldn’t figure out what it might be. A wooden tentacle? Some new booby trap? Then she realized what was tugging her hair. It was the bottom end of a tree root. She calmed down as she removed it from her hair. Kerri couldn’t remember seeing any trees in the area when they’d fled from the street gang. True, they’d had more immediate concerns and she hadn’t really been paying attention at the time, but she thought she’d remember if there had been trees. Here was a root, dangling down from unseen heights. She lifted her arms over her head and waved them around. Her fingertips brushed against more roots. There were definitely trees overhead. That meant either she was farther away from the house than she’d originally thought, or the trees were all dead and gone and their underground root systems were all that remained—nothing more than ghostly fingers, pulling her hair in an effort to remind humans that they’d once existed before the pavement and houses and concrete. She shivered at the thought. Kerri wondered whether the network of roots was keeping the ceiling from collapsing on her. If so, that was a good thing.
The trapdoor that had led into this subterranean chamber was somewhere behind her, but she wasn’t sure of its exact location anymore. She assumed that since she was close enough to the surface to discover tree roots, the ground beneath her feet would begin to climb higher, but it was hard to tell in the dark.
She kept moving. The air was still, without even the hint of a breeze.
Which was why she stopped in her tracks when a puff of rancid hot air suddenly blew across her face. Startled, Kerri lurched forward. Her arms bumped into something in front of her—something soft and slick and yielding. Flesh. Two powerful, hairy hands grabbed her wrists and yanked her forward. She stumbled as another blast of the creature’s breath assailed her senses. It stank like rotten eggs and feces.
Kerri screamed, and the thing in the darkness laughed. Then its arms snaked around her body and squeezed.
***
Just when he was beginning to think that he wouldn’t be able to take the silence for a second longer, Javier stopped and listened. There was someone up ahead of him. No, not just someone. There were at least two. Maybe more. His spirits rose for a second in the hopes that it might be the girls or Brett. But then his hopes were dashed. What followed was a bewildering series of noises—snatches of what sounded like conversation, but like no language he’d ever heard. It sounded like gibberish, constructed to almost make words. He couldn’t tell how far away they were. The voices weren’t alarmed, so he was pretty certain that they weren’t aware of his presence.
His bladder ached. He needed to piss, but Javier was afraid that if he did, the sound or smell would give his location away.
The sound of shuffling footsteps caused him to hunker down. They were coming from a different direction than the hushed voices. A moment later, a third speaker joined the fray, but unlike the others, this new addition was understandable—if barely. His voice sounded like he had a throat full of barbed wire.
“What are you two doing? I thought I told you to hunt! Bad enough we lost them all earlier, in all the confusion. The longer they’re down here running loose, the worse it will be.”
This elicited a garbled, excited response. Then the new arrival spoke again.
“See, this is why you should have stayed put and helped make man-pudding or tended to the fires. I knew you two weren’t old enough to hunt yet. Get on back. Noigel and the others will handle this.”
More chatter. This time, they sounded dejected.
“I don’t care. You can’t hunt if you’re standing around playing with each other’s peckers and making the milk come out. Now go on. Tell Curd I sent you back to help him. He’s got one hung up now, freshly cleaned and skinned. I want you to take all the bones and smash them open and pull out the stuff inside. The eyeballs, too, and his poop tubes. We’ll make a good pudding with it all.”
Another unintelligible response.
“Don’t be stupid. You can’t milk a man once he’s dead. Now get going.”
Javier heard them scurrying away. A moment later, the third set of footsteps faded, as well. He waited another ten minutes, until he was absolutely certain that he was alone again. Then, unable to hold it anymore, he pulled down his zipper and pissed. He wanted to groan with relief, but he held his breath instead. Javier shuddered at the sensation. The stream was hot and heavy and splashed back against his legs. He forced himself not to gag as the piss wet his shoes and cuff s. Then his fear evaporated and the anger came back, a deep and abiding rage that nestled in the back of his skull and pulsated with a life all its own.
Although he couldn’t be sure, it sounded from the conversation he’d just eavesdropped on that one of his friends had been caught and killed. He wondered who it was. Then it occurred to him that maybe the speaker had been referring to Tyler or Stephanie—or maybe somebody they didn’t even know. Somebody from the neighborhood, perhaps? Some drug addict or homeless person.
Who it was didn’t really matter. He intended to kill every single one of these fucking things he came across just the same. No more hiding. No more pissing on himself. No more being a victim. Javier shook his feet one at a time, grimacing at the feel of his wet socks rubbing against his soles. Then he moved forward again, walking carefully and doing his best to be completely silent.
He wasn’t sure how far he’d gone or how many minutes had passed before he heard the voices again. They were muffled and distant. He slowed his pace and crept forward, summoning all the stealth he could manage. His hands trembled and his teeth chattered from the adrenaline and anger coursing through his body. Javier resisted the urge to charge blindly forward, shouting with rage and lashing out in the darkness.
As he progressed, he noticed a spark of light ahead, coming from the same direction as the voices. When he got nearer, he saw that it was a flashlight beam—weak, but still effective in this near total darkness. He paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust and then moved forward again. The conversations continued, the speakers oblivious to his presence. He tiptoed closer, until he could see their silhouettes. Then Javier paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the sudden light. He took slow, shallow breaths and tried to remain completely still.
There were three of them. He couldn’t see them clearly. They were too close together, but he could make out enough to disgust him. The only similarities he could see in them was their utter
wrongness
. Two were malformed. Their skin was slicked with greasy perspiration, and their brittle, matted hair was thin and long, as if it had never been cut. They wore no clothing, but they’d painted themselves with mud and wiped it away in strategic places to act as distinct markings. Both were decidedly female.
The third figure was a man. At first, Javier mistook him for a female, but when he looked closer, he saw that it was really a man wearing a woman’s tanned and preserved skin. He wondered if this was the same maniac Brett had encountered, or a different one with a similar fetish. The man seemed older than the females. He was taller and equipped with broad shoulders that bulged through his suit of skin with each small move he made. Horrified, Javier wondered how he’d fashioned the gruesome outfit to cling so tightly to his body.
Skin tight
, he thought, and had to bite his lip to keep from screaming.
He studied the man more intently. As far as Javier could see, there was no fat on his body. The woman-skin suit didn’t bulge from a potbelly or prodigious abdomen. Javier had little doubt that the thick fingers on the man’s hands could gouge through the hard-packed dirt around him with ease, and the length of his fingernails suggested that digging like a mole wouldn’t be anything new for him. Most surprisingly, Brett’s belt dangled from the man’s clenched fist. This was the same attacker that had ripped it from Javier’s grasp during the initial fight!