“Probably not,” Dan replied. “But I’m no scientist. Something’s making it warmer though.”
He could Eric sigh behind him.
“Sack up, Eric,” he said. “This may be your moment to shine.”
“I’ll be a lot shinier when this is over.”
After they had all dropped down into the room, Dan crouched again and shined his light into the darkness ahead. The current room was around fifteen feet long, and led to another small tunnel. The trench continued into the darkness, and Dan could hear a slightly more intense trickling of water.
“You know,” Toni said. “This has got to be one of the strangest situations I’ve ever experienced.”
“What do you mean?” Dan asked.
Toni gave him a look of disbelief. “Seriously?” she asked. “I’m crawlin’ around in a damn dungeon with two white boys. That kinda shit doesn’t happen every day.”
Dan grinned and started forward again. The strange smells were changing and intensifying. In addition to the rotting smells, there was the smell of mildew and what he could only guess was piss. He came to the sudden realization that this may have been not only a storm sewer, but also a cesspit. He shivered at the thought. However, that would explain the heat. Decomposing waste gave off heat.
“Shit pit,” he said out loud.
He could hear Eric gag.
He led them into the second tunnel, noting how the warm breeze had picked up. It was very noticeable now, but mixed in with outside air. He could barely make out the faint smell of pine. They emerged into a large, round chamber, lit from a ventilation shaft in the peak of the dome-like ceiling. There, hanging near the peak, were a half a dozen cocoons.
“Holy shit,” Dan said, shining his flashlight at the larger, deflated one.
Eric’s flashlight lit them as well, revealing that the five others were still occupied, but were motionless and dripping with green fluid. Dan studied them closer, seeing that they were covered with deep lacerations. The half-mutated torso of one of the occupants was hanging out, lifeless and mutilated.
Dan shined his flashlight in the middle of the room. There were at least two dozen bodies in various stages of composition; from almost freshly killed down to nearly bare skeletons. One of them, a fresh one, was riddled with bullet holes. Dan recognized the body as one of the men from Oolitic.
“Mason’s men,” Dan said. “And some other poor victims.”
“The cocoons,” Eric gasped. “Melanie must have hatched first and killed the rest.”
Dan nodded. “That looks like what happened.”
He carefully went across the room to get a closer look at another body. It was naked and pale, resembling one of the ghouls. He flipped it over with his boot, gasping as the thing opened its eyes.
“Shit,” he said, putting a round in its head.
The creature groaned as its head was pulverized, and slumped down lifeless. Dan looked at Eric and Toni, who were still in shock.
“We got what we came here for,” he said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
There was a rough tunnel on Dan’s side of the chamber, with foul water and other things floating down it in a small river of filth. Fresh air wafted in from the outside. This was likely the final drain that led out into the nearby creek—which was obviously some kind of effluent system.
Dan squatted down to peer into the round, stone-lined tunnel. It was roughly four feet in diameter; large enough to duck walk through. He turned to his friends with a questioning glance?
“Shall we?” he asked. “It’s better than going back the way we came.”
“What if it’s blocked at the end by a grate?” Eric asked.
“It’s not that sturdy,” Dan said. “We could probably knock it out.”
A sudden splattering sound startled them. Buckets of green and brown fluid splashed down from the darkened dome, covering the floor and splatting on the walls. Eric shined his gun light up, seeing a newly opened cocoon still flapping and dripping.
“What the fuck?” Dan growled.
He searched the ceiling with his own light. All he could see were shadows, and the veiny flaps of torn cocoons. He started to back into the tunnel and drag the others with them when a low, echoing hiss pierced the silence.
There, attached head down to the wall, was a monstrosity of bone and bare flesh. It clung to the wall like a lizard, flicking its snake-like tongue in and out. It was roughly human shaped, but with no discernable skin; only the glistening red fibers of tightly corded muscle and exposed bone. Its long tail flitted from side to side menacingly as it began its slow, threatening descent.
Eric fired his shotgun immediately. The blast pounded the bricks near the creature, and it jumped to the opposite side. Dan raised his rifle, flicking on its laser sight. Toni had already drawn her other revolver, and her rapid firing filled the chamber with its deafening power. Dan fired several shots at the creature as it jumped from surface to surface, its bone chilling hisses echoing in the small dome.
“Fuckin’ go!”
Toni shouted, pushing Eric into Dan and down the tunnel.
“Move!”
Dan backed into the shadows, keeping Toni and Eric in sight. They were all faced backwards into the chamber, waiting for the creature to drop down and give chase. Finally, it did. Toni’s revolvers went into action again. She emptied the remaining rounds into the beast, splattering its thick blood on the walls and pissing it off something fierce.
She pushed past Eric and Dan, reaching into her pockets for more rounds. The two men unloaded on the creature as it crawled rapidly down the tunnel like a fairy tale dragon. Dan removed and replaced his magazine just in time. The creature’s tongue shot out at Eric, who was frozen in fear. But Dan fired just in time, hitting the creature square in the face, and it drew back its tongue.
“Go!”
he shouted, turning to push Toni down the tunnel.
Toni yelped suddenly and fired her revolver down toward the exit. Dan turned to look, seeing the headless corpse of a shambler slowly settling down into death. Eric continued to pummel the creature with shotgun blasts, drawing more intense howls of pain and fury from their pursuer. Still, the creature came.
“Dan!”
Toni shouted.
“There’s another chamber!”
“What the fuck?” he whispered.
He turned around, following Toni as she jumped down into the opening ahead of them. He grabbed Eric, pulling him along. They landed in a rocky cavern, where all of the waste from the tunnels gathered into a chunky, smelly pool. Fortunately, they were able to avoid it.
They backed away from the large hole, their weapons pointed into the shadows, waiting for the creature to emerge. One claw appeared, then another, and then the red, glowing eyes. They unloaded into it, splattering the walls with its blood. It backed away quickly, and hid in the darkness.
Dan turned around and shined his light in every direction looking for the exit. There was a cave to their right, leading down. Dan pushed them toward it, but then shined his flashlight upward for some reason he couldn’t fathom.
Three glistening and quivering cocoons hung from the cavern ceiling; pale white and crisscrossed with blue veins. There was movement inside them, and the silhouettes of their contents showed through the thin membranes.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Dan gasped.
Eric and Toni gazed upward as well; their mouths hung open in shock. They looked at each other at the same time, and then raised their weapons. They all fired simultaneously, blasting the cocoons with every round they had. The screams of pain that came from the cocoons were deafening and demonic. Fluid spilled onto the floor along with great chunks of stone and bits of flesh. That could mean only one thing.
The ceiling was collapsing.
“Let’s go,” Dan said.
They all backed into the cave, still firing and reloading in an effort to destroy the cavern. Their pursuer appeared again, leaping out of the dark hole just in time to be crushed by falling debris. Now, they all turned and ran, with Eric in the lead.
They sprinted as fast as they could while the rumbling sounds behind them became louder, and closer. Debris fell just behind them, barely missing Dan. He pushed forward, his lungs and legs burning, and his heart on the verge of bursting. Finally, the three of them ran off the rocky ledge of the outer cave, and tumbled painfully down into the open air.
Eric groaned loudly, and Dan knew that he had broken something. Breathless, he rolled and crawled in Eric’s direction. Toni was sitting up, still holding her revolvers, her face cut, and bleeding.
“You alright?” Dan asked, grasping his own right side. There was a broken rib in there, he knew. Toni nodded.
“Eric,” he said, crawling over to the big man. “Eric, are you alright?”
Eric gasped for breath, but he nodded, gritting his teeth in pain. “I think I broke my leg,” he said.
“Shit,” Dan said, lying back on the cold ground. “That was fucked up.”
“You said it,” Toni whispered.
He could see her standing, holding her back and stretching. After a few moments, and a head shake, she reached down to help Dan to his feet.
“Come on,” she said. “We need to get Eric to Travis. You too, looks like.”
“Right,” Dan said.
Together, they helped Eric to his feet and began their hard trek back up the ravine. It would probably be daylight by the time they returned, and everyone in the camp would be worried. Fortunately, they had made it out alive, and much wiser for the effort. They had gotten the answers they were looking for, and could relate everything they saw to Travis and the rest.
And they would mention the bizarre new creature they had battled.
“So,” Dan asked, thinking of the strange beast. “What do we call the new thing?”
In the sky above, out of their sight, the telltale signs of the comet showed through the clouds. It was nothing but a smudge to anyone who saw it, and would likely go unnoticed. To those who knew what it was, it was an omen; a sign of darker times. To those who studied scripture, it was something else entirely.
The Destroyer was coming.
My observations over the past year have led to many false conclusions as to the nature of the comet. The initial assumption was that the potential ELE would safely find its way out of the Solar system. That assumption, even though based on trajectory data gathered for the previous ten years, was incorrect.
Though its course, as predicted, carried the comet across the orbit of Venus, the combined gravitational pull of the Earth-Moon system caused a massive breakup of the comet. The two major halves were thrown into separate trajectories. The larger of the two will continue toward the inner Solar system, likely colliding with Mercury. The smaller half, upon reaching its orbital peak, was broken up yet again into seven equally sized pieces; each approximately 0.8km in diameter.
While none of these fragments are large enough to cause any major damage to the Earth itself, the fact that they are all on a collision course is highly disturbing. The fragments are arranged in a row, much like the Shoemaker-Levy comet that crashed into Jupiter, and will impact Earth intermittently. The likely time between collisions is roughly one month, with the last and largest fragment impacting nearly two months after its predecessor.
While data projections cannot predict the outcome of these strikes as far as physical damage goes, the comet’s makeup suggests that whatever it was that caused the mass deaths of billions of humans and animals will be much more devastating when it actually impacts than it was during the initial flyby.
Data received from NASA prior to the first flyby has suggested that the comet is a fragment of a larger object that may have been responsible for seeding Earth and the nearby planets and star systems with its initial DNA strands.
I am confident that this event, and its subsequent events, will be the deciding factor of the fate of all life on Earth. All native species are in danger of extinction, and would likely be replaced with derelict lifeforms, as has been evidenced thus far. This has led me to a painful decision.
I will take my own life.
Whoever finds this recording should know one thing. This is my will. I do not wish to watch all life on Earth be destroyed. I do not wish to be witness to Armageddon, and the new Genesis of life. Human eyes are not worthy of witnessing creation, or attempting to stop divine destruction. That is not our place.
Life will continue, as it has always done, and that is the way of the Universe.
I look forward to Oblivion.
Namaste,
Dr. Priyank V. Patil, PhD.
NASA-JPL
Edward lives in the rolling hills of Brown County, Indiana, where he shoots things, eats things, and tries to grow things. Unfortunately, nothing grows well on his land, since it’s in the middle of the woods… dang it.