Necrophobia 4 Page 16

  Get out of here! They’re coming!

  The insurgent had tried to give us a chance that we would never have given him. Why? The answer to that was obvious. Whatever threat we presented was minimal in comparison to who or what was chasing him. He must have had an explosive charge wired in one of the rooms or under the floor. Maybe he had gone in there as bait to draw them into a trap so they could be destroyed.

  My guess was nightcrawlers.

  Everything Mongol said about the others on the third floor, from the stealthy figures being very good in the dark to the tongues being cut out of the throwaways, pointed at nightcrawlers. Add to that the cannibal’s lair we found and those two we killed that had been bound together. They were here, all right. I was just hoping the explosion had killed them or sent them back into their holes.

  Following the blast and the floor collapsing beneath me, I had managed to loose my NVGs and my rifle. I still had my sidearm and knife, but my Icom was damaged. I couldn’t get anything on it.

  So I was alone.

  Maybe buried beneath a mountain of rubble for all I knew.

  I dug around in my vest until I found the pocket with my lighter in it. I flicked it and found myself staring an immense wooden beam that was pressing against my forehead. I had to get myself free. Carefully, I worked my hands around the back of my head. There were bricks or rubble beneath it. Slowly, sweating rivers, I worked a piece of jagged stone free, then another. I could move my head maybe an inch in either direction by that point. How ironic it would have been if I dug myself free only to have my head crushed by the beam. I kept digging at the rubble behind my head, removing what felt like bricks or broken stone.

  There was one last good piece under there that trapped me.

  I began to dig it free with trembling hands, praying that shifting the rubble wouldn’t make the beam shift, too. It didn’t. I slid my head free of the beam, nearly tearing my nose off in the process.

  I was free.

  Or was I?

  I lit the lighter again and saw heaped rubble all around me along with broken lathing and sections of walls, shattered plaster and split planks. I was in a little hollow scooped out of the debris. It was freakish luck. I crawled around looking for an escape route, anything, even a little worm hole I could widen…but there was nothing. Overhead was the broken remains of the ceiling from above that fit over my hollow like a cap. I moved the lighter around, clouds of dust settling around me.

  I wondered about Smitty. Was he dead? How about Doc and Mad Mike? Had they been trapped or crushed in the cave-in?

  My hollow was about twelve feet by twelve feet. I began circling around it, flicking the lighter from time to time to see if I could locate a draft. If I couldn’t find even that then I was going to have to start digging blindly. My luck held. A slight draft made the lighter flame waver a bit. I tracked it down. It was coming through a tiny three-inch aperture in the rubble. Carefully again, I started removing bricks and sections of splintered wood. I dug out a floor lamp, then I unearthed the arm of a sofa. I kept working at it, removing the debris piece by piece until, suddenly, the entire wall shifted and rubble fell and I slid down farther into the hollow.

  I waited for the whole thing to cave-in, but it didn’t.

  I climbed back up there and flicked the lighter. My tunneling paid off, I saw, because the wall had opened into another room. Maybe not a room exactly, but another chamber hemmed in by debris. I crawled in there and it was a bit bigger than the one I had just left. There was a small crawlspace that I widened. It led into darkness. It was big enough to creep through and I couldn’t ask for much more. I started in, slinking forward like a worm until I came to a sort of pit that dropped down about four feet below me. But above, as I held the lighter up I could see an opening. I got down in there and climbed up the wall of rubble until I reached the opening. It was a corridor. The entire thing was shifted about twenty degrees or so, giving it a very weird, surreal sort of angle.

  I moved down it, passing several rooms whose doors were buckled in their frames and would not budge. I followed it until it turned off to the right, more rubble and debris heaped around me. I was exhausted. I sat there, my back up against the wall and had a cigarette which didn’t taste real good with my dry throat, but the nicotine did wonders in waking me up.

  I heard a sort of scraping sound close by.

  I flicked the lighter and there was nothing. I knew I couldn’t let my imagination go running away on me. There were going to be sounds. Things would still be shifting and falling. It only stood to reason. I pulled off my cigarette, closing my eyes, wondering if the others were looking for me or if they had written me off as being dead. If Doc was alive, he would make the others look. Then again, it was night, so he might call it off until morning. I kept listening for the sound of voices or the rumble of the LAV, either of which would have told me if I was getting closer to freedom.

  I heard nothing…save for that scraping sound again.

  I flicked the lighter and, again, there was nothing.

  I had a few drags left on my cigarette. I enjoyed each one. When I took the final and last drag, pulling hard off it, the cherry glowing orange and lighting up the corridor briefly…I saw a shape moving away in the darkness.

  I saw it.

  But it made no sound.

  I reached down and pulled my 9mm Beretta from its holster. I knew I hadn’t imagined the shape. It had been moving back the way I had come and I hoped like hell it would keep going. I listened for awhile, my senses acute, my heart pumping in my chest. But there was nothing more. I started off again, moving faster now, needing badly to put as much distance as I could between myself and what I had seen. I came to another wall of rubble that sealed off the corridor. That was bad. But what was good was a hole in the wall that I slid through and found myself in another tunnel cut through the debris.

  It had to lead somewhere.

  At least I hoped so.

  But after following it for another twenty minutes or so, I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t so sure of anything. The explosion had pretty much turned the building inside out and it was hard to know where anything was or to even begin orientating myself. But I had to keep going so I did…and then the floor fell away beneath me and I was sliding down a mountain of bricks into what had to be the cellar. Luckily, I hung onto my gun and lighter. My face was scraped, my arms laid raw, but I was still holding onto the two things that could keep me alive.

  I was in what looked like a huge cavern.

  I moved around piles of rubble and stepped through pools of standing water.

  And that’s when I found the bones.

  Heaps of discarded animal bones and human bones. I saw jawless skulls whose craniums had been staved-in, femurs and tibias, a few ribcages, a section of vertebrae.

  Jesus, what was this place?

  Then I heard the scraping sound again that I had heard above. I flicked my lighter and I saw a ring of grotesque faces pressing in at me. I saw something like a child scraping together two sticks of bone. Nightcrawlers. They were naked and hunched over, their bodies white with plaster dust, their hair long and matted. Their faces were narrow, teeth jutting from pink gums. They hissed at me and I started shooting. I fired again and again and then something hit me from behind and I pitched face-first into a puddle.

  When I came around again, I was being dragged off by the ankles. It was pitch black. My lighter and gun were gone. I reached down for my knife, but it was gone, too. I heard that reptilian hissing all around me. Then I blacked out again.

  When I came to, I was suspended by my wrists.

  It felt like wire cutting into me.

  I couldn’t see a damn thing, but I knew I wasn’t alone. I didn’t dare make a sound. The dread I felt was nearly incapacitating, an instinctive fear that was hanging above me, it seemed, like some immense spider waiting to drop down on me and suck out my blood.

  There was an odor in the air, hot and revolting. It reminded me of gutted deer, m
arrow and blood.

  I heard a sound.

  And it was the worst sound imaginable.

  The sound of a knife being worked on a stone by a practiced hand, its blade patiently being sharpened. There was a flash, followed by another and another and a fire was lit. It was small, but pale hands fed it until it blazed up high. And that’s when I saw the sort of place I was in: a butcher shop. That’s exactly what it was. The floor was scattered with bones and scraps of meat, the walls splashed with dark stains. I saw limbs hanging from them, arms and legs, stray hands and feet, a dozen or so heads with open bloody mouths and gouged-out eyes. That was all bad enough, but what I saw stretched over a table was the thing that took the heart out of me: a body. Two old women were poised over it. They each had meat cleavers and they began chopping on it, sectioning it, twisting bones from sockets and sawing through ligaments and tendons. Using a carving knife, they opened the abdomen and began yanking out organs and entrails, carefully sectioning them and dropping them into pots of water. All the pots were emptied into a kettle which boiled over the fire on a makeshift tripod.

  I saw the face of the corpse.

  It was Little Gun.

  I had no true love for him, but he was still part of KIA-9 and I felt a burning hatred over what they had done to him and a burning terror of what they were soon going to do to me. Yes, these were nightcrawlers, the eaters of men, cannibals and ghouls and night-stalkers. I had read once that cannibalism, from a cultural viewpoint, was taboo because once men tasted the flesh of other men then they would be less than human. It was feared that they would regress into primeval flesh-eaters, descend into the dim past of their savage ancestry.

  I have no doubt that in many ways that is true.

  But at that moment, as I dangled there like a side of beef, I had no such memories of things I had read. I only knew simple animal fear and raging hatred. I wanted to get free. I wanted get a weapon in my hand so I could put these things down.

  I saw their grotesque faces ringed in the darkness, the shining eyes and narrow faces, the overlapping teeth. Maybe they had been human once, but now they were only monsters. There were children there. I saw infants nursing at their mothers, toddlers playing with bones in the accumulated filth of the floor, and older children tearing at hunks of offered meat. A couple of them came over to me with blackened sticks in their hands. Making those hissing sounds, they began poking me with the sticks like a prize hog until one of the men shrieked at them. Then they disappeared back into the darkness.

  If I was a rational man, I would have bided my time and tried to reason my way out of it, if such a thing was even possible. But I wasn’t a reasonable man. I was a soldier. I was a killer. I was an exterminator. Dr. Cripps had seen to that. All I wanted was to get a weapon in my hand so I could kill.

  Two of the women and one of the men came over.

  The man lifted me up and one of the women cut my hands free. I still played dead, dropping limp into their arms. As they dragged me over to the fire I saw my chance and took it. One of the women had a knife stuck in the back of her pants and I seized it, knocking the man into the fire. I slashed one of the women across the face and grabbed the other by the hair when she tried to get away, slitting her throat ear to ear. And then they were all charging at me. I slashed and cut and hacked and then the knife was knocked out of my hands and three of them tackled me, pounding my head against the floor.

  One of the women had her hands around my throat.

  She was squeezing with incredible strength, strangling me while the others held me down. I was done for and I knew it, but still I shouted and screamed and raged…and then I heard an M4 firing and tactical lights speared through the darkness. The nightcrawlers were screeching, grabbing up simple weapons—knives and hatchets and clubs and spears—but it did them no good because I heard the sound of a SAW, the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, opening up, 5.56mm rounds ripping through the nightcrawlers. Bodies hit the floor and blood spattered the walls.

  The three tormenting me got up and were cut nearly in half instantly. It happened very quickly. I saw Mad Mike come storming in, drilling anything that moved with the SAW. Doc was with him. He had his M4. He walked amongst the blood and bodies, capping nightcrawlers in the heads that still moved.

  He reached down and pulled me to my feet.

  “You wouldn’t have tasted good anyhow, Dog,” he said.

  THE UNDEFEATED

  The night didn’t end there much as I might have liked it to. We went back outside and linked up with Scales and Mongol and Zulu. Little Gun and Big Bird were dead and they were never discussed again. We never did find Smitty. My guess was that he was crushed when the floor gave away, buried in the rubble.

  I was given a new weapon and we moved through the streets for hours, mowing down zombies in great numbers and killing nightcrawlers and insurgents in the ruins.

  When the sun finally came up, we were exhausted.

  We leaned there against the LAV-25, covered in dust and old blood, soot and grit. We were worn out, nauseous, our ears ringing from the constant drumming of automatic rifles and machine guns throughout the night.

  I remember Mongol blathering out how we were warriors, the best of the best, but nobody was really listening to his carefully-programmed propaganda. In retrospect, I’d heard shit like that in Iraq from officers who didn’t know any better and soldiers who wanted, hell, needed to believe they were fighting for something tangible. But like in Iraq, we weren’t warriors, we were just soldiers trying to survive to fight another day. And once the flag-waving and propaganda are dispensed with, that’s all it ever is in any war. Leave the higher concepts to the people on the homefront. Like I was told in infantry school, “You were hired from the neck down, leave the thinking to people with brains.”

  We smoked and avoided looking at each other, each knowing there was something wrong with who we were and what we were, but our brains wouldn’t let us remember just what and I think by the time the sun came up we were too tired to even contemplate such things.

  Ultimately, we were wind-up toy soldiers.

  We were mannequins.

  We were puppets.

  We pulled triggers because that’s what we were told to do. We didn’t know anything else and we weren’t allowed to know anything else.

  PSYCHO WARD

  I woke up alone in a place I did not know, certain blood was running down my face. It wouldn’t stop running. Terror that was huge and crushing weighed down on me. It was the instinctive fear of a trapped animal. I couldn’t move my arms or legs. I couldn’t move anything, it seemed, except my fingers and I could only wiggle them a bit.

  I was strapped down.

  You’re dreaming. You’ve got to be dreaming.

  A voice in my head kept telling me that, but I didn’t believe it. Slowly, I was able to move my head and I saw I definitely wasn’t alone. I was in some kind of hospital ward. There were others strapped down to beds like I was. I could see Zulu. She was convulsing, yellow foam coming out of her mouth. I could hear people moaning. I could hear someone else screaming.

  Where the fuck am I?

  My mind came out of the fog slowly, but it did come out. My memories were confused and overlapping. I saw faces—Mongol and Zulu, Doc Feelgood and Mad Mike, Scales and Smitty, Little Gun and Big Bird—and those were eclipsed by still other faces—Sabelia and Tuck and Diane and Jimmy and Paul. It was all scrambled in my head.

  Make it stop. Dear God, make it stop!

  But it wasn’t stopping. If anything, it was getting worse, a riot of images and memories and faces and incidents and I wasn’t sure what was dream and what was reality.

  And a voice in my head said, Remember.

  Yes, I had to get my thoughts organized. I had to sort out reality from fantasy. I knew who I was. My name was Dog. That’s all. Dog. I was a soldier, an exterminator. I served the greater cause of…of…ARM. Yes, I served the cause and Dr. Cripps told me the only things I had to know. The rest was unimpo
rtant. The rest was trivial. It was marginalia and I didn’t need to think about it.

  Your name is not Dog.

  No, no, no, that wasn’t true. I had to shut all that out. I had to escape from it. I had to hide from it. Memories were returning to me, they were shining like a bright light in the darkness of my skull. I had to avoid the light. The light would undo what had been done. It would make me unhappy. It would take away the simplicity of being. I would question things and worry about things and fear things and maybe, yes, maybe I would even fear myself.

  Your name is Steve Niles.

  The memory caused pain and I didn’t want pain. I was something that gave pain but I didn’t want to receive it because it frightened me. Like all brutes and bullies and thugs, I was terrified of being hurt.

  Steve Niles.

  There was no hiding from it. The light found me and enveloped me and then I knew all those things maybe I would have been better off not knowing. I was a programmed killer with a synthetic life that had been engineered for me by Dr. Cripps. I went around with a group of savages, killing and killing, but that wasn’t who I really was. That was an act and Baneberry was strictly theater.

  Jesus, how long had this been going on?

  Weeks? Months? How long had I been drugged up and conditioned and where was Sabelia? I had to get to Sabelia because…because, yes, I loved her and she loved me and together we would hook up with Tuck and the others and get back to the Silo and my son. That was the plan. That had always been the plan. Why in the hell did I let Cripps sidetrack me? Use me like a fucking vicious attack dog? Why did I let him control me?

  “I see you’re awake,” a voice said and I saw Cripps standing there, that crooked grin on his face.

  “Get these off me,” I said to him, indicating the straps that held me down. “I need to get free. There’s things I have to do.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “There are things you have to do and when the time is right, I will tell you what they are.”