I Am Chosen

Not Enough

"Guys, come in," Kacey said. She hadn't heard anything from J.D. and Hollis since her brother had announced over the radio that he thought they found it: The Traveler that Walks Unseen. The Beast that Dreams. The Lord of the Flies. Now that they weren't answering, her concern deepened. Were they out of range, or had something happened? Uncertainty tore at her mind with each passing second.

Hollis spun, raising the rifle just as a spiky appendage descended, impaling the right side of his chest.

The thing before him was the Rhonda creature. Her once-pale skin was now almost pure white. The glow that illuminated her came from her own eyes, twin, fiery white-orange orbs. Remains of clothing clung to her nightmarish frame. She stood on legs that had become elongated, spider-like, ending in claw-feet bathed in the phantom, water-distorted illumination of Hollis's discarded mag light. Rhonda's right arm had shrunk and appeared to be almost useless, while her left had become dominant, powerful and deadly. The she-thing opened a mouth full of pointed teeth and worked at removing her finger-spike from Hollis's chest so she could strike again. Hollis worked on not passing out as he dropped to his knees and willed himself to lift the rifle.

Declan Crowe's left leg was the size of a large tree trunk. Six-inch-wide claws now served as oversized toes jutting from the dark mass that made up his foot. His left arm had taken on the appearance of a giant black squid, the long tendrils writhing, furling and unfurling. Crowe's red eyes bored into J.D. as the freakish spectacle drew closer.

Swinging the sledgehammer in a one-handed, overhead arc, J.D. brought it crashing down on top of the Declan-thing's head. After his experience with the bear creature, J.D. knew his strike would not incapacitate his attacker. At most it would buy him only a few precious seconds.

Immediately following the strike J.D. dropped the hammer, darted around Crowe's right side and splashed to the wheelbarrow, removing the masonry drill. He stumbled backward as Crowe spun, then lunged in the dim wash of J.D.'s bobbing flashlight beam; the tentacles of Crowe's left limb whipped out, barely missing J.D.'s face. The freakish monstrosity charged forward again as J.D. felt the drill cord go taught. He angled around in a half circle and attacked Crowe's flank, activating the drill and aiming directly for his opponent's left eye as the head turned and a slithering mass of tendrils wrapped around his chest and throat. He pressed the drill through the needle-point pupil of the red orb and continued driving, boring through the back of Crowe's skull and into the wooden support behind him.

Crowe was effectively pinned, but J.D. was on the verge of blacking out from the tentacle around his neck. He heard a gunshot somewhere to his left; as his consciousness dimmed he heard a second gunshot and saw Crowe's head split apart like a rotted melon just before he blacked out.

Hollis was losing a significant amount of blood, but there was no time to worry about that now. He had managed to shoot Rhonda, and he had managed to fire a round into Crowe. Head shots for both. The bullets (or rather, the gun) did the trick; both attackers appeared to be dead. J.D. was temporarily out but once Hollis extracted him from Declan's tentacles, retrieved the flashlight and dragged him one-handed back toward the wheelbarrow he knew Kacey's brother would regain consciousness quickly.

The most urgent matter was that of the Sleeper. Or Dreamer. Or whatever the hell it was called. They needed to get the second copper wire around the rebar. Hollis leaned the rifle against the right-side wall and began working on the task. As he did so, he heard Kacey's voice continuously calling over the radio.

The chanting of the Twilight Convocation took on an urgency. The man who had been Hanson perceived that something was amiss; some threat to the Awakening existed down in the mines. Too far for him to intercede. Even if he were able, it was not his place to do so. His task was to guard the Convocation, who withered with each passing second and yet somehow managed to escalate their exalted hymn, to great success.

The synchronized intonations reached a fevered crescendo, and one by one, the bodies of the Convocation collapsed, their life energies spent.

Now, no outside threat would prevent what would come next. Whoever interfered, whatever it was they attempted, they were too late.

The Dreamer had awakened.

Hollis finished winding the wire around the rebar with his left hand, flashlight held in his mouth. His entire right side was now numb and he was growing dizzier by the second. But he had to-

Just then the "wall" in front of him came alive. It moved and shifted; bits of it emerged and stretched, forming groping tendrils that shot out and closed around him like a python constricting its prey.

One of those tendrils wound around his head, and piece by piece, Hollis's mind began to shatter.

J.D. awakened to see Hollis caught up by snake-like coils that had sprouted from the tunnel face. The rifle lay against the wall just a few feet away, apparently forgotten. J.D. snatched the radio from his pocket and said "Now, Kacey! Hit it now!"

Kacey at last received a response. Her brother sounded frantic as his voice blurted over the radio "Now, Kacey! Hit it now!"

She had already propped the flashlight so that its beam would fall on both rebar ends. Now, yanking the sledgehammer up from where she had rested it, she drew back and put all her weight behind a strike to first one rebar end and then the next.

The copper wire shook; the wailing sound inside the tunnel intensified to the point that J.D. was forced to cover his ears as he ducked under the wire and rushed to aid Hollis. The wire shook again and now, in the mag beam projecting from the light in Hollis's pinned hand, J.D. could see a faint ripple pass over the coils and the "wall" itself. The snake-limbs loosened slightly, but the effect that J.D. had hoped for-that the thing they battled against would liquefy, had not come to pass.

Hollis had dropped to his knees. J.D. shouted into the radio mic: "You're hurting it but it's not enough!"

Kacey summoned every ounce of her strength for one hit, and then another on the second bar. She gave it everything she had, and yet she heard her brother's harried voice a second later over the radio: "It's not working! We need to-it's killing Hollis-deform the quartz! Rattle it more! Whatever you can do-"

They weren't going to make it. They wouldn't make it and it would be her fault. What she was doing just wasn't enough. What more could there be? She couldn't hit the quartz any harder than-

And then she thought of the fireworks. Among them had been M-80s...

Flashlight in hand, she rushed up the passage, hoping and praying that she could run fast enough.

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We're almost there folks! Thanks for sticking with me!!