|-MABEL O'CONNOR-|
No Entry.
|-ROSALINE EUBANKS-|
Waking up to a dark ink sky one expects to see stars. Where, in the swirls and pools of clouded eternity were the patches of dying structures far older than that of time itself, slowly fading into obscurity? The air was cold and bitter and it tasted foul. Rose scrunched her nose. The air made her lungs hurt and she wanted to throw up. The air was too foul here.
You need to breathe better air.
She couldn't see a thing and yet she knew that she was in a graveyard of sorts. There must have been at least two, maybe more, dead bodies on the floor next to her. She patted the wall above her head until she felt safe enough to stand. It hurt when the key clanked against the sharp stones, and she was careful to keep it from making too much noise lest her captor knew she was awake.
Once up, she brushed one leg against the ground in front of her, making sure it was clear to walk, and then moved forward. Even in darkness, she had ways to see. It was easy. As a child, she played in the dark all the time.
In the army, they taught her how to move at night.
Step. Sweep. Step. Sweep. Hand against the wall. The wall ended, and she turned with it. She kept her ears alert and made certain to clear her mind. Focused. She needed to be alert. The monsters–aliens–demons–whatever the hell they were, whatever she was, wanted everyone in their little Arizonian town dead. She couldn't let them out of the caves. She had to destroy the exit, to keep them locked down there for good. Perhaps too then she could free herself from this beast of destiny.
What would she be, if she lived a life of her own?
Who could she be?
There was time for idle contemplation another day.
Just as she'd started to grow used to the darkness, she crossed another wall of rocks and the familiar warm crimson glow engulfed her. It was bright and she squinted at first. She welcomed it and began to walk a little faster, feeling more confident that she could get back to the stairs until she noticed a pair of white glowing eyes with a soulless black iris that seemed to come from a dark patch of rock. The closer she got to it, the more unsettled she became. That is until she got too close, and the eyes stood up. And the rocks stood up. Until it rose and was almost as tall as she. It stood at roughly five feet tall, with the head of some type of canine, a long snout, a black body with some brown and white spots on it, and keratin spines that looked almost like hair sticking out from its back.
"Whoa," she said, her hands raised out by her sides in a gesture of peace. She made certain to show she had no weapons on her.
Another three dogs stepped out from the shadows, all of the same size. She couldn't help but let out a string of curses that couldn't be repeated on family television.
The dog let out a rotten-sounding growl and what appeared to be blades for teeth clacked against each other.
"I don't have any food on me," she said. She tried to raise her voice some. In a magazine once, she heard that dogs seemed to like raised voices more than deeper ones. "You're a good boy or girl, right?"
The creature let out another growl and pawed at the ground. It seemed to regard her with suspicion. It started to move closer and she didn't move an inch. She knew if she ran, the dog would chase her. Based on the shape of the dog, it was some type of Greyhound, or perhaps a Whippet. Those dogs were made for running and biting. The jaw on the beast was impressive too. It could bite into her easily. She needed to be careful. The only thing close to a weapon she had on her was the key. She couldn't fight the beast. She needed to think.
If she could be fast, faster than a damned beast dog, she could grab a crystal off the wall and use that. But would she be able to break the crystal off the wall? Could she do it before the dog got to her? It seemed highly unlikely. The dog edged even closer. She didn't want to show fear.
The closer it got the more she wanted to run. If she ran, it would chase. She knew that, logically.
But fear weighs more than logic.
One hand was still against the wall. She dug her fingers into one of the warm glowing red crystals–just a test. To see if she could grab it. Nothing budged.
Cujo over there kept coming closer still, and by now she could feel its breath on her, and it was growling at a regular pace. It barked in her face. Territorial. It wanted her gone. She stayed still.
Her fingers dug deeper into the wall and she felt something begin to budge, it seemed like her efforts were beginning to work–
And it bit her in the arm, digging straight into her flesh, with no warning.
She screamed and with her free hand plunged her fingers into the dog's eye. It howled in pain but didn't release her arm. She wrapped herself around its neck and went for the other eye, effectively blinding the creature, while it whipped its head back and forth.
It finally let go of her arm and she screamed in pain again at the release, unable to move her fingers on that hand at all. The dog ran into a corner and she kicked at it as it left.
The other three ran up to her and she screamed at them. They backed up at first, looking towards their wounded leader, but then ran forward again. She grabbed the first dog by the snout as it opened its mouth to bite her and threw it against the wall, then kicked the next dog in the jaw.
"Fuck!" Yelling didn't help, but it sure felt great.
The third dog just barked at her in the corner, then lowered its body and crawled into the corner next to the leader. It cowered like a weakling. The second dog came back up to her and went to bite her again and she grabbed it and slammed its head into the wall again, this time leaving it bloodied.
"Fuck you!" she shouted.
The dog barked at her.
"Yeah, I know!"
After a long pause, she took off her jacket and her shirt and tied up her forearm with her shirt. Then, she put her jacket back on. She gave one final glance back to the creatures.
"I'm sorry. I've always liked dogs," she said. "I hope you live, Cujo." Sure, they couldn't understand her. But in a way, she felt that they understood her more than anything else in that cave ever had. They were trying to live and would do whatever it took to survive. She couldn't blame them for that. Unlike her, they were a family. They had each other.
She had no one.
With that, she left the creatures as they were and continued on her mission.
It was time to finish things, once and for all.
|-SKY WONG-|
The ground climbs, sinks, scrabbles at his ankles like hounds snapping at his feet. Behind him, the monkey's heavy footfalls are jaws gnashing inexorably at the trail, tumbling stone echoing down a long throat into a dark belly. Sweat stings Sky's open eyes as he sprints, staring angrily into the eternal emptiness of nothing, Mabel a line of pressure on his back driving him onward. The ground swerves, dips, defies the screaming tempo of his feet. And the further he runs the further he is disappearing, swallowed, careening dangerously through the veins of the cave. Dust in the darkness. A pebble dropped down a wind tunnel. The Earth's crust crumbles at his back, gulped down in the scrape of tectonics shifting.
His breaths and his steps skitter in tandem, raindrops on a roof. The ground swells, drops, bucks him off abruptly, and as he stumbles the looming rumble meets him with the deafening force of an explosion.
The impact of the monkey's fist knocks Sky prone, pain lighting up the nothingness blinding white for a single moment—and the second one knocks the lights back out with a blow that makes his head rattle. Those abnormally long fingers are sinking into his tendons, splitting his sinew savagely to the bone. The monkey is ripping open his flesh with its fingers, with that stone fur, with that red crystal, and the way the hard edges open jagged wounds in Sky's skin is his fear finally fulfilled. The cave is going to eat him alive.
The crystal touches some live wire buried in his veins and the answering jolt sears through Sky, a power surge. He bucks up and opens his mouth and all that pain escapes him in pure noise. Sky screams and the monkey screams out in harmony and somehow, that's all it takes; his own limbs jerk forward as he throws himself up to meet the attack. His nails are short and blunt, not made for violence. As he sinks them into the monkey its stone skin fights him, tearing up the tender flesh of his palms. The momentum sends them careening off their outcropping and plummeting blindly into the cave, cinched tightly together by the fingers they've sunk into each other as they rip each other open. The monkey shrieks like ripping metal and the sound clangs around Sky from every angle as they're buffeted by each other's strikes until it's the industrial machinery of an active mine.
A stone hand rams into his skull, crushing the clamor abruptly into a hollow ringing. Sky slams his own fist up blindly, the impact seizing up his entire arm in a painless tremor. The next punch he throws comes up bloody, his fingers sliding against each other in his slick fist—and somehow, miraculously, the next boulder-fist that crashes against his head lights up the world once more. The two of them are intertwined, the monkey's face too close and all he can see. It's an endless sea of needle-stone fur and wrinkled seams in stone skin etched into Sky's eyes, domed under Sky's fingertips. The seam of that world splits and gapes open on empty cave, tombstone teeth. Hell echoes up from it; the monkey is screaming, dust and dank right in his face, and Sky opens up his own mouth and screams that same scraped-up raw noise back, staring unblinking into those mirrored red eyes. The monkey lunges forward with the momentum of their grappled tumble to slam Sky back into the ground, looming upward so its body spreads over Sky's vision until it is the sky, a blanket of cavestone over his head. Its hand rises impossibly high, stone fist still clenched around crystal.
A whirl of chittering bone streaks through that sky like a comet, clotheslining the monkey off Sky with a gasping release of pressure and a pitiful, animal whimper.
Sky leaps up instinctively, his skin still fizzling with fight, and that's when a second explosion slams into him. Spikes pierce through Sky's abdomen, catching him up in a clawed back. Where the monkey's attack had been as devastating and savage as a force of nature, these new creatures are somehow more human, a surgical puncture rather than a blunt impact. The creature howls, lashing around, and the piercing exoskeleton of its back swipes him carelessly aside. Sky scrambles as he skids against the ground, clawing dust into his bleeding palms as he scrapes his crumpling skin into an upright kneel to meet the leering eyes of the wolflike creature before him. Cavestone skin, pustule heads. But unlike the monkeys, those red stones are a part of it: crystal encrusts the edges of its peeling skin, embedded into its open wounds, climbing the columns of its exposed ribcage. A few feet away the strange, living light of those gems flash in the dog's translucent veins as one of the creatures tears into the yowling stone monkey, sending up flecks of its rocky flesh as it digs into the body as if burying a bone.
The other dog, crouching alert in front of Sky, sniffs at him before baring its teeth. Spears of glowing ruby protrude from its snout. Its faceted eyes roil.
A shiver runs through the dog, the coiling of a spring before release—Sky slams his hand out, blindly grasping one of those spears before it impales him in the dog's eagerness to bite him.
Just like the first time he grabbed that glowing red ruby fresh from the cave, it pierces through his mind as it sinks into his flesh, cleaving him from himself. That same atom bomb of alien emotion, shrieking rage and cataclysmic despair and paralyzing need vaporizing everything and buoying him out of his own body, then plummeting him back into the empty shell of it. The dog whips its head back to shake him off, snarling out glittering gems of garnet spittle that jingle as they strike the ground; Sky's other hand comes out automatically, and when his palm swallows that blade of red crystal for a second time the answering thunderbolt escapes his mouth the same way it had with the monkey. This time his scream is its own brand of inhuman, joining the starving howls of the dogs and the dying shrieks of the monkey; need and hunger that aren't his bubble up from his shredded throat and push at his skin.
He drags the dog down by the external teeth gripped in his hands, driven by that nuclear strength as he plows its snout firmly into the ground. It twists serpentine in his grasp and sways upward to bite him, and the more it sinks those red-rock teeth into Sky's skin the more, more, more, courage and anxiety and disgust and distress and wonder and pain smashed into an unintelligible amalgamation, needles cauterizing his brain. The pressure pounds—an avalanche, a roaring monsoon restrained by skin that is only skin and not stone, an ocean held back by a dam, and there are red claws in his back and red teeth in his neck and Sky turns, his own sinuous ripple against the pointed stone, and sinks his own blunt little paper-teeth into the dog's shoulder, the taste of sand and grit and more of that ruby-rich alchemy melting into his spike-shredded tongue. The red veins of the beast throb rhythmically with that same heartbeat drum-march that had lit up the cave and Sky can feel it in himself, in the pulse of those strange sourceless feelings in his own skin, and his hands move to beat that same rhythm into the ground, into the dog, all the feelings that have alchemized into too much, too much, too much, his lungs open as he screams them all out, the dam open and the ocean pouring out of his fists and his mouth in a long, endless, undulating flood.
"—!"
Disappeared. Swallowed. A drop in a river of rushing red.
"—ky!"
Crystallized in the sensation of so much, so much—
"SKY!"
A thread jerks at his wrist.
He surfaces into himself with a gasp, the red haze draining out of his eyes as the dregs of madness disappear back into the darkness.
Sky is kneeling over a bloody smear of pulp on the cave floor; it bobs in his vision every time his chest heaves. Every breath feels shallow after the river-flood that had poured out of him, leaving him empty, but as he stares down at the glittering mess of ruby and stone before him he feels animal panic trickle into that emptiness like water from a stalactite.
Did I do this?
His fists are hot and stinging like boiling water, sheathed in blood—not the red of Mabel's thread or of the cave's crystals, but something closer to the darkness. They steam in the creeping cold of the cave.
He raises his head. The other dog is gone, escaped; the monkey is nowhere to be seen. Mabel stands before him instead, face impassive and lantern aloft.
"...Did I do this?"
His voice is dust in the darkness. Mabel looks down at him, thread in hand.
"Mabel." He looks down at his hands again, at the blood trailing down his wrists. His bracelet is somehow still clean, blazing in the lamplight. Mabel's thread is shimmering red. "Mabel. Did I do this?!"
"...It was a monster," she says quietly—
"It was a living thing!" The too-much feeling is back, but it's his own, and it's all horror. "I'm not—I don't do this shit, fuck, I'm not. I couldn't. I can't. I'm just—I'm just me, I'm just a normal person, and I—I can't believe I did this. How could I do th—"
"You didn't do it." Mabel turns, lifting her lantern up to the vein-stripes of the cave wall. Those same red crystals lace them; when she touches it this time a tremor runs through her, but she doesn't collapse. She breaks it off in her hands instead, turning to show Sky the gleam of the gems. It is different from the blood on Sky's fingers and different from the thread looped on her own wrist. It leers like the eye of a hungry dog.
Sky thinks back to what the stranger said, about the rocks causing the wrongness.
"It was this," Mabel says, brow furrowed in her own quiet consternation. "...It was me."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The red rocks. The dogs." Mabel's lips are pursed thin as she speaks, perched on a nearby stone. Her words are still abrasively honest, but her tone is hushed and tentative. The red thread snakes between them, draped over the stones and coiling obediently around her feet. "I didn't know until I touched the crystal back there, but I'm sure of it."
"How?" Sky, lying flat on his back, turns away from her to stare up at the ceiling. The lantern light illuminates the cavern, curved golden and smooth like a cheek. It fades away back into darkness on the other side of his vision, eclipsed. Without the panic of the unspeakable thing he'd done and the high of those red-rock feelings, he is hollowed and smooth like a cave.
"The thing of mine I left down in the caves." Mabel speaks hesitantly, a reluctant confession. "It was before they built the mines, back when the people of Idle just talked about the labyrinth under the Earth that no one should ever enter." There's a shifting noise, Mabel's clothing against stone. "...Two hundred years ago, I walked into it and left my heart behind."
Sky stirs, turning to her jerkily. "...So the rock—"
"I don't know how or why all this is happening." Mabel's dark gaze is trained unwaveringly, almost desperately, on the flame of her lamplight. "The crystals are my emotions bleeding into the cave, and I suppose the dogs might've been borne out of my heart's desire to protect itself from threats, like the government officials or those monkeys—but it isn't supposed to do that. When my heart was mine, it was never this intense. I was supposed to put my heart in the ground, and then I wouldn't have to worry about it. I wasn't supposed to have to worry about anything ever again."
Sky looks at her: the golden light wreathing her hair, her features stone. In the absence of emotion, she looks ancient—timeless, and tired.
"I locked my heart away so it couldn't hurt me anymore," she murmurs. "And instead it brought those soldiers here, and made these feral dogs, and drove you and those strange monkeys insane. I locked my heart away so it couldn't hurt me, and now it hurts everyone else instead."
Sky shakes his head silently.
"...Is my heart really such an awful thing?" Mabel, oblivious, frowns into the fire. Her voice cracks, stumbles over her syllables. Doubt is not an emotion, but it still seems wrong on her face. "Was I right to lock it into the ground? Should I even be looking for it at all?" She squeezes her eyes briefly closed. "When I heard people were digging things up here I thought I needed to get it out to keep it safe, but clearly it did that itself, with—that."
Mabel stretches out a careless hand toward the viscera of the dog, turning sharply away from it with a scornful tsk.
"I was right," she mutters. "All the feelings I couldn't have, all the feelings in my heart...they're monsters. They deserve to be locked away."
"No," Sky says firmly. It comes out with more breath than he thought he had, ringing off the walls. Mabel falls silent, finally lifting her eyes from the lamplight to look at Sky. His next words come out low, quiet in their somber sincerity. "Your heart isn't awful—it's not just the thing you put in the ground. It's all of you, and I've seen you, and there is no part of the Mabel I've met that could ever be awful. And the feelings you couldn't have...the only terrible thing about them is that you couldn't have them."
Mabel meets Sky's gaze for a moment, features lifted by mild surprise. Looking at her now, it's easy to see that she feels nothing—that that vague, disconnected confusion is the only thing behind her eyes. It turns out she'd only ever felt nothing, all those times he'd been searching for something.
Even so, Sky doesn't take his eyes off her. Instead he reaches out a stiff hand, pressing his bloody finger to one of the shining red crystals the dog had spit out across the floor earlier. He braces himself against it reflexively, but something about it—perhaps the size—makes it gentle, an almost apologetic pulse of wonder and guilt and sorrow and some unnamed, fluttering warmth flickering through the hollowed-out darkness of his chest like a lantern in a cave. Where the last crystals had blown him clear out of his body and tossed him carelessly back, this one merely floats him on the surface of his own consciousness, sparing him the long fall down.
Mabel had cut her heart out of herself and tried to bury it like a dead thing in the ground. But she'd been so much more than even she herself had known; instead, planted like a seed in the great earth, it had been so full of feeling and force and love that it had grown its own roots and made a new life, a new body, out of the cave that was supposed to be its grave. Mabel had thought she could hide her heart but instead it had expanded to fill the space around it and then overflowed; now it was the cave, the very rock her lantern lit all around them, the very walls that cradled Sky in their inescapable grasp. No wonder it had been too much for her to bear; Sky had touched it and found it large and so terrible to hold it had terrified him, the sort of feelings so strong and true they could swallow him whole.
"Look at the terrible things it made you do, though," she says to him, her tone as short and emotionless as a stranger, either oblivious or ambivalent to his thoughts. "When you thought they were yours, you were horrified with yourself—but you weren't yourself. They weren't yours, they were mine. Why should they be any better, from me?"
Mabel scares Sky to death. Her feelings—her heart—is too much.
He wants her to be safe. And he wants her to have it—to have too much. To have everything.
"That's why it's okay." He feels a small smile spreading, despite everything. Belatedly, he realizes how that might have come out; Skye sighs, reeling the words in, too exhausted for his usual frantic backtracking. "Not because it's you, that's not what I mean. But if I do those things for myself, it's because I'm that violent animal at heart. It's not so bad, if I'm doing it for you."
As Mabel blinks, uncomprehending confusion, Sky smiles at her again before turning away and closing his eyes. It's fine if she doesn't understand. But it still feels good to say—for her to know that he thinks her heart is brilliant, even if she doesn't know why.
You weren't yourself.
In the blank exhaustion of his mind, the furred stranger from the cell wells up. Red-rock fur. Pinprick eyes. At least I'm myself, in here.
Abandoned cities full of mad monkeys in the caves, chewing crystals that have driven Sky to his own madness. A stranger in a cell speaking a language only he could understand and feeling a fear only he could feel, calling him xiaohou.
For the second time, Sky stretches out a bloody finger. Red meets gold in the darkness; he presses his thumb to his bracelet, to his pulse point, to the monkey engraved over his heartbeat.
It cleaves in two off his wrist with a clatter. The universe flows through him like a river through a cave—and suddenly, Sky remembers.
|-RUMI-|
"You will fight or die trying, so help me God." Rumi dragged up the bounty by his hand, still locked in the handshake of truce. Or perhaps, a handshake that masked a betrayal in the waiting. Still, Rumi was out of options, and an enemy of an enemy was now her friend.
"I'd rather not die down here," the bounty mumbled as Rumi pushed him next to her. She handed him a sharper piece of rock. "You expect me to fight with this?! You've gotta be kidding me."
Rumi shrugged, her eyes trained on the tunnel entrance where the noises were coming from.
"If you hadn't shot those stalagmites-"
"Stalactites."
"-stalagmites, then we wouldn't be in this situation!"
Rumi's knife, she's afraid to say, shook in her hand as she adopted a defensive stance. She tapped her goggles, trying to use the heat sensors to figure out just what the hell was coming in their direction. They didn't work.
"Just be glad I don't kill you first," Rumi glared out of the corner of her eye at the bounty, who had the sense to remain quiet.
The duo stood in the middle of the cavern, the skittering only getting louder and louder from the main tunnel branching down. With bated breath, Rumi could barely make out talons glinting sinisterly in the darkness until the world seem to explode.
Two hellish creatures, blood-red yet black as the midnight sky, burst into the cavern.
"Split!" Rumi rolled to the side, barely missing becoming dinner for one grotesquely disfigured mouth, its serrated teeth gnashing on air. She barely had time to see that the bounty had managed to also avoid this first attack before the terrible growl of the creature whirled her back. Noting the tensing in its back legs, Rumi dove again as it leaped at her, sliding to the right but not before slashing her knife in its general direction. The knife bounced off of the creature's fur-like spines like butter and Rumi wanted to cry.
Oh, what she'd give to be eating butter instead of fighting this right now.
Panting slightly, Rumi levelled off against the creature again as it turned towards her, its eyes narrowing at the knife in her hand. Rumi feinted left; it lunged again, though she managed to slash across its muzzle as she danced out of the way. The creature pivoted before it could crash into the cavern wall, a thin trickle of blood marring its otherwise unharmed face.
It snarled at her, its tongue snaking out to dab away the blood. That blood, the same red as the one pounding in her veins, glistened in the faint, twinkling light of the overhead system.
"I will paint you red with your own blood," Rumi promised, her voice muffled as she pulled up her mask to hide the growing stench of the creatures. They smelled of an earth that was rotted and discarded, forgotten by time itself in the dark depths.
She knew that an offensive move by her would only result in, well, death. One quick look over her shoulder, where the other creature seemed to be toying with the bounty, who was already wounded, confirmed all she needed to know. These creatures weren't driven by instinct; they knew they were hungry, and that their prey didn't have anywhere to go.
Rumi refocused, dodging a swipe by the creature by deflecting it off of her blade. The creature regarded her with bloodthirsty eyes before it swiped at her again with its talons. She tried to jump to the side but the talon caught her side, hard. Rumi collapsed with a curse, pain like a thousand fires racing through her.
Looking up just in time to see the creature bearing down on her for the kill, Rumi lunged towards a pile of larger rubble, ignoring the wounds screaming at her. The creature, more wary of trying to bite her again, stopped at the glint of her knife as she stabbed at its direction to keep it back. Unfortunately, this action brought a fresh wave of misery upon Rumi, and she dropped the knife with a gasp as her right sided burned in protest. The creature's eyes lit up with a devilish fire as she lost her weapon, and Rumi scrambled backwards, falling onto her back in her panic.
Barely escaping another flash of talons with a lucky duck to the left, Rumi desparately grasped a rock and chucked it as hard as she could at its maw; the creature reeled back as the rock chipped off a piece of tooth. It blinked at her in surprise as Rumi gaped at the damage the rock had wrought upon the once-invincible creature.
A laugh escaped her mouth.
She snatched up a few more rocks before she scurried away to the other side of the cavern, ready to lob it at the newly-enraged creature. However, this slight victory was immediately snuffed out by the bounty, who ran screaming bloody murder towards her from across the cavern as his attacker followed almost leisurely, an eerie smile painting its indigo lips.
"What ARE YOU DOING?!" Rumi crouched in the face of the two creatures bearing down upon her; her few rocks seemed absolutely ridiculous as she aimed it at them. The bounty scurried behind her, his chest heaving and his arm and face a mangled mess.
The two creatures appraised her from only a few metres away: apparently, she mustn't have seemed like much. They lunged as one.
"DUCK!" Spear roared as he hurtled into the cavern, blasters blazing in each hand. Hope, once buried so deep in resignation, blazed in her heart with such force that Rumi nearly cried.
He didn't have to say it twice; Rumi hit the ground, pulling down the bounty with her as he screamed in pain. She didn't have the heart to hush him.
Lasers bounced around the cavern, some deflected by the ridiculously armored spines of the creatures while some managed to hit the creatures' snouts with some damage. Spear bore down on the two creatures as they tried to withstand the force of the rapid-fire blasters. Spotting her knife only a little distance away, Rumi abandoned the bounty and scrambled to it before crawling towards the feet of the creature closest to her, her right arm nearly useless now.
In its defensive stance against the blasters, the creature didn't notice Rumi until she was underneath it; that was when Rumi struck. She drove the knife up into its chest, her right arm screaming in protest as she used it to help twist the knife in before ripping it out. Its blood spurted all over her, pulsing in time with its heartbeat; Rumi choked as she got a mouthful. The creature let out a pitiful roar before stumbling over her; it just barely missed stepping on her face, though its talons dug into her leg with a painful grip.
Rumi cried out, doubling over to shove off its leg, when the other creature, probably its mate, turned on her, ignoring the laser fire. Spear yelled at it in a distressed attempt, still a distance away, his blasters glinting off harmlessly of the creature's side. The bounty still lay crumpled on the ground, painted red in his own blood.
The creature, laser burns slashing its face, bared its teeth, desperation now staining its ruined eyes. Jaws wide open, the creature lunged towards her; Rumi let out a similarly desparate scream as she shoved the knife into the roof of its mouth, its jagged teeth closing around her left arm with a ring of fire. But then, its grip on her arm loosened, before slackening completely. Spear was upon the two in an instant, easing the creature off of her and gently laying her down before pulling the knife out of the creature's mouth with a sickening sound.
Rumi laughed weakly then grimaced, her side still on fire.
"Wipe off its brain guts from your knife, please," Rumi quietly demanded to the dim ceiling light, a thousand stars dancing in front of her eyes.
"Hey, Rumi! Stay with me, you absolute ninny." Spear's face materialized over hers, its features blinking in an out of existence. Worry seemed to lined his face, though that confused Rumi. What was he worried about? Oh, the bounty?
"Spear, the bounty, is he alive?" She whispered, pain making her light-headed and thirst making her throat dry.
"Yes, he's alive, though barely. You're gonna have to help me with him." Spear spoke softly from her side, where Rumi couldn't see. "Hold your breath for a moment, okay?"
Rumi complied; but she immediately shot up with a scream wrenched from the depths of her body as a excruciating pain carved out her arm.
In shock, Rumi stared open-mouthed at Spear, who sheepishly held a bottle of liquor, her scream echoing within the cavern walls. She looked down at her arm, where the liquid dribbled off of the still screaming wounds.
"You bastard."
|-GREY REDMOND REED-|
The flare burned.
It was the light of something never alive but the sparks licked the air. It roared low and seemed to breathe. It was red and bathed the space in that color. Smoke and char billowed from its burning end. It cut through the air like the promised sword of a bloodline that used to mean something. In the generations before oil, a father pledged his son a sword. Now? Now that bloodline chipped away at rocks under the chains of robber barons. The many sons of sons of that father were no longer knights, maybe they were miners. But these stories are now forgotten. They are no longer traced and were never transcribed. They are nice to know, though, so let's remember.
A piece of that fire sword soared and the quick dying ember launched farther than any others. It brightened and that burst ablaze the air to reveal the face of the beast. And the moment of extinguishment seemed to last forever, time slowed or moved so fast that it was impossible to tell the difference. Grey and the miner both looked into the eyes of the beast. They were black—pupils intelligible from the iris. It was black like oil, an inescapable black. Inside the eyes lay nothing but wastelands and decay and oblivion. The beast lifted the side of its lips to sneer and its teeth reflected more light than they should. They threw the red-burned light of the flare back. The eyes, however, remained motionless, glossy, and absent, staring right through the two men.
But the fiery plume began to waver. Its brightness bumped up and down. With every cycle, it circled darkness again. Then it went out. The sudden shift in the light was incredible. Neither Grey nor the miner could see. Their eyes would need to adjust to the newfound familiar darkness. But that was the time they did not feel comfortable affording.
The miner dropped the dead flare. It hit the ground with a thud and rolled to the side. The sound echoed but only a little. And then it was mostly silent too. Silent and unseeable until the beast began to move. And then another, moving from the men's side, and then more from all around. The sound was almost inaudible and the creatures were indistinguishable from the darkness. But as they grew closer to the two men, there was the unmistakable padding sound of paws and the scratch of nails against the floor. And, of course, the strengthening smell of rot.
Grey stepped closer to the miner. At this movement, the beasts halted their advance. The soft sound was replaced by another that seemed like the shifting of a form, like the preening of a neck, the lifting of a snout, or sharp inhales of the air. After this short rest, the walking resumed at a faster pace ane accompanied by the sound of tongues sliding over teeth and the brush of fur against itself or skin or the bars of cages until it stopped.
There was a feeling of pressure but the beasts were not touching either of the men. So it was their minds playing with fear, trying to get them to run. But for the scientist, this was an issue. Grey Redmond Reed was not descended from knights or barons or miners. None of that, maybe town watchers if a genealogist had to place a bet. But, much like him, his ancestors remained on their own. They did as they always did. They did not shoulder weight that was not burdened on them. They lived and later died, and what happened in between was not extraordinary. It was extra ordinary. And so they were rather forgotten. They did not run or fight and beat the odds. So this situation, this standing still—or really, shaking in place—was a situation that he had inherited no preparation for.
A bead of sweat trickled down his neck. The feeling of cold wetness was calming except it was quickly replaced by warmth; the beast now stood in front of them. It was smelling its prey. Its nose felt the exposed neck of Grey. The feeling was damp, lukewarm, and leathery. It moved along the shape of his neck and then moved to the other side of his body. As it moved, the beast exhaled and the wind of the breath exploded against his face. Up to this point, this was the worst thing he had ever experienced. That record would be replaced soon enough.
The miner slowly slid his boot next to Grey's. It was the closest either of them could get to expressing solidarity in a moment that could be their last. As the beast in front of them continued savoring their two scents, another beast walked behind them. It pressed its snout against the back of the miner. He let out a sharp inhale, a mix of a gasp and a failed attempt at screaming. The thing about these animals is they love playing with their food.
After the beast facing them finished its investigation, it circled behind them and swapped places with the other one. As this rotation occurred, the miner unstrapped something from his belt and ushered it towards Grey as subtly as he could. Grey accepted the item but did not have the bravery to move his head down to see what it was.
So they remained standing there, and the message on repeat in Grey's head was "I'm so scared, I'm so scared, I'm so scared." And he was. And while this was repeating the beast currently in front of him lowered its head to Grey's leg. It sniffed and then opened its mouth slightly, placing Grey's shin between the two parts of its jaw. Grey could feel the hot breath, the humid air of its saliva, everything. And then the mouth bit down.
The teeth were sharp, which made the cuts smooth, but it was still like the largest needles piercing his skin, everywhere around his leg. The beast gnawed slowly as if uncertain it was biting into the meat because of the pant layer.
By this point, the men's eyes had adjusted to the now near-darkness light. Despite this, all they could make out was the general blurs of the animals against the slightly brighter background darkness. Grey gripped the unknown device in his hand but was focusing on staying still. He let out a quiet groan from low within his throat.
The miner moved quickly in the following display of action. He leaned down and uncapped the flare he had in his hand, peeled away part of the outer layer, and struck the igniting end against the surface of the cap. He waited for a second as a new fire lit the space, brighter and taller than the first. Then, he pressed the bursting device against the skull of the beast that was biting down on Grey's leg. The fire burned through its snout, melting its skin. It formed a hole, a charred one, growing, blooming over the short period of time that the miner had it pressed down.
Immediately, the beast released its hold on Grey's leg and bounced back. Small melted bits of the hound's face sizzled on the floor and the smell of burnt hair joined the putrid mixture of rot. Then the miner turned around and brandished his flare like a sword and swung at the other beast. It barked or howled, or it is equivalent because the sound seemed like the high-pitched cry of many dying animals—a mass of rodents or a group of wild boars. The miner slashed forward with the fire, giving the two men more space and fighting the animals back. The beasts ran back behind the caves, which although freed the miner and Grey, was worse because the hounds were not accounted for. They banged against the outer cages, even far toward the other end of the room. They were unknown.
While all of this was happening, Grey stood in place and down at his leg. He was motionless because the first thing he saw when the miner illuminated the area was a collar around the beast's neck. It had a tag etched with the same Zonaco logo in the center of the room. He had no time to think about this, though, because he then peered at his leg. There was a stain, of course, but it wasn't red like he had thought. It was dark. There was no blood leaking out of him, but something was trailing down his leg. That, he could feel. Slowly, amidst the chaos of fire and darkness and the miner resumed yells as he jaggedly brandished the fire wand, Grey lifted his pant leg. He could see the many puncture wounds of the hound, too many teeth to be a normal wolf but that was not important. Instead he gazed at the color and thickness of the liquid. It was black and tar-like and, most absurd, was coming out of him. It was oil.
He sat down in surprise, landing on the device in his hand. It was another flare, currently unlit. Grey's hand held his shin and rubbed up. The thick black substance coated his hand. He hated it, hated it like he has never hated things before. Hated the thing he used to love. He rubbed his hand against thef floor to discard most of the oil. Still, it continued to secrete from the wounds in his leg.
Slowly, he stood up. The leg throbbed in pain but it was enough to continue moving. With the flare in his hand, he made his way—with haste—towards the miner. The miner stood in the center of the room and had produced another flare that he was now holding in his hand. Only one flare remained unused on his belt.
The beasts, it seemed, were afraid of this burning heat. Perhaps because they were used to the darkness, or perhaps for some unknown and unexplainable reason. Regardless, they also learned fast; they were beginning to resume a close circling distance around their uncaged meal of the miner.
Grey, then, pushed himself forward and took his flare. It had been a long time since he had lit one, not since his initial safety training with Zonaco. But it was like lighting a match, a massive, bright, powerful match. He limped towards the mass of the circling beasts and brought the fire to life. However, the light was small: a production defect.
But it was still enough to catch the attention of one of the pack members. With its pupils that revealed nothing, it turned and removed itself from the circle. It growled at Grey, a low intense, multi-toned, dissonant growl. Grey swallowed the growing pool of saliva that subconsciously started in case he vomited. Sheepishly, he tried to threaten the wolf with the flare. It was not working.
His grip was loose for a few reasons. First, his hands were shaking out of fear and pain. Second, they were sweaty and coated in oil so they were slippery. And third, he was still holding the now crumpled pieces of paper of data. He needed them. He wanted those sheets. But as the beast and the boy circled in a constant diameter to each other, there was the dawning truth that the flare alone was enough.
So Grey made a decision. There was life knowing and there was life unknowing. He could have only one. And as much as it pained him, it was also easy. He placed the flare in the crook between his torso and bicep and balled up the paper, the data, the truth. Then he took the first step closer to that rancid oil hound. It snapped its jaws at the movement with a small burst of anger, perhaps, in those empty eyes. Grey took another step and removed the small flamed flare from his armpit. He tensed his bitten leg and lunged at the hound. As the beast's mouth opened he threw the crumpled-up ball of paper—a perfect tinder—and the flare inside the wolf's mouth and dodged to the side.
Behind the geologist and the beast, the first of the miner's flares extinguished. The room darkened slightly. The miner tried to yell louder but he was getting tired. It came out as a cough and during that the clutch of beasts tightened around the miner. He looked at Grey in hopes of disrupting the predator's fateful dance. Grey had no more hope for saving others in that last-ditch chance to save himself.
He broke eye contact with the miner and looked back at the animal. The circle of animals around the miner roared. The animal in front of him let out what seemed to be a roar but failed. It opened its mouth again in an attempt to swallow. The flare, awkwardly shaped, was the issue. On the second attempt, its jaws carved away at the outer paper. The flare's fire grew brighter. Its barbed tongue adjusted it and the beast swallowed. It returned its focus to the now unarmed Grey and stared at him. There was some sense of distraction in its voided eyes.
It took a step towards the geologist but then stopped, wheezing. A smell of burnt flesh entered the air. Grey stepped back, unsure if this was some unknown biology of the hound, a preparation to end their encounter. The animal took another step but then pawed back. It howled through a horribly distorted sound. From the veins of red that lined its skin, a burning, energetic redness expanded. And then, slowly, but also all at once, the hound began to burn from the inside out. It was an unpleasure.
The cries and whines of pain were almost worse than the hunt, but not quite. It turned around and pushed its way into the circle and thrashed itself against other hounds in hopes of putting out that internal fire. Instead, it singed its pack members. Alarmed barks arose and the rigid border it formed began to break away.
Taking advantage of this and the rush of adrenaline, Grey pushed through the distracted pack toward the miner. He left a trail of oil behind him. The miner, seeing this change of behavior as well, grabbed Grey's hand and they made their sprinted-limped way to the staircase out of the room. On the rise, Grey stole a look behind him.
From the burning hound, now laying dead on the seal in the center of the room and cooking itself, the faces of Idle's former residents could be seen. They buried their faces in their hands or onto the floor. Some wanted to look at the animals. Others hid in the corner of the cages furthest away from the newly frenzied and enfeared collection of animals. The room glowed in that color of burning flesh, and other hounds that had caught their fur on fire darted around the rows, columns, and roads of cages. They were like torches, scattered, their flesh like the sticks in a great store that kindled great campfires red-flaming in hundreds. They blazed this fire beneath the former city of Idle and brought this hidden world—by gleams—out from the darkness: the men, the women, the children—the fearfully alive and hoping for peace. And in the light of each blazing hound, all—those hoping to not meet an entombed end—were standing, sitting, awaiting the beautiful-awful awful-beautiful future of oil.