Rick Yancey - The Monstrumologist

It was to the protected banks of this subterranean stream that she had taken the one-year-old “toddler,” the youngest and most vulnerable of her brood. As the doctor had pointed out, her leaving its older siblings behind was exceedingly curious, but I suspect she had meant to return for them, or they, in their confusion and fear, had refused to follow her. Whatever the case, it was this sequestered youngster they found upon the final turn of their final descent, mewling and snarling at the edge of the life-giving water, unable to flee or defend itself. At that age Anthropophagi, like their prey of the same age, cannot walk with any efficiency. Kearns went right up to it and killed it with a single shot.

The shot echoed up to us, and Malachi stiffened at the sound, raising his rifle and turning toward the passage’s mouth. In the hollow below us the hunters waited, knowing she had to be hiding somewhere close, and certain she would come out.

And they were right; she did come out.

She had returned to fetch her other children. Kearns and the doctor had not encountered her on their way down because she had taken a different path, a path that ran directly beneath Malachi Stinnet’s feet.

Behind him the ground burst open in an explosion of water and mud. The floor gave way and he lost his balance, falling forward onto his knees, losing his rifle when he did, the canvas tote slipping from his shoulder as he caught himself from landing face-first in the mud. He slid backward in the muck toward the widening rent in the chamber floor, the expression in his beautiful eyes horribly familiar to me. I had seen it before, in the eyes of Erasmus Gray and in the eyes of my poor father: the grotesquely comical look of the doomed when their damnation is inescapably upon them.

His fingers cut furrows in the wet earth; his legs kicked helplessly. His ankles vanished into the swirling maelstrom in the middle of the muddy whirlpool behind him, and then something caught his boot and yanked him. In a trice he was sucked down to his knees.

He screamed my name. His body was spun round like a top, whipping his head about with such force I was certain he must have broken his neck. He was upright now, with only his writhing torso visible, stretching his arms beseechingly toward me as Erasmus had, as my father had, and this soundless supplication broke my paralysis. I lunged forward, reached for him. “Grab hold, Malachi! Grab hold!” He slapped my hand away and gestured violently toward the bag that lay beside me. He sank to his chest in the roiling surface, borne down by the same beast that had punched her fist through the chest of the navigator Burns aboard the Feronia, and blood gushed from his gaping mouth. She had rammed her claws into the small of his back and wrapped them around his spinal column, using it as a kind of handle to pull him down.

I had misread Malachi’s true desire, which had nothing to do with rescue. Unlike Erasmus and my father, Malachi did not want deliverance. He had never wanted it. It was too late for that.

Again he frantically jabbed his finger at the bag. I picked it up and flung it into his arms, and in mute dismay watched him pull out a grenade. He clutched it to his chest, hooked his finger through the pin, and then with bloodstained teeth Malachi Stinnet smiled triumphantly at me.

He closed his eyes; his head fell back; his expression was one of complete peace and acceptance. He disappeared by degrees, first his arms and chest, then his neck, until for the last time his eyes came open, staring into my mine, unblinking and unconcerned.

“For Elizabeth,” he whispered.

He vanished into the bloody froth. I threw myself backward, scrambling away from the spot as fast as I could. The earth heaved, the walls rocked, huge chunks of ceiling shook loose and came crashing down. The concussion of the subsequent blast sent me flying. My fall was broken by, of all things, the body of the juvenile that Malachi’s bullet had brought down. Draped over it, I lay stunned for a moment, ears ringing, drenched in water and mud, flecks of flesh and bits of bone. I sat up and rubbed my eyes, the harsh residue of the powder that hung in the air like a fine aerosol burning in the back of my throat. I looked toward the epicenter of the holocaust. The explosion had created a ten-foot crater, in the center of which bubbles lazily ascended to the rosy surface.

Where was the doctor? I turned to my right, peering through the smoky haze, searching for the opening. Had it collapsed? Were he and Kearns now trapped beneath tons of earth? Had the entire structure, weakened by water and ripped apart by the explosion, crashed down upon their heads, crushing them or, worse, burying them alive?

I swayed for a moment upon unsteady legs, took a shuffling step toward the wall… and stopped. The smoke had cleared a bit and I could see the opening; it had not collapsed; but it wasn’t this welcome sight that gave me pause. It was a sound-the sound of something rising out of the bloody bombed-out crater behind me.

The hairs rose on the back of my neck. The skin between my shoulder blades tingled, the muscles twitched. Slowly I turned my head, and saw her towering form rear up, like an obscene mockery of Venus from the surf, her pale skin pock-marked with shrapnel wounds and painted with her and Malachi’s blood, one arm completely gone, torn off by the explosion, her body mangled horribly but her will unbroken. In the cruelest of ironies, Malachi’s body had shielded her from the brunt of the blast.

And now she, the matriarch, the mother of the Anthropophagi, with her one remaining eye spied me standing beside her precious progeny, whom her instincts demanded she defend, as the doctor had said, to her last breath with ruthless ferocity. Her own pain did not matter. The fact that she was herself mortally wounded did not matter. What animated her was as old as life itself, the same irresistible force that the doctor had marveled at in the pastor’s parlor: How strong is the maternal instinct, Will Henry!

That overriding compulsion now drove her toward the spot where I cowered, frozen in fear’s icy grip, wavering in indecisive agony, for even in her injured state she moved with frightening speed and would catch me should I make a run for the passageway-which may or may not still have been open.

The space between us had shrunk by half when I regained my wits, pulled the doctor’s revolver from my belt, and took aim, remembering as I started to pull the trigger the thing that had nagged at me before, the thing I should have remembered but couldn’t: bullets. I had forgotten to ask the doctor for more bullets. There was but one left.

One bullet. One chance. A wild shot or one that missed a vital organ and it was over. I was bound by the bitter fruit of my own forgetfulness.

She gathered herself for the final, finishing leap. Her extant arm came up. Her mouth came open. Her good eye with merciless malevolence shone. I had to stop her before she made that leap, and I did, though not with a bullet. Instead I turned her mother’s love against her.

I flung myself beside the body of her young and jammed the gun against its lifeless side, screaming stupidly at the top of my lungs while praying that no animal instinct told her the child I threatened no longer lived. My feet slipped out from under me, and I landed with a startled grunt upon my backside, my left arm curled awkwardly around its headless shoulders. My desperate gambit had worked, however, for she did not jump but came to a complete and sudden halt. She snuffed the air. She issued a low, gurgling call, like a cow in the pasture lowing for her calf.

She did not hesitate long, perhaps only a second or two, and then she renewed her charge, leading with the shoulder that held her remaining eye, closing down upon me until I could smell her putrid breath and see the rows of jagged three-inch teeth marching toward the back of her cavernous mouth.