Kelly Mendig - Three Days to Dead

“Shit!”

I wiped off his face as best I could and tilted back his chin. With muddy fingers, I scooped some of the gel out of his mouth. CPR training was years ago, lost along with most of those first few, intense weeks of training at Boot Camp. I did what I remembered, hoping it was accurate. I pinched his nose and blew twice. One hand over the other, five compressions. Two more breaths. Five compressions. Each motion performed with careful precision. No panic, no haste, just absolute faith that he would—

Wyatt coughed. I rolled him onto his left side, so he could vomit onto the floor. His entire body shook as he expelled the offending goo. He coughed for a long time, and I held his head, content just to have him breathing again.

We were in a tunnel of some sort, probably an abandoned construction shaft, part of last year’s attempt at creating a city subway system. There were dirt floors and walls, with a hand light strung every ten feet or so. It was cold and quiet. I listened for the sounds of traffic or running water, anything to identify our location.

Wyatt rolled onto his back, still coughing. His grimace melted into a smile when he saw me. I cupped my hands on either side of his cheeks. “Do not scare me like that,” I said.

“Sorry.” He cleared his throat and spat to the side. “I tried, but I guess I didn’t take a deep enough breath.”

“Well, Smedge could have warned us.”

“Did not ask.”

His voice, less than a foot to my right, scared the shit out of me. He had emerged in the wall, features more pronounced in the softer earth. I considered arguing with him, but failed to see the point. Trolls were very literal, and he was right. We didn’t ask what to expect before leaping into his mouth.

“Halfway.”

“We aren’t there yet?” I asked.

“No. Halfway. More air.”

“No kidding.”

“We have to go back into that?” Wyatt asked.

“He said halfway. So we just need to take deeper breaths.” And a shower, once we got where we were going. In the open air, that fluid smelled like rotten eggs.

I helped Wyatt sit up. He threw his arms around my shoulders. Though slick and smelly, and uncomfortably chilly, I still hugged him tight. Together again and away from the blocking crystal, the sense of power returned. It tingled through me like a static shock, energizing and comfortingly familiar. I started laughing for no good reason. He did, too. Smedge probably thought us a pair of loons.

“Must go.”

We both stood. I held Wyatt’s gaze as I inhaled, matching my breaths to his, prepping like a deep-sea diver. I nodded when I was ready. He winked. Mucus trickled down his cheeks like tears.

Smedge had shifted, creating another mouth-shaped hole in the dirt floor. I took a deep breath, held it, and jumped.

Halfway my ass. The second trip felt interminable, and even with the prep, I was screaming for air by the time I was finally ejected. I coughed and spit and gulped in oxygen. This time, I had the good sense to roll a few feet and avoid Wyatt’s crash landing. He hit the sand a few seconds after I did, alert and gasping.

No, the stuff on the ground was finer than sand. Like confectioners’ sugar, without the white residue and dust. It didn’t scrape my skin like regular dirt, but it still stuck to the goo and made a gross, pale brown paste on my arms and hands.

“Evy, are you okay?” Wyatt asked. He tried to wipe his face and succeeded in smearing muck across his forehead.

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah. Where the hell are we?”

Awareness of my surroundings set in with the nearby thunder of falling water. We were in a cavern. Its roof towered over us at least twelve stories high, the very top lost in dimness. The water flowed from a break in the upper rock, straight down in a stream as thin as my arm, and splashed into a pool the size of a small car. The water in the pool was black as pitch and glossy as a mirror, despite the constant ripples. The sound should have echoed louder, given the enormity of the cavern. Instead, it created a rhythmic white noise.

Dotted here and there on the craggy walls around us, flowers grew. Nothing I’d ever seen before—blue and purple and red, trumpet-shaped like lilies, but with dozens of petals like a daisy. I couldn’t imagine how such a stunning flower grew underground without sunlight. The sandy ground around the pool was peppered with small pockmarks, like thousands of tiny feet had once run across it. Glowing orange orbs stood on rock poles, acting like street lamps and casting a glow on the underground world we’d been vomited into.

“Holy …”

Awe crept into Wyatt’s voice. I twisted around, away from the falls. My mouth fell open.

A city rose up behind us. Carved directly into the rock, hewn stairs connected level after level of doors and windows and walkways. Their sizes varied, but few were larger than five feet tall. Curtains of shimmering material covered them all, cutting off their interiors from prying eyes. It reminded me of photos I’d seen of Mediterranean villas, but built up instead of out. Other varieties of flowers grew among the stones and doors and steps.

More impressively, abstract murals covered every inch of rock on that side of the cave. Scrolls and filigrees surrounded doorways and repeated on the windows—splashes of red, green, orange, blue, purple, and yellow, twisted into a thing of beauty. Dotted among it were silver and gold and bronze, and I had no doubt that it wasn’t paint creating those rich, shimmering colors, but the metals themselves. Spheres the size of basketballs dotted the walls between windows, along the stairs, and in the stone face of the cave itself. They glowed with the same burnt orange color. But more than the visual aesthetic, I felt the power of the place. Stronger than I’d ever felt in the city; keener than just those vague wisps of energy.

I stood up on trembling legs. There was no sign of Smedge, or of the cave’s inhabitants. No, “village” was more appropriate than “cave.” Cave did not do the space’s majesty any sort of justice. The air was rife with the scents of flowers—lavender and roses and honeysuckle—none of the stale, humid air I expected.

Wyatt’s fingers slipped around mine, and slimy as they were, I held tight. My heart sped up a few beats, but not from fear. Nothing about this place scared me. It was exhilarating, like coming home after a long absence—a feeling I didn’t quite understand. Wyatt’s wide-eyed, slack-jawed gaze indicated similar feelings.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. He whispered, as though afraid speaking too loudly would destroy the peace around us and bring a horde of angry locals down on our heads.

“It’s amazing. Empty, but amazing.”

The burnt orange spheres glowed brighter, becoming first yellow, and then shimmering ivory. The colors of the wall murals sparked and lit, creating rainbow washes that almost hurt my eyes with their beauty. It bounced off the cavern walls all around us, making it seem somehow larger than before. Like a football stadium, minus the fake grass.

A curtain in one of the ground-level doors pulled to the side. A petite figure emerged, walking slowly, but with purpose and intent. Barely four feet tall, her sky blue skin radiated light and life. Her flaming red hair was done up in fancy spirals and held in place with crystals. More crystals dotted her face and cheeks, creating lazy paths down her shoulders and arms and across her stomach to her legs. Her breasts were faint mounds on her chest, with no discernible nipples. The sharp V between her legs was smooth and sexless. She was the perfect re-creation of the female figure, on a slightly smaller scale.