Artyom Dereschuk - Hate the Sin

After a few hours of walking, they finally reached the abandoned mining facility, located on the side of the hill, with a narrow chasm splitting it in two. Homewrecker didn’t know for sure, but he made a guess that the entrance to the Underworld was in one of the mines.

The mining facility was in a sorry state: the rusty fences, rickety buildings made out of wood, and glass windows so dusty that you couldn’t see through them showed that it was abandoned long ago. The hill was dotted in mine entrances half covered in rubble and lined up with dusty roads weaving to and from them, and small hills of excavated ground that gave the scenery such uneven look had long since slumped under their own weight. Sagged from old age.

It was the same kind of mine where other, larger fighting groups, were excavating diamonds. Their brigade couldn’t afford such a side gig—they lacked people to oversee such a monumental process, as they needed every set of hands on the battlefield. For now, all of the diamonds they had were trophies from the battlefield.

The brigade entered the mining site slowly, carefully. Half a hundred pairs of feet shambling forward, each step measured, careful not to stir any trouble. A hundred eyes were darting around, hoping not to catch a glimpse of scythe-like finger blades and wanting maws, and five hundred fingers were gripping their guns so that they wouldn’t slip out of their sweaty grasps.

The boy suddenly heard gasps coming from the front of their procession. They weren’t gasps of fear—rather, there was shock and disturbance in them. The boy could tell that they weren’t going to fight anyone, but then what was the issue?

When he walked up closer and pushed through the crowd to take a look at what was stopping them, he saw the reason for their delay.

A pile of severed heads was lying on the ground. There were roughly twenty of them, and the height of the cone they formed reached up to the boy’s knees. Some of the heads had clean cuts, while others seemed like they had to have been torn out of the shoulders that used to bear them. The location of their bodies was not known.

And at the very top of the pile was the head of the man whose name Homewrecker had heard before. Killmonger, the leader of the group that had escaped the day before.

So that’s why they didn’t attack yesterday, the boy thought, looking at the fly sitting on Killmonger’s open left eye. They were busy with other prey .

Which could mean only one thing: the priestess and her monsters were done with the appetizers. It was time for the main course.

Other soldiers seemed to be sharing his worries. Their guns were eagerly circling their surroundings, trying to pinpoint any movements.

“Hey, kid.” Homewrecker felt a strong hand grab him by his shoulder and forcefully turn him around to make him face one of the officers. “Grab one of your friends and go check out that old office. I wanna be sure there’s nothing inside.”

He had no choice but to obey. Turning toward Corpse Eater with pleading eyes, Homewrecker saw his friend nod; he would accompany him. Letting out a sigh of relief, he slowly started heading toward the building, keeping his gun ready.

It was a no-brainer to figure out that the building was indeed the main office—or at the very least some other sort of administrative structure. It was two stories high and, looking at its walls of rotten wood, Homewrecker was concerned that it would cave in at the slightest push of the door, burying the boy under it.

The building, however, endured; the door creaked as it was disturbed from its thirty years of rest when the boy carefully opened it, but that was it. No other noises—like the shuffling of feet rushing away from the door, or toward it—had been picked up by the boy. He nodded to Corpse Eater, and the boy assumed position near the door.

Corpse Eater snuck the barrel of his gun into the opening so that he could fire at a moment’s notice, and Homewrecker pushed it open, taking a step back and raising his gun. Not the most delicate or correct way to enter a building with a potential threat inside, but with no enemies in sight it did the trick.

The building was empty; it was clear that nobody had set foot in there for many years. At the far wall of the room stood a large plywood table, with an old map of Liberia hanging from the wall behind it. Years had drained it of all of its colors, although Homewrecker could say that its new bleak colors suited it better. Aside from that, the room had a few empty cabinets in it, a door leading further into the building with a heavy rusty padlock on it, and some mining equipment piled up in the corner, clearly not valuable enough to even be taken away when the place was abandoned.

Despite the fact that there seemed to be nothing of interest, the boy nevertheless entered the room. He could hear his friend follow him. Even though there was no way they—or anyone before them—could get past the padlock, he still felt the urge to come in—if only because the chilly interior of the building provided better protection from the sun and otherworldly attackers than open space outside.

As he walked, he felt old papers rustle under his feet and, looking down, he saw a paper trail from the cabinet to the door. The place seemed to have been left in a rush, and the old owners didn’t seem to have cared about the lost paperwork.

“Hey man,” he heard Corpse Eater speak to him from behind. “Check this out.”

Turning around, he saw his friend swatting dust from the table, leaning in to take a closer look at something hidden beneath the thick layer of dust. When he came closer, he realized what Corpse Eater was looking at: and old stack of black-and-white photos.

“Check this out,” the boy said as he picked one of the photos up. Time had not spared it, but at the same time everything else had; even though it had been left out in the open, it had been protected from harmful exposure to moisture and the sun outside. At first, the boy struggled to figure out what was he looking at, but after a few more seconds of staring at the old picture, he figured it out: it was a photo of a dismembered body of what seemed like one of the mine workers.

“I don’t think he was mauled by a wild beast,”—Homewrecker said, and Corpse Eater understood what his friend meant; the gruesome wounds on the worker’s body seemed awfully similar to the ones inflicted on the group of gamblers they had found killed two days before. The photo seemed to have been taken at night with a flash, and the worker’s white clothes and the white sand below him made for a sharp contrast to the black vertical slash running from his shoulder all the way down to his belly button.

“Look, there’s more.” Corpse Eater conjured up more photos from the dust. “Whoa… what the hell is this?”

The next photo was unlike the previous one; it didn’t have a man in it. Homewrecker struggled to figure out what the photo was of, but he just couldn’t recognize the shape.

“Is this an animal?” he asked, squinting. He made out what seemed like limbs, but everything else was making him uncertain.

“I’m not sure,” Corpse Eater replied, turning the photo sideways with hope that it would shed more light on the object’s origins. “I think it’s a man in a suit.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Corpse Eater said, as the shapes on the photos were starting to come together into something unified. “I think it’s some sort of creature?”

There was no doubt of that; the unknown photographer, whoever he was, had managed to capture a shot of an unknown gunned down beast. Corpse Eater had never seen anything like it, even during the last few days, but there was no doubt that it was not some sort of hoax. Its wrinkly maw, with wide and round murky eyes above it, had too many details for them to make up, and the multi-jointed numerous hairy legs were not similar to those of any animal that the boy knew. Whether it was accidental or done with the intention of having something for reference, the photographer had also included a leg of one of the men standing near the slain beast, and it provided for a good size comparison. If the boy’s estimates were correct, the otherworldly animal was at least three meters long.