James Axler - Labyrinth

“Man, look at your arm!” Tolliver said. “You’re hurt triple bad.”

Ewald’s right arm had ballooned up to nearly twice its normal size and turned black, but it no longer pained him. He couldn’t move his grossly swollen fingers, and he couldn’t bend or raise the arm. Hanging straight down from his shoulder, it felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. When he tested his forearm with a fingertip there was no sensation, and the spongy flesh didn’t spring back. The pressure left a deep dent and split the skin, like it was already dead meat. For a second Ewald thought he was going to puke.

“You better give me that blaster,” Tolliver told him. “You’re in no shape to use it.”

Ewald grimaced at the graybeard’s shaking hands. No way could Tolliver aim the Uzi. He probably couldn’t even fire it. Not that the ex-mercie would have willingly surrendered his weapon, anyway.

“Don’t worry about me,” Ewald said. “I can shoot lefty just fine. We’ve got to keep moving. Got to find another way down.”

The landing’s short flight of steps led to a polished concrete floor. Beyond the hazy circle of light cast by the torches it was pitch black. At Ewald’s direction, they turned and speedwalked in a straight line until they reached a wall. From the floor to a height of about seven feet, it was lined with narrow, sheet metal enclosures, control panel after control panel with LCD readouts, gauges, warning lights, and thousands upon thousands of exposed switches and terminals. All dead.

As they followed the wall, to their right, out on the floor, a low, hulking cylindrical shape came into view. The twenty-foot-wide, machined steel housing sat in a matching circular depression in the concrete. Ahead, there were more of the dam’s generator turbines. One after another they squatted, stretching off into the darkness.

Around the silent machines were scattered bodies. A litter of corpses in random piles and puddles, in varying states of decomposition. The vast generator room was both slaughterhouse and dumping ground.

A kill zone even less defensible than the stairwell and hallway.

“Move it! Move it!” Ewald said, pushing the others to a trot.

They didn’t get far.

When the clicking began, it seemed to come from everywhere at once, from the gridwork of I-beams above and the far corners of the immense room. The hall’s infuriating echo made it impossible to tell how many there were, or which way to run.

“Shoot ’em!” Willjay cried. “Why don’t you shoot ’em?”

Something moved out of the shadows at the edge of the torchlight. It moved past Ewald at chest height so quickly he couldn’t raise the machine pistol, let alone track the target. He glimpsed a blur of brown, and got the impression of a sleek, banded body. Many legs. Powerful, jointed legs. There was a scraping sound, but the bright flash of sword he was anticipating never came. The blur bounded high in the air. He thought he saw a turned-up butt, like a deer’s, an instant before it vanished into the blackness ahead.

Then something warm and wet splashed his good arm.

As Ewald turned, Tolliver’s torch dropped to the floor. Sheets of blood poured out from under the man’s beard. He staggered, slamming back against the control panels, and upon impact his head fell off. It didn’t roll away, like the guttering torch. It flopped to one side, toppling from his cleanly sliced neck, and hung there upside down, connected to his body by a strip of skin. Tolliver’s legs gave way, and a blood waterfall became a blood fountain.

Even though he couldn’t see anything to shoot at, Ewald cut loose with a burst of autofire. In the strobe light of muzzle-flashes, slugs sparked off the generator housings, and the ricochets zipped around the room.

“Other way!” he shouted in Willjay’s face.

Reversing course, they sprinted along the wall. Ewald didn’t want to return to the hallway, but he had no choice. He had given up trying to find a quick way out. All he wanted now was cover. Some kind of cover.

They found another metal door fifty yards down the corridor. It was unlocked. Ewald and Willjay stepped into a narrow, low-ceilinged room crammed with with tall metal storage cabinets and open frame shelves. It looked safe enough. The exposed walls were free of weeping holes. They slammed the door and pushed shelves in front of it.

“What’re we gonna do?” Willjay sobbed. The teenager had pissed himself. The insides of both trouser legs were dark, from crotch to cuff.

“Let me think,” Ewald said. “Just shut up and let me think.”

Then he made the mistake of looking down at his arm. And his brain vapor-locked. The heaviest muscles—deltoid, tricep, bicep—had begun to slough off the bones, like overcooked meat. Where his fingertips had been, red bone peeked through.

A sudden, frantic, scrabbling noise made him forget all about his ruined arm.

“Where’s it coming from?” Willjay shouted, looking wildly around the room.

Walls, ceiling, floor, Ewald couldn’t locate the source. But it was close. It was very close.

One of the cabinets behind Willjay shuddered, tipping forward, then crashed to the floor. Ewald blinked and the boy was gone.

Gone.

His torch lay on the floor.

Above the toppled cabinet was a gash in the wall.

Ewald lunged for the hole, the Uzi up and ready in his fist. He saw the boy’s face a split second before he disappeared around a bend in the burrow. A face blanched white with fear. Elbows wedged against the slimy walls, fingers desperately, futilely clawing.

Ewald thrust the muzzle forward and pinned the trigger, firing full-auto until the weapon locked back empty. Gunsmoke filled the gash; his ears were ringing. He couldn’t tell if he’d shot through Willjay and hit whatever had snatched him away. Tossing the Uzi aside, Ewald turned his full attention to the barricade. After he cleared the door and opened it, he bent to pick up the boy’s torch.

As he straightened, the thing climbed out of the hole, head first, uninjured, and in no apparent hurry.

It wasn’t like any mutie he had ever seen.

It had a crop of thick, bristling hairs, like spikes on top of its broad, flat skull. Its widespread eyes were solid black and huge. When it rose from a crouch, he saw the banded segments of its abdomen. It had six legs. The top pair were short, with talons at the ends; the second pair was longer, and the last two the longest of all. Standing on its back legs it was as tall as he was.

The open doorway was a foot from Ewald’s back. The creature stood fifteen feet away. Before it could step closer, he made his move. A pivot started, but never completed. The thing was across the gap and in his face just as his hips started to turn.

Ewald was expecting a slash from the daggerlike horns that studded its rear legs, not a straight thrust from one of the stumpy arms.

The flesh above his right nipple dimpled around the shaft of a black thorn, a long stinger that protruded from the top of the creature’s wrist. Its talons and arm flexed rhythmically, and he felt the pressure of a massive injection. At once, cold flooded his torso. Numbing cold. The small arm jerked back, withdrawing the stinger.

Ewald clutched at the wound in his chest, the numbness spreading to his legs. Before he could take a step, his knees gave way. He slumped to floor on his back and lay there, paralyzed.

As he struggled for breath, the creature leaned over him, clicking. The noise came faster and faster, becoming a single, earsplitting tone. Then the thing opened its jaws impossibly wide and, puffing its abdomen in and out, began to dry-heave in his face.

While they waited for Jak to return from the canyon bottom, Ryan and the others took a rest break. With the sun almost directly overhead, there was no shade. Every surface reflected blinding light and withering heat. To keep their heads and shoulders out of the sun, they made canopies of their coats, stretching them between the tops of low rocks. As they sat on the hard ground, they tipped back their canteens and sipped at the Anasazi sludge. The thick, gritty liquid rasped down their throats. Once swallowed, it lay in their bellies like bags of wet cement.