Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire

“More,” he said.

In all, they managed to remove four stones before Millie let his leg drop and lay back, exhausted. “I’m shot,” he said. “That enough?”

The hole was wider now—just wide enough, Gabriel thought, to admit his broad shoulders. No way Millie could fit, but one person would be enough. If he made it out, he could come back for Millie. “I’m going in,” Gabriel said.

“You sure?”

“Didn’t we go over that already?” Gabriel said. He squeezed into the opening before Millie could respond.

Inside, it was dark, except for the slight glow of bioluminescent moss faintly outlining the walls. It was narrow, too, the stone ceiling no more than two feet above the damp dirt floor. And it looked like it got narrower as it went—the people who’d dug it had presumably been young women, not six-foot-tall men. But maybe if he hunched down and was willing to lose a bit of skin on his shoulders—

He cocked his head. There was a low scrabbling sound coming from the darkness in front of him, like the scratching of claws. Animals of some sort—scavengers, perhaps. Then he heard a louder sound: a thumping, as of a paw, or perhaps a tail, batting against the ground.

He reached ahead of him with one hand, sweeping it back and forth along the dirt. He felt the air stir as something darted out of the path of his arm.

His fingers brushed along something hard lying half-buried in the ground. A bone? He grabbed it, wrenched it out of the dirt—and as he did, he felt a pair of sharp teeth sink into the flesh of his arm.

He swung the arm up and against the tunnel wall beside him, heard a squeal as the animal released its hold and dropped off. But the clattering of claws was louder now, and it sounded like it was all around him, as though the animals were somehow emerging from the walls of the tunnel itself. A furry flank slammed against the side of his face and he felt sharp claws scrape across his cheek. Another animal leapt over his shoulder and bit down hard on the back of his neck.

“Millie! Get me out of he—” His open mouth was suddenly filled with warm and greasy fur. He felt it wriggling back and forth and realized the narrow squirming thing probing inside his mouth was an animal’s head. He bit down hard and spat the thing out just as he felt a pair of strong hands clamp down on his ankles and forcefully pull him out of the tunnel.

He emerged into the light with Millie on his knees beside him. The big man hauled two of the animals off his back and slammed their heads together, then threw them aside. Gabriel himself took care of the one clinging to his throat, knocking it off with the thing in his hand—which did turn out to be a bone: a scraped-clean femur that looked distressingly human.

Gabriel swept the bone along his chest and legs, knocking more of the animals to the ground. But more still were pouring out of the drainage hole, maybe attracted by their fellows’ distress, or maybe just by the prospect of fresh meat.

The creatures looked like a cross between shrews and rats, only larger than any of either Gabriel had ever seen. Each was more than a foot long and had a pair of sharp prognathic tusks protruding from below an elongated snout. And they were more aggressive than any rats he’d encountered, even in New York, jumping on him and Millie with no regard for their own safety, no fear.

Gabriel batted them away as they came, while Millie fell back against one wall and did the best he could while balancing on his good leg.

“Jesus Christ,” Millie said, picking one off his thigh before it could make the leap it was attempting onto his unprotected crotch. “What are these things?”

What ever they were, a dozen more were boiling out of the hole in the wall. They were all over Gabriel in an instant, screeching, clawing and biting even as Gabriel swung and kicked out blindly in all directions. As soon as he got hold of one to smash it against the pit wall, three others seemed to take its place. The hot, musky stench of the creatures was nearly unbearable and their sharp teeth and claws were everywhere he turned, tearing into his flesh. In the frenzy, he lost track of Millie but he could hear him somewhere behind him, shouting and flinging the furry attackers aside.

“We’ve got to block up that hole,” Gabriel said, dropping to his knees by one of the large blocks of stone they’d so painstakingly moved aside. He hauled it up in both arms as one of the animals leaped over the stone and onto the back of his hand. With a grunt, Gabriel pressed the stone into place at the bottom of the drainage hole. It did little to stop the flow of angry shrews—they just kept coming.

“Get over here, damn it,” Gabriel shouted, plucking a shrew off his upper arm, where it had begun to make a meal of his triceps. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Millie lumber over and bend to lift another of the stone blocks. He shoved it on top of the one Gabriel had placed. Gabriel himself lifted the third of the stones and jammed it into place as soon as Millie’s hands were out of the way, and then Millie was there with the fourth.

The fit was far from airtight—hell, it wasn’t even shrewtight, as evidenced by the continuing appearance of furry snouts between the stones. But the fit was tight enough to be a squeeze for any but the skinniest of the animals and the constant flow subsided, enabling Gabriel to pick off the ones that remained in the pit, first two or three at a time and then one by one as their numbers dropped. Millie, meanwhile, grabbed up bodies of fallen shrews by the fistful and shoved them into the spaces between the stones like so much fleshy mortar.

“Sweet Jesus,” Millie said, finally, lowering himself exhaustedly to a patch of ground from which he’d swept a layer of bloody animal corpses. Gabriel sat beside him, sore all over from bites and scratches and the bruises and abrasions he’d sustained in bashing the creatures against the rock. He felt weak and wanted desperately to lie down and sleep, even just for a little bit. But he knew that with the sun beating down and nothing to eat or drink, he’d only feel weaker when he woke—assuming he didn’t find himself waking with more of the animals somehow chewing on his jugular.

Getting up, he kicked aside the bodies before him and bent to retrieve the bone he’d taken out of the tunnel. It was human, the leg bone of some previous visitor unfortunate enough to find himself fighting for his life in this pit. Well, it was too late to do the bone’s original owner any good—but he might be able to do them some.

Gabriel handed the bone to Millie, who turned it over in his hands and looked up at Gabriel quizzically. “Can you break it?” Gabriel said. “Two pieces, equal length would be best.”

“You don’t ask for much, do you,” Millie said. He took one end of the bone in each hand, then thought better of it and reset his grip closer to the center.

“Careful,” Gabriel said.

“Why do you want a broken bone?” Millie asked.

“I don’t,” Gabriel said. “I want a pair of titanium climbing pegs. But I’ll settle for a broken bone.”

Millie gripped tighter, the veins standing out along his thick forearms. The bone bent in a narrow arc, then a bit farther, and then snapped in two, one piece just slightly longer than the other. He held the pieces out to Gabriel, who looked at the angled edges where the bone had broken. Nice and sharp—but all the same, he began working them back and forth against the face of one of the rougher stones, like a knife against a whetstone. The bones needed to go in smooth and come out the same way, and penetrate as deeply as possible into the cracks between the stones, and that meant taking off any rough edges or protrusions and sharpening them even more.