Brian Keene - Urban Gothic

“Holy shit . . .”

“What is it?” Heather asked, edging closer.

“He wasn’t kidding about the broken glass.”

“Yeah,” Javier said, glancing around his prison. “Gotta admit, it’s even worse than I thought it was.”

“How badly are you cut?” Kerri asked.

“I’m okay,” he insisted. “None of it pierced my shoes or anything. If you keep the light there, I think I can make it over to the rope.”

Brett’s moans drifted to them.

“Okay,” Kerri said. “But please, try to hurry. Brett’s in pretty bad shape.”

Groaning, Javier stood slowly. Shards of broken glass fell from his body. Kerri noticed a few small fragments jutting from his arms, and winced as Javier plucked them out and cast them aside. He carefully plodded forward and grabbed the line. Kerri sat Heather’s cell phone aside and braced herself, gripping the rope with both hands while Heather grabbed on to her legs again.

“Okay,” Kerri grunted. “Let’s go.”

“Don’t let him fall,” Heather pleaded.

Kerri locked her arms and clenched her jaw. Javier’s weight nearly pulled her down into the pit with him, but she managed to hold on until he’d reached the top. He clambered out of the hole and collapsed next to them, breathing hard. While he examined his cuts, the girls untied the rope and got dressed again. Kerri noticed that even under duress, Javier copped a glance at both her and Heather in the nude.

“Thanks,” Javier said when he’d recovered.

“How bad is it?” Heather asked, brushing tiny pieces of glass from his hair.

“Nothing too deep. Just scratches mostly. Could have been a lot worse.”

“Let’s see to Brett,” Kerri said.

They hurried out into the hallway and knelt next to their friend. Brett was conscious, but obviously in pain and going into shock. His teeth chattered uncontrollably, and his face was pale. Despite this, he smiled when he saw them.

“You look like shit,” Brett told Javier.

“So do you. I hope you got the number of the truck that hit you.”

Kerri heard the tension in Javier’s voice, even though he tried to joke with Brett. His eyes were focused at the three bloody stumps on Brett’s hand.

Brett nodded toward the mutant’s corpse. “See for yourself. Kerri fucked it up good.”

Javier stood and stared at the dead thing. He prodded it with his toe.

“Heather, get a picture of this. My cell is down there in the pit.”

Without a word, Heather touched a button on her phone and aimed the screen toward the dwarf. Kerri held Brett’s good hand and watched. Up close and illuminated, the thing looked worse than it had in the darkness. The skin was pasty and pale, blotched with red areas that appeared to be advanced patches of eczema. The remaining eye was not merely large, it was malformed, with an oblong, hazel iris and uneven pupil. In the stark light, the whites of its eye appeared slightly yellowed. The nose on the woman was wide and flat, the skin on each side pulled back to accommodate a wide slash of a mouth and the thick teeth inside. The jaw was broad and angular. Kerri understood now how it had chewed through Brett’s finger bones so easily. Kerri’s attack had ruined any possible symmetry in the thing’s face, but staring at it now, she was sure that no part of it had ever truly been balanced. The thin hair running along the dead woman’s scalp sporadically painted the jaw line. It was hard to judge how old the mutant might have been.

Then Kerri noticed something else. Earlier, when she’d been attacked in the dark, she’d bitten down on what could have only been her attacker’s tongue. The tongue of the woman on the floor was uninjured, and while the hand that had clutched Kerri’s hand was equipped with long, talon-like fingernails, the corpse’s nails were blunt and cracked.

Javier shook his head. “Midgets. Giants. What’s next?”

“Let’s not stick around to find out,” Kerri said. “This isn’t the one that attacked me earlier. That makes at least five of them, counting the two we’ve killed, and the two Brett saw earlier.”

“Brett,” Javier whispered, “can you walk?”

Licking his lips, he nodded.

“Where’s your cell phone?” Kerri asked him.

“I put it in my pocket,” Brett explained. “I didn’t want the battery to get low. We might need it later.”

“So you sat here in the dark?”

“Y-yeah.”

“You dork.” She patted his hand.

“We can’t go back the way we came,” Javier said, his Spanish accent growing more noticeable for a moment. “And we can’t go forward any farther, unless we want to swim in broken glass.”

“And all the other doors and windows are bricked up,” Heather said. “So how do we get out of this shithole?”

Kerri cringed. Heather’s voice was shrill and stressed.

Brett moaned again. “Seriously. I need bandages, or a real tourniquet.”

“I’m going to need your belt, anyway,” Javier told him.

“What? Why?” Kerri frowned.

“Because I lost my knife, and I need a weapon, and you’re in no shape to fight if we get attacked again.”

Brett chuckled and winced. “Yeah, well, I think I need it more than you right now, dude.”

“You can use my club,” Kerri said.

Javier smiled. “No, you’re keeping that. By the looks of this thing, you’re pretty good with it.”

Heather sighed impatiently. “Well, if the doors and windows are all blocked, why don’t we try hammering our way out? I’ve still got my brick.”

Brett answered before anyone else could. “There’s no way we’re getting past that barricade. Not without a sledgehammer or something.”

Javier looked down at his hands for a moment and then back at each of his friends. “So we find a different way out of here. And I know how.”

“What do you have in mind?” Kerri’s voice was low and soft, but every word was clipped. She’d noticed that Brett’s breathing was growing erratic.

Javier looked up at the trapdoor in the ceiling. “We have one doorway that isn’t blocked.”

Heather shook her head. “No fucking way.”

“How are we going to get Brett up there?” Kerri asked. “Look at his hand. He can’t go crawling around on it.”

“He has to. Either that, or we hide him here and go for help.”

“I’ll go along,” Brett whispered. “I can do it.”

“We follow it to wherever it lets out,” Javier said. “Then we look for this basement that Brett told us about. It’s the only choice we have left. Either we find a way out, or we find something to help us get past the barricades.”

“Maybe if we all tried to move them together?” Kerri suggested.

“No,” Javier’s voice was low and firm. “I tried moving the barrier, too. I think something is locking it in place.”

Coughing, Brett sat up and started taking off his bloody T-shirt. “Somebody want to help me here?”

“What are you doing?” Kerri tried forcing him to sit back against the wall.

“I need to use my shirt as a tourniquet. Javier needs my belt.”

Kerri slipped her hands under her shirt, and unhooked her bra. Then she slipped it out of her sleeve.

“Try this. It should do the job a little better.”

Brett grinned. “Impressive.”

“Yeah. Tyler used to . . .”

She trailed off, unable to complete the sentence. Kerri was surprised. With everything that had happened, she’d forgotten about Tyler while they were trapped in this hallway. She guessed that she’d pretty much gone insane after Tyler died—freaking out and everything. But here in the corridor, she’d pushed past all that. She’d killed the mutant, made a tourniquet and a rope, rescued Javier, and then made another tourniquet with her bra like she was MacGyver with breasts. Now her take-charge attitude evaporated as it all came rushing back to her.