I didn’t even ask him where we were going.
We splashed along, our lights bouncing with each step, huge sliding shadows moving over the tunnel walls. The smell down there was awful. Just dank and polluted, the stink of moist rot and stagnant water, other things I didn’t want to contemplate. Water dripped and bits of masonry fell now and again. We saw huge colonies of corpse-white toadstools that grew from cracks in the tunnel. I swear they were pulsing almost like they were breathing. A fetid mist came off the water.
“How far do we have to go?” Specs asked.
“Quite a bit. At the very least I want to get a good five, six blocks away from here.”
“And how are we gonna know when we’re that far?”
“I’ll know.”
“But-”
“Just shut the fuck up for awhile,” Sean said.
I suppressed a smile. Specs was like that. He got nervous and he’d talk your head right off. It was his way. Pouting, he walked along at my side, casting sidelong looks at me, maybe waiting for me to rise to his defense. I had no intention; what we needed now was quiet.
We came to places where the tunnel was nearly blocked by fallen rubble. Many times it was because of a collapsed building whose blasted cellar had opened right up into the tunnels below. There was moss growing everywhere, some kind of green mildew that was luminous.
We’d gone about a block when we saw our first living rats. They were immense and filthy, eyes lit like red Christmas bulbs. They let us pass, but they kept a tight eye on us.
I kept hearing things behind us. Subtle sounds like scratching. It might have been our echo because everything echoed down there, even our voices. But the farther we went the more certain I was it was no echo.
Finally, Sean stopped. “You hear something?” he said.
“Yeah.”
We all heard it plainly: a scratching and squeaking as of many, many rats. The sound was getting louder. I had dealt with the rats before. They were bad enough when there was only a few, but when they came in numbers you were in trouble.
“Move it,” Sean said.
We hurried down the tunnel which sounds easy in the telling, but splashing through a foot of water gets hard going after awhile. Sean knew his way-or I hoped he did-leading us down side tunnels and then into the mainline again, back and forth until I had no idea where we were. We came to a cave-in and stepped around it into a flooded cellar. There was no building above it; it had been blasted away. The sun sure looked inviting. But there was no way to get up to it. Back into the tunnels, this way and that.
We charged into another offshoot and Sean stopped. “Trog,” he said, then relaxed. “Shit, it’s a dead one.”
It was stuck in a little ell, standing up. It was gray and withered looking, near-mummified. Even its hands were folded over its bosom. A fine plaiting of green mildew grew over it like a caul.
We came into another cellar. It was black in there, the water up to our knees by this point. Dead things were floating in the leaves. Broken beams and shattered sections of concrete rose around us like dock pilings. I saw human bones sticking up out of the water. A ribcage here, a yellowing femur there. The air smelled like blood and meat. I didn’t like it in the least.
We came around a rubble pile and right into a nest of rats.
11
“Shit,” Sean said, his light playing over them.
We all had our lights on them and our guns. Behind us, I could hear the squeaking and scratching of the rat pack that was tailing us. I started thinking the Hatchet Clans didn’t sound so bad.
“Kill ‘em!” Specs said.
“No,” I told him. “Not unless we don’t have a choice. No sense riling them if we don’t have to. You shoot them, they’ll be forced to fight.”
“Good thinking, brother,” Sean said.
There were eight or ten of them sitting on a section of collapsed wall, huge, fat-bellied rats with glistening red eyes. Several of them were chewing on something white and bloated. It was a human arm. There were maggots on it. One of them looked right at me, wormy growths coming out of its belly making obscene slithering sounds. Its teeth were bared, claws splayed out like it was ready to jump. Its greasy black fur seemed to flutter and bristle as if it was infested with lice. And as I watched in disgust and amazement, a grub-white parasite the size of a jelly bean hopped off the rat’s back.
“Good ratties,” Sean said, moving around them. “We’re just passing on by. No harm in us.”
We moved around a pile of wreckage and the cellar opened up into a cavernous hollow. I could see tree roots dangling from the ceiling. All sorts of junk was rising from the water, even several badly rusted metal beams. There were bones everywhere, human bones. All polished white and licked clean. I saw several skulls that were riddled with teeth marks.
“Nash,” Specs. “Nash…”
I saw.
There were literally hundreds of mutant rats. Armies of hump-backed things waiting with sharp teeth and shining scarlet eyes. I saw one that was blubbery and shapeless, almost hairless. There were several stubby, blind fetal heads rising from it. The mouths were opening and closing. And the stink…dear God. Where before it had been a high, hot smell of rot and blood and dampness, now it was a seething, noisome envelope of putrid decay.
Nothing nature had birthed could smell like that.
The rats began to inch closer, crowding us. They were behind us now and in front of us, to all sides. Wherever our lights played, we could see rows of shining, hungry eyes.
Sean took a green cylinder from the pouch around his shoulder. It was one of the white phosphorus grenades. He kept it ready.
Some of the rats were the size of beagles and terriers. Big, mutated things, some almost completely hairless, others lost in a storm of writhing, twitching growths. Many did not have the usual compliment of limbs, but three or sometimes two gigantic clawed appendages. They were so large you could hear them breathing. Many were covered with tumorous, jutting humps and open sores. Some had too many eyes, others not enough, a few were blind, squeaking things.
The rats were clustered around us, mutants, abominations of every sort, pushing in closer and closer. Hosts in this black, stinking nightmare world. Closing in, pushing us forward, leading us towards something, it seemed.
We splashed on, ready to fire our guns at any moment…but to what end? The rats would have buried us alive in seconds. There were that many.
Specs came around a section of floor fallen from above and he screamed. I’ll never forget the caliber of that scream. It sounded like his mind was venting itself, blowing everything clear so it could look upon this new thing and make room for the immensity of its horror.
He fell into me, clutching at me, pulling at me, trying, it seemed, to wrap himself around me. “Nash, Nash, Nash…it’s there, Nash! It’s right there I tell you! I saw it…I fucking saw it looking at me-”
Then my light found it, too, and something in me sank, submerged forever. I looked right at it and to this day I know I saw it, but I couldn’t have. For there are mutants and then there are mutants.
It was a rat the size of a pick-up truck.
Maybe not one rat, but two or three that had grown into a single flaccid nightmare mass that was horribly puckered, hairless, and fish belly white. That’s what I saw. It reposed on a filthy, stinking pile of debris, cannibalized human bodies, and bones in a huge oblong cavity in the wall. It was like some kind of fucking altar. That clownwhite flesh was nearly transparent like some kind of pulsating jelly and you could see the bones beneath it. The skin seemed to move, to writhe, vibrate with a slick, boneless motion as if everything beneath it was in constant, sickly motion. Two bobbing heads sprouted from trunklike necks, jaws of yellow knifeblade teeth gnashing together. But the worst part were the eyes. One head had three oozing, red orbs the size of softballs. The other had but one, filmed and pustulant. There was a third head that was limp, dangling on a stalk of neck
And I swear to you, that growing out of that body were a dozen other smaller fetal heads like on that other rat, each filled with an unnatural, atavistic life that would not die.