Father Burns leaned to one side a moment, and then began a slow, shambling walk towards Ethan. Ethan brought the gun over and fired. The retort made the girls scream again, and the flesh of the thing’s chest exploded out its back in a black sticky mass, coating the rock wall behind it. The priest did not slow.
Ethan fired again, this time joined by a couple of shots from Shannon’s pistol. It still had no effect, and Father Burns reached for Ethan’s face with one large boil-encrusted hand, the cinders in its arm trailing an oily smoke.
Kayla suddenly rushed forward and began spraying the thing with her bottle of cleaner. It reacted immediately, melting the flesh of the corpse’s face and neck, boiling down its chest where it stripped more as it went. It screamed a high-pitched, many-voiced scream. Ethan thought immediately of Hell and that this was the many voices of its victims.
Burns turned in the same sloppy fashion and tried to get away, streaming its flesh behind it in violently sizzling puddles. It screamed again, and Ethan almost lost hold of his bladder. He gently worked the bottle from Kayla’s small hand and rushed up behind the creature, spraying its back with the cleaner, like some murderous housekeeper. It screamed again and finally pitched forward to dissolve into the forest floor.
Captain Black stood stationary for a moment, and then rolled its head onto its shoulder atop the neck long shattered by a hangman’s noose. “We cannot die, we are forever…” it hissed. Raising its cutlass, the corpse began walking towards Ethan.
Ethan rolled the nozzle over to stream and began spraying the thing, its flesh reacting in the same violent manor as the priest’s, but the captain’s screams were more hideous, more voice-filled and ruined.
Ethan found himself backing away, spraying the thing repeatedly before it toppled from lack of muscle and the sinew that held them. He continued back until he met Shannon, still holding the spray bottle before him like a flamethrower.
He turned to Shannon, and then quickly looked away, seeking out his little savior. When he found her, he scooped her up in a full hug and began to sob with her on the little girl’s shoulder. Shannon embraced them both in one large hug.
“Thank you, Kayla,” Ethan whispered softly into the girl’s ear.
“Yes, thank you. You were very brave, Kayla.” Shannon sounded as if she were about to begin crying herself.
“It’s not over,” the little voice came from between them. “There is more to clean.”
“Clean?” Shannon asked as she leaned back to see the girl’s face.
“Mommy always said that dirty was bad, and that all bad things came from being dirty. There is more dirty in that cave, and we need to clean it up!” This last she said more like a girl at a carnival.
“Do you think we should go in there, Ethan?”
“It’s that, the fog, or we wait. You remember what you were saying to me yesterday, that thing about being the people who save the world from some biblical evil. I am beginning to think you might be right.”
Shannon gazed at the dark opening of the cave and then at the dissolved corpses still smoldering to either side. “Do you think we can kill the Culture, whatever it is?”
“No, I don’t think so. I do know if this spreads, if this Culture thing decides to keep expanding, the world will be unlivable.”
“Yeah, and we would get to watch it come to an end knowing we did not try to stop it.”
Chapter 34
They stripped themselves of everything they would not need. Ethan knew that this nightmare would be ending today, and either they would come out of that cave or they would be dead. Either way, most of the things they carried were useless unless they came back out of the cave. These they left stacked and wrapped inside the collapsed tent in an attempt to protect them should the smog close off the rest of the campsite.
“Ethan?” Shannon whispered softly from just behind him.
“Yeah?” Ethan replied as he handed her a gallon jug of bleach.
“What about Kayla? Should she stay out here?”
“At this point, Shannon, I think she should make her own choice.”
“She is going to want to stay with us.”
Ethan looked at Shannon for long moments before responding. “I don’t think it is going to matter either way.”
Shannon’s face drooped slightly before she nodded.
“You’re not really going to go in there, are you?” the bum asked with his fetid breath.
Ethan looked up at him for a moment but did not reply. “Ready?”
“You’re gonna die in there, ass scab.”
“Yeah, I’m ready.”
“Me, too!” Kayla chirped. She seemed happier now than she had since they found her.
“Fuck!” the bum shouted as Ethan ducked down and began working his way into the cave.
Each of them carried a flashlight, the long metal cylinder kind that could double as a club and produced very bright light. The glare played around the stone tube in maddening flashes of sight then darkness as they made their way deeper.
Ethan had to crawl, just as he had when escaping the first time. The settled calm of his suicidal decision began to crumble under the strain of fear, which grew with each waddling step. He had just recently fought so hard to be free of this place, and now he battled within himself to get back in.
Kayla was almost able to walk upright, but still had to bend at the waist. The flashlight was difficult for her to hold with one small hand, but the other was still carrying the almost full bottle of bathroom cleaner. She seemed immune to the terror she was walking towards, most likely too innocent to know her real danger.
Shannon brought up the rear, duck-walking just behind Kayla, trying to watch behind them for fear of attack by some outside smog dweller. The bleach she carried was heavy, but proved too effective to leave behind. If a spray of cleaner could dissuade those two horrors, even kill them, it might be their key to survival. She was not sure if it would ward her against everything in the cave, but she would be holding at least this bottle when she found out.
As Ethan came into the cave itself, he immediately saw the changes. The black water that had been so still, so dead when he came through the first time had now stretched and sought out the walls of the chamber. It was oozing up and over the shores and cavern walls, coming close to the ceiling. It was apparently moving, but so slow he could not see it. Except for the light of their flashlights and the gray filtered sunlight working its way through the cavern, the cave had become like glistening pitch.
The lake at the center had given itself to coating the walls with its dark ilk, and so the depth had dropped dramatically. Ethan was shocked at the number of corpses that polluted the lakes bed. There were so many skeletons, bones with flesh, shattered, denuded bones, and other bits of death’s debris in such quantity, it was impossible to identify the creatures that had fallen victim. What was certain was the violence used to bring them to their end.
“It’s stinky in here!” Kayla said loudly, and Ethan winced at the volume.
“Oh dear Christ!” Shannon hissed as she played her light over the walls. “What is that?”
“I don’t know…” Ethan trailed off.
“It’s the Culture, and it’s going to kill you and me!” the bum shouted into Ethan ear painfully. “Leave here now!”
“I think it might be the Culture,” Ethan repeated thoughtfully, as if it where his idea. At this point, he was not sure if it actually had been his idea or not. His voice echoed through the cave distortedly with the sound of dripping water.
The flashlights tried in vain to be everywhere at once, playing across the blackness creeping along the walls, sweeping frantically this way, then that. Motion seemed to be all around them but always just outside the circles of light. It was as if the place had come to some dreadful life, a life bent on their capture and its own stealth in plain sight. The oozing motion of the blackness gave Ethan a chilling, clammy feel, and he suddenly wished he had tried surviving the smog instead.