“Every time you open your mouth you’re giving away our position,” Reaper told him.
“Yeah. See, I woke up one morning, everything was gone. Only thing left was me. They wanted the TV more than they wanted me.”
The tunnel must be getting to the Kid — connecting him to the primal fear he’d felt, waking up to find his parents had abandoned him. Back in that other dark childhood tunnel, in a way.
Anyhow, it was better that the Kid cowboyed up, and stopped being so personal. This was the time to be professional and nothing but.
And Reaper didn’t want to hear about the Kid’s parents vanishing on him. His own parents hadn’t exactly abandoned him. But one day they were just…gone. Dead.
The Kid stared owlishly back at him, mouth moving soundlessly, his eyes…
Reaper found a small flashlight in his belt pack, pointed the red-tinted light at the kid’s face. “Your pupils,” Reaper burst out, furious. “They’re dilated, Kid! Are you fuckin’ high?”
The Kid looked away. Tried out a lie. “I got this condition, Reaper…”
“Who’s supplying you?” Reaper demanded. “Portman?”
The Kid didn’t answer. Which was answer enough.
Great. The Kid and Portman were high on some trashy neurostimmer. In Reaper’s experience, guns times drugs equaled fuckups. Stoned people always fucked up big-time, in a tense situation. Meaning somebody would die, as a result…and not necessarily the enemy.
“You take any more of that shit, Kid,” Reaper said, deliberately making his voice loud enough for Portman and Sarge to hear, too, “and I’ll blow holes in you and Portman.”
“Oh sure, Reaper,” the Kid snorted. “Like you’re gonna shoot me.”
Reaper pointed his gun at the Kid’s head. Settled in like he was about to follow through on his threat.
The Kid swallowed. “Hey — look — I was just kidding.”
There was something moving, something big and bulky, in the side tunnel just beyond the Kid.
“I won’t do it again, okay?” the Kid was saying. “I’m sorry.”
“Get down,” Reaper said.
Something was coming closer…
“What?”
“Get down!”
The Kid crouched low into the water. “What is it?”
It slipped past them — swimming now, but unmistakably a bipedal shape, a large, living creature…then he lost sight of it.
But as he pressed back against the curved wall, the Kid now against the wall opposite him, Reaper saw a V-shaped ripple moving along the surface of the water, its motion purposeful, sliding between them. Heading back down the tunnel…
Heading for the squadron like a submerged alligator.
Reaper followed, came to the place the tunnel divided, saw it turn into Goat’s tunnel.
“Goat,” Reaper said into the comm, “something’s behind you! It’s under the surface! It’s coming toward you!”
“Oh fuck!” Portman hissed, hearing the report on the comm, pointing his gun at the water. Not sure where to shoot. He might blow someone’s kneecap apart before he hit the thing swimming under the water.
“It’s under the water!” Reaper repeated, on the comm.
Portman fired a nervous burst into the water — the rounds sent up little geysers of sewage, ricocheted down the tunnel.
“Hold your fire!” Sarge ordered. “It’s not in this tunnel!”
In the center tunnel, Goat had turned, was swinging his light from side to side, trying to spot the thing Reaper said was coming for him. Seeing nothing at all but floating crap.
“I don’t see it!” Goat reported.
“It’s there!” came Reaper’s voice, crackling in the headset.
But he still saw nothing but water and spiraling waste. Worse, his light was going out. Getting weaker and weaker…
Wait — was there something under the water, over there? It was hard to tell in the weak gunlight. Should have brought an extra flash or a flare or something, but he liked to carry as little as possible. Stay sleek. So he had no other light on him. No night goggles. Not even a match.
And as Goat peered, eyes aching, into the dimness — his light went out completely.
Total darkness snapped down around him. Perhaps this was a message from God. He remembered a line from the Bible, Matthew 6:23, If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
God was showing him the darkness of his own soul…
But the soldier in him struggled to stay in control . Don’t give in — fight! Let the others know.
“This is not happening,” he muttered into the comm. “My light is down. Think my battery’s out. Pinky…you see it?”
But the cameras he bore were in darkness, too. “No, nothing,” came Pinky’s voice on the headset.
Then he heard a splashing sound, and a kind of reptilian chuckle. He remembered the coat they’d found floating down the tunnel.
“Dr. Willits?” he whispered.
Something rose up from the water, quite near him; he could hear liquid dropping from its body, could hear it breathing — close beside him, on his right…
Less than a foot away.
He swallowed…and turned, could just make out a shape that was a deeper darkness than the background gloom — a misshapen head.
The dark shape opened its eyes. Two luminous eyes…
Then the rest of its eyes opened.
A whole cluster of them — glowing against the backdrop of darkness. Goat stumbled backward —
A light flashed on them from down the tunneclass="underline" Reaper’s gunlight. But he was too far away to shoot the thing without hitting Goat.
There was a flash of spiky teeth, a flicker of something rocketing from its maw — a sickly pink tongue stabbing like a stinger but coming like the tongue of a frog zapping an insect, flying harpoonlike into Goat’s throat — and he felt the impact on his neck, stabbing and pumping to gush a fluid into him, a venom or worse.
Goat shrieked and fell, thrashing. Hot pain spread rippling out from his neck, washed over him — and then a terrifying numbness. Not the numbness of blessed relief, but a malevolent dullness. Paralysis started in his lower body, making it go rigid and he slid down into the water. His hands flailed at the barbed tongue embedded in his neck…
The creature that’d injected Goat stepped back — and as it did, its tongue unspooled from its throat. It reeled out, out…longer and longer, an absurd connection of flesh between its drooling maw and Goat’s jolting form…
Then, as it was supposed to, the tongue snapped free, detaching itself, shortening, becoming about two feet long; pumping its fluid sack furiously into Goat as it writhed around his body, finishing its work. Goat tried to pull the tongue off, but it was no use, he was losing control of his upper body…
The creature moved away from its detached tongue. The tongue would follow a homing instinct back to it, in time to be ready for the next anointing.
But then it turned, startled by a flash of light — Reaper was there, splashing up the tunnel toward it. It ducked down in the water.
“Man down!” Reaper shouted, seeing Goat twitching in the water.
He’d seen the thing shoot its tongue into Goat — but where had it gotten to?
There was an eruption from the foul water just two yards from him, then the creature was transfixed for a strobic moment by his gunlight beam: sheathed in sliding water, its semihuman head lifted; a cluster of eyes like a spider’s, no nose to speak of, most of its head taken up by vast jaws bristling with teeth, its skin raw-looking, its hands ending in talons, its body rippling in muscle.