There was no doubt in my mind Baalth would kill me. Even worse, it wouldn’t be a quick death. He’d make me suffer in ways I didn’t feel comfortable even thinking about. McConnell wasn’t worth all that, but it sure felt good to imagine. With a big smile on my lips, I got on with the task at hand.
Uncertain of how far the passage went down, I holstered my gun to free my hands. While thinking I was gonna regret doing so, I crouched at the crypt entrance and talked myself into climbing inside. After a deep breath to calm my nerves, I grabbed the edge and swung my feet over and let them drop into the darkness. Even at six-three, I hit open air, my feet dangling. I glared up at McConnell.
“You better follow me down, cowboy.” With no point in worrying if he didn’t, I let go.
In freefall for several harrowingly long seconds, I discovered the bottom was easily over a hundred feet down. I hit the ground hard. The air was knocked from my lungs in a huff as I landed in a heap, but I didn’t feel anything break.
Unsure of what might be in there with me, I hopped to my feet fast. With solid rock beneath me and blackness all around, I inched forward as I caught my breath, drawing in deep gulps of the rancid smelling air. Something dead was in here. At least I knew we were on the right track.
Off a ways into the blackness, the distance hard to judge, there was a dim, flickering glow. To get my bearings, I looked up, the shimmer from the mausoleum above doing little to chase away the dark. Right then, McConnell appeared above me, momentarily blocking the light as he floated gently down beside me.
I growled at him, my voice low. “You can levitate?”
He nodded, his smile glistening in the gloom.
Bastard. “You could have said something.”
“You did all right.” His grin grew wider. He was enjoying this too much.
Ignoring him, and the urge to put a bullet in his eye, I drew my gun once more and headed off down the tunnel at a creep. The carved stone passage was almost tall enough for me to stand upright and the sides were about a foot and a half from each of my shoulders. I moved forward slow, McConnell’s scuffling feet behind me letting me know he was still there. His presence was reassuring, let me tell you.
What’s that old saying, between a cock and a hard place? The enemy behind, the unknown ahead, I was feeling mighty vulnerable.
After about fifty yards, the glow was just in front of us, illuminating the start of a bigger chamber. I eased forward, my palm sweaty on the grip of my. 45. The funky smell stirred with our passage and grew with every step. At the end of the tunnel, I squatted down and peered into the room beyond.
Cut out of the earth, the chamber was easily a hundred yards across and about twenty high, all rough-hewn. A row of dim, battery powered lamps hung from the furthest wall, providing just enough luminescence to see by.
On the floor below them, like a scene out of a World War II documentary, were haphazard piles of corpses, heaped on top of each other, five to six bodies high, in some places. All in various stages of decay, the fresher bodies had oozed bile and embalming fluids, which had formed glistening pools on the stone floor. Arms and legs lay akimbo, no apparent order to the collection of dead bodies. As my eyes took in the mass of lifeless faces, there was one I recognized. My stomach hardened into a tangled knot.
In the heap, nude from the waist down, was Candy. Though I didn’t know her well, our relationship cut short, I was sure she didn’t deserve this. It was a pretty lousy way to go, her body hidden in a cave, dumped amongst the nameless, rotting corpses of Old Town like so much trash. It was a bitter end.
While sickened by her death, her life gone to waste, I still had work to do. I returned my attention to the bodies. I didn’t bother to count them, but it didn’t look like there were two hundred. It was probably something closer to seventy. That meant there was another hideout somewhere or the dead were on the march. I sighed at the realization. Nothing was ever easy.
Seeing no movement, I let my gaze slide across the rest of the room. To my left were several shrouded alcoves cut high into the walls, their depth impossible to tell from where I stood. I’d have to keep an eye on them.
The rest of the room, away from where the bodies were, was empty, but there on the floor, etched into the rock, were a large number of magical symbols I didn’t recognize. Schooled as I was in demonology and the dark arts, that was surprising. I dredged my memory to see if maybe they’d simply been buried in the murk, under thoughts of a particularly good night out, but there was nothing. A little common sense told me they were necromantic in nature, given all the zombies, obviously, but that didn’t tell me much about their true purpose.
Unable to decipher the symbols, I decided to record them. I pulled out Candy’s phone, feeling a twinge of guilt knowing she was lying just a few feet away, and snapped off a few shots. Tiny clicks accompanied each picture, the sound over-loud in the confines of the cavern. The images, while a little dark and spotty, would be good enough for what I needed.
McConnell grunted behind me, shuffling his feet. Realizing he couldn’t see past me in the cramped quarters of the tunnel, and thinking I didn’t want to get caught unaware in a space I could barely move in, I stepped into the room. As he followed me, I heard him hiss. I glanced back to see him staring off past me, his eyes grim.
I mouthed the word, “What?”
He pointed to the corpses. “They know we’re here.” He didn’t bother to whisper.
I turned around slowly just as a gentle creaking, like a ship moored at low tide, sprung up behind me. My heart dropped into my stomach when I saw the corpses on the pile rising up, slowly getting to their feet. They groaned a horrible threnody, spewing bouts of random nonsense as their blank stares settled on us.
I slid the phone back into my pocket. “Time to go.”
I spun around to run but before I could take a step, a hail of zombies dropped down on top of us from out of the alcoves; the same ones I told myself to watch and had forgotten to do so.
Under slabs of rotten flesh, I crashed to the floor, narrowly avoiding having my nose bitten off. Assaulted by the smell as much as by the zombies, I squirmed, trying to get them off me. To my relief, my gun hand was free. Twisting my wrist into an awkward angle to point it toward the corpses, knowing it was gonna hurt for a while-if I lived that long-I snapped off a round. The recoil whipped my hand back and slammed my knuckles into the rock floor, causing an explosion of pain before going mercifully numb.
Though I was gonna have a hard time using my right hand effectively, the pain was worth it. My shot struck the top zombie in the side of the head. Its dead again body rolled to the side, and off me. I helped it along, using its bulk as a bulldozer to muscle the other two that were gnawing at me, off my chest. It worked somewhat. My upper body loose, I sat up just as a pair of gnashing teeth tore into the meat of my calf.
Biting back a scream, I pressed the barrel of my gun against its biting head and blew a fist-sized hole in it, my hand twinging like a motherfucker. Its head snapped back and crumpled, leaving behind its teeth, still buried in my leg. I shot the other one and swiped at the embedded teeth, knocking them loose in jagged little pieces. With a growl, I examined the wound. A gooey greenness was mixed in with the blood.
“If I catch Corpse Creep, I’m gonna kill you again,” I shouted at the toothless undead while I hopped to my feet. My leg gratefully supported my weight, though it felt as if it were on fire.
I glanced around for McConnell. He, too, had been caught off guard by the attack. While I played zombie snack, he must have freed himself. A pool of melted, disfigured flesh and yellowed bone encircled him. Steam wafted up from the waxy zombie puddle as he stood with clenched fists, sparkling gray energy whirling about his hands.