For a second it was frightening, and then he saw Sera push tears away from her eyes, and smile down at him. “You are all so wonderful. Thank you,” she whispered at him, turning away. He felt the fear vanish at her sincere expression of gratitude, and instead it was replaced by a cocktail of emotions he had no name for. The dinosaur turned his head with some pain, to look at the banner that hung above him. He had traded away easy pleasures for the hard road, but so be it. It would not be a lonely road, at least, and some would live that otherwise would not.
His last thought before he settled back down to sleep was a human one. He had no regrets.
SUCKER OF SOULS
Kirsten Cross
“Is that as fast as you can run? Because fella, I’m telling you right now, it ain’t fucking fast enough!” Snarled from a frightened man way, way out of his comfort zone and desperately trying to appear in control of an uncontrollable situation so as not to ‘frighten the civvy’ as they stagger-ran.
Soldiers, even ex-soldiers who now got paid to babysit grave-robbing archaeologists, shouldn’t show fear. Ever. Even when they were faced with an enemy that apparently had powers well beyond those that could be controlled with a quick double-tap from a Glock.
Fuck.
This was gonna be one well-earned pay cheque. If he lasted long enough to collect the damn thing, that is. What they had just witnessed had challenged Flynn’s whole concept of what was worth seven hundred dollars a day plus expenses and what wasn’t. And this very definitely wasn’t.
“I’m sorry?” The archaeologist didn’t seem to get the barely controlled desperation, panic and outright ‘what the actual fuck was that?’ tone in his babysitter’s voice. Flynn was still in control of himself. Just.
When they stopped to catch a breath and take stock of their surroundings for a second, Flynn pressed home his advantage. “You bloody well will be if we don’t stay ahead of… whatever the hell that was.” The ex-soldier gave his charge a cold, emotionless smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
The archaeologist peeled off a pair of round spectacles and rubbed at them with the corner of his shirt. He perched the glasses back onto his nose and pushed them up to the bridge. His hands were shaking violently. He used the mundane act to try and ground himself while his brain attempted to process the carnage they had just seen. “I’m an archaeologist, Mr Flynn, not an Olympic sprinter.”
Colby Flynn turned his steely-cold, pale-green eyes onto the quivering academic, rammed home a new clip and primed his sidearm in front of the man. That always got their attention. Sliding the bolt back on the Glock 17 made that gloriously satisfying cher-chunk sound that all movie scriptwriters love. It acted as an underline, emphasising his determination to go down fighting no matter what. It also helped to make the archaeologist more frightened of Flynn than the thing that was currently snuffling and snarling its way towards them. And that was a good thing. Because it would mean the bolshy academic would now do what he was told for a change. “Good. That increases my chances, then.”
The bespectacled, owl-like man blinked curiously at Flynn. “What?”
“It means, buddy, that while mister bitey back there is chowing down and ripping your throat out like he did with your mate, he won’t be gnashing on me, will he?”
Oh no. Not again…
A snorting, snuffling sound that was so thick and black you could chew it like a piece of liquorice imposed on their momentary pause. “Seriously, will you just fuck off, you bastard!” Flynn abused the darkness and then emptied a volley of shots into nothing. Whether it actually made any real difference or not, he couldn’t tell. But whatever was back there yelped and snarled. Flynn hoped that the swarm of hollow-points at least gave the bastard cause to pause so they could focus on running again.
Move! For fuck’s sake, move!” Flynn spun the archaeologist around and shoved him hard. “I’ve got your back. As long as you stay in front of me.” Flynn put his mouth next to the sweating man’s ear. “And yet, you’re… still… here?”
The archaeologist suddenly developed a surprisingly-fast turn of speed for a Cambridge academic.
Normally, Flynn wouldn’t give anyone a head start. This wasn’t a school egg and spoon race where the ‘special kids’ got to jog a few steps before everyone else set off, and it was the ‘taking part that mattered, not the winning, little buddy’. This was a slime-covered stone corridor lined with spluttering, flickering lightbulbs that had been Jerry-rigged by Micky Cox – an ex-REME armed with a screwdriver, a happy disposition, and a real ‘MacGyver’ approach to fixing shit. Their only source of light was being produced by a wheezing, 40-year-old generator with carburettor problems combined with mile upon mile of gaffer-taped cable. And there wasn’t some happy-clappy teaching assistant cheering them on. There was a five-hundred-and-seventy-year-old psychopath with a taste for blood, violence and carnage just a few turns behind them. And he – or it, whatever the hell it was – was playing with them, the sick, twisted little bastard.
Flynn needed the archaeologist alive. What was in professor brainiac’s balding little noggin might just keep him and his team in one piece, if he could get the egghead to the safety of the citadel’s old armoury that was currently doubling as a control centre for the dig. Damn it, if he was going to be paid to babysit an academic, he’d make sure the son of a bitch stayed alive.
The twisting, turning corridors were slick with algae. These dungeons and corridors were built well below the natural water table and a musky, foetid atmosphere permeated every inch of the subterranean labyrinth. Rivulets of water seeped down and followed the channels between the huge blocks of granite. There was no mortar holding these blocks together. Stone like this didn’t need cement to keep it in place. These tunnels – deep under what would have been a massive, imposing castle – had thousands of tons of masonry and rock pressing down on them.
Back in the comfort of the hotel, the archaeologist had told Flynn and his team a rambling account of the supposed history of the citadel. It was, as Gary Parks had said, a ‘two-bottle tale’. The bottles in question had been filled with the local hooch, a paint-stripping, intestine-melting liquor that would probably lead to blindness if you drank too much of the damn stuff. Flynn was a practical kind of guy and, right up to the point when that… thing… had come wailing through the door, took a pretty pragmatic approach to concepts such as the ability of true evil, despair and pain to impregnate the very walls of a building. So he listened patiently about how the stones were held together with the screams of the damned, long since dead but not necessarily buried. The archaeologist had gone into great detail about how the terror of the inmates had been etched into the stone with scrabbled, ripped fingernails and bloodied stumps. It had become as real as any painting; an everlasting memory of the evil that had happened in this dark and savage place. He recounted grisly details of how every cell had been occupied with frail, frightened prisoners, their minds shredded and tattered by the constant screams, yowls and cries for mercy that echoed throughout the underground chambers. When the guards came for them, they’d begged. Oh, how they’d begged! They crawled on their bellies. They pleaded. They called to their God – who utterly abandoned them to their fate and the whims of their sadistic captors.