Plus, the situation back inside the main tunnel undoubtedly had not changed. Even if he were successful at finding his way out of Alpha Seven with no light and some strange creature stalking him, his reward would be a painful and probably protracted death. The air was certainly even more poisoned now than it had been when he made the decision to walk away.
He had no choice but to stick it out here. He wished he had thought to bring something to use as a weapon; even the two jagged rocks which had nearly beaned him would have been better than nothing. But the prospect of having to defend himself against… some kind of attacker… had never even occurred to him. He was alone between two closed bulkheads, with no possibility of anyone coming or going, so self-defense had not been a top priority when compared with trying to survive poisonous gases.
Karl closed his eyes and concentrated on Susan. She would be his rock; she would help him survive. It made him feel somehow even more vulnerable to be sitting in this supposedly haunted mine shaft with his eyes closed, but what difference did it really make? He couldn’t see a damned thing anyway. This was a darkness thicker than any he had ever known.
Karl slowed his breathing and concentrated hard, listening closely for the slithering noise. Nothing. Maybe the whole thing had been the product of his fevered imagination working overtime. It would make sense. Stuck in the dark in an abandoned — and some would say haunted — mine shaft with no company, facing an uncertain future and possible death, it would be strange if a person’s mind didn’t play tricks on him.
Before he knew it, Karl Meyer fell into a fitful sleep.
In his dream, Karl was lying on a beach, stretched out in a lounge chair with a drink in his hand and the sun beating down on his tanned body. A few feet away, the waves pounded onto the sand, the ocean’s hypnotic efficiency lulling him to sleep. He was warm and comfortable and happy, and Susan lay next to him on a lounge chair of her own.
Karl had never been to the beach, had never seen the ocean. He had grown up an immigrant in central Pennsylvania, raised by a drunken father and a disinterested mother. The family had never taken a vacation, to the ocean or anywhere else.
Karl knew he was dreaming but didn’t care. He was warm and comfortable and happy.
Something was on his arm.
Karl gasped and his eyes flew open. Something was on his arm and it was thick and cold, ropy but hard, like a flexible tree branch or a wire cable or something similar. He jerked his arm, pulling reflexively to get it away from the awful cold thing but could not move.
The ropy cable-like thing wrapped itself around his injured right wrist tightly and pulled with a steady pressure and Karl screamed in terror and pain and the sound fought its way through the unnaturally thick air in Alpha Seven and disappeared. Karl felt his body sliding sideways, moving deeper into the pitch-black mining shaft. His injured wrist pounded and throbbed, sending white-hot bolts of pain shooting through his arm like someone had inserted TNT into his wrist and chosen this moment to detonate it.
He kicked and scrabbled in a desperate attempt to halt his attacker’s progress and succeeded only in losing a boot. He was stretched out on the tunnel floor, sliding through the dirt in the endless black hole that was Alpha Seven. He knew the thing had begun pulling him deeper into the abandoned mine shaft, but in his panicked attempt to free himself, Karl had lost all sense of direction. It was possible the thing had turned around while he struggled against it, but somehow Karl knew that was not the case.
His attacker dragged him along steadily. He gasped and moaned and was rewarded with absolutely no response whatsoever. The monster either had nothing to say or no way to say it. In the midst of his mindless panic, Karl Meyer now realized all the stories he had ever heard about the Tonopah Mine were true. The whispered rumors of some horrible entity lurking in the long-forgotten depths of Alpha Seven, eternal and vicious and deadly, were not just stories but fact.
Karl pulled and yanked and tugged on the ropy thing which had clamped itself around his wrist like a vice. It felt scaly and cold but organic. It throbbed with ancient life. He closed his eyes in silent prayer and then reached up and tried to bite the thing, and as he did he felt a second ropy tentacle twist its way around his chest and move relentlessly upward. The thing wrapped and twined and worked its way to Karl’s mouth, forcing it open.
Karl tried to spit it out and failed. He twisted and writhed and kicked to no effect; more ropy things—Sweet Jesus, where are they all coming from? — worked their way around his body. In a matter of seconds, he found himself completely immobilized.
And then the invasion began in earnest. His jaws were pulled apart, the cold alien things wriggling into his mouth, gripping his upper and lower teeth with inhuman strength and he screamed, long and loud, now beyond all conscious thought, the explosion forgotten, the mine fire forgotten, Susan forgotten, his children forgotten, Alpha Seven forgotten.
He twisted and struggled. It made no difference. A single ropy protrusion slithered into his mouth, pausing for just a moment on his tongue, flitting back and forth as if reassuring itself it was safe to proceed. One second later it did, sliding down Karl Meyer’s throat. As he felt himself being torn apart, possessed from the inside, Karl wished with all his heart he had stayed inside the main tunnel. Dying from poison gas would be infinitely better than this.
And then he was gone.
2
A mountain of blankets covered twelve year old Tim McKenna’s small form as he lay shivering in his bed. Tim’s mom felt his forehead with the back of her hand for the third time in the last twenty minutes. “You’re burning up,” she muttered. “I wish I could find that darned thermometer. You’re definitely not going to school today, but I’m a little concerned about leaving you here alone. Your fever seems to be spiking.”
“I’ll be okay,” Tim told her with a weak smile. “If you could leave some orange juice for me to drink while I doze, though, that would be good. I’m pretty thirsty.”
“Of course you can have juice,” she said. “I’ll get it before I leave for work. I have a couple more minutes before I have to leave, so I’m going to look for that thermometer one more time. I know I left it in the medicine chest.” She clucked distractedly and ruffled Tim’s hair and walked out of the bedroom.
Tim waited until he heard the click-click-click of her high-heeled shoes fading off down the hallway and then ducked under the covers, pulling them tightly over his head and anchoring them against the mattress with both hands. He had almost blown his whole plan the last time his mom left the room by going overboard, staying under the blankets too long. He had come up for air red-faced and sweating, raising his body temperature almost to the point where a fever might no longer be believable.
One thing he didn’t have to worry about was his mom finding the thermometer. Last night before bed, Tim had swiped it out of the medicine cabinet — right where Mom always left it; no wonder she thought she was going crazy — and slid it under his bed, between the mattress and the box spring. There was no way in the world he would be able to pull off a fake fever if he had to fool a thermometer as well as his mom, but as long as he didn’t stay under the covers too long again or do anything else stupid, in a few minutes Mom would leave for work and he would have the whole day to himself.
The whole day to do a little exploring.
Tim McKenna wasn’t in the habit of ditching school. He didn’t earn straight-A’s or anything like that, but knew how important it was to his mom that he get an education, “so you can do something with your life,” she would say wistfully, the unspoken message clear even to a twelve year old, that she hadn’t done that, and look where it had gotten her.