A whoosh of hot kerosene breath, too close for comfort, Mendoza’s lantern setting the spilled fuel from Castillo’s broken one alight as the former shattered against the hard-packed earth. Our world went briefly campfire-orange and choking hot. The creature’s one good eye slammed shut against the bright, its jaw still snapping all the while. I held it away from my borrowed face as best I could, but my/Mendoza’s best wasn’t gonna cut it for long. Our smoker lungs seared, our vision went dim. Our elbow was on the verge of giving out.
Guam, here I come, I thought.
Then Solares — that beautiful, brave, stupid son of a bitch — came barreling around the corner, popping five shots into the beast quick as a drum machine. Chunks of flesh tore free of the creature, gouting green-black blood, and it howled in pain and animal fury. Then all the sudden, the goddamn thing was off of me. I watched in horror as it sailed through the air toward Solares with all the deadly grace of a jungle cat. He popped off three more shots before it tackled him. All three shots landed center-mass, but they didn’t slow the monster down a bit. He and it bounced off the rusted honeycomb of chicken wire holding back the loose dirt of the tunnel wall, and wound up a tangle of limbs amidst the mess that was Castillo. When teeth and claw found flesh, Solares didn’t even scream.
Then it ripped his throat out, and he couldn’t if he tried.
I wanted to mourn him, to apologize for dragging him into this. But there wasn’t time. Not while this thing was still breathing.
The spilled kerosene on the tunnel floor burned off, and the fire extinguished itself, leaving the tunnel full of thick black smoke and precious little oxygen.
My eyes stung. My lungs burned for cool, clean air. I crooked my elbow and breathed through Mendoza’s shirtsleeve, blinking back tears as I cast about for a weapon.
Guns were useless against this thing, they didn’t do shit. And there was no skim blade in this private hell of mine, replica or otherwise.
There was, however, rebar.
The men who’d constructed the tunnel had used it to anchor the chicken wire. It jutted from the dirt floor and walls as well. Not everywhere, just here and there. Took a good thirty seconds of fumbling in the smoky dimness to find some. It poked out cold as nighttime desert from a nearby wall, and came out reluctantly. I can’t say how long I yanked at it before I finally freed it from the wall. Long enough for the beast to disappear into the deeper dark of the eastward tunnel, I suppose, because when I looked back toward Solares, where I’d last seen it, it was gone.
It didn’t stay gone long.
I heard its ragged breathing, back and to my left. I spun, but saw nothing.
A sudden pop like a gunshot, only quieter. Then another, then another. All to the west, from whence I came, which was now as dark as was the eastern passage.
The creature had broken the nearest three light bulbs.
A rustle of scale-dry skin. A flash of slightly paler dark amidst the black. And then needles in my shoulder. Teeth or claws, I didn’t know.
I swung blindly at the creature’s point of contact with the rebar, and hit the fucker so damn hard, I heard something crack. If its reflexes had been better, that crack would have been my meat-suit’s collarbone. Instead, given the muffled yowl the beast let out, I’m guessing I took out its jaw. No telling how long that jaw would take to mend. Minutes, maybe less. This thing had been feasting, after all. Its powers were no doubt at their peak.
It retreated some, and let me stew in the black a bit. I didn’t much enjoy it. Played Babe Ruth and swung for the cheap seats once or twice with my rebar, succeeded only in tiring myself out. So little air left in this still, dark tomb of a tunnel.
I fell to my knees, then onto my back. Felt consciousness bleeding away, the choking air a pillow against my face. My eyes fluttered shut. And then it struck.
Just as I’d been hoping.
I knew I hadn’t much time left, so I figured playing possum was my best bet. A bluff’s all the more believable when it’s half true. And I’d seen this fucker’s game once or twice already. I knew it liked to cover ground all lickety-split with a well-timed pounce.
Unfortunately for it, I was ready. Got the rebar up in time. Felt the thrum of electricity through the iron as it broke through the creature’s chest, traveling from my meat-suit’s hand up the bar like Lilith had suggested was the case. I pray the Lord its soul to take. Its one intact eye gleamed wet and wide in the near-dark. Its body slackened as the rebar broke through the ancient flesh of its back. Atop the rebar, stuck like iron filings to a magnet, was the gnarled, lifeless hunk that was this creature’s soul. I could feel the vibration of it through the three feet of rebar. Weak, but still alive, though the body I’d removed it from was nothing more than empty flesh.
I lay a moment, pinned beneath the impaled creature. Then I heaved it to one side and climbed out from underneath. “You know what?” I asked its corpse as I wrapped my hand around its soul and crushed it to dust like so much chalk. “That one was kinda personal.”
The ground rumbled all around me, swinging light bulbs on their naked cords and loosing dust from the ceiling, while the creature’s lifeless figure crumbled to bone and dust. My memory cast back unbidden to the collapsing Pemberton Baths, and I feared for a moment the tunnel was going to come down around me. But whatever mystical juice Magnusson had tapped into in the length of his unnatural existence proved weaker tea in this subhuman, feral beast, because almost as soon as it began, the rumbling quieted, and the swaying lights stilled. The cave still stood. And eventually, creakily, so did I.
Then, my task completed, I left the cave of cooling dead behind, and stumbled out into the half-lit predawn of the slowly waking desert alone.
8.
“Nicky! Nicky, are you effing seeing this?”
As a point of fact, Nicky wasn’t effing seeing this, because Nicky wasn’t home right now. He hadn’t been for a while. When he and his cohorts stopped to film their live webcast Q&A in Boulder two days back, I took the opportunity to hitch a ride in ol’ Nicky, stuffing that poor, befuddled neo-hippie burnout into a metaphorical steamer trunk in the back of his mind next to some half-remembered Rusted Root lyrics, the abandoned mental blueprints for his pot-themed amusement park, and that awkward memory of seeing his not-yet-stepmom naked that one time by accident only really on purpose.
Not that Topher (pronounced Tow-fer, like we didn’t know his name was really Chris) or Zadie’d noticed. Firstly, because Nicky — the cameraman, equipment tech, weed supplier, and webmaster behind their all-the-sudden way-more popular web series Monster Mavens — who oh, by the way, really hated being called Nicky it’s Nicholas or at least just Nick you guys c’mon — was the quiet type, usually too baked and too absorbed in tinkering with his many gadgets to offer up more than a crooked half-smile or a grunt to register his happiness or displeasure (excepting those rare instances in which he felt he’d been Nicky-ed to excess). And secondly, they were too busy basking in the their newfound fame.
Until two weeks back, Monster Mavens was a modest internet success, with their blog generating a couple hundred unique hits per post, and their YouTube channel clocking in at somewhere around twenty-five hundred subscribers, half of whom were smartass college kids at least as baked as Nicholas-not-Nicky, who only tuned in to mock Topher and Zadie’s stubborn, moronic credulity in the face of no evidence whatsoever.
See, Topher and Zadie hunted monsters.
Badly.
Of course, they called them cryptids, and played them off as animals as-yet undiscovered. You know, Bigfoot and Nessie and the like, only they talked about them like they were a hair’s breadth away from coelacanths, those fish everybody thought were extinct until some fisherman netted a live one off the coast of South Africa. But if you ask me, finding a seven-foot ape in the Pacific Northwest or a dinosaur in a goddamn loch is a frick-ton less likely than a new fish in the sea. As anyone’ll tell you, there are plenty of them. Plus, these two patchouli-stinking, constantly bickering Deadheads (their shirts all said “Phish” or “Moe” or “Dave Matthews Band” on them, but I’ve been around a while, and I know the type) didn’t strike me as the scientific-method type — all the jargon-laced talk of fossil records and investigative methods in the world couldn’t convince me this gig of theirs was anything other than the two of them successfully forestalling their entrance into the real world, in favor of nights spent swigging jug wine around the campfire and boinking in tents while — and unfortunately, I know this part for absolute, if unscientific, fact — don’t-call-me-Nicky here surreptitiously recorded audio for his own, uh, personal use.