The plan. Okay. First things first. Transport Clayton to the Challenger.
Luke cut the Tensors and rolled Clayton onto his side. His brother showed no sign of awakening, but Luke filled another hypo with Telazol and slipped it into his pocket just in case. After a moment’s consideration, he slipped a scalpel in with it.
Luke raised Clayton’s arm and ducked his head under to heft him up. Clayton was incredibly heavy, especially with Luke as exhausted as he was. He’d manage it somehow. As he was leaving the lab, Luke heard a muffled thump from Clayton’s lab.
The cooler.
Oh, God. Its contents were thawing. And they wanted out.
He set Clayton down and shone the flashlight into the lab.
The cooler lid rattled ominously.
Thump. Tha-thump-thump.
The box of lab equipment Luke had set atop the cooler jumped. Before long, it would get knocked off. Then the creatures inside would be set loose in the dark.
Luke retrieved the Tensors he’d used to bind Clayton. Working quickly, he strung them under the cooler and knotted them tightly across the lid. When he was finished, it looked like a birthday present that nobody in their right fucking mind would want to open. He put the lab equipment back on top, thinking it couldn’t hurt.
With his ear pressed to the cooler, he could make out noises inside: long slow scratches, not unlike nails raking the inside of a coffin.
He shut the hatch to the lab and turned his attention back to Clayton.
“Okay, brother dear. Let’s get cracking.”
Dragging him through the tunnels was draining, awkward work. Luke tried a modified fireman’s carry, but the tunnel was too low for that. He tried carrying him the way you’d hoist a drunk, one arm hooked over his shoulder. Clay hung limp and heavy, toes scraping the floor. It was hard to carry him and keep the flashlight focused forward at the same time. Eventually Luke sat Clayton down and hooked his arms under Clay’s armpits, hands clasped across his chest, and dragged him. Luke hated not being able to see where he was going—he couldn’t see what, if anything, was waiting in the dark—but it was a lot quicker this way. Every few feet he stopped to sweep the flashlight behind him, ensuring that the tunnel looked as he remembered it.
He reached the crawl-through chute. Jesus. How was he going to manage this? It’d be easier to shove his brother in headfirst, humans being naturally top-heavy, but without anyone to catch him on the other side, Clay would fall bonelessly; he might smash his head open. So feetfirst it would have to be.
Luke shone the flashlight down the crawl-through. Its insides glittered fitfully; the beam didn’t penetrate the solid dark on the other side.
“Fuck it,” he muttered. “Upsy-daisy.”
He wrangled Clay’s heels and calves into the chute. It was hard work to shove and shoulder Clayton’s body up and in; Clay’s scalp got cut open on the grate and one of his arms got hooked behind his back in a painful-looking chicken wing. Luke was breathing hard by the time Clay’s knees cleared the lip of the chute. He felt like a mobster feeding a dead stoolie into a wood chipper.
Luke cranked Clay’s midsection up and levered him into the chute. Luke figured he should go feetfirst, too, his heels braced on Clayton’s shoulders to push him along. Progress would be tortuous, but he could do it.
He pushed Clayton down the crawl-through as far as he could using his hands, then pulled himself out, gripped the first overhead rung in both hands, swung into the chute, and settled his feet on either side of Clayton’s head. Pushing with his hips and hauling with his arms, he was able to get Clayton’s body sliding forward. Luke’s shoulders and head were swallowed into the chute. He braced his palms and pushed against the rungs, propelling their bodies forward. The flashlight jutted from the hip pocket of his overalls, shining directly into his eyes—
Something was behind him. Coming down the dark tunnel.
He couldn’t see it, not yet—but oooh, he could smell it.
A childhood smell. The same one that would waft up from the white Styrofoam container with the perforated lid he’d buy at the local bait shop for two bucks. He’d put that container in his backpack and sling his fishing rod over his shoulder and head down to the river. On the banks he’d open the container and see them wriggling under a layer of sawdust. Maggots. The best bait for rock bass. Luke had always found them revolting—their fat, milky bodies so translucent you could see the weird workings of their guts through their skin. They wriggled delightedly, it seemed, when he pinched them between his thumb and fingers—just happy to be touched, even if it meant they’d shortly be skewered on a barbed hook. Their skin would dimple like a badly inflated balloon before the hook punched through their bodies—and their elated paroxysms would persist after they’d been skewered, these crazed squirms that would entice a fish to bite…
This was what filled Luke’s nose: that rancid, sawdust smell of maggots in a bait cup.
He snatched the flashlight and twisted onto his stomach. The beam flooded out of the crawl-through and hit a sheer wall of darkness where he’d just been. The light picked up a patina of dust—dead skin cells, it could only be, seeing as there was nothing else down here that could become dust.
Lubbaduuuuu… Loooooolubbaduuuu…
This sound came next, sluicing out of the dark. A slick and gooey noise, like a ball of Vaseline-smeared yarn squished in a fist.
Luke felt it out there now—pulsating and lewd, a giant maggot. A horrific white grub in search of its wormhole; the very hole Luke and Clayton were trapped inside.
The tunnel lights flickered on for a moment.
Luke saw it, or was certain he had. Enormous. It curled around the tunnel and out of sight, thirty feet of it visible, as thick around as an industrial trash can. Its pale ringed ugliness seared his eyeballs; its huge gelatinous body convulsed along the floor in a series of giddy, peristaltic flexes. The sight filled Luke with a narcotizing terror—a slow-acting nectar that oozed into his veins.
The lights went out again. The thing continued to suck and shudder itself forward.
…looolubbaaaaaduuuuu…
Frantically, Luke pushed himself backward. His hands slipped uselessly on the frictionless coating inside the tube: he may as well be trying to climb a greased pole. He reached up, spine bowed, and shoved desperately at the rungs with his palms.
The flashlight picked up an oily slab of chalk-white flesh no more than a yard away from the mouth of the crawl-through…
Loorblovvaducthhh…
Luke paused, trapped in a breathless bubble of panic. That noise, which he’d mistaken for the sound of the maggot’s body shucking across the floor, was something else.
It was a voice. A familiar one.
Looooordloveaducthhhhh…
A quivering mass of unctuous, marble-white flesh plugged the end of the crawl-through. The air turned dense; that stink rolled off the maggot in thick, drowsy waves.
The maggot’s face was not his mother’s—of course not; maggots didn’t have faces—and yet, this was exactly what Luke saw. Her visage stitched onto the maggot’s shuddering, enormous body. There was a porcine fleshiness, that flat-hanging sagginess his mother’s face had held at her heaviest. And its eyes—two of them, socked deep into the puddled sickliness of that sallow face—were black and empty, as his mother’s would get when she was angry. Its mouth was a puckered orifice like an anteater’s: a long, needlelike proboscis.