Neil got to his feet and went to the rotting wooden boards that partially obscured Shaft C. The boards were older than Neil was. The paint strokes of the white Danger! warning were gray with age. Neil heard tell of some sort of unexpected drop-off down Shaft C, where lots of miners died in the old days. At least two company guys had slipped through the old boards and gone exploring, looking for forgotten gems, and didn’t come out. Talk was the company hadn’t even bothered to fish them out again—the Shaft C drop-offs went way down and the cost would have been far too high.
Neil flipped on the flashlight. The beam penetrated maybe fifty feet before getting lost in the tumbling rocks and the curvature of the corridor. Something disappeared behind a boulder. Something pale.
Cave rat. Neil had seen albino cave rats, and they weren’t pretty. Maybe he ought to try pegging a couple of them.
The company stipulated there should be no weapons fired in the subsurface except in the face of immediate threat. Violating that rule was a serious offense. A guy could get fired, Neil thought with pleasure as he switched off the safely.
He poked the assault rifle through the wooden slats and flipped on the barrel-mounted light. There was another flicker of movement, and he shot at it. The burst of fire echoed away into the shafts and corridors.
Something squealed, but it sure didn’t sound like a rat
Neil watched the corridor. “I know I shot
Then he saw what the something was, as it came out of the rocks on wobbly legs. He saw the something fall dead in a pool of blood.
He still wasn’t too sure what that something was.
Another one appeared, sniffing, crawling along the floor, until it was sniffing at the corpse’s bullet wound.
The creature snarled with a mouth full of yellow teeth. It raised its head, sniffed the air and turned to Neil. It rotated its head as if transcribing a circle in the air, reminding Neil of a bird of some kind.
It was human, more or less. Mostly less, and its flesh was pale, like death. Its eyes were closed. No, Neil realized, its eyeballs were grown over with a transparent cover of skin, with a web of blood vessels visible beneath the translucent skin.
Neil had never seen anything more repulsive in all his life.
He was about to run, he was about to radio for help, when the cave thing did something that made it even more repulsive.
It started eating, voraciously. Huge mouthfuls of flesh were ripped off the corpse and swallowed.
Whatever that thing was, it shouldn’t be. Neil could not suffer it to live. He stitched it across the chest with a quartet of rifle rounds. It was still chewing as it died.
Then other creatures arrived and began feeding on the first two bodies, and Neil shuddered. He shouted briefly into his radio, tied into the wire-linked transceiver on the desk, then began the task of exterminating the subhuman vermin. He never doubted that he was doing the right thing as he slaughtered the creatures in Shaft C.
He had a magazine in the rifle and a spare in his belt, and both mags were emptied in two minutes. By then the shaft was a madhouse. The creatures were thrashing at one another, sniffing for wounds, scampering to and fro to escape the mysterious cause of death. And all the time they were eating, burying their razor fangs into any bloody flesh their sense of smell could locate, tearing it off with shaking heads and chewing fast. But the most horrible thing to see was the wounded victims being eaten alive. Neil would never forget that, even if he escaped this hell and lived to be a hundred.
When the gunfire stopped, the creatures calmed themselves and started sniffing the air, bobbing their heads and coming for Neil Velick.
Neil’s gun was dry. The armed response to his distress call was at least ten minutes away. He wasn’t going to last ten minutes.
‘Neil started running. He chose Shaft E, where maybe he’d meet up with the reinforcements. It was an uphill run and he ran fast.
The slapping of their feet told him the creatures were coming after him, and getting closer. He wasn’t going to outrun them! He found a crevice in the wall where he could make a stand. They were eyeless. He could hold them off with his bayonet.
As he took up the position, his sweeping light caught two or three of them in its shine, but then they were gone, into the darkness. They were just like the colorless salamanders that skittered around some of the cave pools.
Neil tried to control his heaving breath, which sounded like a rushing windstorm. He couldn’t hear the creatures anymore. Maybe they had been scared off.
One of them came out of the blackness, and Neil didn’t see it or hear it until the death-white hand closed on the barrel of his gun. It started to pull, then whimpered and let go, flesh burned by the heat of the metal.
