‘Sam, I’ve got to stop.’ Tink bent double, bringing them to a halt.

  Sam trained the machine gun on the darkness behind them.

  ‘Where are we?’ Tink panted. She was filthy. Her white vest had turned the colour of dishwater. Her skin sheened with streaks of grime mixed with mucus. Sam was sure he looked no better. Plus, they were ankle deep in a rank slush, warm and fetid.

  ‘Inside Sugnar... I guess.’ Sam strained to see if the ghoul and his coterie of shadows were following.

  Tink turned her hands over, inspecting her bare arms. ‘Does that mean this is...?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Oh, gross.’ She wiped her palms down her forearms and flicked off the phlegm. ‘Herne’s arse, it smells like a dead guy barfed on me.’

  ‘Kind of did, but shh!’

  Tink wiped her hands on her shorts and coughed on the back of her hand. ‘Why did you go all Rambo on that guy?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Rambo, soldier guy, headband, unnecessarily big knife.’

  ‘I know who John Rambo is. Surprised you do, but I don’t get it: he was attacking you.’

  Tink looked at him like he was stupid. ‘Attacking me? He was saving me. Slapping me on the back so I could cough up this... this...’ She considered the slime covering their bodies and coating their mouths. ‘Oh Herne!’ She dry heaved.

  ‘Saving you?’ Sam said, doubtfully, turning the question rhetorical.

  ‘Probably saved you too. Bet he dragged us from the...’ Tink was unable to hold back another retch. She held up a hand, which might have been to indicate she was alright, or not to help, or even a placeholder in what she was saying. It turned out to be the latter.

  She wiped her mouth. ‘Where’s Eddie?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was thinking about other things. Oh no! Do you think he’s back in the pool?’

  ‘If he is, I doubt a dog can hold its breath that long,’ Tink said, wanly.

  ‘We should go back.’

  ‘Maybe now you’ve shot up the place, that guy won’t be so helpful this time.’

  ‘And he wasn’t the only one there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There were others, in the dark, coming up behind him. Is there anything in the legend about this?’

  ‘Are you nuts?’

  ‘That’s a nuts question? After everything we’ve been through?’

  ‘Well, yeah. It’s not as if anyone gets eaten by serpent god and comes back for a natter over a pint in the Stag and Snake.’

  ‘So, we’re dead?’ Sam said, not feeling dead. A raw throat and bone sore weariness told him otherwise, but then again, what did he know about being dead? That barbed hook twisted in his chest, moored as it was to the thought of his mother. The pain she’d been in the end, even pumped full of morphine. A long, tortured suffering. Death had to be a reprieve. Had to be. But why? Life was an utterly cruel wanker. Why would death be any better, especially in a universe of capricious gods?

  ‘How am I supposed to know?’ Tink snapped.

  They were both exhausted, and Sam didn’t have an answer either. ‘I don’t feel dead,’ he said, fingering the grooves of the machine gun.

  Tink slumped back against a leathery-grey arch. ‘Me neither,’ she sighed. ‘Just dead knackered.’

  It was a rubbish joke, but Sam returned her weak smile.

  ‘Here, you better take this.’ He unbuckled the gun belt and handed it to Tink. ‘Even if we are dead, these still seem to work.’ That sounded stupid too, but maybe death was similar to the projected avatars in The Matrix. If that was so, gun metal retained its blue pill weight.

  The belt was too big to tie around Tink’s waist. Instead, she slung it across her body, like Raquel Welch in Bandolero! Sam showed her what he thought was the safety and how to thumb it on and off.

  ‘Doesn’t mean we’re engaged or anything?’

  ‘Is that a line from a movie or something?’

  ‘What? No... well, yes. Aliens.’

  ‘You’re such a nerd. But as lines go, it’s a good one.’

  ‘The best. Hicks says it to Ripley right before...’ He thought something moved out of the corner of his eye.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  ‘What?’ Tink said, stopping her eyeroll.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Sam surveyed their surroundings. They were in yet another tunnel or long cavern. Unlike in the petrified tree, a greenish light emanated from the slush around their feet. This was a softer glow than at the pool. The leathery grey arch was one of many, at roughly equal intervals.

  ‘Ribs?’ he muttered to himself. Between them, presumably, sickly pink walls of flesh, the colour of spoiled salmon, speckled with liver spots. From these the greenish glow also burnished. This wasn’t what caught his eye though. In the weak light, their environment lacked clarity. He felt watched and consolidated his grip on the machine gun. There was an invisible presence running its dirty fingernails over his scalp, a caress.

  Tink made an awkward move to her own gun. ‘Do you see something?’

  ‘Don’t you feel that?’

  She looked around, thinking hard. ‘The hum?’

  She was right, there was a hum, a deep rumbling that he’d almost tuned out because of its omnipresence. That wasn’t it, though. Sam shook his head, squinting into the gloom and straining to hear.

  Tink screamed, and Sam spun around. She’d drawn the pistol and held it at an awkward angle because something had her arm. She struggled. The gun went off, with a muted report in the soft walled chamber. A bullet splashed in the sludge between Sam’s feet. He leapt back, almost losing his balance. His own gun seemed to have developed a mind of its own, jumping out of his shaking hands.

  A white arm, with that same greenish glow as the walls, grasped Tink’s bicep. As she tried to yank herself away, the gun jerked back and forth. The attacking arm was a sickening thing. It appeared waxy and without definition. From over her shoulder, like a giant pore seeping the congealed pus of a spot, a shoulder, chest, and head emerged.

  As more of it birthed from the orifice, Sam took aim, but Tink was in the way. Thinking fast, he ran forward, hiking the butt of the gun over his shoulder. With gritted teeth, he slammed the stock into the soft head. The skull collapsed, spraying pus from its single off-centred eye and the puckered ring of a mouth on its chinless face. With a shriek of revulsion, Tink came free. They retreated, as the grotesque thing oozed from the wall, passing another shoulder, a second flaccid arm. Finally, its weight accelerated its excretion with a wet, mucosal slap.

  Sam’s gorge rose as the anaemic figure pushed itself up on doughy arms. The stoved dent in its cranium began to expand back into place, as it raised its cycloptic face towards them. Below the waist there were no legs, only a tail of ribbed segments that narrowed to a stubby point. Trembling, Sam levelled the machine gun at the half-maggot-half-one-eyed-Morlock thing. It opened the circular orifice of a mouth and let go a rasping mewl.

  Sam let go of the machine gun and jammed his fists into his ears.

  Lorrriiimeeerrr!

  It was a noiseless sandpaper scream grating across the soft matter of Sam’s brain. Tink winced too.

  The maggot-man twitched at the neck. Weeping pus, it’s glaucous eye blinked and rolled in its socket. Lorrriiimeeerrr!

  Sam wrestled with his head, unable to throw off the violation.

  Movement came from all around them. Dozens of pores, in the walls, the roof above, and up from the wet ground, stretched open. Some pores tore as they excreted their abominable pustules, birthing monstrosities in a feculent cream of afterbirth. They brought with them a chorus of desiccated sibilation.

  A maggot-thing dropped from the roof into the sludge with a splash. Tink spun to face it, while more of its kind were ejected with torpid squelches, surrounding them.

  What is this? The voice, as dry as a desert wind, scrapped through Sam’s mind.

  A Lorimer is here, another answered. More white bodies wriggled free, while those already squirming in their own slime and the filth in the cavern floor swayed blindly. Some reached out misshapen, three-fingered hands, searching.

  Tasty morsel for we. A different voice again.

  Young, said another.

  Tender

  Juicy.

  Sweet.

  Their stubby grey tongues barely poked free of their circular mouths ringed with pointed teeth.

  What be this other thing?

  Feee-male.

  Sweet is the flesh of woman.

  Of the stag this one is not.

  She is. We can taste her.

  No, she is of the wrym. We taste our rot upon her.

  Yes.

  A freak.

  A collective hiss grated through Sam’s head. Tink and he pressed back-to-back.

  Aberration!

  Rarity!

  Delicacy! One of the maggots suggested, as if the word itself was delicious, breaking it apart to savour each sound.

  Indeed, they agreed.

  ‘What the hell are you?’ Sam shouted louder than he’d meant to and with a tremor in his voice.

  Heads swung towards them, homing in on his voice. A stubby grub slunk forward with a walrus lurch. The tuber of its tongue tasted the air in their direction. We are Nar.

  We are hunger, said another.

  Each maggot-man was turning to face them, dragging themselves closer with doughy arms and flexes of their segmented tails.

  ‘That’s reassuring,’ Tink said.

  The Nars’ heads twitched, and every single one of their grotesque tongues poked through their puckered mouths, tasting.

  Sam played for time. ‘What, and you’re going to eat us?’

  It was as though the Nar were hacking up a collective furball at the base of Sam’s skull, and he realised they were laughing.

  We eat once you are dead.

  Have to die first.

  Then digest you.

  Slowly.

  Eons.

  Rotting flesh.

  And tortured soul.

  ‘I guess that confirms we’re not dead yet,’ Tink said.

  Sam moved the machine gun between too many targets. ‘I don’t suppose you want to let us go?’

  They were inching closer, one at a time, seen at the edge of his vision, moving when he was looking the other way. The cavern they were in presented two options: the way they came and the way they were going. To pick either meant going through a dozen or more Nar. They didn’t appear to be very fast, but that might not matter. The way they were closing their ranks, inching closer, made their potential speed, or lack of it, irrelevant . Heroic last stand time: Gladiator, Saving Private Ryan, The Grey, and a million more before all the superhero movies hollowed out Hollywood of original action movies. But still, to pull the trigger and go first was a mental barrier. He’d hit the Nar grabbing Tink because it was self-defence. They were getting too close. All this flited through Sam’s head while the Nar chuckled telepathically.

  The pistol cracked. ‘Herne’s nuts!’ Tink had missed.

  The Nar understood what she’d meant to do and ignited into a flurry of squirming and hissing. One of the longer and more emaciated Nar had clawed and squirmed to within three feet of Tink, meaning that when she levelled the gun for a second attempt, it was almost point blank. The gun kicked in her hand. The top of Nar’s soft head ruptured like a punctured cyst. Its milky eye rolled, and the thing teetered, segmented tail spasming to regain its balance. A second shot, dead centre, exploded the Nar’s head, showering Tink and Sam with warm putrescence.

  The Nar screamed. A mental onslaught that might have brought Sam to his knees if he hadn’t pulled the trigger and screamed himself. Trying to kick out of his hands, the machine gun spat pulses of bullets. But he held it firm, strafing left to right. The gun’s butt punched into his shoulder with the force of a malignant older brother. Behind him, Tink was firing and cursing at the Nar with the wild madness of wading into a fight. Sam felt it too, the purity of having his back to the wall and, with no other choice, breaking through the barrier, through to the obliteration of all civility. Shots missed, some winged a Nar, shredding an arm, blowing off the tip of a tail, or puncturing a stomach in a gout of congealed ichor. A few found a monster with a clean shot to the chest or head. Then the Nar would fall and spasm with palsied twitches. All was a hail of screaming and gunfire and gore.

  Tink clicked dry first, which Sam heard as a faint cry of ‘Shit!’ With his senses piqued, however, everything was more intense, from the smallest of movements to the acridity of the stench around them. Reality shot at a high frame rate. He looked over his shoulder, saw Tink frustratedly fingering the gun and trying to fire again, and crab-stepped to cover her. The machine gun gave a double jerk and was out of ammunition. Those last two rounds caught the closest Nar low. It doubled over, clutching a wound that gushed like curdled whey over its hands.

  There were two more scavenged magazines for the pistol and one for the machine gun, but Sam had no idea how to reload. Despite their attack, they hadn’t managed to take out enough of the Nar. They remained grossly outnumbered, and those that had only been winged were pulling themself together. Their wounds were sealing. Their waxy flesh oozed into cavities and reconnected torn tissue.

  ‘What now?’ Tink’s panic echoed Sam’s own as he scrambled to find extra ammo.

  He found one of the smaller magazines in his jeans. ‘Here,’ he said, pressing it into Tink’s hand.

  ‘What do I do with this?’

  The Nar were closing in, with that squirming, clawing lurch of theirs. Licking the air. Necks twitching side to side.

  ‘I don’t know. Check for a button or a catch or something.’ Sam tugged the spare machine gun magazine from his back pocket.

  Reinforcements of Nar were already struggling free from Sugnar’s flesh,

  ‘Fucking dunes! Are you kidding me?’ Tink swore.

  Sam turned the gun over in his hands, checking each side. It was a foreign land of mechanistic valleys and steel outcrops. The magazine itself stuck out the side of the gun, with a fat screw where it joined the perforated barrel. With the hateful chatter of Nar in his head, he pushed it and pulled at it experimentally. It worked. The magazine dropped free. He slapped in the spare, just as a war cry went up from beyond the encircling Nar.

  It seemed the universal answer to whether things could get any worse was about to come back with the obligatory affirmative, until Sam saw something unbelievable. A sight that conjured emotions so raw tears sprang instantly to his eyes.

  He heard a dog barking, and then Eddie sprinted into the fray. Not far behind him were people. They tackled Nar, swinging bones and lengths of wood and rocks, ploughing a path through. And at their vanguard, a sallow version of her former healthy self, crushing a Nar’s skull with a heavy branch of driftwood, was his mother.

  ‘Samwise, this way,’ she shouted. A Nar reached out a grubby hand to her. She parried and smashed the side of its head with a backswing. Sam stood paralysed with emotion. Tara grunted, hefting the club over her head. ‘Now!’ she cried and crushed the Nar’s head.