The Stars Are Legion(35)

The munching goes on and on. Eventually, the monster snorts a final time at the disturbed pile of bodies around me and shambles off. I lie still and strain to hear it until I can hear nothing. Then I choke on a sob, because I don’t know what else to do but sit in my misery. It would have been a kindness to kill me above. A kindness for me to die in the fall. But the world is not kind.

“Zan?”

It’s Prisha’s voice. “Where are you?” I say.

I try to pull myself clear of the bodies again, my leg and shoulder throbbing. “Can you see me? Where are you?” I ask.

“I can’t move,” Prisha says. She sounds at least a dozen paces away. An impossible distance, in the shape I’m in.

“Is anyone else alive?”

“It ate Soraya,” Prisha says. “Lord of War, take mercy on the fallen. Lord of War, let us die here. Let me die, Lord.”

I hear someone else take up the prayer, somewhere deep in the pile of the dead and almost-dead. I didn’t know Soraya. I’m glad of it.

Maybe we’ll all get lucky. Maybe we’ll die of our wounds before the monster comes back. I want to believe in a Lord of War that gives all what they deserve, but I fear that—among these people—I am indeed getting my due.

I try to surrender myself to true darkness. Maybe I’ll bleed out. But if I bleed out, who will rescue Jayd?

It’s that thought that stirs me. I open my eyes. Darkness won’t come.

But the monster returns.

It shambles among the dead, picking through them like sampling some fine banquet. Its massive eye fixes on a body near me. I hear a rambling prayer and a squeal.

It’s Prisha.

I watch the monster waggling her body high above the ground. It gnaws off one of her legs while she shrieks. I expect it to eat her the way it did Maibe, but instead it lumbers up on its haunches and grabs something dangling from above them, some tentacle or tendril. It wraps Prisha up in the thing, knotting it around her torso, and leaves her there, bleeding and struggling, until she dies or passes out. I can’t tell which. I hope she is dead.

The monster trundles off, leaving Prisha to hang like bait on a line for something far worse, far larger, and I don’t like my imagination then. Not at all.

I don’t know how long it’s been when I hear Prisha again. I’m sweating and burning with what feels like a terrible fever. I hope that maybe this is all this is; some fever dream.

Prisha wails. I don’t know how she has the strength for it. She should know better. She’s just going to draw the thing back. Maybe that’s what she wants. Like me, she just wants this all over.

Her wailing continues. Screams ripple out over the landscape, far off, which makes me wonder how many more have been pushed down here from other parts of the world, still alive.

I grit my teeth. I have two choices: to wait for death or to fight it. No one is coming for us. There is no one to save us but ourselves.

I heave at the bodies surrounding me, finally peeling myself free of the heap. It takes an age, and I am sweating and shaking, but I am free of the dead. Time is difficult to measure here. I have only the trembling light to go on, and the long shadows. Where is the light coming from? Are the tentacles trailing from the ceiling attached to something else, some greater horror?

If there is a way down here, there must be a way back up. How did these creatures get here?

I pass out on the other side of the corpses.

When I wake, I’m sweating and delirious. I know I’m delirious because I see little black animals crawling among the filth across from me, but when I squint hard they disappear and it is only me and sobbing Prisha dangling high above me.

Then the ground begins to tremble.

I hug the ground like it is a solid thing, though it is filled with bones and feces and darker things. I’m thirsty and shaking, but none of that is worse than the fear I feel as the monster approaches, wending its way through the corpses. I hear the crackling of bones as it moves closer.

It looms above me now like a terrible nightmare, a mother’s horror story. It grabs Prisha from the dangling tentacle and makes that huff-huffing sound, the one that is like laughter, and pops her head from her body and eats her.

I grip the ground hard, hanging on for my life.

The monster makes great walloping noises behind me, poking at the refuse. A heavy force thumps my shoulder.

Its massive fingers wrap around my torso. It clutches me so hard, the breath leaves my body. The monster lifts me high and pushes me right up in front of its great yellow eye.

I kick with my good leg, but miss the eye. The monster roars. Its hot, rank breath roils over me. I wish the fever and infection had had time to take me. Let the darkness come. Anything but this.

The monster barks. It yanks at another of the tendrils on the ceiling. Knots it around my torso.

“Fuck you,” I mutter, so softly I can barely hear it myself. “Just eat me. Just eat me.”

But it chortles instead. And leaves me.

The sticky tentacle clings to me like a living thing; I feel sharp little needles along its flesh, digging into my own.

I hang at least twenty paces above the ground. Even if I manage to get free, the fall will hurt, and I’m already pretty far gone. I don’t know how much more I can take.

I dangle there for a long time, drooling, nodding in and out of consciousness. I have enough strength on my third waking to try getting myself free of the tentacle. The blue light swings over me, and I see I am not far from a heap of very old corpses.