The Anomaly(68)

The screen of the phone flickered to life. I held it up above my head—revealing eight badly lit feet of tunnel.

Ken and I spread out across the passage. We drew level with the stinking room but kept going, on the unspoken assumption that nothing would go in there if it had a choice.

Ken kept his gaze on the passage ahead while I peered into the doorways as they coalesced out of the darkness. All were empty, further examples of the anonymous rectangular spaces we’d seen down passages on the other side of the main area, with the small rock pyramids.

“Hell did it go?”

“We’re not finished yet. And however it got in here…”

“I know.”

We kept pushing forward, and a couple of minutes later came across a doorway that was narrower than the others, opposite one final room.

“Doesn’t that look a lot like…”

“Yes,” Ken said. We quickly headed into the narrow passageway. Off the passage on the other side of the main room was a line of the hieroglyphs chiseled into the wall.

After fifty yards the floor stopped abruptly. A foot below was crystal-clear water.

“Oh, thank Christ for that. It’s another pool.”

“Back away, Nolan. We do not want to kick a single grain of dust into it. And given what just happened to Gemma, I’m not sure I’d risk it anyway.”

We turned and hurried back up the tunnel into the passage. “Okay, so it’s got to be in the room opposite.”

“How do we do this?”

“Block the doorway together so it can’t get out.”

“And then what?”

“Ask it politely how the fuck it got in here.”

“Ken…”

“If it feels cornered, it’s going to run back out the way it came.”

“Or it could just attack us, Ken.”

“Yeah. There’s that.”

We were halfway across the passage when Molly started shouting Ken’s name from the main room.

Shouting it like a siren.

“Shit,” Ken said. “It got around us.”



But when we reached the room, Molly and Pierre were in the center, near Gemma’s body. Molly turned. Her eyes were wild.

“Where were you?”

“Just…looking,” Ken said. “What’s up?”

She pointed down at Gemma’s body. “We heard something. Like a…I don’t know. Look at her.”

At first Gemma just looked like she had when I’d last seen her. Deader, but otherwise the same. Then I saw what Molly meant. Her abdomen was even more swollen.

“It’s gas, trapped inside…her,” I said. The shape on the ground really didn’t seem like a “her” anymore. “I guess…I guess even though she’s dead, it’s still increasing. It does that postmortem. As the…processes of decay start to take place.”

“That quickly? And shouldn’t it be able to escape?”

“I don’t think so. The autonomic nervous system…”

I stopped. For a second there, in the low light, it looked as though the surface of her belly moved. The buildup was continuing, very fast. “I don’t know much about what happens to bodies after death. But I think it’s going to keep…”

Then it happened again. A bulge, more on one side of her stomach than the other, strong enough to strain the buttons on her blood-soaked blouse.

Ken was ahead of me. He always is. “Nolan—get away from her.”

I didn’t understand. He grabbed me by the arm and yanked hard. “Get away from her.”

I scrabbled back, finally realized what he meant. The gas was building up so very fast that there was only one thing that could happen to the body containing it.

There was a tearing sound as the buttons on her shirt gave way. Then a darkening as blood trickled out of a line across her belly—the pressure from inside so dreadful that it was causing the flesh to split. Or so I thought.

But then something emerged from the line.

This was so very wrong that it took a second to credit that it was really happening, that it wasn’t just a trick of the light, the eye misinterpreting the slow spread of dark blood.

But no, something was coming out.

It was leathery, like a bat’s wing, but bigger.

It seemed to thrust out like an elbow. Then more of it was released. Another arm, or wing. A hunch of back.

Finally a head. The creature wasn’t even that big. The size of a small hawk, though scrawny and sinewy, and with a skull that was bony and elongated.

The thing finished digging its way out. It flopped off the glistening mess of Gemma’s belly and onto the ground, turning its head, assessing its environment.

I stared at it, openmouthed, frozen. Pierre and Molly were the same. But Ken stepped over in one fluid motion and kicked it with all his might.

It flew right across the room and crashed into the wall. He strode over there and was by it in seconds, heel raised.

“Wait,” I said.

I stood with him and looked down at it. It had already gotten itself back onto its clawlike feet, and was unfurling wings dripping with Gemma’s blood and tissue.

“It’s a fucking pterodactyl,” Ken said.

“Kill it.”

He stamped on its head, and then again, and again, until it was dead.