The Anomaly(74)

Ken stood over me. “How much water got inside you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fingers down the throat, mate.”

I didn’t think it was going to make any difference but I did what he said. I knelt over the pool and stuck my index and middle fingers as far down my throat as I could. After a while I managed to get my gorge to rise in a vomit reflex, but nothing came out except a long trickle of spit.

“Okay, so not much,” I said, falling back against the wall. My stomach muscles had locked, feeling empty and torn.

Ken made Pierre do the same. He managed to get a mouthful of water to come back up. He stayed on his hands and knees afterward, looking out into the room—and specifically at the faint glow right at the other end.

“Shit,” he said. “We left the light.”

“You know what? I’m not going back for it.”

“Did you get the carbon ball?”

“No, Moll,” I said. “It’s still massive. The four of us together wouldn’t be able to move it—ten people couldn’t. And that’s where we got attacked. That entire plan was screwed from the get-go. I don’t know what we were even thinking of.”

“So let’s get out of here,” she said. “I don’t want to be sitting waiting when the next thing climbs out.”

We limped back along the narrow corridor. As we turned into the wider passage a sound echoed down along it. Long, mournful, keening, split into several notes.

“Christ,” Ken said wearily. “That sounded like a wolf, didn’t it?”

“No,” I said. “It sounded like two.”

“So what do we do?”

“Main room.”

“Which is where the sound came from, Nolan.”

“Maybe—or it could have just echoed through there from one of the other tunnels. I don’t want to get trapped down a corridor with no exit, do you? Especially the corridor where anything new and bigger is going to arrive.”

“Good point. All right, well, let’s be big and loud.”

And so we coughed and talked and made strange pointless noises as we advanced up the passage, my phone on and held above my head. We stopped at the entrance to the main room. We couldn’t see or hear anything, and so headed for the middle.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Moll said, turning away.

We’d disturbed some creatures by returning to the main room. They hadn’t finished what they’d been doing. Ken and I looked at what remained of Gemma. But not for long.

“Things are getting hungry.”

Despite what we’d said about being trapped, we headed down the passage toward the big stone ball. Maybe because it was the closest thing we could do to leaving. The idea of being stuck in this place with other creatures had been unnerving enough. The knowledge that they were getting to a point where they needed sustenance was far worse.

They weren’t the only ones. We split the last two granola bars and shared the remaining mouthfuls of water. Nobody suggested only eating or drinking half this time. That way led to dividing and dividing until we were down to crumbs and molecules and eventually lost in homeopathic memories of food. There was no point in going there. We needed far more than what we had, not even less.

We finished it all.

There was nothing left now.





Chapter

44



Yes, we were scared. But the body—especially when its most basic needs are not being met, and it is becoming desperate—has a way of closing the shutters, conserving energy when it can. It switches to low-power mode.

One by one the others fell asleep, or passed out, slipping sideways into a state where awareness was turned inward, wandering the internal halls. The distinction between sleep and wakefulness was becoming less and less clear. Time, too, was ceasing to have the usual depth of meaning. When I glanced at my phone and saw it was 9:43 p.m., the numbers looked arbitrary, like shapes left in sand by the swish of a dog’s tail.

Part of this was the fact it was permanently dark and we had no mealtimes or sleep periods to make sense of the slow onward march of minutes. But also this place felt sodden with duration. It had existed for longer than any of us had the ability to comprehend. How long had we been in here now? Twenty-four hours? Thirty-six? Either was so minuscule in comparison with the site’s age that in the grand scheme of things it would be rounded down to zero—as would our entire lives. No matter how long we managed to last out, statistically we wouldn’t have been here at all.

This realization didn’t help my mood, and so I let my mind wander, not trying to push my thoughts in any particular direction. Being at the end of the passage with my back to the big ball reminded me of the last time I’d sat here, talking with Feather. Assuming that was her real name, of course. Assuming anything about her was real, from the hippie clothing—and in retrospect, wasn’t her outfit maybe a little too perfect, right down to the ankh necklace?—to claiming that if I put my mind to it, I had all the information I needed to work out what was happening.

I kept blinking and opening my mouth wide to stretch my face, keeping myself awake, believing one of us should keep watch. The amount of Gemma’s abdomen that had been missing when we returned from the pool made it clear that it wasn’t going to be long before the things abroad in this place became hungry enough to regard us as a foodstuff worth tackling, even while we were capable of self-defense. I wasn’t sure how much of a fight we’d realistically be able to put up, but starting from a position of fast sleep seemed a dumb tactical move. Not least because if I’d been right in thinking I could hear not one, but two wolves, that might be the case with some of the other…