The Anomaly(91)

53



I knew we were approaching the bottom when I heard a grunt and then a crashing sound.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” Pierre said faintly. “Lost my grip at the last minute. I’m okay. Just…Yes, I’m okay.”

We heard him shuffling back out of the area at the end of the shaft. “Clear,” he said.

Molly dropped down the last few feet. Then I followed. We stood crowded together on the rock ledge.

“Air,” Pierre said. His voice was barely more than a croak now. Both his bandage and the sling were soaked through with blood. “Real, fresh air. I can smell it.”

“Let’s go get it.”

“I need a minute,” Molly said. She was panting hard.

“No, seriously, keep going.”

She was about to snap back at me but stopped. Cocked her head and listened. “What…is that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s been coming awhile and it’s moving a lot faster than we were.”

Molly dropped off the ledge first. Half turned her ankle on landing, swore feebly and nearly fell over. But got herself quickly in position to help Pierre as he scrabbled down after her, letting out a yelp of pain. Then I descended, making both of them look like mountain goats.

“Run,” I said.

They ran. Molly in the lead, the light around her neck bouncing shadows off the rough walls. Pierre did a decent job of keeping up. I was moving at barely more than a fast shamble. My entire torso was rigid now and felt cold as ice.

Soon I heard something arrive at the bottom of the shaft behind me. It made a noise. A low, resonant sound that echoed around the tunnel. I couldn’t tell for sure whether it was the same noise we’d heard from the things that had attacked us—and slashed me—in the bad-smelling room upstairs, but I thought it sounded different. Bigger.

“Come on!” Molly shouted.

They started to get ahead, to pull away from me, and that was okay. I wanted them to. They had a decent chance to escape and I could make it better.

Another growl and now I was pretty confident it was of a different kind than the one the ogre/troll things had made in the site above. It was deep but had greater texture to it. There was more articulation in the sound, a variation in tone—as though, under the right conditions, it could be bent and twisted to render speech.

It was loud enough this time that Molly stopped running. She turned. “Nolan!” she screamed. “Run!”

“I can’t,” I said. “And there’s no point.”

Even if we managed to get to the ledge, to the hole in the canyon wall, to the fresh air and the big world outside, we were still hundreds of feet up a rock wall. You can’t climb down something like that with a thing after you. Not when you’re exhausted and in terrible pain.

Molly gave Pierre a shove and told him to keep going. He didn’t, of course.

They both came back for me.

And so they were by my side when the thing finally came into the range of the light from the lanyard, twenty feet away.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Molly said.

We saw its limbs and body first. These answered the question of why the height of the passages in most of the site was well over that required for humans.

It was nine feet tall.

It was naked, and its skin had a burnished quality, like a dark hairless hide. It was broad-shouldered and very powerfully built, but basically in human proportions. It had stubby horns coming out of the top of its skull but these were not neat or symmetrical—there were three of them, twisted and gnarled like winter branches. They were a weapon, something that could be thrust into the belly of another animal and then twisted to effect immediate evisceration.

Its face was nearly human, though the jaw was massive and the features large and coarse. And there was something else about them, too.

“No,” Pierre said. “Shit no.”

The hair hanging down to the creature’s shoulders—bunching up as it raised its huge hands—was a dark, rusty red. That could have been natural, the way this creature was supposed to be. But the arrangement of the face…

It wasn’t female, so it wasn’t exact or even close. But it could have been a cruel caricature of Gemma’s brother, if she’d had one, a terrible sibling the family kept hidden under the stairs and never spoke of.

“Her DNA was in the blood in the p—”

That’s all I got out.



The thing we’d encountered in the smelling room had been round-shouldered, squat. There had been a rotation to its movements, a lumbering quality that you might have hoped to have been able to avoid if you were faster and better on your feet than I was.

Not this thing. It came in hard, fast, and straight, with clinical precision and ferocious speed.

I barely knew it was upon us until Pierre had already been swatted out of the way—sailing back into the dark.

Once he was dispatched I saw the thing’s eyes flick between Molly and me, then back again, swiftly making a judgment (possibly wrongly) that I was the second-biggest threat.

Those eyes had ten times more depth than Dylan’s. This creature wasn’t human but it possessed equal and perhaps similar intelligence. An enlarged, souped-up, weaponized version of us. The end-times cleanup squad.

It started to lower its head, arms out wide.