Smight ran.
By the time the screaming in the ready room finally trailed away to silence, he was on his feet, barreling full-tilt down the maintenance shaft, sprinting headlong through the near-darkness. He didn’t know where he was going or what he would do when he got there, but right now that wasn’t as important as putting as much distance as possible between himself and the gang members who had pursued him.
His skull was pounding; his lungs blazed. Rounding a corner, unable to go another step without resting, he sagged against the cold wall and sucked in a deep, ragged breath. The glitterstim had worn off completely now, and he felt wrung out and edgy, shaking so hard that he could scarcely stand up, his knees threatening to betray him at any second.
Look at the facts.
Fact #1: He was an unarmed guard trapped inside a prison full of homicidal monsters, any of whom would relish the opportunity to kill him.
Fact #2: He couldn’t go back to Jabba for help, even if there was some way of contacting him.
Conclusion: He was a walking dead man.
Smight fought the almost irresistible urge to weep, to scream, to collapse. None of those things would help him now. A tiny voice inside him whispered that if maybe he could sneak back to his quarters and score a little bit more of the stim that he kept tucked away among his personal items, it might help clarify things, but even that seemed hopeless. Coming down from the spice’s euphoria only made him more aware of how much he’d depended on it up till now. He didn’t know where he was or where he was going.
He felt his gorge rising with disgust. Self-pity wrapped itself around him like a damp, familiar cloak. Having failed in his mission for Jabba, he’d validated everything about himself that he’d secretly suspected to be true—cowardice, inadequacy, incompetence. What, then, was the point of going forward?
Then, in the tunnel ahead of him, something moved.
Smight listened. There was a muscular enormity to it, a great slithering massiveness like nothing he’d run across inside these walls. He could actually hear the sticky, clicking snap of its mouthparts.
The Wolf Worm.
He’d heard the stories of the Syrox—they all had. A thing that lived inside the pipes and ducts of the prison, that fed and grew sleek and fat on the blood of the matches. Some of the other guards even swore they’d seen it, although there was never any hard evidence of its existence.
That was when he heard something else. Not out loud. In his mind.
Voices—
—helphelp—
—the words—
—murderkillyoustrangleyouall—
—emanating through his brain.
—outletusoutletusFEED—
Smight inclined his head more closely toward the wall, captivated in spite of himself. He wasn’t imagining it. The voices emanating through his brainpan were a tangle of horrors, a braided skein of a thousand different tongues, human and nonhuman, all shrieking and begging and snarling and roaring for mercy, deliverance, revenge.
Smight was not a particularly intelligent man by nature, but he knew enough to trust his perception, even when it flew in the face of what he thought to be true. And his perception on this matter was crystal clear.
The Syrox was not only real, it was sentient.
Its mind was a threnody of violence and pain, stitched together from every inmate whose body the thing had devoured during its time squirming through the guts of the prison. Their collective minds, though dead, were somehow still living inside it.
Glancing up, he caught just a glimpse of something so thunderously huge and fat that it filled the entire passageway, gleaming and pale and blind-eyed, surging toward him with its mouthparts peeling open like the petals of some hideous albino flower. Smight glimpsed pink and a dozen rings of teeth. The smell that came pouring out from inside it was wretched beyond description, the stink of a mass grave.
His heart sprang up to the pit of his throat and clung there, cowering.
He turned and fled.
Fear made him weightless, boiling him down to his most essential reflexes. The overall effect made the stim seem weak by comparison. Strength that he’d never imagined exploded through his legs, pumping him in the opposite direction, adrenaline pounding hard through every synapse.
He could hear the thing squeezing through the corridor behind him, surging forward faster now, closing the distance with every passing second. He kept his head down and doubled his pace, navigating the twists and turns purely by instinct, the gray walls flying by in a blur. Off in the distance, the thunderous approach of the thing disappeared beneath the steady pounding of his heart, its rhythms optimized for bare-bones survival.
He ran harder. He could run forever if he had to.
Swinging around the corner, he slammed headlong into something solid but not as hard as a wall. It knocked him flat, and he looked up to see Vas Nailhead squinting down at him. The inmate, like the Bone Kings gathered behind him, was drenched from head to foot in blood.
“Well, well.” Nailhead stood there with Strabo alongside him, the Bone Kings and Massive clustering closer. “I guess there’s no end to what you’ll run into down here, is there?”
Smight didn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.
“What’s the matter, maggot?” Nailhead wiped his mouth with his wrist, smearing the scarlet streak of gore sideways across his beard. “No blaster you can point at me? No dropbox you can punch my numbers into?” He grabbed Smight and yanked him to his feet. “What’s wrong, bro, you got nothing you want to say to me?”
“Well,” Smight managed, in a voice that didn’t sound remotely like his own. He could hear it coming again, the noise getting louder as it moved up the passageway. “There is one thing …”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
He pointed up the corridor. “You better watch out.”
Nailhead tilted back his head. Behind him, Strabo was also staring. As their expressions changed, Smight himself became aware of something—the presence returning, huge and warm and terribly eager.
And then the screaming started.