THE ROCK DIRECTLY overhead was alive—with scorpions.
Big as rats, with bulbous black bodies and pincer-claws long as fishhooks, they seethed over the stone. Diamond teardrops of glittering poison dripped from enormous barbs at the tip of shiny, curled tails. But instead of mandibles, these scorpions’ heads were unformed and smooth as mirrors. Then, in the next instant, gashes appeared and split to become mouths.
Jesus. Bode felt the cracks in his mind widening, his thoughts splintering. The glassy surfaces peeled back to reveal eyes: dead eyes, black eyes, the eyes of cobras, the eyes of nightmares. Faces, they have faces.
“RUN!” he screamed, much too late.
As one, the scorpions dropped from the ceiling. Bode felt the hard bodies bouncing off the padded arms and shoulders and chest of his jacket. They bulleted off his scalp, then slithered over his face. One landed on his left shoulder, hooked, and held on. With a wordless screech, Bode swung the flashlight like a club. The heavy stock batted the thing from his shoulder, and it tumbled, pincers flailing. These just managed to snag his pants, and then the thing’s tail was stabbing him again and again, the pointed barb working to pierce the tough olive canvas of his fatigues. Still shouting, Bode battered at the thing with the butt of his flashlight. Losing its grip, the thing did a flip and landed on its back. Its spindly legs churned, the pincers snapping uselessly at air. Its many eyes glared up at Bode, and it let out a rasping, almost mechanical chitter that sounded eerily like an M16 cycling on full auto.
“Die!” Bode brought the sole of his boot smashing down. He felt the soft belly give as the scorpion’s body burst in a viscous spray of thick, yellow fluid. Cursing, he ground the thing into paste. The others were screaming and flailing and stamping; the floor was turning sludgy with slick, gooey, foul ichor. The only reason they weren’t dead—not yet, anyway—was their clothing. But their faces were exposed, and their hands.
“Get them off!” Emma shrieked. Her hair was a living tangle. “Get them off, get them off, get them off!”
“Emma!” Spinning her close, Eric swatted scorpions with his bare hands, crushing them like overripe grapes beneath his boots.
“Bode, we got to go!” Casey bawled. “We got to get out, we got to go, we got to go!”
Bode didn’t need convincing. “Go back, go back the way we came!”
“We can’t!” Still hugging Emma close, Eric aimed his flashlight back down the tunnel. “Look!”
Whirling round, Bode followed the light—and what he saw made his guts clench.
The floor was moving now, too. The scorpions were there, a remorseless, black, undulating river. Driving us forward, Bode thought wildly. Just like the fog, making sure we keep going this way. We should be dead by now, but we’re not. They’re herding us.
No choice but to keep going. “Move!” Bode grabbed Casey, spun him, and then gave the boy a vicious shove to send him on his way. “Go, kid, go go go!”
“Casey, wait!” Eric shouted. “Emma, quick, give me the lighter!”
“What?” Bode asked, but Emma had already tossed the lighter to Eric, who was yanking out his torch. Bode thought, Yeah. He grabbed his own unlit torch. “Emma, the matches!”
She jerked out the box; the dry chatter of wood inside cardboard was like dice on stone. She worked out a match, struck it; the match flared, and then her torch caught with a small hoosh as flames fled up the rags in liquid, orange-yellow runnels. Eric was already swinging his. The creatures didn’t like the fire; rearing on their hind legs, they hissed. Their pincers snick-snapped, the clawed jaws clashing like scissors. A few got too close, and then the air was alive with a pop-pop-pop, the scorpions bursting in sprays of stringy yellow mucus. Several tried shooting beneath the flaming arc of Eric’s torch, but then Emma was right there, by Eric’s side. Together, they swept their torches back and forth, keeping the scorpions at bay while Bode jabbed at the ceiling.
The things retreated, but Bode knew they couldn’t keep this up forever. Their torches were too weak, and the second they turned to run, the scorpions would sweep after them. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Eric strip out of his parka and shout to Emma, “Give me your coat! Take off your coat!”
“Devil Dog!” Bode bawled. “What the hell you doing?”
But it was Emma who answered. “Gas!” She yanked off her jacket. “Our parkas are still wet, and we’ve got a jar of gasoline!”
“Guys, get ready to run!” Tossing their parkas into the roiling mass, Eric threw his torch after, then spun on his heel. “All right, Bode, Casey, go, g—”
The parkas went up in a flaring yellow ball with a solid, heavy whup! The scorpions’ reaction was instantaneous. The ebony wave shied as the air filled with stuttering pops loud as gunshots. The scorpions’ screeches became a keening wail as a thick, sooty bloom pillowed through the tunnel. A second later, the jar of gas, still zipped in one pocket of Eric’s parka, erupted like a flash-bomb: a great, hard, brilliant bang.
They charged down the tunnel, Casey in the lead, boots clapping stone, running so fast the walls streamed and blurred. Their torches guttered, and Emma’s died, but no help for that. Bode’s breath tore in and out of his throat; he kept expecting the walls to sprout more of those scorpion-things at any second. The tunnel was curving right now, growing ever wider, and he thought, Got to be a room, there’s got to be a junction; that’s how these things work.
Almost before the thought was fully formed in his mind, the maw of a junction pulled apart and firmed to his right. At the same instant, he saw that the way dead ahead was blocked. Again, there was really no choice. They may have stopped the scorpions for the moment, but the tunnel itself would make sure they went in only one direction. “Casey,” he shouted, “to your right, that way!”
Cutting right, Casey darted out of sight. Bode followed, the blackness unreeling like a tongue. Room, room, there’s got to be a room; there’s got to be a way out of this ma—
Casey pulled up so fast that Bode couldn’t stop in time. He hit the kid a solid body blow, and they went down in a tangle of boots and legs. “You okay, you okay? What the hell, why did you—” The question evaporated when Bode got a good look at what lay directly ahead. A bright arrow of fresh terror pierced his heart. Behind him, over the thud of his pulse, he heard the clatter of boots and then Emma’s voice, broken and horrified: “Oh no.”
Because she now saw what he did: a rock wall, as glassy and smooth and flawless as a silvery-black diamond, not three feet away.
The tunnel was a dead end.