Chapter 17

Olivia wasn’t liking having to move through these cramped spaces with Kevin and Noah as they chased some unknown creature through this maze of tight passages. The original path had narrowed frighteningly only to widen into a slightly more open area with various new tunnels and passages leading in and out of it. Only a handful of these had been large enough for them to squeeze into and Kevin had led them through the only one that seemed to be going up and out of this labyrinth instead of deeper into the network of tunnels that must permeate this entire structure.

As the rock ceiling slowly closed in on them from above, forcing them to crouch lower and lower as they pressed on, Olivia began to get claustrophobic. She kept picturing some demonic rattlesnake lashing out at them while they were down on their hands and knees, its long curved fangs sinking into the soft skin of their faces and necks as it struck from the cramped spaces ahead of them. Kevin brought them up short as they reached what looked to be an exit judging from the light they could see ahead of them. “Gonna have to crawl through here if we want to keep going,” Hughes muttered. He didn’t look happy about the prospect.

“You sure it went this way?” Noah asked, eyeing the small gap Kevin was proposing they squeeze through with open skepticism.

“Hard to tell in the sand, but whatever left those tracks didn’t have many other options

besides coming this way, at least not from where I last had a good bead on it,” he said, rubbing the stubble on his chin in a way that didn’t exactly inspire confidence. “Half tempted to huck a frag in there, but I’m worried it’d bring everything down on us.”

“Yeah let’s not do that,” Olivia said, eyeing the man with disapproval. Kevin was supposed to be a pro. She really hoped he’d been kidding just now.

“So you wanna just send Benjamin in as bait then?” Hughes chuckled.

“I can go first if you think that’s smart,” Noah offered.

“Doesn’t matter who goes first if something’s in there,” Hughes said, “and since I’m leading this mutherfucker, I guess it should be me. Unless you have a damn good reason not to, I expect you two to be right behind me.”

“We will be,” Noah said.

“Holler if you see it before it sees you and we’ll pull you back out,” Olivia added.

“Shit, if I see it before it sees me, I’m gonna kill the son of a bitch,” Hughes said as he slid head first under the low rock ceiling and began crawling into the narrow tunnel. Olivia held her breath as they waited for some sign of what Kevin had found waiting for him at the end of his harrowing crawl. “All clear,” Hughes’ voice called after a few agonizing minutes.

Noah didn’t hesitate as he ducked into the cramped tunnel with Olivia close on his heels. The confined space kept them belly down on the cool red rock, but now that Kevin had made it through Olivia knew she and Noah weren’t going to have trouble. As she emerged from the tunnel behind Noah, she was relieved to see that they had finally found a way out of the subterranean area they’d been crawling around in for what felt like hours.

This new space seemed to be the start of a natural footpath leading up the side of one of the middle-height spires that made up this monolithic structure. They were still closed in somewhat by the walls of desert stone around them, but the open sky and room to stand shoulder to shoulder felt much better than the cramped spaces they had just left behind. “We should be able to get a better lay of the land if we head up there,” Hughes said, nodding up the path. The spire wasn’t as tall as its fellows, but it was the widest and sprouted up from the earth at an angle that made it possible to climb without gear. “Might help us get eyes on one of these things or Hector and the others.”

“Hard to believe how big this place is,” Noah said, looking up at the rock formations towering all around him.

“Don’t focus too much on the scenery,” Olivia said. “We’ve got to be getting close. Stay alert.”

As they traveled the path that led up the side of the massive, diagonal spire, they clung closer and closer to the rock wall on their right. The steep slope down the spire to their left wasn’t an automatic death sentence by any means, but the jagged rocks waiting at the bottom did not seem particularly inviting. As they got higher, the path became narrower and steeper and keeping their footing on the sand covered surface quickly became an issue.

“How much further until the top?” Noah wheezed as he climbed up the path behind her. He had already slipped three times, the second coming awfully close to sending him down the steep slope to their left, and she could tell his confidence was waning.

Kevin stopped to take stock of just how much farther they had to go, but something else caught Olivia’s eye as she looked up towards him, though she struggled to figure out what. The wall next to Kevin seemed to be bristling, breathing somehow, but that didn’t make any sense. Maybe the desert sun was playing tricks on her eyes after being underground for the last few hours. Unless...

“Watch out!” Olivia yelled, raising her gun, but she was too late.

What looked to be a sizable chunk of the wall next to Kevin exploded from the rock face and slammed hard into his side, launching him out into space. The force of the attack had been significant and Kevin had to fall a good ten feet before beginning his tumble down the steep side of the spire. Olivia swore as she heard Noah, just behind her but out of sight, begin scrambling down the rock decline towards where Hughes was destined to land when his painful descent ended. She understood Noah’s concern, but he’d left her up here alone with a target she couldn’t see yet. Not his most chivalrous move since they started working together, but she couldn’t dwell on that now.

Olivia kept her focus on the path before her as she tried to ignore the sounds of Noah and Kevin to her left. The thing was attached to the wall somehow, but that was about all she could tell at the moment. As she went to fire a few bursts from her machine gun into whatever this thing was, it dropped down from the rock wall and landed squarely on the path before her. The thing seemed to have been anchored by the mass of thick tendril-like hairs that ran down its entire back like it was kin to some sort of alien hedgehog or porcupine. As Olivia got the creature back in her sights, she watched as these tendrils seemed to move of their own accord, searching for a new place in the rock face to take root, even as the creature itself was now waddling towards her.

With each ungainly step, the thing’s coloring shifted from a reddish hue that matched the rock around them almost exactly, to a dark brownish green that might have been more at home in the swampland she had just left behind. Olivia was having trouble picking a place to take aim since the anatomy was so odd, but as her eyes took in the otherworldly creature she saw the basic structures were all there. A large diamond shaped body that made her think of a manta-ray’s stood atop two powerful looking legs. These had likely been what sent Kevin flying moments ago and were of the most concern to her here on this precarious ledge. The mouth and eyes sat in the middle of the body, lying almost under it, and a short horn, more of a protuberance really, jutted from just above the middle of the low-set eyes, stretching the thing’s skin tight and warping its already unnatural features.

Had the thing been able to move quickly, she might have found herself in danger, but as Olivia watched this ambling creature advancing on her, she realized it had played its hand too early. While it had been anchored to the rock it had been almost completely camouflaged, but now it was vulnerable. Had Kevin been alone, this ambush strategy might have worked, but he wasn’t and that meant this thing was in trouble.

“Tough luck you ugly fuck,” she said to the strange creature waddling towards her on its severely bowed legs. Two short bursts from her SMG and the thing was dead, the place where its face had been now nothing more than a ruined hole. Kicking the thing hard to make sure it wasn’t playing possum, she looked down the steep decline to her left and saw Noah and Kevin down at the bottom. “How is he?” she called down to them. Noah was kneeling next to the prone man, but Kevin looked conscious and wasn’t crying out in pain or anything like that.

“I’m fucking fine,” Kevin yelled back angrily. “What the hell was that thing?”

“I got nothing for you there,” Olivia called back, looking down at the grotesque corpse at her feet. “You think you can get back up here or…” she began but a flurry of gunfire, followed by dead silence, stopped her short. Looking out from her high vantage point, she saw nothing but towering red rock in every direction.

“That was down here,” Noah called. “Over there,” he said, pointing towards where the others had wandered off almost an hour ago. Quite a bit of rock stood between them and the area he was pointing to, but that didn’t exactly matter. The others were in trouble and no one was going to bail them out if Olivia, Kevin and Noah didn’t.

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Making sure she had the safety engaged on her weapon, Olivia began her careful descent towards the others. When she reached the two men, Kevin still wasn’t on his feet. “You sure you’re ok?” she asked him, offering him a hand.

“Arms a little fucked up,” he said, accepting her help with his good arm. “Going to give you the rifle. I’ll take the pistol and Benjamin can have your weapon, God help us.”

“You want me to take the lead?” Olivia said.

“I think that’ll work for now,” Kevin replied, handing her his weapon. She in turn gave her weapon to Noah who exchanged his with Hughes. The rifle felt good in her hands and she wasn’t worried about Benjamin. He wasn’t an idiot and that was about all they needed or could expect out of him right now. Even more importantly, they had one target down. If there was such a thing as momentum in a situation like this, that was the best they could hope for.

“Let’s move,” she said once everyone was ready. Racing off towards the sound of the gunfire, she kept her ears perked for further disturbances, but heard nothing. The rocks around them had fallen silent.

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The Raven stirred uneasily as the gunfire erupted for a second time. He wanted to rush off to help his new allies, but right now he was with old ones and their quarry was in his sights.

When he’d seen the place Margaret had shown him on the map, he’d guessed that the one once known in this world as Rabbit might be coming through. Ghat-soh, as she was known to him, had been one of his earliest allies. She had met him at the beginning of his long crusade and was to this day his only true friend. In the first years after his transformation had taken place, she had kept watch over him despite his numerous warnings to leave him be. Eventually they’d grown close, but it had taken far longer than she would have liked. Seeing her here had filled him with confidence that perhaps this cycle had not been wasted, but when he’d seen her companion...he’d been close to abandoning them both to whatever fates they might create for themselves. Ghat-soh may be his friend, but it seemed she had made a critical error when it came to traveling companions.

Coyote was young, still new to his powers and struggling with the price of his decision to join the ranks of the hunters. This made him justifiably unstable. To make matters worse though, instead of the masks and weapons of power the Raven and Ghat-soh had been gifted, Coyote had been warped into something far from his original state of being. The Raven had seen the beast the desert peoples of cycles past had named Coyote after, but the resemblance to this local pest was slim. What they had really meant to convey was that he was a predator, a killer of men, and devious to boot. The Raven had gone through his own growing pains early in his days as a hunter, but that was then and this was now. The Raven could both sympathize with this poor beast and acknowledge that he was a threat to all the Raven hoped to accomplish here. The Raven would need to handle this well or everything could come undone before it even began.

He hadn’t told the other two much yet, but that was mostly because they’d been hunting Anaye since they’d joined together the night before. The two newcomers had left an easy trail to follow and the Raven had caught up to them as they had set up camp for the night, mere hours after he’d left his human companions behind. Coyote had seemed unhappy to see him, but Ghat-soh had greeted him warmly. There hadn’t been much time to catch up though. The Raven had been shocked to hear the others tell him that a whole host of Anaye had managed to come through the gate as well. Two parties both using a gate simultaneously was rare, though not unheard of. In fact, it had happened to the Raven himself on his entry trip to this world mere weeks ago. Either the odds were set firmly against him, or things back home were as chaotic as he’d feared.

These desert demons were formidable in their own way, but not an insurmountable threat by any means, even without the help of Ghat-soh and the other one. Ghat-soh had not been able to get a good bead on exactly which Anaye had accompanied them here, but she knew that they had brought Degleeth and once the Raven had known that, he’d known what his first priority must be. Degleeth was a beast of raw power and for him to escape into this world unchecked would be far more disastrous than any of the others. If the Raven wanted to start mending the trust he’d broken by fleeing in the night, stopping Degleeth here would be a good start.

They’d backtracked to the crossover site and then followed the Anayes’ muddled tracks to this strange, rocky outcropping. They had avoided the lesser Anaye left to guard against intruders and then prowled through the odd colored rocks that made up this alien place until they found Degleeth. The massive creature had stayed in the caves for most of the night, but come morning he had emerged here at the center of the rocky labyrinth where the towering spires above them met the earth below. Degleeth looked even larger than he normally did in the confines of this place. The creature stood on six short, powerful hooved legs and its body was a mass of muscle and short bristles that stung and stabbed when loosed from Degleeth’s thick, rough hide. The thing had no clearly defined head, but four sets of tangled, deadly antlers sat on either side of the front end of the body, framing a wide mouth full of cube-shaped, pulverizing teeth. This massive Anaye had no eyes and relied fully on sound to locate his enemies. While Degleeth was no carnivore, not most of the time anyway, he was a murderous creature and eternally ill tempered.

“So what’s the plan, Tenoshin,” Ghat-soh said to him. She was one of the few who knew his true name and one of an even more select group that could mutter it without incurring his wrath. There was power in someone’s true name and his friend seemed to forget that far too often.

“We kill it,” he said, though he knew this answer would not satisfy her. In truth, he was still working out just how to take the beast down quickly enough that the other Anaye didn’t have time to come to its rescue. The sounds of gunfire, as Allen Becker called it, might have indicated that some of the demons had been taken out by Kevin Hughes and the others already, but it could also mean that some of the humans lay dead. If the latter case was true, he would need to go it alone from here on out and would likely be hunted by Allen Becker, Atticus Daniels and Margaret Wynters at the very least. He would never admit it to them, but they were not people he wanted as his enemies. They were...formidable.

“Excellent plan,” Ghat-soh hissed in her rich, heavy voice. “Why hadn’t I thought of that? So glad I’ve come all this way for a friend as bright as you. How was I managing on my own?”

“You get its attention with a few arrows and I’ll make enough noise to confuse it,” the Raven said, ignoring his friend’s familiar but unwelcome chiding, before turning to the monstrous form of Coyote crouching at his other side, “and then you go in for the kill. Can you manage that?” Coyote nodded wordlessly, saliva dripping from his fanged maw, a crazed look in his constantly bloodshot eyes. “Good,” the Raven said, refocusing his narrow field of vision on the beast stomping around in the sand in front of them. “Let’s do this quickly, we have more to worry about than loose Anaye.”

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Mustafa Jabari knew he was running out of time, but he couldn’t seem to clear his head enough to do what he needed to to help the others. The three of them had followed clear trails from the place they’d left Kevin and his group behind, though it was beyond any of them what kind of thing could have left such odd, faint tracks. Their route was uncomfortable from the start, forcing the large men into smaller and smaller tunnels and cracks between mountainous slabs of sandstone before leading them into this large alcove somewhere beneath the towering spires. Here they had found their quarry, but that had only been the start of the battle.

Waiting to meet them had been four of the ugliest things Mustafa had ever seen, though some of those formless deep-sea fish came close. Each of the things seemed to be mostly a single large eye sitting atop a wide mouth of razor sharp, needle-like, teeth; the rest of their flaccid, fleshy bodies dangling grotesquely below them, just barely touching the sand. Mustafa could only guess what was keeping these things floating before them as they were, but he did have the sickening feeling that the now empty sacks of flesh below each of these things would soon be full if they didn’t find a way out of this.

He supposed they’d been lucky in a way. He and Morales had gotten off two bursts of rifle fire, each killing one of the things immediately, sending their odd bodies to the cave floor with a wet splat that had made Mustafa’s skin crawl. Unfortunately, the other two had remained unscathed and soon the things had pulled the three of them into a kind of trance. Mustafa could only speak for himself, but when one of those things fixed its gaze on him, his whole body tensed uncontrollably to the point that he was unable to move a single fiber of his being. Their only hope, as far as he could see it, was that it seemed that the things needed to maintain this sustained eye contact to keep the paralysis in effect. Even through his fear and panic, Mustafa could see this was causing them problems.

As the two horrors inched closer and closer to the three of them, they continued to be distracted by whichever one of them was not actively being subdued by either of their numbing gazes. While this always allowed one of them to be in the process of recovery, they were never spared long enough to do anything to save the others or themselves. Twice now Mustafa had been on the verge of being able to move enough to try and get to his sidearm, but it was as if the things knew exactly what to do in this situation and each time he’d been stopped just shy of making an attempt. As the things got closer and closer, Mustafa realized their time had already run out. The dangling monstrosities were far too close now and the only chance one of them had was if they were left out of the initial feeding. Their only other hope was Kevin’s people or the Raven, but Mustafa doubted they could navigate this damned maze fast enough to reach them.

He hadn’t wanted to admit it, even to himself, but he’d hoped to be the lucky man of their unfortunate threesome, but to his horror he was the first of them to come face to face with their grotesque tormentors. The large eye, filmy and caked with some sort of disgusting sludge near the heavy lids, struggled to keep its gaze firmly on him as it positioned its mouth to feed. The smell of the thing’s breath alone was enough to make Mustafa want to pass out, if only to escape the rancid air now washing over his immobile face, but what came next was far worse.

A long forked tongue, much thicker than it should have been given the proportions of this thing, seemed to dance out of the wide mouth towards him. He felt it brush painfully against his neck, small ridges hooking into his skin even at this faint touch, just as the eye that was gazing into his own exploded, showering him with foul smelling liquid and viscera. Jabari slumped forward, his muscles still cramping painfully, but a song of joy in his heart. The others had found them. Thank the Lord on High that they had. Allowing the Ellis girl and her young friend to roll him gingerly onto his back, he fought painfully to flash them a smile.

“What the fuck is this?” Hughes asked, his voice sounding oddly garbled even from this close distance, as he propped Morales up against a large rock before moving to do the same for Talbot.

“Those things had them in a trance or something,” Olivia said, as Jabari tried to blink his eyes in confirmation of her hypothesis. It wasn’t exactly working though. He seemed to only be alarming the young woman as she looked down at him. “They look like they’re coming around ok though, hard to say right now. We falling back or pressing on? Still at least two more of these things in here. Maybe more.”

“Oh we aren’t going anywhere,” Hughes said. “These sons of bitches are dropping like flies and so far I’m not impressed. We move as soon as these guys can. Time to show these things that we aren’t fucking around.”