Part 1

Part 2

Guns came up, lightning-quick reflexes taking over among our group. These men and women were bred for this war, trained for it their whole life.

Still, the ghoul was faster.

It leapt forward, slamming into Rodriguez and knocking him to the ground. The first shots fired went wide, criss-crossing the air above the pair of writhing shapes. Rodriguez kicked out, catching it in the midriff. The ghoul rolled over backwards, folded itself into a piece of shadow, and was suddenly gone.

“Lights!” roared Anderson. “Back-to-back! Lights on!”

The group leapt into formation. I squeezed in next to Rodriguez. He was breathing heavily, great gasps of air shaking his body.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

“Bastard tried to knife me,” he growled. “My kevlar stopped it, but barely.”

We were back-to-back, guns pointing outward, stabbing at the shadows with our flashlights. A voice came from the dark, seeming to come from several sides at once. A chill ran down my back. It was barely a hiss, but every syllable had the deranged promise of bloodshed to it.

“Oh, my pretties,” it crooned. “So alone in the dark. So lost. Let me take just one to the temple, and I’ll be on my way.”

“Shit, that’s Crowley,” muttered a soldier. “I know him, he went missing in action half a year ago.”

“Fuck,” muttered Anderson. Then, louder, addressing the shadows around us: “Crowley, I don’t want to kill you. If there’s anything left in there of the soldier I knew, come out, or leave us be. Don’t make us hurt you.”

Instead of an answer, a patch of darkness above our heads suddenly dropped downward. A blade glinted in the half-light, and a soldier fell to the ground, gurgling blood from a slashed throat. The group opened fire. Flash of light. Crowley was there, a gaunt skeleton of a man dressed in rags. Flash of light. He was gone.

The circle reformed, the wheezing, choking soldier pulled into our centre.

“The temple gates are wide open,” Crowley crooned from somewhere in the shadows. “It can’t be undone. Everyone will see the truth, soon enough. And one of you, one lucky person, will get to see it ahead of schedule! Do I have any volunteers?”

“What truth are you talking about?” I asked, unsure where the courage to address this monster even came from.

“The old truth. The first truth. Older than man. Older than time. Older than light.”

One of the soldiers fired into the dark, nerves tightening his trigger-finger. In the flash of light, we saw Crowley standing on the opposite side of the circle, just for a split second. Lights swivelled to point at him but caught only the edge of a ragged cloak before he was gone again.

“Enough of the cryptic bullshit, Crowley,” Anderson growled. “Either fight or go to Hell.”

“Haven’t you noticed, Anderson? That’s where you came from. Welcome to the real world.”

Crowley materialized out of the dark, knife raised, mouth open in a leering, skull-head grin. He smashed into a soldier, ramming the blade up to the hilt into her shoulder. Her scream of pain and his deranged laughter melded into a single tortured sound.

He was too fast. We couldn’t get a bead on him long enough to risk a shot. Rodriguez leapt at the blurred shape, dropping his rifle and grabbing Crowley in a bear hug, hoping to immobilize him. The insane soldier slipped free, slippery as an eel. With one hand, impossibly strong, he grabbed the neck of the woman he’d wounded, then took off down the tunnel, laughing maniacally as he ran.

“You’ll grow old down there with us, oh so old. Older than light, older than light, older tha-”

A shot rang out. Crowley spasmed, a fountain of blood erupting from his shoulder. Somehow, he kept on running. The next round took him in the lower back. He stumbled, righted himself, just in time for the third bullet to hit him dead centre, ripping through his spine. He dropped, suddenly a boneless sack of meat.

We sprinted after his prone form. The woman he’d grabbed scrambled backward, desperate to get away from the madman. Anderson walked over to Crowley, standing over him, legs wide, like a vengeful god.

“Ol- old… older tha… than – …than li- ” the ghoul began, choking on blood.

“Fuck you, Crowley,” Anderson spat, and shot him in the face.

The next ten minutes were a flurry of activity I had no way of participating in. The soldier who’s throat the maddened ghoul had slashed, a young private named Miller, was surrounded by medics. Despite their efforts, they couldn’t staunch the flow of blood from his slit neck. He would be dead in minutes, and we all knew it. The woman who Crowley had tried to abduct was shaken, but once her shoulder was patched up, she seemed capable of carrying on.

I walked over to Rodriguez.

“Are all the ghouls this bad?” I asked under my breath.

“No,” he answered. “They’re always dangerous, but this… this is like nothing I’ve ever seen. He was just playing with us - if he hadn’t gotten greedy and tried to take Ross, we might all be dead. If all the ghouls are like this now…”

He trailed off. A shiver ran down my spine.

“Gamma Camp is still a long way off,” he continued after a moment. “With luck, we-”

A loud, insistent beeping cut him off. Even in the half-light of our flashlights, I saw Rodriguez go pale.

“Shit. Oh, shit…”

I recognized that sound from the time of my abduction. A shiver ran down my back.

It was the high-pitched alarm of a spectrometer.

The hunt wasn’t over just yet.

“We have to move!” Anderson hissed. “Someone get Miller up!”

Rodriguez and another soldier moved to pick the wounded private up, but he shook his head at them weakly, raising a hand in objection.

“Go… Go. I’ll… hold them,” he gurgled, blood running down his throat and through the makeshift bandages wrapped around it.

“Miller…” Rodriguez whispered. Instead of replying, the wounded soldier saluted with a shaking hand.

“Die well,” Anderson said simply.

The group turned and set off at a dead sprint down the tunnel. The spectrometer was wailing insistently as the things from below approached. From the passageway behind, there was the sound of gunfire, percussive flashes that were suddenly cut off. Rodriguez crossed himself as he ran.

We came to a crossroads. Not even stopping to look at the map, the soldier in front leapt into the left fork, then cursed as her spectrometer began wailing louder.

“They’re down that tunnel as well! Take the ri-”

Something moved in the murky darkness, like a murderer’s shadow on snow. The woman was ripped backwards without even the time to scream. We sprinted into the right fork, Anderson loosing a flurry of bullets into the left as he ran.

That was how they hunted us. We would reach a fork, try to head for Gamma Camp, only to be turned around by spectrometer readings, unseen things heading us off, turning us around. Soon, we were running downward, into the bowels of the earth, away from our intended destination. Without any warning, the concrete and steel-reinforced passageways suddenly became rocky tunnels and caverns. We had left the man-made defences of this war behind and entered enemy territory.

I find it hard to write about these events. They are the most confused and harrowing part of my journey, a mess of fear, gunfire and exhaustion in my memory. Rodriguez sits next to me as I write. I look over, and he is smiling reassuringly. He smiles a lot these days.

We were only five now – a nameless soldier in front of me was suddenly gone, dragged away into the shadows by a leering, knife - fingered horror. I grabbed his gun as it clattered to the ground, firing blindly in the direction the thing from below had dragged him in. I don’t know if I even hit anything.

Finally, after what seemed like hours of burning lungs and cramping muscles, the spectrometer quieted down. For reasons we couldn’t possibly guess at, the pursuit had ended, or at least eased off. We stopped, gasping for air, doubled over.

“We have… to make a stand.” Anderson wheezed. “They’re driving us to The Pit. We have to break out, or we’re as good as dead.”

“Why the hell do they want us down there?” Rodriguez asked, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. “Before, we could never even get half that deep, and now they’re herding us there of their own accord?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it is, it can’t be good. We have to make a stand.” Anderson repeated.

“No way. The war has changed. There’s too many of them. Maybe these things can be stopped at Alpha Camp - hell, maybe even at Beta or Gamma. But there’s only five of us now, and Matt is a civilian. We barely have the firepower to take down a ghoul, let alone fight our way back out of the tunnels.”

“Then what do you suggest we do?” Anderson asked, turning on Rodriguez. “You have a better idea?”

“We head further down, right into The Pit. Face it, man. The chance of us getting out of here alive are slim to none. If there’s something down there that these things are guarding, I’d like to see it before I go out.”

Anderson was silent for a while, regarding my friend mutely. Finally, he shrugged.

“I don’t care what’s down in The Pit. I care about revenge - I’m staying here and taking my pound of flesh from these things, and hopefully getting back to our own lines. Anyone who wants to join me is welcome to. Anyone who wants to go with Rodriguez and head further down – be my guest. But I won’t pretend to think it isn’t a fool’s errand.”

The remaining soldiers shifted uncomfortably, then moved, one by one, to stand behind Anderson. Gripped by a sudden compulsion, I took a stand next to Rodriguez.

He was right. The chance of getting back to the surface was next to zero. Whatever waited in The Pit – I wanted to see it, and then allow the horror to end forever.

Anderson nodded at us.

“Good luck,” he said grudgingly. “When you get out, send us reinforcements. We’ll do the same for you if we get out first.”

Anderson’s sudden, naïve optimism took me by surprise. By his expression, I could tell Rodriguez felt the same.

“Good luck to you all,” my friend said. He turned around and headed down the dark tunnel, flashlight bobbing. I nodded to the assembled soldiers and followed him.

For some time, we trudged on in silence. The sounds of Anderson and his group were quickly cut off by distance and the snaking, twisting passageways. Thankfully, our spectrometer remained silent. Maybe the things from below were satisfied with our heading, or maybe they were busy with our comrades in the tunnels behind.

Suddenly, at least half an hour after we’d departed, Rodriguez’ radio sprung to life. He pulled it up in shaking fingers.

Its sounds were static-laden, broken up by the winding tunnels. We could barely hear a voice – Anderson’s voice, I realized with a start – on the other side. Even through the static and distortion, he sounded desperate.

“This is- …erson, 7th fo- …requesting backup. We are surrounded.”

“Anderson,” Rodriguez whispered into the radio. “What’s going on up there?”

“I rep- …questing backup…” Anderson continued, ignoring us or unable to hear our reply.

From the darkness behind us, a desperate gunfire staccato broke the silence. Rodriguez cursed softly. Anderson’s voice came again, more desperate.

“My squad is d- …falling back t- … can anyone read me?”

There was silence for at least half a minute, the only sound the thunder of my own heartbeat in my ears. No reply came to our frantic attempts to answer.

Finally, the radio crackled to life again.

“Rodriguez…” came Anderson’s voice. He sounded strange. Not panicked or desperate as before, more amazed and horrified. A chill ran down my spine. I couldn’t place his tone, but it made me uncomfortable, like nails on a blackboard.

“Rodriguez… I can see one. I c- …e one. I have a visual.”

“What can you see?” Rodriguez hissed into the radio. “What can you see, Anderson?”

“It’s…” came the reply. “It’s beautiful.”

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