Andy’s hand caught Kerri’s forearm, automatically allowing a strap of her backpack to slip off her shoulder. The bag tipped over, Tim facing the whole depth of the chasm for the first time, yelping in panic at the sight of Kerri hanging in the void, digging his front paws into Andy’s back.
“Ah, shit!” Andy screamed, her left arm now holding the weight of two people and a dog, her muscle fibers tearing apart. “Kerri! Get a foothold!”
KERRI: Tim, don’t fall!
ANDY: Kerri, get a foothold, please!
Andy swung her against the shaft wall, Kerri’s feet and hands finally finding and curling around the rungs again. Andy held on with both hands and righted the backpack onto her shoulders, while Tim shouted into her ears.
“Calm down! Tim, calm down!” She looked down at Kerri, below her now. “Follow me closely!”
Kerri nodded, fear restricted to the inside of her mask, and tried to keep up with Andy as she ran up the last of the ladder.
Andy landed onto the catwalk, on her torso, and Tim immediately kicked his way out of the bag and ran away from the hole, his mind made up never to even be in the same state with a pet carrier ever again. Andy hurried to help Kerri up before even allowing herself to take a breath.
As soon as Kerri put a foot on the catwalk, she lifted up her mask and asked, “What the fuck is Nate doing?”
Andy noticed the scene into which they had just climbed. Nate was a few yards farther down, facing the drift, squatting, searching his bag.
Slightly closer, the bird in the cage was having a seizure.
“Nate?” Andy called, walking in his direction while removing her mask. “Nate, what’s up?”
She could see what he was doing now—loading shells into his uncle’s break-action shotgun, his hands trembling like an old eremite’s defending his cabin from an alien raid. Tim was by his side, yapping into the drift they had traversed earlier.
A howling, chuckling, myriaphonic clangor was approaching from the distant end of the 1.6-mile-long tunnel.
“I’ve got twelve rounds,” Nate stammered, closing the action. “How many you got?”
Andy’s fingers ran to her empty back pocket. She wondered whether the pistol would have actually hit the bottom of the shaft by now.
Nate noticed: “You lost the gun?!”
“I ran out of hands!”
Peter stood on Nate’s right, arms crossed, contemplating the incoming horde. “That’s funny, I wonder who could’ve summoned those guys.”
“We need another way out,” Andy realized.
“I mean, it’s almost like someone read a spell or something and they were attracted to it, isn’t it?”
“Shut up,” Nate whispered.
“The vent!” Andy ordered, grabbing the birdcage on her way to where Kerri was finishing throwing up. “There was a utility tunnel here with a vent; maybe we can climb it!”
PETER: Yeah, good idea, try that door over there.
NATE: (Looking in that direction.) What? NO! Andy, not that door!
The call arrived just a tenth of a second after Andy had already executed a triumphant door-opening on the steel gate in the rock wall, covered in black-and-yellow cave-in warning signs.
And every twisted amphibian inside the service tunnel, every four-armed and zero-eyed and reverse-skulled wheezer, shrieked in bloodlusty joy.
Andy bought the next second of her own life by sticking an arm forward in a reflex gesture to block the wave of razor claws and needle teeth with the one thing she happened to be carrying: the birdcage. It turned out to be just big enough to get stuck in the narrow tunnel, and for a whole second it held as the creatures thrashed at it, and the bird literally screamed in terror like birds had never been witnessed to do, and Andy spied through the bars to count the enemies on the other side. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Whatever the Fifth Letter in the Greek Alphabet Is, all quickly maneuvering over and beneath the obstacle, slashing Andy’s aura.
The next second of life she earned at the cost of using whatever hung from her belt as a weapon. The first thing was the two-way radio, which proved a terrible choice; it bounced off a wheezer’s head before another crushed it between its teeth. The second item was the pickax she’d used to seal E-6. It proved useful to stab a couple of heads and hold the barricade for a second longer, while Tim, stripped of his stupid breathing mask and ready to bite, arrived just in time to intercept Beta scuttling under the cage.
Andy pulled the cage out of the way, buried the pickax in Alpha’s temple and kicked its body away, heeled Beta’s skull, and blocked Gamma with the cage again.
“Nate, gun!”
“I don’t have a clear shot!”
Gamma slashed through Alpha’s corpse blocking the way, all four arms somehow managing to dodge the pickax’s thrusts.
ANDY: Nate! Gun!
NATE: You’re in the way!
ANDY: Hand me. The fucking. GUN!
Nate threw the shotgun to Kerri, Kerri to Andy; Andy aimed and tried to prioritize the targets.
And she shot at the ceiling.
The loud, echoing bang managed to appease the wheezers for a moment, the shallow depressions on their faces where eyes should gleam staring at the ghost of the explosion fading off, until they in return shrieked a ten-times-louder, twenty-clawed, million-teethed, cord-ripping warcry of psychotic bloodlust and carnage-announcing hyperadjectivated rage.
And then the tunnel caved on their heads.
All that Kerri saw was a birdcage, and a pickax, and Tim, and Andy fly out of the tunnel like shrapnel expelled out of the booming thundercloud, and the sound had not even been demoted to echo before Andy had barely landed on the ground and rolled back onto her feet, not obliging her body a solitary second of respite before the next move. She stumbled toward Nate and snatched the blueprints from him while his attention returned to the wheezer wave coming through the drift, slowly devouring yellow lamps like a nightmare Pac-Man.
“There’s gotta be a way out!” she shouted at the map. “One of these galleries must lead to the surface!”
Kerri joined her, compass in hand: “We go northwest! Just find me the tunnel labeled ‘Debo?n Isle.’?”
Andy began speed-reading the prints before fully processing the sentence.
“The isle?” Nate cried. “No way!”
“That’s the route we know to be open; Wickley used it in ’seventy-seven!”
NATE: To get to the haunted mansion!
ANDY: On an island, Kerri, we’ll be trapped!
KERRI: (Desperate.) Just—fuck, trust me once! Okay?!
Andy looked around. Again, she’d managed to stand between the two cousins, physically stand between them. She wondered at how the stage movements betrayed her every time.
NATE: Andy, look at me: there is something in that house. I am not fucking hallucinating.
PETER: No, you fucking aren’t!
KERRI: Andy. (Grabs Andy by her collar, effectively freezing time.) I can get us out.
And her orange hair gazed up in awe at its commander.
Andy swallowed. “Right. Help me find the way on the map and I’ll—”
And that was when the power went out.
For a brief, seconds-long dark age, only the bird’s ongoing hysteria eased up the absolute absence of sight or sound. That, and the approaching cacophony of rabid amphibians coming up along the drift.