Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
As we crossed the threshold from the hallway into the cave, I saw a strange mixture of architecture. There were patches of cave extending into the end of the hallway, and remnants of twisted metal and small areas of bright red paint still stuck to areas of the cavern wall. It looked like the cave had grown organically into the hall and fused with it. I had no idea how this could have happened naturally, but I figured the antimatter bomb had changed this world so drastically that now, even the Earth itself might act in unnatural and bizarre ways.
Most of the soldiers had scattered into various places when we had entered the Pit of the Skull. Only two now stood guarding me, one holding each arm and forcing me forwards into the sick green light that emanated from the cave, twisting my stomach and making my head pound. I felt my mouth go dry and my heart race. Goosebumps rose on my skin and I felt myself beginning to tremble uncontrollably, my teeth chattering. My hands reminded me of the tremors of an earthquake.
General Matheson had gone, receding deeper into the Pit of the Skull. I wondered if I would see him again. I knew that, if I was transformed, he would become like a god to me. I would become just another mindless soldier in his vast army of abominations.
As we went deeper into the cave, I saw that the green light seemed to emanate from the walls, floor and ceiling of the cave itself. They came in rhythmic waves, strengthening and fading, giving everything a diseased look.
The fused, half-cavernous setting continued to spread before me as I saw barracks rooms and large halls. I looked over at the first one I passed and saw a massive mess hall.
A murmuring susurration seemed to hiss from the mess hall where hundreds of soldiers in black uniforms sat down to eat. I looked over for a moment as I was dragged past, my ankle shrieking in pain as the soldiers kept pressing me on farther towards my doom.
With horror, I saw that the faceless, transformed soldiers ate human body parts, raw and sliced up, each on a tin plate. I could see parts of legs and arms, faces with the cheeks and tongues missing and much more evidence of this brutal and sickening mass cannibalism. From behind a serving window, I saw a pig-like man in a large chef’s uniform, his face round and pink, his nose bovine. He snorted and spat constantly as he used a large meat cleaver to slice up more bodies. I saw blood splattering the ceiling and walls behind him as the cleaver thwacked down again and again, splintering bone and slicing through flesh like butter.
I felt like I had entered into the 9th Circle of Hell itself. How could anyone live in such a place? Who would want to cling to life in such a destroyed world, or in such a ruined and dead city as this one?
But even as I looked in with absolute terror, I noticed that they could talk. They all seemed to talk at the same time, murmuring in low voices, their skeletal mouths moving up and down, the muscles underneath flexing and contracting. But it didn’t sound like words by the time it reached me, but more like the hissing of a snake, combined with the rhythmic “thwack-thwack-thwack!” of the meat cleaver behind it all.
I saw those same strange half-pig men all over the cavernous compound. Sometimes they were hauling loads of emaciated dead bodies, naked men, women and children whose faces were all twisted into eternal expressions of terror and agony. I saw marks of torture on many of the bodies, deep gouges that cut to the bone and burn marks on their faces and eyes. They took the bodies towards the mess hall and the kitchen behind it, snorting and grunting as they passed.
My faceless captors frog-marched me past this den of nightmares, twisting my arms painfully behind me, forcing me to lean forward and stride fast. I wondered if Frankie was still alive, whether he, too, would be taken here, and see the true nature of the Pit of the Skull.
Then the corridor opened up into a massive chamber, with stalagmites and stalactites thirty feet long appearing up and down, sharp as spikes and thin as pencils. The walls seemed to shiver and vibrate as curtains of green light passed through, emanating from the floor and ceiling, swirling and moving in cyclonic waves.
I saw cages stacked on the sides of the walls, cages filled with naked, starving people. Some of them cried and wailed when they saw me, holding out their thin, skeletal arms, like a child asking for its mother.
Many of the others moaned in their cages, their eyes rolling, the sores on their bodies often infected and leaking. Large areas of discolored purplish bruises shone on many of the victims, and I even saw leg bones and arm bones poking out through the skin, compound fractures that had turned necrotic and infected. Thousands of human captives lived in this place, and the green light illuminated every one and shone light into the darkest of corners. The smell of sickness and death was overwhelming, so thick I could taste it.
Behind the screams and moans of the tortured souls imprisoned here, I heard a distinct, electrical humming sound, as if I were standing under high-voltage power lines. I could feel it rattle my bones and vibrate my chest. It was a powerful feeling, and it grew stronger as I went deeper into the chamber, past the last of the cages.
The smell of ozone as we got further in became overwhelming. Faint odors of sulfur and mold mixed with it. My senses began to feel overwhelmed, and I wasn’t even at the worst of it yet.
In the middle of the chamber, I saw stone tables, covered with blood. Some of it had long ago dried and darkened, but much of it looked fresh and wet, bright red pools that dripped from the sacrificial spot. It reminded me of an Aztec sacrificial altar.
General Matheson stood next to one of the tables, holding a serrated, wicked-looking knife. Its blade looked made out of obsidian, a thin, black blade with a glassy sheen curving out of a bone handle carved into the shape of a skull. He grinned when he saw me, his white marble face pulsating with an aura of that same green light. It seemed to embrace him, surround him and emanate from every pore as I drew nearer.
The two faceless soldiers strapped me down on the table, putting a leather belt around my arms and legs and a gag in my mouth. Then General Matheson slowly began to lower the blade down towards my face.
“This is going to hurt a lot,” he said, laughing. “But that’s part of the becoming. All great men have had great suffering. This is an eternal law.” I closed my eyes tightly, waiting for the blade to make contact, to begin skinning me alive, to rip off my face and then begin the transformation into a monstrous soldier who would eat raw human meat and carry out atrocities without a second thought or any sense of emotion.
“What do you think you’re doing?” a voice hissed from the edge of the chamber. My eyes flew open and my head turned. I saw Foras standing there, his bleached-white skin given a green hue by the supernatural light of the chamber.
“What business is it of yours, High Priest Foras?” General Matheson asked coldly.
“I brought this one here to this world!” he screamed, his voice sounding inhuman and amplified as it echoed through the vast cavern. “This is my soul for the taking, not yours.” General Matheson looked down at me, his eyes blazing with fury.
“Is this true?” he asked me. “Did this man bring you here?”
“He is no man,” I whispered, still terrified, still expecting the cutting pain of the blade at any second. “But yes, he brought me here. That is true. He kidnapped me, and I escaped him. I thought he planned to kill me.”
“Regardless, this is my sector, and it is staffed with my troops. I must demand you leave at once, Foras. Do not make me angry. My troops will come at a moment’s notice, and I will have you executed if you interfere with me. My business is state business, and I am the leader. My will is absolute.”
“You have been swallowing your own bullshit for too long,” Foras said, laughing. “If you try to attack me, I will kill you and all your troops. I don’t need to mutilate bodies to get my power, General Matheson. I am not so weak as that.” General Matheson’s eyes widened in surprise at the insult.
“Guards, kill him!” he shrieked. “Kill him now! I want his head brought to me on a platter!” Soldiers in black uniforms rushed in, their bloody skulls grinning under their visor caps. Many had guns, and others had flamethrowers and rocket launchers. They showed no fear, but instead ran straight at Foras. I watched in surprise as Foras calmly surveyed the dozens of men rushing in his direction, intending to kill him.
He pulled out a black stone from his pocket. I recognized it immediately. It was the stone he had used to suck out the soul of the mutant boy we had encountered in the city, the stone he had used to follow me here. He threw it in a bored, under-handed way, not rushing or panicking, not showing a hint of emotion. He spoke a few guttural words in some strange language I had never heard before as the stone flew across the cavern, and suddenly, it burst into a blinding white light.
It almost hurt to look at it, but I kept watching, mesmerized by the surreal scene taking place before me. The soldiers had begun firing their weapons, and bullets raked the walls and floor. General Matheson cursed and began running out of the chamber, towards a large metal door built into the wall at the far side. A rocket-launcher went off, and an explosion of heat blossomed only forty feet away. Yet I ignored the mayhem and watched Foras, knowing I could do nothing to save myself if a stray bullet came in my direction anyways.
The light began to expand from a pinpoint to a line about ten feet across. It looked like a tropical sun shone out of the rip in space that now appeared across the chamber. Strange tentacles reached out, groping blindly. They were a sickly, dark shade of purple, with black, razor-sharp spikes sticking out of the front, like the legs of a poisonous spider. The spikes clicked closed and open in fast, rhythmic waves. The tentacles kept coming, ten feet, then twenty, then they were wrapping around the soldiers and squeezing hard. I saw the spikes bite into their skin and begin to drain the blood from their bodies, prodding and sucking as the soldiers’ skeletal mouths opened in silent screams.
Dozens of the tentacles flicked out, and soon Foras stood alone among the alien appendages reaching out from another dimension, looking at his handiwork and smiling. He seemed to have totally forgotten about me. More soldiers were streaming in by the second, firing guns and rocket-launchers and flinging grenades, but the tentacles would wrap around them and drain all the blood from their bodies in mere seconds. The cacophony of explosions and the heat and the light made me flinch and turn away, and I trembled uncontrollably, feeling I would die at any second.
I heard a soft whisper from right behind me. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Turning my head, I saw Frankie crouched there, holding a very sharp silver dagger.
“We have to get you out of here,” he said, cutting at the leather bindings holding me to the table. “I know where we are now. The hallway that leads out of here intersects with Veriden. I’ve never come down this far before, and now I think you know why.” In a few moments, he had freed me. I quickly jumped down from the table and followed him, looking back to see Foras throwing another black ball into the air as hundreds of soldiers ran in from the mess hall and surrounding barracks.
Countless bodies littered the floor, and I saw at least thirty tentacles now reaching out, some of them stretching up to the ceiling or hundreds of feet down the hall. Shuddering, I followed Frankie.
We passed room after room where half-pig men sliced up bodies, hanging them from the ceilings like a hunter prepping a deer. I saw human skins lined up, discarded in corners, flat and stacked one on top of another. I smelled roasting meat, and the delicious scent of herbs and spices floated out of the rooms.
After running for twenty minutes without any trouble, I saw with fear that a group of the pig-men now moved down the hall, armed with tall axes and massive, blood-stained meat cleavers. They snorted and began shouting when they saw me and Frankie. Frankie stopped, pulling out a silver dagger from inside his tattered clothes. He turned to me.
“You ready to fight?” he said, a gleam in his eyes. He gave me a grim smile, his scarred face twisting as the excitement of battle and the rising blood-lust took hold. I knew because I had the same rising feeling in my chest.
“Stop!” the pig-men cried. “Surrender, or we’ll slice you into pieces and feed you to the dogs.” I reached for the revolver in my pocket, whipping it out. I knew I only had eight bullets. I counted the pig-men, a wave of adrenaline coursing through my body. Everything seemed slowed down, my reflexes much faster. In a moment, my mind told me: “Ten.”
Well, that’s not good, I thought to myself. I began firing, aiming for the head or heart. The pig-men rushed me, waving their weapons, a fanatical gleam in their small, squinting eyes. Their round faces were flushed and sweating, and even from here, I could smell the body odor that surrounded them, like flies surrounding a carcass.
The first one’s head exploded in a mist of blood and bone splinters. He still ran for a few steps, his headless body following some random nerve impulses that still fired in his destroyed nervous system. Then his body collapsed, sliding forward, the meat cleaver sliding out from his opening hand.
The second one I hit in the chest. He grabbed at his heart, his eyes widening as he fell to the side, tripping another one who went sprawling, his large ax flying across the rocky floor.’
They kept coming, and I kept shooting. I killed seven, and wounded another one, who was dragging himself across the floor with a massive hole in his leg, a flood of blood coming out in time with his heartbeat. Then I heard the click of the empty chamber. The last two pig-men were now within a few feet of Frankie and me. With a roar, Frankie rushed forward.
They swung their meat cleavers at his face and neck, but he ducked, slicing one across the abdomen. I saw his intestines and organs spill out in a waterfall of gore. In the same swiping move, Frankie raised the knife, expertly slicing the other across the neck. They both fell back, the latter choking on his own blood and writhing, kicking his feet and clenching his fists as he raised them in the air.
“Come on!” Frankie said, and we kept running. The end of the hallway was in sight now, and I was grateful. “We have to get out of the Undergraves before the drums start.”
“What drums?” I asked. He just shook his head.
“You’re almost home, friend,” he said. “The door to your world is right up ahead. Many others have come through there too. Most don’t return through there. Most of them die. But I try to help those I find. I try to help my friends.”
“How did you even get to me?” I asked.
“I hid, and they didn’t find me. I crawled under some machine in the corner. They took you out. I waited, and then I saw that really white man creeping down the hall, and I followed. Something in me told me he meant trouble. Then I just snuck in and did what I did.” He shrugged, as if it were no big deal that he had saved my life, or maybe even saved me from a fate even worse than death.
At the end of the hall, I saw a wooden door with a blue daisy painted on it. It stood before me, chipped and old. I opened it, finding a huge stone stairwell rising up. It seemed to go on forever.
I turned and hugged Frankie.
“Thank you,” I said with tears in my eyes. “You didn’t have to help me, and you did. Why don’t you come with me? You don’t have to live in such a nightmarish hellscape as this.” He just shook his head.
“I belong here, where my family lived and where they died,” he said. I turned and closed the door, ascending the stairs for hours before I came to a shed. I found myself locked in. I stood at the door, knocking and yelling for hours before an old man came with a key and let me out. He didn’t look surprised to see me or the endless stairs in his shed, but I think that’s another story.
I ended up finding myself over a thousand miles away from where I first started on my way home from work. I had a tough time trying to explain to my family how I teleported that distance in a single night.
I still have nightmares about that world, about that dead city, and sometimes I wonder if Foras will come back for me. I can only hope he died in the battle with the undead soldiers, but late at night, when I’m falling asleep, I still see his face- and I wonder.