Bad Glass

From the taut flesh in the middle of his chest, an arm sprouts, reaching up and bent at the elbow. The soldier is impaled all the way up to the arm’s bicep. There are small rivulets of blood stretching the length of the arm—from taut, pointing fingers, past the elbow, all the way down to the soldier’s chest, where the thin streams pool and spill off into his shirt.

The fingers are blurred slightly, the shutter speed too slow to freeze them in motion.

I took the first left inside the tunnel. This was the way Mac had gone during our first exploration. This was the dead end into which he’d disappeared.

But there was no dead end this time. The tunnel continued on, tilting down, farther into the dark earth. I looked for wires in the tunnel walls but didn’t find any. Not here.

There were paw prints on the floor, though.

And, here and there, footprints.

The ceiling dripped wet mud onto our heads as we advanced. I jumped in surprise each time a drop hit the back of my neck.

“Fuck, Dean,” Floyd hissed as our flashlights stabbed into the dark, picking out nothing but tunnel and more tunnel. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this one fucking bit!”

I didn’t like it, either, but I didn’t say anything. There was no point; I wasn’t about to turn around, not without Taylor. Charlie remained silent as well. I don’t think the teenager had said a single word since we left the house. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself.

A sound up ahead startled us to a halt. “Do you hear that?” I asked. They both nodded.

Muffled shouting. Shrill, frantic voices. And then the sharp crack of gunfire.

I jolted into a run, surging down the length of the tunnel. The mud slid beneath my feet, but I caught myself and continued on.

Gunfire in the tunnels. That couldn’t be good. Is it Mac? I wondered. Is Taylor already …?

After a hundred yards the tunnel deposited us into a small hub, a circular room with five new tunnels branching out into the space ahead. Floyd and Charlie slid into the room behind me. Floyd fell on his ass as he tried to avoid running into my back. “Fuck,” he muttered. For a moment he just sat there, shaking mud off of his arms, then Charlie helped him to his feet.

“How could this be mushrooms?” Charlie asked, finally breaking his silence. His words were tiny, as if the dirt were trying to steal his voice, absorbing its strength and leaving behind nothing but a hushed whisper. “The tunnels—how do spores explain any of this?”

I shrugged. They didn’t.

“Or are we hallucinating?” he continued. “Are we still in the house, collapsed on the floor, muttering and dreaming together? Or maybe passed out in the park while Mac and Taylor get farther and farther away?”

The thought was horrifying. I shook my head, and the room slid back and forth around me, continuing to move for a moment even after my head stopped. The light dimmed for a couple of seconds, then it returned to normal. “We can’t think about that,” I said. “They’re in here, and so are we, and we’ve got to find them.”

Right then, a shout sounded in the distance—indecipherable, but shrill and desperate. It didn’t sound like a woman’s voice. I turned my head, trying to locate the source. After a moment, both Charlie and Floyd pointed to the tunnel on the far left. I ran on ahead.

There were things in this tunnel. Objects. At first, it was just chunks of rock and wood breaking up the endless stretches of mud. Then a milk crate and an empty vodka bottle. Then there were planks beneath my feet, forming a makeshift floor. We came into another hub and found a geometric asterisk laid out in the dirt, narrow lengths of flooring that reached out into five new tunnels. There was a wooden chair set up against the wall, with an unlit lantern perched on its seat.

I swung my flashlight from tunnel to tunnel, looking for something new, something to point me in the right direction.

“Dean—” Floyd started, but I let out a hiss and he fell silent.

“Turn off your lights,” I said, hitting the button on mine. “Shut them off. Maybe we can see …”

Charlie clicked his off. Then, after fumbling for a moment, Floyd did the same.

The tunnel dropped into darkness. It was a deep and claustrophobic black, and as soon as my eyes lost input, I got dizzy. I thought I was falling, toppling forward into the void. Without vision, without that point of reference, I lost all track of the world. The Vicodin, I thought. The alcohol, the plank upside my head. It wasn’t the world doing this, I assured myself. It wasn’t the spores or the speed of light. It was the things I’d done to myself, and the things I’d let happen.

I reached out to catch myself against the floor, keeping the flashlight and baseball bat clenched tightly in my hands, but the floor didn’t come. I just continued spinning through the void.

“Dean …” It was Floyd, terrified, keening in the dark. “I hear him …” And I wondered at the “him.” Mac? Floyd’s dead brother?