SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

“I don’t know. Would you? Spencer, leave your tablet here and double time back up the tunnel. If you don’t catch up to him in a few hundred yards, we’ll have to let him go and I’ll kick his fucking ass when we get back.”

“Righto, Sarge.”

Spencer put down his gear and jogged away. They stood in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes.

“Nervous kid,” Brown said eventually. “First tour.”

“Don’t make excuses for him,” Coulthard said. “He’s a fucking soldier.”

Spencer walked back towards them, holding something out. “We need to get the fuck out of here,” he said. Hanging from his fingers was a chain with two dog tags.

“The fuck?” Dillman whispered.

“Beaumont’s?” Coulthard asked in a tight voice.

“He’s a fucking skeleton just like the insurgent fuckers we found. Nothing left but buckles and weapons and shit. He’s just fucking bones, Sarge!”

Dillman began muttering and shone his helmet lamp frantically in every direction. The mood of the squad began to fracture.

Coulthard swatted Dillman’s lamp off. “Stow that shit! Everyone stay calm.”

“Calm, Sarge?” Gladstone asked. “Seriously, we’re in deep shit here.”

“Stay. Calm. Spencer, did you recover Beaumont’s weapon.”

Spencer shook his head. “Left it there. The strap is gone, too hard to carry. But I took his clips.”

“Fair enough. Now, we need to reassess what we’re doing here.”

“I think we should leave, Sarge,” Brown said. He tried to keep his voice calm, but heard and felt the quaver in it.

“It ain’t that simple.”

“It must be,” Dillman said. “Fuck those guys, if they’re even still alive down there. Whatever got Beaumont can get them. We’ll wait outside the caves and pick off any who comes out.”

Coulthard held up a hand, a pale green wave in their night vision goggles. “Chill, everyone. It ain’t as simple as leaving. I’m with you. In any other circumstances I would absolutely call an abort. But whatever took Beaumont, it took him from the back.”

“Which means it’s behind us,” Brown said, realisation like an icy wave through his gut. “Or there’s more than one, ahead and behind.”

“Exactly.”

“Does that mean we should carry on though?” Gladstone asked. “Maybe it’s only gonna get worse.”

“Maybe. Or maybe there’s another way out.” Coulthard picked up Spencer’s tablet, checked the display. “We’ve still got a bunch of sensors, yeah?”

Spencer dropped Beaumont’s tags into a pocket. “Yeah, plenty.”

“Okay. We carry on for another kilometre and see if it leads to any branches in the tunnel, any other way out. If it does, we can maybe go around whatever’s in here. If not, we turn around and risk facing it. Spencer, it’s unlikely but do we have any signal down here?”

The corporal pulled out his gear and spent a moment trying to get a response from Base. Then he went wide band, looking for any transmissions. He found none and no one responded to open hails. “Nothing, Sarge.”

“I didn’t think so. Okay, Brown, you stay in the middle. Me and Spencer will take point. I want Gladstone and Dillman on rear guard, but you two walk backwards. We move slow and you don’t take your eyes off the tunnel behind us. Let’s go.”

They moved slowly on again. Brown felt more than a little useless in the middle of the group, but he knew what Coulthard was doing. Protect the guy with the best chance of helping any wounded. Except it looked like whatever was in these caves didn’t leave any wounded. He heard a gasp from Gladstone and turned to look.

“See that?” Gladstone whispered to Dillman.

“Yeah. There!”

Brown saw it too. He lifted his goggles to see with unfiltered eyes. A movement, more a shift of light across the darkness, like a ripple of wan blue luminescence. He caught part of a smooth, glassy sphere, a glimpse of something globular, but it pressed into the wall and vanished.

The others had stopped to watch. All five of them stared hard, but the tunnel was black as death and still.

“Keep moving,” Coulthard said.

Brown walked backwards as well, eyes trying to scan every inch of the tunnel behind them.

“There!” Gladstone said sharply.

He’d seen it too. A glassy flex of movement on the ceiling about thirty metres back. Closer than before. Almost as if a giant water droplet had begun to swell and hang, only to be quickly sucked back up.

“It’s fucking following us,” Dillman hissed and snapped on his helmet light again.

“But what is it?” Spencer demanded. “Is it even alive? Doc?”

Brown jumped as he was directly addressed. “I’m no expert here,” he said. “Whatever it is…”

His words were drowned out by Gladstone’s screams and Dillman’s shouts of fright as the torchlight reflected back off a huge slithering mass across the ceiling right above them. It ran and undulated like an upside down river across the rock then expanded, long and pendulous, extruding from the tunnel roof like a clear jelly waterfall. The huge, gelatinous blob unfurled itself and dropped.