Chapter 12 – I Am NOT a Fan
The rumbling continued for several long minutes as the team made their way forward doing their best to find their way back to the surface through the tunnel system. In their haste to follow the rampant down, no one had bothered to leave any markers leading their way back out. All the while, the earth could be heard cracking and crashing down on itself could be heard in the distance. Waves of air pressure washed over the group more than once as entire sections of the underground must have come down.
Glen couldn’t believe just how large that explosion had been. This apparently had been another secret that Team Specter had held. They had been experimenting with other uses for the glow moss before this trip, Liz had only kind of explained it to him in the time since the explosion. He was still trying to wrap his head around it.
The powder reacted to the air and would ignite slowly under normal circumstances, today though the gunpowder had acted as a catalyst and turned the simple powder into an unstable bomb just waiting to blow. Rather than little patches of powder igniting here and there, all of it set aflame at once when the reaction in the bag couldn’t be held anymore. The smaller explosion of the glow moss bag triggered a chain reaction to the powder that had aerosolized in the room.
Though Glen could tell everyone was doing their best to push forward, an eerie silence had fallen overtaken them all. No one wanted to be the first to speak, afraid of doing more harm than good, especially towards Jordan. No one here apart from Liz has been aware of just how involved the two had been.
That’s why it came as a surprise that she was the first to comment on the situation saying, “I can’t believe that dumb bitch. Went and left me on my own. I always told him he couldn't escape me, just had to go and try and prove me wrong one last time.” She said it with a smile that didn’t quite touch her eyes.
After a couple seconds, almost everyone laughed. It was the kind of laugh you just can’t stop when hearing something so ridiculous you can’t even process it. Yet, here they were. Deep underground, one teammate down, and laughing.
“He would have wanted it this way.” Miles said out loud to no one in particular. “He always had a flair for the dramatic. We all know the risks we take every time we leave home. We need to make his sacrifice count for something, we have to make it back and warn the town.”
Glen hadn’t known Bryan very well before, only having met in passing when he was visiting his sister. Their teams just didn’t have a lot of overlap. Different personalities, different priorities, and one was always going out at the other returned. So, it wasn’t strange to him that he had only a passing feeling of sadness for a man he barely knew. What did eat at him though was the knowledge of what lay beneath the streets. Their safety had been an illusion for all these years.
‘Okay,’ Glen thought, “maybe I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. This abomination couldn’t have been down here for long, the rampant had only begun to increase in number recently. What changed?’
He asked the question again aloud this time to get the party’s input, “Hey, does anyone else find it odd that we’re just running across one of the things now? We’ve been scouting for decades, and no one has ever reported anything like this thing. What do we even call it?”
“Flesh thingy, world’s ugliest asshole, a crime against nature, god’s mistake? Any of those would do.” Douglas said with a light chuckle, chiming in for the first time in a while.
Pirah just eyed him dead pan before opening her mouth to reply, closing it in what could only be described as profound confusion, and then opening it again. “Alright, ignoring everything that big idiot just said- “as she pointed at Douglas, “- I think we need to give it a clear designation. This is clearly more than what could be a standard aberrant. Once more, there’s another problem I don’t think anyone else has considered.”
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The group looked between themselves trying to catch on to her meaning, and then Glen asked what was on everyone’s mind. “How do you mean? What are we missing?”
Pirah gave them all a chance to consider the situation before asking them another question. After giving them just a bit of time to catch up but seeing that no one was making the same connection as her, she decided to share her thoughts.
“Aberrants are generally pretty rare right?”
Looking between each person she saw everyone more or less nodding in agreement. She took this as a sign everyone agreed and then moved on with her thought.
“It’s unusual to see more than one or two a month across all the scout teams. And yet today, we have seen at least three. The pack leader that had shown signs of intelligence, the flesh shaper that was birthing new rampant, and the tracker that used his enhanced smell to not only detect up, but also pin point our location at a considerable distance. Something is off about this entire situation. I'll be the first to say, I am not a fan of any of this."
Even though they had been making a steady pace through the tunnels up until this point, Pirah’s words had everyone coming to a stop. She was right of course. In the course of just a few hours they had seen more aberrant themselves than the entire town usually sees in a month. To say it was worrying would be doing the situation a disservice.
“Getting back to Skytop quickly just became our number one priority. With everything we have already seen, there is no telling what else is down here with us. No matter what happens, at least one of us needs to get back to warn the city.” It was Glen that had spoken where Pirah had left off.
To solidify the joint team decision Liz added, “I want every one of us to make it back, but one way or another we need to get more people on this. We can’t allow that, what did you call it-”
Douglas immediately jumped in, “World’s ugliest asshole!”
After a brief pause where the team starred daggers at him, Pirah added “...Flesh shaper...”
“-Right, the flesh shaper! We can’t let that thing stay down here and keep creating more of those monsters. No doubt that is also why we’re seeing an uptick in other forms of aberrant as well. It makes sense that if more of them are coming in to being, that at least some of them are going to be abnormal.”
The conversation died down shortly after that, everyone was running off only a scant number of hours of sleep, and they were emotionally drained as well as physically fatigued. They had been wandering for what felt like hours, but this far underground it was difficult to tell how long had actually passed. It seemed like they must have made a wrong turn at some point, because they should have hit the surface already.
In true old world fashion, the sewer system they were trapped in was a convoluted mess. It had many layers stacked on top of each other that had been built to accommodate millions of gallons of water and other detritus daily. Seemingly there was no rhyme or reason to it, when the earlier layers could no longer handle the waste created daily by the people above, they just expanded rather than ever make it more efficient.
Glen found himself drifting as he sometimes did while trying to get his thoughts in order, thinking to himself, ‘Man I am glad this place has been used in the last century. The only thing that could make today worse is if we were trudging through up to our waist in shit.” He found himself wishing for a light at the end of the metaphoric tunnel, and as if he willed it in to being, there was a small patch of light visible in the distance.
“Come on, lets go! We're almost out.” Glen said to the group trying to keep them motivated, pushing just a little longer until they could find rest. As they drew closer, the tunnel expanded, and the light got brighter. The team picked up their pace and might as well have been jogging towards the fresh air. A collective sigh of relief could be heard as they made it out in to the full light of day.
The six of them shared their first real moment of joy since this all began, they had survived what easily could have been the end of both teams. It was as Glen was looking around taking in his surroundings that he noticed two things. The first being the time of day; it was past noon already. When going underground it was still pitch black in the middle of the night, they had been going non-stop for the last twelve hours. They were in serious need of reprieve. Liz, Jordan, and Miles all looked dead on their feet, swaying from side to side just trying to stay standing.
As he turned to tell his team it was time for them to take a breather before pushing on to Skytop, he noticed the second thing. A lone man stood silhouetted by the sun behind his back stood on the ledge above them peering down into the water runoff canal they were standing in. Something about the man’s appearance was ringing alarm bells, be he was unsure why.
Glen’s eyes finished adjusting to the change of light and he took in the man before them. Tall, and slender, he struck an imposing figure. The person before him filled out the suit as if it were made for him, muscle was clearly visible despite being fully covered head to toe in clothes that had to be hundreds of years old.
The man spoke, “So it is you that has been causing our new neighbors such trouble. Why am I not surprised?” When he finished speaking, he looked down to the other side of the canal and tilted his head as if acknowledging someone just out of sight.
Glen did his best to follow the gaze and to his shock he locked eyes with the intelligent aberrant from before. It had to have been following them. It led this man here. Somehow, they were talking? No, that wasn’t right. Communicating? Maybe that fit better. Glen turned to say something to the rest of his team and saw they had all tensed up as well.
Glen was just about to say something to break them out of their stupor when the interloper decided to speak again, “Yes, I do believe it is time for us all to have a talk. I don’t think I can let you scamper off now that you know our little secret.”