The tunnel/basement went far beyond serving a minor factory on the outskirts of a city core. What Gaylen was running through was some sort of connecting system, meant for the wider urban sprawl. Perhaps the outskirts had originally been meant for more, or perhaps this had originally been built by the natives for whatever purpose.
Gaylen didn’t care about the why; he cared that there were plenty of different passages, all of them with a similar amount of minimal lighting, and doors. He cared that there was a wide array of possibilities for dead ends, and that the thing was still after him.
He didn’t see it, much. There were turns, the lighting remained low, he felt he was gaining distance on it, and he just didn’t turn his head around much. But he heard it. Not growls or roars, or anything that indicated emotion or thought or intent. Just movement. The movement of a body much, much heavier than his own, and sharp appendages touching concrete and metal in passing.
And with no sound dampening on the walls, it all echoed, down tunnels and side-tunnels, and back again. A multidimensional audio experience; just not a fun one.
Fortunately, there was Sammy. The Green Jacket douchebag, whatever his other qualities, seemed to know what he was doing. At least, in this moment. And so Gaylen followed.
The man existed in glimpses beneath the scant lights, a blur around corners and at the end of hallways. The man could leg it, and was, if anything, slowly gaining ground on Gaylen, even as he left the thing further behind. The echoing also added a complication in following the sounds of his feet, and a couple of times Gaylen thought he’d taken the wrong turn.
But then, off in the distance, he would see a figure dart around yet another corner, or into another opening, and he would have his next road marker.
Even with all that, something within, some instinct nestled deep in the ancient dark of his brain, told him that the thing wasn’t in any danger of getting lost. It was tracking them.
Sammy did stop, eventually, and the echo of his footsteps was replaced with snaps and clicks and groans of metal. As Gaylen kept on going he heard the man’s voice; frantic little snippets of it as he struggled with something.
Finally, there was a louder groan, and Gaylen realised he’d opened a difficult door. He went around one last corner, and at the end of a hallway he saw Sammy in a doorway, backlit by a feeble light. The man saw him, flashed a vicious look, and closed the door from the outside. Then he locked it.
“Die, bastard!” the Green Jacket snarled, his voice muffled by thick metal as Gaylen arrived at the door. “Die screaming!”
He ran away, and Gaylen was left with an issue. He could backtrack and try to dumb luck his way to some other exit that led to the outside, or he could try to get this damned door open.
There was another one of those scrapes, carried down the mostly-dark hallways of this little underworld.
Damn it.
The door, rugged though it was, was a simple thing with a mechanical lock. A single plasma shot would have opened it, but his gun still wasn’t working. Kiris could have opened it in moments, but she wasn’t here, and he had neither the tools nor the skills.
Without Sammy, and his own thumping feet, the thing’s sounds were all the clearer. He had gained some ground on it, but not a huge amount. And now it was closing in. Two inhumanly heavy footsteps at a time.
Gaylen checked his gun and his comm yet again, hoping against hope that the strange effect had been lifted. He was up against magic, after all. Actual, fucking magic, even if he felt like an idiot for allowing the thought. And who knew how the rules for it worked.
But both remained dead and useless. And somehow pistol-whipping a thing did not seem like a winning idea.
There was another scrape, and Gaylen thought of how those men in the meeting house had died. He hadn’t really seen it, but the sounds sure had told a story.
He was about to turn and run, and throw his fate to blind luck, when a thought occurred: He had brought the belt of little lock-charges.
With nothing to lose but very precious seconds, Gaylen took out one of the little plastic clumps and pressed it against the lock, then pressed the button on the belt.
The tiny explosive charge went off, directed in a cone into the metal, and tore the lock apart.
Magic. Who knew how the rules worked?
He went at the door with all his strength, pulling against rusted and badly designed hinges to which the heavy slab of a door was attached. It did move, faster than it had for Sammy, but far too slow for Gaylen’s nerves, as the thing neared. As it scratched metal and concrete, thumped its weight, dragged the bulk of its surface against wall and ceiling in passing…
The moment the crack allowed for his head, Gaylen squeezed his entire body through. It wasn’t smooth or painless, but he did not give a damn. He was out, and as it had for Sammy the door swung back in far more easily.
The doorway was in a bit of a drop in the landscape. He was out of the city core’s suburbs and out into the wilderness, or at least near enough. The sole bulb that shone above the door showed him trees, and the ground beneath his feet wasn’t paved. But it was rather well-trod, and he found himself going along a path.
For a few moments Gaylen was simply running blind. He let his feet guide him as the darkness and the trees closed in around him, staying off the grass and on the hard-trod dirt path. Paths led somewhere, and Sammy was surely going somewhere specific.
Then he started seeing lights. They were little glimpses, like shooting stars in the sky, seen for a moment through foliage and around tree trunks. Gaylen looked around, and found them only on his right. He decided on a gamble and left the path, smashing his way straight into the foliage. It was quick to start fighting back. Plant matter tripped up his ankles and pushed against his thighs. Thin branches, and few thicker ones, intercepted his face, and he found himself going on with his arms held up in a boxing pose, his face down.
All of his wanderings, all of his ‘adventures’ in far-flung locations had never had much to do with the wilderness. It had always been about space stations and cities and backwater starports; always ready to fly away on short notice. Now here he was, stumbling around in wild nature like some oaf.
An unusually thick, low-hanging branch intercepted his gut, and he himself provided the momentum that hurt him. It was too sturdy to bend out of the way, and he was too hemmed in by other lesser branches to go over it. He rather wished he’d brought a long blade of some sort, but that sort of melee fighting had never been his thing. So instead he got down and crawled underneath the obstruction, before getting back up, getting poked at by yet more nasty little branches.
He was getting closer to the lights, but progress wasn’t great. He was getting a picture of some sort of tiny village, or maybe just one of those situations where a bunch of houses came together in a rough cluster, without any kind of plan or unity to it. None of them looked over two storeys tall, and he heard no hints of any kind of night life. Not even among the animals. He was no child of nature, but he did know that forests were noisy places. Birds, insects, and other things lived there, hunting, mating and eating.
But they were silent. For whatever reason, all the little wild things were silent, and so he could, on occasion, through all the noise created by his own passage, hear something large moving in the dark. Each time deepened that strange pit in his stomach; a different kind of fear, that he had only felt once before. The first time he’d encountered something he truly could not explain.
The forest around him unclenched its fist a little bit, allowing him to run more freely. Still the lights neared, and still they were too damn far away. Still he caught little hints of the thing at his back.
It was strange to think, after all his time in space and artificial environments, that here he was reenacting the ancient past; fleeing from a predator through the wilderness, pushed on by primal instincts of survival. Except ancient proto-men on Earth hadn’t fled from unnatural horrors from some other place.
Or maybe they had. What did he know?
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Though it all felt like eternity, there was no such thing, and he did eventually emerge onto clearer ground. The cluster was quite lush; either built up within the forest, or its forces had simply pushed in without opposition. It was a bit like most of the houses had their own little park, except there were no fences or any such thing.
Lights burned above the front doors, or shone through upper floor windows. Most, if not all of them, were frosted, so one could not see inside.
Gaylen picked one that was small, well-maintained, and overall had all the hallmarks of a family home, and stepped up to the door. He saw no bell or comm setup, and so simply knocked on a door made of plain old wood. It was slightly funny to think that in many of the galactic corners he’d visited, the door would have counted as a luxury product.
There were no sounds from inside, but that could just mean thick walls. After a few seconds, Gaylen knocked again. He tried backing away from the door and looking up at the glowing windows on the second floor. He did see movement; someone looking back, made vague and almost formless by the window frosting.
“Can I trouble you for a quick use of a comm?” he asked, and mimed holding one to his ear. “I just need to make a call. I don’t expect you to let me into the house.”
The lights turned off.
“Right.”
Gaylen continued on his way, neither surprised nor even really upset. Codes of silence, and of minding one’s own business when shit was going down, were no new experience to him.
Still, it had been worth a try, and even a second one. He strode away from the house, to its nearest neighbour, a bit more than a stone’s throw away. It was built much in the same general style as the other one; plain, unassuming, making heavy use of the plentiful local wood. This one also had some sort of pen; a low fence around a little shack, and a faint smell of animal dung.
Lights glowed on the upper floor here too; one on each end of it. Gaylen knocked, firmly enough to surely be heard unless the interior had outright soundproofing. This time he immediately stepped back from the door, and did the little mime gesture again. And as a vague blob of darkness appeared in one of the glowing squares, he spoke.
“Can you please help me out? Just real quick?”
He didn’t see movement, but the window opened by a finger’s width.
“The night has its troubles,” a woman’s voice said calmly. “The night keeps its troubles. It is our way here. We know what hunts you, we who belong here, we who know here. The old ways, the dark ways. Come here in daytime, if you live long enough, and I shall play host. But now is the night. Now is evil. You might try to the north, for the off-worlders, and a different sort of evil.”
The window crack was closed, and Gaylen sensed the finality in it. He started moving again, and the stars told him which direction was north. He moved through this not-quite-a-town, over lawns and not-lawns, around wild, sturdy trees with large, bushy crowns, and more of the isolated houses. The urbanisation opened up even more, and he finally heard something other than wind and swaying branches. He heard Sammy.
The man’s distinctive tenor was raised in agitation, apparently in some sort of argument. Gaylen sped his steps up again, even as he made an effort to soften them. Once around a row of younger trees that lined up too regularly to be natural, he saw the largest house so far.
It looked less like a home, and featured more concrete and other man-made materials than the surrounding style. Gaylen thought it might have been a minor storage building, or perhaps an unattractive hotel, but regardless there were no business signs, and it had been allowed to decay a bit. A large window on the second floor was pushed all the way open, and two men looked down at Sammy as the man pleaded with them from the ground.
“You know I’m good for it, Drebb! Come on!”
“I don’t know what you base that on,” one of the two in the window replied in a neutral tone. “Do you?” he added to his comrade, before turning his head. “Do any of you?”
“Look, I’m hitting it big! WE are hitting it big! There is just a complication, and I need a comm and a gun.”
Drebb tapped his hands on the windowsill in contemplation. Or maybe he was just irritated.
“You are close to home, aren’t you?” the other one said after a brief, awkward silence.
“Look!” Sammy said, with a burst of annoyance that he then visibly suppressed. “I’m tired and I need a ride. I need to talk to my boys. Just help me with that. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is that we don’t have anything firm and formal between us,” Drebb told him. “Not yet. And it makes me reluctant to get involved with whatever has you running over here, wild-eyed and exhausted, unarmed and alone, in the middle of the night. I mean, I’m willing to do business, but-”
“Fine, we’ll do business!” Sammy said, as Gaylen moved a bit closer for a better look. “I’ll make this… really minor… thing I’m asking worth your while. We have a shipment coming in, three days from now. I’ll cut your boys to the east in, and-”
A branch snapped under Gaylen’s foot, and Sammy’s head snapped around in a very rodent-like fashion.
“Oh, you’re alive, you wet fart?!” he snarled. “Call my boys!” he shouted to the men in the window, as he then broke into a run.
He headed into the north-west, and with no immediate reaction from the window, Gaylen gave chase. Sammy led him through the outskirts of this hamlet or cluster, past more houses that didn’t have the look of being homes, and then hopped down a short flight of stairs down onto lower ground. It was some sort of paved lot, hemmed in on at least two sides by a tall fence of metal bars. A single light shone down upon it, from the roof’s edge of a nearby storage house. Sammy cut to the left, towards a gate, and vanished behind a row of trees.
Gaylen skipped the stairs and just cut left on top of the bank. He poured his strength into a burst of extra speed; just a few seconds outperforming Sammy, then made the leap down. He went down between the trees, the momentum carried him over concrete bursting apart with roots, and he T-boned Sammy, leading with his crossed forearms.
It hurt both of them, of course, but Gaylen was ready for it. Sammy wasn’t, and was thrown to the side. He landed on his hip, sort of rolled, with both legs going up in the air for a moment, before coming to a stop on his back.
Gaylen stepped over and gave him a tap on the jaw, before he grabbed the man by the front of the jacket and pulled him up a little.
“So, where were you going, man?”
He shook him.
“Go on. Where do you rats have your little hideaway? That guy said it wasn’t far.”
“You…” Sammy mumbled, and Gaylen gave him another shake. “You…”
“Yeah.”
Sammy kicked with a sudden burst of vigour. Gaylen fell back, and the back of Sammy’s head fell onto the concrete before he could switch to supporting his own weight.
The man didn’t let it stop him, and scrambled back his feet with another flailing, angry burst of energy. A knife came out from beneath that green jacket, and the man waved it through the air as if he were showing off a piece of craft, blissfully unaware of the tracker Gaylen had planted in his clothes.
“You’re all alone this time, butthole!” Sammy growled, though there was a heavy wheeze to it after all that running.
“Likeways,” Gaylen pointed out, as he stepped out of immediate lunging range.
“Hah.”
The man stared at him with hatred Gaylen knew very, very well, but after a couple of silent moments it parted a bit, showing a confused horror underneath.
“What is going on?” the Green Jacket demanded to know. “What the HELL is going on?”
“You’re the local,” Gaylen said. “You tell me.”
“I’m not local!” Sammy told him. “I’m not one of these backwater, tribal, ignorant - oh, Drebb!”
Gaylen looked, and took a couple more steps back away from Sammy. The man from the window had come down to join them, along with two others. They weren’t put off by the sight of violence, but then Gaylen hadn’t expected them to be.
“So, what’s all this?” Drebb said, and Gaylen wasn’t sure which of them he was talking to.
“This… is a bit of pest control, Drebb!” Sammy said, putting on a sudden brave face. “Why don’t you help me step on him?”
“Hm.”
Drebb and his comrades were about twenty metres away. They didn’t have weapons out, but Gaylen would eat his shoes if they weren’t packing something. He thought about his own gun. If they didn’t have firearms, then brandishing it might make this all very simple. But if they did have them, then theirs were presumably in working order.
“Well, give me a comm already, at least!” Sammy demanded. “Just to make a call! You came out here already, anyway!”
Drebb made that “Hm” noise again, and reached into a pocket. Out came a small object that he tossed the distance. Sammy tried to catch it with his off-hand, fumbled the job, and had to pick it off the ground, cussing quietly under his breath as he did so.
“Really?” he then mumbled, as he took in the little stick-comm he’d been given. “This is… whatever.”
“And you…” Drebb said to Gaylen. “You’re on our territory. What’s all this about?”
“A quick thing, and then I’m gone,” Gaylen told him, through the stern, emotionless front he’d long since learned to put up. “Forever.”
“Forever…” Drebb repeated. “Oh, I don’t know,” he then said, as Sammy struggled with the tiny buttons on the stick-comm. “I think we-”
He was lifted off the ground. And before he could even yell, the front of his torso was torn open. Only then did Gaylen see the thing. The others saw it too. Both screamed. One went for a weapon, while the other bolted. The latter made it a few steps before those long, strange legs caught up with him, and fingers or claws or something dug into his back. The other one latched onto his waist, and tore him in two.
Gaylen ran. He heard two plasma shots behind him, accompanied by a desperate scream as those strange footsteps descended on the remaining man. Sammy ran too, towards that gate, and beat Gaylen to it.
From behind came a third, horrid rending noise, while in front Sammy slammed the gate shut. Before Gaylen could reach him, the man worked his knife into the lock, then backed away.
“Ha-HAW, asshole!” the man exclaimed shrilly, before he turned and ran.
Gaylen grabbed the handle and pulled and shook it with all his strength, but the crude bar on the other side held. He tried putting his arm through the bars, but couldn’t quite reach the knife. And then the thing was coming up behind him, and time was up.
Instinct, just instinct, guided him to the right, and into a dive. The thing’s arm came in a wide swipe, and sparks flew from the metal as claws chipped it. Gaylen finished a roll that ended with him back on his feet and in motion. And he ran, with the thing back on his heels. He ran away from the gate and into the unknown.