I knelt by the girl and held out a hand, flicking my fingers impatiently. “Give me your cloak,” I said, furrowing my brows in concentration.

The young orc woman lay on her back, eyes still closed. Her chest rose and fell slowly. Beneath her, the spider silk cocoon had been slit down one side and unwrapped from her body into a sort of hammock-shaped piece of fibrous cloth.

“Ha.”

I looked up. “What?”

The grey-skinned warrior was looking down at me like I’d said something amusing.

“She needs clothes,” I told him. “Or something, at least.” I knew it wasn’t strictly necessary, from a survivalist standpoint. But like I’ve said… clothes are what separate us from the monsters.

The duergar huffed another sharp laugh and narrowed his eyes. “You suppose I would give up my only cloak for an orc?” He shook his head. “No, elf. Do not push my tolerance.”

I blinked, stunned. “Seriously?” I frowned, now, as the duergar hugged the garment tighter around his body. “You want me to just lug her around completely naked?”

He shrugged. “You are the one who wishes to keep her,” he grunted. “Clothe the savage yourself.”

I gritted my teeth. If I had something, I would have used it, I wanted to snap. But I was in no mood to bicker. And I got the feeling that the duergar and I were already treading on thin ice as far as the orc girl was concerned. “Fine…” I muttered. Just perfect.

We didn’t have a ton of time. More spiders could arrive at any minute, and I could tell the warrior was growing nervous. His eyes darted this way and that, scanning the shadows above. His fingers twitched on the haft of his axe, which he had pulled free from its sheath.

I focused, forcing my mind back into old, familiar patterns. Assets.

I looked down at my own clothes. I was wearing a pair of pants. They might have been white to begin with, but now they were dirty, stained with blood and dark ichor and spatters of other… even less appealing bodily fluids. I remembered falling to my hands and knees and heaving, my body overwhelmed with pain. The pants tucked into my only other clothes, the pair of supple leather boots that sheathed me from foot to mid-calf. They looked like something a swashbuckler would wear. Neither option, though, would help me with my orc problem. The pants didn’t have enough cloth to wrap around her body, and they were too disgusting, anyhow.

“We must go,” the duergar muttered impatiently, shifting his weight from foot to foot.  

“If you would just help me—"

“Leave her, then,” he said sharply. “I care not.”

Fuck. He was right about one thing, at least. There wasn’t time.  Maybe clothes would have to wai—… Ah. My eyes lit on something and I stuck out my hand again. “Knife,” I grunted.

Nothing.

I looked up. “It will take five times as long if I try to use my spear,” I snapped. “Do you want to get out of here or not?”

The duergar narrowed his eyes. Shiing. The hilt of the knife stung as he slapped it down in my palm.

“Thank you,” I muttered, and then went to work.

*             *             *

We jogged through dark tunnels, my head constantly ducking to dodge low ceilings and outcroppings. Ahead of me, the duergar warrior swish-clinked through the gloom. His axe was out again, swinging in one pumping hand. Heavy boots thud-thud-thudded into the stone.

The curvaceous, evergreen-skinned orc girl I had flung over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry bounced and jostled. I didn’t mind. Her luscious curves were soft. One of my hands gripped an athletic thigh while her hair fell across my bare shoulder. The other gripped the haft of my warspear.

Wrapped around the girl’s body, long strips of spider silk made up a sort of primal covering. I’d sliced several strips with the duergar’s knife, tying one long piece of cloth across her round, perky breasts and behind her back. It served to cover her nipples, though it was generous with the side boob, under boob and cleavage. I cannot comment on whether or not that was intentional. Another several strips I’d knotted together so I could wrap a makeshift loincloth around her hips and between her thighs. I might be a Cro-Magnon when it came to gorgeous women, but I wasn’t some sort of perv. In fact, as much as I wished I could enjoy the sensation of a beautiful female pressed close to my body... I couldn’t.

I was worried about her.

Worrying about a third party went against all the instincts I’d developed in the past two years — and every time I’d done it, things had ended poorly — but I’d seen the twin fang-marks in her chest when we’d cut free the silken cocoon. They were dark, angry wounds, and her skin was clammy against mine.

The girl mumbled something near my ear, once again in that language I didn’t know. But I forced myself to ignore her feverish murmurs so I could consider something else. Burdened though I was, I kept the dwarf in sight, my long legs and agility making up for my general clueless as I blundered after him.

And that’s what bothered me. Well, it was one of the many bothersome things that queued up to punch my general anxiety up a couple notches. Like someone had taped a “Kick Me” sign to the Worry button in my brain. And this particular issue happened to be first in line.

 I had no idea where we were going.

Home? the duergar had said. But what did that mean? Back to the castle that the girl and I had so recently escaped? I didn’t think so.

I might not have any idea where we were, but I could tell that we were heading down. The air was growing warmer, stiller, staler. Passages branched aimlessly, natural tunnels through the rock worn by millennia of dripping condensation. At one point, we flashed through some sort of corridor, chiseled from the living stone. Then I ducked past a rusted brazier half-ripped from the wall, under a cracked archway. Like that, the tiny, forgotten sliver of civilization was gone again. The duergar moved fast through the twisting stone entrails of the earth, like he knew where he was going. It lent credence to the theory that was rapidly developing in my mind — like me, the pale-skinned warrior was a survivor.

I ticked off points in favor of this theory: His possessions, even his ragged old cloak, were precious. Check. He was distrustful of outsiders to the point of violence. Double check. And he had gone up against a formidable opponent all by himself. Something told me that hadn’t been by choice. He had been out on his own. And he had been hunted.

But what did all of this tell me about him? Was he some sort of outcast? An exile? Lost? And why was he helping me?

The other duergar I’d met — admittedly a poor sampling — had seemed more of the torture, rape and pillage variety. A sort of anti-dwarf, as far as my preconceived notions of dwarves went. But if this one was on his own, at least, I could begin to interpret his actions. As a Survivor myself, I knew that there was one thing in which I could trust: self-interest and pragmatism.

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Fortune had thrown us together. The duergar would be a fool to hurt me when I’d proven myself a useful ally. In addition, there was the whole Undying thing. Obviously he was impressed. Or calculating. Likely, he figured he could somehow make use of me.

The woman, on the other hand, could easily be seen as a liability. Hell, I would have looked at her as a liability if I hadn’t already invested so much time, energy, pain and ingenuity in trying to keep her alive. My other comrade had no such investment. Maybe he saw things clearer than I did. Maybe I was just blinded by this silly hero instinct that had been starting to creep up inside me.

Should I be worried?

But I shelved the idea for a moment and checked in with my body. I expected to be breathing heavily, sweating buckets in the strangely thick air. Instead, I was surprised to find that even though we’d been loping for a solid fifteen minutes I was nowhere near winded. I had been in good shape back home. I needed to be. But I still hated cardio, like any normal human being. And the only time I’d ever run while carrying another person…

I wasn’t strong enough.

I swallowed, hesitated in my stride, and felt the boneless body jouncing across my shoulders. A familiar sensation. My mind flashed with blood and sunlight and dusty sweat and the ravenous sounds of—

No.

I clamped down and sprang ahead, following the clinking chainmail tunic as it scraped around another bend. I shoved my thoughts into a box and locked the box. Then I put that box in another box. And then I smashed that box with a hammer.

Instantly, I felt lighter. Compartmentalizing my emotions might not win me any awards for Most Well-Adjusted Apocalypse Survivor. But then again, I might win something if all the emotionally sensitive contestants were dead. My burden was nothing. I felt like I could run forever. My feet were barely touching the rough ground, and my legs were tireless.

I ran without thinking, without feeling, without questioning.

For a brief, blissful moment.

Silence.

*             *             *

I jogged to a halt beside the duergar. I shifted the orc girl on my shoulders, tossed strands of flowing white hair from my face with a flick of my head, and cursed softly, wonderingly. I couldn’t think of anything appropriately snarky to say, so instead I just stared.

The tunnel mouth spilled out onto a jutting ledge, the crumbling stone parapet evidence that — at one time or another — some sort of civilization had claimed this world of stone as their home. We had arrived at the edge of a massive cavern. The space was gigantic, looming, empty. Large enough to house half a dozen football stadiums with room to spare. It was split down the middle by a huge crevasse, probably a hundred yards across, which ran from one end of the cave to the other. And, for the first time since I’d left the flickering, torchlit bedchamber of Duergar Central, I could see in color.

Blueish, greenish, whitish light shone from the walls like abstract patterns stitched from the aurora borealis. I couldn’t tell if it was glowing rock, phosphorescent moss or just the flowing light of embedded stars, but I imagined it’s how the night sky would look if all the constellations moved a couple hundred thousand light years closer. And then threw a rave.

The stocky warrior was panting, hands on his knees, glancing up at me as I looked around with dumbstruck wonder. “Nearly there,” he muttered gruffly.

I nodded, unable to keep my mouth closed. Instead of speaking, I followed his pointing finger with my eyes. Down the staircase carved directly into the curved stone wall, along a broad, paved path and right to the edge of the monstrous crack in the cavern floor.

There, arcing out over the abyss, was the bridge.

“Holy shit…”

“Aye.” A whisper that was almost reverent.

It was so wide that you could have fit four lanes of highway traffic. Plus room for shoulders. It arched gracefully, up in a shallow curve that rose a dozen, two dozen feet. And then, abruptly, ended. Almost exactly at the midpoint of the overpass, the stone broke off in a jagged fracture. The remains of a central building that bisected the bridge — something between a guard tower and a toll booth — tottered right on the edge of the saw-toothed brink. The rest of the arch continued, after twenty yards of empty air, the shattered stonework as ragged as a fresh wound. It was punctuation. An exclamation point dragging your eyes from the masterful masonry and natural splendor of the cavern. A question mark demanding that you wonder what on earth had split the bridge in half.

After another moment, the pale-skinned dwarf shouldered his axe and thumped carefully to his left, down the worn stairs. I followed. It was clear where we were going.

The stairs were larger, higher than they looked, and we descended several stories before reaching the flat expanse of the cavern’s floor. Everything, in fact, seemed larger than I’d expected. Like I was a tiny little creature that had entered this place through a mouse hole and with each step was finding the world to be bigger than I’d anticipated. On either side of the path, I could see flat, shimmering patches of what turned out to be sparse, sparkling plant life. The plant colonies spread out along the ground and looked as delicate as lace, filmy like crawling cobwebs. Fragile enough to tear at the faintest breeze.

Only here the air was still, quiet and oh-so-heavy. The gentle flutter of Webster’s quiet wingbeats was the only sound beyond our quiet footfalls. The great weight of all that air seemed to press down around us, and our group suddenly seemed indescribably small. I’d experienced something like this in the city, back on Earth. The crushing sensation of surrounding emptiness, like you’re the only thing around for miles that is alive and breathing and thinking your tiny thoughts.

I was grateful when we stepped onto the bridge. Stone beneath my feet felt real, and the rising bridge lifted me away from the strip of alien landscape we’d just crossed. The duergar led me up the center of the arcing structure, avoiding the remnants of shattered stone balustrades and split paving stones that had been obscured by distance. Up close, it was obvious that whatever had sundered the bridge had shaken the structure to its foundations.

“What happened?” The question seemed mandatory, and it came out in a hoarse whisper. I felt like speaking too loud would disturb something, shift an invisible balance. And not in our favor.

But the duergar simply stumped ahead.

When we arrived at the central building, I realized the walls of the structure had been dwarfed by the size of the chasm and the bridge itself. The wall might have been crumbling, but it still stood two or three times my height, and the single layer of windows indicated that it was all one level. The wall ran the entire width of the bridge, broken by three gaping archways that I imagined were tall and wide enough to allow for some sort of vehicular traffic. What was the fantasy equivalent of a semi-truck?

The final quarter of the wall was more built out, obviously some sort of guard house or administrative arrangement. There was a big, raw opening like a missing tooth, badly in need of a door, and my guide paused at the threshold before I could see inside.

His shoulders hunched forward. Like he was thinking. Or praying. And then he raised his head and stepped through. Beyond, the bridge continued for another twenty or thirty feet before the pitiless drop.

Immediately, I could tell that the duergar warrior had been living here for some time. A ring of charred stones, a tripod of old iron and a sprinkling of ash indicated the fire pit. There was a small black kettle next to it, half the spout broken off. A ragged bedroll, a shallow metal pan that hadn’t yet been washed, a spoon and a knife and a bent fork. The short fighter stood to one side, his face twisted in an expression somewhere between nervousness and pride.

“Nice place,” I muttered, since it was the polite thing to do. And he did have a pretty big axe.

The duergar grunted, ducking his chin into his beard. A nod of acknowledgement?

But I had more important things on my mind than his feelings. I knelt by the fire pit and gently rolled the girl onto the bedroll, sighing as the tension of her weight left my shoulders. My spear I set gently on the stone. I looked at the young woman for a long moment. In the soft, glowing light of thousands of underground star-plants, her features struck me as lovely, beautiful even. Alluring, in a foreign kind of way.

But that’s not why I was doing this. I shook my head, clearing those thoughts away. It was an honor thing. An obligation. I was man enough to admit that she’d helped me out of a pretty gnarly situation when I arrived. I was just… returning the favor. As it were.

My eyes traced down her throat and across her collarbone. They started to journey lower but my instincts picked something up before my gaze could reach the swell of her chest. My glance flicked back up to her neck. My breath seized.

There was no pulse.

Shit. The fang marks were dark and angry, and now I could see tiny veins of dark purple and black spreading out beneath her skin.

I looked around wildly. Shit shit shit.

The duergar lived here. Surely he had some dusty old potion bottles. A book of spells. A rack of healing herbs, at the very least. Lonely hermits always had those, didn’t they? “Do you know medicine?” I demanded, my voice strained. My eyes, I’m sure, were hot. Helplessly angry.

The pale dwarf grunted and shrugged, scratching his beard thoughtfully. The tattoos on his knuckles were dark blue against his alabaster skin. “Why?”

I pressed my ear to the woman’s chest, fingers groping desperately at her wrist. Nothing.

No! This couldn’t be happening.

Not again.

“She’s not breathing.”