The crow sat on Bee’s shoulder as she jogged down the never-ending corridor. It squawked and pecked at her earlobe, as though to remind her to go faster, faster, faster. The light bobbed along above her, casting its ghostly light over the walls and distorting her shadow grotesquely long. Bee was just glad it hadn’t winked out.

She caught up with Pigeon in a rough hollow of earth that had been dug out of the side of the corridor, a chamber of some indeterminate purpose. The Jeweler stood above the corpse of a creature, poking at it with one foot.

The wretcher, Bee presumed. Didn’t look so fearsome dead. Then again, few things did. It was a tall, pale, hairless humanoid clad in a tattered robe. Its head was unnaturally large and split into two sloping lobes at the top. Sort of like…

It looked like it had a ballsack for a head. Once the thought came to her, there was no way she could unsee it.

“Well, that takes care of that, I guess,” Bee said to announce her coming. Not that the sound of her boots slapping on stone as she came up had been subtle.

Pigeon spared a glance back at her. “Took you long enough.” She held out her arm, and the familiar hopped from Bee onto her wrist, then sidled up onto the Jeweler's shoulder and began tugging on her hair.

“I got held up,” Bee replied.

“Well, whatever.” Pigeon brushed past into the corridor and beckoned her to follow. “Come along, now. We’re not done here quite yet.”

“What else is there?”

“More killing to be done. You’ll see.”

Bee remembered Will saying that they needed the wretcher’s corpse, so she went over and kneeled by the thing. It looked to have died of blood loss from half a dozen stab wounds, but luckily Pigeon had left it largely intact, rather than vaporize it or some such.

She managed to get the corpse draped over her shoulders. It was lighter than it looked, but the limbs were long enough that they kept getting in the way, flopping all over the place. Pigeon did not wait around for her, already continuing down the corridor. Bee swore as she wrestled with her dead new friend trying to keep up.

On they went. Bee’s light sputtered into a shower of white sparks, vanishing, and the one Pigeon kept was left their sole source of illumination.

They ran and ran, until suddenly… they reached a dead end. A collapse had tumbled down an impenetrable wall of rock blocking the passage. A small group of amalgams toiled to clear the obstruction, hauling away stone and clawing at gravelly soil. Bee thought she could detect panic in their insistent howling. They knew that they were not in for a fun time.

Jerking up at the light, one of them turned to face Bee and Pigeon as they came down the corridor. An ugly, pig-nosed creature with a pair of drooping breasts that leaked an off-yellow fluid from the nipples. It had a large, gravid belly scored with claw marks.

“The wretcher’s breeding stock,” Pigeon murmured. “It was buying time for them to escape in the hope that they would continue its putrid line.”

Bee struggled with the concept of a pregnant zombie, found that it upset her stomach, and forced herself to stop thinking about it. “It… sacrificed itself for its children?”

“Yes. Rather altruistic of it, I suppose. Admirable. I’m sure the Mother of Monsters is very proud. Anyway, would you like to do the honors?”

Sensing that their struggles were of no use, the other amalgams ceased digging and joined the first, facing the newcomers. There were six of them. They did not appear aggressive. Their bodies were slight, deer-like. Not created for combat. An infant was actively tearing its way through one of them, ripping a hole through the flesh of its stomach with half a pale head sticking out. The lucky mother did not appear to register any pain from the traumatic damage.

The ladies were about ready to pop, apparently.

Good thing we got here when we did, I guess. I don’t want to imagine another half-dozen of these things wandering around the interior.

Bee let her charge drop to the floor and reached for her sword. With a sigh, she stepped forward. “I guess I’ll do it, yeah.”

She felt queasy, sour bile at the back of her throat. There was something innately wrong about killing a pregnant woman. These things weren’t women. of course. They were beasts. A blight on the land.

But they weren’t completely different, either. Bee could see the fear in their foggy, lightless eyes. The wretcher had died in vain to protect them.

The first one struggled only weakly when Bee took hold of it by the throat. She yanked it off its feet, onto the ground, and caved its head in with two hard stomps. Its pregnant belly popped and deflated like a puffball mushroom when she stepped on it. She thought she could hear a weak gurgle from inside.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The others shrank back into a corner, pressing themselves flat against the fallen debris and huddling close together.

“I’m sorry to say, but you’re way too ugly to guilt trip me,” she said, confident that they couldn’t understand her anyway.

The others went the way of the first. They died screaming.

Their pleading eyes did not stay her hand. Neither did the weak thrashing of their unholy children.

But she did feel a little bit bad.

By the time she was finished, Pigeon had regenerated an AP crystal. She used Compress to draw all the rubble together into a solid sphere about a meter across. It thumped to the floor with an impact so heavy it rattled the floor and made pebbles jump. Her maneuver left them enough space to squeeze past and continue along the corridor.

*****

Will sat on a rock, digging dried blood out from under his fingernails. There wasn’t much he could do except try his best to stay awake through the exhaustion that battered against him. It grew stronger with every moment he resisted, a throng of tempting imps that weighed down his limbs and pulled on his eyelids.

He kept his mind trained on the bond between him and Bee. Monitoring. Making sure she was okay. Okay being a relative term. She had taken some damage, but she was still alive, at the very least. It seemed to have been dicey for a while, plenty of pain coming her way, but now she was doing a bit better. Nothing distressing for a while.

<> she reported after way too long. <>

Her message was concluded with the mental equivalent of a wink. Will managed a tired smile at that. Fighting didn’t energize him the way it did her. It took something out of him.

He knew he’d be having nightmares about this for a good long while.

Will relayed the good news to the others, draped across rocks and tree trunks. No one was in any better shape than him. Disregarding the dead chimps, Nix had gotten the worst of it, laid out on the ground with Mongrel sitting by her side to offer some comfort. There wasn’t much they could do except let her rest.

Pigeon came first bounding into their ragged little circle, but Wíll felt Bee close by. She caught up not a minute later, a frightfully ugly corpse draped across her, its elongated hands and feet dragging over the ground. She deposited it at Will’s feet and held up a tired peace sign, panting.

“One wretcher, as promised,” she said. “And don’t you say I never give you anything nice.”

Will would have liked to examine the thing, harvest some of his parts, but his tiredness outweighed his curiosity by far. He only managed to blink tiredly at the body, not taking in a thing about it. He didn’t even feel happy.

“Good job,” he worked out. “I’m happy you’re safe.” Looking Bee over, she didn’t look too badly hurt. Worse than Pigeon, who didn’t have a scratch on her. Barely looked tired as she moved to a bare patch of ground and began assembling small stones into a circle.

“Best we leave before any stragglers catch up with us,” the Jeweler said without looking up from her task. “Those who don’t want to be left behind, I suggest you make ready.”

Bee dragged Will to his feet and brushed a severed ear from his shoulder. He hadn’t even noticed it.

“Poor baby,” she said with an exaggerated pout. “We’ll find you a nice spot to nap, don’t you worry.”

Bee was tired, too, but not like he was. She was still enjoying herself on some level. He felt a tiny bit annoyed about that. Her intentionally patronizing tone of voice didn’t help.

Before Pigeon could finish her circle, there was movement among the trees. It was Oatmeal who called it out, leveling his shotgun at the shambling form. Will should have noticed it, but at that moment he doubted he would notice if someone smacked him upside the head.

Nix tried to get up, but Mongrel held her down. She let him, head slumped on his leg.

“Wait,” Bee said once the amalgam got closer, and pushed the barrel of Oatmeal’s gun towards the ground. “That one’s friendly. I think.”

Will had no idea what she meant by that, but didn’t have the energy to question it, either.

It was the biggest amalgam Will had seen, batting smaller trees out of its path as it came running at them, dragging an injured leg behind it. Will took an instinctive, staggering step back as it got closer, but Bee stayed put. The creature’s leg gave out before it reached her, and it fell gracelessly belly first some two meters in front of her.

It had the head of a bear and the body of a… troll, maybe? Something big, anyway. It flopped over onto its back, and it stuck an axe into the air.

The weapon looked comically diminutive in its great fist. Will instinctively fumbled for a weapon, didn’t find one, until he realized after several seconds that the amalgam wasn’t attacking. It held the weapon out to Bee. Waiting for her to take it.

She did. The amalgam clasped its clumsy hands in prayer. Begging for mercy. Its dull black eyes contained only horror and pain.

“The wretcher took him,” Bee explained without looking back, spinning the axe around and around in her hand. “Gug. Fused him with the bear I fought. Made this thing. I guess it doesn’t like its new existence much.”

Ah. The creature wasn’t begging to be spared. It was begging to die.

Will strained his tired, gritty eyes, and sure enough, the thing did have a sheet that matched Gug’s. The AP crystals were as black and dead as the creature itself.

Bee raised the axe over her head in both hands, as though to chop a log.

“Hold on,” Pigeon said with a sigh.

Bee lowered the weapon a hair, hesitant. She glanced back. “Huh? What?”

Pigeon did not reply straight away. There was a faint buzzing. Something rattled beneath her vest. She sighed once more, rubbing at her eyes. “All of you, give me a minute with that thing. Clear out.”

Will glanced around and got a crowd of quizzical looks in return. Seconds dragged out into an awkwardly long silence. Since no one wanted to ask the obvious question, Will volunteered. “Why?”

Pigeon spun on one clog to face him. She smiled, but there was nothing happy about it. Like a predator showing teeth. ‘Back off’, it seemed to say.

“Just a theory I want to try out,” she said. “It won’t take long. We’ll be out of here soon.” She watched him patiently. That was all she was going to give him. Basically nothing.

His annoyance at being displaced with no good explanation was almost great enough to overpower his healthy fear of that woman. Almost.

Go fuck yourself on a pike, he said in his mind.

“Fine,” he grumbled out loud. “Come on. Everyone, get up.”