The Ardoon King Read online

  Chapter 25: Monstrosity

  As the sergeant had reported, the block room inside the cave was concave and took up the entirety cavity, aside from the tunnel that led to the surface. Ben, Vedeus, and two squads of Peth stood inside the chamber while others guarded the approach. All wore helmet lights. Being below the frost line, the bodies and severed organs had continued to decay and were in a much worse state than those Ben had encountered in the frozen temple in Cash. The smell was not overbearing, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant.

  He noted that the Ardoon bodies, or what was left of them, were much more decayed than the Peth bodies.

  “Okay,” said Ben, spinning in a slow circle as he examined his surroundings. His words echoed off the tall block walls. “The bodies inside here have been ripped to shreds, the same as the bodies outside. Big difference from Cash. The bodies there were intact. Also, there’s no black paint here. Just exposed block.” Running a hand along the seams between the blocks he said, “This is not a real wall. It’s just a bunch of blocks stacked atop one another.”

  “I do not understand, Anax,” said Vedeus. “It appears to be a wall.”

  “Well, yeah, but, there’s no mortar between the blocks, see? I doubt there’s grout or rebar inside them. These walls, if you want to call them that, have no structural value. That being the case, what’s the point? Why was this faux wall built? Aesthetics? I don’t think so.”

  He wanted to extract one of the blocks but couldn’t see how to do that without bringing the ones above tumbling down. Then in a “duh” moment he saw the aluminum ladders strewn about. Some were oddly deformed but some were intact. “Vedeus, have Peth tear down a section of wall.”

  “As you say, Anax.”

  Vedeus organized a detail of men which raised three of the ladders and began tearing down a segment of the eastern wall. Four rows had been removed when the Peth commander said, “Do you smell that?”

  Ben, who had been watching the start of the demolition, turned toward him and sniffed, then sniffed again. “Yeah, it’s sort of an ozone smell.”

  Their helmet lights flickered. All of them.

  “That can’t be a good thing,” Ben said. “Hurry up!” he yelled at the men on the ladders.

  The Peth responded, throwing the blocks to the muddy floor instead of handing them down, as they had been doing. One block landed on the head of a corpse and crushed its skull with a sickly crunching sound. The smell of ozone grew stronger. The helmet lights flickered again, this time staying off for a longer period.

  The mud on the chamber floor began to vibrate. Bubbles formed and popped.

  “Vedeus,” said Ben, “get the troops out of here. Tell them to use the vehicles for protection and to face the cave entrance!”

  The Peth was of the same mind, and gave the order. When the last Peth had scrambled down to the cave floor from the block wall, Ben seized one of the abandoned ladders and began climbing up.

  “Anax!” shouted a confused and horrified Vedeus. “We must leave!”

  “Give me a second,” Ben said, feeling the floor’s vibration resonate through the ladder. This probably isn’t smart, he told himself. Still, he finished his climb, and, at the top, poked his head over the edge of a section of wall that had been partially disassembled.

  “Anax, please!”

  Now the ozone smell was nauseating and Ben could feel every hair on his body standing on end. He moved his head left and right, scanning the narrow, dark cavity between the block wall and the adjacent cave wall.

  “Anax!”

  Just as Ben was ready to give up, he saw the glowing script. The glyphs.

  “Ah, shit…” grumbled. He lifted the Cicada and captured a digital image of one glyph, then another.

  Seconds later, the chamber shook violently and his ladder was thrown backwards. As he fell, the Ardoon king had visions of his head busting open against the cavern floor. Instead, he found himself lying in a pool of muck, a skeletal arm around his neck.

  “God almighty!” he yelled, seeing the dismembered appendage. He tried to rise, but the muck held him in place. The vibration was incessant now.

  Vedeus hoisted him up and the skeletal arm fell off into the murky waters. A group of Peth appeared and the shaken group made its way to the cave entrance.

  “Grab the Cicada!” Ben yelled, pointing at the glowing tablet that had fortuitously landed in a soft patch of mud.

  Vedeus obeyed, and they scrambled toward the cave’s exit.

  “We’ve got trouble,” said Ben when they could again see the stars above their heads.

  The smell of ozone was omnipresent now. As if to confirm the king’s warning, there was a roar from inside the cave. The warriors manning the perimeter were hurriedly realigning themselves to face the cave entrance, all taking positions either under or inside the abandoned vehicles, which conveniently formed a perfect circle.

  Ben and Vedeus took refuge in in the front of a boxy gray Volvo. The windows of this vehicle, like those of almost all the others, had been shattered, and the car offered little protection against the painfully cold winds that rushed across the plains from the north. The moon’s light bounced from the snow and gave the world a surreal blue tint.

  There was another roar from the cave, and the Peth that formed the perimeter looked at each other nervously. Though they were expert warriors who would die fighting, like any humans, when faced with the unknown, they feared it. The sound of the thing in the cave definitely qualified as “unknown.” The roars were utterly alien, like a mix between a whale’s call and the roar of a lion.

  The air began crackle with static electricity.

  Ben readied the Cicada, which was in camera mode. “Okay. Here we go…”

  The thing crawling up from the cave announced its presence with a hundred and fifty decibel roar. When its emerging silhouette partially obstructed their view of the stars, the appointed Peth popped flares. Curses and gasps filled the air. The thing was a writhing abomination with an appearance was so grotesque that, were it self-aware, it would have ended its own miserable life.

  The creature had the appearance of a thick tube laid on its side. Perhaps forty feet long and twenty feet in diameter, its body consisted of only razor-sharp ribs encased in hundreds of writhing, undulating pink tendons that were shiny with a pungent slime. The ribs were as long and broad as a man’s thigh and were interconnected every few feet by knots of muscle. There was nothing else between the ribs, and no internal organs, which meant it was possible to see through the creature’s undulating mass, just as one could look directly through a skeleton’s rib cage.

  The ribs expanded and contracted as the thing crawled on its belly from the cave. It had no head or tail, but there was a hardened shell the size of a bowling ball visible inside the thing, near where the top of a spine might have been, if it had had one. Protruding from that deformation were dozens of serpentine antennae that were in perpetual motion, and a trunk, like an elephant’s trunk, but plumper and shorter, which was connected to an air bladder the size of a life raft. It was from that trunk that the thing emitted its ungodly roar.

  As soon as it emerged from the cave, the creature lifted its front half into the air, its body taking the shale of a fat “L”. Its internal antennae darted about in all directions before collecting together and pointing at something in the clearing.

  A Peth.

  “What the hell is he doing?” screamed Ben, lowering the Cicada and slamming a hand into the Volvo’s dash. “We don’t need any heroes! Damn it!”

  The Peth moved toward the thing, blasting away with his assault rifle. There was no reason for him to aim. The thing was too damn big to miss, or should have been. His problem was that the creature was nothing more than a giant pipe composed of widely spaced bones, which meant the vast majority of his bullets sailed harmlessly through it.

  The creature contracted its ribs until its body was almost solid and then pushed its forward half out, like an inchworm mig
ht. As the Peth released one magazine and reached for another, the monster lifted its front half into the air and, with a roar, fell atop the Peth. A razor-sharp rib severed the man’s left arm on impact. The soldier dropped to his knees, screaming.

  Almost immediately, the abomination contracted, squeezing its ribs together and snapping off the man’s legs. The soldier fell forward as the creature expanded, and was chopped into smaller pieces upon the next contraction. Arms, legs, hands, feet, torso, and head could be seen scattered about the bloody snow inside the beast.

  “Gods!” screamed Vedeus. “How do we fight such a devil?”

  When he’d recovered from his shock, Ben yelled, “You and I need to get back into the cave. I need to see what’s written on the walls.”

  A Peth in an abandoned farm tractor slowly opened the cabin door - it was one of the newer, air-conditioned models, with GPS, not that such amenities mattered anymore - and fired a burst into the air. The creature roared and began to slink towards her.

  “Let’s go!” yelled Ben, and he and Vedeus opened their doors, fell onto the frozen ground, and began running toward the cave entrance.

  As they did, the creature reared up and slammed itself onto the top of the tractor, shaking it violently. The monster constricted and off popped an exhaust pipe, the mirrors, the extended lights, and an antenna. It roared, expanded, and constricted again, and this time the cabin’s roof began to buckle, as if squeezed by a hydraulic vise. The windshield shattered under the pressure and the woman inside screamed and began vainly firing at the creature. A few of her rounds bounced off the things slimy ribs. Most sailed cleanly between them. Shooting at it was like shooting at chicken wire.

  Ben and Vedeus slipped over the edge of the cave’s entrance and began sliding down the tunnel toward the block chamber. The cacophony of gunfire above grew louder as the Peth in the other vehicles engaged the monster in a desperate bid to lure the creature away from the tractor the woman trapped inside.