Descent: Part Nine

Around us, the inky darkness muttered. Grinding choking sounds, like sharp stones being scrapped across glass, crept out of the shadows beyond the flare of my flashlight to wrap around my brain. I knew what the beasts looked like now, their grey-scaled, almost human faces surrounded me in my mind’s eye, growing steadily closer, clawed, webbed hands grasped at me.

Mary did not look back. She moved forward, step after cautious step, head swivelling from side to side. I tried focusing on her, putting all my attention on her back just a few steps before me, but that only showed me the stains. I saw the bright red splotches on her shirt, and thought that maybe, just for a second, they were growing.

Shaking my head, I quick-stepped and put a hand on Mary’s shoulder. She turned her head, eyeing me sideways, concern obvious in the tight lines at the corners of her mouth. “I don’t want to get separated again,” I said, trying my best to smile reassuringly at her. It seemed to work, she smiled and turned her attention back to the darkness ahead of us.

Our footsteps echoed back at us, ringing in my ears. It nearly drowned out the shuffling sounds of the monsters in the dark. I strained my ears, trying desperately to know where the next attack might come from. Vaguely, questions rose and fell in time with my breath, trying to tear my attention away from the moment, trying to tear apart my mind.

I ignored them, I didn’t really care what the monsters were. I didn’t even care who or what Mr. Sage was, I just wanted to get out. That was the only thing in my mind, even Mary’s powerful shoulder under my hand was barely noticed.

Not running, hands over my head and screaming at the top of my lungs, took every drop of effort I had left. There was no room for anything else; I had to stay calm, stay present. Mary needed me, just as much as I needed her. I’m a sprinter, not a fighter, my skills include getting as far as possible as fast as possible. I’m not built for this kind of stress.

Without being aware of what I heard, I pivoted hard and brought my torch up and back down in a flash. The monster screamed, clawed hands flying up to cover its bulbous eyes, clawing at the hated light. Mary felt me turn, heard the scream, and shouted, “duck!” as she brought the heavy silver beagle around in a devastating arc that buried the dog’s nose in the beast’s head. Its scream cut off abruptly, replaced with a gurgle like broken glass in a garbage disposal.

Look at me, being useful. If only my hands could stop shaking so hard; Mary must feel it through where I still held her shoulder. There wasn’t really a way for her not to, I was trembling from head to toe, an autumn leaf caught in a gale, barely hanging on before being torn free and dashed on the ground. A laugh, the unhinged/crazy kind bubbled up in my throat, trying to break free.

The monster had gotten so close. Too close. But I’d heard it, and we’d dealt with it together. If only I could stop shaking.

“Amy,” Mary’s voice shook, my trembling must be worse than I thought if it was shaking her like that. “I need to see ahead, I think we’re getting close.”

Step after cautious step, I had no idea how long we had been walking. How big did I say the room was? Feels like you could drop a football field in it without touching the sides. I brought the light around and shone it over her shoulder. Its beam knifed into the dark, stopping barely two meters ahead of as though it hit a perfectly black wall. The kind that light didn’t bounce off of, what was it called? Vantablack? Hadn’t I read somewhere that if you painted a swimming pool with it you’d start the zombie apocalypse? Wait, no, focus.

“Is there a wall there?”

“Don’t think so,” cautiously, Mary stepped forward, cane extended. “Let’s be careful, eh?”

My breathing settled, she was so calm. Just her small smile, the one she threw over her shoulder at me as we walked into the dark, was enough to steady my hand on her shoulder. It still trembled, fear coursing through my veins as I shone my light around, trying to avoid a pattern so that the monsters couldn’t predict where it would shine next. The steady light sliced through the darkness, driving the shuffling feet further away with every sweep.

Steady? I double checked the hand holding the light. Steady as a rock, sweeping back and forth like a lighthouse warning ships way from hidden rocks. My other hand still shook, trembled with every step forward. It wasn’t me.

Squeezing Mary’s shoulder gently, I tried to give her the same sense of calm security she gave me. One of her hands released the cane for a moment, reaching up to touch mine for just a moment. It seemed to help, the constant trembling that shuddered up my arm steadied a tad, I smiled warmly at her back, forgetting my job for a second. I was helping, and her touch all but sizzled against my skin.

Once upon a time, I had heard that people who survived things like this desperately wanted human contact. They were taken with the crippling desire to prove to themselves that they survived. Images flashed in my mind at the thought, a hundred daydreams passing in an instant about how exactly she and I would find that proof. Only for a second until Mary shouted, “found it” as the cane’s tip clicked against the giant stone goblet.

“Give me the phone,” she said, turning to look at me, putting her back to the stone. “See if you can get it lit.”

Nodding, barely trusting myself to speak, I handed the phone over to her and pulled the other one out of the pocket where I’d put it earlier. Switching on the torch, I set it up on the lip of the basin and rifled through Mary’s blazer pockets. The matches had to be there somewhere, no way she would forget something like that. I started muttering prayers to a God I never believed in, begging that they were still there.

“Amy,” said Mary, her voice tight with constrained emotion. “I don’t want to rush you too much but…”

I didn’t look back. My fingers had just closed around the tiny, blessedly dry paper book. Drawing it out, I folded it open and nearly choked with glee. It was full, which told me two things: firstly, that I had a few chances to get this right, and second, that Mary probably wasn’t a secret smoker. Sasha once told me that kissing someone who smokes is one of the more disgusting thing she’s done. Sasha…

Shaking my head, I thrust Sasha out of my thoughts. I couldn’t think about that now. I couldn’t think about where she had gone, wonder if she was ok, or who the Hell Ms. Sherman was. Carefully, I plucked one of the tiny matches out of its nest and flipped the book over. From behind me, I could hear Mary swearing and the unmistakable *thuck!* of a cane cracking through a skull.

“Amy,” Mary’s voice was the wrong kind of steady. I touched the match to the striker on the back of its book and applied just a touch of pressure. “Amy, please,” another *thuck!* followed by a gurgling, broken glass groan and splat as something else hit the ground. “Hurry!”

Drawing the match across the striker with a swift flick of the wrist, I closed my eyes, hoping. Heat blazed against my fingers, I hadn’t realized how cold the room was before. It shocked me so much that I dropped the match. My eyes popped back open, catching the barest sight of it before its tiny, frail light winked out.

“Amy!” Whoosh, crack, splat. “Seriously, there’s too many of them!”

Hands trembling worse than ever now, I pulled an other match out of the book and laid its head against the striker. This time, this time for certain. God, if only I could keep steady. These cheap matchbooks are devils to work with.

My wrist flicked again, a deft movement practiced over years in the Parks with my parents. I was a natural, fucking born for this. I had to succeed.

The match broke in my fingers and I dropped it, no time to focus on the failures. Another match and a fourth went by. Mary screamed in wordless fury behind me, the sounds of combat growing louder, coming closer together. Something clattered and the shadows around me danced as Mary dropped the phone and took the cane in both hands, bellowing in rage.

Finally, a tiny orange flame flared in my fingers. I held my breath, fighting down the urge to cringe away from its light. Warm and alive, but terribly bright, sending needles of pain lancing through my eyes and into my brain. I raised the tiny torch, carefully held it over the rim of the basin and let it fall.

Suddenly, the idea of anything being in the basin to burn seemed laughable. We were being attacked by scaley fish-people with a magically de-aged teacher. What in Hell were we thinking? The fires that had been in the room were probably powered by the souls of children, what hope did we have of –

Light exploded out of the basin. A huge orange inferno that dwarfed the feeble flames which had ringed the room when we first entered. It blazed out of the basin at the back, flowing like a stream of lava to both sides and igniting the basins on right and left. Behind me, Mary screamed at the unexpected light and heat. Other things screamed too.

The wails of agony from the hoard of demons that waited in the shadows, suddenly exposed to the hated light, shot into my teeth like roofing nails down a blackboard. Like a knife’s high-pitched scream across a dinner plate. Both hands shot up to cover my ears as my eyes raced against the firelight, trying to close before I was completely blinded.

When I opened my eyes and uncovered my ears, Mary was standing before me, hands on knees, sucking in huge gasps. Around her feet, seven more bodies lay in crumpled heaps. They were nude, like all except the one in the tunic, and covered in greyish scales. Their enormous all black eyes were filmed, like spiderweb cracks across glass. Dead.

Mary sighed and slowly fell to one knee. Around us, the room was empty except for the dead. Scattered here and there, marking our trail like breadcrumbs through a forest, bodies lay with limbs at painful angles. It didn’t even seem that they had bones, except for one in a black tunic I could barely make out. It lay between us and the door through which our class, and with them Mr. Sage, had gone. Bags and Saint Martha’s blazers lay in scattered heaps around that door too, like they’d been dumped by fleeing refugees or something. I don’t think I heard the monsters disappear into the shadows. I couldn’t tell where they had gone, or where they had come from.

Turning my eyes away from the corpses scattered through the room, they landed on Mary where she knelt. Her sides heaved like a blacksmith’s bellows, and her breath wheezed out in painful sounding gasps. I sprinted to her side and reached for her, but she stopped me dead. “Wait. Don’t touch me yet.”

Slowly, she lowered her other knee to the ground and sat back on her heels. If not for the blood, red and blackish-green side by each, she would have looked radiant. Her black braids falling around her shoulders, and skin a few shades lighter than normal. The shadows that danced across her from the new fires accentuated her curves and cast her eyes in a mysterious darkness. I smiled, looking at her as she knelt there.

Mary groaned and started fumbling with her shirt buttons. The red of the blood on her shirt came into sharp focus and I lunged towards her. Not listening to her cry of alarm – it was a weak, small thing – I tore the blouse open, sending buttons flying like that scene in the Hobbit and felt my empty stomach heave at the sight.

Given what little I knew about really bad injuries, the types they teach you about in Scouts mostly relate to basic camping booboos, it wasn’t hopeless - From emergency response to bloody noses and broken bones, I was your girl - but what I saw on Mary’s body genuinely scared me. It triggered the frightened rat that lives in all our heads and made it want to hide under a rock somewhere until the danger was passed. But there was Lord Baden Powell’s ghost sitting on my shoulder whispering “be prepared” and what was all that learning for if not for this?

“Stay here,” I said, surprised at how steady my voice was. This was something that, maybe, was out of my wheelhouse. But it was still on the damned ship, so I could handle it.

I sprinted across the room and snagged arm loads of backpacks and blazer’s at random. None of this was a perfect solution, but it was better than nothing. And hey, Melody, one of the girls in our grade, was an army cadet and someone else was in scouts, so maybe they had dropped something useful. I skidded to a halt beside Mary, who was staring at me without really seeing because of shock, and started rifling through the bags.

Water bottles were neatly lined up in descending order of fullness, snacks and other essentials got arrayed in neat rows in front of those, and – Saint Martha be praised if she’s real – sanitary products by the handful. Some people think it’s weird or gross to even see the things, but as long as they aren’t used, who cares? In this case, having them around might even save Mary’s life.

Soothing words flowed out of me, a long and carefully measured string of meaningless sounds as I took one of the smaller pads out of its packaging and started using it to slowly clean the worst of Mary’s gashes. Each one was a single entity, I would only focus on it and its immediate neighbours as I steadily worked through the pads and water. Now, all I had to do was find something to bind up the wounds. My fears about the infectious monster blood still fresh on my mind.

Mary didn’t react to the water or the cleaning aside from the bog-standard groaning and hissing as water was used to wash away anything we didn’t want near her injuries. When I got to Melody’s bag – her family still insisted on getting her name embroidered on things – I found a treasure. A medium sized bottle of rubbing alcohol in a small hard plastic first aid kit right at the bottom of the bag.

“So there really is a God,” I said, shining a ten thousand watt smile at Mary, who offered a small one in return. “Here,” taking one of the nearly full water bottles, “drink this.”

“Amy, I don’t think we have time-“

“Shush. I’m in charge right now, so pull up your big girl pants and sit still,” my dad’s words had the same impact on her as they always did on me. She sat still, and drank the water, letting me sort through Melody’s treasure. Some mild, over the counter anti-biotics were pushed in Mary’s hands, and two sterile bandages for the larger cuts laid out ready for me to work. There was even a pocket knife, strictly against regulations but anyone who’s been near outdoorsy people knows that a little Swiss Army Knife is the kind of thing no smart person leaves home without.

Working quickly, taking frugal sips of water and encouraging Mary to eat one of the granola bars, I used the combination of pads, alcohol, and bandages to deal with the worst of her wounds. Then moved on to cutting up fabric from the clean shirts that a few students had been carrying around to make more bandages, applying them with more alcohol.

“My kingdom for some Polysporin,” chuckled Mary, but I ignored her. I just kept on with my steady flow of calming, inane chatter. The important thing is the tone, people like to think we’re so great but really we’re all just big dogs. Pack animals more interested in tone than the content of the words themselves. By speaking like that, by presenting a calm, collected outlook, I would be working to reduce her stress and steady her heartbeat. Hopefully that would help.

Finished, I sat back on my heels and admired my handiwork. My troop leader would have been proud, my parents would have been over the moon – dad especially – and my brother would have sarcastically quipped ‘and you wonder why people want you to work in medicine’ with an affectionate smile. Mary’s patch job wouldn’t have won any awards, but it would sure keep most of the foreign crap out of her system and give everything a chance to heal. If we ever got out.

I struggled for a moment, mind suddenly and violently breaking from my calm, detached professionalism with the crisis averted, to stay focused. Her shirt was off, and better left that way given how spoiled it was. But that meant other things were on display bra or not, and I wasn’t used to having to look away. This must be how boys feel, I thought, except they’re more used to hiding it at my age.

Muttering something even I couldn’t understand, I grabbed a clean gym uniform shirt that should fit her – found in a school-mate’s bag – and helped her into it, being extremely careful with her shoulders as we maneuvered her arms into the sleeves. Not being a button down this time, we had to wrangle it over her head, and in the confusion of limbs and soft cries of pain as we raised then lowered her arms, I was able to forget about what she had under the new shirt. For now.

“Come on,” she said after a long moment. “We need to get going.”

“Which way?”

“Can’t go back. There’s that tunnel and the stairs were… gone you said?”

“Yeah, the door vanished after that first blackout when we got down here.”

“Right. Only way then,” she pointed with her cane towards the door where our treasure trove had sat. “We don’t really have a choice. Besides,” her smile made my heart skip a beat, “we aren’t leaving anyone behind.”

She used the cane as a cane in our walk across the room. Putting her weight on it, but not all of it. Steadying, not supporting. That was a good sign. If she had been unable to move without it, we might have been in trouble. I don’t know how Mary got so good at swinging the thing, but I certainly had no idea what to do with it. My brother was the combat sports kid; I focused more on track and camping. I still needed her, just as much as I hoped she felt she needed me.

Honestly, in the stress of not only lighting the fires, but also binding Mary’s various wounds, I had forgotten about the out of place corpse. But I still stopped beside it and crouched down so that I could take a closer look. He, this one was obviously male, wore those black rags that almost looked like a uniform, if not one I recognized.

Mary gently turned his head towards us using the end of her cane, funny how I was starting to think of it as hers, instead of Mr. Sage’s. The thing – the boy’s? – mouth was still open, expression trapped between rage and terror. The left side of the unfortunate’s face was just the same as the others, grey-scaled with rows of pointed teeth, and a bulbous, shiny, all-black eye; but the other side, it was almost human. Smooth, pale skin pulled taught in a grimace, almost like it had frozen in an attempt to get away from the infection.

“What is this?”

“Mary, we have to get going.”

“Do you think this is what he wanted to do to us?”

“Honestly? I don’t want to think about that, I’m scared if I start thinking too much I’ll just collapse and wait to find out. Let’s go, please?”

Instead of responding, Mary slowly knelt down and closed the boy’s one remaining human eye.

She closed her eyes, and much as I wanted to push her towards the doors out, I didn’t interrupt. The warm orange glow of the fires around the room slowly drove the cold from my bones, filling me up like you see those videos of plants who don’t get enough sun moved into a better spot. I could actually feel my spine straightening, the dragging fatigue fading away.

When she stood, wiping a tear from her eye I pretended not to notice. Whatever had just happened, it had been very private, and I figured it was best forgotten. Maybe it had been easier to kill them when she thought they were just monsters, but the pattern of the skin and scales made it clear that this boy was being infected, and nearly gone. I hesitated a little in my steps, though, if Mary wanted to say anything, then it was only right that I give her the chance, right?

But she didn’t say anything. Instead, she marched up to the enormous stone door and raised her hand before freezing. “Amy,” she said, arm in the air before her, barely centimeters from the stone, “how did you say Sasha vanished?”

The door swung open. Whisper silent on hidden hinges. And gave us our first view of the altar.

“Oh,” said a perky voice from out of the shadows on either side of the steps leading up to where Mr. Sage stood. “You made it. Shame.”

-0-

"A Community Story [Challenge]" By: Donna Fox (The whole inspiration for this entire series)

"Descent: A Community Story Challenge" by: Yours Truly

"Descent (Part Two)" by: Mackenzie Davis (who is amazing, and everyone should read)

"Descent (Part Three)" by: *politely raises hand* me

"Descent (Part Four)" by: this dude right here.

"Descent (Part Five)" by: some guy named Alex, seems cool.

"Descent (Part Six)" by - drumroll please.... me!

"Descent (Part Seven)" by: is he still doing this? Yes! I am :)

"Descent (Part Eight)" by who's got two thumbs and a writing addiction? This guy!

"Descent (Part Nine)" retrieved from the jaws of the Archive itself by: the last shreds of my sanity XD

"Descent (Part Ten)" Release date Redacted