Death From Below

Chapter 28

He reaches out for me, but Garret shoves him back roughly. "Don't touch her if you want your hand," he says with venom dripping from his promise. Tristan forces him back to the couch, "What the hell is your problem?" Tristan asks the man angrily as he crosses his arms while glaring down at him. The man lunges for me once more when Dante slams his fist hard into the side of his head, knocking him out, and he lands with a loud thump on the wood floor. Dante steps over his body and glances around the living room area. He then heads over to the kitchen, looking around at everything.

I walk down the hall and open the first door to the right. It opens to show a small bathroom that hasn't been clean in a long time. Dirt covers the floor; the trash is overflowing, the toilet looks like something out of a horror movie, and the room smells like urine and poop. I close the door and open the one opposite of it. I see a small bedroom with a twin bed and a dresser.

I keep going until I come to a set of stairs leading further down under the first floor. "Garret, Tristan, Dante, come here!" I call out and wait until they arrive to descend the stairs. "Do you think we might find something?" I ask, and they shrug their shoulders. We make it to the bottom of the stairs and freeze. The entire room was straight out of a horror picture; a table with a mutilated body sat in the center of the room.

There were huge cages that held death. They were trying to reach for me through the bars. Along the back wall, what appeared to be things for scientists. The floor had blood all over it. There was what looked like a well, in the back corner. It had blood and chunky stuff all over it and leading down into it. The whole room smelled of decay and metal that caused your eyes to water, and I had to hold down my vomit.

I dodge the decayed hands reaching for me and make my way towards the table in the back that held beakers and flasks filled with different colors. I pick one up and twist it around, looking at it from every angle. I set it back down and glance around at all the others sitting around. I notice a stack of papers next to an open notebook and reach for them. I begin to read what he had written and feel my bile start to return, trying to find its way out of my mouth.

"He was doing experiments on people. It states here that he was a scientist and was working on some medicine that would make people immune to cancers and viruses," I explain to all three of them while they stand watch. "He would test the people he found hiking, kidnap them and bring them here to experiment. The ones that failed, he would dump down this hole that exits to the swamp we used to get here. It states that the people in those cages were once his family." I say, looking up at the dead in the cages reaching for us still.

"So, the animal life that lives in the water mutated and became infected as well since he was mixing all the liquids?" Tristan asks as he looks around at the table.

"When he learned about what it was doing to the people, he began to put it into the drinking well and into the animals so it would be passed to people when they ate...chicken." I continue to read the rest out loud.

"So, this dirtbag is the reason for this whole situation? You need to figure out a way to alert your parents," Garret says, finally speaking since we got down here.

"Let's go search his house for a phone; maybe he has a landline of something we can use," Garret says, taking me by the hand and leading me up the stairs and away from the awful mess from the basement.

Rushing back up the stairs and into the house, we began to search each room after checking to see if he was where we had left him. I find a house phone on the nightstand next to a bed and pick it up, sighing in relief to hear the beep of the dial tone. I quickly type the numbers on my dad's phone and pray he picks up. I was about to slam the phone down when I heard his voice, hesitant at the number calling him. I say what I had learned, along with what had happened upon arriving here and what we had done.

I hang up after a while and follow the guys out the front door, and we make our way back to the boat. I pull out my cell phone and turn it on, not wanting to waste the battery if only I had called them on the house phone instead. Josh answers on the first ring, and I tell him what we had learned while jogging down the dirt path. Halfway to the boat, we can hear Eddie screaming after us. I turn to see him running ways behind us. I am yelling into the phone at this point while running as fast as I can to get to the boat that was still about five minutes away.

Garret and Tristan make it to the boat and climb in to wait for Dante and me. I jump into the boat. It sways as Dante rushes to untie it and hops in just as Eddie catches up. Eddie's unable to reach us as we use the oars to push away from the dock. I am breathing hard as he stands there screaming at us, and I look down to see I am still on the phone with Josh. I hand the phone to Garret and lean my head down into my hands as I try to even out my breathing and think about what we can do next.