Dark Fangs: Forbidden Fugitives

Chapter Twenty

Drip...

     Drip...

     Drip....

     Drops of water trickled from the hollow's soaring, shadowy ceiling, onto Jae's marred figure, where she lay on moist, cold cavern rock.  

     Snort.

     Warm breath was blown into Jae's face. Her eyelids fluttered weakly, and with even that small motion, pain erupted in her skull. 

     Midnight Moon...Jae thought, wincing against the aching agony in her cranium, her now dull green eyes blinking open. She saw the bloodied muzzle-tip of her Thoroughbred mare prodding tenderly at her face, her eyes somehow alight with apprehension.

     Jae clenched her jaw, flinching at the pain even that tension caused. She shifted an arm softly to try and push herself up, but every muscle, every sinew, every thew was throbbing, every bone was stabbing her with pain, and every inch of her skin was sore and scraped. Blood discolored her complexion, bruises varnished her limbs, and pain was present in every fragment of her being now.

     "Arrrrhh...." Jae groaned, a damaged muscle in her throat wrenching as she wedged herself up to a sitting position with her injured arms. 

     Midnight Moon stepped back--no, limped rearward, for she too was covered in a dull, frightening array of wounds and lesions. Her face was gashed in many places, one of her pretty ears had been torn right down the middle, and blood was clotting as it streamed down around her eye and reached down for her nostrils, and the remainder of her body was abraded, bruised, and bludgeoned. Her left hind ankle was in fact swollen and heavily damaged; bleeding an appalling amount of blood.

     Jae reached out a hand to her horse and pressed her shaking, scraped fingers to the mare's forehead, unable, despite the pain, to suppress tears from racking her body further. Mixed with her own blood, in the dark of the subterranean ravine, Jae's tears seeped in pinkish rivulets down her scarred face. 

     It's so dark...whimpered Jae's thoughts in an echo through her skull, as if her mind were a graveyard.

     I'm never getting out of here....Lamented her mind.

     I'll die in so much pain down in this cavern....

      I never got to tell Happy good-bye. I never got to tell Drake good-bye. I never even got to tell Angel good-bye...I never got to tell my Grandparents good-bye....Her mentality added ruefully.

     I...I never got to tell my parents good-bye....

     Even in the face of all of their negligence, all of their irresponsibility, their omission of her, they were still her parents. She still loved them. She still wanted them to love her, and she still wanted them to care about her. 

     Midnight Moon nudged her long face forward compassionately, closing her bleeding eyes as she tried to comfort Jae, her senses comprehending the teen girl's emotions.

      A cold drop of liquid from above fell and splattered onto Jae's nose. She cringed back, recoiling again in the sting of agony that stirring evoked, and wiped away the drop of glacial water from her face, tilting her head very gently up to stare at her surroundings. 

     Darkness and a damp stone range stretched in all directions that Jae could see, and the ceiling of the ravine-cave was so tall she was frightened suddenly at how far she and her mare had fallen. She flicked her gaze upward, trying to make out the gap she and Midnight Moon had plummeted through. 

     Oh...my...gosh....A flash of lightning from thirty feet skyward told Jae where the slot in the earth lurked, in the vast coulee below; It was flowering with creepers, tendrils of vegetation that cascaded down only half way into the cave, and it appeared like a gaping mouth in the terrain without teeth. Rain still misted down into the expansive cavern from the hole above, and some of the beaming light from strikes of lightning scattered a blinding grey illumination into the underground gorge, enabling Jae and Midnight Moon to glimpse quick images of the abyss they were stranded in.

     From the ravine mouth-like slit in the earth, around eighteen to twenty feet of space expanded. There was a patch of the vines and foliage that padded the stone of the gorge floor right below the cavern's opening, but gradually the plant growth receded, and the ground sloped downward, then sharply dropped seven feet, then declined some more, until it bowled out in a mostly flat stretch of cave ground, where Jae and Midnight Moon lay now. The rest of the cave stretch into darkness, and Jae thought she could hear the distant, violent resound of waves crashing against stone shores and jagged rocks, and the guttural sound of a massive creature's throat rumbling in a low-pitched frequency.

     There better not be anymore terrifying hybrid animals living down here. Jae thought bitterly, remembering with a sharp twinge of fear in her stomach of the last image she'd seen, before blacking out as her skull collided with the cavern ground; Yellowish, blood-stained fangs as ragged and uneven as a mountain range flashing across her vision.

     That Violent Creature was--

     A shriek howled from above Jae and Midnight Moon with shrill, sheer force, unman enough to strike a person blind with horror. Midnight Moon whinnied and reared, yet her mutilated hind hock took her down as if a tree limb had just collided with her chest.

     "No!" Jae lunged forward and nearly screamed in pain as her spine sinews were strained furiously. She tightened her jaw, disallowing most of the acute yelp that escaped her maw. 

     Forearms stretched out in front of her, her face pressed against the hard, cold ground, Jae writhed in aching distress, her heart pounding like the storm outside against her rib cage. She lifted her head barely, pressing most of the tension hard against her bruised forearms and glimpsed Midnight Moon laboring on her side, flanks heaving, bloodied limbs spasming.

     No...No, please don't die yet--Jae twisted her forequarters to cast a glance up and behind her, at the ravine gap. 

     She gasped frantically.

     There, staring down through the cleft, the hellish black face of the Indoraptor impended, his red eyes glowering with malice, his fangs gleaming wickedly. 

     Jae grimaced, her heart in her throat. He's going to kill me. He's going to kill me, Midnight Moon, and find my family and everyone on Sanctuary Island and murder them all.

     He's loose on the Island. He's loose and coming to butcher everything with a pulse.