Still Breathing

Chapter 6

Into the Dark

The darkness was a living thing, thick and clinging, pressing in on all sides like a physical weight. Rose could feel it in her lungs, in her bones, a cold dread that slithered down her spine and pooled in her gut. Every creak and groan of the old building made her flinch, every skitter of debris in the shadows had her white-knuckling her makeshift bat.

Beside her, Castillo was a wall of coiled tension, jaw tight and eyes glittering behind his frames. He held his Chaucer like a talisman against the gloom, knuckles standing out stark and white. Rose had never seen him so on edge, so far from his usual unflappable cool. It was unsettling.

The others fanned out around them, sticking close but covering ground, pale faces floating in the murk. Nina had found an ancient flashlight somewhere, the weak beam cutting dizzy arcs through the dark. It caught on hulking shapes shrouded in dusty tarps, rusted hulks of farm equipment from a bygone era.

"I feel like we're in the freaking Upside Down," Toby muttered, eyeing a moldering tractor like it might sprout fangs. "Any second now a Demogorgon's gonna come screaming out of the shadows and eat our faces."

"Not helping," Max sing-songed tightly. But his gaze was jittery on the looming dark, fingers clenched white-knuckled on his bat.

They crept along in tense near-silence, straining for any sound, any hint that they weren't alone in the sepulchral gloom. But there was only the groan of old metal, the whisper of small, skittering things in the walls, the rasp of their own harsh breathing.

"There!" Margot hissed suddenly, making them all jump. She was pointing to a dim red glow in the distance, barely visible through the forest of tarps and frames. "Emergency exit sign. That's our ticket out of here."

Rose could have wept at the sight of that small, stalwart beacon, a pinprick of hope in the all-consuming black. But as they picked their way towards it, threading through the maze of Equipment and shadow, a low, gurgling moan shivered out of the dark.

They froze, breath caught in throats, pulses jackrabbiting. Rose pressed instinctively closer to Castillo, so near she could feel the leashed tremor running through his big frame.

"What...what was that?" Nina breathed, knuckles bloodless on the flashlight. "Another straggler from outside?"

As if in answer, another groan rippled through the cavernous space, louder, wetter. Closer. A off-tempo duet of gasping, choking unholy noises, dragging against raw nerves like nails down a chalkboard.

"That's not a zombie," James said numbly. "At least...not like any we've seen."

His flashlight beam jittered wildly as a shambling silhouette lurched out of the dark, sickeningly backlit in crimson by the exit sign. But it was wrong, twisted, moving with a spasmodic gait that sent ice water flooding Rose's veins.

As it staggered into a shaft of feeble light, she clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. Dear God.

It had been human once. A man, tall and broad in the shoulders. But where his head should have been was only a glistening mass of tumorous flesh, pulsating obscenely. His limbs were twisted, elongated, the bones splinted through the mottled skin. One arm ended in scythe-like claws, jagged and black with old blood.

But worst of all were the spores. They wreathed the creature in a drifting nimbus, fat and fuzzy and green-black in the curdled light. They puffed from splits in its overstretched skin like pustulent smoke signals, dancing on the fetid air.

"Holy fucking Lovecraft," Tobias choked out. "It's...what is it?"

"The next stage of evolution," Castillo said grimly. "Something tells me our farmer friends didn't stop at Miracle-Gro."