MudMan (The Golem Chronicles Book 1) (25 page)

He hunkered down on his haunches, drawing a few deep breaths as he wrestled with the bone-deep weariness—both from his injuries and his stretching absence from Inworld—eating at him. Every second he languished was a second wasted, a second more for Chuck and Ryder to hopelessly entangle themselves in danger.

It would be nice to rest, though, just a little.

Unfortunately, niceties such as rest were for people with time and options. He had neither. With a grumble he pushed himself up, fatigued legs carrying him onward. After a few scant minutes of dreary trudging, a four-way juncture loomed before him—tunnels shooting off left, right, and straight ahead.

He glanced around, eyes scanning high and low, looking for any sign of Chuck and Ryder’s passing, intentional or not. He’d been hoping one of the two would’ve had the presence of mind to leave behind a marker—a piece of trash, say, or a dirty sock—indicating which way they’d gone. But no.

Nothing. He needed to lower his standards a bit, he suspected.

He popped his knuckles, rolled his neck, ground his teeth. They’d been scared and under tremendous pressure, he reminded himself, so mistakes were understandable. Completely understandable. He still wanted to smash in the wall. After all, understandable mistakes were still liable to make his job a hundred times more difficult. He bent over and touched the floor, pressing his palm flat and leaning into the limb while his senses trickled into the bedrock.

This facility continued to rebuff his attempts to infiltrate and read the earth all around him—courtesy of the sentient plant life, he was sure—but he could work around that in a pinch. Now that Levi knew what he was up against he could adjust appropriately. Most of the prison, its myriad of twisting passageways and rooms, lay bare in Levi’s mind like a 3-D map, but there were whole sections of the complex that were invisible to him. As if someone had taken an eraser to those sectors of the map.

But, those invisible sections
did
tell him something. Those sections, Levi now understood, were areas heavily infested by the living flowers,
tacca chantrieri gigantis
, which meant those were the areas best avoided. True, he’d managed to free himself from the tangles of vegetation at the entry checkpoint, but he wasn’t keen on doing it again, not in his weakened state. Next, he shifted his focus away from the temple as a whole, probing for the gentle pitter-patter of feet or immobile hotspots, which signaled life.

There were
several
such hotspots emanating from different points throughout the sprawling facility.

Too
many points
for Ryder and Chuck to produce alone, which meant they weren’t the only ones in this place. Professor Wilkie was out there somewhere, but so was the person responsible for crucifying and disemboweling Wilkie’s lab assistant.

He couldn’t tell which hotspots were which, not with so much interference, but he could distinctly sense three different parties: one lingered deep, deep, deep in the complex, near the pyramid’s apex, nestled in a room swarming with blooming plant life. Naturally, that was the room containing the emergency exit. He’d have to make his way there eventually, but he wasn’t looking forward to what he’d find. The second hotspot moved through a corridor off to his right. The last lay only a few minutes from his current location—in a room not far down the left-hand path.

Most disturbing of all, though, were the pockets of
shifting
invisibility—five or six of them—patrolling through the hallways. To Levi’s earth sense, those invisible blips of motion held the same signature as the immobile sections of prison infested with vegetation, but these were, without a doubt, on the prowl. Hunting.

He pushed those things, whatever they were, away from his mind and took the hallway to the left. Since he couldn’t be sure where Chuck and Ryder were, he’d make for the nearest hotspot. The left-hand passageway, identical to the one he’d just come from, ran straight as an arrow for a few hundred meters, before coming to an end at another intersection, this one with a single hallway jutting off sharply to the right. Here, Levi halted, pressing his back against the wall while trailing his good hand across the stone.

This was it.

The hallway to the right was actually the entrance to a small room, with two more stony tunnels snaking off in opposite directions. The blip was in that room, though Levi couldn’t discern whether whatever waited was friend or foe. Only one way to find out, he supposed: he curled the fingers of his serviceable hand, then reformed the limb into a colossal double-edged battle-axe. Levi liked to think of himself as an optimistic realist—
hope for the best, plan for the worst
—but so far, this whole mess had been one bad turn after another. He wasn’t going to take any more chances.

Should whatever lay in the other room be unfriendly … Levi smiled, an ugly gash across his face. Well, he was in the mood for a little justifiable bloodshed.

NINETEEN:

Into the Dark

Ryder hobbled down the connecting corridor on wobbly legs that refused to work properly. Thankfully she had Chuck by her side, one arm slung around her shoulders, helping her stay upright and moving forward. The sound of battle—of mayhem, chaos, and death—floated to her from the guardroom: the ground shaking and rattling. Levi’s gravelly shouts of pain. The shrieking alarm of black flowers. All those noises seemed to build a brutal soundtrack that shouted for her to turn back. To help Levi. It was the soundtrack of a man dying.

She’d seen him fight and kill scores of dark and grisly things.

He’d rescued her from the Deep Downs where she’d been held captive and killed the Kobocks responsible for her abduction. He’d murdered more of the creepy-ass blue-men on the side of the road—not to mention the boar-faced driver from the Caddy. The point was, he was one tough-ass son of a bitch, but how could anyone fight what was in that room? A monstrous plant with human intelligence that had a thousand plus years of experience?

The way those vines had wrapped themselves around his legs, thorns digging into his body, while those flowers shot their whipping tendrils up underneath the skin, rooting around inside him. Fucking disgusting. Even as she stumbled along, the desire to clutch her stomach was overwhelming. She could almost imagine something rooting around inside of her. She couldn’t help but envision those vines ripping their way inside her, like in that Evil Dead movie. Branches and vines shooting up between her legs and putting down roots right in her guts.

She shuddered, but kept on moving, refusing to look back.

“Run! I’ll find you!”
The Mudman’s final words echoed in her head.

Running wasn’t the brave thing to do—better to go back and make sure Levi got clear, like she’d done with the Sprawl wolves.

Except she wasn’t brave, and that thing with the wolves was a fluke, one great big mistake, though she was ashamed to admit it. Sort of. She hadn’t meant to save Levi, not that she’d really saved him, anyway—more like bought him a little time. She’d tripped while running away and by the time she’d gained her feet, Levi was right there and so was that bat-eared fuck. She’d fired out of fear and self-preservation, not heroics. She was a survivor, a scavenger—she would’ve left Levi to die in a minute if it meant making it out alive.

Still, she found herself dragging her feet. It
was
hard to leave him; she didn’t really like the disagreeable asshole, but she owed him, no doubt about that. Nothing could get her back into that guardroom, though, guilty conscience or no, not after what she’d seen during her “body scan.” She couldn’t really explain it, but somehow her mind had connected with Siphonei, tapped into the woman-machine’s subconscious. Horrifying shit. The images kept on cycling through her head as she limped along, just incoherent flashes:

Her body strapped down to a stainless steel gurney, harsh white light blasting her eyes while a host of tubes ran into her arms, and nose, and mouth—some delivering medication or nutrients, while others vacuumed her free of fluids. Blood, stolen, recycled, altered, and fed into a massive torpedo-shaped flower, big as a full-grown man, which reeked of decay and spoiled milk. A tangle of vines vomited outward from the base of the enormous blossom, snaking their way into her every orifice.

Next:
A portly man with a round face and a swath of brown hair knelt, completely naked, in a pool of congealing blood. She couldn’t remember his name, a sort of forgettable man, but she knew he was an under-warden. A tech analyst or maintenance worker, one of hundreds. That much she was sure. A red pool, thick and viscous, spread out around him; a series of symbols ran over his chubby body, all painted on in glistening crimson. A corpse lay in front of him. An older man with full silver hair, who she knew was the High-Warden, Lir-Thildo. His well-coiffed hair was matted with chunks of skull and globs of more blood.

The naked kneeling man had caved his head in with a jagged shard of stone.

Last and worst of all, she caught a glimpse of a monstrous thing, of the thing trapped in this godforsaken place. The wyrm god, the one that kept cropping up—first in the Kobock temple, then in that photo from the professor’s camp. Except this glimpse was no painting or carving. No picture. She wasn’t sure if the vision was some kind of hallucination or memory, but if felt as real as the biting heat of a flame.

She saw a pool of orange, a pit of churning fire like the inside of a volcano—blacks, reds, and various hues of gold, mixing and swirling in ever shifting patterns.
And lurking in those molten waters?
A bloated beast, large as a whale and long as a city block. The creature was all chitinous plates the color of a fresh scab, and waving, multi-jointed spider legs. Thousands of the spindly appendages pushed the creature’s bulk through the fiery waves. Worst of all, though, were the eyes. A million glinting insect eyes covering its head and serpentine torso.

Fuck, she hoped to never see that thing again.

So no, she wouldn’t go back into that room, not if it meant even a remote possibility of seeing those awful visions again. She had enough troublesome memories without adding in the nightmares of some dead woman trapped inside a fucking plant.
Levi will be fine
, she told herself.
He’s tough as an old dump truck.
A grain of guilt lurked at the back of her mind, though, rubbing at her like a piece of gravel in the bottom of her shoe.

She slowed, hesitated, and after a second, craned her head toward the way they’d come from, searching for the Mudman. Empty hallway all the way back. Chuck tugged at her, strong arms urging her forward.

“Yo, let’s move it, girl,” he said. “Dude told us to run, so we run. Guy might be screwier than a bag of screws, but he’s also meaner than a roided up pit bull. Don’t sweat it. Levi knows how to fight and he knows how to smoke shit. Let’s just do what he said.”

He pulled at her again, and she let her body yield to his guidance.

It took only a few minutes to reach a four-way juncture. Here they paused, Chuck shining his SureFire up and down each hallway. They all looked the same to Ryder: stone-sided tunnels cutting deeper into darkness—and it was dark. There were weird orbs running along the walls, casting a pale-purple light over everything, which did approximately jack-shit to dissipate the darkness. Even the SureFires, bright as they were, only did so much to penetrate the gloom.

“Which way now, oh guide of Outworld?” she asked, glancing left, forward, right.

“How the hell am I supposed to know that?” He threw up his hand in exasperation. “Do I look like Indiana Jones, solving riddles and swinging across spiked pits with a whip? Hell naw. You want to know where to get a kidney? I can set you up with one of the Little Brothers, no problem. You wanna get in touch with a demon outta the pit? Shit, you know I can do that, too. But I ain’t no witty archeologist, you feel me?”

She frowned, still surveying their options. “Wow, what would we do without you, Chuck?” she said absentmindedly. “And you’re pulling twenty-five grand on this job? I can see Levi’s really getting his money worth.”

“Don’t get smart with me, little lady. This bullshit right here”—he paused, glancing around the dusty prison—“is y’alls bullshit. Ain’t no way to prepare for this kind of nonsense. I think even Indiana Jones would throw up his hands and let you folks sort this out on y’alls own.”

“Yeah well, sadly, neither us have the option to walk away from this. Nope, we’ve got to pick a direction,” she replied. “We can’t just stand here with thumbs up our asses, waiting for some freaky plant-monster to I don’t know …
murder
us.”

“Yeah, well true as that may be, let’s stop talkin’ about things goin’ up our asses … ’Cause I don’t get down that way.” He paused, lips screwed up. “I read this thing once—”

“You read something, once,” she cut in. “I don’t believe it. Literally, I don’t believe it. Unless maybe it was on the back of a cereal box.”

“You just tryin’ to piss me off, right?” He paused, eyes squinted, daring her to say something else. “Thank you. Now, as I was sayin’, I read this thing about mazes—it was in
National Geographic
, so you know it’s legit.”

She sighed and gave him a
get-along-with-it
nod.

“Someone left it on a plane, alright. Anyway, point is, this magazine said if you were stuck in a cave or a maze you could keep your hand on one wall and you’d find your way out.”

“That’d be great if we were in a
maze
, but this”—she swept a hand out—“isn’t a maze, it’s an ancient prison holding an insane monster.”

“Okay, Miss Negative Nancy—talking about how we need to do something, but here you are just standin’ around, shooting your mouth off. So let’s hear your plan?”

“Shut up.” She held out one hand and canted her face to the side.