MudMan (The Golem Chronicles Book 1) (32 page)

The creature dropped its weight and scampered back a step, clawed arms swatting at Levi, eager to push him away. The Mudman would have none of it. Instead he pushed through the tearing thorns, pressing ever inward, keeping inside its guard, limiting its ability to utilize its pincers. Levi pounded at its chest, his fiery fist an industrial-grade piston driving home punishing blow after punishing blow.

The hydra, tough as old bricks, hardly noticed.

Time to shift tactics.

The Mudman brought his scythe back and slashed at any exposed skin he could find. The razor glanced off hardened vines and green armor as unyielding as steel. Even the flame covering his body seemed reluctant to bite into the creature, as if it were afraid the creature might bite back. Levi had no clue what this thing was, but he realized it was made of sterner stuff than the smaller guardians he’d dispatched a few moments ago. He also realized his chances of walking away intact and alive were diminishing by the second.

Oddly, the thought of his imminent demise wasn’t troubling, it was appealing.

Though he hunted monsters and murderers, he had no illusions about himself—he couldn’t read his own aura, but if he could he was sure it’d be black as the heart of the earth. He was a monster as surely as the things he killed, so it seemed proper somehow that he should die at the hands of something equally monsterish—an unwilling abomination not so different from himself. Die while doing something genuinely good. Saving someone else, someone who deserved saving.

That was a death and fate he could be proud of in some small measure.

What’s more, he also found himself glad he would die without ever discovering his origins or his ties to the wyrm god buried in this place. He’d always wanted to know the
why
and
how
underscoring his existence, but the deeper he dug, the more he wished this secret had stayed buried. Buried deep in the earth, in this ancient temple prison, where it belonged. Some things were better left unknown. In this case, better for his soul. It was with these thoughts that Levi fought, no longer striving to survive, only concerned with the survival of another.

The creature bucked up once more, a forest of legs slamming into Levi’s face, hurling him to the floor.

The Mudman pushed himself upright in time to see the colossal and bloated belly split down the middle as if a seam ran along the center. Whatever was happening wasn’t his doing.

The split widened with a pop, pulling apart like the lips of a giant mouth. Ropes of piss-yellow slime, thick and viscous, dripped from cavernous jaws loaded with foot-long saw-bladed teeth which lead into an endless gullet. A forest of tentacles shot out, wrapping around Levi’s neck, chest, waist, and thighs, pulling at him as though he were some prized catch. Then, pressure bore down as the tentacles constricted, working around his limbs, yanking outward in an attempt to tear arms and legs from their sockets.

Death
, Levi thought again,
is not so bad
.

Instead of resisting, fighting off the vines or seeking to slice his way free, he leapt forward, embracing his fate, hurling himself bodily into the thing’s stomach-mouth. The sudden lack of resistance caught the creature off guard—a child playing tug-of-war, only to find the tension in the rope vanish—which left Levi momentarily free to act. He forced his way past the teeth and into the maw, then slammed his scythe blade into the roof of the beast’s mouth, lodging himself firmly in place. He smiled the whole while, envisioning the hydra choking to death while the fire burned up the monster from the inside out.

The creature—unprepared for such a violent, unconventional act of lunacy—thrashed and howled in reply. The tentacles trying to pull him apart a moment before, now tried to pull him out. Levi transformed his right hand into a saw-toothed machete, its blade bathed in flame, and hacked at the pulling limbs. Then, the gelatinous goo coating Levi’s parched skin—the moisture a sweet, but temporary relief—ignited. Apparently whatever external defenses protected the flower-hydra from the fire didn’t extend to its belly.

A haze of heat and motion washed over Levi’s body as the stomach cavity erupted in a conflagration far hotter than the inside of Levi’s kiln.

The thing shrieked again, no longer in defiance but pain and fear, as its body wriggled and its gigantic jaws snapped closed. The razor-edged teeth sliced into Levi’s left thigh and his right calf, penetrating all the way through, threatening to chop both legs clean off. The beast continued to howl, but to Levi, the sound was faint and reedy as if he were hearing everything through a pool of deep water. The light engulfing him was as bright as a bonfire in darkest night, yet, oddly, the darkness stole new ground with every passing breath, creeping in first at the edges, then blanketing his eyes entirely.

“Critical damage,” he heard, the words bouncing around inside his skull. He recognized the voice in a vague and distant way, as though recalling an old, dim memory. Female. The computer who wasn’t a computer, Siphonei. “Auto power down required to prevent total system failure!” the voice screamed. “Auto power down initiated.”

The Mudman was too tired to care. Numbness crept through his broken, charred, and mangled form. He closed his eyes and uttered a deep groan, one-part sigh, one-part moan.
Dying isn’t so bad
, he thought as his mind slipped entirely into hazy gloom.

TWENTY-FOUR:

Doctor Hogg

Levi tried to blink his eyes open, but couldn’t. A layer of caked-on grime, warm to the touch, ran over his face. With the numb and dumb fingers of his right hand, he groped at his ugly beat-to-hell mug, scraping at the seared on goo, which came away begrudgingly. After a few seconds of fitful struggling he’d cleared off enough of the muck to crack his eyes open—not that it helped much. Gloom surrounded him on every side, a pocket of darkness enveloping him. Everything hurt, though hurt was a word insufficient to the task of describing his misery.

The entirety of his upper body tingled, his skin too tight, like an overfull party balloon, and crispy to the touch. Next he ran his hand over his chest and opposite arm: deep cracks and fissures zigzagged back and forth, running from everywhere to everywhere else. No part of him had been spared. Though he couldn’t see himself, he knew he must’ve resembled a slab of Oklahoma hardpan after a hard year of drought. Finally, he inspected his legs—there he found a sliver of pale light trickling in around the hydra’s teeth. Two of those huge, saw-bladed teeth were buried in his left thigh, and another ran through his right calf.

And, in a blink, it all came back to him.

Somehow he’d survived the scourging and even the hellish inferno blaze. Staring at his mangled legs made him wish he hadn’t. At least his legs didn’t hurt. The grievous wounds should’ve been screaming in his head, gibbering like a wild animal caught in a trap, but instead he felt nothing. Numbness radiated up and down; everything below the waist was just dead meat.

Survive he had, though, and Levi was never one for dwelling overlong on what could’ve been. Instead, he saw what was, and, with workmanlike dedication to duty, he set about freeing himself.

With a moan, he wriggled his upper body, shifting his weight and position until he could slip his equally mangled hands in between the clamped lips of the stomach-maw. Repositioning himself in such a way was excruciating—all that twisting and contorting was like running face-first into a wood chipper. It was the only way out, however, so the Mudman persisted. Without his fingers, the left hand was virtually useless, so instead he pressed down with his forearm, then used his good hand to pry the top lip upward, an inch at a time.

The first few feet were the worst and the hardest going since he had to not only force open the jaws, but also had to free his legs from the teeth. Unfortunately, the teeth were serrated and each tug ripped away more muscle, shredding his flesh as a final parting gift. Once that bit was done, though, the lips practically sprang apart, spilling Levi onto the floor in a burble of guts and burnt slime, still thick and sludgy, but now black instead of yellow. Levi rolled onto his back, limbs splayed out, chest pulling in great lungfuls of air, while his eyes adjusted to the rainbow light of the room.

Staring up at the ceiling—at the giant diamond inset into the apex of the pyramid, refracting the glimmering sunlight into a thousand colors—Levi felt …
good
. Not in a physical sense of the word, of course. In the physical sense, he felt like a strong breeze might kill him. Rather, he felt good in some deeper, spiritual sense. Despite the dirt and grime and gore, he felt
clean
. He regularly purged in the kiln for his numerous failings, but what he’d undergone in the belly of that beast was without equal in his long, morbid life. Purification.

As he lay there, the words of Saint Matthew tickled at the back of his mind:
“But after me comes one who is more powerful than I … He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
 
His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

He’d been baptized at conversion; only natural since Anabaptists were the first Protestants to practice and teach adult baptism. The baptism had been full immersion, a particularly horrifying experience for Levi, who so feared water. Yet it’d been nothing compared to this baptism of flame, which seemed to him a truer baptism. Reborn from the womb of a monster, birthed not by water but by fire. Perhaps the chaff of his soul had perished in the process.

“Get your hands off me, you disgusting piece of shit.” The words belonged to Ryder, though Levi couldn’t see her.

“Stop struggling, you miserable bitch,” a man replied. His voice was harsh and he spoke with an accent, something light and vaguely European. “You’ve already made such a bloody mess of things. Fighting’ll only make it worse for you in the long run. And your sutures won’t hold if you keep bucking like that, so unless you’d care to bleed out on the floor, you’d better comply.”

“Fuck you,” she said. “We both know you’re not going to let me bleed out here. Not after what you did to me—what you put into me.”

There was a pause followed by a sharp
crack
, the sound of a backhand slap across the face, then a cry of shock. “Consider my bluff called,” the man said. “No, you’re right, you won’t have the pleasure of bleeding out until I
allow
it. And you
will
bleed out, be sure of that. Whether it’s painful or not, though, is entirely up to you. Furthermore, if you really insist on being so difficult, please know that I have no qualms about beating you until you’re comatose. You see, you are
nothing,
you wretched druggie whore.
Nothing,
you hear me! Your only value is as a fat sow. A bag of meat to feed my creation. Someone gag her.”

Despite Levi’s brokenness, he pushed himself up into a sitting position. He hadn’t come this far to let this man, whomever he was, walk away with Ryder. With a heave, he clambered onto unsteady legs—legs that swayed beneath him, threatening to buckle and topple him at any moment. He immediately spotted Chuck, still bound in a silken spider sac, not far from where Levi stood. His face was battered and swollen, his eyes closed, though his chest rose and fell in rhythmic succession.

Beaten and unconscious, but alive.

The Mudman staggered and lurched as he turned about, each step a perilous one, until at last he spotted Ryder.

A man, 5′3″, round in the stomach and face, with narrow, swine-like eyes and thin hair stood next to Ryder. He wore khaki pants, a button-up shirt carelessly tucked into his pants, and a white lab coat, complete with pocket protector.
Slovenly
described him well. This, Levi reasoned, was the man behind this whole fiasco—behind the Kobocks and the mutilations, the terrible experiments, and the homunculus growing inside Ryder. This could only be Hogg.

What really caught Levi’s eye, however, was the man’s aura: dark as the heart of a black hole. Each sin or virtue added its own flavor to a person’s aura—ribbons of silver for an honest heart, say, or swirls of infected-wound-red for hate—and each brand of murder left its own mark as well. An unintentional death, vehicular manslaughter, for example, left a stain the color of an old bruise. Killing, even in self-defense, marred the aura with swatches of malignant green.

Cold-blooded murder, however, was a whole other beast, and it irreparably tarnished the soul, leaving it black and stunted. Still, even black-hearted murders usually had touches of other colors permeating their auras. A splash of red-rage here, a streak of purple-lust there, or even the shimmering gold of love blinking through.

Not this man. There was nothing to him but death.

Never had Levi wanted to kill so badly, but if anyone were to have answers about Levi’s clouded past, it would be this man.

He didn’t look like much of a physical threat—even in Levi’s battered condition he assumed he could crush the man—but it didn’t pay to underestimate someone capable of such wicked deeds. And even if he wasn’t magi, Professor Wilkie had said he could do magic in one fashion or another. With that said, the Mudman was still outclassed in the muscle department because the portly doctor had four Thursrs—identical to the wild, white-furred, boar-faced creature who’d ripped his arm off at the rest stop—in tow. Two flanked Ryder, holding her upright by either arm. One was shoving something into her mouth and taping it in place.

The other two flanked Professor Wilkie, who was bound with steel hand and leg restraints and gagged with a strip of gray duct tape. The professor was awake and alert, but any fight he had in him was long gone. His face was drawn, his eyes heavy, and the sag of his shoulders told Levi the professor was resigned to whatever fate awaited him. Which meant Levi, with his cracked skin, wobbly legs, and worthless arms, was the only defense remaining. Unfortunately, against four Thursrs and a whatever the doctor was, Levi was no defense at all.