The clicking came first, a wet, rhythmic sound from deep within its chest, increasing in tempo with each stride. Its jaw already worked, chewing through the distance between us.
Fifteen yards.
Twelve.
“Hurry.”
Libby reached me, hands shaking. Without a word, she gripped the frame, swung her legs over, and dropped into the dark. Her boots rang on the iron rungs below.
I tracked it.
Ten yards.
Eight.
Now I could hear the wet labor of its breathing—continuous, automatic, indifferent, not ragged or desperate. One hand was wrong, fingers bent back past the knuckle, pale bone catching the light where skin had given way. Yet the arm still swung forward with each stride, still reaching, the ruined hand opening and closing.
“Keep going,” I called down, my voice low.
“I’m going!” she snapped, her words echoing off the stone walls.
Six yards.
The thing seized, its back arching hard, its one functioning eye rolling up until only the red-threaded white showed. Its loose jaw, the ruined tissue at the corners of its mouth splitting in two neat lines like an overworked seam. A sound emerged, not a shriek exactly, more wet, resonant, and wrong, as if produced somewhere below the throat, climbing in pitch as the body bent further than a spine should allow.
Then it lunged.
Whatever had been holding it back snapped free; it came at me in a dead sprint, arms reaching, the loose jaw swinging with each stride in a wide pendulum arc that made the whole face horrific—the bottom half gone, the mouth no longer a mouth.
I fired.
The round caught it through the left eye socket. The back of its skull came apart. Its legs went out mid-stride, and it came down hard, face-first, close enough that the impact sent grit skittering across my boot. It skidded forward with its momentum, the loose jaw finally finding the ground, then the fingers, dragging once against the concrete in that same reaching motion, and then nothing.
The shot echoed out both ends of the alley and kept going.
Everyone heard that.
I didn’t wait. I swung my legs over and grabbed the ladder, hauling the hatch over with one arm as I descended, pulling it shut above me. The groan of metal, loud and carrying, the metal finding frame with a dull clang that rang down through every rung and into my palms.
Above us, muffled but clear—shuffling. Multiple sets of feet on pavement, converging on the alley from both directions, drawn by the sound.
I scrambled down, rust flaking under my grip, leaving only darkness and the sounds of my own descent.
My boots met damp concrete, cold, shallow water spreading beneath my heels.
Libby, a faint shape in the gloom, stood a few feet away, her breathing quick and uneven.
Above us, through the sealed hatch, something scraped slowly across the metal.
It stopped.
Then scraped again.
We both stared into the nothingness above. The silence that followed stretched, making the memory of the scraping almost worse.
I forced myself to breathe, slow and deliberate, waiting for my hands to stop shaking around my grip.
The air was thick and stale down here. Darkness pressed in from all sides.
