The Dragon's Blood (Part 63)

During which Lorelei Price enacts retribution for the dead...

63

  

     Now that the darkness had retreated, leaving her bathed in that red glow, everything, every nook and cranny, every shadow, every strange trick of light became one of those terrible things they'd seen in those tunnels behind them. Nothing scurried about her, nothing struck at her, nothing screeched or clattered, but they were there nonetheless, just on the edge, ready to leap out and punish her for leaving the fairy circle. 

     She pushed those monstrous images away or at least tried to. They were still there, reaching for her throat, their jagged claws reaching out, the blood of the innocent and the damned dripping from them. 

     Step by step she went, each and every foot like a mile, each and every breath like it could be her last. Her gun was out, aimed at the end of the corridor, the cell phone tucked back into her coat pocket for now.

     She reached it without incident, the end of the red corridor and beyond it, the red glow reaching far enough for her to see the edge of an escalator. She breathed a sigh of relief and rushed forward, stopping at the foot of the unmoving stairs and peering up, praying to see some light, any to give her that one shred of hope.

     There was none, and as nothing but more of the pitch black she'd just cut through spread out before her, her heart fell, that little boy's face never very far. 

    And then common sense cut through the avalanche of despair, her cell phone remembered. She yanked it out of her jacket yet again and flipped it open.

     7:45pm

     It was late, late enough for it to be dark, particularly in the streets of New York City where the skyscrapers blotted out most of the evening sun. 

     She was close, she had to be and there was no sound, nothing above but silence. 

     She turned back. Hope, if only a dim glimmer of it, once again blossoming within her, she hurried back down that red corridor. It was time to get the others, to bring them at least as far as this escalator before she scouted further ahead.

     This time the red haze was a blur, the shadows smaller, less menacing, not hideous unholy monsters but merely shadows and nothing more. Those kids were going to live and that was that. 

     It was at the end of the corridor, hunched over one of the devastated corpses, feeding like the bottom dwelling monstrosity that it was, that she found the first of the Sahajin. The monster was caked in blood, it's head half in and half out of the demolished ribcage of it's intended meal. It's long glistening lobster pincers held the dead person's torso as it rummaged around within the corpse. She couldn't see it's eye stalks, the monster's head being far too deep in it's gorging. It couldn't see her either, and she had at least that.

     Grimly, ever fiber in her being repulsed by the atrocity before her, she forced herself to stride up to the feasting monster. She heard and smelled as human bone crunched before it's powerful mandibles, this poor dead soul's innards spilling out onto the cracked concrete floor.

     Her resolve that of forged steel, she placed her gun over the back of the monster's malformed head and fired one bullet into it, killing it instantly. 

     With nothing more than a soft hollow gurgle, the dead monster slid deeper into the ruined human remains, the smell of blood  and waste threatening to overcome her senses. 

     Disgusted, feeling mortified and violated at the complete desecration of a human being, she violently grabbed one of the many protrusions that lined the creature's carapace and ripped it out of the human body, letting it drop silently onto the cement, another corpse to add to the pile. 

     Then she heard the child scream.

End Part 63