Dirty Work: Volume 1

Cold Space - 5

Some of you who have never seen a dead body will be wondering how I could be so cold as to leave her there, lying in a sewer. You may say, 'Ashrore can track down the maniacal freak thing. You stay and grieve for her.' And I will tell you that after you have grieved for one body, the body of one you knew, and had saved before, you learn to steel yourself against it. It hurts, don't get me wrong. It hurts and it feels like you shouldn't be this cold towards it, and you feel like you should empty your soul onto the corpse, but you don't. You get up and mourn internally and move on.

The tunnels seemed to have grown darker since a few minutes before, and they seemed to close in on us as we moved, stalking our prey. They seemed to echo louder than before, each hiss or drip of the machine's wiring up Celestria along with us as we moved through the chambers, trying to distract us. Disorient us.

I checked my Halo-Core to see if I could get a message up to the surface yet, to tell the boss what had happened. Still nothing. Typical.

Everything in my body seemed to be even more tense than usual. Even more than before the attack. I have said that I was tightly strung then, but now it seemed as if every nerve in my body was ready to snap. I tried to control my shaking hand but found that it would shudder constantly, no matter how much I attempted to still it. My feet seemed to be hitting the ground harder than ever, and I was sure that out of nowhere something would leap out at us and rip us to shreds.

Ashrore kept scanning the floor, looking for a trail of blood, or anything that would allow us to follow our prey more easily. I was on task of constantly turning to look behind us, to see if anything was stalking us. We knew that there was definitely one of them, but it had crossed both our minds that there might be a friend of our beast of the tunnels that could pincer us fairly easily. I wanted nothing more than there to be several of them, lined up in a row, for me to send a single blast right through the centre of all of them at once. It would have relieved my stress to no end.

I kept thinking back to the glimpse we had had of the man/thing. More than its shrivelled body, its thin, spindly legs that still had a brutal force behind them, I kept thinking of its eyes. Its eyes, bloodshot and wavering, eager and hungry, though not for flesh. No, there was something else lingering behind it.

We trod through the sewers, opening a door that had fresh blood on the handle. Ashrore took the rear as I pushed through it, wiping the blood onto the slimy pipe work of the tunnel walls. I looked down at it under a flickering light and saw faces in the red smears, faces of the dead. I said a silent prayer to her and moved on.

The stench of the sewer was stronger here, and Ashrore told me that through a wall on the far side of the tunnel we were now in was the main sewage river for the Area. I told her not to take us through there.

'If he doessssn't go through there, we won't,' she chuckled quietly.

'He'd better fucking not,' I said. Our attempts at humour to relieve the mood weren't working, it seemed.

On the ground were flecks of blood. Ashrore bent down and touched one.

'Fressssh,' she said, her tail stopping its usual swing and falling to the ground. I haven't had the experience of reading Trovation tail movements, even being around Ashrore and the others from Dirty Work hasn't given me the know-how. I'm not even sure how much expression can be read from them. But it obviously meant something bad, and with a sniff and a quick growl, she moved off once again. I scanned behind us. Nothing. I followed her.

The tunnel here was illuminated by old, flickering yellow lights on the roof. I guessed it was one of the old main maintenance shafts that were built and used in building the city. Either that, or it was an old tunnel used for checking the sewage if it got blocked. It hadn't been used for ages, judging by the dust that clung to the walls, and the occasional cobwebs that hung from the ceiling pipes like stalactites. It was choking, and a thoroughly awful place to go through.

Ashrore suddenly stopped.

'What is it?' I asked.

We stood there in silence, listening. Nothing save for the sound of dripping, the hum of the sewage, the reverberation of Celestria.

'There are bonessss,' she said.

Looking past her, I saw that, lining the tunnel before us up to a turning to the left, were splinters of crunched white. Initially I dismissed Ashrore's statement, thinking that there was no way that bone would just be laying around here. But then I saw one particular section of white and recognised it as the bottom half of a jaw, cracked and fractured.

'We must be near it's lair,' I said. Ashrore nodded. She checked to see if her safety was off. We proceeded, closing in on the target.