Tunneling, a short story

Down there, below the street, as the sun sets today. Something buried deep is going to sleep, and something different is waking. It is an ageless balance which the engineers for the new subway tunnel have disturbed. Such things should stay asleep, as Philip Rattlekin, subway line 4, will soon discover in the Twilight Zone.

[Heads up, some adult language in this one…]

—

Philip Rattlekin sat in a dirty puddle of mud, struggling to catch his breath while making as little noise as possible. His body felt numb, not because of the frigid temperature of the water, but because he was the only one still alive.

It had come from nowhere and everywhere and killed everyone.

And now it was coming for him.

—

“You have to stop the drilling!”

How many times had Philip heard this in the past two weeks? Usually, his assistant ran interference when the nuts fell off the tree, but he’d just been sent on an errand to deliver some new tunnel schematics to the city planner’s office, and the nuts had managed to corner Philip as he was heading out to get to Evan’s soccer match.

There was at least a dozen this time. More than twice as many kooks as last week. Enough that things could get messy if they got too pushy. Philip was a big guy, a head taller than the tallest kook and firmly packed with muscle that showed he was far from a pencil pushing engineer, but he’d learned in Iraq how quick things could go south and he wasn’t going to scuffle with a mob.

He turned to the main kook – a middle aged man with frizzy Einstein hair and a look nuttier than Doc Brown. “Look, we told you guys last week. We’re on a tight schedule, millions of dollars have been poured into this project, and there’s no way it’s stopping. Why don’t you get back to your university and let us do our job.”

“You don’t understand!” Doc Brown shrieked, pulling out a tablet from a leather bag he wore around his neck. “Our studies have shown that you are causing irreparable harm to the water table, and this will impact our entire city’s water supply!” He stuck the tablet in Philip’s face to show him a bunch of meaningless graphs and numbers.

Philip snorted. Last time they claimed the subway project was disturbing the habitat of some mole or groundhog or something. Now it was the water table. The city had done their own studies, and the water table was in no danger from the extension of line four. Why would he help wreck his own city’s water supply? It made no sense, and he said so.

“Yes, well, be that as it may, you must stop the drilling,” the old kook stammered, with a surprising amount of conviction.

Philip was done.

“If you got a problem with what we’re doing, take it up with the city planner. This is her ballgame.” He stepped up and stared down at the kook, just inches away. The guy smelled like garlic. “Now get out of my way.”

Doc Brown stammered incoherently but wisely stepped aside, letting Philip through so that he could get to his truck. As he pulled himself into the cab, he could hear Doc Brown mumbling something about the water table and disaster and the end of the world.

Stupid hippy environmentalist nutjobs, Philip thought as he pressed the ignition and started up his F-150. Evan was starting today and he didn’t want to be late.

—

Philip inhaled for four seconds and exhaled for another four while reciting the mantra he’d been taught in Basic. This too shall pass… this too shall pass… this too shall pass… It had saved his life in that back alley in Mosul, maybe it would save his life now.

Feeling his heart rate lower and his breathing come under his control, Philip opened his eyes to take stock of his situation. He still sat in a puddle of dirty tunnel water where he’d stumbled just a few moments before. Work lights flickered in the tunnel several meters away, but all was quiet. No sounds of pursuit.

No sounds of that… whatever it had been. All teeth and tentacles and blood…

Maybe this is just a bad dream, he considered, shaking his head. I’m going to wake up any minute now and have to go and pee.

Just like Evan and his bad dreams. The kid would wake him up in the middle of the night, shrieking in the darkness and claiming to have seen monsters. He’d take him to pee and the then he’d be off to sleep again in no time. Night terrors, the doctor said. Leftovers from daddy’s deployment.

So much blood…

Sitting still gets soldiers killed, Philip thought, another life-saving mantra coming back to him. He raised himself out of the puddle and leaned against the tunnel wall. Everything was darkness where he’d come from.

He took a step towards the flickering lights and nearly fell down again as a sharp pain hit his right foot. Damn it, he grunted as he went down on his left knee, his hand going to his right ankle. He froze as his grunt echoed down the tunnel.

Nothing.

Whatever it was, it apparently didn’t have a keen sense of hearing.

Or it wasn’t hungry any more.

Then he heard the growl.

Damn, he thought. The kooks were right.

—

“Shutting us down? How the hell are they shutting us down?”

Philip stood at the opening to the tunnel where he could get cell reception, and he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. They’d just broken through a major wall of bedrock, and there was more than enough work to do without this kind of nonsense.

“The mayor got wind of the kook’s concerns and ordered the halt,” his assistant said on the other end. “They tweeted out some infographics about the dangers of the project – I’ll send you the screenshots. Somehow, they managed to get retweeted by Neil DeGrass Tyson or The Science Guy or someone, and now it’s gone political.”

“Politics,” Philip muttered. Every curse word he’d ever learned – before the service and during – came to mind, and it was all he could do to not kill the messenger. “Alright Lou, get back over here and we’ll figure out what we’re gonna do. Meanwhile, I’ve got to go pull out the crew and get the machinery tied down. Situation normal.”

“All fucked up.” Lou finished. “You want I should bring you a coffee?”

“Make it Irish and we’ll be moving in the right direction,” Philip chuckled, glad for some levity. “Just get back here so we can clean up this mess.”

His phone buzzed as the screenshots showed up, and so he said goodbye to Lou and stared at the images. The kooks claimed that the tunneling disturbed subterranean life and might endanger species that humanity was yet to encounter. The images were flashy and sensational and absolute bullshit.

Philip found a few extra curse words that he had been saving for a special occasion and muttered them as he headed back down into the tunnel.

—

It happened in flashes, like a firefight.

He’s giving orders to withdraw when they first hear the growl coming from the tunnel that they’d just finish boring.

They swing over the spotlights.

A ripple of green skin flashes and vanishes in the shadows.

The first scream as Juan, who operates the excavator, is snatched by… something… and yanked into the darkness.

Building hysteria as one by one his workers vanish. The green skin… crashing lights… wrapping tentacles… a mouth as big as a horse… sharp teeth… more screams… and he runs.

And he runs.

Like he did in Mosul, when the firefight had grown too intense, and everything had gone to hell, and he had no choice because he had a kid and a wife, and he wasn’t losing everything for this shithole…

And then… darkness.

—

Our writing prompt this week was a story based on a Twilight-Zone-ish setup, written by one of the members of the writing group.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Pint of Stout

I sat in the dark corner of the drab, empty little pub staring at the pint of stout sitting on the grungy table. How long had I been sitting, staring?

“You gonna drink it or not? We’re running out of time.”

Considering that the irritable scowl on the bearded face of the dwarf sitting across from me had grown even more irritable, it must have been a while. He leaned over the table and half spat, half whispered, “I told you I’d get you here, and I did. Now you keep up your end of the bargain.”

He’d been irritable since we’d first met – when he approached me at that other dingy pub in Belfast offering his assistance. “I know where the stout is, and I’ll take you there, but once we get there you’ll use it to help me.”

I’d heard this before – in pubs in Ediburgh, Glasgow, Dublin… the same empty promises and the same wasted time, and lots of lost money. But this time had turned out to be different: the dwarf had actually done it: led me here, to the isle of Inisturk of all places, and now the stout sat before me.

I’d been searching for more than ten years, ever since first reading about it in some obscure Gaelic literature in that nearly abandoned section of the Taylor Library at Oxford. A stout made from the springs of the mythical isle of Brasil, an island that only appears from the mists once every seven years. The stuff of fairy tales, not academia or reality.

But for some reason, the idea latched onto me like a leech, and I persisted. I continued to research, dig through ancient texts, trying to find the truth. My professors laughed at me, as had my classmates. And when I ignored them all and published my research, Professor McDonald said that I had “committed academic suicide.”

“Wasting my time,” I muttered, watching a single drop of condensation make its way down the side of the dirty glass.

“What’s that?” the dwarf asked.

“They all told me I was wasting my time, that I was mad to keep pretending it was more than legend.”

“We don’t have time for this,” the dwarf said, grabbing the shot of whisky that sat before him and downing it in a swift gulp. “See? It’s not hard. Just drink the damned thing! That’s what you came here to do!”

What I came here to do. Right.

I turned my attention back to the stout. I lifted the pint glass, which was surprisingly cold, and held it up to the shaft of light coming from the dingy window over my shoulder. The onyx liquid seemed to absorb the light. But was that just my imagination?

“The Ballad of Ailbe Ailbhe said that the one who drank the stout of the isle of Brasil would receive untold gifts from God, “Beidh súile Dé ag titim air”… The legend of Cu Chulainn says that the stout is what gave him his mighty powers, that he kept a cask nearby as he fought Queen Mebh of Connacht. But all the stories end the same way… there was always a cost…”

A sudden pounding on the rough wooden pub door just to my right brought me out my revelry. With a curse in a language I didn’t recognize, my diminutive associate shot out of the seat and stood before the door, his hands raised and head bowed.

Ciara.

She’d been trailing us every step of the way, but the dwarf had kept us out of her reach. But now, she’d found us.

She wanted the stout for herself.

The irony is, she’d been the only one who’d believed me. I’d opened up everything to her, given her my heart, confessed all my hopes and dreams. She’d listened and absorbed and learned and then betrayed me. First, Ciara went to the dean accusing me of plagiarism, and then after I’d confronted her about it, she went to the dean again accusing me of assault.

All lies, of course.

“Drink the damned drink!” the dwarf cried, his hands now pressed hard against the door. Were they glowing? “I can’t hold them!”

I turned my attention back to the stout. God only knew what Ciara would do if she got her hands on something so powerful. It’s my fate, not hers. It’s my dream, and she – with all of her lies and masks and broken promises – she can go to hell.

My hands shook as I lifted the pint to my lips, and as the glass grew closer, the sounds of the struggle at the door receded until they were nothing more than a buzzing fly or a neighbor playing his music a bit too loud. The glass was cold. So cold. Why would they serve it cold?

Before I could drink, the door exploded in, flinging the dwarf across the room and slamming him against the wall beside my table. He slumped lifelessly to the floor, and then she was there, her da’s pistol pointed at my head, two ugly goons flanking her on either side.

“Put it down, Liam,” she said breathlessly.

“I can’t,” I whispered, the stout just an inch from my lips. “You know I can’t. This is the stout of Brasil! It’s real!”

“It’s not real, Liam,” she whispered, desperation in her voice. “Please put it down and come with me.”

“Or you’ll shoot me?” I asked, laughing at the irony. Just two weeks earlier, we were lying naked in bed playing Fortnite on our phones, and now she’s pointing an actual gun at my head? “You just can’t stand the idea of me getting the power.”

“I want you to get some help,” she said, shaking her head. “Please.”

But I’d come too far. Maybe she would shoot me, maybe she wouldn’t. But if I could take a drink – even just a quick one – then none of it would matter. Her bullets, her rejection, all of the rejection – none of it would matter.

I took a drink.

She fired.

Blackness.

—

This is a short story written for the Shenzhen Writing Group, Shenzhen, China, September 2018.

Nanowrimo Day 15 – Halfway There

Nanowrimo Day 10 – The Return of the Memes

Nanowrimo Day 7

Nanowrimo • Day Five

Nanowrimo • Day Three

Nanowrimo 2017 – Day One

Nanowrimo 2017… are you ready?

It’s nearly here.
Are you ready?
Easy peasy.

Thimblerig’s Ark is Free, Feb 3 & 4!

In honor of yesterday’s most important holiday Groundhog’s Day (why isn’t it a day off, Mr. Trump? That should have been your first executive order!), we’re pleased to announce that Thimblerig’s Ark will be free for download on February 3 and 4!

The second book in the series is nearing completion, and so you want to make sure you grab the first book while you still can. And tell your friends!

You already know about Noah. Just wait until you read the animal’s story.

—

Thimblerig is a little groundhog with big problems.

He’s a loner con-artist who’s losing his mojo; the wild dogs who run the forest harass him at every turn; he’s having vivid nightmares of apocalyptic floods; and worst of all, he believes he sees unicorns when everyone knows unicorns are only the stuff of legend.

But what one animal might call a problem, Thimblerig calls an opportunity.

In a moment of inspiration, he comes up with the ultimate con: persuade as many suckers as he can that a world-ending flood is coming; the fabled unicorns have told him where the only safe place will be; and only he can lead them to safety.

All for a reasonable price, of course.

When the flood really does come, Thimblerig has a choice: either save the ones who trusted him, or lose everything.

And that’s when he discovers that his problems have only just begun.