Ephemerys by A L Brooks

Author:A L Brooks [Brooks, A L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

5

It’s not easy though, trying to get anywhere fast in this city. The water doubles or triples any time it takes to get places. We are constantly snagged in the twisting roots of lilies, constantly knotted up in reeds and marine vegetation. Things bite us. Leaches. Flies. Gnats. At one stage I feel my leg abruptly sucked backwards and when I turn to see what’s got me I find the lips of a giant grotesque tadpole sucking around my thigh, my entire leg gulped down its throat.

I squeal. I can’t shift myself. Another tadpole with great goggling eyes swims up and starts sucking at my arm. ‘Eddie, Morgan!’ I try knifing the critters with my free hand but I’m in an awkward position, it’s like trying to stab things with both arms tethered behind my back.

Morgan wades quickly back through the water, hacking wildly into the tadpoles with her dagger, pulling me from their sucking mouths. We kick away from them, tadpole guts floating to the water’s surface, a horde of pond skaters zipping over to feast on blood and flesh.

We climb up mud banks that span the roadway between buildings. Ahead of us huge domes of mud and clay block our way forward. At the base of each there looks to be a cavernous opening with a deep dark tunnel leading down into some subterranean grotto.

‘I don’t even want to think what could be living down there,’ Morgan says, fearfully.

‘We need to get around them somehow,’ Eddie says.

‘Or we turn back,’ Morgan says when we realise there’s no space to squeeze between them. They span the street, from building face to building face, packed in like barnacles on a rock.

Eddie looks about. There’s a side street maybe thirty metres behind us. But to reach it we’d need to swim back across the body of water teeming with those tadpoles.

‘I’m not going back near those tadpole things,’ I tell him.

‘We gotta climb over the top then,’ Eddie says, gazing up the slopes of these mud stacks. ‘Just keep clear of those openings.’

He doesn’t need to tell us. We’re already giving them a wide berth. ‘Sweet Mother,’ Morgan says as we begin to claw our way up the nearest mud mound, one with what looks to be an easier gradient than the others. ‘Please tell me nothing lives down there!’

I’m trying not letting my mind go there. I just want to scale these stacks and put them behind us.

But as we start our climb, we suddenly hear noises. Wet sucking sounds. Hissing sounds. Groaning sounds. Coming up from the depths of the tunnels. Things deep down beneath us, stirring, waking.

We abandon our climb, sliding down the mud.

We can hear them, creatures scrambling up the dark funnels.

The first visible sign of them are their long spiked limbs, the sort that impaled Reid and Imogen and Eddie that day at the Stardream portal.

Eddie, holding his proximity unit, clambers backwards. ‘Move back!’ he cries, ‘move back!’

Another of them comes up from a separate mud dome.

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