Page 10 of Spelunking Through Hell

Neither was a great option for letting them get just one shot in. I jumped back over the fire and snatched the machete from the dead one’s hand, digging it into the embers and using it to fling them at the one with the morning star. He howled and reeled backward, clawing at his face. I took advantage of his distraction to shoot his friend, twice. Four bullets left, no javelins in the air. Not bad.

Morning star guy finished clawing the embers out of his eyes and began advancing toward me. I lowered the machete and tried to feign cowering. It wasn’t easy, not with a fire between us and him moving at a speed commensurate with his size. Still, he seemed to buy it, making a noise like laughter as he advanced.

Issues with fighting a nonsocial species: any primate who’d just seen their friends mowed down the way these ones had been would have at least paused, if not elected for a full-on retreat. Not this guy. He kept coming, apparently happy to charge straight through the fire to keep bothering me. No worries. I shoved my gun back into its holster and bolted, trying to circle around behind him.

He snarled and spun, clearly anticipating the move, and whipped his morning star around over his head. If he could get enough momentum on that thing, he could just let go and trust gravity to do the rest. Nice guy.

I waited until I was close enough to have a clear shot, then flung the machete as hard as I could at his stomach.

Like I said, machetes aren’t very aerodynamic, but even a brick can fly short distances if thrown with enough force. Morning star guy made a startled noise that sounded a lot like “urk” and staggered backward, looking slowly down at the two feet of steel now protruding from his gut. He dropped the morning star, narrowly missing his own foot, and reached down with shaking hands to grasp the handle.

“Don’t!” I said sharply. He glanced up at me. I sighed. “I know you speak some English. If you pull that out, it’s going to take your internal organs with it. You’ll bleed out.”

He looked disbelieving. I was the one who’d put the machete there, andnowI wanted to worry about whether or not he ripped out his own intestines? It was all very confusing, and he was losing a decent amount of blood. I sighed again, more heavily this time.

“Yeah, all your friends are dead. Maybe you’re not, if you tell me how to find my stuff and I help you get that thing out without doing any major damage.”

He snorted and pointed toward the hills to the west. There, not far away, was the mouth of a low cave. Then, making eye contact thewhole time, he reached down and yanked the machete out of his own stomach.

He was dead before he hit the ground. “Great,” I said, as I walked forward and took the machete away from his corpse. “And I’m sure your well-timed suicide has nothing to do with the caves being home to something that’s going to try to eat my ass, right?”

Being dead, he didn’t reply. I considered the virtues of kicking him a few times, just for the comfort of it, and decided that harassing the dead wasn’t worth my time. Not when I had other things to do. Sighing one last time, I turned to face the cave.

Time to get this over with.

Four

“No one ever really dies. We live on in the memories of our children, and it’s down to us to make sure that we’re remembered kindly.”

—Alexander Healy

Heading into a dark, unfamiliar cave in a dark, only semi-familiar dimension, because that’s a great plan

I paused outside thecave to dig bullets out of my pocket—not the best bullet storage location, but when you don’t have a pack and need to move while you can still get it back, you make do with what’s available—and reload my revolvers. Whatever was waiting inside here would be susceptible to bullets if it was somehow immune to stabbing. Weird damage immunities like “fire” and “blood loss” only really crop up in that fantasy game my grandkids like, the one where they pretend to be elf warriors who seduce dragons or whatever.

Here’s a tip: do not attempt to seduce a dragon. They don’t have the right pheromones, and they think humans are gross. Which, to be fair, we kind of are. Lots of fluids in a human.

I wanted to keep my fluids where they were, which was why going into this cave without a light or a guide was probably not the best idea I’d ever had. Still, it was so far from the worst that it was fantastic by comparison, and so, after a moment to wish I still had any grenades, I gripped my new machete and stepped inside.

The cave was dark, as expected, although notasdark as expected; glowing fungus stuck to the walls, almost matching the colors of the sky outside—greens and blues and soft whites. It wasn’t proper lighting, more like Christmas lights strung around the edges of a room, but it was enough that I could see the outlines of the things around me, rocks jutting up from the cave floor, the walls themselves. The airsmelled stale and musty, like a basement that had been closed off for too long. I paused once I was a few steps inside, listening intently. Nothing moved.

Wasting charms is never a good idea, but I was going to have to be redone once I got home anyway, since I’d burned through all my gates, and that meant I didn’t need to be as frugal as I normally would. I slipped the first two fingers of my free hand under the strap of my tank top and pressed the small star I knew was tattooed there. “Light, please.”

None of my tattoos actually have a verbal component—they’re all intent—but sometimes saying what I want out loud helps. I closed my eyes for a moment.

There are two kinds of light spell that can be embedded in ink. The little ones give you a nice, easy, long-lasting glow, but it’s better if you give your eyes time to adjust. The big ones are more like a sudden nuclear flash. There is no letting your eyes adjust. They’re either closed when you trigger the effect, or you’re going to be walking into walls for a while. I can power both, but the second kind knock me on my ass for a couple of hours after the adrenaline wears off, and they’re really a last resort kind of thing.

Naga frequently reminds me that both types of light spell pull electrolytes and sugars out of my system, which can lead to seizures, rapid heartbeat, and unconsciousness if I don’t take steps to correct it and could presumably eventually kill me. That’s not the goal most of the time, so I’m as careful as I can be while dealing with situations that sometimes require me to write checks my body doesn’t understand how to cash. Once I found my pack, I could take a few packets of the powder that’s supposed to put things back to normal. It was just a matter of finding the pack.

When I opened my eyes, my entire body was glowing a soft white, like one of those weird glow sticks that are so popular with the kids. The cave, thus revealed, was a pretty standard representative of its kind, although the ground was smoother than it would have been naturally; someone or something had been moving through here for a long time, long enough to wear a path into the ground. The only real question was whether it had been the charming gentlemen who’d welcomed me to this dimension, or whether it was some sort of local monster my last friend had been hoping to feed me to.

Well, nothing like a little caving to liven up an already too-lively night. I started walking deeper inside, machete at the ready, watching for any sign of movement.

About twenty yards from the entrance, I had it, as something that looked like a hellbender if a hellbender were the size of a portable toilet stomped out of the shadows and opened its mouth in silent threat display. Its teeth were tiny nubs in its gummy jaws; it looked like it was built to eat larger bugs than any I’d seen on this world, which didn’t make me optimistic about the depths of the cave. I was usually in and out, exterior only, when I had to pass through here. While I knew there were no big predators left in the open, there could be giant bugs in the depths of the earth. Why the hell not? Everybody seems to love a giant bug.

Almost as much as they love giant snakes. The universe is full of giant snakes. Earth got off easy, since most of our snakes are too small to swallow people, but not everywhere has been that lucky. And some snakes are very nice people, not interested in eating anyone they can carry on a conversation with.

I have yet to meet a giant bug, except for maybe the Madhura, who I would classify as “a very nice person.” Sarah and Angela don’t count. They’re biologically cuckoos, but they’re culturally human in all the ways that matter.

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