Chapter #33The Sins of the Mother... by: Nostrum   Mireya drew a gun from a concealed holster. The bag with the rest of her equipment bounced between her shoulder blades as she jogged after Jeff back the way he'd come.
The corridor opened out into a large chamber. Not the kind of thing you'd find in a mine, Mireya thought. Nor was it filled with the kind of equipment you'd find in one.
The ceiling was low, but the room was large enough to hold what had once been a well-equipped scientific lab. There were tables and stools, shelves, storage cabinets, and wheeled carts. A freezer unit. One side had even been given over to what looked like a small greenhouse.
But everything under the flicking fluorescent lights—somewhere a generator still worked—was smashed and broken. Tables were flung about, and the floor twinkled with broken glass. The freezer had been tipped over, and a stench of rotting food hung in the air. The frames of the greenhouse were bent.
Jeff beckoned her to the far side opposite the entrance , where a low block of painted cinderblock topped with plate glass spanned the width of the room. It was shatterproof glass, Mireya saw, for it held together though spiderwebbed with cracks. At one end the wall a steel door, given entrance to the narrow space beyond, hung ajar. Mireya peered around it. There the living rock on the other side had been smoothed to a sheer face, unmarked save for the dark mouths of four burrows near the floor. They looked like giant rat-holes, and Mireya drew in a hissing breath when she saw them.
Next, she and Jeff examined the greenhouse. Inside, tables had been smashed and heat lamps scattered. Gingerly, Mireya lifted the twisted frame of a wooden box; a little soil fell out. Affixed to one end was a label: Batch 3, Specimen 1.
Mireya dropped the box, then stooped to dig into the mound of soil. Her finger touched something sharp, and she pulled on a pair of gloves before probing deeper. From the dirt she pulled something gray and leathery and curved like a a tiny bowl. It was part of an egg shell.
Jeff spoke the words she was thinking. "Basilisk?"
She nodded, looked around, and in her mind's eye reconstructed the room from the ruins. "And you were right," she said, "this is the kind of place you'd build if you were breeding them."
"Why would anyone do that?"
"Because," Mireya spat, "some people can't leave well enough alone."
--
Mireya paced the facility, lifting and poking through the debris as Jeff watched, putting the clues together.
Basilisks, according to the evidence, laid at most between three and five eggs in a reproductive cycle that, blessedly, only came around every few decades, and the hatchlings took decades as well to mature. The species had also evolved to reproduce asexually if needed, meaning a female could birth a brood even if she went into her cycle with no mate.
That someone had built a facility to breed such monsters suggested those someones had had a long-term plan to do just that. Or they had been extremely unlucky, and caught a basilisk just entering one of her fertile cycles. If a juvenile had wrecked this place, Mireya didn't want to face an adult female. But neither would she want to face a juvenile that had done this.
She returned to the burrows. The wall with its shatterproof glass and door had plainly been erected with the intention of controlling the movements of the things once they were too large for the birthing crates and had been moved into a nest. But they had failed. There was a bag of cement near the door, and Mireya wondered if someone had had the desperate notion of sealing the things up inside their lairs. If so, had the attempt been countermanded? Or had the basilisks proven too strong, too quick, too deadly?
Then, even as she knelt by the mouth of the nearest burrow, she heard a skittering from within.
Mireya signaled Jeff to move back, and scurried after him to duck behind an overturned table. From there she could peer out at the steel door as it hung ajar—a good vantage from which to snipe anything trying to crawl through. Quickly, she weighed the odds. Then, by feel, she returned her pistol to its holster, slid her pack off, and from one of its pockets pulled out another, larger pistol—the one chambered with the special tranquilizer darts.
The sound of claws on stone grew louder, and something hissed. A shadow appeared in the gap between the door and frame—a muzzle like that of a crocodile. But Mireya held back until the skull appeared. A eye like polished onyx gleamed as the thing, its tongue licking the air, crawled into the room.
Mireya was very careful to look anywhere but into that eye.
A juvenile, she thought in relief, and squeezed the trigger.
The crack of the shot split the air, and the monster jumped and flopped and scrabbled at the floor to regain its balance, then scrambled back through the doorway.
Mireya held her breath, then rose and on tiptoes hurried toward the cracked plate-glass window. With her peripheral vision she glanced into the narrow room beyond. The thing sprawled on its stomach, its sides heaving with labored breath. The bright feather of the dart protruded from its neck. Mireya shifted her glance until she saw that its eyes were closed.
Still, though Dr. Gus had told her that the tranquilizer would last only for fifteen minutes, she waited a full five minutes for fear that the sound of the shot would bring out more of the things. During the wait she exchanged the tranquilizer gun for a set of harnesses and muzzles, and a rifle. The latter she loaded with the kind of ammunition that might punch a hole in the front of a tank.
Finally, when the silence had become unbearable, she gestured Jeff over.
"We're lucky," she whispered. "It's a juvenile, and it looks like it's the only one here. So let's take our chances while they're good. You get this onto it," she continued as she handed him the harness. "Get the hood and muzzle over it, then I'll help you buckle up the rest."
Jeff nodded and pulled the door farther open.
Afterward, he could never decide (to his lasting torment) if that had been a wise or very unwise decision. The door, as he pulled it, creaked very loudly on his hinges. If, instead, he had been able to slip quietly inside, would he have gotten in and out safely? Or would he have been trapped inside, unarmed, and unable to retreat?
But he did pull at the door, and he was still outside the chamber when they lunged from their lairs. Three were size of the one Mireya had shot. The fourth, though, was a monster like an alligator.
They were waiting for us to make another move, Mireya thought as she grabbed Jeff's shoulder. "Don't look in their eyes," she warned as she thrust herself past him, her rifle at the ready.
One of the juveniles was at the fore, lunging over the body of its unconscious sibling, mouth open, fangs dripping. The gullet seemed bottomless, but Mireya concentrated on it as she raised the rifle.
But before she could squeeze the trigger, something sailed over her shoulder and landed in the monster's gaping jaws. It was a sphere, and the runes on it glowed like fire.
Then the room went white. A noiseless concussion, like an enormous hand, pushed her backward. She landed on her back, jolting every bone in her body. "Run, Yiya," a voice said in her ear, "and don't look back!"
She flopped onto her stomach and pushed herself upright. But as she planted a foot under herself, she felt a hard sting, as of something long and sharp and edged like a razor, pierce her foot. Glass, she thought, and as the flash faded she raised herself upright with the help of an overturned table, and hobbled after Jeff. He hung back just long enough catch her around the waist and support her as they fled.
But her foot hurt, like the glass had lodged itself in her flesh, and with every step she felt she was driving it deeper in. "Gotta stop and face it," she gasped, and fell from Jeff's arm to the floor. She wriggled over and sat up, raising the rifle and aiming it back down the hallway.
The mother hunched there at the other end, twenty yards off, a black shadow under the dim and flickering lights. Her growl was a low rumble.
Mireya raised the rifle, but as her finger closed on the trigger, the basilisk shifted its head, and its eye locked onto hers. Mireya felt her blood curdle and freeze.
No no no, she thought as the world turned gray, and her field of vision shrank into a point that held nothing but the swirling iris of the basilisk. Not like this. Not like Mami.
The eye shifted and spun. It's charging, Mireya thought. I'm paralyzed but Jeff won't know that, he'll think I'm holding back, and when it's be too late it'll kill us both and it will all be my fault for being greedy and careless and stupid!
But though her body was paralyzed, her will was not, and though her mind raced her thoughts were still straight and clear and true. The rifle is aimed and cocked. I only have to break eye contact with the thing.
And nothing, she realized, could be easier than that.
She relaxed her hold on her body, and her eyelids, released from her conscious control, dropped shut.
And the instant the the thing's eye vanished from her sight, she squeezed the trigger.
--
Her shot had blown its head clean off, and there was no sign of the other juveniles. But Jeff paid the dead lizard no heed as he cradled and studied Mireya's foot.
The boot was punched clean through in two places, and the blood oozed out. He didn't need to examine the holes any more closely to know they had been made by a pair of fangs.  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
| Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
More by this author