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The Chant of the Sibyl
“But... all the lights are still on.” Donovan looked around, wide-eyed behind the mostly-obscuring mask of his respirator. “There has to be someone here.”
Caleb shook his head a little, shifting the empty pack at his shoulder. “I've seen stranger things in my life, kid. Nothing is assured. Make no assumptions.”
The small band of men fell silent other than the crunching of their footsteps on the dust and gravel outside of the substantial compound. There were guard towers, where in the wispy halo of light machine gun turrets were silhouetted. They appeared to be unmanned. Adrian had decided not to go ashore with them initially – not uncommon – so it was just Caleb, Donovan, and two others who had dragged themselves off the boat begrudgingly. It surprised Caleb that so few were anxious to get off the ship... there was a disconcerting lethargy that had settled over his fellows since they came into sight of this shore. Nobody was comfortable with it.
Caleb was not immune to this - although Donovan seemed to be – whether it was from some actual extra-sensory caveat that he was picking up from the universe, or just the attitude of the rest of his community rubbing off on him, he wasn't sure. Mostly, Caleb just tried to rely on Adrian's demeanor as a compass and, although that in itself was beginning to be an extremely trying task, it had not changed in a way that appeared to be directly related to drawing up on land this week.
The four compatriots skirted the outside of the camp for a few meters, strafing along the edge of visibility and staring up at the light. It was eerie... most of the world was very dark, uninhabited and falling into ruin in the years after the plague had ploughed through all the major population centers and picked them down to clean bones. But this... this was an extravagance of light, burning into the night sky. From the sea, it was faintly hazy, amplifying the effect of the illumination substantially, as if it were a tangible force overflowing the walls of this seemingly abandoned fortress. But if it were abandoned, why were the lights still on? Donovan's question echoed in Caleb's mind.
“Hold up.” He raised a hand, breaking the silence with his voice and hearing the slightly-quickened breath of his men after he stopped speaking and they stopped moving. Caleb stood, staring, listening, until Donovan swayed slightly into his shoulder.
“I heard it too.”
It was one of those sounds that you don't really hear... something like an unbidden tremor-sense that humans weren't evolved enough to be able to rely on had detected helpfully in the dark quiet. He thought hard on it, trying to define the edges of the sound in his mind to no avail. No, he had simply sensed something... perhaps a tiny movement in the periphery of his vision, a change in the air or the most fleeting odor passing under his nose.
Turning to full face the threatening facade of the compound, Caleb lifted a hand and waved. He drew a deep breath, hesitated, and called out into the thick, foggy darkness.
“Hello! Is there anyone there?”
The tenor bay of his voice bounced back to him off the black walls, deadened by the mist, by the lack of reply. He tried again.
“Hello! Hello there!” All three men – or, perhaps, two men and a boy – shifted their weight behind him. He could hear every scrape of their feet in the dirt, the shuffle of their gear and clothing. Narrowing his eyes, Caleb swept the top of the wall. There was nothing... not a motion, no tiny cloud of someone releasing a breath in the chill night.
“There's nobody here.” Rocking back on his heels, he spoke with his chin down, studying the ground around them in a vain hope that he might spy some fresh footprints that didn't belong to their boots. Close to his right side, Donovan exhaled, the sound made raspy by the respirator.
“Ok... so are we going to go inside or not, captain?” Though his face was covered, Caleb could imagine Donovan's nervous grin as he spoke, spreading wide over slightly crooked teeth. The rangy youth's eagerness lightened his heart, but only a little, and he remembered what they'd come for. Exploration, supplies, information.
Adrian had said that he doubted they would find anybody. Anybody alive, anyway. The way he'd put it set a chill in Caleb's stomach, which he remembered now, as he nodded to the boy. Gesturing over his shoulder to the two men who stood behind them, Caleb began the trudge up the small incline toward the fortress's wall.
Getting inside had been something of an ordeal, each one of them tense and unspeaking. All the eternal apertures to the compound were locked down, not giving an inch to Caleb's pry bar. Circling the wall itself, and worrying every moment that they were going to be fired upon by the guns – which perched along the top of the wall like gargoyle sentinels, waiting to lay low any intruder who got too close – it didn't look like there was going to be a lot of opportunity to gain entry into the place.
They walked for nearly a quarter hour, their pace stiff over the scratchy ground. Caleb guessed they'd gone about a mile, and hoped that this was the reverse side of the roughly-round enclosure. Donovan stopped up next to him, having kept pace at his side while the other two brought up the rear a few paces behind.
“Hey, what's that up there?” Donovan's curiosity regularly outweighed his nerves, and one glance between himself and Caleb elevated their pace to a quick trot toward whatever it was the younger boy had seen. He stopped up short in the dark, nearly causing Caleb to trip into his back, and pressed his hands against the wall.
“It's wood. It's boarded up here.” Donovan said excitedly.
Drawing back, Caleb risked a light, for where they now stood sunk into a lee of the wall, sheltered from the illumination above. The reason was clear from the beam of his hand torch.
The wall itself – whose interior construction was partially revealed as layered concrete reinforced with iron girders – had been smashed, here, by what must have been a formidable blast. Scorch marks striated the stone, and the metal was twisted away from the damaged area in frozen, angry gestures. It was like something had come along one day and taken a bite out of the protective shell of the compound. Caleb's initial thought was that, perhaps, this was why it seemed to be empty... that they'd been attacked. But that would have had to have been recently, for so much light to still be humming inside the interior of the compound. Additionally, as Donovan had observed, the hole had been filled in with old wood planks. The black burn marks on the stone were also beginning to weather slightly... this assault was at least a few years old. More logically, it dated back to the war.
Caleb stood back, sweeping the weak beam of the torch over the edges of the substantial hole and considering it. Pry bar in hand and three other strong men present ought to make reasonably quick work of the weak spot, if they were diligent. Alternately, they could probably climb over, because it had not been filled to the full height of the wall, suggesting a lack of manpower or equipment inside when the job was done initially. He wondered where they were... he'd entirely lost track of, geographically, where they sailed. The faceless ocean and threatening mask of black land all looked the same after a time. Many landmarks of the old world were destroyed – for they had been man made – or terribly defaced by the destruction that the war and sickness had caused, so there was little for them to orient themselves by. Not that it mattered much... even if he had known where they were in relation to that dead time, there wasn't anything for them where the centers of mankind had been. Who knew where people had settled, where resources would be left in tact. They sought what they could find and, for four years now, that had been good enough.
“Alright, let's do this.” He said after releasing a breath that he didn't realize he'd been holding.
Prying the wood away was no small task. Each plank had been screwed down all over the place, and the wood filler was held in place by bolts that had been driven deep into the concrete wall at fairly small intervals. So, after ten or so minutes of huffing, tugging, and heaving the first few boards off only to discover another layer, that probably gave way to another layer and then another below that, they unanimously voted to climb it.
Donovan, being the lightest, scaled the wall first and perched precariously on top of the wood structure. Teetering a moment, one arm braced on the damaged concrete, he kicked at it with his boot and called down to Caleb and his other partners.
“Good call! This thing is a few feet thick... someone was pretty serious. I guess they didn't think they'd ever be able to get this fixed the right way.”
With Donovan up top, and Caleb down below – he'd come up last – they pulled the two other men and empty packs up to the top with them and took a moment to regroup. Caleb waved the hand-torch toward the ground, then out into the compound. The area of the breach was pitch dark; he couldn't see the ground below them, but they hadn't climbed up very far, so the climb down shouldn't have been too difficult. Whatever blast had opened up the wall had also – from what little he could see – damaged the other structures in the immediate area, including any lighting fixtures, explaining the deep darkness on either side of the wall.
Unfortunately, the only light he had wasn't very effective at a distance. He glanced about between his men. “We'll just have to go down blind.”
“You really think there's no one here, don't you?” Donovan inquired. He sounded a little dissapointed to Caleb, a sentiment the older man could understand. Dangerous as it could be, there was always a unique brightening of hope when one encountered other people, other survivors. Out there on the sea, never seeing another vessel and only sometimes going ashore, it was easy to succumb to the desolate feeling that Adrian's flock was the last pocket of humanity to have survived the cataclysm, and that wasn't a good feeling for anyone to have, even Adrian at his most megolomaniacal.
“I really don't think anyone is here, Donovan.” Caleb said soberly, fixing him with a stern look in the dark. “With the racket we just made, somebody would have come.”
Donovan opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind, nodding. “Let's go down then, see what we can find.”
They all dropped down to the edge at the same time, as the filled-in area was pretty wide, and started scraping for footholds. They made their way down fairly easily, but in the dark the climb was a little treacherous. Caleb was just starting to feel like he was getting pretty close to the ground, though he couldn't feel it with a reaching toe, he heard the scuffle of another man's boots and jacket sliding down the wall, followed succinctly by an agonized shriek and the most sickening, scraping crunch Caleb could possibly imagine. The scream dwindled quickly to a gurgling series of grunts, then died away to a whimper, then silence. Caleb was paralyzed, clinging to the wall. The voice had been that of Carl Resher, one of the other two men assigned to go ashore with he and Donovan.
“What the fuck? Carl? Carl!” That was Donovan, his voice rising tensely in panic. This snapped Caleb's mind into action very quickly.
"Don't you go down there Donovan! Be careful!" Caleb found himeself barking, his heartrate accelerating painfully in his chest. Donovan, however, wasn't listening. He was scrambling around desperately on the wall, whereas Caleb still found himself totally frozen, gripping the cold wood desperately.
"I can see it! I can see the edges, there's... some kind of big hole!" The boy gasped, at a position lower and a little further away than he had been a moment ago. "You can get down on the side, over here! Come quick!"
Tense and trembling, Caleb sidled across the wall gingerly, terrified - now - of falling. Carl wasn't making any more noise. There was a thud as Donovan's boots impacted the solid ground, causing Caleb to redouble his efforts to get over to the side of the wall. His reaching hand met concrete, and he lowered himself carefully down to the earth below. Donovan was scrambling around on the ground a few feet away, having dropped to his belly to peer into the pit.
"Carl? Carl? Jesus, oh Jesus..." His breath was hard and fast in the respirator. "Caleb, I can't reach him... Shit, I can't see a damn thing!"
Reeling, dizzy, Caleb fumbled with the hand-torch and skidded to his knees beside prone Donovan. "What? What is it? What happened?" He was panting. The torch didn't turn on initially, and he struck it so hard against his palm that he yelped involuntarily with pain. Fortunately, the weak beam was restored and he angled it over the edge. Behind him, he could hear their taciturn fourth - a man named Anthony Flushing that Caleb didn't know particularly well - come down behind them and approach at his back.
Collectively, they all stopped breathing as the illumination from the hand-torch penetrated the murky darkness. Below the wooden wall, a pit had been carved out, maybe six or seven feet out from the wall itself and nearly the bredth of the breach in the concrete. It was deeper than it was long, the edges hewn steep and rough, slanting slightly outward from the surface of the ground so that the bottom of the hole was just a little bigger than the top. To keep someone who fell into it from being able to climb out. That wasn't the only thing, however. The black maw of space was populated barbaricly with six and seven foot wood poles, each carved to a point. In the middle of this macabre forest, Carl's body was sprawled, penetrated by four of the crude spears. Two through the chest, one through the stomach, and one through the left thigh, each slick and dark with his oxidizing blood. His face was a mask of brief but abject horror, eyes staring blindly. His upper body was slightly lower than his legs, creating an angle for his twice-punctured lung to bleed out from, and the blood was running out from underneath his respirator, making a thick line against his exposed throat.
Out of nowhere, Anthony's hand shot out and wrapped around Caleb's wrist, jerking the beam of the hand-torch up and away from the gory scene. Donovan curled in on himself with a shudder, and Caleb sat back on his heels.
"Oh my god." He breathed deeply once, twice... sitting still and silent as the other two men waited. This is why he was here. Because Adrian trusted him as a leader. The moments agonized their way by his brain, but after a few of those painful seconds the sensation, the shock, began to fall away. Carl was dead. There was no changing that... no ammount of horror or sorrow would bring him back. They could, however, salvage their mission without him.
"What is it?" Anthony was the one to speak this time, his thick voice falling hard on the darkness.
"Give me the torch." Caleb's voice was sober enough to illicit immediate, unquestioning obedience from the other man. Shining the beam around the edge of the hollow pit, Caleb gestured with his other arm. "We can reach him from the far side. Go. Haul him out." Standing up, he moved forward several paces before he heard the other two men - stunned, no doubt - started stumbling after him.
Getting Carl out of the pit was a sweaty, bloody, beast of a task but they managed it without injuring themselves. Finally hefting him onto the solid earth just out of the pit, Caleb shoved the dead man over onto his side and sat back for a second, panting.
"Are... are we going to take him back to the boat, for some kind of... burial or something?" Donovan piped up finally, his voice small in the blackness.
"No." Caleb said flatly, his voice hoarse and short. "Take off his boots. We're leaving him here, but his gear is valuable." The two men fell silent again. Caleb didn't dare try to conjecture their unspoken thoughts. He unfastened Carl's respirator and tugged it off the dead weight of the corpse's skull, which lolled awkwardly on his limp neck. A slurry of ichor ran from the inside of the respirator, which Caleb dropped reactively. He sighed, trying to steady his breath and his hand, before giving the mask a good shake over the edge of the pit and tucking it away in his pack. Donovan unhappily presented him with Carl's boots, the laces reverently pulled tight and tucked inside, as well as a few of the other objects the boy thought would be useful. His boot knife, flask, and wisely, his belt. The rest of his garments were ruined by the blood and sticks, so after a quick once-over of the body, they all decided that was good enough, and turned to the still-illuminated portion of the compound.
"So much light..." Caleb, eager to turn his thoughts away from their dead comrade, mused to himself. "They must have incredible generators... that they ran these all the time."
"Maybe they didn't." Donovan observed, looking around. None of the trio were eager to dive in, especially with the first course this place had served up for them. "Maybe they turned them all on for something in particular."
"If they didn't run them all the time," This was Anthony, coming up behind their shoulders. "Why would they all be on now?"
On board with Donovan's thought process, Caleb nodded slowly. "Maybe they were looking for something. Or trying to ward something off?"
"Or trying to attract attention." Donovan offered. "Maybe they thought somebody would find them?"
Unbidden, all three men turned in unison to look at the yawning mouth of the spike-pit that Carl had found his end in. Shuddering, Caleb shook his head and took the first strides into the light.
I haven't quit! I'm behind, but I haven't given up!
Wordcount as of November 21: 25,245.
Caleb shook his head a little, shifting the empty pack at his shoulder. “I've seen stranger things in my life, kid. Nothing is assured. Make no assumptions.”
The small band of men fell silent other than the crunching of their footsteps on the dust and gravel outside of the substantial compound. There were guard towers, where in the wispy halo of light machine gun turrets were silhouetted. They appeared to be unmanned. Adrian had decided not to go ashore with them initially – not uncommon – so it was just Caleb, Donovan, and two others who had dragged themselves off the boat begrudgingly. It surprised Caleb that so few were anxious to get off the ship... there was a disconcerting lethargy that had settled over his fellows since they came into sight of this shore. Nobody was comfortable with it.
Caleb was not immune to this - although Donovan seemed to be – whether it was from some actual extra-sensory caveat that he was picking up from the universe, or just the attitude of the rest of his community rubbing off on him, he wasn't sure. Mostly, Caleb just tried to rely on Adrian's demeanor as a compass and, although that in itself was beginning to be an extremely trying task, it had not changed in a way that appeared to be directly related to drawing up on land this week.
The four compatriots skirted the outside of the camp for a few meters, strafing along the edge of visibility and staring up at the light. It was eerie... most of the world was very dark, uninhabited and falling into ruin in the years after the plague had ploughed through all the major population centers and picked them down to clean bones. But this... this was an extravagance of light, burning into the night sky. From the sea, it was faintly hazy, amplifying the effect of the illumination substantially, as if it were a tangible force overflowing the walls of this seemingly abandoned fortress. But if it were abandoned, why were the lights still on? Donovan's question echoed in Caleb's mind.
“Hold up.” He raised a hand, breaking the silence with his voice and hearing the slightly-quickened breath of his men after he stopped speaking and they stopped moving. Caleb stood, staring, listening, until Donovan swayed slightly into his shoulder.
“I heard it too.”
It was one of those sounds that you don't really hear... something like an unbidden tremor-sense that humans weren't evolved enough to be able to rely on had detected helpfully in the dark quiet. He thought hard on it, trying to define the edges of the sound in his mind to no avail. No, he had simply sensed something... perhaps a tiny movement in the periphery of his vision, a change in the air or the most fleeting odor passing under his nose.
Turning to full face the threatening facade of the compound, Caleb lifted a hand and waved. He drew a deep breath, hesitated, and called out into the thick, foggy darkness.
“Hello! Is there anyone there?”
The tenor bay of his voice bounced back to him off the black walls, deadened by the mist, by the lack of reply. He tried again.
“Hello! Hello there!” All three men – or, perhaps, two men and a boy – shifted their weight behind him. He could hear every scrape of their feet in the dirt, the shuffle of their gear and clothing. Narrowing his eyes, Caleb swept the top of the wall. There was nothing... not a motion, no tiny cloud of someone releasing a breath in the chill night.
“There's nobody here.” Rocking back on his heels, he spoke with his chin down, studying the ground around them in a vain hope that he might spy some fresh footprints that didn't belong to their boots. Close to his right side, Donovan exhaled, the sound made raspy by the respirator.
“Ok... so are we going to go inside or not, captain?” Though his face was covered, Caleb could imagine Donovan's nervous grin as he spoke, spreading wide over slightly crooked teeth. The rangy youth's eagerness lightened his heart, but only a little, and he remembered what they'd come for. Exploration, supplies, information.
Adrian had said that he doubted they would find anybody. Anybody alive, anyway. The way he'd put it set a chill in Caleb's stomach, which he remembered now, as he nodded to the boy. Gesturing over his shoulder to the two men who stood behind them, Caleb began the trudge up the small incline toward the fortress's wall.
Getting inside had been something of an ordeal, each one of them tense and unspeaking. All the eternal apertures to the compound were locked down, not giving an inch to Caleb's pry bar. Circling the wall itself, and worrying every moment that they were going to be fired upon by the guns – which perched along the top of the wall like gargoyle sentinels, waiting to lay low any intruder who got too close – it didn't look like there was going to be a lot of opportunity to gain entry into the place.
They walked for nearly a quarter hour, their pace stiff over the scratchy ground. Caleb guessed they'd gone about a mile, and hoped that this was the reverse side of the roughly-round enclosure. Donovan stopped up next to him, having kept pace at his side while the other two brought up the rear a few paces behind.
“Hey, what's that up there?” Donovan's curiosity regularly outweighed his nerves, and one glance between himself and Caleb elevated their pace to a quick trot toward whatever it was the younger boy had seen. He stopped up short in the dark, nearly causing Caleb to trip into his back, and pressed his hands against the wall.
“It's wood. It's boarded up here.” Donovan said excitedly.
Drawing back, Caleb risked a light, for where they now stood sunk into a lee of the wall, sheltered from the illumination above. The reason was clear from the beam of his hand torch.
The wall itself – whose interior construction was partially revealed as layered concrete reinforced with iron girders – had been smashed, here, by what must have been a formidable blast. Scorch marks striated the stone, and the metal was twisted away from the damaged area in frozen, angry gestures. It was like something had come along one day and taken a bite out of the protective shell of the compound. Caleb's initial thought was that, perhaps, this was why it seemed to be empty... that they'd been attacked. But that would have had to have been recently, for so much light to still be humming inside the interior of the compound. Additionally, as Donovan had observed, the hole had been filled in with old wood planks. The black burn marks on the stone were also beginning to weather slightly... this assault was at least a few years old. More logically, it dated back to the war.
Caleb stood back, sweeping the weak beam of the torch over the edges of the substantial hole and considering it. Pry bar in hand and three other strong men present ought to make reasonably quick work of the weak spot, if they were diligent. Alternately, they could probably climb over, because it had not been filled to the full height of the wall, suggesting a lack of manpower or equipment inside when the job was done initially. He wondered where they were... he'd entirely lost track of, geographically, where they sailed. The faceless ocean and threatening mask of black land all looked the same after a time. Many landmarks of the old world were destroyed – for they had been man made – or terribly defaced by the destruction that the war and sickness had caused, so there was little for them to orient themselves by. Not that it mattered much... even if he had known where they were in relation to that dead time, there wasn't anything for them where the centers of mankind had been. Who knew where people had settled, where resources would be left in tact. They sought what they could find and, for four years now, that had been good enough.
“Alright, let's do this.” He said after releasing a breath that he didn't realize he'd been holding.
Prying the wood away was no small task. Each plank had been screwed down all over the place, and the wood filler was held in place by bolts that had been driven deep into the concrete wall at fairly small intervals. So, after ten or so minutes of huffing, tugging, and heaving the first few boards off only to discover another layer, that probably gave way to another layer and then another below that, they unanimously voted to climb it.
Donovan, being the lightest, scaled the wall first and perched precariously on top of the wood structure. Teetering a moment, one arm braced on the damaged concrete, he kicked at it with his boot and called down to Caleb and his other partners.
“Good call! This thing is a few feet thick... someone was pretty serious. I guess they didn't think they'd ever be able to get this fixed the right way.”
With Donovan up top, and Caleb down below – he'd come up last – they pulled the two other men and empty packs up to the top with them and took a moment to regroup. Caleb waved the hand-torch toward the ground, then out into the compound. The area of the breach was pitch dark; he couldn't see the ground below them, but they hadn't climbed up very far, so the climb down shouldn't have been too difficult. Whatever blast had opened up the wall had also – from what little he could see – damaged the other structures in the immediate area, including any lighting fixtures, explaining the deep darkness on either side of the wall.
Unfortunately, the only light he had wasn't very effective at a distance. He glanced about between his men. “We'll just have to go down blind.”
“You really think there's no one here, don't you?” Donovan inquired. He sounded a little dissapointed to Caleb, a sentiment the older man could understand. Dangerous as it could be, there was always a unique brightening of hope when one encountered other people, other survivors. Out there on the sea, never seeing another vessel and only sometimes going ashore, it was easy to succumb to the desolate feeling that Adrian's flock was the last pocket of humanity to have survived the cataclysm, and that wasn't a good feeling for anyone to have, even Adrian at his most megolomaniacal.
“I really don't think anyone is here, Donovan.” Caleb said soberly, fixing him with a stern look in the dark. “With the racket we just made, somebody would have come.”
Donovan opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind, nodding. “Let's go down then, see what we can find.”
They all dropped down to the edge at the same time, as the filled-in area was pretty wide, and started scraping for footholds. They made their way down fairly easily, but in the dark the climb was a little treacherous. Caleb was just starting to feel like he was getting pretty close to the ground, though he couldn't feel it with a reaching toe, he heard the scuffle of another man's boots and jacket sliding down the wall, followed succinctly by an agonized shriek and the most sickening, scraping crunch Caleb could possibly imagine. The scream dwindled quickly to a gurgling series of grunts, then died away to a whimper, then silence. Caleb was paralyzed, clinging to the wall. The voice had been that of Carl Resher, one of the other two men assigned to go ashore with he and Donovan.
“What the fuck? Carl? Carl!” That was Donovan, his voice rising tensely in panic. This snapped Caleb's mind into action very quickly.
"Don't you go down there Donovan! Be careful!" Caleb found himeself barking, his heartrate accelerating painfully in his chest. Donovan, however, wasn't listening. He was scrambling around desperately on the wall, whereas Caleb still found himself totally frozen, gripping the cold wood desperately.
"I can see it! I can see the edges, there's... some kind of big hole!" The boy gasped, at a position lower and a little further away than he had been a moment ago. "You can get down on the side, over here! Come quick!"
Tense and trembling, Caleb sidled across the wall gingerly, terrified - now - of falling. Carl wasn't making any more noise. There was a thud as Donovan's boots impacted the solid ground, causing Caleb to redouble his efforts to get over to the side of the wall. His reaching hand met concrete, and he lowered himself carefully down to the earth below. Donovan was scrambling around on the ground a few feet away, having dropped to his belly to peer into the pit.
"Carl? Carl? Jesus, oh Jesus..." His breath was hard and fast in the respirator. "Caleb, I can't reach him... Shit, I can't see a damn thing!"
Reeling, dizzy, Caleb fumbled with the hand-torch and skidded to his knees beside prone Donovan. "What? What is it? What happened?" He was panting. The torch didn't turn on initially, and he struck it so hard against his palm that he yelped involuntarily with pain. Fortunately, the weak beam was restored and he angled it over the edge. Behind him, he could hear their taciturn fourth - a man named Anthony Flushing that Caleb didn't know particularly well - come down behind them and approach at his back.
Collectively, they all stopped breathing as the illumination from the hand-torch penetrated the murky darkness. Below the wooden wall, a pit had been carved out, maybe six or seven feet out from the wall itself and nearly the bredth of the breach in the concrete. It was deeper than it was long, the edges hewn steep and rough, slanting slightly outward from the surface of the ground so that the bottom of the hole was just a little bigger than the top. To keep someone who fell into it from being able to climb out. That wasn't the only thing, however. The black maw of space was populated barbaricly with six and seven foot wood poles, each carved to a point. In the middle of this macabre forest, Carl's body was sprawled, penetrated by four of the crude spears. Two through the chest, one through the stomach, and one through the left thigh, each slick and dark with his oxidizing blood. His face was a mask of brief but abject horror, eyes staring blindly. His upper body was slightly lower than his legs, creating an angle for his twice-punctured lung to bleed out from, and the blood was running out from underneath his respirator, making a thick line against his exposed throat.
Out of nowhere, Anthony's hand shot out and wrapped around Caleb's wrist, jerking the beam of the hand-torch up and away from the gory scene. Donovan curled in on himself with a shudder, and Caleb sat back on his heels.
"Oh my god." He breathed deeply once, twice... sitting still and silent as the other two men waited. This is why he was here. Because Adrian trusted him as a leader. The moments agonized their way by his brain, but after a few of those painful seconds the sensation, the shock, began to fall away. Carl was dead. There was no changing that... no ammount of horror or sorrow would bring him back. They could, however, salvage their mission without him.
"What is it?" Anthony was the one to speak this time, his thick voice falling hard on the darkness.
"Give me the torch." Caleb's voice was sober enough to illicit immediate, unquestioning obedience from the other man. Shining the beam around the edge of the hollow pit, Caleb gestured with his other arm. "We can reach him from the far side. Go. Haul him out." Standing up, he moved forward several paces before he heard the other two men - stunned, no doubt - started stumbling after him.
Getting Carl out of the pit was a sweaty, bloody, beast of a task but they managed it without injuring themselves. Finally hefting him onto the solid earth just out of the pit, Caleb shoved the dead man over onto his side and sat back for a second, panting.
"Are... are we going to take him back to the boat, for some kind of... burial or something?" Donovan piped up finally, his voice small in the blackness.
"No." Caleb said flatly, his voice hoarse and short. "Take off his boots. We're leaving him here, but his gear is valuable." The two men fell silent again. Caleb didn't dare try to conjecture their unspoken thoughts. He unfastened Carl's respirator and tugged it off the dead weight of the corpse's skull, which lolled awkwardly on his limp neck. A slurry of ichor ran from the inside of the respirator, which Caleb dropped reactively. He sighed, trying to steady his breath and his hand, before giving the mask a good shake over the edge of the pit and tucking it away in his pack. Donovan unhappily presented him with Carl's boots, the laces reverently pulled tight and tucked inside, as well as a few of the other objects the boy thought would be useful. His boot knife, flask, and wisely, his belt. The rest of his garments were ruined by the blood and sticks, so after a quick once-over of the body, they all decided that was good enough, and turned to the still-illuminated portion of the compound.
"So much light..." Caleb, eager to turn his thoughts away from their dead comrade, mused to himself. "They must have incredible generators... that they ran these all the time."
"Maybe they didn't." Donovan observed, looking around. None of the trio were eager to dive in, especially with the first course this place had served up for them. "Maybe they turned them all on for something in particular."
"If they didn't run them all the time," This was Anthony, coming up behind their shoulders. "Why would they all be on now?"
On board with Donovan's thought process, Caleb nodded slowly. "Maybe they were looking for something. Or trying to ward something off?"
"Or trying to attract attention." Donovan offered. "Maybe they thought somebody would find them?"
Unbidden, all three men turned in unison to look at the yawning mouth of the spike-pit that Carl had found his end in. Shuddering, Caleb shook his head and took the first strides into the light.
I haven't quit! I'm behind, but I haven't given up!
Wordcount as of November 21: 25,245.