The Tunnels

The sound is what you notice first; that sound of dry leaves skittering across flagstones in an autumn wind. That terrible hollow rustling sound which announces their approach, which pierces the sweat and pain of the tension you live in down there and sets every nerve on edge, screaming in barely contained agony as the fear grows. You know that the sound will be followed by violence as they rip into your world with flailing limbs, claws and teeth whilst you get on with your job of frantic extermination.

The sound defines you, here in the tunnels, clutching your rifle, trying desperately to not get shredded by the creatures as they appear out of the impenetrable darkness in ever increasing numbers, flying like nightmares into the glare of the spotlights as you and your guys stand firm amidst the slime and rank-smelling ooze of the tunnel, trying not to die. After the sound, your world becomes a mad blur of flying claws, the screech of the creatures and the deafening report of your squad’s weapons in the close confines of the underground world that now shrinks into the tiny bubble of chaos and death that has become the total limit of your senses.

The swift, animal motion of the creatures in the glare of the electric lights, the muzzle flashes of the .303 Enfields and the brain numbing sounds and smells of bullets finding their mark in the coarse hair and cold hide of the enemy. The sound of your comrade getting his face ripped off by a creature, which has managed to get through the tightly drilled cordon of fire, which is all that stands between you and a similar fate. The ringing screams of humans and creatures dying in the slime-filled tunnel.

These are the images that haunt you day and night for the rest of your life; the price you pay for being on the squad, for being a rat-hunter in the endless tunnels under the settlements.

****

But off shift, the world up there becomes everything you know, everything you have ever known, again. Nobody up topside talks about the creatures, few think of them. They are a horror they never have to deal with. Not since the squads were put together and sent down into hell. Not since they have us to stand between them and the forces of their most primeval nightmares. The people of the settlements just live like they have always done; there are jobs to do, harvests to gather, paperwork to complete. They don’t give us a second thought these days.

I walk through the leafy boulevards of my hometown and nobody looks at me twice. I wear no badge to tell them my story, no symbol of my role in their world. My job is just like any other, though I find it impossible to talk about it with the people I grew up with, people who have become farmers, bankers and lawyers. These people know little of the tunnels and care less about their horrors. That’s just Squad business. My business.

The evening draws in as I walk back to my place. The sun is setting over the quiet suburban streets of the town, leaving streamers of colours in the nearly cloudless sky. Oranges, golds, reds, pinks, and mauves all painted above my house. I take a good long look at it; there are no colours in the tunnels, no colours at all.

****

My squad, like all rat-hunter units, comprises five guys; a point man, who goes up front, crouching low to get the first hits at the enemy when we find them, a flash man, who holds the main spot over the point guy’s head for the two flanking shooters and of course, the rear guy who primarily makes sure no creatures get behind us. Of course, when he’s not on the ball and they do get round behind you, it’s all over quickly.

Five guys isn’t much to stand against the tunnels and their horror, but long experience has shown that larger groups can’t get enough room down there to function well, and it just becomes a real mess. So we go in formations of five, spaced at two-hundred metre intervals throughout our sector, when we go hunting.  

We wrap the barrels of our rifles in oiled canvas strips to keep the damp off the steel of the gun’s mechanics. Some of us stick bayonets on the end as an extra defence but I never bothered. A rifle tangled in the speared corpse of a creature becomes useless when the next group come leaping over the bodies of the fallen. We hope that we don’t find anything when we go down there. We hope that the other squads will come help us if we find a pack of creatures. Hope is pretty much what we live on.

****

By the time I’ve gotten into my uniform and joined the rest of my squad at the designated tunnel mouth, its dark. Not that it matters. In the fetid warren of the tunnels, it’s always dark. We’re in luck tonight; the sector we’ve been assigned to clear is a quiet one, not many creature packs expected. Any luck and we’ll come out the other side the same way we went in ­ all five of us still standing. Squad HQ has given us basic ammo only ­ thirty rounds per man. The settlement is getting short of supplies for the squads and doesn’t want to fork out more to re-supply us. They don’t think they need to; there hasn’t been a creature pack break up to attack a settlement in ten years. They’re getting complacent, thinking the creatures have gone away. We know better. Only reason half this town hasn’t been shredded into rat-food is that the squads have successfully kept them down in the tunnels for the past decade. There’s even been talk of cutting down on squad numbers, as if that’ll help keep everyone safe. They know nothing.

Through the tunnel mouth we go and moving fast. I’m left shooter for the squad tonight and have my side-spot strapped to my chest as I keep the Enfield rock-steady and pointed forward. The water dripping off the tunnel roof keeps a constant background of noise around us, but everyone is straining to listen for the sound of creatures. Nobody talks down here. We can’t afford to. The only way we can tell where they are is by the sound of their approach.

The Flash Man with our squad tonight, is Jon Kenich. He carries a huge, mean looking .44 calibre revolver in his left hand, whilst balancing the hefty main spot on his right shoulder. Since our last Flash Man got shredded three weeks ago, Kenich has been the new guy, even though he technically outranks us. The rest of us have been on-squad together for nearly six months, which down here may as well be forever. We are a tight squad, a good squad. We’ve never let a creature past us yet. If we did, we hope the squad two hundred metres behind us will get them. If they failed then the rearguard would be next in line. Creatures don’t get through that kind of firepower. Not often, anyway.

But the system works well; creatures don’t make it to the surface tunnel mouths and nobody topside ever gets to face the horrors they live above, day in, day out.

****

Nobody knows where the creatures come from or really what they are, but they’ve been with us for decades. They constructed a catacomb of burrows under our town from which to hunt us. In the early days, we were almost annihilated. They came in the night and tore people apart, in their homes and in their beds. When the authorities finally responded, they rallied armed citizens to push the fast-moving predators back into their tunnels and keep them there. It was quickly realized that they couldn’t be exterminated entirely ­ there were just too many of them. But we managed to hold them in their tunnels and awayfrom the towns.

So the squads were put together to contain the threat and ever since, volunteering to join a squad has been a civic responsibility undertaken by young men who wanted to do more with their lives than just rot in an office or a bank shuffling paper back and forth all day. The glory of saving their town pulled many into the squads. It pulled me in, though I had never considered myself to be a tough guy.

So now I spend forty hours a week in the tunnels, with my rifle ahead of me, waiting, listening, advancing slowly through whatever sector my squad has been given to clear. It’s the hardest job there is, but without us, nobody could live. Nobody at all.

****

Three hours in and I hear them, scuttling towards us from the East. Maybe twenty of them, all with insatiable hunger and predatory instinct driving them insane as their diamond-hard claws pull them through the ooze and across the walls of the tunnels towards us. They can smell us. They know we are here. We tighten up, crouching in the tunnel, ready and waiting.

The flash man spins to point the main spot down the Eastward spur of the tunnel from which we think they are coming. Point man Mike Resilik drops low and brings his rifle up to bare, ready for the attack. I flatten against the left tunnel wall to get a stable position from which to lay down fire. My squad now fills the tunnel, blocking the pack from moving out of the tunnels. Within fifteen seconds they are on us.

More than I thought; mature hunters, some over five feet long, blurring through the beams of our lights, momentary glimpses of fang-filled jaws and their evil black eye clusters. They leap at me from the darkness, momentarily pinned in the shafts of light from our spots. These infinitesimally brief moments are all the time we have to take them down with a bullet, before their claws and teeth are sinking into the soft warmth of our throats, arms, bellies and faces. My world shrinks to the space occupied by the squad and the creatures and we open up with our rifles, pacing rapidly through our six round magazines, single shot kills and taking down the rest with a bayonet, a boot, or a rifle butt. Kenich’s pistol booms through the dark of the tunnel as he covers my reloading. I’m good; I can shift a new clip into the Enfield in under three seconds. Any longer and I’d be in trouble. Within ten minutes, it is over. Every creature lies wasted and the squad is intact apart from Jim Lovatt, the right shooter, who is bleeding heavily from a shoulder laceration.

Just another day on the job.

****

Squad men don’t date too regularly ­ we have little to say to settlement girls that would make them want to know us. In fact, we generally stick to our own kind when we socialize. But I need company now, safe, sane human company and so I go out with this girl I know, Julie, who I’ve been seeing lately. She’s quiet, ordinary, uncomplicated. She works in the back office of a bulk trading company in town and her life is dominated by accounts, transactions and ledgers of numbers.  She is a rare exception for me as I usually avoid settlement people as much as possible when off shift.

“Good day?” she asks innocently enough, as if I’d spent the day, like her, in an office, with potted plants and filing cabinets to keep me company. I grunt with noncommittal at her and move on to passing her compliments about her appearance. She looks good and she shimmies in response to my flattery.

“You’re such a hon. You know, everyone says squad guys are rude and rough but you really do prove that wrong…its good to know that all that running around with guns doesn’t make you less of a gentleman.” She smiled over her cocktail.

“So come on, tell me about the action-man stuff. Was it good today?”

I smile cautiously and give her a blandishment for an answer. The tunnels are many things, but nothing in them is good. Nothing. I change the subject and enquire about her day whilst concentrating on drinking enough to get the images of claws out of my head - though there isn’t enough alcohol in the whole world for that.

“I guess my job must seem pretty mundane to you, what with all your war-stories and all. I’d love to be able to do something as exciting as you.” She says.

“I mean, you get to spend all day saving the human race from destruction and all I get to do is file reports on trade accounts and credit ratings. Hardly compares really.”

At least you get to go into work every day knowing that you’ll make it home every night. At least you have that.

But she wouldn’t understand.

So I restrain myself from saying anything. Squad guys learn fast that settlement people don’t have a clue about the tunnels. I carry on drinking.

****

Lovatt wasn’t bad enough to stay off the next shift, which was unlucky for him, as we ran into a whole new bunch of trouble. Three large rat packs of creatures, hungry and aggressive; out for blood. The squad ahead of us in our sector got chewed, only two guys making it back alive and we, as second along, got to get the next hack at the creatures as they broke through. We had more ammo than on the last shift, but even so, we spent it all in the skulls and bodies of the creatures as they leapt out at us from all angles. After I ranout of ammo, I got the last of them with the butt of the Enfield as it tried to sink its teeth through the rubber shoulder pad of my uniform. I wasn’t as fast as I could have been, because one of its claws had torn a chunk out of my leg. Hurt like hell as I limped to get back to daylight; another scar for my collection.

Back at squad HQ, talk is muted; fatigue is etched into every face. An unusually high level of activity in the tunnels had been taking its toll on the squads. There is talk of a return to the bad old days, when the struggle against the creatures had been desperate and packs had regularly broken through to the surface, to kill, maim and eat our neighbours in the settlements. But that had been twenty years earlier. We were sharper now, better trained, tougher and more aware of what the tunnels could throw at us. We could stop the deaths in the settlements with our guns and our sheer determination not to get eaten. The bad days for us are when these things are not enough to stop your colleagues dying and the deep horror of it all settles upon you.

It’s some way to live and for four hundred dollars a week, it’ll never make you rich. But that’s not why you join a squad. You join a squad because you are crazy enough to do so and maybe stupid enough to believe all the tough talk about saving the world that you hear from the kids you grew up with, whose fathers are in the squads and who don’t know enough about what they actually do to really ever feel afraid for them.

The medic’s face shows no expression as he stitches my latest wound, cleaning, sterilizing and applying bandages to the area. He has seen so many variations on the theme of the impact of claws and teeth on human flesh, that he scarcely notices me as he goes about his business on autopilot. “You need to rest that a while, or you’ll tear the hell out of those sutures.” Is all I get by way of sympathy. It’s no more than I ever expect around here. Men lose their compassion in the tunnels and all who are touched by their evil suffer the same fate.

Jon and Mike are sitting in a corner of the rest room looking as blank as a winter sky. They nod in recognition at my approach, but neither seems in much of a mood for talking a great deal.

 “How’s the leg?” ventures Jon.

 “Yeah, it’ll heal.” I say. “Busy shift, huh?”

“Yeah. I heard we lost eight guys in total today.” Says Mike. “That’s a real bad one.”

I grunted. Not much you can say to that. I knew a couple of the dead; the casualty list in HQ was, as ever, full of names I recognized. You don’t keep squad friends for nearly as long as you’d like when the creatures come calling.

I live near the squad bases where I need to be. My family lives across in the Western boulevards, where people never talk of the creatures and never think about the lives of Squad men. I see them sometimes; they ask about my life and I tell them as little as possible about it.

People, who don’t do this stuff every day, don’t want to hear about it. They have politics and trade, buying, selling and making money. They have family and friends, music and laughter. They have these things because squad men go down into the tunnels to make sure that none of the horrors of that hellish place can ever get out and take away all that they have. They have these things and all we have is a loneliness of cold, dank fur and the ravenous light in a creature’s eyes.

Simon Maslin is a writer and cynical journalist of the human condition who has published short fiction and poetry in several international electronic publications. He has also released a novel and several other books through his own imprint Lulu's. He plays a mean blues guitar, lives in Southern England and interfaces with the universe largely through Maslin Books.

Email: Simon Maslin

Return to Table of Contents