The Thief

The stone bounced off the wall. It skittered down the incline, clanging off of old metal and into darkness. The echo rebounded in the tunnel with loud insistence. That was good. It distorted the direction I’d thrown it from.

Footsteps followed. The voices weren’t far behind; a novice mistake really. I could see their shadows dance in the dim light of their lantern.

“Guttersnipe!” The first snapped. Her head swiveled about, her beady eyes narrowed behind a hooked nose. “Give it back, you stinking whore!”

I grinned from the darkness. Crouched low, I could make out the silhouette of her comrade, a big grunt. All brawn, tiny brain. His jaw was hanging open as he held the light aloft and peered hopelessly in each direction.

“That catch was ours! When I find you I’ll gut you. I’ll gut you and feed what’s left to Orion!”

Apparently that was the big fellow’s name. Judging by his nose wrinkling, he wasn’t fond of the idea.

I began retreating further into the darkness, slinking along a hidden passageway. They must have been new to the Ruins. The way they banged around they would probably invite something else to come for dinner. Something more inclined towards cannibalism than Orion.

“Find her!” She snarled at the grunt. He thumped down into the grime, his holey shoes sloshing through fetid pools. I grimaced. I wouldn’t go near that stuff if I could avoid it. Too many rusted pipes and glass shards were hidden in the muck.

That, and the lengths of fishing wire I’d tied right below the water’s surface.

When he tripped, I drew in a breath and threw my voice down the tunnel:

“TIMBER!”

The woman snarled again. She jerked on her heel and ran towards the sound, while poor Orion struggled with the wire, flailing as the water doused the lantern. I turned and made my break for it, feet quietly pattering like a rat on the run. Her swearing got fainter and Orion’s floundering faded. I found the ladder I was looking for, latched onto it, and hauled myself helter-skelter up the rungs until I could push against the door above and climb into the room it opened to.

Once I’d slid the bolt home, I let myself relax. Had they been brighter I wouldn’t have been so careless. If I were honest, I shouldn’t have been so careless anyway, but a girl’s got to have fun somehow.

Removing a glow-stick from my pocket, I gave it a twist and set it in a makeshift sconce on the wall. White light burst out to compensate for the room’s lack of it. I peered around with hands on hips, head cocked for the sound of someone clambering up after me.

I let a full five minutes tick by before I was satisfied. Carelessness does a dead man make.

All in all I was pretty proud of my secret compartment. The bolt hadn’t been there before; I’d made it myself. It was easy to pick but not easy to break, and there weren’t many folks around with fingers as nimble as mine. Another exit sported a getaway to the level further up. My guess was that the place used to be some sort of access point for storage or maintenance, but had long since been abandoned and forgotten with time.

I’d made a table of crates in the middle of the room. It was littered with finds, most of them routinely polished so I could get the ideal shine out of them. The more shine, the more people would pay. Pretties for the pretty.

The bracelet was a precious discovery. Silver-banded and littered with diamonds, there were faults and flaws in both but it was still a marvelous rarity. I’d been prying it off the wrist of skeleton when they found me and tried to call dibs on it.

Honestly, I have to wonder sometimes how people that stupid survive so long.

After admiring it in the light a while, I pursed my lips and hesitated. I hadn’t brought anything to my mother for some time. Part of it was because I hated her. Part of it was because she hated me.

I pocketed the bracelet again and turned towards the shelves. They were really just wooden boards precariously stacked on top of each other, but they served. I couldn’t just leave books on the ground. There was something sacrilegious about it, and books were so fragile that I couldn’t bear the thought of something wet and grimy crawling up to eat them.

Marta was due for a treat. I pulled off three and stuffed them into my bag.

Someone screamed.

My blood ran cold. There are different sorts of screams. The playful ones ditzy girls give when they’re pretending to be in love. The alarmed ones children make when their friends jump out from around the corner. And the gut-wrenching, blood curdling kind when someone’s afraid for their lives.

This was definitely the last.

I edged my way back to the door. The sound had been close, and I’d put at least a half mile of tunnel between myself and the other scavengers. Either it was someone new, or somehow they’d figured out the true direction I’d gone.

Neither option explained the scream.

I grasped the bolt and slid it slowly. Reaching up, I twisted the light again and dimmed the whiteness to a hesitant glow, before I slunk down the first rung and squinted into the tunnel again.

Amorphous shadows congealed in the distance. I recognized some: abandoned subway cars that lay torn from their tracks, a statue of a naked woman knocked from its pedestal. None of those ever moved, though, and the shapes peeling away from them certainly were.

There were three. They got closer, and I could hear for the first time a whispering that the screams had drowned out before.

“I don’t want to. I don’t, I don’t want to. But I have to. You don’t understand. But you will. I’ll make you understand.”

The first to step into my light was Orion. I could see his face, white with horror. He hadn’t noticed me. His attention was fixed on the figure before him. It wasn’t a large man, but his eyes were wide with madness. His teeth chattered rhythmically, and his hand held a jagged, makeshift knife. It dripped blood.

His other hand held the woman’s head by the hair. Her throat was slit, and her mouth was in the final throes of trying to pull in air past a severed windpipe. A fish on the end of the hook. She found me from my vantage on the wall, and her fingers twitched once, upwards, while the others grappled at the blood gushing from her. With a final wheezing gasp, she went limp.

“Abby?” Orion whispered, backing up another step. “Abs?”

“You’ll see,” the man insisted. “Yes, yes you will. And then they’ll be quiet, because I did it. What they asked. You know what I’m saying?”

He stepped into the light, dragging Abby’s corpse with him. She trailed blood behind her. He was completely naked, his body all reedy muscle. His legs were severely scarred, tiny marks like a cat’s claws had raked violently up and down his shins and thighs.

He’d found an entire pod of bugs, and they’d carried disease into his flesh. The illness they’d given was the Voices.

Horror churned in my gut. I knew what was going to happen, but I couldn’t force myself to move. I clung frozen to the ladder in the wall, unblinking, unbreathing.

The madman lunged. Orion let out a cry of rage, grabbing his wrist. It snapped like a twig beneath his grip, but still he came at him, dropping both Abby and the knife as he howled and battered at Orion’s chest.

The grunt pinned his head between his fists and rammed it against the wall. Again. And again. And again. The scrawny body went limp between his hands, and the skull made sick, wet smacking sounds against the stone, but still he continued, shrieking like a lunatic and hammering away until he’d painted the grey to red and his attacker’s face was completely flattened.

It was when he was bent over and panting that the bugs came.

They were sleek and smooth and metal. They thrust out tiny, filamentous legs and crawled through the dead man’s flesh. They skittered along his skin and clattered to the floor, hundreds of them surging towards Orion. He let out another shriek, this time of raw terror, and tried to run. He only made it a few steps when the first reached him and slithered into his ankle.

His leg stiffened. There was a sickening crackling sound and he fell to the ground as they fell upon him. Their tiny bodies disappeared into his and the immobilization continued, spreading to his other limbs, his muscles and ligaments calcifying instantly.

He did not scream, though his face was a mask of agony.

The pain itself killed him.

I could hear the skittering start up the wall towards me.

My immobility vanished. I ran up the ladder. The door would not stop them. They would crawl through the cracks, through the tiny keyhole in the bolt itself. I grabbed at the tiny canister in the corner and pried it open with my fumbling fingers, gasping over and over, “Oh god oh god oh god-”

Gas erupted. I threw the canister down and the instant it hit the floor, I sent a match tumbling after. I slammed the door shut and ran behind the shelves.

The explosion took the metal straight off its hinges.

I gagged and coughed. The smoke filled the room, and I pulled my scarf over my nose and mouth. There was no way of telling if I’d gotten them all. They were fragile but small and hard to burn. I climbed up the second ladder and out into the darkness of the tunnel above, running, running, tears streaming down my face and praying I wasn’t Tainted. Praying I wouldn’t change.