Terror From the Deep - Chapter Four
the next chapter in my forthcoming novel
CONTENT WARNING: ALL OF IT. HORROR AF.
We have reached the point of no return.
Beware… Turn Back… This way leads to certain doom…
Terror From the Deep
by Daphne Garrido
Four
Oh god, that’s Darla.
But it wasn’t — not at all. Cora couldn’t breathe to look at her; it, whatever. This was beyond any nightmare she’d ever had, watching this woman she once knew twisted into such a mindlessly grotesque fiend, stricken by visions of herself being torn limb from limb by its wrath.
Cora took her slender slab of sheet metal wrapped by cindered-wire and buried it into their torso, if that’s what you’d call the breadth of flesh at its centermost. When she’d torn her weapon back, ducking its claw arm’s reactionary swipe for her head, it’d taken three good rips, and every bit of muscle she had to tear it free.
The wire snagged on their thickest skin.
Her screaming effort of excision brought an enormous swath from its top few layers of surface tissue peeling-outward, birthing a faucet of a now constantly streaming murkblood, allowing escape for tangled bits of its sponge-like intestinal tubing to bounce loosely, dangling, dripping mucus-coating in scattered patterns as the monster twirled and reared into a thundering vocal expression of its torment.
That voice was a sound Cora would wish she’d forget.
Some dying, cawing, gurgling goblin from hell is what she’d imagine the source. The fact her eyes saw it coming from the decapitated head of Darla — mounted, reanimated, with sagging skin and soulless voids where her eyes should have been — would make this memory particularly unpleasant.
Cora had officially seen too much, and definitely heard it by those tortured tones escaping its wretched inner chambers. She’d jutted into space, away from this beast, quite knowing it was coming, needing the earned time with no-doubt. This monster’s ferocity was unyielding.
As she cut a path through the gut strewn decking — of this extension to that flesh pit by which she’d been borne into hell — she’d wretched a streak of the little left in her belly across the only patch of floor in sight not already covered in layers of petrified viscera.
An inquisitive notion was found passing through her mind despite the unfortunate timing, wondering if the entirety of The Hellrath itself was in fact one giant extension of that waking chamber she’d previously believed some haven of its deepest horror.
Though it sounded right, there’d be no time to consider this as Cora heard the squelching caw of gargled challenge emanating from behind.
Fingernails still caked with more than just dried blood, no time to breathe, her chest bearing the weight of evil’s fiercest anchor, she decided there was need within her heart to get this over with quickly.
Brandishing that makeshift and heat-stricken great sword, Cora spun on her heels, fully anticipating they’d be right behind her. Yet, she’d found the whole of whatever Darla had become inclining itself up the farthest wall. Its pincer arms, attached from the top of that globular meat sack at its midpoint, now leaking furiously, buried deeply into the Hellrath’s steel plating in stabbing punctures, carrying itself upward.
Darla’s head swiveled with impossible stillness, her dead-black eyes remaining locked upon Cora, neck keeping perfectly balanced as the rest of it’s abominable form thrashed in disoriented ascent, all intents focused upon her.
Watching its claws tear into the ceiling, and the way it began to swing as if some kind of primate made of equal parts transfigured humanity, and repurposed junk-heap technologies, head ever locked in that most horrifyingly balanced stare — Cora said it aloud.
“Okay, fuck this.”
This thing would certainly be connected to The Hellrath’s devil-pilot, steered to its purposes, consumed in whole by the consciousness of evil itself, and Cora wasn’t going to bring this thing down anytime soon. Escape would be her only bet here. More evil was surely on its way.
She needed to find some way to speak to Ruth. They could help. Cora didn’t know how, yet could feel the truth in that idea borne to her mind within this moment, and would make that her plan.
Escape — survive — get through to Ruth somehow.
Cora’s ominous intuitions proved most correct, as Darla swung past the middle-point of this chambers high-ceilings. It was closing her into a corner, and she was anticipating its violent attack plunge to come. Frozen here, waiting for some spark of hopeful direction to bloom within her scrambling mind, the blast doors at the side of the chamber began to heave open by grinding scrapes of its ancient machinery.
She knew better than to move in that direction. Rapid evolutions would soon prove her correct; there only one choice to make, and that was to get quite far away from that doorway as soon as possible.
Only just before making her move, their sounds confirmed what she’d rightfully felt in her gut. It was the Crawlers. She knew it by the skittering, irking, mousy screeching — the pelting, boisterous, vibrating strikes of their steps upon The Hellrath’s decking — the furious, thundering orchestra of it all.
It wasn’t a sound or feeling she’d ever forget.
The arrival of these demons had been a greatest tragedy for the people of The Loose Cannon. They were that first wave sent by The Hellrath after its docking tethers had latched. Cora watched dozens of people she’d loved torn to shreds by their horde.
She’d not wait to see their wide-set, toothy, devil’s grins — nor the frothing bile protruding through the gaping cracks of their razor-sharp fangs — or those vicious barbs so appearing as hairs on their blackest crooked legs.
Cora wouldn’t want to see that again if she had a choice in the matter.
She’d taken off, giving up hope for some window which felt right, blessed to discover in those first few steps that Darla — perhaps distracted by the incoming wave of hell’s arachnids — hadn’t reacted in time to drop onto her head.
There was a birth within the far wall, previously torn by some wicked unknown force; a burrow, and Cora knew it her only shot.
While tearing across that hangar decking, or whatever this cavernous extension of the flesh pit had once been before The Hellrath had become evil itself, Cora discovered a strange bliss in the moment. Every breathe since she’d awoken had been of pure anxiety.
Nothing had improved except herself. She could sense the ways she was thriving, something here was meant to be. A part of her purpose ahead was now felt, whether or not that happened to be found within this shredded cylinder of descension so near.
With that confidence held within her heart and mind — Cora dove in head first.
