FICTION - Eli McMorn and The Tunnel - Part IV

I was on my back, and Stewart was on top of me. I was overpowered by his strength, and he held me down with ease. He hissed once more like an angry cat and flashed his razor-sharp fangs. The display jolted my brain into action. Moments before, when he threw me across the tunnel and onto my back, I’d dropped my flashlight, but not my gun.

Stewart grabbed the side of my head with powerful hands and turned it to the side to expose the flesh of my neck. He was straddling me and my left hand was pinned, but my right hand held the gun. He lowered his mouth to my throat, and that’s when I fired all six shots into his stomach.

The muffled shots were loud in the tunnel, and Stewart yowled in pain. He clutched his stomach, rose and staggered back. A wound like that would have killed or disabled any normal man, but Stewart regrouped quickly. My flashlight had come to rest only a few feet away, so rolled toward it and picked it up.

I trained its beam on Stewart in time to see him approaching with bloody, outstretched hands. His fingers looked like claws, and his mouth was a fang-filled hole. It was then that I remembered that there was an old fashioned pistol inside of Stewart’s camera bag.

I could see the bag behind Stewart, and in desperation, I switched off the flashlight. Next, I threw the empty handgun to Stewart’s left to make him think that I’d ran in that direction. I then bolted around his right side for the bag. I heard him grab for me despite the complete darkness, but he missed when I slipped headlong in the guano that covered the tunnel’s floor.

I recovered quickly and bear-crawled toward the camera bag. Stewart grabbed the tail of my jacket, pulled hard and the jacket came half way off my shoulders. I lunged for the bag and reached for it with my free hand. In the same instant, I turned on the light, and Stewart protested with a loud hiss.

I saw the gun inside, and my guts turned to ice water when I considered that it might be empty. I lunged again, but Stewart yanked me back hard. I clutched at the bag, and it turned over. Its contents went everywhere, and I caught a glimpse of the gun falling into the shadows on the other side of the tracks.

Stewart stood over me then with the tail of my jacket in my hands. Almost as if he meant to yank me to my feet, he jerked back hard, so hard in fact that he pulled the coat completely off my back. By some miracle, I held on to the flashlight. How it didn’t come out of my hand when it passed through the jacket’s sleeve, I’ll never know.

A moment of confusion ensued, and I made another attempt for the gun. I scrambled in the muck and over the tracks. The beam of the flashlight fell on the gun, and I snatched it up. A brief glimpse at the gun told me that its muzzle was packed with guano and filth, but there was no time to clean it.

I spun and pulled the trigger. I half expected to hear the impotent click of the hammer against the firing pin, but instead the small gun roared in my hand. The flashlight in my left hand shook, but I could still see where the round punctuated Stewart’s shirt in the center of his chest.

Stewart yowled and smoke began to issue from the wound. He tore at it with his claws and continued forward. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears as I unloaded the weapon into Stewart’s looming form. In all, I fired five shots. The sixth misfired even when I pulled the trigger two more times.

Stewart stopped his advance and dropped to his knees. I backed up and watched as smoke billowed from his wounds. Snorting great breaths from his nose, like an injured bull, he ignored me and tried to remove the rounds from his chest with his long fingernails. In the brief time that I watched, he dug into one of the wounds and removed a silver-colored slug. He even inspected it briefly, holding it between his gore-covered index finger and thumb. The bullet was badly misshapened, and caused his fingers to burn and smoke.

He discarded it and tried to remove another one. That’s when it dawned on me that my only real chance of survival was to run. I switched off the flashlight again and ran to the opposite side of the tunnel. I hoped to avoid him and run for the entrance. Klutch’s patrol car was a mile or so back down the tracks at the railroad crossing on Tunnel Road.

Just as I passed Stewart, I heard a great rustle of clothes as he jumped to his feet and began to chase me. Another rustling sound came to my ears, and I realized much too late that it was the sound of my boots wrapping up in the jacket that Stewart had torn from my back only moments before.

I went down hard, and the side of my head struck hard against one of the grimy, iron tracks. A wave of nausea swept over me as I almost passed out. Again, I’d held on to my flashlight somehow, and I switched it on as I flipped onto my back. I was exhausted and had little strength to resist when Stewart attacked me seconds later.

He straddled me and this time, he pinned both of my arms under his knees and legs. I dropped my flashlight, but could see in the ambient glow the smoke still issuing from the bullet wounds in his chest.

Once more, he gripped my head with both hands and turned it to expose the side of my throat. He flashed his fangs and hissed as he began to move in for the kill. Suddenly, there was a noise from close by, and Stewart rose slightly and half-turned in reaction to the sound. His eyes went wide though in the next instant when a great wooden stake penetrated the front of his shirt.

A great fount of stinking, putrid gore flowed from the wound and in the half-light, I saw one of the smoking slugs fall from the fresh wound caused by the wooden stake. Stewart was bolt upright, and his eyes seemed empty as he examined the large piece of wood that was lodged in his chest.

I pushed him off with one great shove and he fell to the side. Behind him, illuminated in the eerie glow of my flashlight was Detective Klutch. His broad shoulders heaved up and down as he tried to catch his breath. In his left hand, he held another wooden stake and in his right was the mallet I’d seen earlier in Stewart’s camera bag.

I got to my feet and picked up the flashlight. We stood over Stewart’s body for a minute or so and watched him. He gurgled now and again, and eventually Klutch threw down the mallet and stake. “Go and get your camera,” he said. He pulled another flashlight from his jacket and switched it on as I set off down the tunnel in search of my digital camera.

I found it several hundred feet back. As luck would have it, I’d somehow managed to drop it earlier in one of the few spots in the tunnel that wasn’t covered by either water or guano. I picked it up and brushed it off. “Hurry up, McMorn!” Klutch yelled. “Something’s happening.”

I shouldered my camera and set off back in his direction in a jog. I came around the bend of the tunnel and saw Klutch looking back. “Hurry up and get some pictures,” he said. I looked down and saw that something strange was happening to Stewart’s body. It seemed to be breaking down or liquefying somehow. I snapped picture after picture with my camera as thin tendrils of smoke began to rise from his clothes and skin.

Five minutes later, there was nothing left of his body, only his clothes, and they were badly damaged. His clothes looked rotten, as if they’d been buried in a hot, jungle cemetery for a decade or so. “You got shots of all that?” Klutch asked.

“Yeah, I’d say 50 or 60.”

“Good, because nobody’s going to believe us without those pics.”

We walked back to his car, and he drove us to his office in the basement of the Claiborne Police Station. There, we downloaded the pictures from my camera onto Klutch’s desktop computer. None of them turned out. Those of Stewart’s body were either blurred or pixilated. Klutch told me to go home and get a shower. He never mentioned that night to me again, and as far as I know, Stewart’s disappearance remains an active missing persons case.