The Best We Get

We blindly fled into the dark of the maze, its menacing shadows strangely comforting out of the meagre hope that it might hide us from whatever we were fleeing from. Any noise or clumsiness on our part that would’ve made us an attractive target was drowned out by the roars that were echoing through the labyrinth. Only a few moments after we had left that charnel house could we hear the sound of flesh and bone being violently torn asunder and consumed by a ravenous glutton. Its movements made the ground quake and the walls shake, shaking ancient dust and debris free from corners that hadn’t been disturbed in ages. There was an apex predator roaming these halls, and I had no desire to ever see it up close.

After a certain point, it became clear that we would move faster if I carried Javier alone, and so Amparo loaded him onto my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Our pace picked up dramatically, and I still was capable of some degree of self defense, but any serious fighting would be a tall order. Amparo held the lantern aloft and went a little ahead of me, in the hopes of using the light to chase away anything that we might come across. The orb of light that had been following him earlier stubbornly maintained its place above his head, and I prayed to the dark gods that saw fit to punish me by sending me here would show mercy by letting the light remain for just a little longer.

We ran and ran, abandoning my old policy of stubbornly going left, and instead just going in whatever direction seemed to take us farthest away from whatever we were fleeing. I hoped that Javier’s God would grant a more abstract miracle, like granting us a place of safe reprieve. At every intersection I kept searching for any sort of marking that might lead us to a safe room like the one we’d sheltered in only a few hours ago, but no such miracle manifested.

Eventually Amparo had to stop, gasping for breath, utterly incapable of running any further. I too was at my absolute limit and barely able to keep going. We paused for as long as we dared, so winded that we couldn’t muster a word in conversation. Then we heard the roar echo through the maze once more, and unlike before, where its terrifying cries were fading, this one felt closer. Amparo and I looked at each other as the horror of being hunted began to sink in. Although we were exhausted, fear gave us wings.

We continued our blind flight until I was struck by the unusual scent of fresh water. Not the horrid stench of tepid, stagnant water, but clean stuff. And just barely audible was the sound of water crashing, a waterfall or river perhaps? Either way, it was the miracle I was looking for. I grabbed Amparo by the sleeve and tugged her in the direction I hoped was water, and too exhausted to exchange words, she followed my lead.

The scent and sound of water was drawing closer, until we emerged into another large chamber where the ceiling had collapsed, and water came torrenting through. At the room’s center, the floor had given way, forming a pond whose shore lapped at our feet. The water was so clear that through the light of the orb and the lantern, we could easily see into the room below, and saw no movement or anything waiting to drown us.

"I… Can’t run… Anymore…" Amparo panted, leaning against a wall.

What do we do? Could we wash away our scent? No, I remembered watching a show on Earth, a real tracking animal wouldn’t be fooled by such things. We’d merely die wet and miserable. Could we dive into the water and hide below? Even more foolish. There could be something down there, beyond our sight, waiting to take us if we intruded. More likely, we’d just drown. Javier’s body remained cold, and barely breathing. I think he only lived by virtue of my body being an absolute furnace from all our running. If we took him down, he would die. Simple as.

The floating orb above Javier’s head made hiding a difficult proposition. We would need to find a room, and we had passed by many on the way, but nothing that looked secure enough to hide in. Granted, hiding seemed like the worse option at the time, but now we could no longer run.

While Amparo caught her breath, and the distant roars grew ever closer, I began searching for anything that could save us. There were four other paths leading out of the room, not counting the way we had just come from. I quickly inspected each passage for any markings or signs that indicated a way to safety. No such thing manifested, but I did see a doorway only a short way down from the waterfall room. Waving over Amparo, we both investigated it to find a small room, a little bigger than the one we’d sheltered in. It had no door, but it did have several pieces of ancient wooden furniture that remained dry.

"This is the best we get." I sighed, setting Javier down. "Help me take off his clothes and put on the fresh ones we had stored away."

Amparo numbly obeyed as we dispensed with trying to carefully remove his monk’s habit, and went to cutting it away with knife and sword. The wounds he’d suffered had made them worthless as clothes, and at least he was civilized enough to be wearing undergarments. Still, it was remarkable to find that where once there had been gaping holes in his body, there was reddish flesh. I would’ve been awed by the miracle, if I hadn’t been on the verge of breaking down into insane panic.

After wiping away as much blood using the ruined clothes, I left Amparo to continue dressing the boy while I returned to the waterfall room. Finding a decent sized stone, I wrapped it in the blood soaked clothes and ran down the opposite direction for a few dozen feet. Every few steps I paused to dab the walls or floors with the wet, bloody cloth. After arbitrarily judging that I’d gone far enough, I hurled the pile of bloody rags further into the darkness, hoping to never see it again.

Sprinting back to the waterfall room, I took a moment to wash my hands, and in a moment of weakness, I dipped my entire head into the thunderous stream. The water was cool and refreshing, and it would’ve been an absolute joy had we not been fleeing for our lives. Let me at least die refreshed.

I returned to find Javier half dressed and Amparo struggling to get an arm through the spare tunic we’d brought. Like me, it was far too large for the boy, but it made for a long dress that would be comfortable to move around in, if he lived.

"What do we do now? It’s getting closer!" Amparo nearly shrieked as she fought to get the arm fully through the sleeve.

"We hide here." I said while I opened the backpack that Amparo had set aside and dug out one of the blankets we’d brought, as well as the climbing kit I’d taken with me in my own satchel. "I’m going to seal off the entrance."

I took one of the pieces of ancient furniture, an old armoire, and pushed it through the doorway, just outside the frame. I then took the blanket and using the pinions and hammer from the climbing kit, began nailing it into the cracks of the stone door frame. Amparo quickly realized what I was up to and tried to help by taking another pinion and hammering it into the cracks with a rock, but found that she was too weak to make much headway. We resorted to her picking me up to reach the upper arch of the doorway so I could hammer the rest in. By the time I was done, I’d made a light-tight barrier between us and the outside. Differential air pressure made it bulge slightly outwards, but the armoire stood in the way.

"Shouldn’t we have put the armoire on our side if we were going to use it to block the door?" Amparo asked as we both fell onto our backs in that cold, tiny cell, panting heavily.

"I put it there as a scent distraction. If that thing is hunting us by smell, it might still be able to track us by a more subtle scent, like the smell of the lantern oil, or blood." I said, waiting for the throbbing heartbeat in my ears to reside so I could better listen for the roar of the monster, "Since the wardrobe is in front, the scent of old wood might overpower the smell of us, or the blanket. Or at least confuse it."

I wasn’t sure if it would even work. My nose wasn’t much fooled by the ruse. Maybe, hopefully, that thing is just stupid. I’m basically praying for a miracle. Things were not looking good. We really might just die here.

"Then why the blanket?" Amparo asked, looking at me.

"I don’t know how to turn off the saint light." I said, pointing to the still brilliant orb of light floating above Javier’s head.

The boy himself was not looking too good. He looked pale, ghastly even. "Then what will we do?" Amparo asked.

"I’m going to pray that the monster doesn’t get us." I said as I picked up my sword and positioned myself at the doorway, listening for the slightest noise. "If it does find us, we at least still have this hunk of wood in the way. Maybe I could fend it off with a cut or two."

"Then I should do that too." She said, drawing her small knife, and it almost made me laugh. My broken sword, her little table knife. We are certainly dead.

"Just stand back as you always do, with the sling." I said, glancing back to find Amparo’s sour frown, "Don’t you know? Killing things from more than five feet away using a rock is what made humanity great."

"What does that even mean-" Amparo began to say, only for her to be interrupted by noises that were far, far, far too close. She froze, and shrank back into the corner farthest away from the door.

The roars had grown louder, and now they were accompanied with the noise of something slavering, coughing, hacking, weezing, as if something were caught in the throat of some wild beast. Then came the trembling in the ground, and the subtle noises of a giant creature sniffing deeply at the air. It was close now, possibly in the waterfall room. It seemed to pause there for a time, maybe still searching for us? Maybe drinking water? Maybe the crude distraction I’d laid worked. Either way, the anticipation, the tension, the terror, all of it was building to a crescendo in me, and I just wanted to scream.

I glanced back at Amparo and Javier, and I saw them both shivering for very different reasons. The fear that Javier will die anyway, and that our efforts had been in vain, only piled on and sharpened the stress stabbing into my brain. Nothing in my life, either in this one or the last, had terrified me as much as this. I heard the faint rapping of metal on stone, and realized that I too was trembling, the hilt of my blade lightly tapping against the stone doorframe. I pulled it away in fright, but it was too late.

Seconds after that, I heard it stomping, and not away from us. Every step drove it closer and closer, and my heart fell into the pit of my stomach, and from there, my stomach fell to the ground and into the center of the earth. Had I just gotten us all killed, because of that small error? My heart pounded far harder and faster than it had when I was running at full speed while carrying Javier. The sound of my blood rushing through my head at speeds I never knew it could travel deafened me to every other noise, save for the thing outside the door.

By now its gait and coughing hack were clearly audible, the ground trembled at its approach. We were dead, and I have killed us. I looked back at Amparo, her eyes locked with mine, and I saw a terror so complete that I feared we would both die of fright before the monster sunk its teeth into us.

I heard it pause, just outside our door, and it inhaled deeply, causing the blanked to visibly ripple. Amparo was on the verge of tears, biting into the handle of her knife to vent some of her tension into something else, lest she scream. I raised my broken sword up, prepared to cut down at whatever lurked on the other side. It continued to breathe deep, tasting the air. Once. Twice. Three times. Its attention was dominated by the mystery of the armoire, as if unable to decipher the strange thing before it. Then it bumped at the armoire, threatening to tip it over and back into the room. I fought the urge to push it back to keep the old piece of wood upright, out of fear that the resistance might tip it off. Then it bumped the armoire again, tipping it so far back that it tore a little at the blanket before gravity returned it to its place.

Do I prepare to get in the way to keep the armoire standing? I may be strong enough to move it, but it was still so much larger than me. If it tipped over, I wasn’t confident that I could keep it up, and if it did fall over and crush me, I would be rendered defenseless. Or do I let it fall, and prepare to use that opening to try and cut at something vulnerable? What kind of creature will come through that door? What if it’s incomprehensible, and I can’t tell what to cut? What if? What if!? What if!

We could hear it turn away, and continue moving onwards, no longer interested in the strange conundrum that we’d presented. Has it worked? Were we going to live? Was it really just stupid? Whatever the case, it felt too convenient, too lucky. Maybe the grace of God was on our side thanks to a literal saint. After all, just as he was in mortal peril, we arrived. God was working hard to keep this boy alive.

Just as the tension began to bleed out from my legs, I heard something clatter in the distance, its echo rushing all the way down here like a beacon. Someone else screamed. The strange acoustics of the room made it difficult to tell, from what direction, but whatever noise that was, it was close enough or loud enough to overpower the thrumming background noise of the waterfall nearby. The faint sounds of footsteps tapping through the halls. The monster lost all interest in us, and stomped away in search of this ready prey.

"Is it gone?" Amparo whispered.

"Yeah. Didn’t you hear that? It noticed someone else." I whispered back

"No, I didn’t hear anything. You said it noticed someone else?"

"I heard a scream." I whispered, and I saw Amparo’s began to tear up.

We survived because someone else was going to die. I couldn’t tell much from those noises, but what if they were children, like us? Scared, lost kids, thrown into a maze filled with absolute monstrosities? I ironically prayed to the dark and evil gods as I always did, because I’d become convinced that the real God was a cruel and fickle being that delighted in our suffering. Just as it was in my old world as it was in this world.

"They’ll… They’ll get away." I muttered, clinging to a false hope.

"Maybe you just misheard." Amparo whispered back.

"Yeah, I must have."

When we could no longer hear its stomping, snarling, and wheezing, when the ground ceased to tremble and its roars faded into echoes, when silence fell and only the throb of my heart could be heard, all tension left our bodies. I collapsed into a puddle, unable to find the strength to straighten myself, to even breathe. Amparo began to weep, sobbing uncontrollably. Still, the strain of fear still infected us, and she wept quietly, and I couldn’t find the courage to stand. Javier remained unconscious, frighteningly pale.