A desperate sprint.
Through the suffocating dark of the crevices, Erika ran like a stray dog with a shattered spine. No direction. No destination. Only the raw, bleeding instinct to survive, pushed to its absolute limit.
The right foot Cole had nearly crushed to powder felt like a rusted bone saw, viciously grinding between his sole and ankle with every agonizing plunge into the mud. His vision flickered and dimmed, cold sweat and muddy water stinging his eyes. But he didn't dare stop. Not for a fraction of a second.
Behind him, the popping of burning pitch, the mechanical synchronization of iron boots, the dying shrieks of the zealots... The meat grinder was closing in, snapping at his heels.
Huff… hah… His lungs heaved like a punctured bellows. Every ragged gasp tasted of heavy copper and acidic bile. His leg muscles shrieked in spasm, but the invisible bone saw kept grinding, forcing his broken body forward.
"This way! Seal the alley!"
The Night Patrol's icy, emotionless command detonated from a blind corner terrifyingly close! So close the words practically scraped against his eardrums.
Erika's body locked up as if struck by lightning. His good left leg slammed down into the muck, braking so violently the inertia nearly sent him face-first into an open cesspool.
Orange torchlight, clinging like parasitic worms, was already bleeding onto the mossy brick wall at the alley's mouth. Within the sickly glow, rows of identical, mechanical dark silhouettes were advancing.
Squelch. Squelch. The executioner's rhythm of iron boots crushing mud. It was the exact same cadence he'd heard moments ago when they butchered the zealots. They were coming like a wall of iron to grind every breathing thing in this alley into chum.
Erika pressed his back flat against the slick brickwork.
Forward? The Night Patrol's iron wall. Backward? The slaughterhouse he'd just fled. Left was a dead-end wall. Right, a rotting pile of collapsed timber.
A dead end.
His eyes, feral as a cornered wolf's, slashed across every inch of shadow. Then, his gaze locked.
A few feet away, slumped by the edge of the sewage trench, lay a Red Hand zealot, freshly disemboweled by a longsword. Dark, steaming organs spilled into the black mud. Slippery intestines and liver gleamed with a nauseating wetness in the dim light, emitting a copper stench thick enough to choke on. The corpse's face was contorted, eyes rolled back, the branded red handprint on its forehead looking like a coagulated ulcer in the flickering firelight.
No hesitation. No moral wrestling. Even the biological instinct to vomit was brutally strangled by the absolute will to survive.
The instant the thought flashed, Erika moved. He became a cold, calculating machine. Ignoring the screaming spasms in his right foot, he dragged himself to the corpse, dropping to one knee beside the reeking trench.
His lone left hand locked in a death grip around the icy Night Patrol dagger. Dried blood still crusted the steel. He aimed for the gaping chest wound, reversed his grip—
Shlk.
A sickening, muffled thud. Like a blade plunging into a sack of overripe rot. The tip punched through the remaining skin, violently prying apart the ribs to bite deep into the chest cavity.
Then, he twisted his wrist and viciously churned!
The razor edge butchered the tissue inside the dead man's chest. A gush of warm, foul blood mixed with lung fluid erupted like a ruptured pipe.
Hot. The temperature splashing against his knuckles made his nerves twitch. The dead man's blood hadn't even started to cool.
Expressionless, he plunged his trembling left hand deep into that pile of warm, slippery, viscous gore. He grabbed a massive handful of the thickest sludge and shredded meat, and without a second thought, slapped it directly onto the expensive, dark blue silk robe on his chest.
Once. Twice. The slippery fabric was instantly swallowed by dark red stains.
Not enough. That aristocratic perfume was too potent.
He brought his gore-slicked hand up to his neck. Icy fingertips, drenched in hot, dead blood, smeared the filth over every inch of his skin. The sensation was horrific, like countless freezing maggots writhing across his flesh. But he didn't even blink.
Next, his face. He wildly scrubbed his cheeks with his crimson palm. A few drops of salty, foul blood slid into the cracks of his dry lips. It tasted of heavy rust and rot.
Finally, he shoved his entire dripping hand into his own damp hair. His fingers violently massaged his scalp, forcing the viscous sludge to bind to every strand, sealing every pore that might betray the perfume.
In mere seconds. That expensive, deadly sweet scent was utterly annihilated by the ultimate stench of the slaughterhouse.
The smell hit his brain like a physical blow, making his stomach violently heave and his vision swim with black spots. Yet, amidst this suffocating foulness, he let out a long, ragged exhale. He had successfully marinated himself into a perfect, rotting corpse.
"This way! Block the alley!" The Night Patrol's commands were now less than ten paces away. The halo of their torches cleaved through the darkness like the scythe of the Reaper.
Erika collapsed. With practiced, feral fluidity, he curled his body into a tight ball, violently wedging himself right up against the disemboweled corpse. He used the still-warm meat shield to block his front.
Half his body plunged directly into the sewage ditch. Icy, bone-piercing filth, blood, and rotting refuse instantly soaked through his tattered outer white robe, seeping into the open wounds on his legs. The freezing muck shocked his muscles into uncontrollable tremors.
But he locked his jaw, violently yanking the blood-soaked white robe over his head.
Bloody water seeped through the lining, dripping onto his closed eyelids. Warm. Sticky. Like a water clock counting down the last seconds of his life.
Erika stopped breathing entirely. He forced every biological sign of life down to absolute zero. He locked down the rise and fall of his chest, even as his oxygen-starved lungs screamed in agony. He let the freezing sewage drain his body heat, letting his violent shivers masquerade as the post-mortem spasms of a fresh kill.
Squelch… squelch… The Night Patrol's iron boots marched into the killing field, passing so close they practically grazed the white robe covering his skull.
He kept his eyes squeezed shut. A drop of boiling pitch from a torch overhead sizzled as it struck the bloody water less than half an inch from his eyelid.
"Confirm targets. No survivors. Continue advance." The mechanical voice detonated right above his head. Then, the rhythmic crunch of iron boots on mud gradually faded, stepping further and further away until it was swallowed by the end of the adjoining alley.
Dead silence returned.
Lying in the bloody sewage, the muscles Erika had stretched to the snapping point finally, fractionally, relaxed. He had won. This cold-blooded, utterly nauseating disguise had successfully fooled Darenz's most ruthless executioners.
Slowly, silently, he propped himself up on his lone left arm. The blood-logged white robe slid from his head, settling heavily on his shoulders. Foul water dripped from his chin onto the hollowed-out corpse beneath him.
He prepared to drag himself out of this pile of rotting meat. To find a blind spot free of Patrols and zealots, and just survive the night.
However—
Crack… crunch…
So faint it could have been a hallucination born of blown eardrums. But the left arm suspending him above the muck instantly locked into rigid iron.
A teeth-grinding screech of bone-on-bone friction echoed abruptly from the dead air above the alley. The sound was too familiar. So familiar that pure terror bypassed his thoughts and detonated straight in his nervous system—just tens of minutes ago, when that living man had convulsed in the mud, his spine snapping backward, his bones had made exactly that sound.
Scritch… slp… slp… Soft, fleshy pads and razor-sharp claws biting into the vertical, moss-slicked brickwork.
More than one. The sounds were bleeding in from all directions.
The eaves overhead trembled slightly. Something was crawling down the steep pitch of the roof, upside down. Dense, frantic scratching sounds erupted from the alley walls on both sides, rapidly closing the distance. Even from the deepest, pitch-black maw of the sewage ditch he was lying in, wet, slithering noises were skimming across the surface of the water.
They were approaching. Approaching him. Approaching this "bait," gift-wrapped in the overpowering stench of fresh blood and entrails.
In a singular, horrifying fraction of a second, lightning struck Erika's brain. The food stall entrance... those grotesque humanoids frantically lapping up the slop... The slum girl clamping her hands over the dying man's mouth. She hadn't been afraid of the Night Patrol hearing them. She was terrified the blood-scent of his mutation would attract its own kind!
What did Crawlers eat in this wasteland? They ate corpses. They ate flesh and blood.
And he, to outsmart the Night Patrol, had personally gutted a fresh corpse to marinate himself into the ultimate, most irresistible piece of prime meat on the menu!
"Hsss… gurgle…"
A thick, wet breath, reeking of extreme rot and stomach acid, blasted against the back of Erika's neck without warning. Too close. That ungodly heat scalded his skin, making the hairs on his nape stand rigid as an electric shock ripped from his tailbone straight to the crown of his skull.
A thick, freezing glob of saliva stretched into a nauseating, gelatinous thread mid-air, before snapping with a wet plop, landing squarely on Erika's gore-smeared cheek.
The icy slime slid down his jaw, trailing over his tightly clenched lips to seep into the dead blood caking his neck. It felt like a venomous slug slithering across his flesh.
Stiffly, at a speed so agonizingly slow it threatened to snap his cervical vertebrae, he turned his head inch by inch.
Less than four inches from his face. A face.
Devoid of blood. Just dead, gray skin shriveled tightly over a skull. The lower jaw had violently split all the way back to the ears, exposing a gaping, black, everted crater of a maw. Viscous saliva dripped steadily from the tear, splashing into the muddy water right beside Erika's ear.
Its limbs were bent backward, joints snapped and reversed in an obscene mockery of anatomy. It hung upside down on the mossy brick wall like a gargantuan, malformed spider.
And its eyes—the sclera completely rolled back, leaving only two pupil-less, murky, bone-white voids—were dead-locked onto Erika. It wasn't looking at his face. It was staring with dead, unblinking focus at his neck. At the carotid artery pulsing frantically with ultimate terror just beneath the thin skin.
"Hsss… gurgle…" Another greedy hiss wheezed from the torn maw, blasting a wave of putrid heat directly into Erika's face.
And behind it. Deep in the pitch-black throat of the alley, clinging under the eaves, lurking at the mouth of the sewage trench.
One pair. Two. Three. Dozens of identical, pale, hollow eyes blinked to life in the suffocating darkness.
They hung upside down. They crouched. They crawled. A silent nightmare completely encircling him. All of those dead eyes facing the exact same direction. Staring at the only living piece of meat in this pile of corpses whose heart was still pumping blood.
Erika remained half-kneeling in the bloody water, his blood turning to ice. His left hand was locked in a death grip around the Night Patrol dagger, but he knew it was utterly pointless. The exact millisecond he twitched that blade, those dozens of gaping maws would tear him apart.
The drop of saliva slid into the corner of his mouth, tasting of rotting, sweet copper. He could hear his own heartbeat hammering like a war drum, echoing desperately in the dead silence of the alley.
Dozens of hollow eyes, unblinking, stared at him silently from the dark.
As if waiting for the signal to begin the feast.