34/Skin Hill
IT WASN’T TRASH.
Trig came to this realization as he took another step toward the mountain, hoping to find some trace of Kale around the other side. That was when his toe struck something soft and yielding, and when he glanced down he saw it was a human leg.
Very slowly, he looked up.
The leg was connected to a torso, covered up by another, and another, the pile growing in front of him comprising what he realized was hundreds of dismembered corpses—heads, arms, legs, and whole bodies, bare bones, many of them still dressed in rotten Imperial uniforms and incomplete stormtrooper armor. The pile rose up to the ceiling. Details leapt out at him from everywhere. The bodies had been mangled like parts at an abattoir, some of them in handcuffs and manacles, others hacked recklessly to pieces, still others looking partially devoured, whole gobbets of flesh gnawed off. Many of the parts were bloated to the point where the skin itself had begun to split open like sausages, and Trig realized he was standing in a tacky puddle of whatever had leaked out of them to coat the floor.
He felt the room start to spin. A scream ballooned in his throat and died there, snuffed out by his own inability to open his lips and release it. Instead, he stumbled backward, trying not to look at what was in front of him, all around him, wanting it not to be there but unable to get away from it. Somewhere behind him was the door he’d come through, the hatchway that would get him out of here, but he couldn’t find the switch to activate it. He began slapping the walls blindly at random, pounding them, and nothing changed.
At last the seal broke in his throat and he let out a shriek, a combination of “help” and “Kale,” and that was when he heard the sounds, a soft, moist rustling noise from inside the mountain. Bodies shifted, shoved aside and rearranged by something within.
And then he saw the thing come burrowing out.
First the white head, maggot-white, then the rest of it, slithering through to emerge outward on the floor.
It rose to its feet, a figure in dripping, ragged clothes and a bloodstained stormtrooper helmet, staring at him. The black polarized lenses of the helmet were streaked and filthy, clotted with slime and gore. The breath filter had been broken off on one side, and Trig caught a glimpse of the scaly infected throat of the thing underneath it. There was blood caked around the mouthpiece, and it occurred to him that the thing might possibly have eaten its way out.
It staggered toward him.
Trig backed away, immediately tripped, and fell. Jumping up, lunging sideways, he started running around the edge of the mountain. He imagined that he heard the thing coming after him, but it might have just been his own heart hammering in his ears. He didn’t dare look back. But he could feel it there, growing closer, a steadily intensifying presence like pressure buildup behind his eyeballs and chest cavity, pushing him onward, faster.
The room spun around him. Trig jerked his head right and left. The door, wherever it had been, was utterly lost to him now. Fear had robbed him of all sense of direction. He didn’t even remember where he’d come from.
As he bolted around the edge of the pile, lunging over three corpses that appeared to have been bundled together, wrists and ankles bound with cords, something caught his eye from up above—a glint of light.
Looking up, he saw the open ventilation shaft in the ceiling, at least ten or fifteen meters up, maybe more.
He finally stopped and looked back, saw the thing in the trooper helmet coming around behind him. It was moments away.
This time Trig didn’t give himself time to think.
He started climbing.
It was even worse than he’d expected. The huge pile of dismembered parts and severed heads made up a loosely knit, constantly shifting terrain, moving and tumbling down as he clawed his way up and over it. The stench only seemed to thicken as he uncovered submerged levels of decay that hadn’t yet been exposed to air. Struggling against his gag reflex was a nonstop battle, one he didn’t always win, and the wobbling sensation of continuous near nausea only made climbing more difficult.
He tried to focus on the vent shaft, forcing himself to think only of getting out. Every few seconds, though, he did look back—he couldn’t help it.
The thing in the helmet was climbing up after him.
It crawled with the steady relentlessness of something out of one his nightmares. And in fact, even in the depths of his own scrambling climb, Trig couldn’t help but flash back to the voice of Aur Myss from the cell next to theirs, how he had promised to come for him and his brother. Was that an undead version of Myss behind him now? How had it gotten here to this part of the Destroyer before him, and what had it been doing inside this heap of human rubble? None of those questions even rose into his mind—only that it had followed him here to satisfy whatever undying urge drove it forward.
Rage.
Murder.
Hunger.
Something moved underneath him in the mountain.
It’s just another body part, don’t think about it, don’t let it—
He felt a scabby, clay-cold hand reaching up out of the pile to seize his ankle.
Trig let out a painful squeal of fright and wrenched his leg free, almost losing his balance and falling. He was struck by the vision of his small, helpless frame bouncing back down the slope of corpses, as hands and arms and mouths lunged out, ripping off pieces of his flesh, until they’d finally added his own bleeding carcass to the mountain.
Instead he climbed faster, forced himself to dig in, yanking himself upward, dumping down bodies as he went. He was close enough to the top now that he could actually see inside the vent, the oversized duct that had been exposed there.
With what felt like enormous effort, he thrust his entire body upward. His brain had shut down completely at this point. He no longer smelled the room or even truly felt its awful, gelid presence sticking to him. He was aware only of what lay ahead, and how much he needed to get there, and the last few moments, as he got to the top of the pile, left no imprint in his memory whatsoever—they might as well have happened to someone else entirely, a stranger.
Consciousness snapped back through him as his fingers scraped cold metal, the blessed solidity of the ductwork’s outer rim, and he levered his upper body through it with a gasp, jerked his legs up behind him and only then allowed himself to breathe. The vent was not much bigger than his shoulders, but it was large enough.
Trig looked around in a kind of mild hysteria. His heart was slamming, trying to smash a hole through his chest, the muscles in his throat working up and down wildly.
I’m going to start bawling again. Well, go ahead and cry. I suppose you’ve earned it.
But he realized his eyes were dry. At last, at the top of a pile of human bodies, he had arrived at a place beyond tears.
There was a whistling, breathing noise below him, and when he looked down he saw that the thing in the trooper’s helmet was still climbing up the mountain of bodies.
Trig looked back and forth through the open duct. Then he picked a direction and began to crawl.