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turned white as they gripped my father, and for the first time
I felt him retreat from the rage growing within me. I would
give these wretched things to oblivion, beyond the whispers
of myth—where even memory would never touch them
again.
I would not be baited like some dumb animal, so I
bypassed the field leading to the barn and disappeared into
the darkness—far beneath the silence, where the scurry of
a draft can sound like a blast from hell—and I made my
way into the caverns beneath the city. There were many
entrances into the great hollows scattered all around me,
beneath broken statues, secreted away in basements. I
chose a yawning hole that opened up from the bottom of
a dry creek bed. As I descended into the earth, I found the
darkness to be old and untroubled by the sun, but it was
stained by an unfathomable degeneration that caused it to
flow sick and slow. It had become a corpse of its former self,
having sheltered too much debauchery than was healthy. Its
shortcomings were to my advantage, as the slothful pitch
was slave to no one, and felt no obligation to alert the under-
creatures to my presence.
As I traveled the spaces beneath the world, I encountered
entire caverns filled with machines designed for the
preservation of dead bodies. Thick electrical cables unraveled
from the devices, moving up the walls and disappearing into
the many cracks of the ceiling. Other rooms were occupied
by a more completely degenerated form of cannibal, a
type which apparently had no place even among the filthy
comforts of a ruined town spilling over with mold and rot.
They were ungainly things, mouth-heavy and blind, as
nature had perfected for them a body that was meant only
for hunting and gorging. Like plump vermin, overstuffed
by a limitless banquet, they squirmed and croaked from the
cave floors where they lay belly-up, slick with gore. They
wore only the blood of many meals upon their bodies, and
were too full from their eating to feel the heat of my gaze
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