Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

head. The frozen air burned in his throat and lungs, like swallowing razor blades. Hoarfrost formed immediately on his hair and eyelids, and his eyes ached as the cold began freezing the liquid in his eyeballs. He blinked hard, gritted his teeth, and knelt down to fit himself into the tunnel he’d made. Even with his disrupter set on full, wide dispersal, it hadn’t been able to produce a very wide tunnel. He’d have to crawl through it on hands and knees. His knees jarred on the frozen bodies, frozen hard as concrete. Some had been cut open by the energy beam as neatly as a surgeon’s knife, revealing hard, frozen innards. They were mostly gray, with a few pale shades of pink or purple, even the vitality of color leached out of them by the dreadful cold. Owen shuffled forward, reaching out with his hands to grab the bodies ahead and pull himself along. The dead flesh was so cold it burned his bare hands. Every instinct yelled at him to let go immediately, but he refused to listen. He tightened his grip and pulled himself on. When he did try to let go, his warm flesh clung stickily to the cold, and he had to use all his strength to pull free. He left patches of skin behind, but felt no pain.
    Owen refused to let it upset him. The skin would grow back, and it would happen less and less as his hands cooled. Already his body was adapting to the horrid cold, his core temperature plummeting at a speed that would have killed anyone else. He had no sensation left anywhere, and his eyes were stuck open, but he’d stopped shuddering. When he moved his arms and legs, they felt like they belonged to someone else. His breath no longer steamed on the air before him. He pulled himself on down the tunnel, farther into the domain of the dead, and the dark closed slowly in around him. He could hear Hazel moving close behind him, breathing harshly, and she was his only comfort. The tunnel ran out sooner than he thought it would. He grabbed the bodies before him, pulling them apart and away from each other, opening up a path. Often limbs stuck out like barriers in his way, and he had to tug and pull, breaking them off and putting them aside, out of the way. The arms and legs snapped cleanly, like pieces of wood.
    He tried to think of them that way but couldn’t. They were people, his people. Sometimes he had to smash in rib cages with his more than human strength to make the necessary room. The unmoving bodies were stubbornly resistant, and he came to resent them. Didn’t they knew what he was doing was for their sake? He lashed out with his fists, and was glad his hands were numb, for more than one reason.
    He could feel Hazel’s presence behind him, and hear the ragged, breaking sounds of her slow progress, but when he croaked her name, she didn’t answer him. Presumably her voice was as wrecked by the cold as his. Either way, he couldn’t turn around to see if anything was wrong. There wasn’t room. So he pressed on, heading for the door.
    It was very dark now. The last of the light from the main cavern and the reerected force field had long since died away. There were shifting and creaking sounds all around him, as the bodies redistributed their weight in response to Owen’s actions. It was almost as though the dead were stirring, disturbed by the presence of the living in their midst. Owen was glad of the dark. He had a quiet horror that one of the dead faces might open its dead eyes and turn to look at him as he passed, and he thought if he saw such a thing he might well lose his mind. There were some things no man could bear to see and still stay sane. And so he fought his way on, his heart hammering in his chest, his breathing harsh and ragged, half convinced that at any moment a dead hand would reach out of the darkness and clamp down on his arm or leg. Claustrophobia sank slowly into him as the weight of all the bodies seemed to bear down with increasing weight. He began to doubt the surety of the direction in his mind, of the location of the hidden door. He had no other way of telling one direction from another in the utter dark. They could be moving in a slow circle for all he knew, hopelessly lost in the kingdom of the dead. He began to feel he’d been moving for far too long without getting anywhere. That he should have been there long before this. That he’d be trapped in here forever, in his own private hell. But he wasn’t alone. Hazel was there with him. And just knowing that gave him the strength to go