Blackteeth Read online

  “Where he’d come from?” the girl asked. She had an accent that Hesper would have said was South African.

  “Big fils de pute,” a boy said. His accent was probably French based on the words, and the words didn’t sound like they were a good thing.

  The other boy said belligerently, “He ain’t in charge of me, and I don’t give a fuck good goddamn how big he is.” His accent was American South and possibly East Texan.

  “Trust him?” Mun-Hee asked Hesper. His brown eyes looked at her just the way she remembered, and it was as if two years hadn’t passed. She nodded.

  “Shut it,” Mun-Hee said to the other children. “Time to move. Keep quiet. Back to base. Stopping to get food. Then beat feet.”

  They all shut up, and Mun-Hee motioned at Hesper and Moss to follow him. They went out into the grand hallway, and there were three other children waiting. It was difficult to tell, but their ages ranged from six or seven all the way up to fourteen or fifteen.

  Hesper could feel the weight of Moss’s stare on her back. She didn’t need to be a psychic to know what he was asking himself. Is Olivia with these children? Is it possible?

  Hesper didn’t want to answer those questions but she would later. It was unlikely that Olivia lived past being here more than a few days. Few did.

  Hesper had escaped not long after the Blackteeth had brought her here. She’d been locked in the belly of the beast, and she’d clawed her way out kicking, screaming, and biting the whole way. If Olivia had been captured in the two years following that, then it wasn’t when Hesper had first started helping others escape the Blackteeth. That was more judgment to be heaped on Hesper’s head, if she was correct about the timing. She hadn’t had the brass balls at the time to creep into the Blackteeth’s backyard and steal their bounty out from under their noses. Not then. That had come later.

  The silent group followed the grand hallway for a bit, and Hesper had an idea where they were going. It wasn’t where she’d made her home for years because that place had been compromised, but it was closer to the Blackteeth’s home than she would have liked. She supposed Mun-Hee was rubbing their faces in it in some fashion. Perhaps it was even clever because the Blackteeth might not expect them to be so close by.

  Then they were on the roofs again, and Hesper had Moss clasp the edge of her shirt to follow her. Hesper wasn’t sure if the children would allow Moss to follow them. He was too different, and adults in this world were generally turncoats. They wouldn’t trust him until they knew they could trust him, which was the only way they’d survived.

  They passed a pair of Blackteeth sometime later, and Mun-Hee had signaled by hand that something was close. He reached back to touch the person behind him. They followed along until Hesper felt a little hand touch hers and make a gesture into the palm of her hand. Hesper knew the hand signals because she and the boy had developed them together.

  Hesper paused to reach back to Moss. She lightly rested her hand over his mouth and she felt him nod in understanding. They stilled and watched as the wall lights came on in the distance, making their way diagonally across the expanse of the great cave. Lights slowly began to glow and followed a path along whatever was activating them. The rearmost lights gradually went off as they no longer registered the heat of the creatures. The route of the lights moved like a living creature with a long tail, twisting and turning as the Blackteeth patrolled the area.

  After a long while, all of the lights vanished, and they knew that the Blackteeth had passed into another hallway.

  Mun-Hee led them in the opposite direction. After another bit of time, they stopped and there was another water outlet on the base of a building they were on. If one approached from the side, the lights wouldn’t go on because apparently the builders hadn’t extended them that far down a dead end. But the dead end did have a series of boxes that extended up the wall, and the boxes were filled with fungi of some kind. Hesper would have called them mushrooms, but they grew wildly into flower-like shapes and possessed an unearthly greenish color when viewed in the light. When they flowered, they glowed in the dark, and there were animals in the system that ate them.

  Hesper had discovered long before that the fungi was edible. When one is starving anything looks better than nothing. The fungi tasted like dirt and shit, but it filled the stomach and didn’t poison them. Occasionally, they could make a stew from various things they threw together. She supposed the builders had used the water to keep the fungi moist while it grew in relative darkness.

  The children spent a few minutes harvesting the crop, picking from the top boxes, so it wasn’t obvious that they had been there. There were literally hundreds of these fungi boxes in the cave system, and they went from one to another so that it wasn’t noticeable that they were reducing the yield. Hesper had even transferred the spores to her original base and there had been several blushes of fungi before…

  There were equal parts of dread, shame, and horror that Hesper had left children behind. Especially Mun-Hee. If she had any idea that he was still there, she wouldn’t have dreamt of using the pool. She would have dragged him with her, and they could have escaped together.

  She didn’t want to linger on the thought. It was simple, however. She would have never left him behind if she’d known.

  With her direction, Moss climbed down the wall and got a drink and then waited while Hesper got hers. She directed him to the garden where she piled fungi into his backpack. She knew he must be curious, but it wasn’t safe to answer questions. She also knew he wanted to see where the Blackteeth kept their prisoners, but that wasn’t going to happen for the moment.

  When the children were done, Mun-Hee led them across the grand hallway, and Hesper waited for the lights to go on. She kept watch in the back with Moss at her side. Both held their weapons ably.

  The group returned to the roofs and after a few endless minutes, the blackness became absolute again. There was only the occasional chafe of someone’s clothing against a solid surface or a toe kicking a piece of rock that might have fallen from the ceiling.

  Again, Hesper had an idea of where they were going. In her time here, she had explored as much as she could. Once she understood the way the builders’ lights worked, she was able to understand the way the doors worked. A slow drip from under one of the bumps led her to how the builders’ faucets worked. She had light, shelter, and water. It wasn’t hard to figure out how to get food. She knew how to set traps, and the Blackteeth and the children weren’t the only living creatures in the underworld.

  The system was a series of caverns or possibly excavations that rivaled any cave system Hesper had ever heard about. It was miles long and a mile or more in width. The interior might have stretched upward the length of a football field. Occasionally, she could see where it dipped down, and in some places, stalactites had formed. Once she’d found a mighty stalactite that had fallen and pierced the roof of a building. It looked like a rock she would have seen anywhere in Alabama. There were even corresponding stalagmites that were growing because of minerals in water being dropped from above. She knew from her visits to caves in Alabama with her family that it was a living system, but that was the extent of her knowledge.

  What the original builders had created was a horse of a different color. The interior buildings were mostly what she thought of as living quarters, and there were many of them. There was what she suspected was a power plant on one of the long sides and that was near where the Blackteeth tended to congregate. Overall, the shape of the expanse was a long hallway with equally long intersections. It was the form of a huge I with more than a hundred cross strokes. It was more than Hesper could have explored in 100 years, much less the ten that she roamed. The pools were on the ends of the cross strokes. There were more pools than she could have counted. She had a rudimentary idea of what the symbols meant next to the pools, and there were more symbols all over the place that she couldn’t fathom. One might have been directing a builder to the nearest latrine for all
she knew.

  More notably, there were hidey holes that the Blackteeth either didn’t visit or didn’t know about. Above the roofs and through the ventilation systems were rooms that were blocked off. Hesper had pried the doors open and found hidden treasures galore. While there wasn’t a handy Rosetta Stone, there were tools and there were things that could be used as tools and there were places where the builders had obviously slept. Hesper’s take was that it was used when the system was originally being constructed and then forgotten because it had become unnecessary or possibly because the builders had abandoned the entire place.

  No matter of its origins, she’d made enough of a home there that it was where she’d brought Mun-Hee and the others.

  It had been safe for a time until one of the children had been flipped by the Blackteeth.

  Hesper didn’t know what the promise had been or the type of communication that had been used, but the Blackteeth had set a trap. She had freed two children from their clutches, and at the time, it had seemed all too easy. She’d passed the children on to Mun-Hee while she’d reconnoitered around them to make certain they weren’t being followed.

  It turned out that the Blackteeth hadn’t needed to follow because the child who’d been flipped had begun shrieking so that the monsters could simply find them.

  On the end of the builders’ world, almost a mile away, Hesper had heard the screams. She would always hear the screams when she closed her eyes. They would pierce her like a hot knife in cold butter, slicing into the very depths of her soul, prying at her humanity and leaving nothing behind but blood and pain.

  Moss’s warm hand touched her neck as if he sensed her distress, and she realized that she was shaking. He patted her gently and soothed her hair away from her forehead. She realized that they had stopped and had been stopped for some time while Hesper’s mind went back to a time where a child had done the Blackteeth’s dirty work. His fingers soothed her skin and tapped out a question. “Okay?” he spelled with his index finger. She put his hand on her cheek and nodded silently.

  Hesper’s mind was on the past regardless of her answer. She hadn’t stopped to count bodies because there had been so much blood and so much gore that the world had gone crimson for a time. Instead, she had quietly lost what remained of her sanity and disappeared into the builders’ world. Hiding, drinking water, eating fungi, and sleeping had been what followed.

  That was the basis of Hesper’s existence for some time. Her brain had slowly begun to function again. She became what no one should become once she realized she didn’t have to sit passively waiting for an errant Blackteeth to find her; she became a guerrilla fighter who wanted to have only vengeance. She began simply enough with constructing an unpretentious ambush using what she remembered from her days spent with her grandfather in the mountains. It wasn’t that hard to kill the Blackteeth once she’d put her mind to it. Seemingly, the children they’d taken had never fought back before. She’d been happy to persuade them that not all humans were that easy.

  The Blackteeth might not have been pleased to know that the last class that Hesper had taken had featured a chapter on the headhunters of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Smith, had once been in the military and stationed in the area. She’d brought back many stories and various heading implements. There had been an axe and a sword. There was even a statue of a man with a huge grin holding up a trophy head with one hand and a sword with the other. It had been carved from wood and was the type of thing that walked through a 10-year-old Hesper’s nightmares. It was also inspiration. She wasn’t going to keep heads as trophies, but she could scare the Blackteeth in much the same way that they scared her.

  Then, Hesper had begun to spy on the Blackteeth, and she’d learned something else. She could get back to the real world. She might even be safe.

  But in reality, Hesper had never been interested in only safety. There was a more pressing reason that burned her like the magma percolating in the gut of a massive volcano. It was called revenge, and it was a molten rock that scalded everything in its inexorable path.

  Chapter Seventeen

  He that goes barefoot must not plant thorns.

  – English proverb

  The group came to a halt as hands from those in the front reached out to the people behind them and stopped them. Hesper came to a standstill and then stopped Moss behind her, she could hear the others moving around surreptitiously. Then rocks scraped over surfaces ever so lightly, like the subtle dragging of fingernails over stone. She realized they were moving their camouflage from the entrance to their hidey hole.

  There were literally dozens of the openings in the builders’ world. Most were concealed by the debris of time. Once Hesper had found one, she located others, and she got a sense of where they would be positioned because of the way the place had been constructed. The builders had been fans of symmetry and parallelism, and it hadn’t taken long for her to recognize the patterns. If the Blackteeth had thought about it, they might have known about them, too, but as always, Hesper was glad that the creatures didn’t think the way humans did. Nor, ostensibly, did they think like the builders.

  Hesper sketched the word “tunnel” onto Moss’s arm, and he sketched a question mark onto hers. She put her fingers over his mouth and signaled him to be quiet. It wasn’t the time or the place to be impatient or to ask questions. She suspected he was thinking about his sister and whether or not she waited for him at the end of their path. Hesper could have told him that the odds were against that. Too many died in this painful half existence in a place that no one knew much about.

  She patted his arm and let out a breath, listening to a careful dance of movement in front of them as children worked in an economy of motion. She cocked her head toward the rear, listening for any sign that they’d been spotted or followed. There was nothing to be heard except the softly furtive movements in front of her.

  Mun-Hee came for Hesper a little later and signaled to her that they would crawl in the darkness for a while and to take her time. Hesper sketched three words on Moss’s arm: crawling, slowly, carefully. She felt his nod with her other hand.

  Hesper waited her turn and tugged Moss behind her. For a moment she worried that his bigger frame wouldn’t make it through, but it did, and he didn’t even come close to scraping his flesh. The tunnel widened after about twenty feet, and Hesper could feel that the children had been clearing it away from where it wasn’t readily apparent. After another hundred feet they were able to stand up, and they continued to move carefully through the darkness. The ground was rough and the ceiling was low enough that Mun-Hee signaled for Moss to duck several times.

  After three jackknife turns, Mun-Hee produced a light made from something Hesper had never seen before. It looked like the same kind of light made by the builders’ walls, but it was a compact square with a handle like a lantern. He glanced at her and grinned broadly. “We explored, Hesper, and we found all kinds of new stuff,” he said quietly. “Safe as can be here. The Blackteeth never came to this one. What happened to you?”

  “I came back after that last time and found nothing but blood and death,” she said. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Moss recoil. “I thought you were dead. I thought you were all dead.”

  “That last boy we helped screamed for the Blackteeth,” Mun-Hee said resentfully. “They came on us as if they had been just outside the tunnels. We couldn’t stop them. There were three of us who went out the side tunnel and were able to make it across the grand hallway before the Blackteeth followed our scent. We were able to backtrack and cover ourselves with dirt and shit. We hid for a long time, waiting for some sign of anyone else. I didn’t know what happened to you. I thought they’d gotten you.”

  Hesper looked at the other children. She didn’t know any of them. Mun-Hee was likely saying that he was one of the original ones remaining. It wasn’t surprising. They had freed more than a dozen children, and the Blackteeth sometimes caught them alm
ost as fast as they got them out. However, once a child was freed, the Blackteeth didn’t always recapture them.

  “What happened to the boy who betrayed us?” Hesper asked.

  “The Blackteeth killed him with the rest,” Mun-Hee said. “No deals for him. They don’t honor their word.”

  “This is still too close to the tunnel opening,” the boy from Texas said. “All y’all are crazy if you stay here and gab away.” He turned and headed down the tunnel.

  Mun-Hee rushed Hesper, and she caught him in a fierce hug. “So glad you’re alive, Hesper,” he whispered. “So glad you’re not dead. It’s been hard without you.”

  Hesper couldn’t bring herself to say the words that would give Mun-Hee hope, that she knew the way home. It seemed too abstract for the moment. She hadn’t counted on other freed children. A new plan began to form in her mind. Safety first, then she would come back to do what she’d imagined doing for two whole years.

  There were other tunnels that the children ignored and complicated backtracking so that they could not easily be followed. The children glanced at Hesper and Moss often as if they were skeptical of their allegiance. Or perhaps it was because they hadn’t seen an adult for so long.

  Moss nearly danced in eagerness beside Hesper. She could feel the waves of anticipation rolling off his skin. He didn’t have a problem with hoping. He hadn’t yet learned that sometimes hoping was wasted emotion.

  “She may not be there,” Hesper said quietly, wishing the words didn’t have to be said.

  “I know,” Moss said, “but…”

  “Who?” Mun-Hee asked.

  “A girl from Alabama named Olivia,” Moss said eagerly. “She would have come about two years after Hesper. She was ten years old then.”

  “Ain’t no Olivia with us,” the Texan said guilelessly.

  Moss took a shaky breath, and Hesper could almost hear his heart ripping itself apart. She wanted to pat his back and tell him that there was still hope, but she didn’t think there was any left.