I drop my camera bag, pull out my other Z9, quickly set up a tripod, and start capturing video from the platform. Nothing happens. Taranis continues to hover there, staring angrily down the tunnel. Leaving my bag behind and proceeding with only my primary camera and the backup in my Kevlar, I drop down from the platform onto the tracks and wait ... and wait ...
Just as I start to think Taranis may, in fact, be a total and complete crazy person, I hear it. A faraway sound that sends chills crawling from the crown of my head down my shoulders, to my spine.It’s a giggle.A woman’s giggle, so light and innocent it makes her sound like a child.
Taranis flies forward, moving with a speed that would shock me were I not built as battle hardened as a tank. Instead, I move forward at the fastest speed I can. I shove past the two idiots, slightly concerned at being shot from the back and hoping to high hell this vest protects against machismo and stupidity as well as bullets as I dart into the darkness.
The purple lights still glow against the walls but are spaced so far apart I have to pass through rings of darkness to reach the next. It eerily feels like I’m descending into Dante’s inferno as I blast forward, stale air stroking my face. The volume ahead increases, as do the sounds of running feet at my back. Behind me, I can hear Tweedledee and Tweedledum struggling to catch up, and ahead, I can hear the sounds of a battle beginning. Taranis’s cries are punctuated by a woman’s wild laughter, and I know before I round the next cornerexactlywho’s making a sound so haunting.
Taranis hovers at a fork in the tunnel, brawling with another hovering superbeing—a villain who is one of the most feared—while a second villain, the one who’d been making that awful giggling sound, stands on the ground, looking up at the pair with a smile.Bia.
Bia was among the first unaffiliated Forty-Eight that the Champions and villains actually campaigned over in a real battle of the brands. With power over animals, the COE called her Aja, named after an orisha associated with nature. They offered her millions and millions of dollars, but whatever the VNA gave her she liked better. In less than a week, she dropped the name Aja and announced herself to the world as Bia, who in Greek mythology is the personification of violence. The news never was able to unveil what exactly the Marduk had offered her to join the VNA, but she’s been one of his closest allies ever since.
I come to a dead stop, drop to one knee, and snap her photograph. That’s when I notice that while she’s just standing there, she’s not doingnothing. There’s a sound ... a horrible tittering, clattering, scraping sound—a subtle white noise behind the much louder sounds of violence coming from the villain and the Champion tearing each other to pieces thirty feet from me. All around Bia’s feet, an army ofratsis forming.Mi-chi-nyeon.
I lower my camera from my right eye just in time to catch Bia’s maniacal gaze. She has curly brown hair and dark-brown skin, and is looking at me with bright-green eyes that shine light onto her cheeks. She’s considering something, and I don’t want to know what it is. When she finally waves at me, too slowly not to terrify, I don’t need further instruction—or warning.
We must have arrived at the service room with the electricity boxes Taranis was originally looking for, because there’s a door hanging ajar in a little recessed area halfway up the tunnel wall. Flanking it is a short ledge lining the tunnel walls, barely wide enough to shuffle down sideways. Whatever. I’ll take it.
I spot a short ladder that will bring me up to the ledge. It’s closer to Bia than I care to be, but with no other choice, I dare to run towardit. Bia stands there watching me with an amused and utterly sinister expression as I haul myself up onto the high ladder, spin around on one knee, and crouch on the short foot-wide ledge, gripping the edge for dear life.
Bia simply watches me, and I take a chance. I show her my camera. Snap her photo. She grins even wider. The Forty-Eight are all alike, at least in this. They alllovehaving their picture taken. It’s so strangely human.
Bia turns her attention away from me down toward the tunnel, and I whip out my backup Zfc, setting it to record from the edge of the platform. I use my 50mm to capture everything else I can in photographs.
While Bia stands below, a horde of what must be tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of rats amasses around her feet while, hovering over her head, Taranis fights the villain parents tell naughty children stories about that are sure to haunt them in their sleep.
The Meinad is a white woman with olive skin, curly black hair and bloodred lips. Her eyes shine red in every photograph of her ever taken, just as they do now as she attacks Taranis with massive claws that are taupe at the base and black farther along—red at the tip now, wet with his blood.
Electricity shoots off his skin as he throws a punch that hits her square in the jaw. She shrieks and the sound ... the sound is nauseating. Literally. My stomach punches up into my throat and I hurl over the edge of the platform. Even Taranis is thrown back. He hits the concrete tunnel wall a dozen feet to my left above my head.
I manage to get one single photo of him trying to shake off the sound as the Meinad closes back in and scores his chest with her claws, cleaving gashes into his perfect skin that look deep and painful. Bright-red blood weeps down his uniform.
“Hey, you fuckers!” a voice shouts to my right. I don’t know if it’s driver or dickwad. What I do know is that it’s a mistake.
A short hail of bullets blaze, several of which smack the Meinad in the side and in the leg. She screeches again and the bulletfire is cut short when both men fall to their knees. I take their photos, horrified and nauseated myself, this time because of the sound, but also because I can sense what’s coming.
Bia lifts both of her long-fingered hands above her head, palms facing the sky, and says so very sweetly, “Time to dine, my sweets.”
The rat army around her feet charges forward and overtakes the soldiers too quickly for them to fall back. They try to defend themselves with their bullets, but what are hundreds of bullets against thousands of rats? The men fall and then scream in agony as the rats feast.
Taranis doesn’t help the men at all. Instead, he uses the distraction they’ve provided to his advantage and shoots lightning from his chest and from both arms, two bolts hitting the Meinad in the chest and a third hitting Bia in the thigh. Bia collapses, and when she looks up at Taranis, her features have transformed and she’s suddenly wearing the snout of a giant rat.
The Meinad attempts another assault but is battered back by lightning strike after lightning strike. Taranis pummels her into the opposite wall and looks like he’ll go for the kill, until hundreds of bats suddenly rush down the tunnel and swarm him. Electricity radiates off his skin, keeping some of them at bay but not all. The Meinad is given another opportunity to lunge. I capture everything with my camera.
“Don’t forget our other guest, sweethearts,” Bia says, setting her sights to me as the cries of the two men on the tracks devolve to gurgling pleas. Half the bat army suddenly moves in my direction, and I quickly move down the ledge to the electrical closet, gather all my breath and courage to my chest, and step back into the darkness.
Scrambling to grab hold of the door handle from the inside, I manage to wrench it closed, the heavy sound of metal scraping over concrete almost as horrible as the sound of the Meinad’s screech. The door slams shut one single heartbeat before thousands of bats pound against the other side of the metal.
I hold on to the cold handle, praying it doesn’t give up the ghost while listening to the thuds of tiny bodies, their pounding and scratching, clawing and little squeals on the door, mere inches from me.
It lasts ... and lasts ... and they don’t give up. But I don’t either. My arms are shaking. I’ve got sweat coating my hairline and lubricating my tits, smashed underneath my bulletproof vest—a vest that does absolutely nothing to deter rats, if the two men still lying on the tracks are any indication.
I don’t have time to pray. Don’t have the thoughts for it. I know the moment I’m feeling. I’ve felt it before. Back in that pipe in the DRC, drinking the last of the water from my canteen. The panic of potentially dying for the job,onthe job. But back then, sitting huddled with those soldiers, there was nothing I could do. Here and now, it’s entirely up to me. If I relax my arms and give up, the rats and bats will come in. If I get tired, I get eaten.
I’m not sure if it’s better or worse than having no control at all, and as I stand there, vowing to myself that I will not fucking die here, my mind starts to wonder if this is how drowning people feel. Not only a sense of panic at impending death but also a feeling of absolute horror that they died because they weren’t strong enough to keep going. That fatigue won out and cost them everything.
The human body isn’t meant to endure it all. It just can’t. But the will it has to do just that is incredible. Which is what I’m still thinking when I realize the pounding of rats and bats against the metal door has stopped. I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here. It could be minutes. It could be hours. It felt like years.
My arms shake. My legs shake. My core muscles quiver. My neck, shoulders, and back all sear with agony the moment I move. My grip on the door handle spasms as I hallucinate the sound of banging, but it’s just the clack of my camera bouncing off my Kevlar and hitting the pocked metal. Taking several deep, staying breaths, I pull open the door an inch, and when nothing tries to kill me, I heave it open the rest ofthe way. It scrapes even more brutally against the concrete than it did before, this time dragging with it dozens of little rat and bat corpses.
