Chapter 6: Into Sheol

Balto and Jenna went on through the darkness, finding it difficult to see. Jenna was talking to Balto. “You know, we’re really lucky Sorrow didn’t find this place. It was practically right under his nose when he…” “Stop!” Balto said suddenly, putting a virus arm in front of Jenna to stop her from moving. “What is it?” she asked. Balto was standing there, trying to figure out what was going on. His virus sense was working violently, the visual and audio alerts playing havoc with his eyes and ears. He switched to the virus vision, trying to deduce the problem. Immediately, his vision was flooded with red, from the floor up to the ceiling, completely blocking the passage. “Man…” Balto said. “What?” Jenna said. Balto took a deep breath. “We were really lucky not to walk into a wall of leprosy bacilli just now.” He extended a virus arm cautiously and ignited the wall with the virus cleansing, and the deathtrap eventually burned away. The virus vision showed nothing, and Balto switched back to normal vision. “It’s clear here and up ahead,” he said, and the pair continued on. Before long, the passage opened into what seemed to be a large chamber. The path curved left, and began descending. It was here that Balto and Jenna actually received some visibility from vent holes in the ceiling. They walked up to the side of the now very wide path, which they could see descended into the darkness in a curve, with the wall on the left side and empty space on the right. They stopped in front of a dark-colored, slimy kind of cell, in which a three-foot, green-skinned, flagella-covered beast rested, barely breathing. It was a mutated leprosy bacillus, not an advance form, just a regular bacterium. “You know, Jenna?” Balto said quietly. “This thing is an actual bacillus. It’s exactly like the tiny things, only our size, and it has organs.” “They’re probably packed with the little bacilli.” “You bet. Not as much as Sorrow, though.” Balto used his virus vision, and he could see other living things. “They’re all bacilli, like this one,” he said. “They’re asleep; I guess they’re hibernating.” Balto was somewhat perplexed, however, because of the small amount. “There’s far less than even a hundred here,” he said. “I don’t know why Sorrow is going though such a pain just to get…” He extended the virus vision, and suddenly it revealed the rest of the bacteria. “There are…hundreds,” Balto said quietly. “Maybe even thousands.” He sighed and set his jaw. “Sorrow can never find this. I’m going to have to destroy this place. Let’s go.” “Won’t we wake them up?” Jenna asked. Balto shook his head. “They’re sleeping too deeply for that. Noise won’t do it. Just don’t touch them.”

They walked down the path, which spiraled down, making tighter circles as it approached the bottom. They passed dozens and dozens of sleeping bacilli, until they got close to the bottom, where there were no more cells. Balto looked around. “The question is,” he said, “how am I going to knock this whole place down at once?” “Use these,” Jenna said, tilting her head towards a nearby pillar of stone. “Just crack these, and when we go back up, hit one, and they’ll all come down.” Balto smiled. “I don’t know where I’d be without you, Jenna.” He kissed her on the cheek, and she smiled. “Thank me later. We should get out of here as fast as we can.” Balto nodded and climbed up next to the first pillar. “You’re right. The ceiling will be so heavy they’ll all want to come down by the time we’re back up top.” Balto put one arm on the pillar and the other on the wall, and began to push against both. He groaned and strained, quivering from the effort. This continued for a few seconds, and Jenna thought Balto wasn’t making any progress, until suddenly the pillar split almost clean through. Balto released immediately to keep from collapsing the pillar. “There are three more,” he said, after looking around. The two of them went on, and Balto cracked each pillar in the same way, making the whole support structure unstable. After they reached the fourth, they saw that they could descend no further; they had reached the bottom of the path. In front of them, a tall, skinny shape rose up from the floor. Balto walked up to it, finding what it was before long. “It’s some sort of light,” he said. “It looks like it’s powered by viruses.” Balto extended two spikes, like the ones Equinox had, from each of the virus arms’ mouths, and inserted them into holes near the base of the lamp. He poured a stream of viruses into the lamp, and the pair could see an immediate effect. The lamp began to light up, starting at the bottom and winding its way up to the top, where the viruses flowed into a large crystalline container at the top. It was then that the real illumination came forth, light from an unseen chemical reaction spilling from the crystal in all directions. Balto and Jenna looked up and around, rendered speechless by the sight. Their location was actually a cavern of massive proportions, shaped like an upside-down cone, with Balto and Jenna at the lowest area, at the “point”. Wrapping around the sides were terraces, spaced ten feet above and below each other, each containing a tremendous number of cells, each one of those containing one bacterium. On the floor beneath their feet, there was a massive etching of a bacillus, pointing in the direction of the entrance far above them. On the whole, the cavern was perhaps two hundred feet deep. Jenna was the first to speak. “This is what he was looking for, all right. I saw a drawing he had that looked like a two-dimensional view of this place.” “In that case,” Balto said, “the sooner it’s gone, the better. Let’s head back up.”

The pair began walking back up the spiraling stone path, still observing the great swarm of bacilli. “I wonder where these things came from in the first place…” Balto thought out loud.

Jenna sucked in her breath suddenly.

Balto turned around. “What happened?” he asked. Jenna lifted a paw off the floor very slowly, and Balto saw that one flagellum of a bacillus had hung down onto the path. Not seeing it, Jenna had stepped on it. She looked up at Balto, and seemed like she was going to move. Balto silently held up a paw, urging her to stay still. Terror filled Jenna’s face; she expected the bacillus to spring out and seize her any moment. Balto raised a paw to his lips, signaling her to be quiet, and they both looked at the sleeping threat. It didn’t move. It didn’t stir. It didn’t make a sound. After several agonizing seconds, Balto gestured for Jenna to come to him, and she walked gingerly away from the bacillus. He nuzzled her comfortingly. “Whew,” they both sighed. “That was too close,” Balto said. He made sure no bacteria were on Jenna’s paw, and they headed up again.

A horrible shriek came from behind them, and they whirled around. The bacillus with the stray flagellum burst from its cell in an explosion of mucky black slime, and it looked back and forth quickly. It didn’t take long for the monster to spot the pair, and it roared and leapt through the air at them, flailing its tentacles like whips. Jenna threw herself to the ground, narrowly missing getting her head bitten off, and Balto grabbed one of the bacillus’ flagella, halting its jump. It screeched and striped his face with a pair of flagella, but he didn’t let go; he punched it in the teeth, then turned and flung it into the wall with great force, causing it to burst like a tomato, showering green blood over the pathway. Balto and Jenna thought they were safe, but that hope was quickly dashed. As the bacillus died, it sent a tremor through the group mind of the swarm, and several nearby bacilli awakened suddenly. “I’m sorry!” Jenna cried. “It’s not your fault!” Balto shouted. “Come on! We have to get out of here!” The bacilli reached them, and Balto roared and laid into them, throwing heavy blows back and forth, knocking the bacilli flying. They fought much differently than advance forms; they kept trying to get close and grab him so they could bite, rather than subduing him with blows from their tentacles. Balto stabbed the teeth of a virus arm into the side of one bacillus and pulled, ripping its gooey, leprous skin in a fat strip down its body. It shrieked loudly, thrashing back and forth, and Balto punched its head, imploding the cartilage skull and killing the beast. The dance of death continued like this for several moments, but for every bacillus that died, more awakened. “Run!” Balto shouted, and they both took off up the spiral. Jenna was in front; Balto hung back a little to head off any of the more successfully advancing bacilli. One bacillus was knocked into a pillar, which unfortunately began the collapsing process early. “Oh, no,” Balto said. “Hurry, Jenna!” They ran over cracking rock, their escape route getting more and more hazardous. The path bottomed out ahead of them, and Balto caught Jenna up with the virus arms and ran across the wall in a very daring move, coming down and letting her back to the floor. Rocks from the ceiling were falling and landing on the bacilli below, killing many of them before they had a chance to wake up. The din of crashing rocks and shrieking bacilli was deafening.

One bacillus looked up, observing the destabilizing structure. It called to a large group of its kin, and they made their way out of the cavern, through a tiny hole in the back.

A pillar shattered almost entirely, letting the section Balto and Jenna were on fall forward and dash against the path ahead, which had been separated by a large fissure. Balto slipped and fell from the edge, and Jenna leapt to it, reaching her paws out, giving something for Balto to catch onto with a virus arm. He grabbed her paw with the mouth of one arm, careful to keep the teeth retracted completely. “Don’t worry!” Jenna shouted. “I can pull you up!” She backed up steadily, raising Balto higher, and he soon found a hold for the other arm on the rocks. He mounted the ledge, and they took off again, finally reaching an area that wasn’t dependent on the pillars for stability. “There’s the door!” Balto shouted. They both ran toward it…and Jenna uttered a bloodcurdling scream of agony. Balto spun around to see her caught in the grip of an enormous foot, massive claws stabbed into her back. The foot attached to a long, skinny leg, which turned out to be one of many on the grotesque worm-like green body of the colossal monster that stood there, apparently having climbed up from some hidden lair below. Balto stared at it, not believing what he saw. It was the eyes more than anything that gave it away, the eyes with the asymmetrical irises…

It was the creature from his nightmare.

He jumped forward and cut into the hand, ripping muscles and rendering its grip useless. Jenna’s body fell from the claws, and she seized with pain. “Oh…Balto…” she gasped, trying not to scream again. “Easy, Jenna,” Balto said, fear and distress in his voice. He was about to continue speaking, but his paw happened to touch the wounds on her back. He slowly raised his paw, looking at the shiny crimson staining his pads, breathing hard. It was Jenna’s blood. This monster had drawn Jenna’s blood.

Deep down, something awakened.

The pure, raw fury of animal rage built up gradually within Balto, and he began shaking from the intensity of the emotion. He saw red, and in the middle was the red of Jenna’s blood. He leaned his head forward and licked the blood from his paw, letting the metallic taste run over his tongue, and he let out a savage roar, his eyes turning a bright yellow, fingers of the color reaching out into his fur, blood leaking from his eyelids, some of the hairs on the rest of his body thickening and becoming yellow, his muscles gaining strength as Ebola swept into them, every sense sharpened to that of the ultimate predator. He felt all of his virus powers at his disposal, and he realized that this was what had been happening to him coming out of the Ebola River nightmare. The virus arms screamed like demons, and Balto turned to face the monster, crying out at it. “YOU WILL NOT TAKE HER LIFE!” He had unleashed virus rage, becoming as close to pure virus as possible. Now, he was ready to fight.

Ready to kill.

The huge beast made an attempt to grab Balto, but he turned around and ran at the wall, moving at blinding speed, using pure inertia to overcome gravity as he propelled himself up the wall and across the ceiling long enough to come down on its back. He drove the teeth of both virus arms into its right shoulder and jumped off, using his body weight to give a mighty yank. The creature’s feet lifted off the ground, and it spun around twice in midair, coming down with crushing force on the floor, shredded muscles hanging from the gash in its shoulder. It twisted its long body with the flexibility of a snake, biting at Balto with a mouth big enough to easily cut him in half. Balto flung himself to the ground, and the behemoth’s jaws snapped shut above him. He roared and leaped straight up, hammering a virus arm into his enemy’s jaw, sending its head crashing into the ceiling, causing rock dust and pebbles to fall. As it came back down, Balto realized he had made the mistake of not moving aside, and the creature shot out a foot and snatched him easily. It pounded him into the ground, so hard it made a hole, then flung him up into the ceiling, making another hole. Taking him in its mouth, it turned and threw him across the entrance room, and he struck the wall like he had been shot out of a catapult. He slid to the floor, pain nearly crippling him, but the viruses inside him quelled the pain and fed him more strength, and he stood up. He threw himself at the monster, and it swung a foot in anticipation, ready to slice his head from his shoulders. However, Balto had been expecting this move, and he caught onto the foot, using its continuing swing as an easy way to get close enough to the creature’s head to jump on. He punched downward with terrific force, cracking the beast’s skull and causing it to roar with pain. This wasn’t the desired effect, though; Balto had been intending to penetrate its skull and pulverize its brain. However, this was one creature that had a skeleton of bone, not cartilage. Balto was soon thankful that he had a skeleton of bone, as the monster reared up and crushed him against the ceiling, successfully causing him to lose his grip and fall off. He landed directly in front of the creature, and it opened its slavering mouth. Now, Balto didn’t have a chance, and he knew it as the mouth loomed in his vision…

For a moment, Balto wasn’t sure what happened. He had been bitten by the creature, instantly killed by its powerful jaws. He could see it there, standing over him, roaring and thrashing. Perhaps he could turn and see his dead body before passing on completely. However, as time seemed to inch along, realization slowly came to him; he hadn’t died. The creature had never had a chance to bite him. But then…what had happened? What had stopped it? He jumped to his feet, finally recovered enough from shock to move, and stepped back a few paces, observing his foe. It squirmed painfully, still roaring, and Balto saw that a massive slab of stone had fallen from the weakening ceiling and landed on its body, apparently causing some sort of back injury. Balto panned his gaze across the whole cavern, and his eyes widened. The pillars were buckling, and the ceiling was disintegrating and coming down everywhere at once. Suddenly, a flash of inspiration came. He couldn’t kill it quickly enough to save Jenna and himself, no. He’d let the cavern do it for him. He jumped forward, grabbing the beast’s neck. With an unearthly roar, he summoned all his strength and threw the creature, sending its body smashing clean through a pillar. Now, with two supports totally destroyed, the chain reaction of collapse sped up exponentially. Balto grabbed Jenna and ran full speed down the passage out as the walls caved in around them, launching himself through the doorway with a yell, escaping crushing death by a hair. Balto set Jenna down…and collapsed with a soft moan. “Balto!” Jenna cried, lying down beside him, horrified by what she saw. The virus rage had ceased, and Balto’s face was absolutely soaked in his own blood. His eyes, nose, mouth, and ears were all letting crimson trails run over his fur, and they collected in a small puddle on the snow. Balto’s eyes were half-closed, and he breathed weakly, uttering bloody coughs sporadically, seeming incoherent. “Balto! Please, Balto! Talk to me!” Jenna was nearly in a panic as she tried to get a response, thinking she would have to watch Balto bleed to death before her eyes. But suddenly, Balto took a more normal breath and turned his eyes up towards her, and the leaking blood stopped. “It…it’s alright,” he whispered. “Are you okay?” Jenna cried, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m okay. Don’t be scared, Jenna. I…had to use the virus powers at a high level…and it turned out to be dangerous. The viruses attacked my body, like a real infection. It’s okay. I’ve…got it under control. I know it…looks bad, but I’m going to be fine. Could you help me up?” Jenna put her head under one of Balto’s shoulders, helping to lift him to his feet. Balto used virus cleansing on his face to remove the blood, standing still for a few moments to recover his strength. “Okay,” he said. “Better now.” They looked back at the entrance just in time to see the door cave in on itself, becoming entombed in snow. From inside, noises of screams and the thunder of collapsing rock were still easily audible. “Let’s go, Jenna,” Balto said wearily, and they walked away.

Sorrow awakened from a horrifically turbulent sleep, still feeling the bombardment of hundreds and hundreds of telepathic impulses that had fallen on his mind as he slept. They felt like death…but that couldn’t be, he knew. He didn’t have hundreds of advance forms with him. He was too disturbed to go back to sleep, however, so he stayed awake, wondering what had just happened to cause this.