A startled cry was all Sam managed before the bars slammed shut again, closing him inside that moist, pink, barbed cage.

“Sam!” Faera’s scream seemed to come from a long distance as the world began to spin around him. The barbs in the walls of the cage only went one direction, slippery and smooth, helping him slide deeper. When he struggled towards the bars, they dug into Sam’s skin, stopping his movement.

The pink walls started closing in on Sam rhythmically, trying to squeeze him farther backward. Sam slid three feet and the pressure magnified, becoming intense.

With a grunt, he propped the crook sideways, sticking it in the thing’s throat like a splintered chicken bone. He had been swallowed. He’d bought himself a couple seconds, but he had been swallowed.

Even then, the hand around his ankle tried to pull him deeper, and it took every ounce of his strength to stay put. Sam panted, thankful that there was enough clearance to allow a path of air from the front of the thing’s gaping mouth. The bars had been wickedly long teeth that narrowed down to razor-sharp tips. The arm had been its tongue, and the voice, well… this fucking thing did a great falsetto.

Humans and monsters must respond better to women than men, Sam thought in a moment of madness as he slid six inches deeper. For humans, women were things to be protected and sought after, and for monsters, well, women had more body fat.

“Sam, hold on!” Faera shouted again, sounding about the same distance away.

There was an impact, and the entire throat shook and slammed back and forth. Foul, moist air passed by Sam as the creature let out a cry of pain. The shaking slid Sam a good six inches farther away from the opening of the mouth.

What the hell could he do? The only thing he could have possibly grabbed hold of were the tooth bars, but they were far out of reach now… Sam looked up, at his crook with the glowing mushrooms hanging in the center of the sheep-catching hook. “Huh.”

Sam twisted his body with all his strength, turning the crook once again parallel with the throat. If he missed this, he was shit out of luck but… With a grunt, Sam thrust the crook forward. He turned the crook, swung it to the side and pulled, even as the walls closed in on him in the absence of chicken bone. Moment of truth.

With a clack, the crook caught the teeth at the monster’s mouth, arresting Sam’s descent into the bowels of the monster. Okay, we’ve got a more secure foothold, but now roughly sixty percent of my body is anchored by barbs, he thought.

Sooner or later, he was going to lose his grip on the crook. At this point, it was simply a contest of strength between his hands and thousands of stationary barbs. And the wood was getting slippery. Sam had to do something drastic or he’d get tired and wind up lunch.

“Alright you fucker,” Sam snarled, and began to pull with everything he had. The barbs sank deep into his skin as he slid a half inch forward before coming to a halt. The monster tried to shake its head, and several pulses traveled down the wet pink walls, trying to dislodge him.

“Not… getting off… that easy!” Sam said, to himself and the monster. He curled up, putting his legs and back into pulling on the tooth. Sam let out a scream of effort as the monster squealed in pain.

With a wet, sucking pop, the monster’s massive, bar-like tooth came free, pulled into its throat by Sam’s crook. The raw, bloody tooth was at least nine feet long, and as soon as it came free, Sam began sliding backwards again.

He thrust, swung, and secured the crook on another tooth. “Give you a toothache, buddy?” Sam asked, his voice muffled by the flesh pressing in on him from every side.

He took one hand off his crook and snagged the massive, curved tooth as it tried to slide by. Bracing the fleshy bottom of the tooth against his palm, Sam shoved the razor sharp tip forward, using the leverage from the crook to pierce the monster’s flesh.

Sam’s world began to thrash, the barbs ripping out of his skin, and a monumental hacking, heaving filled the space he occupied. The slick pink passage became smooth, and with a blast of rank wind, Sam was jettisoned forward.

He burst out into open air, flailing with the crook as he fell.

One second, still falling. Sam saw nothing but shadows and blue lights dotting his surroundings.

Two seconds. Sam tried to locate Down, but a freefall was essentially weightless. He scanned the blue-dotted void, looking for some point of reference. Some of the blue dots had to be moving Up relative to him, which would inform Down.

Three seconds. This was starting to become a problem. If the ground didn’t make itself apparent--

Sam’s thoughts were cut off as he hit to the tune of dozens of broken bones. Sam’s vison went white, and he forgot how to breathe.

His vision cleared about the same time he remembered to breathe, and with a painful gasp, his eyes snapped into focus. Above him--and he was sure of the direction now--he saw a black shadow gliding along, obscuring the blue dots of light on the ceiling. It had to be a ceiling. They were still underground, weren’t they?

Sam lifted one severely scraped arm up and tried to check his broken bones. Moving his arm was a good sign; it meant he hadn’t severed his spine. Sam wiggled his toes. Still had feeling there.

Sam levered himself up, and while his whole body ached, he couldn’t locate the broken bones. Sam pressed his hand down, and jerked it up as something poked his palm. There was a shard of bone there, softly illuminated by the blue lights on the ceiling. Sam blinked his eyes and looked more closely at his surroundings.

He sat on a pile of bones that had no perceivable end. Fading into the darkness, the pile was composed mostly of humanoid skeletons. Most of the skeletons were small with wide heads and razor-sharp teeth. Ungrin, then.

Just barely visible was another layer beneath that, older skeletons rotting from age and damp. They had human proportions, although Sam could only make out the occasional bony arm or leg jutting out beyond the freshest bones. One of them still had a scrap of digital camo wrapped around an ankle.

Sam’s reverie was cut short by a piercing wail that echoed around the massive chamber. He stumbled to his feet, dizzy from blood loss. Minor punctures all over his body wept blood as Sam stabilized himself with his crook. He glanced up, and the shadow on the ceiling paused long enough for him to gather some details.

It looked like a giant black gecko, except its mouth dwarfed the rest of its body. The thing’s neck twisted a half rotation, and the teeth that had been concealed against the ceiling were exposed, revealing a gaping, cage-like mouth. He was even able to make out the hand-tongue thrashing around in the gap he’d made. The missing tooth jutted from behind its jaw, causing the monster to bat at it with irritation.

Sam didn’t know where the creature’s eyes were, but he could feel its attention on him. He could also tell that it was pissed. Sam glanced around, looking for Faera. If he didn’t get some help, he was looking at being dinner sometime in the next few minutes.

It still needed to pry the tooth out of its mouth, so Sam figured he had a little time. He began stumbling off of the bone pile, heading for one of the dark halls intersecting the perfectly smooth cavern. The cavern couldn’t have been a feature of the original bunker. It seemed like a bore hole cut by a VAMPR, but much bigger than it should have been, unless someone overloaded it…

Sam came to a halt. The Variable Anti Matter Pulse Rifle could be dialed in to cut a very specific amount of matter out of existence and store it as matter and energy. A VAMPR could even be wired up to use as a generator in a pinch--which could’ve been the case here, after the base lost power. But if someone had turned the thing all the way up, it would have cut a perfectly spherical hole in the base and then exploded with the force of a nuclear blast.

The base obviously wasn’t an open-topped crater, so the gun must not have exploded, but Sam was increasingly certain a VAMPR had taken a huge chunk out of it. Somewhere underneath this enormous pile of bones, there might be a bomb that had been trapped there for hundreds of years. A bomb capable of vaporizing him, his friends, and a goodly stretch of the surrounding forest--a bomb which, inexplicably, hadn’t gone off.

Sam started running again, not wanting to stay on that pile any longer than necessary.

A black shadow swooped across the ceiling, and the monster dropped down in front of him. Sam saw its eyes now, wetly glistening from the edge of both its upper and lower jaws. The moans of pain that’d drawn him in earlier took on a buzzing sound, as though the monster were standing in front of a fan.

Sam backed away from the enormous creature as it stalked toward him. He would’ve given anything to have one of his guns right now.

Sam took a deep breath to clear his swimming head and drew the crook back, ready to smash out another tooth. “Come get it, you slimy bastard!” Sam shouted.

The strange wailing-purring reverberated through the cavern, growing in strength as the creature charged forward, bones rolling off its blue-stained chest like water from a ship’s prow. Sam tensed, aiming his first blow at one of the beady eyes that dotted its chin. It had more than two eyes, but there wasn’t a creature that Sam could think of that didn’t cherish all of them.

As Sam’s crook came down, two balls of crackling energy curved around him to impact on two more eyes. The creature’s wailing rose in pitch, until it sounded like Sam was fighting a steam whistle. The creature had lost three eyes in one go, and it reared its head back and plowed over Sam, slamming him to the ground as it dashed madly forward.

There was a deafening explosion, and he was sprayed with warm liquid. One of the monster’s enormous feet crunched bone beside Sam’s head as it veered away, thrashing in pain. Sam lifted his head and saw it slam into the cavern wall at full tilt. Bones and ancient, rusted guns were flung through the air like confetti by the creature’s death throes.

Sam rolled up and glanced over, spotting Faera with a shotgun strap slung over her shoulder. “Found the armory, I see?”

“Yeah, but all the good stuff is locked with biometrics.” Faera nodded down at the gun in her hands and shrugged.

“Okay,” Sam said, pushing up to his feet. When he stooped to pick up the crook, he nearly toppled over. He’d lost a lot of blood. “I… probably have access.”

Faera appeared by his arm and put her shoulder under, stabilizing him. “Let me stop the bleeding first. Come on, let’s sit you down in one of these halls.” Faera guided Sam to one of the intersecting hallways, about four feet off the bone-laden ground.

Sam clambered up and then reclined against the solid wall. The fungus draped along the floor and walls here was infinitely more comfortable than bone shards. He watched Faera hoist herself up the four-foot gap, and decided there was time to rest his eyes before she managed to reach him…

An impact against Sam’s jaw snapped him awake, ears ringing.

“Sam, I’m gonna need you to keep your eyes open and keep talking to me until I’m done, okay?” Faera said as she returned to working the first aid spell. Sam watched her fingers making convoluted gestures over his skin, causing the myriad puncture wounds to slowly seal. He noticed that only the skin within two feet of her hands seemed to respond to the treatment, marking the range of the spell.

“Okay,” Sam said, his words slurred. “Gonna need to eat something after all this.” He hadn’t eaten in three days, and the effort just to keep his eyes open was dipping into his body’s reserves.

“Yeah, what would you like?”

“A cheeseburger.”

“You’ll get roast hare.”

“Fine. Faera?”

“Yeah?” Faera asked, glancing up from where she was closing the wounds on his waist.

“There might be a vampire under the bone pile, set to explode in a blast that could rival a nuke.”

Faera’s hands stopped. “What?”

Sam explained the VAMPR, how it worked, and the concept of E=MC2. How the weight of a single person could be measured in gigatons of TNT if it was converted directly into energy.

“Why the hell would your scientists build a handheld device that could do that?” Faera asked, her eyebrows furrowed.

Sam would’ve shrugged, but it was too much effort. “I don’t know the politics of it. I assume they were under duress and the government wanted a gun that was unstoppable.”

“ih Seh kno, humans,” Faera said, shaking her head.

“I have to check,” Sam said, looking her in the eyes. “I have to see if I’m right, and if there is a VAMPR under that pile, I have to discharge its energy.”

“Without blowing us up?” Faera asked, passing her glowing hands over Sam’s shredded thighs.

“The VAMPR was built with a lot of safeguards, its ease of use being one of them. I just switch from suck to blow, so to speak, and it’ll shoot the matter back out, only using five parts per billion as energy, the least explosive way to discharge it.”

“How long will it take to dig up?” Faera asked.

Sam rolled his head to look at the floor composed of bones. Assuming that the cavern was a perfect sphere… “Maybe a day.” The walls were tilted inward, indicating that the bones couldn’t be any more than ten feet deep.

“Fine,” Faera said with a nod. “If it’s to keep the forest from blowing up, I guess we can delay for a day. Maybe we can find you some clothes in the armory, or the barracks, if it still exists.”

Sam glanced down at where Faera’s hands created intricate patterns above his naked skin. It seemed like the sheet Sam had taken to wearing had stayed in the monster’s gullet, caught on the teeth in its throat. He had been ejected as naked as when he first stepped out of the bath--but bloodier.

Sam sucked in a breath and glanced around for something to cover himself, finally settling for his crook propped between his legs. Faera shook with suppressed laughter as she put the finishing touches on his feet.

“Okay, now turn over,” Faera said, a spark of mirth dancing in her eyes. “I need to make sure I got your back.”