Free Ghost Hunters by Sam Witt

at the end of the slope and flopped onto his back, spreadeagled.
    Dick scrambled back to his feet, and his headlamp stabbed at the darkness. Pale bodies fled from the light, darting all around him. There had to be close to fifty of them, all turning to stare at Dick and his crew.

13
    G uttering blue flames flickered to life around the edges of a bowl-shaped cavern, shedding a grimy light that sent shadows dancing across the floor and up the walls. Dick blinked against the weird light and held his gun out, stabbing it into the shadows before him. The weapon kept the freaks at bay; they were filthy mutants with a taste for blood, but they definitely knew what a gun was. Dick’s worry was that soon they wouldn’t care.
    They’d gathered before a freakish altar, a massive thing fashioned from countless bones and crudely sharpened blades. The altar had the shape of an enormous bat’s head, its bestial snout filled with sword-like teeth and eyes that bled blue fire. Luminous silver smoke drifted from the shrine’s mouth to form a gauzy cloud around the freaks’ heads. They sucked it in then blew it out along with a murmuring chant.
    Amy and Randall helped each other back to their feet. There was a gash across Amy’s forehead that drooled blood into her eyes like a crimson veil. Randall kept trying to get a look at his back, which Dick could see was striped with a trio of long, red slashes. More of the pale people were coming down the slope behind them, grinning in the blue light.
    “I told you,” Amy started, but Dick’s sharp glare knocked the rest of the words out of her mouth.
    Randall was panting and turning in place. He used the light as a weapon, driving their pursuers back. They clenched their eyes against the blinding white, and howled in frustration. But Dick knew it wouldn’t take them long to recover from the light, and then they were all fucked.
    “We have to get out of this room,” he whispered. “There’s another ledge that winds up the far side over there. I think we can get ahead of them and go up that way.”
    The ledge was a hundred feet away and no more than two feet wide. It started at the bottom of the bowl before ascending sharply and looping around the perimeter to the room. He couldn’t see where it led, but he needed to believe it was somewhere better than down here with a bunch of albino bat-faced people who wanted to eat his face.
    Amy clenched his free arm so tight it tingled with the pain of pinched nerves. “What about Mickey?”
    Dick’s anger flared at the reminder of their missing crew member. “You want to go to war with all of these right now?”
    The mutants were shuffling closer together, their chant gathering steam and growing louder. Dick could feel them winding up to attack. If they rushed him, even the gun wasn’t going to do them any good.
    Amy stared at him, her fingers digging into his bicep. “I knew you’d do this. You’re going to run away, because it’s easier, because it makes things simpler. When we get back home, that’ll be two less people to share the cash. Two dead people who can’t accuse you of the bullshit you did that pushed us all down here in the first place.”
    He tore his arm out of her grasp and his hand froze, poised to strike. That hadn’t been what he was thinking, not at all, but there was no sense in denying the sense of Amy’s words. They’d pooled their money, went deep into debt, for this one last stab at fame and glory. Except, things had gone wrong, and not everyone made it out.
    “I tried,” he spat at Amy. “But now’s the time to run. We don’t even know where she is.”
    Amy’s finger stabbed toward the smoking altar then rose to the ceiling above it. Ropes hung from D-rings mounted in the cavern’s ceiling, and bodies dangled from them. He could see Mickey’s blonde ponytail swaying above the blue flames. “We do know where she is.”
    Dick flicked his eyes back to the freaks on the slope behind them. They’d made