Free Dead Five's Pass by Colin F. Barnes

metallic water before choking. All the while the thing dragged her deeper into the darkness.
    And in the gloom she saw what she had feared: three bodies, deformed, twisted and half-eaten, lying as if discarded, used up on the bed of the shallow lake.
    Their skulls looked up at her as if screaming.
    She pulled against the tentacle with her free hand, trying to unwrap it from her wrist, but it just circled tighter like a constricting snake. Her chest tightened under the cold and the force of holding her breath. Red spots danced in front of her eyes, but then a hand grabbed her ankle, then her leg, and against the pressure of the thing in the water, Marcel pulled her back out.
    Her head breached the surface and she coughed out the water before heaving in a lungful of air.
    “Carise!” Marcel shouted as reached out again for her. He missed but grabbed her pack and pulled her back close to the edge. The thing on her wrist uncurled and suddenly she was free…before it dug its hooks into her ankle, sending a belch of blood blooming into the already red-tainted water. And then she realized what she had tasted, what was in the water: blood. She began to retch.
    It yanked on her leg, making her scream with pain as each hook dug deeper into her flesh, and tearing chunks of skin and pant leg away. “Marc, help!”
    She spun onto her front, her chest now out of the water and hanging over the edge.
    She reached out, managed to grab hold of one of the square stones, and with Marcel gripping her under the arms, together they managed to drag her out of the lake completely.
    The hook-lined limb, however, still tightened around her leg, and she thought it would slice right through her ankle, when Marcel pulled the ice axe from his belt and hacked away at the rubbery appendage.
    It took nearly half a minute of frantic cutting before the thing gave up and let go; by then Marcel was almost all the way through the tough gristle, rubber, and interlocked muscle. When it finally let go, the lake shuddered and a terrible roar echoed up from the depths of the mountain and into the cavern, along with a foul, fetid stench of rotting meat.
    Carise collapsed into the fetal position on the dusty ground, one hand around her bleeding wound, the other covering her eyes as she sobbed with the pain.
    Marcel knelt by her and gently pried her hand away to look at the wound.
    “It’s just a flesh wound, you’re going to be fine,” he said, shrugging off his backpack. “We’ll get you fixed right up. You just hold on for a second, okay? Cari…just breathe. Be calm.”
    Marcel took the first-aid box from his backpack, spilling the contents on the floor.
    “I’m going to disinfect the wound and bandage it, okay? It might hurt a bit.”
    “It already hurts like hell, just do it.” Carise shut her eyes and clenched her teeth, holding back a scream as Marcel sprayed the wound with a disinfectant and painkilling spray. The whole of her ankle and shin became numb as he wound the bandage tightly around the cuts.
    “We need to get you into a change of clothes and warm you up. Let’s get you to the fire.”
    She took a glance at the damage and winced at the sight of the blood on the ground.
    “I…saw them,” she said after a while of shuffling in silence. “Three of them, down in the bottom of the lake; their skin had been removed and sections of their body had no flesh, it’s as if they were nothing more than food. But worse, I saw the thing…in my mind.”

 
     
     
    10
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Marcel helped Carise out of her wet clothes. He took the spare set he kept in his pack and helped her dry in front of the fire. She never looked as vulnerable as she did there. Even more so than in the hospital after the terrible news about their baby.
    She shivered and trembled as he dressed her, and she made no attempt at hiding her modesty. She was almost as catatonic as the kid he had… The thought stuck in his mind. He didn’t want to admit it, but