Ekron

Red Cocoon - 2

Two centuries passed by and the ice age receded. Ice melted around the cocoon and sharp metallic nails cut across its fibers, from the inside. Free from the snow layer, terrain seemed dead in front of them. Former Belarus was like a desert with vestigial tree trunks scattered all over it. They kept walking to reach the scorched ruins of Riga in former Latvia and spotted the entrance of the subterranean bunker called Lidya.

Gog did not stop there, and said to Alex, "We must eat first."

They advanced to a vestigial forest in the gulf shores and heard something moving behind them. They hid between the black trees and saw that the horrific inhabitants of Lidya were going fishing, just like them. They were human skulls with their respective spines. All flesh from their bones had been removed, except for shiny green eyes in their sockets. Coming out from their necks, four arthropod legs, four feet long, allowed them to walk like spiders. The spines were transformed in long jellyfish tentacles that dragged on the floor while they walked and could emit electrical discharges at their will. They could not propagate their condition to living humans, only to dead corpses. A dozen of them plunged into the Baltic sea, and fifteen minutes later, they came back with deformed fishes, stunned with electricity, dragged them into the forest and then to Lidya. The bunker doors opened for them and closed once they were inside, controlled by electric arcs from their tentacles. From inside the tormented city of Lidya, savage noises like those heard in the caves before history, came out through its underground walls.

At night, Gog and Alex approached to the coastal sand, and she heard more company from the woods.

"There are Ekron spies in the trees," she said to Gog.

"Don't mind them, what they are looking for is not here yet."

Sentient machines were hidden in the vestigial woods; from there they saw Gog open his arms and recite a Qatrian orison to the sea. Then they went back to Ekron with unconclusive reports. From the sea before Gog, a marine aberration bred by acid rain came out and growled, only to receive a ray from Gog's eyes in its head, which became crystal, then Gog collected its body dragging it across the sand with his metallic nails. Alex and Gog ate from the creature's flesh and went to sleep in the residual forest.

The next morning, they walked to a plain near Lidya's entrance. Gog aimed at the ground and casted a white ray with his eyes that transformed a portion of the soil into glass. He kept his gaze on that same spot until all layers of Lydia's armored shell became crystal in that point. Then he stabbed the glass with his sharp nails and the glass broke, leaving an eight inches wide hole from the surface to the interior of the city. He hugged Alex and both became a black fog, entering the city through that hole.

Inside, the reek was overwhelming, as the city's ventilation system was only partially operative, and its inhabitants were not prone to hygiene in any of its forms. Still floating as a fog, they traveled through the filthy corridors util they found a small room, with only one "spider-skull" inside. In a wall of that room there was a shelf displaying a series of transparent jars, with special insects inside them. They materialized into the room, Gog closed the door and locked it as the skull approached him with aggressive intentions. He casted a black electric arc to the skull, black spectral worms appeared near its eye sockets and entered its brain. The skull became black and rotten, collapsing inert to the ground. Other spider-skulls were charging the door from the outside as Gog inspected the jars. There was a spider, whose head was a skull with green eyes. Gog opened the jar lid and took the spider out. The arachnid walked in Gog's hand and the sorcerer made a little incision in his own flesh near the spider. The arachnid drank Gog's blood and went back to its jar. The skulls outside the room stopped their attack, Gog opened the door and came out with Alex.

The spider-skulls started to obey Gog's thoughts, so they wandered around the City of Plagues with tranquility. Humans had been kept prisoners there since the Annihilation War, under the rule of Gizem, a witch that was once Gog's apprentice and collaborator. She had probably died, to Gog's knowledge, and she had left the bunker to the automated will of the skulls. Living humans were kept in locked departments and cells under the vigilance of the undead, that started fishing in the gulf of Riga to maintain them. Supplies were saved when the ice age began and were sufficient for the first decades of it. Then the gulf froze, and fishing became impossible, so humans without means of subsistence slowly fell into cannibalism. Decades later electric illumination and ventilation partially failed, so an eternal gloom and stench took over the city.

From a population of almost five thousand prisoners in Lydia, at the end of the Annihilation War, Gog found barely five hundred; but no corpses, only bones gathered in filthy cells by creatures that had lost most of human traits, except for violence and a simplified guttural language. Months before, the gulf ice melted, and skulls began to fish again, but it was too late for the prisoners of Lidya; they ate fish, but also craved for human flesh.

Gog took a crystal jar that had a lacewing inside (various of them had different types of lacewings), he opened a cell full of those cannibals and liberated the insect there. The lacewing bit one of them and returned to the jar. The infected human convulsed and lost his arms, his legs fused together and his torso lengthened tree times its original size. His jaws prolongated backwards to include the throat and the tongue became a clawed proboscis as he started hissing. The infected transformed into an eel or monstruous worm, it started to emanate foam from its jaw and from the foam came a swarm of little spores that inundated the room. The other humans in that cell were infected by the spores and transformed too, they started to bite each other, and left the room with an inexplicable rush. Gog ordered the spider-skulls to open all other prison departments and cells. In minutes, the remaining humans in Lidya became horrid hissing worms.

Alex went to a big hall in the middle levels of the city and sat on the floor resting her back on a wall. Gog took a worm and placed it in front of her. When the worm looked at her eyes, a black spirit came out of her mouth and possessed the worm through its eyes. The worm's eyes became bright red, the creature stopped hissing and foam stopped coming from its mouth. Alex's left eye lost its red coloring and became a human blue eye. Her body became inanimate and remained in that same position, like a doll.

Lidya's entrance was opened by the spider-skulls, and the possessed worm went out through it. It crawled hundreds of miles in silence until it reached Ekron and entered the city's ventilation system. Heavily damaged by the massive fans inside the airing system, it managed to reach the interior of the underground metropolis. Once inside, it expelled foam from its mouth and the spores flew to the bodies of Achish's most precious possessions, electronically enhanced humans under his complete control from birth to death. They became mindless vermin causing extreme repulsion and pain to Achish.

Havingachieved his vicious vengeance for Achish's betrayal, the spirit of Anubis leftthe worm, coming out of its mouth and went back outside through the airingsystem. The worm, mortally wounded, died in the streets of Ekron surrounded bychaos and never-ending hissing. The chimeric black dog flew south over theBaltic shores in spiritual form, heading to Lidya.