Mission

The beast’s tongue was slick and rubbery—it slid back and forth beneath their feet as they crossed, and his taste buds were huge, misshapen lumps, a series of nipples that someone lost during creation. When the vanguard, a boy hardly old enough to walk, stepped on one, it wiggled. He lost his footing and bounced, but he recovered giggling.

The woman in the lead had already reached the bicuspids. Her battery-operated lantern was swinging back and forth, and the violent movement of the light made her husband dizzy, so she switched it off. They didn’t need to see where they were going.

There were twelve of them in all—a married couple, three unrelated children, an old man whose facial muscles already drooped, four girls, all twenty-something and well-decorated, and a woman with her fiancée. It’d been six hours and they hadn’t made much progress at all; hadn’t even escaped the lips and tongue, and had little hope of making it to the tonsils before nightfall, though the fine line between night and day blurred when they stepped inside. The married woman was in the lead and had been for awhile, and intended to stay in the lead until she saw the thing through. Part of that was her stubborn nature and part of it was guilt, and part of it was nothing but morbid curiosity.

As he passed the twentieth incisor, the little boy, keeping up the rear, tripped. His companion, who wasn’t much older, reached over to help him to his feet, and the married woman spoke.

“Leave him.”

“Hey, you can’t do that.” One of the twenty-somethings, a girl of Hispanic origin with dark hair and a quiet voice, stopped. “He’s only a kid.”

“We don’t have time.”

The second kid sat right where she was, straddling a taste bud, and began to wail, long, loud screams that echoed off the gooey cheeks and danced frantically over their heads. “Don’t wanna, don’t wanna, I don’t wanna.”

They ignored her, because the situation was more serious than both the kids and all of them if it came to that, and kept going, farther and farther along the tongue to the bitter receptors at the very end. Plaque clung to the teeth they passed like mold, but none of them noticed. The married woman’s hand never moved to her light again.

In another two-and-a-half hours, passing the last eight tricuspids before the slope of the gums gave way to the fall of the trachea and esophagus, the old man needed a break. He heaved his body onto a tooth and tossed his cane back, watching it fade into the darkness. The fiancée looked at him, asked if he could make it, ran his tongue across his lips, considering. The old man said that he could, but he wanted to catch his breath first.

The married woman walked on.

Someone from the rear began to sing, a campfire ditty from her scouting days—great green globs of greasy grimy gopher guts. The remaining kids picked up the chorus.

For the steep slopes of the throat, they had a rope. The married man removed stakes, one at a time, from his pack, so the woman with a fiancée could drive them in, and with each impact they heard a groan, a sound that arose from all around them, seeping through walls of heaving flesh to reach their ears. One of the children looked at the fiancée, and the fiancée shrugged, wishing he had something to say. But that would mean an echo.

“I don’t like this.” The twenty-something with the quiet voice was waiting for her turn to rappel and crying. “Can’t we just—go? Please?”

Her partner offered a little consolation, touched her arm, was repulsed. The married woman shrugged and glanced around for her husband, couldn’t find him. When she realized what had happened she dropped to her knees and was silent. The woman with a fiancée watched.

Ten minutes later they were all dangling from the trachea, scrabbling for footholds with their feet, but the twenty-something and her partner. The girls were dangling their legs over the edge, shedding tears that fell into the blackness with no uproar at all, clutching each other and grieving, stolen kisses forgotten.

The widow remembered that the beast had five hearts, though she’d long ago lost her sketchy map of its anatomy. The hearts stood in a row; the aorta from one bonded to the aorta from the second, and so on and so forth, creating one tremendous artery and another, larger vein—unnamed, but they might be eventually. In the first of the five the widow expected to find acid; it was the purification chamber, the beginning of a complicated process completed before blood could be absorbed by the beast’s body, allowed to reach its delicate organs. For protection, they had nothing but their own flesh and bone. Foolish.

Necessary.

The fiancée was holding his lover’s hand, twisting her fingers back and forth until the joints popped and she nudged him away. She cried while she looked down.

When the widow hit bottom, she dropped her lantern. It rolled away so she couldn’t see where it landed, but no one would ever have flipped its switch again. She put out a hand and encountered the alveoli of the lungs first, poking her fingers for just a second into the wobbly cavities before she pulled away and called to the others. From where they stood they heard the whooshing of oxygen as the beast breathed, and if they moved over a few steps its rush was dizzying, buffeting them about, rocking them like sailboats at sea.

Here the woman with a fiancée would disregard the widow’s careful instructions and climb inside for a look. Here she would call to her fiancée about the curious attraction of the walls, billowing before her eyes.

Here he would come inside to see for himself.

And here they would never be seen—by anyone else—again.

The widow left while the fiancée was taking his last steps, while she could still hear his lover talking to him from within; the remaining child, a six-year-old girl, and the other twenty-somethings followed her, four of them in all, silent as an empty grave. They went on to the hearts. One of the girls had a walking stick. She touched the floor with it at intervals, until the kid asked for a turn and took over, smiling while she waved it, laughing at the give of flesh. The widow turned back every time she heard the noise and said nothing.

Acid bubbled in the depths of the first heart. They clustered at the lip and peered down, watching the hot gold liquid, the way the dangerous lumps that emerged and sank over and over again glowed. Both twenty-somethings held onto the kid, who accidentally dropped her walking stick and wailed as it disappeared. No one looked up—no one looked back. No one met the widow’s eyes. The oldest girl was holding the rope again, and the widow secured it with a stake. The kid dried her eyes to watch. When they heard the helpless groan, she smiled.

She fell herself a few minutes later. Her hands loosened from the rope and she fell for miles, screaming all the way down.

There were three of them. The twenty-somethings stood close together and rappelled close together, saying nothing about anything. One of them sang a verse of gopher guts in a voice that was weak and cracked on the higher notes, but without the kid to pick up the words the campfire song died and was forgotten. The widow’s eyes were glued to the acid. It surrounded her boots, boiling far beneath her. She looked up to check on the twenty-somethings occasionally, but they were okay, making progress.

At the bottom, the widow knew what she would find. There would be six wide, flat stones floating in the acid directly to her right. With a little luck, she would land on the first of those, and with balance she could progress in short jumps. Lucky the kids were already gone, because they would have had to be carried.

Her feet hit the rock and slipped. She felt the toe of one boot dragging through something hot and sticky, so thick it was almost solid. A twenty-something, standing in flesh to her right, reached out a hand to help her upright, and she clasped it, stood. The shoe leather had already begun to dissolve. Now, where drops of acid still clung, she watched it being eaten away, wondering how long the potency could survive. Not long.

The other twenty-something stepped from block to block grinning a grin that was horribly wide, holding onto her companion, gopher guts forgotten. The widow, having crossed, stood and waited. After purification came evaporation; blood that survived its journey through the bubbling acid of the first heart gurgled down a drain at the far side, where it would twist and gush around bends, over small obstructions, to the lava vents of the second. The vents were rumored to produce so much heat that the purified blood, falling from the top of the heart, evaporated and disappeared before it reached the bottom. Lucky thing—the bottom, no more than a great rush of molten rock, would destroy it.

They walked along the right side of the first heart for half an hour, until the widow held up a hand and they stopped, all looking down into the acid, waiting.

“This is our stop.”

“But there’s nothing here,” the younger twenty-something protested, the one who’d grinned.

“I thought—” the other one began, and the widow winced as her voice cracked, hitting a key that hadn’t been discovered yet.

“No. This is it.”

Now the grinner sat down and wailed. “But we’re heroes! We’re supposed to stop it!”

“And you’re going to be heroes,” the widow said, wondering where the drain lay beneath the golden whirlpool. “You just have to jump.”

“That’s not gonna solve anything!”

“Heroism never does.” She laughed. “Not really.”

“Well, I don’t want to do it,” the second twenty-something murmured, taking a step back. “I’m not gonna die for nothing. I mean—” she swallowed— “I mean, how do we even know you’re right?”

“You don’t.” The widow glanced down again, then tilted her head back, looking for the cavernous throat that was there, somehow beyond her range of vision. “Going to jump anyway?”

The grinner crawled forward and sobbed once, but she didn’t stop smiling. “I don’t know,” she said, again and again, like the taste-bud kid who’d gone centuries ago. Her voice kept breaking. The widow studied her back and touched her shoulders. She had beautiful hair.

“I’ll help you,” she whispered. And pushed.