Chapter 110: Truly Vile
The sewer stank, as it always did, but this time, Simon didn’t even wait until he was close enough to catch the attention of the carrion crawler. Instead, he used only a very small light spell to guide his feet on the familiar path, and as soon as he turned the corner and saw the bodies at the end of the channel moving slightly while the thing feasted on it, he muttered the word of lightning and sent electricity arcing along the sewage toward the thing.
The flicker of arcing electricity that followed was brief, and the smell of ozone lasted a little longer, for which he was grateful. It certainly smelled better than the shit and decay, but both were gone by the time he reached the end of the tunnel and found the still-quivering pile of corpses.
This was the first time that the slimy bastard didn’t climb up to the top of the tunnel to attack him. It was also the first time that he waded into the filthy water to see what it was he’d glimpsed last time.
Simon flinched as he stepped into the churning slime as it rose first to his ankle, and then to his knee as he waded over to the small mountain of bodies, and began to pull them off the stack one at a time.
“I’m going to burn these clothes when I’m done with them,” he muttered to himself. “Maybe my hands too.”
The corpses themselves were in a fairly advanced form of decomposition, and when he yanked on an arm or a leg to pull a body out of the way, as often as not, the rest of the body didn’t follow, which was somehow more disgusting than all the other disgusting things he was doing right now, like wading in sewage or touching dead bodies.
Each time it happened, he gagged, but it wasn’t until the third time that he actually threw up. “What could possibly be worth this,” he wondered aloud.
Simon wanted to quit, but not as much as he wanted to never do this again. So, instead, he plowed ahead, slowly clearing away the bodies, widening the stack as its height shrank. Part of him wanted to use force to make this easier and faster, but he hesitated.
He’d seen this whole place collapse before. He knew how fragile this arrangement was, and even as he moved the corpses around, he could hear the rusted grating creaking and screeching as the load against it shifted. It would be very easy for the whole thing to give away and send him tumbling into the darkness that lay beyond.