We found it.
The center shaft.
It's...it's difficult to describe in words.
The Church- it's not a Church. It's the heart of the town. The living, breathing, beating heart of the town.
We came out of one of the tunnels into the shaft; there was a long sloping set of black stone stairs going down into darkness. I could still hear the helicopters overhead, the gunfire. I looked up, and I could see that above us the ground had been peeled open. Just like above, like a hand had just pulled it apart like it was nothing. We started heading down the sloping stairs.
The whole shaft was coated in every kind of bodily fluid you can imagine. Blood, mucus, shit, vomit. Huge swathes of the wall were made entirely of that pulsating, sickly pale flesh we found in the buildings above. The whole town is infested. That much is clear to me now. It'd been rotted to it's very core before I even came here. I think that's why Antlers drew me here, why there was such a surge in activity. If this had gone unimpeded...
I can't think about that. I can't think about much right now. The smell is so thick, and there's so much noise. The heart is beating so loud. I'm getting ahead of myself.
While we were descending, we heard something coming up from below. Virgil had us hug the walls, and just as we did, this bloated monstrosity clambered it's way up through the shaft and out the opening. It's hard to describe what it looked like. It was like an enormous, limbed maggot. I can't tell if I'm going insane or if my memory is failing me, but christ, I think I saw human faces on it. Wordlessly screaming human faces.
Every step I take deeper into this fresh hell, I regret taking this job. I'd switch positions with Dante himself if it meant not smelling caked human filth for a few minutes.
...the heart. Right. I'm getting to that.
After what felt like an eternity of walking down, dodging whatever freaks came out of the darkness, we ended up in total darkness. Even the sunlight didn't reach down this far. Everyone broke out the flashlights and we kept moving. Another hour or so, we were finally at the bottom. That was when we saw it.
At the bottom of the shaft was an even bigger chamber, probably a few miles across. In the center of it all was a human heart, suspended by tendrils of muscle in midair. I watched it thudding away, mesmerized before Deb broke me out of it. Nobody had to say anything; we knew what needed to be done.
The stairs fell apart right before we reached the floor, about ten or so feet up. We jumped down.
The ground was made of flesh, just like everything else in this godforsaken town. Not just flesh, though. The floor of the chamber was composed of hundreds, probably thousands of different organs. Human and animal alike. All were connected between one another under a layer of translucent skin, where you could sometimes see completely through. We spotted some of the freaks up ahead and hid behind a pile of strung-together stomachs.
Whitewall was there, I think.
It was hard to tell. Most of them didn't look like they'd ever been human. Just this troupe of wretches that shrieked and moaned hymnals in languages I won't dare attempt to recreate. The strangest part was that they weren't all individuals. Some were halfway melted into one another, others were totally fluid, intermingling with the flesh of others like melted gelatin. Deb started to vomit. That was when the congregation looked right at us. Whitewall, or at least the one I think was Whitewall, stepped forward out of the crowd.
He was wearing priests robes, sure, but he wasn't any priest I'd ever seen. His head was malformed, too many angles in places that shouldn't have angles. It morphed and mutated right in front of me, just as fluid as the others in his flock. The only thing vaguely human about it was a mouthful of teeth that spoke to us.
"There is nothing to fear, children."
I stumbled back.
"There is nothing but fear."
I ran. I ran for my fucking life and I hid. I don't know where Deb or Virgil are, I don't know if they're alive, I don't know how long I'll be alive. I hid in a nest of intestines and I can hear them fucking looking for me.
I want to go home. I want to go home. I wan-
Wait. Hold on. Something's happening.
Something just came down the shaft.
What is that? Is that metal?
Wait.
oh shit oh shit
it's a fucking bom-
