Excerpt from my novella, The Tunnels.

Freeman didn’t want to think about the screams and how terrible they had sounded. Whatever had caused them was something he didn’t want to meet below ground.

Thirty minutes into the next portion of the tunnel led him to a hole in the floor. He shined the light around the opening, but couldn’t see anything dangerous. He then aimed the flashlight into the black cavity. The hole was only eight feet deep. He lowered himself down to the second level of the complex, and then checked out the new tunnel at the bottom. He crawled into it and encountered a much smaller tunnel about thirty feet down. The smell coming from it was putrid. He stuck the pistol in the front of his fatigues and held his nose as he checked the entranceway for traps. Once it was cleared, he entered it and made his way at an upward angle. The short tunnel quickly opened up into a tiny cavern filled with three rotting bodies. He knew the VC buried their dead underground, but the graves were generally blocked up with clay. Freeman figured the bodies had to be at least three days old, and it made him wonder why the grave hadn’t been completed. Still holding his nose, he backed up until he was in the main tunnel again. He then continued his journey downward, heading to the third level. He didn’t know what the water table was like in this area, but he knew some tunnel systems had as many as seven different levels to explore.

He rounded another curve nine yards later and saw the shape of a man’s head at the outer edges of the beam from his flashlight. The Vietnamese soldier was twenty feet ahead and the smell of death was atrocious. Due to habit, he stopped and aimed the .45 at the body with his finger on the trigger, waiting for any kind of movement.

A minute passed.

Then, trying not to gag, he moved closer. When he was a foot away, he shined the light over the dead soldier and saw the expression of object horror etched clearly on his face. It made Freeman back up a couple of feet to regroup and to wrap his mind around the present situation.

The Vietcong are tough little fuckers, he thought, breathing in through his mouth. What in the hell could have put such fear on a man’s face when he was already used to dancing with the Grim Reaper. Could it have been the thing with the red eyes?

Freeman inched his way back to the soldier and carefully examined his body, or what was left of it. The lower half of the man, from the waist down, was missing and there was partially dried blood everywhere. Ants, centipedes and bloated flies were munching on the entrails from the stomach and other parts of the mutilated corpse. Freeman tentatively reached out and felt the man’s face in order to gauge the body’s temperature. It wasn’t an accurate reading, but it gave him some idea of how long the person had been dead, which in this case was around two-to-three days. That meant whatever had killed the soldier was probably still in the complex. This caused Freeman to shiver for a brief moment as he thought about the red eyes he’d seen earlier and the possibility of both Morgan and Bremer being dead.

There was no way to go back, so he had to squeeze himself around the rancid body, trying not to puke or to get bugs all over himself.

“Shit,” he muttered.

Psyching himself out for what he was about to do, he took a deep breath through his mouth and began to maneuver his way over dead soldier. The process of touching the man and crawling through the entrails of the stomach cavity and the insects made him shudder with disgust and dread. Feeling ants on his hands and arms didn’t help; nor did getting semi-dried blood all over his T-shirt and fatigues.

This was the stuff of nightmares.

Pushing the body to the right side of the tunnel, he eased himself around it as quickly as possible. He managed to keep from throwing up until he was past the hideous remains and then heaved out what was still inside his stomach from an early-morning breakfast. Whatever had killed the man had dragged the bottom half of his body back down the tunnel, leaving a wide trail of blood everywhere. Freeman prayed he wouldn’t run into it as he wiped off the ants and other bugs from his clothes. Afterward, he grimaced in disgust at the sour taste in his mouth and wiped the vomit from his lips. It was difficult not to throw up again, but he forced himself to keep the bile down and to make it far enough away so he could finally breathe through his nose again.

(Experience the horror that U.S. Army tunnel rat, Ben Freeman, faces on his last mission during 1968 in Vietnam, in The Tunnels, and then again in present-day Las Vegas, in The Encounter. Both novellas are on sale at Amazon's Kindle store for 99 cents each, or together for $1.49)