Read Online Planet Urth by Jennifer Martucci, Christopher Martucci - Free Book Online

heart contended with the sound, and I swore it echoed along with my footfalls down the tunnel. 
    I looked over my shoulder, though I could not see my mother , when a loud thump rattled overhead and rumbled like thunder, shaking the walls all around me. 
    “Oh no, ” I muttered and June began to cry. 
    “Just go!” my mother urged.  “Keep running, Avery , and don’t stop!”
    Suddenly, a high-pitched whistle filled the air all around me, clawing at my eardrums, before an unearthly din howled out and resonated through the endless hollow.  The sound beat against my skull with such force I thought the bone would crack.  Urthmen had arrived.
    Bloodcurdling screams immediately followed their call, the sound of women and children dying.  I covered June’s ears with both hands, trying desperately to shield her from their cries.  The people we’d just left, all of them, were most certainly dead.  I wanted to scream, to cry, anything, but could not.  I had to keep running. 
    I pushed myself harder, faster, until my lungs burned and my muscles ached as I rushed headlong into the blackened abyss.  I peeked over my shoulder to see my mother’s dark form behind me and saw something that made my breath catch in my chest. 
    Behind my mother, the tunnel was lit.  Four torch-wielding Urthmen made their way toward us, gaining ground fast.  In the firelight, I could see their faces clearly.  The closer they progressed, the more horrific they became.  Nearly transparent skin did little to cover the expansive, vivid entanglement of veins that webbed their malformed heads.  Lidless eyes shrouded in a thick, milky film darted wildly, bloodthirsty.  They did not have noses but two asymmetrical holes that appeared to serve the purpose of nasal openings.  Lips were also missing from their faces, though lines gave the impression that mouths may reside beyond them.  They were monstrous, my worst fear realized at the time. 
    With my heart threatening to beat out of my chest, I pressed on, testing my muscles as they’d never been tested before.  But I was small and weak, and carrying June was hard. 
    My mother caught up to me. “Keep going and don’t look back!”
    She slowed down and I did not see he r beside me anymore.  Then I heard her footfalls stop altogether.  I looked back. She stood there with her arms out in surrender.
    “Run, Avery!” she yelled, but I stopped moving.  I could not believe what I was seeing. 
    Panic seized every cell in my body.  “Mom!” I cried out.  “Mom, what’re you doing?”
    She did not answer me.   She spoke to the four Urthmen that approached.
    “Please don’t kill me,” she begged.  “I am pregnant.”
    But her pleas fell on uncaring ears.  The Urthmen did not care that she was pregnant.  In fact, in hindsight, they probably saw the unborn child she carried as a bonus kill.
    While my mother raised her hands and submitted, one of the Urthmen hoisted his club high in the air and whipped it forward until it crashed against her skull.  My world went completely still.  My beautiful, kind mother, pregnant with my next sibling, had been hit.  She sunk to her knees, a thin rivulet of blood streaming down her temple.  Another strike followed, and she collapsed to the tunnel floor.  And then the Urthmen swarmed, beating her feverishly.
    I tried to scream, to shout at the beasts to stop, but I could not breathe.  My lungs refused to fill and remained frozen, like blocks of ice so cold their chill burned. 
    “No,” I tried, but the word came out as a raspy whisper.
    Pain radiated from the center of my chest and branched out, throbbing and aching as my heart shattered into a million jagged pieces.  My knees threatened to collapse beneath me.  The woman who gave me life, the one who protected me and taught me, fed me, and cared for me, was dead, murdered by monsters. 
    I wanted them dead; all of them.  I wanted them to suffer for what they’d done to my