Part 32 (1/2)

My heart stuttered inside my chest. I glanced to the wall at my side; concrete dust rained down from a neat hole punched at just about heart level. The soldier with the smoking gun stood still for a long moment, his eyes wide in terror at the lethal mistake he'd almost made.

There were two other soldiers in the room, in addition to Danny and the terrified gunman. The four of them were standing back to back to back to back in its center, each covering a different corner. There was a road flare burning near a door on the far side of the room. It illuminated the concrete walls in flickering red light.

For a time, everyone was silent, stunned, not quite sure how to react.

I glanced around the room. There were dinner-plate-size gaps in each of the four walls-large, unnatural boreholes, at least a dozen of them-up near the ceiling and down at knee level. There were piles of dead spiders on the floor beneath each hole-drifts of huge twitching limbs torn apart by rifle fire. Some of them were deformed. I didn't look too closely, but I'm sure I saw human features mixed in with the battered arachnid bits. And not just fingers. A nose and an open mouth. A lolling tongue without lips. A whole f.u.c.king hand.

Danny gestured toward us frantically, and his soldiers broke formation, starting toward the door at our backs.

”We've been down here for almost an hour,” Danny started. (An hour? I thought. That didn't seem possible.) A hint of a smile appeared on his lips as he crossed the room. ”What took you so f.u.c.king-?” Then his foot caught on something. His arms cart-wheeled in the air for a moment, and he toppled over backward. He landed flat on his back. His flashlight and rifle clattered from his hands and a loud whomp of breath exploded from his lungs.

I started forward, ready to help him to his feet, but he began to move on his own, twitching on the floor. I froze in shock.

”Danny?” I asked. ”Are you all right?”

He didn't respond. Instead, his eyes rolled back inside his head. He arched his a.s.s off the floor, keeping his shoulder blades and upper back flat against the concrete. Then he started to make a loud gurgling sound-almost a liquid growl-and thick, foamy strings of saliva spilled from his lips. I pulled back.

”Unnnnghh!”

His quivering hands made their way up to the line of b.u.t.tons on his s.h.i.+rt. He grasped and pulled the drab fatigues apart, revealing the pale white skin underneath. Then his eyes-until now completely rolled back inside their sockets-slowly spun forward, and he looked down in terror as his fingernails continued with their ripping motion, now working away at his flesh. It was like he was trying to pull his skin apart, trying to open up his chest and reach inside. His fingernails left behind beveled lines filled with crimson.

”Danny!” I managed, my voice choked with shock and confusion.

And then the hand broke through.

It should have torn him apart, it should have pushed him wide open, but it barely made a wound: no displaced ma.s.s, no tectonic movement inside his bones and flesh. Just a hand, reaching up from his heart, sprouting from his skin like a grotesque tree.

First fingers, then wrist. Then forearm. Then elbow. All the way up to a thin, unexercised bicep. Pale, subterranean skin, streaked with thin streams of blood.

The hand swiveled on its wrist-a graceful, artistic movement-and blood spilled from its open palm. It froze in that position, palm open and cupped-not as a statue would freeze, motionless, but rather as a human would freeze, complete with tiny muscular tremors.

Floyd, Charlie, and the soldiers all stumbled back as one, and I heard the sound of retching behind me-a violent dry heave-but I stayed perfectly still. Despite their terror, they all kept their flashlights fixed on Danny's grotesque, broken form. Some of the beams were shaking, and I heard Floyd give voice to a tiny little sob.

Danny quivered for a moment-the last vestiges of life fleeing his body-then his lower back collapsed to the ground and all of his muscles fell slack. His bladder released, and the room filled with the stench of urine. I thought I heard the sound of his last breath rattling out in a violent heave, but that might have just been my imagination, my need to put some type of punctuation at the end of this horrific statement.

It was a gruesome sight. Absolutely horrible.

Slowly, reflexively, I popped the lens cap off my camera, raised it to my eye, and started taking pictures.

The soldiers ran away as soon as they got the chance. They retreated back the way we had come, leaving behind a stream of choked obscenities. I think Floyd would have run, too, if I hadn't been there to stop him. And Charlie ... I don't know what Charlie would have done. His face was calm despite startled, wide-open eyes.

”C'mon,” I said, pointing to a door in the left-hand wall. ”Taylor's still out there. We've got to find her.”

”But ... but Danny,” Floyd said, his voice searching, desperate. His eyes remained fixed on the dead body. His face had gone paper-white. ”What happened to Danny?”

”I don't know,” I said, omitting all the stuff I did know, all the stuff I'd seen-Weasel's fingers, Taylor's father, merged flesh and broken form-that might shed light on the situation. ”The city. The city happened.” It was a statement I'd made before, and it still seemed to hold true.

Unless it's me and not the city. Unless I happened. My presence, my being here-melting Danny, punching out his heart.

Then I grabbed Floyd's forearm and pulled him across the room. I cut a wide berth around Danny's broken form and steered us clear of the piles of twitching spider parts.

Charlie followed.

We crossed through two more rooms, then back through the maw of an earthen tunnel. Once again heading down.

There were wires in the walls here, poking intermittently from the dirt. Not neat, straight lines like the ones we'd found beneath our neighbor's house, but branching and skewed, like veins in the walls of an organ, as if they'd developed here over time to push blood through the bowels of the earth.

I headed straight through an intersection, then turned left through another hub. More pa.s.sages followed. I was moving at random, stopping every now and then to listen for sound in the dark, looking for something to guide me through this maze. But there was nothing, and I just kept moving. No sound. No hint. No clue.

Once I looked back and saw Charlie drawing an arrow in the wall with the blade of his shovel. Marking our path.

Then we were in another hub. There was a lantern perched atop a folding metal chair here; it was lit, supporting a tiny guttering flame. The walls danced in flickering light.

I was ready to plunge forward through the mouth of another tunnel, but Floyd grabbed my arm and pointed toward something on the floor, half buried in the dirt. He dropped to his knees and started clearing away some of the muck. It was a messenger bag-tan canvas smeared with mud, a ripped and reknotted shoulder strap.

”This is Sabine's,” Floyd said, a hint of awe in his voice as he brushed aside dirt, revealing a large rectangular patch sewn into the fabric. The patch read: ART SAVES! I remembered my last glimpse of this bag-on the screen of the video camera, draped over Sabine's shoulder as she disappeared into the shattered wall. It had caught on the edge of the hole. She'd had to reach back to set it free.

Floyd's hands were shaking as he upended the bag, sending loose paper, pens, and a can of spray paint spilling to the floor. ”What happened to her?” he asked. ”You said she was with Mama Ca.s.s.” This was the lie I'd told Taylor back at the house. She must have pa.s.sed it on. ”But if this is here ... where'd she go?”

”I don't know,” I said.

But I wondered: Could she be down here? Still alive?

I didn't think so.

Floyd's shoulders started to shake, matching his palsied hands. I opened my mouth to tell him something rea.s.suring-I'm sure she's fine, she just lost her bag-but Charlie interrupted. ”Shhhhhhh,” he urged. He was standing at my shoulder, and when I looked back, I found his eyes fixed on the tunnels up ahead, darting from one to another. His hands worked back and forth on the handle of his shovel. ”Do you hear that? Do you hear that sound?”

I held my breath and listened. After a moment, I picked out the sound of shouting in the distance. Then there was a low, ominous growl, echoing far, far away.

The sound of wolves.

The sound of shouting and wolves.

Photograph. Undated. Amanda and the wolves:

The picture is framed in the horizontal, perfectly level. All browns and blacks, contrasting white bathed in orange.