Screams echoed from all over the building.
Someone he couldn’t see shrieked a warning.
Louie followed Ed’s eyes to the ceiling.
Panic coursed through him.
High above him, a large fracture spread across the domed roof. Pieces of stone fell from the widening crevice and cascaded to the ground.
Too late, Louie raised his uninjured arm, ineffectively warding off an incoming avalanche.
He felt a jolt of pain, and then his world went black.
Chapter 90: Nicholas
From the area near The Watcher’s quarters, Nicholas scanned the floor near the Comm Building doorway. Bodies littered the ground. A few of the standing Watchers groaned, massaging fresh wounds, or brushing off their dust-covered faces and hurrying for safety. Racing over to where Louie and Ed had been buried, he cleared away the rubble, frantically peeling away stones until he exposed someone. Louie’s head was dented and misshapen. Pieces of grey matter stuck out from a gaping, bloodied gash near his temple.
He didn’t move, not even when Nicholas tried reviving him.
He was dead.
Ed lay nearby under a pile of rock, his chest crushed by a large piece of stone. His eyes were transfixed to the ceiling.
Nicholas backed away, fighting off nausea.
A distant rumbling told him they weren’t out of danger.
Collecting his wits and his courage, Nicholas looked across the room to where the dozens of other people stood crying, backpedaling away from the carnage. Others peered out from The Watchers’ quarters—pale, scared people in need of direction.
Bryan’s two hundred, courageous marchers had turned into a hundred confused, hiding people.
The leaders were gone.
Except him.
Nicholas looked up at the ceiling, where small pieces of the roof rained down into the building, as if the heavens were dropping them. Through a crack in the wall near the threshold, he saw a group of men and women occupying the beast.
Maybe they’d distract the thing long enough for him to protect the people around him.
One thing was certain: this side of the building was no longer safe. Raising his voice, he gathered the attention of everyone in the room.
“Stay in The Watcher’s quarters! Don’t come out into the main area!”
Whatever was happening, they’d wait it out.
Chapter 91: Neena
Stones that had stood for generations tumbled and fell, as the wall near the threshold of the Comm Building continued collapsing. A wall of dust blocked Neena’s view of any survivors within, but she could hear their screams, drifting out into the open. She didn’t need to see the damage to imagine the number of bodies inside. Each ear-piercing yell jarred Neena to her bones.
She had more pressing concerns.
The people around her were weaponless.
In their satisfaction at piercing the beast, none of them realized that those might be the last shots they landed.
The spears that stuck in the beast were gone.
Even worse, Neena’s device needed to be reloaded.
New cries of terror echoed from all around her, as an organized assault turned chaotic.
The Abomination churned through the ground, cutting a path of destruction in its wake, tearing up sand everywhere. Its hide came into view as it bore through old tunnels and made new ones, before disappearing again. Much of the circling path was caving inward. She no longer trusted where she stood.
“Neena! We have to go!” Kai cried, grabbing onto her arm.
She took a few, stumbling steps.
With a horrified gasp, she watched several of Isaiah’s Watchers pinwheel, fall backward, and disappear into a furrow next to the creature’s tunneling body, crushed by sand and the monster. A few other people fell into one of the expanding holes, shrieking for their ancestors to save them.
“Kai! We have to help them!”
“We can’t!” he said, telling her something she knew.
A fresh gust of wind and sand hit her face, as they ran, listening to screams everywhere—from the Comm Building, and the people behind them.
While Neena fled next to Kai, Samara, Isaiah, and a group of others ran at a distance from them, also trying to escape the beast’s havoc. The destruction felt like a nightmare that would never be over.
And then she saw something that made the nightmare even worse.
One moment Samara was running on a parallel course to them.
The next she stumbled and fell.
Neena turned to reach for her, but Samara was fifty feet away and already facedown. Samara pulled her head up, desperately trying to get to her feet while the ground behind her shook. The monster’s body came into view, tunneling perpendicularly behind her.
It wasn’t coming at her, but it was close.
Too close.
Neena’s momentary panic faded, as she saw the beast passing by Samara.
Maybe it’d miss her.
Neena prayed for that outcome, even as its tail whipped sideways out from the trench, knocking Samara flat. In horror, Neena watched her friend mashed to the ground in front of her eyes. A living woman became a squashed, mushy pile of blood and bone.
She was here one moment, gone the next.
No scream accompanied her death.
“No!” Neena’s cry sounded as if someone else had made it.
Tears streamed down her cheeks.
Despair took over.
“Come on, Neena!” Kai shouted, pulling her along. “There’s nothing we can do!”
A wail escaped Neena’s mouth.
In an instant, she regretted everything she had done.
She should never have come back here with Kai.
She should never have tried leading those people in the caves.
Hope was a lie that adults told children, and it would never be a reality.
Chapter 92: Neena
Neena stood in a hovel, staring around at the dozen remaining people in her group. Despair sapped their will. They hung their heads and wrung their hands, trying to comfort one another ineffectively. Every now and again, someone glanced at the door of the dwelling into which they’d fled, jerked from grief by the creature’s incessant noise. Terror was an unshakeable companion it felt like they’d never outlive. Neena wasn’t sure exactly where they’d ended up, but it was away from the monster.
For now.
Isaiah muttered softy to himself, pacing in a corner of the small hovel, undoubtedly reliving his men’s deaths. Only three Watchers besides him had survived.
Neena swiped her thumbs over the goggles she’d taken off. Her heart felt hollow and empty.
Samara…
She could still see the desperation in the woman’s eyes, as she raced inevitable death. And she’d never forget the sight of her lifeless, pulped body. Somewhere, high up on the cliffs in the Right Cave, two children awaited a mother who would never return. But that grief wasn’t the end of it, because other women and children would bear equally bad news.
And so would Raj and Samel, if Neena died.
Intense worry washed over her, as she pictured Raj hiding elsewhere in a hovel with Maria, Salvador, and the other injured. She needed to get back to him. But she hadn’t killed the monster, like she’d promised. That thought led to guilt. Perhaps he was better off without her. Every life she touched seemed to end in death.
Darius’s. Helgid’s. Samara’s.
She felt dejected.
Beaten.
Neena looked over to find Roberto guarding the doorway, instinctively returning to the role he’d played in the Right Cave. He fiddled with his hands, empty without his spear.
Brushing the sand from her body, her eyes fell to the weapon on the floor, which she’d somehow managed to keep. Having it felt meaningless.
They’d obviously injured the creature. But that didn’t matter, because the thing was still out there, wreaking havoc.
And no one would stop it.
> Neena was so consumed by her defeated thoughts that she barely noticed someone saying her name until they repeated it.
“Neena…”
She looked over to find Kai at her side, touching her arm.
“There was nothing we could do.”
Neena looked at him through a tear-stained face, and saw that he was distraught, too. She wanted to believe what her heart couldn’t.
“I know it’s awful,” Kai said quietly. “But we would’ve died if we tried saving her. We both know it.”
“What are we going to tell her children?”
“We’ll tell him that we did everything we could.”
A long moment of silence followed.
“That’s not good enough,” Neena said finally. “We should’ve done more.”
Forcing away despair, Kai found strength. “We did everything we could, at the time. We can’t give up now. Did you see the way the beast tore back and forth, after we hit it with our spears? It leaked more blood than when Thorne’s men struck it, and certainly Bryan’s. We definitely injured it. And the way it screeched…”
“For all we know, our spears were the equivalent of a bug bite,” she countered.
“That’s not true,” Roberto said, from his post by the door. “We injured it. I’ve never heard it make a sound like that. Its quills penetrated deeper than any of our spears had before. And so did your weapon.”
From across the room, Isaiah muttered something no one could hear. He wasn’t paying attention, but his Watchers were. They stepped forward, drawn to the discussion. Neena’s attention returned to Kai and Roberto.
“It made a similar sound, when I first hit it, before we met up with each other,” Neena remembered.
“All the more reason to believe it is hurt,” Roberto reinforced.
“What are you trying to say? That we should go out there again?” Neena asked incredulously.
“We have no spears,” Kai admitted. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t retrieve some.”
“You have more spears for your weapon, don’t you?” asked Roberto, gesturing to the device by Neena’s feet.
Neena looked at the bag hanging from her shoulders, where a few of Darius’s spears stuck out. “Each shot will take some time to prepare. And if I miss again…”
“So, we give you time,” Roberto said. “We lead the thing in another direction, while you do what you have to. We distract it. What other option do we have? Return to the cliffs and accept a life of cowering and hiding? Or should we wait to starve, because we can’t hunt or tend our crops safely?”
Neena looked over, surprised to hear him talking so bravely. Given the amount of suffering he’d seen, she couldn’t believe he’d want to continue a losing battle. But somehow, he did.
And so did others.
A few men stepped forward, then a few women, forming a small ring around Neena, Kai, and Roberto.
“When the creature attacked our colony the first time, you led us to safety,” remembered a woman. “You could’ve run past us, but you didn’t. You stopped to help us to the cliffs. We haven’t forgotten that.”
“You helped us stay together, even when the other caves tried tearing us apart,” said a man, emotionally.
“If we go back to our relatives like this—our children—we admit defeat,” one woman said, dabbing at her eyes. “But if we kill it, we give them a new life. That’s what Samara would’ve wanted, and what her children deserve.”
“Darius would’ve wanted it, too,” Kai added.
Neena opened and closed her mouth. The strength of this small group was palpable, and it was growing stronger by the moment. Still, she couldn’t fathom more death.
“What if more of us fall?” she asked, looking around at the people circling her. “What if we all die?”
“When we were out in the desert, we beat the odds and survived,” Kai reminded her. “You and I know the creature better than anyone. We have the best chance out of anyone on those cliffs of beating it. And so do the people in this room. They’ve survived longer than anyone.”
The group nodded, pulling courage through their fear.
“We have to save the people in the Comm Building, if they are still alive,” Kai said.
“I doubt they survived,” Neena said. “We saw how that building collapsed.”
“Even in the worst scenario, if they are all dead, the people on the cliffs need us,” Kai said. “Samel and Raj need you. We have to beat the creature and get back to your brother, Salvador, and the others. This could be our best chance at ridding the colony of the monster. Now is the time.”
Roberto followed that thought. “Let’s go out there and do what we came to do. For Samara, Darius, and all the rest that have died. Let’s honor their memories and complete what we started.”
Neena’s conflicted thoughts tormented her.
But looking at all the people around her, she saw courage.
Despite all the things they’d survived—horrible, atrocious things—they were ready to go out and face the beast again. They were ready to risk their lives and battle the monster with bravery. They were ready to fight alongside her.
If they had faith, how could she let them down? Bending, she picked up the weapon, causing a ripple of enthusiasm among the group.
They needed someone to reinforce their courage, not tear it down.
They needed a leader.
Looking past those close to her, she found Isaiah breaking from his mournful thoughts, listening. The few surviving Watchers already stood near her. They glanced around at each of the people in the circle, and then back at Neena. She was surprised, but probably shouldn’t have been, when Isaiah stepped across the room to join them.
“They’re right, you know,” he said. “We are the only ones who might have a chance at killing it. We owe it to our fallen.”
He raised his chin defiantly.
His conviction settled her decision.
She took a step toward the door, cradling the weapon.
“Are you sure you want to be the one to carry it?” Kai asked.
Neena nodded. “I have the most experience with it. This is something I need to do.” Beating back the last of her plaguing doubts, she moved toward the door with determination. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 93: Neena
Hurrying through the rubble-strewn alley, heading for the monster, Neena replayed what she hoped wasn’t the group’s last conversation.
“We’ll need to find spears.”
“Surely, some of them are still in the area near the Comm Building. We’ll retrieve them carefully.”
“What if the monster is there?”
“We’ll lead it elsewhere.”
“Where will we fight?”
“Wherever we have to.”
Memories of the dead clung to her thoughts. She was doing this for them. For all of them.
She clutched her weapon, which she’d cranked and readied. A half-dozen spare arrows jostled inside her bag. Each one of those had to count. She peered through the slow, steady stream of sand that blew against her goggles.
The rumbling had stopped.
Hopefully, the monster was elsewhere.
They might not have much time to search out and retrieve any spears.
Reaching the Comm Building’s destroyed path, she and the dozen around her surveyed the destruction. Holes had become gaping trenches, extending from one end of the path to the other. More than one tunnel overlapped, or crisscrossed the next. The creature’s rampant churning had swallowed most of the bodies. Here and there, Neena saw a severed limb, or a fallen flask, but mostly, she saw sand.
She didn’t see Samara, though she looked.
Her friend’s missing body reinforced her anger.
Past the torn-up path, the southern wall of the Comm Building lay in ruins. Rock was piled in front of the area where the entrance used to be, creating a jagged, stone barricade. The smooth roof was mostly intact, though it looked like a piece was missing, and p
arts were cracked.
Through the steadily blowing wind, she scanned the building, but she saw or heard no one.
They had to make this fast, so they could get elsewhere.
She and her people waded through the ruined path, stepping wherever there was firm sand.
“Maybe we should split up,” Isaiah said, with the same conviction he’d held in the hovel. “We’ll search over there, while you search here.”
Neena agreed.
Isaiah and his three Watchers walked about a hundred feet to the right of Neena’s group, scouring another area.
Neena’s group surveyed the edge of the nearest trenches for a handle, or a spear tip rising above the sand. Here and there, they found one, but too many were lost, or buried. After a while of looking, they’d only found three spears—and were close to giving up—when Neena checked on Isaiah.
His group had spotted something.
Below them, on a sloped part of the sand in one of the beast’s vacuous holes, sat two intact, quill-tipped spears. Without a word, Isaiah and another man started down the ravine, holding their hands out for balance, while trying not to cause an avalanche of sand. The other two men stayed at the top.
A pit of dread found its way to Neena’s stomach.
She searched for danger around the destroyed path, but she saw and heard nothing.
Isaiah and the man continued down the slope, somehow keeping their footing.
The wind blew steadily all around them, constantly shifting the sand.
A few steps later, their hands were on the weapons. Isaiah and The Watcher hurried up the embankment, using their new weapons for balance.
They were halfway to the top when the sand beneath their boots slid.
Mounds of sand tumbled into the blackness below, churning beneath them and pushing them back. The men cried out in terror, rushing against an increasing cascade.
Neena’s people screamed in warning.
They ran a few steps toward the men, but they could do nothing from where they were.
The two others in Isaiah’s group at the top of the trench rushed a few steps into it, reaching out their hands.
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