As Red Coat wrenched opened the driver’s door, Holly screamed, “Don’t shoot, he made me, he made me!” Red Coat yanked her out of the cab by her hair. “He’s here!” Holly shouted. “HE’S RIGHT THERE IN THE BACKSEAT!”
Michael skidded to a stop in the snow, stunned, confused.
He thought wildly, as he once had before: Holly, you’re a crappy liar. But then he understood her plan, and his head filled with light.
Red Coat seemed to sense Holly’s lie.
But Hammy didn’t. Hammy was already opening the back Hummer door when Red Coat cried: “Stop that. Right now! Belinda, it’s a trick!”
Even from this distance, Michael understood the emotion that flew across the face of the woman who had questioned Rulon’s prophecies in the First Bank of Charleston. The rear Hummer doors creaked on their hinges, revealing what was within, and Hammy was not filled with terror.
Nor surprise.
Just . . . heartbreak.
Devastation that all hope had led to this. Michael knew, more than ever before, how freaking much that this was not a game. In games, you don’t pity the enemy.
An earsplitting cry came out from the dark of the Hummer. Far overhead, one of the field lights burst apart, showering sparks and glass.
Captain Horace Jopek, mutated and risen, launched out of the back of his Hummer.
The sightless, bone-clawed captain collided into Hammy, ripping into her throat before she had even struck the ground. Red dimes of blood flew.
Jopek’s vocal cords issued a second shriek, and with it, pandemonium burst. Most of the remaining Rapture near the Hummer fled in all directions; those who had already run tripled their speed as Hammy’s pleas gurgled and faded. Two or three of the Rapture stood rooted and mesmerized, not knowing what to do when the camouflaged Shriek looked up from Hammy with their friend’s blood and skull fragments on its teeth, and began to chase after them, too. . . .
Through the chaos: “Michael, go!”
Michael’s gazed snapped upward. Having escaped from Red Coat, Holly stood on the roof of the Hummer, waving frantically.
She thrust her arm toward the entrance of the mine. The now-unguarded entrance to the mine.
“GOOOOO!” she shouted.
“I’ll trust you, if you trust me.”
Gratitude and emotion flooded Michael. He did not feel his blood. Clearly, certainly, with no lie between it and himself: Michael felt his heart.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
He dashed, with the Rapture’s screams resounding from the four walls of the world.
Thank you. Oh man, oh God, thank you so, so much.
Weaving through the fleeing members of the Rapture (who did not care to stop him), darting between mountains of coal and ancient machinery, his breath whistling into him, out from him, and he felt every flowing inch.
And then—nearly unbelievably—Michael realized he was going to make it.
He passed under thick wooden beams of the mine entrance; the air, already bitter, seemed to die off ten degrees; the carpet of snow changed to gritty coal. Michael ran. With tears of thank-you in his eyes, he ran into the homeplace of the virus that ended the world . . . and Whatever had created it.
Don’t scream for Bub. Don’t let Rulon know you’re here.
Though his face was drippy with sweat, and his pulse slammed inside his eardrums, just twenty feet into the mine Michael made himself slow. His crunchy footsteps were way too loud. The sounds of the world had faded back with eerie speed: the havoc back in the quarry had a from-the-other-side-of-the-tunnel quality, no realer than a movie playing in a different room.
And Michael had no weapons. Except, maybe, surprise.
Yeah. Yes. Slow down, not too much, but be quiet—do it.
Rulon isn’t slowing down, his mind hissed.
Shit. Damn it.
Michael jogged.
The mine around him looked like pictures he’d seen in school: the roof rough and chokingly low (he could almost reach up and touch it); the walls a rippling black that were squared with wooden beams. But the pictures couldn’t tell how the nightmare of the mine felt. They couldn’t describe the cold, so sharp it was nearly like breathing glass. They couldn’t describe the smell, like the back of a basement, with a cloying stink of . . . was that gas? Could that poison you?
It feels like being swallowed, Michael thought. And Bub went through this.
Oh, Bub, I’m sorry. Ya-ya, I ya-ya.
Water, somewhere in the dark throat ahead: a delicate drip, trailed by a ghostly chuckling echo. Michael tasted fine metallic fear on the back of his mouth. Images pushed into his mind. Bone-hands blossoming from the loose soil at his feet. Faces rising white and thin from the dark. Cady Gibson spidering toward him on the ceiling . . .
Michael glanced back at the entrance. Only a hundred feet into the mine, now. How had he not gone farther?
Michael swallowed and went on.
Ahead, the shaft of the mine curved sharply, almost a right angle. To continue would be to lose sight of the entrance. Michael spied around the corner. The light reached another twenty steps. After that: inner casket.
Doesn’t matter, Michael jabbered at himself, beginning to move again now, slowly, keeping one hand to the wall, trying not to picture Cady Gibson floating from the outer rim of the darkness ahead.
It won’t just be Cady, though, Mikey. Look at the footprints in the coal dust. All those footprints. The evidence of the unimaginable size of the migration. Like the mind-frying, infinite black of space.
Michael’s hand passed over one of the wooden beams. He saw that it and all the others were cracked, ragged with splinters. They’d been sideswiped by deadly force. Oh Jeezus, what was he walking toward?
Keep going. You’re scared, that’s true, but. Maybe the Shrieks aren’t going to come back out. Maybe they just came home, and they’re going to stay here. Maybe—
He had turned the corner, and was approaching the very last ledge of the outside world’s light, when he heard the dead people shrieking.
Michael’s head snapped reflexively back, a jagged outcropping punching into the back of his scalp so hard that it made his eyes water.
But it wasn’t the pain that made Michael’s head swim, or that blanked his brain, or short-circuited all sense of himself in reality. It was the sound.
He had heard dead people bellow and shriek. He’d heard thousands at once, on Government Plaza. But nothing had ever sounded like this. Nothing on Earth.
Place your ear on train tracks at midnight; listen to the nearing thunder; let a ten-thousand-ton roaring black freight train highball to you and take off your head.
This was much worse.
Michael’s hands clamped over his ears, but there was no denying this. The coal ground under his feet rumbled like thimbles in an earthquake. Particles shivered from the ceiling. Wind sped from the secret chambers and passages of the earth, flying through his hair and freezing him through his clothes.
It was primeval; it was first power; it was whatever unholy sound comes from ten thousand or more dead throats as they begin a game.
Michael’s skull seemed to shake with harmonic vibration.
That’s not wind. It’s air pressure: they’re coming.
And for one second, one shivering terror-blank second, Michael thought: Leave! Go back! Bub’s not down here. And if he is, it’s too late. Sounded true. Sounded smart and grown-up.
Leave now, and you can still get out with Holly before those monsters get here. Leave now, and maybe you can go back and get the cure. Maybe you can still save Mom! Doesn’t that sound good, Michael?
Leave, and you can save yoursel—
“NOOOOO!” Michael shouted, and he ran toward the dark.
As if in response, the shriek cut off.
The ground still vibrated, and that wall of air pressure still barreled toward him.
But Michael heard a different, single, high scream flying through the darkness, now not far away. Footsteps,
pattering toward him. His chest leapt. Oh my God. Oh my God, is that . . . ?
Echoing somewhere: “Child, come here! Meet your fate, boy! Come back to me now! Oh, I can make it so much worse if you don’t!”
Rulon’s chasing him.
And Michael stood there, hypnotized, a sunburst of amazement flooding him as Patrick sprinted out of the darkness.
How? How is he—?
Patrick looked like a kid escaping the boogeyman: his lips were strung back by strain and terror, his elbows scissoring, his breath coming in frightened little hiccups.
His face registered astonishment as he saw Michael, but for only a second before horror overtook it again. He slammed full speed into Michael, not hugging him, bouncing back and stuttering:
“Help help help me help me please HELPHELP—” A hand-shaped bruise covered almost half of his face. “Can you, will you, help, PLEASE PLEASE!”
“Bub, it’s okay!”
“He’s comin’!” Patrick gasped. “The cheater’s comin’! The deer, the deer knocked ’im down, then I was brave, but the bad man’s comin’!”
Deer? What?!
Patrick shook his head, pleading. His coat was shredded away at his elbow, blood leaked out from a knife-slit wound. Patrick looked very pale. His tiny hands suddenly grabbed at the belly of Michael’s space suit, his eyes bulging and white.
“Let’s go, please!” he cried. “He’s so bad! Michael, NOTHING IS PRETEND ANYMORE!”
Michael still did not understand how Patrick had been saved from the “Freaking” pit inside himself. But there was no time to consider it. He pulled Patrick’s quivering body against him, planning to retreat out of the mine shaft and up into the light of the world.
The mega-shriek blasted once more, this time much closer, the rancid air pressure surging.
And over Bub’s shoulder, Rulon’s yellow grin materialized in the mine shaft, like the world’s final, possessed jack-o’-lantern, come back from Halloween.
The priest’s face was the twisted rag of a man who cannot wake from a nightmare. Hell-winds caught the folds of his tattered robes and hauled them in all directions. One of his eye sockets was a cratered soup: the eyeball had been pierced and popped, like the Old Testament justice, so Rulon wept both tears and ooze.
He bore the hunter’s knife in his right hand.
“Michael Faris?” said Rulon. As if confused. Stopping for one second.
“R-r-reach—” Patrick was stuttering. He unzipped his jacket pocket, pulled out his orange plastic gun. “R-reach fer the s—”
Rulon snapped out of it. “If you know what will please your soul, boy,” he growled to Michael, “give me the sacrifice, give him to me!”
Michael pulled his brother closer.
The sounds of the Shrieks, building like drums of doom.
“Sacrifice yourself, asshole!” Michael bellowed.
The priest’s face went savage with rage. His knife sang upward. Rulon lunged toward them.
Michael had no time to plan: as Rulon attacked, Michael shoved Patrick away and out of Rulon’s path, then leapt in the opposite direction like a boy dodging the train in the very last moment in a game of chicken. Rulon screamed fury as Michael evaded him. Out of the corner of his eye, Michael saw the priest try to rein back the momentum of his lunge, but perhaps there comes a time when momentum is fate: Rulon’s knife stabbed down, yes, but not on Michael or Patrick:
His blade came down, with his full force and hatred behind it, into the fractured wood of a support beam.
The support snapped like a wishbone.
The ceiling rumbled.
Rulon looked up, blinked.
The ceiling came down in front of Michael with a guttural roar. Air displaced. Michael threw up his hands, shouting, certain his life was over.
But a second later he looked up, still uncrushed. Only part of the ceiling had fallen in. How much, though, he didn’t know: the air was a swirling, nostril-burning haze.
“Bub?”
He heard Patrick hack. Over there, left, left! Michael crawled, feeling out like a blind man.
His hand found Patrick’s delicate chest, which was heaving and hacking viciously.
“Got you, Bub, here I am.” He looked down at Patrick, and he realized he could see now: light, low and weak, was illuminating Patrick. Which meant, oh thank God, that the way to the exit had not been blocked by the cave-in. In fact, all he had to do was go around that corner a few steps away, and he would be able to take them out of the mine shaft the same way he had come.
“H-here, M-Michael!” Patrick coughed.
Run. Now. That’s all. Just run around that corner and out of the mine, and this is over.
“I know. I’ve got you, Bub.”
“N-no, I mean,” Patrick racked, shaking his head, “They’re here! THEM!”
Goose chills screamed up Michael’s back.
With a sensation familiar from a hundred childhood nightmares—his vision being sucked, against every wish, toward some grim, waiting horror—Michael looked into the descending heart of the mine.
Past the mound of coal Rulon had brought down, something had come out of the depths.
Michael thought, It’s the Shrieks! but he immediately knew that wasn’t right. The Things invading the outer rim of light were eyeless, yes, and they hung upon the walls and ceiling like pale death-spiders. But they were not Shrieks, not any more than they were still Bellows.
Michael and Patrick were in the mine with something new, something ancient, and God help them.
Cady Gibson, clattering on the ceiling, led them, smiling its damned, everlasting smile.
Cady, who had entered this mine as a nine-year-old kid, still bore a ruined memory of the face, almost hurtfully beautiful, of the child it had been.
Cady Gibson, endgame mutation, was more bone than boy. The flesh of its arms was stripped entirely. Its fingers were a fan of fine, bleached blades. In its floating ribs, gray lung-sacks flapped. Raw tendon—taut and red—spiraled over the bones like the strings of a marionette brought to jigging life by some demoniacally grinning puppet master. Cady Gibson, the Terror, crawled across the black sky toward Michael and his brother, pealing forth cry after cry: a little boy leading its own hellish children outside to play.
“Michael, he’s the bad boy!” Patrick screamed.
Michael stood up, his knees threatening to betray him. And in that infinite, black instant, Michael caught a glimpse of Something just past Cady—another creature, clittering along the ceiling of the mine shaft—that he knew would haunt the corridors of his dreams forever.
It was a Hell-dream, a beast of shock-white flesh. It had golden-rimmed eyes with slits for pupils. It had a red and lolling tongue that dangled and clocked from its mouth like a long, burst vein. With a shattering clarity, Michael understood: Cady and all the Shrieks had returned to this mine so They could get this creature. They had come to retrieve the Thing that had birthed the virus and ended the Earth, the Thing that had infected Cady in the first place.
Oh God, that’s their MOTHER!
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Patrick burst into tears, and Michael lifted him into his arms and turned in the quaking mine shaft. He dashed around the corner, seeing the lighted rectangle of the entrance a billion miles up ahead. The fractured support beams were snapping now in the force of the stampede: Michael wove through a collapsing storm of earth and stone. The creatures howled in rage as the caving ceiling slowed their flight, but this was still like trying to outrun the wind. And Michael held on to Patrick as tightly as he had ever held anything, as tight as his own heart.
“Michael?” Patrick sobbed into his ear.
Answer him. You might not get to again. “Yeah?” Michael breathed.
Patrick said: “I love you.”
The end of the mine, twenty feet away, ten, six, three—
The dead at their back, their shrieks deafening, air pressure flying like poisonous waves—
And then—Michael ne
ver understood how—he ran out of the mine.
Did it matter? No. Nowhere to run: he looked back into the mine and saw the Shrieks bursting through the fallen ceiling, and even if he got into the Hummer right this moment, it was too late—the field lights dazzled Michael’s eyes—his ears were ringing—
“Holly!” Patrick gasped.
Something was coming, straight across the quarry field, almost bouncing on the ground. Something big. Balloon! Not quite inflated, the jack-o’-lantern aircraft, piloted by Holly, its basket half dragging across the snowy ground toward them. Michael’s heart burst in amazement.
“Patrick! Michael!” Holly called. “Come on!”
Wind gusted, throwing snow from the peaks of the coal mounds, snapping the inflating pumpkin face to the left, parallel with the rock wall containing the entrance to the mine. Michael sprinted to catch up. Holly released the burner for a moment to reach out for them, but Michael shouted, “No no, keep filling the balloon!” and he desperately tossed Patrick into the basket. He placed his good hand on the wicker rim and there came another gust of wind, and the jerk of the balloon nearly pulled his arm out of its socket. He screamed, but held on, the lip of the basket now as high as his chest. He leapt with all his strength, pulling himself up, over the wicker brim.
He tumbled in.
“Up up, go go go!”
“Absolutely,” Holly breathed shakily. She yanked down the overhead handle harder, enlarging the blue burner flame.
And slowly their balloon began to lift toward the sky.
They ascended, fifteen feet, twenty. Holy crap. We . . . I . . .
We made it. The thought shimmered in his mind, nearly too huge and beautiful to grasp. We made it!
Michael looked over the edge of the basket. Fifty feet up now. The new creatures were vomiting out from the mouth of the mine, small in the fluorescent field lights.
Cady Gibson emerged, stopped, gazed up with those ancient eyes.
The monster couldn’t grab them. Not now. Not when we’re flying—
But suddenly Michael’s hope threatened to flicker out.
No. What happens when we have to land?
And that was when he turned and saw Patrick holding his orange gun in his hands.
The End Games Page 31
