by Jeremy Bates
A hundred yards on we stopped before a cat hole in the left-side wall.
I peered into it. “It’s been carved out by hand,” I said, “or at least the original fissure’s been expanded. Either way, it was done for a purpose, so it must lead somewhere.”
Rob nodded. “Maybe back the way we came—”
A high-pitched shriek cut him off. It warbled between sorrow and rage. Another joined it, and another, and more, all as shrill and degenerate as the first.
“They found Zolan,” Danièle stated.
“Zolan?” I said, bewildered.
“My father,” Katja said. “They will know we tricked them. They will come for us now.”
“Zolan?” I repeated.
“What the fuck are you talking about, Danny?” Rob demanded.
A new, chilling howl reverberated through the tunnels. It was close, not originating from behind us, but from in front of us, the direction we had been heading.
“Go!” I said, pushing Katja into the cat hole.
Danièle scrambled into the fissure after Katja, and I was about to go next when I noticed a light down the hallway. It was approaching fast.
Rob saw it too. “Hurry the fuck up!” He shoved me forward. “Motherfucker, go!”
I ducked into the hole and scrambled ahead. My hands and knees slapped the stone ground, my back scraped the ceiling, my shoulders bounced off the rough walls, yet I didn’t feel as if I was moving fast enough.
A wail erupted from behind us.
Rob cried out. Then: “Fucker’s got me! Won’t let go!”
“Kick him!” I shouted.
He crashed into my backside. “Go!”
I clambered onward.
Danièle tumbled out of the hole ahead of me. I flopped out behind her, somersaulting onto the ground, then whirling around to help Rob, my mind racing, thinking we were going to have to make our stand here, they would be bottlenecked, they couldn’t overwhelm us, we’d take them out one by one—
“Fucker!” Rob yelled. He was on his back, kicking at whoever was behind him. “Let…me…go!”
I stuck my upper body into the shaft, grabbed Rob under the arms, pulled.
“Ow!” Shock, then squally, soprano anguish. “Owwwww!”
For a moment I thought I’d caused the pain and let go of Rob. He flailed like a skewered fish. I couldn’t fathom what was wrong until I saw that his legs were on fire. A moment later the flames leapt to his T-shirt, the stench of burning pitch joined by burning flesh.
Screaming, Rob seemed to be attempting to brush the flames off him. I tried grabbing him again, but he was thrashing too violently.
Finally one of his arms snapped past his head. I snatched it—his skin was hot and mushy; raw meat, I thought darkly—and yanked him as hard as I could. He came out of the shaft all too easily, and for a horrible second I was convinced I’d torn free his arm from the socket.
That wasn’t the case, of course; he’d simply been released by whoever had been holding him.
I tripped and landed on my ass. Rob hit the ground next to me. He immediately began rolling back and forth. It was a futile action. He’d already become one big ball of fire. His face and neck and arms were pink and blistered and melting in places. His screams had stopped as well. I ceased thinking of how to save him and hoped he would die quickly.
A gleeful shriek pulled my eyes from Rob back to the hole. Through the reddish glow of fire and smoke I glimpsed Hanns. His was squirming out of the shaft like some ghastly gremlin, torch in one hand, bone-weapon in the other.
I shot to my feet just as Hanns extracted himself fully. I charged the bastard. He jabbed the torch toward my face. I batted it away with my arm, but I didn’t see the bone that followed. It smashed my right knee. The pain was furious, though I didn’t go down; he could have broken both my legs and I wouldn’t have gone down right then. Instead I collided into him, bowling him into the wall. My hands locked around his corded neck. I heaved him off his feet with adrenaline-fuelled strength, pivoted, and ran him across the small room into the adjacent wall.
His head struck the stone with a brief, snappy sound, like billiard balls scattering on a good break. His body went limp. His disgusting mouth gaped open. His dark eyes dulled to sightless orbs. He was dead, but I wanted him more dead. I slammed his skull against the stone again and again and again.
Chapter 62
DANIÈLE
Danièle tried to save Rob. She tore off her shirt and beat it against his body. This did nothing to diminish the flames that consumed him, but she kept at it, not knowing what else to do. All the while she watched in horror as his skin went from blistered to pink to black. Worst were his eyes. They remained open the entire time, and she was sure he could see her doing nothing effective to help him. Then his rolling slowed and eventually stopped altogether. He came to a rest facedown. Thank God it was facedown. The flames continued to devour his body, but somehow they didn’t seem as terrible now that he had gone still.
While Danièle’s attention had been fixed on him, she was only partially aware of Will struggling with the zombie-man. Now she turned to them. They were across the room. Will held the thing around its neck like a ragdoll and was driving its head into the wall repeatedly.
She wobbled over to him and told him to stop, told him it was dead, and tried pulling him away from it. Finally he dropped the lifeless corpse to the ground and turned to look at her. His face was splattered with blood. A madness danced in his eyes and an aura of power radiated off him that she found both frightening and strangely desirable. He glared past her at Rob’s still burning body, then at the thing at his feet.
He raised his shoe and stomped on its broken skull.
Chapter 63
KATJA
This wasn’t what Katja wanted! This was making her sick! She didn’t know Will’s friend Rob well, and she’d never liked Hanns, but seeing them die, the way they died—it was never supposed to happen like this. She wished she could run back to her room and curl up on her bed and close her eyes and forget she had ever tried to help Will. But she couldn’t do that, so she remained in the corner and kept herself as small as possible and waited for what would happen next.
Chapter 64
No time, I thought helplessly as I stared at Rob’s burning body.
No time to put the flames out.
No time to bury him.
Hanns, it seemed, had been alone, wandering the tunnels and doing whatever he did down here by himself. But the others were coming. They would find us soon.
Once again I considered making a stand here and attacking each of our pursuers one by one as they wiggled out of the hole. But this, I decided, was not a good option. They wouldn’t come through like lemmings. We might kill one, maybe two. But they would adapt. They would likely try to wait us out. How long could the three of us remain vigilant? We would have to sleep at some point. Also, that hole wasn’t the only way into the room. A hallway extended from the opposite wall. They might know a dozen other ways to reach that hallway—and, consequently, us.
I picked up Hanns’ torch and bone-weapon and turned to Danièle. She finished pulling her T-shirt back over her head and blinked at me with the eyes of someone who had just watched a tornado wipe out their home and all their earthly possessions. “We have to leave him,” I told her. Then, to Katja: “Are you coming?”
She nodded mutely.
Chapter 65
The hallway ran straight. We passed several small rooms on alternating sides of us. They were bare and led nowhere. This discouraged me, as I had hoped to find branching passageways, which we could take at random, losing ourselves, and our pursuers, in the maze.
Seventy-five or so yards on the tunnel ended at a cavernous grotto. The ceiling must have cleared thirty feet. I couldn’t be certain, because even with Hann’s bright torch, it remained layered in thick shadows. The rocks walls were bulging and irregular, as you found in nature, leading me to believe this was some naturally forming undergro
und pocket.
“Is that water?” Danièle asked me, her voice tight.
I had entered the grotto looking up, not down, and I hadn’t noticed the ground before now. I took a few steps forward, sweeping the torch low. Danièle was right. Stretching ahead of us was a mirror-smooth pool of black water. It covered the entire ground save a narrow ribbon of land that followed the wall to the right of us.
“Must be some sort of reservoir,” I said.
I was already moving along the ribbon, praying it linked to a connecting hallway. It climbed gradually, melding into the far wall, which rose in staggered sheets. I could continue left, jumping from one cleft to the next, like a mountain goat. But what was the point? It couldn’t lead anywhere.
Cursing, I returned the way I’d come, running over our dwindling options in my head. We had to head back down the hallway, back through the cat hole. If we could get there before our pursuers, we could continue the way we’d been going, the way Hanns had come from. When I reached Danièle and Katja, I said, “We have to go back—”
An enraged shriek shattered the hushed silence. A handful of others joined it.
“They found Hanns,” Katja said softly.
“Shit!” I said, going cold with panic. It was too late. There was nothing we could do now, nowhere to go, we were as good as dead.
For a brief moment I wondered if I could take them all out. I was bigger and stronger than them, and I would be fighting for my life.
Nevertheless, this hope was extinguished almost immediately.
There were too many. They would overwhelm me.
I wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Shit!” I repeated.
“What is that?” Danièle said. She was pointing across the water.
I didn’t see anything. “What?”
“That! Look! The darkness!”
The darkness? But then I saw what she had indicated. A patch of black, where the far wall met the waterline. The torchlight didn’t penetrate it.
A deep shadow? Another fissure? Perhaps if it extended far enough into the rock, it would conceal us. But that meant we had to cross the water…
Danièle searched her pockets and produced a book of matches. “Do not make any ripples,” she told me. She popped the matches in her mouth, then waded carefully into the water. After three steps the water reached her waist. Another two it was to her neck. She swam silently forward.
I waded into the water reluctantly. The temperature was close to freezing, but that wasn’t why my body was locking up, my stomach churning with dread.
A couple months after the boat accident on Lake Placid, I’d been with Bridgette on the ferry crossing New York Bay to Staten Island, to visit the zoo, and I’d gotten violently seasick, something that had never happened to me before. After that day, the mere sight of water, in any volume larger than what a bathtub held, made me nauseous until I looked away from it. I had not been on another boat, or swimming, since.
I glanced over my shoulder. “Follow me, Katja, we’re going to hide.”
She stood board-stiff. “I can’t swim!”
I hesitated. We couldn’t leave her behind. She’d give away that we came this way. Moreover, Zolan would grill her until she told him where we were hiding. “Climb on my back then,” I said. “I’ll carry you.”
“I’ll sink!”
“Not if you hold onto me. Hurry!”
She stepped slowly into the water and wrapped her arms around my neck. I disposed of both the torch and bone-weapon under the water. The flame went out with a hiss, and blackness swallowed us.
“I’m scared,” Katja said, her breath warm on my ear.
“You’ll be okay.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes,” I said, slipping deeper into the water, trying not to think how far down the bottom was. “Now hold on.” She tightened her grip around my neck, and I began to swim.
The pool was roughly twenty-five feet in diameter. I crossed it quickly. When I touched the far rock I whispered Danièle’s name.
“Here,” she replied.
I followed the wall to the right. It curved into what I guessed was the fissure. Maybe ten feet farther on the ceiling pressed down until it was mere inches above my head. “Danièle?”
No answer.
“Danièle?”
No answer.
“Where is she?” Katja asked in a small voice.
“I don’t know!” I said. “Danièle? Danièle!”
Something brushed my leg. I cried out, spinning, kicking. Katja tightened her hold around my neck, choking me. I struggled to stay afloat.
Then Danièle’s voice: “Will! Quiet! Stop it!”
I pried Katja’s arms from my throat enough so I could breathe again, but I continued to splash and pant, my eyes bulging. The water suddenly felt mawkish, like quicksand, and I knew I was going to drown.
“Will!” Danièle said. “Quiet!”
“Can’t!”
“Will!”
Somehow I managed to calm myself enough to resume treading water—though it was a fragile calm that could still abandon me again at any moment. “Where were you?” I whispered, tilting my chin to keep my mouth above the surface.
“It continues underwater.”
“What…the fissure? How far?”
“I do not know,” she said awkwardly, and I realized she was speaking around the matchbook in her mouth. “I didn’t go to the end. Are you ready?”
“For what?” I said, knowing exactly what.
“We have to follow it.”
“No!”
“It might lead out of here!”
“Forget it!”
“You think Zolan and the others have not been here before? Of course they have! They will know about this fissure. They will search it.”
She was right, I knew, and the dread in my stomach bloomed to fill me completely, suffocating me from the inside out. I was nauseous with it. I couldn’t dive beneath the water, beneath the rock, with no guarantee of surfacing again. I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t.
“Katja can’t swim,” I said.
“She does not have to. She only has to hold her breath.”
“Danièle—I can’t do this.”
Faint light appeared, blacks edging to grays.
Someone had entered the grotto.
Chapter 66
DANIÈLE
Danièle took a deep breath and sank below the surface of the water. She kept her eyes open, but everything was black as an eclipse. She swam forward with a breaststroke, her legs frog kicking. This made her think of Rob for the briefest moment before she blinked him out of her mind. The passage she followed was narrow. At the peak of her outswept arms her fingertips brushed the rocks walls.
She knew she could hold her breath for roughly two minutes—she and Dev used to time each other when they went to the Aquaboulevard on their birthdays as kids—which meant she had some sixty seconds to see where this passage led before reaching the point of no return.
She began to count.
Chapter 67
The light grew brighter. The grays bled into yellows. Still, our pursuers weren’t making any sound. Did they know they had us trapped? Were they expecting an ambush? And where was Danièle? Had she emerged on the other side of the rock?
If I hesitated any longer I knew I would never be able to make myself follow her lead, so I whispered, “Take a deep breath, Katja—”
“No!”
“Yes!” She either came with me, or she’d have to let go: it was her choice. “One, two—three.” I filled my lungs and sank below the surface just as Danièle had done.
The water slipped over my head and droned in my ears and immediately disorientated me. I didn’t know up from down, left from right, couldn’t recall which way I was supposed to go. I might have chickened out, crashed back through the surface, if I could find the surface, had it not been for Katja. She had not let go. Her thin arms remained wrapped around my neck. She was putting her
complete trust in me, and I wasn’t going to fail her.
I stretched my arms wide, touched the sides of the fissure, and began to kick. After a few yards I felt for the ceiling. It was submerged, confirming I had gone in the right direction.
A pressure began building in my lungs quickly—too quickly—so that soon my lungs felt as if they were about to burst.
I was going to have to turn back…but turn back to what? To Zolan and his mob? They would kill me. That was a given. The only question was how they would do it.
Likely slowly and excruciatingly, revenge for Hann’s death.
Drowning, on the other hand, would be relatively painless. The TV depictions of swimmers flailing around in panic and agony underwater were wrong. That only happened to those who had not yet gone under (like me a minute before); it was their body’s last-ditch effort to obtain air. The actual act of drowning was more often quick and unspectacular and silent.
Without oxygen reaching my brain, my body would shut down and I would lose consciousness. My breathing would stop. I’d go into respiratory arrest and sink. Then I would enter the hypoxic convulsion stage. My skin would turn blue, notably in the lips and fingernail beds, and my body would go rigid. Finally my heart would stop pumping blood, and I would be clinically dead.
That’s what happened to Max anyhow; it had all been in the coroner’s report.
I could see Max and everyone else killed on Lake Placid gliding alongside me, phosphorescent shapes darting in and out of my peripheral vision. I could hear them too, their voices ghostlike echoes inside my head, telling me of all the things they would never able to do. Karen would never become a dentist and meet Mr. Right. Brian would never earn his MBA and prove himself at his father’s investment management firm on Wall Street. Gina would never visit her older sister in Italy. Tommy would never bike through Central America. Eddy would never finish restoring the 1998 Porsche 911 Carrera he’d bought from a police auction, while Joseph, the sixty-three-year-old retired accountant who’d lived year round on the lake, would never catch the monster largemouth bass that had snapped his line and gotten away the summer before, and that, according to his wife, he had been hunting the night he died. And Max, of course, would never graduate the Manhattan School of Music, never play in Carnegie Hall, never achieve her dream of becoming a New York Philharmonic cellist—