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“Something is making them do this,” I breathed, hardly believing what I was seeing. “They can’t do it themselves. They haven’t got it in them, there’s not enough left. Someone is telling them—moving them—to do this. ”

It was fascinating, so fascinating that even though they were climbing up close, I couldn’t look away. I tried to reach them again, tried my hardest to concentrate and project and all those other hippy-trippy terms Dana liked to use, but they just weren’t there anymore; their minds were completely gone, rotted out their ears or burned out their noses. Nothing.

But their emptiness didn’t make them any less dangerous, or disgusting. And when one reached the lip of the hole I didn’t step back fast enough to keep it from grabbing my leg.

It gave my ankle a yank hard and fast enough to bring me down, but Malachi caught me under the arms and tried to draw me back. I kicked with the other leg, using the heel of my boot as a chisel, but not meeting a whole lot of success.

Nick came back in and tried to help Malachi, but I tried to scream them both away—the floor, it wasn’t going to hold. “Can’t you hear it?”

With the added weight of Nick, the guys pulled hard enough to loosen the thing’s grip; its bony black fingers slipping down to close around my toes. It might have been the least of our problems. Two more of the things were reaching the edge, using their arms, elbows, and creaking old shoulders to creep onto the jagged rim.

Malachi stiffened, and I thought it was fear because I didn’t understand. I didn’t get it because I couldn’t have imagined or predicted it, or else I would never have let him do it.

I didn’t understand until after he slung one arm lower, under my ribcage—and hefted me back with such force that part of the thing’s fingers got caught in my laces, and the crumbling flesh came away with me too. I didn’t understand because I didn’t know he was that strong.

He moved so fast, too. He backed up and into Nick, who stumbled backwards but caught my hand as he went. Together we tumbled away from the edge while Malachi went towards it.

With a running jump he took the top two creatures headlong and toppled with them down into the hole.

I yelled his name, and would have jumped forward if Nick hadn’t gripped me like a vise and held me in place, back by the wall, back by the hole where we could get out if only we would push the plywood aside.

Down below in the hole with the writhing, teeming creatures, all arms and legs and mindless limbs, Malachi struggled.

And spark, spark, spark—I could hear the wheel turning on the little lighter Nick had left down with the bags. It was sitting on top where it would have been easy to see and find. My brother might not have always been the sharpest crayon in the box, but he was a decisive son of a bitch—that much I knew. That much I’d always known, from the first moment I saw him on a rain-wet playground on Signal Mountain.

It seemed like a thousand years ago.

It felt like somebody else’s lifetime, lived, died, and forgotten.

I could hear him down there—even above the scattering din of the wrestling, restless dead, slopping their limbs together in the mud and trying to reorganize, and rebuild.

And above it all, or under it—a pocket of sound where I could hear the spinning clicks with every twist of his thumb—I heard Malachi striking the lighter, over and over again, and then he stopped.

“Eden?”

“Malachi?”

“I’m sorry about everything. For ever. Since the beginning. ”

“Malachi?

“Run. ”

There was more in the word than when Nick had said it. Nick was frantic, making it into an order too frightening not to be obeyed. Malachi was offering it up as a calm, certain warning. It wasn’t a threat, or even a promise. It was a fact.

Nick was thinking more cle

arly than I was, but I think I can be forgiven for it. He was dragging me to the exit. I wasn’t fighting him exactly, but I couldn’t make my legs cooperate enough to pull my balance together and help him help me.

We didn’t make it through, all the way.

The first percussion hit—a shockwave, a pulse of sound and pressure that lifted the floor and shook us all. I sucked in a breath just in time to hold it for the second, greater blast—accompanied by a tremendous whistle and wail, and then I couldn’t hear anything, really. It was all gone, just a shaking, warbling set of waves that ate the floor and rocked the walls.

Nick was saying something into my ear—he was screaming it against the side of my face, and I couldn’t hear him. When I looked up, the roof was swaying, or maybe it was my vision, I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t sort anything out—there was only the sound, a living, breathing thing that swelled and shouted.

Then there was another pop. Though it must have been as loud as the first one, it seemed a junior version of the real thing. And following it, there was a second big blow—the second shell igniting.

Below me the world was falling away.