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“Okay, okay—just do it. Just, come on!”
I pulled myself forward on my elbows to peek over the edge, and I wished I hadn’t. The halo of light permitted by the edges of the pit was populated. They were coming. So slow, but so steady. Winning the race.
And in the center, at the end of our makeshift rescue rope, there was Nick with the paint thinner and the scrap of towel. He’d stacked the shells one on top of each other. Probably only needed to blow one to set the other. Good plan. Smart man.
“Nick?”
He looked up at me and I saw his face white against the mud at his feet. “You can do this. I can do this. ” Then he pulled the lighter out of his pocket—a nice Zippo. Did everybody have one of those things but me?
“Ready?”
Nick wrapped his wrist up in the cable, and I scooted back away from the edge to give him room. I looked over my shoulder at Malachi, who nodded that he was ready, so I told Nick that I was ready too.
“Three, two . . . ” I heard the wheel snap and spark below.
A new, warmer glow came rising up out of the pit, and a puff of warmth came with it.
“Now!”
Malachi heard it too and locked himself around my feet, and together we pulled, yanked, and heaved.
“Hurryhurryhurrryhurryfaster!”
Beneath me, I could feel the floor objecting. I ignored it, because I had to, except to try, even as I hauled for all I was worth, to distribute my weight more broadly. It didn’t work, or maybe it did—but Malachi was having trouble behind us, and I could see that glow rising, climbing up before I could see Nick’s hands on the other end of the line.
When I did see them, blackened, muddied, and white around the knuckles, I pulled one arm back and sent the other one forward, grabbing him and giving him a wrist to hold. “Take it,” I commanded, and he did. “Take it, I can hold you. Come on. ”
He climbed my arms like he climbed the cable and in a few seconds we had him out, and he had Malachi to help steady him too, and we needed to leave. Needed to stand on something firmer, needed to put our feet on something that wouldn’t fall.
But Nick looked back, down into the pit.
“Shit,” he said, and the urgency had drained from him. “Shit, it went out. Fuck, it went out!”
“What?” Malachi came closer then, even though I tried to hold him back with my forearm.
“Don’t,” I told him. “Don’t—it won’t hold. ”
The floor answered me, believing me. Something too old and too eaten by termites and damp made a crunching sound.
“What’s down there? Oh God,” he said, and I only then realized he hadn’t seen them yet. But he looked over the edge, as near to it as he could come, and there they were—all charred, reaching arms and raspy, struggling throats, shambling into the halo of light where the pit let in the leftovers of sun that could make it through the window.
“Malachi, move away from the edge. Come on. It didn’t work, but okay. It didn’t work. But we can’t stay here—and we had such a hard time getting up, surely it’ll take them some time. Forget it, this was—shit, Nick. You were right, it was a stupid idea. ”
“I never said it was a stupid idea. ”
“You didn’t? You definitely implied it. Let’s just go get the cops; we’ll find some of the nice SWAT boys with all the Kevlar. ”
“What are they? We can’t just—they’re going to come up through that, aren’t they? You were going to—oh God. Oh God. ”
The floor was warning us and I didn’t want to wait for another collapse. “Come on, out now. ”
Nick was way ahead of us, already at the hole in the window with the pried-apart plywood. “People!” he said like he couldn’t believe this was taking so long. “Let’s move it, shall we?”
But by then I was as transfixed as Malachi was. We could see them, just over the edge. They weren’t looking up at us. They weren’t paying attention to us. But they were coming for us, and they were assembling together, kneeling and bracing. They were making their own ladder, out of their own bodies.
“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.
Nick had me, and he held on to me, and he lifted me out. I scraped my back on the window frame and was pulled into the gray-white day outside. It was cool there, and raining again, like it had been for days.
19
Drop by Drop
We staggered into the street and dropped ourselves down behind the nearest vehicle—a blue and tan Ford Explorer, circa 1994. It’s funny, the details you remember afterwards. It’s funny the way the small things that you might have overlooked—that you should’ve overlooked—stick in your head, like your brain is looking for something else to think about.
Anything else.
I looked down at our ankles and there was more water, coming up still, and coming up slowly. Unstoppable. Like the things underground. Looking up, above our heads—it was more water, in drips and drabs, not firmly resolved to rain but too heavy to stay aloft. And I was wrong about the sky, about my first impression of it. It was yellowed then, more than a gray-white.