and blade-claws. He hits the ground. Shoulder taking the brunt. Pain. Like a baseball through a window: ksshhh. The monster is upon him. Covering him. All light is extinguished. A horrible thought crosses Davey’s mind: I’m too old for this now. I’m too old and too slow and I’ve let fear creep in like black mold and now it’s all over.
He hears a shotgun boom. Men yelling, though they sound so distant…
He can’t breathe. The creature sounds like fabric but feels like liquid. Davey tries to swing a fist, but it’s like thrashing around underwater – a slow-motion freakout.
He sees those eyes. Just the eyes. Gleaming buttons. Coins in black water.
Then knives plunge out of the liquid and into his chest.
Then into his head.
But the pain is strange – hardly a pain at all, not in the physical sense. It’s like a spear punching a hole through his thoughts, through his mind. What he feels instead is something far deeper and ultimately worse than physical pain:
Grief and guilt holding hands, la la la. In his mind, memories burst bright like fireworks: pop pop pop. His first day as a shaper on the bench at the Sandhog office, feeling the pinprick stick of shame as he secretly hopes some poor Hog breaks his foot so that Davey has a shot down below; him losing his virginity with a Bronx whore on a dirty afghan on a mattress that smells like beer and cigarettes; the day his daughter Cassie was born and he was down here working; the day his wife died from an aneurysm and once more he was down here in the dark while she flopped around on the kitchen floor like a fish trying to find water. Image after image, memory after memory, too-bright and too-loud fireworks launching into the sky of his mind before fading anew. All of it feels bad, sour, like a kind of mind poison – every memory robed in rotten ribbon, a mummy’s gauze, dusty and cursed.
Then one image stays fixed in his mind: blueprints and blasting plans for Water Tunnel #3, a yellow notebook with scribbles sitting under his left hand, a cold Coors Light in his right, the can sweating–
Cassie walks into the room. He says, “Hey, lollipop–”
He hears a sound. A familiar voice. A familiar roar.
And then it’s all over.
The goblins hang on him like boat anchors. He doesn’t have time to care. Mookie runs. The Blue gives him speed. Puts power in his legs. The Pig churns ahead of him around the bend of the tunnel. Gobbos bite. Claw. He feels blood wet his shirt.
He leaps for the Pig. Grabs hold. Barely. Legs dragging behind him. Gobbo hanging off the legs.
The pig rounds the curve. There. Ahead Davey. Lying underneath the black thing, the reaper’s cloak, men leaping on top of the monster – the monster flinging them off like they’re straw-stuffed poppets.
They’re not Mookie.
The pig lurches forward–
Mookie clambers up over it, toward the front of the cart–
It crashes into the deadstop. Mookie uses the momentum to leap.
He tackles the shadow-thing. Goblins screeching behind him. One gob catches a shotgun blast to the dome – buckshot peels back its scalp like the skin of an orange. A Sandhog’s six-shooter punches a hole in the other.
Mookie wrestles with the reaper-cloak. He pulls it off Davey Morgan – but it has weight and energy like Mookie can’t believe and before he knows it the thing has him pinned. Bullets cut through the shadow and disappear inside it – the shadow-thing continues its assault unfazed. Knife fingers stick through Mookie’s breastbone like the flesh isn’t even there – he feels them cutting apart not his heart but rather, his soul –
Nora. Jess. Grampop. Pop. Worthless. Dumb. Bad Dad.
Ugly thoughts like tentacles reach up, coil around him, threaten to drag him down.
No. No time for this.
He roars. Lifts his head. Opens his mouth.
And bites for one of the only exposed features he can find.
He bites off one of its shiny eyes. Spits it out.
Light shines through the hole – a bloom of illumination like a sunbeam through morning mist. And then the thing keens, a high-pitched tone before diving off Mookie and through the floor. Like a wraith without substance, its flesh unreal.
7
A union within a union. A guild within a guild. Local 147-and-a-half. The men of the Sandhogs know about it, though they’ve little idea what it actually is. They think it’s some manner of “inner circle” composed of veterans of the Sandhog