new shadow hung, like a great bat. With a whispery click sound, the shadow moved. Eyes shone, like black lamps.
Michael’s heart seemed to have shut off.
The Shriek moved toward the vault. Something gleamed: its finger bones. The skeleton of its fingers flashed clean white, the skin and sinew there ripped away like tips worn from old gloves, so its fingers were not just bones, but sharp exquisite axes that could pass your throat and make it smile red.
Michael’s first shot, fired while whirling, missed by yards, two more he squeezed coming closer, not much.
The Shriek cried out and skittered out of sight.
Michael held frozen, the echo of the gunshots cracking around him like caged earthquakes. Then he burst out of his shock and went to the door. It was too fast last night, it will be now too, he thought, panicked. But he also thought: if I can kill it, if I can shoot it in the head, it will die.
Every bad guy has a weak spot in every game.
It’s the last really dangerous one in Charleston. Kill it, and all this is over.
How do you know that’s true?!
Because . . . it has to be.
“Bub,” he whispered, “you stay here while I go out and—”
Except Patrick was at his side as he stepped out of the vault, flattened himself against the wall, like a SWAT member.
“Stop tryin’ to trick me! He’s on your team!” Patrick hissed.
“What?”
Far too loudly: “You’re the Betrayer! The Game Master told me you’re even supposed to have guns!”
“Bub, shh—”
“You have to play right! MICHAEL, PLEASE!”
“Sit. Down!” Michael whispered.
“Pfft, you sit down!” Patrick came back.
Oh my God, omigod.
A call of claws, clicking the ceiling. Shadows coiled all across the ceiling like snakes in a basket. Then the Shriek cried out.
The sound was followed by a second cry, nearer, and suddenly Michael knew where the creature was, on the dark ceiling above the bank’s rows of desks, so Michael breathed out like a Modern Warfare sniper, aimed, and tugged the trigger.
The shot struck absolutely nothing.
One reason: Michael heard another click-click-click movement now, far from where he’d aimed. The Shriek was using the echo in the Bank of Charleston for misdirection.
The second reason: Patrick had laced his finger into the triggerhold, attempting to take the firearm, and this sorta compromised his aim.
Patrick tugged the gun down with a grunt.
Another round accidentally discharged between their four feet.
“Play right!” Patrick pulled the gun toward himself, like he was fighting over a TV remote. He spied down the barrel.
Michael said, “I’m not the Betrayer, let’s switch teams, I want to be on your team!”
“A-la-la-la-la-can’t-hear-you!”
Stone dust rained from the ceiling, this time the cry of the Shriek issuing from directly above. The rippling air pressure came down on Michael’s head like a cold cap. It’s trying to paralyze its prey, shock us, like it shocked us last night, right before it jumped.
The corpse landed on all fours in the aisle leading to the counter and wove among the desks, like a feral wolf.
Michael shoved Patrick and gained the gun.
Patrick stumbled back, over a rumpled orange carpet, and landed on a black metal box, grabbing his butt in pain. Michael was wheeling his aim back to the Shriek when the box began to roar. The creature echoed the cry. But this box’s roar was mechanical: this box was an air pump.
The carpet jerked, which would have been odd except it was not a carpet; it actually was a tarp, a great orange inflatable man with pennants for limbs, and in the adrenaline-soaked brightness of his mind, Michael knew that it had been used as a Halloween decoration, and the employees had brought it in for the night, not knowing the tarp-man would never dance for customers again. Now the tarp-man furled high.
And slapped the gun from Michael’s hand.
The pistol zipped across the marble, skidding underneath a wooden desk between him and the Shriek.
The Shriek stopped, head cocking, as if amused.
The orange, faceless giant jigged.
“Stay,” Michael whispered, “down.”
“Pfff, whateve—”
Michael ran. He ran for the gun.
The Shriek dropped behind one of the desks like a magician into a trapdoor, then rematerialized behind the desk closest to Michael. Michael grabbed a leather roller chair, and thrust it at the Thing.
The creature bounded over the chair, seemed to hang midair before coming down in a cougar’s crouch.
The creature scrabbled toward him. Michael reached behind himself blindly, found on the desk an energy bar, not helpful, then something better: an orb-crystal paperweight. He hurled it. A thud and