least the windshield’s bulletproof, Michael told himself when his foot twitched on the brake.
I think.
Gravel ground underneath them. The pit was so wide as they approached—a quarter mile at least—and the Shriek prints spread across the whole span of it. All the way to the ledge. They’re all in that pit, Michael. And they’re going to come over it now, now, like poison boiling over the edge of a pot, because you were too slow, you’re not good, and Patrick is dead—
“Please what?” said Holly.
“Huh?” Michael replied, startled.
“You said please.” She sounded scared.
Michael’s teeth snapped together, click. “Nothing,” he said.
Finally, he stopped the Hummer a few feet from the rim of the quarry: close enough that, if he sat up from his seat, he could look over the edge and see what was in the pit. He had an urge to delay the moment, to think of something to say to Holly.
But Holly’s seat squeaked. She was already leaning forward.
“What the ass are they doing down there?” she whispered, bewildered.
The Rapture, all still alive, were gathered in the crater in the earth. The walking-dead worshippers, the dozen of them, stood at the far end of the excavated hollow. The great oval crater—maybe a hundred feet deep and set on all sides with steeply cut rock faces (they staggered down, like stairs outside a temple)—was illuminated by enormous fluorescent light poles and dotted with mining equipment: cranes, conveyor belts, load trucks, silos, miniature mountains of coal. It was all fossilized by the snow.
But the Rapture weren’t looking at any of that.
They were gazing unmovingly in the other direction, into the blank face of rock wall before them.
“Do you see him?” Michael said.
Holly scanned the crowd, then shook her head. “I don’t see Rulon either,” she said softly. “Is it just me, or does it seem like the rest of them are waiting?”
Looking again, closer, at the wall, into which all the Shriek footprints funneled. The wall, with a squat, square, black hole at the base of it.
The entrance to the mine.
“The Shrieks went into the mine,” he said. And what was there to say hi to ’em? Cady’s eyes, ancient and unfathomable, flashed again in Michael’s head. “And Rulon must have taken Patrick in after them,” he finished.
Michael looked to Holly. This was a different game than they had known they would have to play here.
But despite her fear, she would not blink.
“Then I guess that’s where we’re going,” she said.
God, Michael thought. It was the spontaneous goodness that made it hard for him to find his voice. Whatever the anger and confusion that had passed between them before, this was just her: good, despite the world.
“I don’t have a plan, Holly. We have to get into the mine, but I don’t know how. Maybe I’ll just . . . ram through the Rapture with the car.” He tried to convince himself that that was not the world’s stupidest suicide.
She reluctantly said, “Isn’t there gas in some mines, though? I mean, couldn’t the car accidentally make us, y’know . . . ?” She made a “blow-up” motion with her hands.
“Maybe.”
She’s going to say: that plan doesn’t make sense.
She’s going to say: your stupid ideas aren’t good enough.
She said: “For those taking notes, that would have actually been an okay time to lie.” Holly half laughed weakly. Still hurt. Maybe still furious. But: a peace offering.
Michael made a small smile.
Wished he could actually deserve the offer.
But what was the point in delaying? He began to lift his foot from the brake, then paused. “If I don’t make it . . . tell Patrick I’m . . .”
You’re what? What are you, Michael?
“Tell him ‘I ya-ya.’”
Holly wrinkled her forehead: You what, now? “Nothing,” Michael replied, shaking his head, yanking the shift into DRIVE with his good hand. “When Bub was little-little, he couldn’t say ‘Love you.’ I just wanted him to feel good about himself. You know? To make him feel normal. So I said it—ya-ya—like him. I guess I thought . . .
“I thought I could make him feel ‘good’ enough that he really would become normal.” He looked to her. “Holly, I’m sorry. I did that a whole freaking lot.”
Something strange—like a revelation—crossed Holly’s face.
But that was when they heard the knock, behind them, on the rear door of the Hummer.
Everything inside Michael jolted.
He spun in his seat, to look back through the sliding panel between the front and rear compartments of the Hummer. But it was Holly who got the