yanked her out of the cab by her hair. “He’s here!” Holly shouted. “HE’S RIGHT THERE IN THE BACKSEAT!”
Michael skidded to a stop in the snow, stunned, confused.
He thought wildly, as he once had before: Holly, you’re a crappy liar. But then he understood her plan, and his head filled with light.
Red Coat seemed to sense Holly’s lie.
But Hammy didn’t. Hammy was already opening the back Hummer door when Red Coat cried: “Stop that. Right now! Belinda, it’s a trick!”
Even from this distance, Michael understood the emotion that flew across the face of the woman who had questioned Rulon’s prophecies in the First Bank of Charleston. The rear Hummer doors creaked on their hinges, revealing what was within, and Hammy was not filled with terror.
Nor surprise.
Just . . . heartbreak.
Devastation that all hope had led to this. Michael knew, more than ever before, how freaking much that this was not a game. In games, you don’t pity the enemy.
An earsplitting cry came out from the dark of the Hummer. Far overhead, one of the field lights burst apart, showering sparks and glass.
Captain Horace Jopek, mutated and risen, launched out of the back of his Hummer.
The sightless, bone-clawed captain collided into Hammy, ripping into her throat before she had even struck the ground. Red dimes of blood flew.
Jopek’s vocal cords issued a second shriek, and with it, pandemonium burst. Most of the remaining Rapture near the Hummer fled in all directions; those who had already run tripled their speed as Hammy’s pleas gurgled and faded. Two or three of the Rapture stood rooted and mesmerized, not knowing what to do when the camouflaged Shriek looked up from Hammy with their friend’s blood and skull fragments on its teeth, and began to chase after them, too. . . .
Through the chaos: “Michael, go!”
Michael’s gazed snapped upward. Having escaped from Red Coat, Holly stood on the roof of the Hummer, waving frantically.
She thrust her arm toward the entrance of the mine. The now-unguarded entrance to the mine.
“GOOOOO!” she shouted.
“I’ll trust you, if you trust me.”
Gratitude and emotion flooded Michael. He did not feel his blood. Clearly, certainly, with no lie between it and himself: Michael felt his heart.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
He dashed, with the Rapture’s screams resounding from the four walls of the world.
Thank you. Oh man, oh God, thank you so, so much.
Weaving through the fleeing members of the Rapture (who did not care to stop him), darting between mountains of coal and ancient machinery, his breath whistling into him, out from him, and he felt every flowing inch.
And then—nearly unbelievably—Michael realized he was going to make it.
He passed under thick wooden beams of the mine entrance; the air, already bitter, seemed to die off ten degrees; the carpet of snow changed to gritty coal. Michael ran. With tears of thank-you in his eyes, he ran into the homeplace of the virus that ended the world . . . and Whatever had created it.
Don’t scream for Bub. Don’t let Rulon know you’re here.
Though his face was drippy with sweat, and his pulse slammed inside his eardrums, just twenty feet into the mine Michael made himself slow. His crunchy footsteps were way too loud. The sounds of the world had faded back with eerie speed: the havoc back in the quarry had a from-the-other-side-of-the-tunnel quality, no realer than a movie playing in a different room.
And Michael had no weapons. Except, maybe, surprise.
Yeah. Yes. Slow down, not too much, but be quiet—do it.
Rulon isn’t slowing down, his mind hissed.
Shit. Damn it.
Michael jogged.
The mine around him looked like pictures he’d seen in school: the roof rough and chokingly low (he could almost reach up and touch it); the walls a rippling black that were squared with wooden beams. But the pictures couldn’t tell how the nightmare of the mine felt. They couldn’t describe the cold, so sharp it was nearly like breathing glass. They couldn’t describe the smell, like the back of a basement, with a cloying stink of . . . was that gas? Could that poison you?
It feels like being swallowed, Michael thought. And Bub went through this.
Oh, Bub, I’m sorry. Ya-ya, I ya-ya.
Water, somewhere in the dark throat ahead: a delicate drip, trailed by a ghostly chuckling echo. Michael tasted fine metallic fear on the back of his mouth. Images pushed into his mind. Bone-hands blossoming from the loose soil at his feet. Faces rising white and thin from the dark. Cady Gibson spidering toward him on the ceiling . . .