at the entrance. Only a hundred feet into the mine, now. How had he not gone farther?
Michael swallowed and went on.
Ahead, the shaft of the mine curved sharply, almost a right angle. To continue would be to lose sight of the entrance. Michael spied around the corner. The light reached another twenty steps. After that: inner casket.
Doesn’t matter, Michael jabbered at himself, beginning to move again now, slowly, keeping one hand to the wall, trying not to picture Cady Gibson floating from the outer rim of the darkness ahead.
It won’t just be Cady, though, Mikey. Look at the footprints in the coal dust. All those footprints. The evidence of the unimaginable size of the migration. Like the mind-frying, infinite black of space.
Michael’s hand passed over one of the wooden beams. He saw that it and all the others were cracked, ragged with splinters. They’d been sideswiped by deadly force. Oh Jeezus, what was he walking toward?
Keep going. You’re scared, that’s true, but. Maybe the Shrieks aren’t going to come back out. Maybe they just came home, and they’re going to stay here. Maybe—
He had turned the corner, and was approaching the very last ledge of the outside world’s light, when he heard the dead people shrieking.
Michael’s head snapped reflexively back, a jagged outcropping punching into the back of his scalp so hard that it made his eyes water.
But it wasn’t the pain that made Michael’s head swim, or that blanked his brain, or short-circuited all sense of himself in reality. It was the sound.
He had heard dead people bellow and shriek. He’d heard thousands at once, on Government Plaza. But nothing had ever sounded like this. Nothing on Earth.
Place your ear on train tracks at midnight; listen to the nearing thunder; let a ten-thousand-ton roaring black freight train highball to you and take off your head.
This was much worse.
Michael’s hands clamped over his ears, but there was no denying this. The coal ground under his feet rumbled like thimbles in an earthquake. Particles shivered from the ceiling. Wind sped from the secret chambers and passages of the earth, flying through his hair and freezing him through his clothes.
It was primeval; it was first power; it was whatever unholy sound comes from ten thousand or more dead throats as they begin a game.
Michael’s skull seemed to shake with harmonic vibration.
That’s not wind. It’s air pressure: they’re coming.
And for one second, one shivering terror-blank second, Michael thought: Leave! Go back! Bub’s not down here. And if he is, it’s too late. Sounded true. Sounded smart and grown-up.
Leave now, and you can still get out with Holly before those monsters get here. Leave now, and maybe you can go back and get the cure. Maybe you can still save Mom! Doesn’t that sound good, Michael?
Leave, and you can save yoursel—
“NOOOOO!” Michael shouted, and he ran toward the dark.
As if in response, the shriek cut off.
The ground still vibrated, and that wall of air pressure still barreled toward him.
But Michael heard a different, single, high scream flying through the darkness, now not far away. Footsteps, pattering toward him. His chest leapt. Oh my God. Oh my God, is that . . . ?
Echoing somewhere: “Child, come here! Meet your fate, boy! Come back to me now! Oh, I can make it so much worse if you don’t!”
Rulon’s chasing him.
And Michael stood there, hypnotized, a sunburst of amazement flooding him as Patrick sprinted out of the darkness.
How? How is he—?
Patrick looked like a kid escaping the boogeyman: his lips were strung back by strain and terror, his elbows scissoring, his breath coming in frightened little hiccups.
His face registered astonishment as he saw Michael, but for only a second before horror overtook it again. He slammed full speed into Michael, not hugging him, bouncing back and stuttering:
“Help help help me help me please HELPHELP—” A hand-shaped bruise covered almost half of his face. “Can you, will you, help, PLEASE PLEASE!”
“Bub, it’s okay!”
“He’s comin’!” Patrick gasped. “The cheater’s comin’! The deer, the deer knocked ’im down, then I was brave, but the bad man’s comin’!”
Deer? What?!
Patrick shook his head, pleading. His coat was shredded away at his elbow, blood leaked out from a knife-slit wound. Patrick looked very pale. His tiny hands suddenly grabbed at the belly of Michael’s space suit, his eyes bulging and white.
“Let’s go, please!” he cried. “He’s so bad! Michael, NOTHING IS PRETEND ANYMORE!”
Michael still did not understand how Patrick had been saved from the “Freaking” pit inside himself. But there was no