“Out of the truck, boys and girls.” He pushed Chad toward the rear of the truck. “We’re on foot from this point on.”
So Chad went, leaping from the truck to the ground, managing to remain upright via some minor miracle. Paradise was next. Then Lazarus. Then the guards streamed out of the truck and took up defensive positions to either side of the vehicle. Lazarus produced a handgun from his waistband and joined them. There was a frozen moment of stillness, during which the surreal nature of the situation caused Chad to believe he was imagining all this. He glanced in the direction from which they’d come, knowing that somewhere back there was a rear guard of banished people making their way on foot through the tunnels, most of them armed only with sticks and knives. If the advance unit failed to overwhelm the howling monstrosities, those people were fucked.
Then the first shotgun blast roared in his ears.
The guards moved deeper into the tunnel, discharging their weapons at a furious rate, and now the tunnels reverberated with the sound of feral agony.
Paradise’s hand was at Chad’s back again.
But he needed no prompting now.
There was really no choice anymore.
He hefted the machete and went after the guards.
Dream screamed and fell against the huge bed.
The Master came up behind her, seized a handful of her hair, yanked her head back, and entered her. The position he’d conquered her with last night. But this experience had none of that encounter’s intoxicating erotic power. There was no subtlety. No gradual increase of ecstasy. This was pure, desperate frenzy, the act of a once- proud creature on the brink of losing control.
She cried now and braced her arms on the bed, cursing herself for imagining she could do to him what he’d done to her.
How naive.
How goddamn naive.
And now he was screaming.
A sound that reached into her and gripped her pounding heart like the ice-cold hands of death.
The creature’s misshapen head loomed in the darkness, its yellow eyes glittering like bar-window neon. Chad loosed a kamikaze yell and charged forward, leaping over a mangled body. The shapeshifter’s snout opened wide, its lips curling away from rows of glistening teeth. It hurtled toward Chad with a speed that would have shamed a greyhound, but Chad had the machete in motiona perfectly timed blow. The blade thunked into the creature’s thickly muscled neck, stopping it in its tracks.
Chad wrenched the blade loose and watched blood pump from the wound with a primal satisfaction that felt at once foreign and familiar, an echo from the collective unconscious-from a time when his ancestors had lived in caves and killed their dinner with spears.
He lifted the machete high over his head and brought it down hard, bisecting the shapeshifter’s head with one devastating blow. The machete’s handle vibrated with power, and the power coursed up his arms, invigorating him and filling him with strength he shouldn’t possess. He yanked the blade out again and kicked the dead shapeshifter’s falling carcass aside.
Another shapeshifter sprang out of the darkness.
Chad moved without thinking, guided by the power suffusing the machete, and the blade penetrated another mound of thick flesh and matted fur, piercing the creature’s galloping heart with the tip of the blade.
The sound of gunfire was loud in the tunnel, explosive and powerful.
And effective.
The passage was riddled with the bodies of fallen beasts. But Chad didn’t envy the firepower of the guards. The weapon in his hand felt like the most potent weapon on earth. And he was its Master.
The ultimate arbiter of life and death.
Then, all at once, there was quiet.
The guns went silent.
Chad stood panting in the tunnel. He turned in a slow circle to survey the carnage around him. He saw the bodies of Todd Haynes and Jake Barnes. The old man had been disemboweled. Todd’s throat was a bloody mess. Wanda stood weeping over him. Jack Paradise was slumped against the tunnel wall, blood pumping from a wound at his shoulder.
“Keep moving, Chad,” the soldier told him. “You’re not done yet.”
But Chad felt rooted to the spot. The shapeshifters were all dead. He’d killed the last of them. But the victory was spoiled by the terrible knowledge of its cost. Most of the people who’d worked so hard to get him this far lay dead and dying around him. He thought of Cindy. Saw the gun blow her head apart. A fury filled him, and he clenched the machete’s handle so hard he thought it might shatter beneath the force of his grip.
So much death.
So much to avenge.
A hand fell on his shoulder.
Lazarus. Somehow the old singer had made it through this without a scratch. His continued health was pure luck. He’d waded into the battle as unhesitatingly as any of them. “Come on, friend. I’ll get you the rest of the way there.”
Chad looked at Paradise. “You should be there, Jack.”
The ex-soldier flashed a grim smile. “Nah, think I’m sitting this one out, buddy.” He grimaced and slumped farther down the wall. “You don’t have time to waste with me. Get your ass in gear.”
Lazarus retrieved a fallen machine gun. He ejected the empty ammo clip and inserted a fresh one. He seemed way more familiar with the operation of such a thing than a former reveler in the summer of love should have been. Chad could only wonder what the singer’s still-devoted legion of fans would make of this scene.
Wanda turned away from Todd’s mutilated body. “You fuckers aren’t going without me.”
Paradise spoke through gritted teeth. “Just go, all of you.”
So, accompanied by the handful of guards still standing, they went.
And soon they reached the end of the tunnel.
They stood at the beginning of an expanse of cracked tile and cinder-block walls. A thick metal door stood open against the far wall. One of the walls bore a scrawled slogan: “Lazarus is the way.”
Chad led the way across the expanse of tile.
Following the path a desperate slave named Eddie King had taken a day earlier.
Dream sat cross-legged on the bed, shivering with her arms folded over her breasts. The Master was pacing the room, crossing and recrossing it in long strides. His nude body was a roiling mass of spasms and nervous energy. He was distraught. He was raging against everything. The gods. The people of Below. His own mortality. He was a volatile mass of dark energy. He was furious.
He was afraid.
“I can’t do it, bitch! I can’t do it!”
Dream flinched, keeping her head down. She couldn’t bear to look at him, she was so afraid. Still, she found one more reservoir of courage. She managed to say, “Yes, you can.”
He abruptly stopped pacing. He crossed the room in less than a heartbeat, seized her hair again, and screamed, “I CANT!”
Dream trembled. “You can.”
He screamed again, but relinquished her hair. “You don’t understand, Dream. You bitch, you’re just too stupid to understand. The gods have abandoned me. My only way to paradise is a sacrifice I can no longer deliver!”
His eyes brimmed with moisture. The presence of tears seemed to offend and disgust him, and Dream wondered if this thing had ever cried-if it had ever known grief.
Maybe now it knew a kind of grief.
The self-pitying kind.
“Something’s happening Below. Something momentous. Something I can’t stop.” He sounded like a helpless child, whining over a toy taken away. “I can’t do what I planned to do. It’s too late. The banished people are coming
