I could see nothing but black, feel nothing but cold. Terror was a white noise, a static roar. I tried to drown it out with inner shouts, chants of Oh fuck Oh fuck and then The Shug will save me The Shug will save me . . .
I touched bottom, ass first, and then the bottom gave way. I sank into mud, silky and unknowably deep. Fresh panic coursed through me. I twisted, trying to bring my feet up, and then slid onto my chest. My face pressed into the mud, and I recoiled in horror. I couldn’t take that. I couldn’t die suffocating in mud.
I convulsed like a fish, finally ended on my side, in mud as deep as my breastbone. I lifted my helmeted head, shook it to clear the mud from my eyes.
I opened my eyes but there was nothing, black in all directions. And silence.
No splash in the water above me, no cloud of white as Toby came for me through the silty water. Toby wasn’t coming. The Shug wasn’t going to save me.
The Shug is a monster. That’s its job. Terrorize people, kill them, enforce the rituals. It doesn’t rescue people. It doesn’t retrieve cats from trees, fight fires, show up for potlucks. That’s not part of the bargain, no matter how many fish you nail to the door. The deal is, if you make the sign, the angel of death passes by your house. The angel of death doesn’t pull you out of the pool, or cut through the steel of your car door and carry you out of the ravine. It’s the fucking angel of death. My chest burned; my ears pounded. It took all my strength to keep my lips clamped shut. I searched the water for some sign of movement—if not the Shug, then Lew, somehow escaped from the Human Leaguers. Come on, Lew. You’re running through the forest, you’re at the pier, you’re diving . . .
There. Floating in the middle distance, a quavering circle of deeper black.
The black well.
As I watched, it blossomed, rushed toward me, filled my vision. The hole was bottomless, a twisting tunnel that branched and split into an infinite number of side shafts, but there was something waiting at the end of each of them. The mouth hovered above me, or I hovered over it, ready to fall, the gravity sucking at me like a whirlpool. It was a door, a gate—to something. Death, or the Hellion’s cage inside my head, or some false paradise generated by my oxygen-starved brain. I didn’t care, as long as it was somewhere else. I let go, and fell.
10
Oh my God, did you shoot him? The commander didn’t say to—
Shut the fuck up, Bertram, I didn’t fucking touch him!
For God’s sake just get him up, pull the chair up—
I don’t understand. Del never said his brother was epileptic . . . Everyone shut up! It’s a trick, dammit. Don’t fucking go near him!
It’s not a seizure.
—please, at least hold his head so he won’t—
What’d she say, “say-zure?”
I could feel him. There, in the dark, I reached for him. I reached and I grabbed—
Light.
An expanse of braided carpet, stretching like a plain. Voices: O’Connell, Louise, Bertram, other men. I’m telling you, don’t go near him!
Black boots appear, large as houses. A giant’s hand. Another male voice, closer: If this is a trick, we’re going to Taser you, do you understand? Can you talk?
I—
Lew’s voice. Resonating oddly, a microphone turned too loud in a small room.
I’m drowning, the voice said.
He struggled, trying to throw me off, and I clamped down tighter, tighter still, like the bear hugs he always used against me to end our wrestling matches.
His arms were stretched backward, wrists touching, bound in hard plastic.
Flex.
Lew’s arms flexed.
“You’re not drowning,” the guard said. “You fell over.”
Pull.
The arms yanked away from each other. Plastic snapped. The pain speared up the arms.
Ignore the pain. Grab him.
The hand seized the guard’s ankle, pulled. Small bones popped. The man screamed, hit the ground.
Get up.
The perspective lurched. A Human Leaguer in midnight camo, firing. The Taser dart embedded somewhere out of sight. The leaguer pulled the trigger, pulled it again. His expression changed from anger to confusion.
Punch.
The fist knocked the gunman back into a wall. The framed photographs clattered to the floor, coughing glass. Bertram, still in helmet and pack, seemed to be in shock, his eyes on the man who’d collapsed against the wall. Louise pressed far back into the couch. O’Connell, beside her, wore a tight-lipped expression that could have masked anything: fear, shock, anger.
“And who are you?” O’Connell asked.
Lew’s hands pulled the dart-tipped wire from his chest, tossed it aside.
“I’m dying,” Lew’s voice said.
Run.
The body knew what to do. It crossed the room in three long strides, pushed through the door, leaped over the steps, and landed in the gravel. Something popped in its right leg. It turned, ran toward Cabin 5.
Faster.
The body obeyed, though it ran jerkily now, its gait thrown off balance by the malfunctioning knee. Lungs heaved oxygen into the bloodstream; the heart forced it down, through clogged arteries, flooding large muscles with oxygen and chemicals. Pain signals traveled up the spine and went unanswered.
The body knew what to do, even though it had never done it so completely, so forcefully.
Trees whipped past. The yellow light of the washhouse illuminated a crumpled body in the middle of the road, one arm missing, the shoulder ending in a pool of blood like a rain puddle. It leaped over the dead man, clearing it by ten feet. Ten more seconds and it reached the last cabin, three more and it was through the trees, onto the wooden pier, and charging toward the water. The Shu’garath squatted at the end of the pier, pulling apart pieces of meat strung together with copper wire, as if deboning a fish. It looked up, white chest slicked with blood. It opened its mouth, and roared a challenge.
Out of my way.
“Out of my way,” Lew’s voice said.
The Shug threw down the loglike chunk it had been worrying and stood to face the running man. A moment before the two big men struck, the Shug melted aside and slipped into the water without a ripple. The running man didn’t break stride. Dive.
The icy water slapped the skin. Lew’s body was buoyant with fat and trapped air, but the big legs kicked and forced it into the dark. Ten feet down, then fifteen feet, the arms plowed into mud. The hands pushed through the silt, overturning rocks, waterlogged sticks, sharp-edged bits of ancient garbage. Eyes opened wide, gathering as much light as possible, but the water was too dim, too silted, to see more than a few inches. The body, already depleted of oxygen from the sprint, had to keep kicking to stay close to the bottom. The hands kept moving, fanning through the mud.
The pier. Closer to the pier.
Legs kicked toward the shore. Hands touched the first pylon, then the body swung back, moving low over the lake floor like a manatee. It worked on, commanded to ignore the burning in its chest, the blood trickling from its
