Supporting Emma with an arm, he walked her down the hallway and into the kitchen. Kingsley gave her a sideways look when he saw Sebastian. They moved past the body, wordless.
Then as they came to the back doorway, there was the sound of footsteps behind them.
They turned to see Mark and John enter the house.
4.
He only knew he was conscious because of the pain. The fear. The constricting, claustrophobic heaviness all around him. The knowledge that he was dying. It all came to him at once, his gut twisting with blind primal panic.
No air. Pitch black. Suffocating – fast. No room. Grit in his eyes, mouth, nostrils, ears. The muffled noise of powdery sand shifting around him as he struggled.
He couldn’t even breathe to scream. When he wriggled his limbs, it felt as if they were encased in concrete.
His mind was melting, everything fading again. He only knew he was still alive – just barely – from the distant sensation of sand sifting through his fingers as he burrowed through the grit without conscious volition. Why was he trying to escape? In a few seconds he would be dead.
But then there was a different sensation on his fingertips: open air, breeze.
By the time the realisation hit that his hand had broken through the surface, he was so oxygen-starved that he felt himself leaving his body…
… floating…
… up above the ground…
… looking down upon his sandy grave…
… seeing his own hand protruding from the grey mound he was buried under…
I’m dead, he thought. And the surreal image of his stiff, pale hand poking up from the sand scared the fuck out of him.
But if he was dead… how was he still thinking? Where even was he?
How was his hand still moving?
It felt like he was there – wherever there was – for several minutes. Then the sand rose as his other hand came to the surface.
Suddenly he was back in his body. Sand and cement powder cascading down his face as he heaved himself up into a sitting position and sucked in a painful breath of fresh air. Everything hurt. Every muscle, every inch of his skin. But he was alive. Somehow.
He dug his torso and legs free, a burn in his lower abdomen reminding him of the wound he’d sustained. His eyes were fuzzy but he could see that the area on the side of his abdomen where he had been stabbed was caked with red clumps of sandy cement. It seemed to have clogged the wound, slowing the bleeding to a small trickle.
He wasn’t going to question how he was still alive; there was only one thing on his mind now and he wondered if he had enough life left in him to carry it out.
*
The two men noticed Sebastian’s body almost as soon as they walked through the front doorway of the house. They glared at the other two survivors.
“Go,” Kingsley hissed at Emma. “I’ll hold them back.”
Emma didn’t move. She knew he wouldn’t be able to take on both of them. Mark and John began to march toward the pair, brandishing their bloody knives.
“Emma, go!” But she only shook her head. Squeezed her knife until her knuckles blanched.
The men stopped at the threshold of the kitchen. Kingsley and Mark stared daggers at each other, no sound in the room but the quick, shallow breaths of fight-or-flight alertness.
It was Mark who made the first move – a horizontal slash, Kingsley flinching back and retaliating with a thrust. They tracked Sebastian’s blood across the floor with their feet as they swiped and jabbed their blades at each other.
Emma wanted to help him, but John came toward her with a predatory glint in his eyes before she could do anything.
She waited for him to get close. Then she lifted the wooden stick in her left hand and swung it at him. He caught it with his free hand and she tried to yank it back, but his grasp was iron. Still tugging, Emma swiped at his arm with her knife and he let go to avoid the cut. He swung his own knife at her but she was already hopping away, retreating out the back door.
John caught up with her and shoved her to the ground outside, Emma dropping the knife as she fell. She rolled onto her back and whacked him in the stomach with her stick. It barely nudged him.
He kicked her sprained knee, snatched the stick off her as she yelped, tossed it to the side.
Defenceless, Emma searched for the knife she’d dropped. But John found it before her.
Squatting above her, he pointed the blade at her belly while pressing down on her knee with his free hand. She gritted her teeth; she couldn’t fight him, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of hearing her scream.
“You dumb cunt,” John snarled. “We helped you, and you turned against us.”
Emma threw her head to the side, a groan escaping from her mouth.
That was when she noticed the snapper. Shuffling past the back wall of the next house, coming toward them.
She groaned louder, watching the snapper and thinking if she made enough noise John wouldn’t hear it approach until it was too late.
“Bitch. You’re gonna pay.” She stared him right in the eye and let her groan turn into a scream as her knee flared under the increasing pressure of his grip. “Yeah, you keep screaming. Might not even kill you.”
When she looked again, the snapper was less than six feet away. She shut her eyes and kept yelling, hoping it would attack him first.
“Might just break both your legs,” John went on. “Leave you out here for the—”
She heard him startle as he let go of her leg, opened her eyes to see him grappling with the snapper. Right away she began to crawl towards the wooden stick John had dropped a few feet away.
Reaching
