“There,” Edgar said simply, his voice flat, pointing at the mound of bodies.
Sandy pulled up, panting, trying to see through her mask that was suddenly fogging up. It must have been because she had been running. She forced herself to slow her breathing, but it was difficult with her heart thumping like a machine gun. She closed her eyes, focused on inhaling through her nose, exhaling through her mouth. When she was ready, she opened her eyes.
For a second, she thought it was Kevin. Same dark hair. Same skinny build.
Wrong shoes.
She looked closer. It wasn’t him. “Oh, thank you, thank you,” she breathed.
Purcell and Charlie splashed up behind her. “Well?” Purcell said, sounding panicked.
Sandy couldn’t speak. She could only shake her head.
Purcell aimed his flashlight at the boy. “You sure?”
Sandy finally managed, “Yes. It’s not him.”
Purcell took a deep breath himself. “Well, that’s… that’s good, I suppose.” He pointed his shotgun, shining his light back down the tunnel. “Let’s see, we have, five minutes left. I think we should—”
Axel cried out and jerked his legs out of the trough and scrabbled up the side of the sewer. There was a hand holding tight to his left ankle. An arm was connected to the hand, but up where the shoulder should have been part of a torso, there was only a mess of gray tendrils sprouting from around the white bone ball joint.
Axel shook his foot, but the hand refused to let go. He brought his AA-12 shotgun over his shoulder, rested the end of the barrel on the severed limb’s wrist, and squeezed the trigger. Three blasts, so close together they might have been a single explosive sneeze, vaporized the arm in an explosion of blood and viscous, gray slime.
The fingers did not relent and clutched his cowboy boot with a tenacity that enraged Axel. He scraped them off with his other boot and fired again, disintegrating the flesh, blowing the knucklebones into the trough. The sound of the shotgun blasts echoed down the tunnels and for a moment, silence reigned.
“You good?” Purcell asked.
“Fuckers!” Axel shouted.
“Okay,” Purcell said. “I think—”
“Shhh.” Edgar put a finger to his lips. “Listen.”
Purcell and Charlie turned their flashlights back down the tunnel. For a moment, all they could hear was their own rasping breathing inside the gas masks. Then, way, way down the tunnel, a splash. Something heavy. More splashing. It got louder. Then a whole cascade of wet slapping, almost like bare footsteps.
“Whoever it is, there’s more than one of ’em,” Charlie whispered.
“Maybe it’s somebody coming to help. National Guard, somebody like that,” Axel said.
“Might be more boys from Allagro,” Purcell said.
“Great,” Axel said. “Let them clean up their mess.”
Sandy shook her head. “We’re part of the mess. They’ll kill us all.”
Something emerged into the very edge of their lights, then backed away into the darkness. Whatever it was, it was down low, as if someone had been crawling along on their hands and knees.
“I wanna try something,” Purcell said. “Point your lights at the floor for a sec.”
Sandy said, “I’d rather keep an eye on whatever is down there.”
“We will. Just for a quick second. Want to see if I can draw it any closer. Let’s get a better idea of what we’re dealing with here.”
One by one, they all aimed their flashlights at the trough. Sandy was last. She stared into the blackness, straining to hear whatever was down the tunnel. She finally couldn’t take it anymore and brought her light back up. A yelp burst out of her before she could stop herself.
The Fitzgimmons whipped their lights up.
The tunnel was alive with crawling tendrils. Human limbs had been stretched out along each tendril, sprouting from each side in random arrangements, like crumbling teeth in a rotten mouth. Pale, bare legs slapped through the shallow trench, arms reached out and clutched at the wet bricks. There were too many tendrils to count. They skittered and scrabbled and clawed over each other, undulating over the mounds of inert bodies, sometimes crawling up the sides of the sewer pipe.
Axel was the first to let loose, unloading his clip in less than three seconds. Charlie and Edgar were next, unleashing a blizzard of lead. Purcell and Sandy started shooting as well. An unholy firestorm of destruction exploded down the tunnel.
The arms and legs shattered in bloodless spatters of meat and gray muck.
The shooting died down and everybody reloaded. The trough and bottom of the sloping walls were littered with empty shotgun shells. Blue gun smoke hung around them in a thick haze.
The tendrils did not stop. They sloughed off the ruined limbs, leaving them behind like a plant sheds dead leaves. Fresh, undamaged arms and legs continued to propel the tendrils forward, surging ahead in a clumsy, hungry motion.
“Go,” Purcell said. “Go!”
Nobody argued; they turned and ran. Edgar and Axel charged through the sewer, side by side, Sandy on their heels, followed by Charlie and Purcell. They sprinted through the darkness, jumping over mounds of bodies, flashlight beams bouncing off the curved walls.
Axel stepped on the kneecap of one of the bodies stretched between the mounds. The sudden weight twisted the vulnerable joint, pitching Axel sideways into the wall. He rolled into a mound, flailing and kicking. Sandy grabbed the back of his jeans and yanked him upright. Charlie crashed into her and they all stumbled.
Purcell fired a few rounds back down the tunnel behind them for the hell of it.
Edgar ran on ahead, panic fueling his flight. He looked back to make sure that everyone was following, and when he turned back around, his head smacked into low concrete. His feet kept going and he flopped flat on his back in the center of the trough. Sandy and Axel reached him and Sandy jerked his head out of the filthy water.
Blood ran from a gash in his forehead, spilling down between the two circular lenses of the mask. He was out cold, limp as an abandoned marionette. Axel and Charlie lifted him up and they turned to see what lay ahead.
The sewer grew smaller here; the larger pipe collapsed down into a pipe only four feet in diameter. Purcell pulled a road flare from Charlie’s backpack and struck the tip. Everybody flinched from the burst of sizzling light. “Might slow ’em down,” Purcell said, and tossed it into the center of the closest mound behind them.
Sandy went first. At least the mounds of bodies had tapered off and stopped, leaving the pipe clear. She could walk through the pipe fairly quickly, keeping her head down and back hunched. Charlie and Axel had to bend almost in half at the waist; they were dragging Edgar anyway, so it didn’t matter as much. The flare sent their running shadows flickering before them like black flames.
Sandy saw something coming up, some irregularity in the top of the tunnel. She got closer and saw that it was another pipe, leading up to a new manhole. She yelled, “Here!” and climbed up. She reached the cover and tried to lift it. It was too heavy. She went back down, saying, “I can’t budge it.” Charlie pushed her out of the way and clambered up. They heard him grunt and a sliver of faint light spilled down around him. He came back down and together with Axel, they lifted Edgar up the vertical conduit.
Sandy followed them and crawled out to a night sky and pavement still warm from the heat of the day. She saw that they had emerged three blocks south on Fifth Street, near the high school. The sun was only a red glimmer on the horizon. The streetlights along Main Street were on. Down here, it was all residential houses, and there were no lights. Night was gathering in the deepening shadows, spreading like ink.