Karen ground her teeth. “Don’t,” she hissed.
Alicia shot a puzzled expression at Dream.
What’s this shit all about?
Dream didn’t know, but a sense of dread caused the muscles in her arms to twitch like those of a junkie in the midst of withdrawal. The spite in Chad’s voice was an awful thing to hear. It was like listening to a depraved stranger. She was having difficulty reconciling the malice radiated by this person with her memories of the boy she remembered. She knew some of it was due to major changes in Chad’s life. Success in business had eradicated most of his former shyness and replaced it with swagger and a caustic tongue. She often had to consciously remind herself that he really wasn’t the same person he’d been-and that a heartbreaking amount of time had passed since he’d even remotely resembled that person.
“Dan Bishop didn’t have all the fun in Florida, Shane.” Chad grinned. His tone was that of one who relished the discomfort his words generated. “Someone else got some extracurricular tail during our ill-fated sojourn to the Sunshine State. Care to hazard a guess who?”
A silent moment elapsed.
Karen closed her eyes and awaited the inevitable.
Chad chuckled, but some of the edge was gone from his voice. Dream had a sudden precognitive flash about what he was going to say, something that just couldn’t be.
Something very, very wrong.
Chad said, “I fucked your girlfriend, Shane.”
Dream drew in a sharp breath.
Chad kept talking, driving the figurative knife home and giving it a wicked twist. “I fucked her while you were out fishing with Dan.”
Dream drew in a sharp breath.
One strangled word emerged from Shane’s throat: “Bullshit.”
Karen sobbed. “You fucking asshole, Chad.”
“It wasn’t the first time, either. But you shouldn’t be jealous.” Some of the malice returned to Chad’s voice. “There’s no emotional involvement. She calls me her fuckbuddy. She has several fuckbuddies, Shane. The way I understand it, she just can’t get enough dick.”
Shane was shaking with barely controlled fury.
“Now, don’t be angry with her.” A tone of mock consolation entered Chad’s voice then. “She needs help. Professional help. Booze isn’t her only weakness, guy. She’s addicted to sex, too.” He smirked. “She’s a nymphomaniac. A slut. A whore. A cheap floozie. Not to mention a really nice piece of ass.”
Dream flicked on the Accord’s right turn signal.
The action went unnoticed by the rest of the car’s occupants, including Alicia, whose attention was riveted to the brewing shitstorm in the backseat.
Karen sagged in her seat and said, “Somebody just put me out of my misery, please.”
Shane looked at her. “Tell me he’s full of shit, Karen.”
Karen apparently had nothing else to say.
Chad’s smirk deepened. “There you go, Shane. Secret revealed.”
Shane lunged across the suddenly gasping Karen Hidecki and clamped a large hand around Chad’s throat.
Karen shrieked.
Alicia surged through the gap between the front seats in an attempt to save Chad Robbins from almost certain asphyxiation. The backseat became a cacophony of screams, shouts, and choked gasps.
No one realized the Accord was slowing down.
Or that it was turning off the interstate.
Most of them would never see it again.
***
Monsters pursued Eddie down a long tunnel lit intermittently by flickering gas lamps. The narrow passage twisted every so often, sometimes creating a blind spot untouched by the gaslight. Several times he crashed into the tunnel wall, tumbled to the hardpacked dirt floor, and staggered back to his feet. Every time he got up, the monsters seemed just a little bit closer than they were before. Their frenzied, hungry cries filled his ears and made his stomach clench with fear. Soon, he supposed, he would feel their hot breath on the back of his neck.
And then it would be too late.
He arrived at a place where the tunnel branched off in two directions. He came to a sudden stop, risked a glance behind him, and listened to the sound of his pursuers drawing still closer. His gaze snapped back to the maddening intersection and the unwanted complications it created. He experienced a long moment of panicky indecision that threatened to paralyze him. He saw himself rooted to this spot until fangs pierced his flesh and tore him apart.
The passage to his left glowed with a brighter light than that cast by the lamps. Somewhere down that length of tunnel, perhaps just around the next bend, lurked lights powered by electricity. The notion of electricity was alluring, with its hints of things sane, of things created by men from the world of his former life. The passage to the right was darker by far. He detected a faint flicker of gaslight from that direction. So he had a choice-on the one hand, more of the same; on the other, a slim possibility of deliverance from this land of madness.
He listened a moment longer to the heavy thud of dozens of dreadful creatures careening down the tunnel behind him.
His once-comfortable head start was dwindling by the nanosecond.
His only choice was forward motion.
NOW
He turned toward the light and started running again.
The tunnel continued in a straight line for a few moments, and the light-its source still unseen-grew steadily brighter. Eddie then reached another bend in the tunnel, the last he would encounter. The hardpacked dirt of the tunnel floor gave way to a short expanse of cracked tile bordered by cinder-block walls. Someone had scrawled “Lazarus is the way” on one of the walls. A bank of fluorescent lights hummed quietly from the ceiling. An unlatched metal door at the center of the wall directly opposite him beckoned like a street-corner whore in stiletto heels and a microskirt.
“What the hell … ?”
A goddamn open door. The fleeting thought that maybe he was being herded rather than chased flashed through his mind like a comet. The implications were dreadful, but there was no time to contemplate this new layer of mystery. No time at all. He would be monster dinner if he lingered any longer. He bolted toward the door, crossed the expanse of tile quicker than Carl Owens on crack, yanked the door open, stepped through the opening, and slammed it shut. He threw the latch home, turned a crank that secured it, and stepped back to catch his breath and gather his wits.
Something large and powerful struck the other side of the wall. Eddie flinched, but he thought he was safe for the moment. Another creature struck the door and its hinges groaned a bit. Eddie gulped. Maybe he wasn’t so safe. He remained certain the door would hold a little longer, but he had to concede it would eventually yield to the furious assault it was enduring. Which was cool, since he meant to be long gone from here by then.
The idea of freedom bloomed in his brain like a spring flower-it was intoxicating, the prospect of again being able to breathe fresh air. To see the sun again. To go anywhere his heart desired. To watch pay-per-view porn at his leisure. Mostly, it would be nice to again live in a world uninhabited by monsters and crazy people. Okay, there were crazy people in the surface world, too, but that was a pedestrian kind of crazy by comparison. He would rather come face-to-face with Jeffrey Dahmer’s long-lost, meaner brother than spend one more second in this freak-show place.
Speaking of which, wasn’t it high time he got his ass in gear again?
The door hinges groaned a little louder.
YEP
He whirled around, staggered forward a foot or two, and came to an abrupt halt.
“Oh my God …”he breathed.
He was in a cramped, dimly lit room that appeared to be some sort of security office or checkpoint. A large, paper-cluttered metal desk occupied much of the room. Above it a bank of black-and-white monitors flickered quietly. Several seemed to show various empty tunnels. Or perhaps these were just different portions of the same tunnel. The tunnel-or tunnels-closely resembled the place he’d just left behind. Funny, he hadn’t noticed anything even remotely resembling a camera. He supposed they’d been obscured in some fashion, an easy enough proposition in all that darkness. The top row of screens was devoted to several angles of a deceptively normal-looking house. How innocuous it seemed. How normal. How safe. Well, how else would the entrance to hell ensnare its victims? Other monitors revealed places he’d become all too familiar with over these last several months. Looking at these scenes made him anxious to get on with his flight from the howling terror behind him.