Warmth was all he felt, and wetness. More blood leaking from him to soak into this unnatural forest’s floor.
Are they watching me even now? he wondered. The death and pain’s for real, but there was still that camera, so are they watching me now? Those controllers? Those bastards?
“Help me!” he shouted. “Please!”
They passed over a small rise topped with heavily thorned plants. First he heard them snagging in Jonah’s clothing and dried skin, and then they gouged and pricked at his own—thighs, scrotum, stomach, chest, and then his face, because he was feeling weaker with each second that passed by, and couldn’t hold it up. His back was wet and hot around the knife wound, cooler elsewhere as the night air whispered across the blood. He could smell it, and see it beneath him as he left a bloody trail across the forest floor.
Marty coughed and spat a dark mass. Tears burned his eyes. The darkness grew darker. “No… help me!”
And then the darkness grew deeper still as Judah went down. At first Marty didn’t understand, but as things started to feel and sound different—the ground was damper, his cries and the dragging noises muffled by something surrounding them—he realized what was happening. Judah had risen from a hole in the forest floor, and now he was taking Marty back down into it.
He started struggling with all the energy and determination he had left, digging his fingers into the soil, clawing, trying to gain purchase as the zombie continued to pull. Trees and sky were being drawn away and total darkness hauled him down, and he’d never wanted to be out in that weird forest as much as he did then.
“Help me!” he screamed again, voice swallowed by the ground around him. He could see each extreme of the hole now as it framed the outside, and the inside smelled musty and of old decay long given over to time. His strength was leaving him. The knife drained his life and poured it into the ground around him. He smelled wet earth and blood.
One final scream and the outside was cut off from view, and Marty could do nothing but be dragged, and dragged, and dragged toward his doom.
The screen grew still as the screaming boy was taken underground. They had cameras and sensors down there too, but there was no need to check on what was happening. Old Jonah Buckner was good at his craft, and if he couldn’t extract the knife from the kid’s back to finish the job, he had plenty more. Down there. In the darkness.
Sitterson swiveled his chair away from the control panel and started whistling, glancing around Control as he did so. Truman stood beside the door just down the curved metal staircase, as he had since the beginning. His eyes were wider than usual, and Sitterson thought he saw a trace of sweat on the soldier’s top lip. But they’d have never been sent a raw recruit. Without even asking, he knew that Truman had seen action and had at least three years of combat postings behind him. He’d likely seen friends killed, and might have killed people himself. From a distance maybe, their deaths little more than clouds of dust and a quick dance. Or maybe he’d killed close-in, so he could look into the victim’s eyes as he or she died.
But none of the action he’d seen would have been like this. Sitterson was only glad the soldier hadn’t yet asked what lots of new ones tended to: But why, when they’re so defenseless? Mainly because the answer was so glib. They have to be.
Still whistling, Sitterson watched Hadley go to the second mahogany panel at the back of the room, slide it open and pull the lever inside. He closed his eyes and kissed the pendant around his neck, knowing that a process was being repeated around and beneath him, blood flowing, grooves and carvings and etchings being filled, all in darkness as ever it was.
Sometimes in nightmares he dreamed of that shape slowly being traced in blood, the primitive human figure holding a goblet and dancing, carved into a chunk of stone as old as the world itself, and on waking he’d feel a deep dread more basic than anything he’d ever felt before, fearing that he was the Fool. Much of the dread came from the knowledge of what he had almost touched, because even dreams were no way to draw close.
And some of the dread came from the mystery of how he knew about the blood, and the carving, and the shapes they picked out.
He had learned to simply accept. Much easier that way. So he whistled, and Hadley returned to his desk, and Truman looked at his feet for a few seconds because he knew it had only just begun.
A rumble passed through Control, and two of the three large screens flickered for less than a second. The sensation passed as quickly as it had begun.
“They’re getting excited downstairs,” Hadley said as he lowered himself gently into his chair.
Sitterson nodded and looked around at Truman, who was standing almost to attention again now, though his eyes flickered left and right as if searching for something.
“Greatest Show on Earth…” Sitterson said. Then he returned to his controls, tapped a few keys and brought up the next screen.
Another rumble filled the room as the last girl did her best to survive.
Somehow she was still functioning. Through all this the fear had clasped her cold around the chest, but she was still moving, still able to stand, still able to think. She had no idea how.
She looked at her hands pressed against the side of the tall dresser as she tried to push it in front of the window, and Jules’s blood was already crisp between her fingers and tacky across the back. Perhaps that was where her strength came from: she knew that Jules would never want her to just give in.
So she shoved, and the wooden base of the dresser squealed across the timber floor.
Patience’s mother was thumping against the window from outside. Two panes of glass had cracked, but the zombie seemed stupid, not realizing that she could shove her way through the glass. She pounded against the wooden frame and around the opening, mouth pressed against the glass, rotten tongue tracing grotesque patterns in the dust. If Dana could just get the dresser across the window.
She’d heard the screams and chaos from Marty’s room. Then the silence. She tried not to think about what that meant, but how could she not? How could she ignore the idea that Marty might have—
Jules’s dead eyes urged her to fight on, and the dresser slipped that much closer to the window.
“Keep bashing, bitch,” Dana muttered, and then the sound of Mother’s pounding changed. The whole room began to shake, dust drifted down from the ceiling, dark spidery shapes scurried to safety in shadows, and then the cabin swayed as a great grumbling sound filled the air. Dana looked around in disbelief.
Earthquake? You gotta be fucking kidding!
“What?” she gasped. “No! No, come on!”
The air seemed to vibrate and her vision blurred. She bit her lip—afraid for a second that she was fainting—but then the rumbling started to subside and the floor leveled beneath her. For a moment all was still and even the bashing from the window had ceased. Let the ground have opened up and swallowed her whole, Dana thought, but she was already shoving hard against the dresser when the pounding began again.
With one last effort she heaved the tall item of furniture before the window, standing in front of it and pushing so that it was flush against the wall on either side. As if that was a signal, Mother turned her attention to the glass and soon smashed it out, and Dana felt the dresser starting to rock. She leaned against it for a moment, absorbing the impacts, but they were turning harder and harder as the zombie became more determined to gain entry.