“Because I can feel it. I can feel the air. Can’t you?”
I closed my eyes, concentrating. He was right. “You’re?—”
“Dig, Lou!” The words escaped him as pained gasps. “Stop fucking talking to me and dig!”
Tears and sweat clung to my lashes and eyelids, gluing them nearly closed. My hands clenched the handle of the pickaxe. Rocks bit into my knuckles, blood staining every stone beneath me. Every breath stung like a thousand wasps. Every movement screamed for release.
But I moved. Stone by stone, rock by rock, we inched forward. The tunnel grew smaller, more constrictive—a serpentine passage into the belly of the earth. But soon, it stopped.
His labored wheezing echoed around the rocks, merging with the mine’s distant groan.
“There’s no opening,” I coughed. “The rocks won’t move anymore. We—we went the wrong way,” I moaned desperately.
“No.” He gasped. “Oh, fuck no. Drop the pick. Use your hands.” He coughed violently, the sound muffled by the thick air and stone.
I plunged back into darkness, hands blindly scraping against the rough surface of a boulder. The skin of my knuckles had ripped away, grime mixing with blood. Desperate sobs hitched in my chest with every inhale of muck and dirt and worms and stone. His own ragged breaths echoed in my ears, still doing his damnedest to help me along, though his voice was no more than a rasp. At last, though, my fingertips brushed against a thin line of cold air leaking from above, and I could barely believe it. I dared tohope.
Until a large, cold hand closed around my ankle.
I shrieked, heart pounding wildly as I was yanked backward.
Zombies.Oh God, they were real, and they were?—
“Noam?” I stuttered, recoiling at the sight of him, which was barely him anymore, his massive body as much of a smoking, blown-open crater as the mine itself. His face was tissue and bone, one eye missing, though his gaze was still somehow, unerringly focused on me.
“What—what are you?—”
“I’m—I’m doing what I came to do.” His voice rattled. He was delirious. Closer to dead than I was.
But that wouldn’t stop him from killing me.
His grip, still iron, tightened on my ankle again, then let go. I scrambled forward, pulling away from his hand, but he wrestled me back as his lip curled into a bitter rictus, and his reanimated corpse coughed again, a violent, throttling sound.
From behind me, his breath hitched with pain as he turned his body, aiming a weak kick at Noam, who lunged wildly, throwing his arms up.
My scream was cut short as the earth made its complaint again. I could only watch in horror as three boulders, one after another, crashed down, swallowing Noam—and the path we’d been on.
Coughs racked my lungs as I struggled to draw air, waiting for the dust to settle. The silence was broken only by the faint groans of the mine as the earth shifted around us. And then even that faded, replaced by our wheezing.
I turned to him in disbelief. “What?—”
“No time.” He gasped, pushing me forward with the weight of his dirt-covered, bloodied shoulder. “Go.”
I needed no further urging. Acridity had my throat in a vise. I was asphyxiating.
My fingertips scrabbled against the rock, discovering a thin crack. I wedged my fingers into it, digging my nails into the stone until they broke and bled, and blood ran down my arms in rivers. Sweat trickled down my brow, flooding and stinging my eyes. Every breath was a battle, every movement a bloody war.
I gritted my teeth, using every ounce of my remaining strength to heave the rock aside. It budged, revealing another narrow crevice. The groaning sound of the earth intensified as we widened the opening just enough for us to pass through. Theair grew thinner, the passage steeper. His coughs and moans of pain filled the darkness, each one driving a stake through my heart. And then all at once, he stopped.
“I—”
I cut him off, reaching back to grip his wrist tightly. “Shut up. Yup, now it’s my turn.Move, dammit.”
With Herculean effort, we edged our way through the crevice, clothes snagging, skin scraping so deep I could swear it was bone on bone.
Behind me, he tried to speak but could only cough again, a rasp that tore at my heart.
“Can you see it?” But the echo of my voice, bouncing off the passage’s walls, was the only answer.
