When the ghost came at Walker, he thought he could defend himself. They had been running and stumbling through the winding tunnel. Beyza had fallen again, and this time only Dr. Tang could drag her to her feet. Sophie careened forward with her arms outstretched as if she had been struck blind, but somehow she followed the light of her suit’s headlamp. Walker and Kim stayed together, leading the way, Kim’s light picking out the shadows and crevices.
The river. Always the river by their side. It echoed and burbled. In places its level dropped, and Walker tried not to think about the fact that they had been going deeper underground instead of climbing toward the surface. With all the hills and valleys in this region, who was to say where the surface might be found?
Shouts followed them and a few bursts of gunfire as if to frighten rabbits from the underbrush, but there were no rabbits here and no brush to hide in. Only the tunnel and the river that must have carved it over centuries. The jihadis went quiet again, perhaps not wanting to let their quarry know how much closer they had come, but Walker felt them gaining ground. The next shots that were fired would be at their backs.
The ledge grew narrower, wide enough for only one of them in some places, and then it broadened again, and here he launched into the closest approximation of a run he could manage with the plague settling into his bones. He felt the fire of lesions opening on his throat and saw them on his arms, and he ignored them and what they meant. And he ignored the ghosts …
But the one directly ahead of him, the one standing on the ledge as if it waited for them, could not be ignored. It stared straight at Walker, head cocked to one side as if its neck had been broken. Where the light from Kim’s headlamp touched it directly, the thing vanished, but in the gloom of light reflected off the tunnel wall and ceiling, it seemed alive with malice, wisps of blue mist rising from its eyes, though the eyes themselves were oil-black pinpoints.
When it lunged toward him, its lower body lost in shadow, flickering in and out of existence as it passed through Kim’s light, its head still canted at that awful angle, yet its eyes remained locked on Walker’s. He had been in a hundred fights, had faced would-be killers before, and though he knew this thing existed only as the waste that had been flushed from a human soul, still he charged to meet it. Feverish with plague, all he knew was that it reached for him, and if it could touch him, then surely he could do the same.
Walker had never been so mistaken.
It entered him with the force of a punch to the chest, staggered him backward. Blinking, he bent double and tried to vomit. Something filled him now, like nausea churning in his gut, and the only connection he could make in his mind was to times he had needed to be sick. He heaved, wanting it out of him.
Walker felt it snaking through him, spreading faster than any poison. Images flickered through his mind of hands that were not his own, hands around throats, fingers clenched on the hilts of daggers, palms stained with blood. A jubilation rose in him unlike any he had ever known, a joyfulness that matched the day his son Charlie had been born, the day of his wedding, the moment of his high school graduation, the night he had discovered Sheila McTeague naked in his bedroom, a bow around her waist to celebrate his seventeenth birthday.
No, not matched. This happiness suffused him so that he cried out and thrust his fists toward the ceiling of the tunnel in ecstasy. His hands flexed and opened, and he laughed with the freedom of it.
Then he turned toward Kim, tore open her hazmat suit, and ripped off the headpiece. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and punched her in the side of the face with such force that she spun out of his grip. Locks of black hair hung from his fingers, dancing in the breeze that swept along the tunnel, and he laughed again as she spun on him, eyes wide, and screamed his name, not in fear for herself but in horror at what had become of him.
Even trapped in the little space at the back of his mind where he’d been banished, where he now suffocated as the humming lust for cruelty filled his body, Walker could read Kim’s face and her intentions.
“Fight it, Walker!” she said, cradling the contagion box against her ruined hazmat suit. Blue plastic hung around her, and she began to tear it away, keeping the strap of the box over her shoulder. “Don’t make me leave you here.”
The cruelty inside Walker glanced over his shoulder at the darkness of the tunnel—their only way forward—and then faced the four women again. Beyza wilted to the ground. Sophie tried to make her stand, and she only shook her head, unable or unwilling to rise again. Dr. Tang hung back.
Walker smiled so wide that he felt the corners of his mouth split and tasted his own blood.
Again, Kim said his name. She did not turn away, did not try to run. Instead, she reached out a hand, her eyes pleading with him.
He knew he loved her then, but only in that little space in the back of his mind. The rest of him wanted to rip out her throat with his fingers and paint his entire body with her blood. There was power in that, and he wanted every drop.
The Walker inside wanted to cry out in grief and sorrow, but the outside Walker spat a mouthful of his own blood and lunged for Kim.
Sophie watched it happen—the moment the light went out in Walker’s eyes and some other, darker thing gleamed there. She had seen the ghost as it raced toward him, seen it vanish within him, and now she understood. Horror settled into her gut, driving out the terror she had felt only seconds before, and she found herself moving before she had made a conscious decision to do so. All thoughts of herself and her parents disappeared, and she found herself trapped in this single instant, this singular choice. The jar had sat on its altar down in the Pandora Room for so many centuries, an unexploded bomb full of malice and cruelty and disease, and her entire team had been in the midst of a slow-motion explosion ever since she had first set foot in that room. Frustration and anger, guilt and fear all swept up together and drove her to action.
She heard the jihadis shouting farther along the tunnel, but those voices seemed far away as she threw herself at Walker. As he reached for Kim, Sophie tackled him, drove him against the wall, and the two of them fell onto the rough stone ledge. Her left shoulder struck a jutting rock, and she felt her hazmat suit tear. It didn’t matter—nothing mattered now. Pain shot through her shoulder, but Walker had landed harder, whacking the side of his head on the ledge.
Sophie hauled back and punched him. Blood and dark spittle flew from his lips. His eyes had begun to turn red as she hit him again, and then a third time, breaking two fingers. The hatred slipped from his face, just a little, and she saw he was in a daze. Sophie leaped up, hauled back, and kicked him hard in the side.
Kim called her name, voice full of fear and concern, maybe for her or maybe for Walker, despite that he’d reached the last stage of this impossible contagion.
“Go!” Sophie shouted at her and Tang and Beyza.
The others started past her on the ledge, teetering on the edge of the river, Dr. Tang holding on to Beyza and almost forcing her to move. Beyza looked so sick now that she would have to be carried if they went much farther.
Kim hesitated, clutching the contagion box against her.
Then the rest of the jihadis came around a corner of the tunnel, back where their advance scout lay dead. They shouted in fury and opened fire. Bullets chipped holes in the tunnel wall and the ledge, some plinking into the water. Sophie whipped her head around to stare for a heartbeat, and she saw them—saw in the light from her headlamp that some were already badly infected, saw the ghosts swarming around them.
Kim ran past her, bullets whining around them.
Sophie turned to follow her, but a sneering Walker reached out and grabbed at her ankle. He used her struggle to drag himself to his feet, took a fistful of her clothing, and spun her around to face him, his grin tearing farther at the corners of his mouth. Red tears slid down his face. He grabbed her throat and squeezed.
She tried to appeal to whatever part of him remained behind those eyes, tried to get him to see the jihadis coming for them. She twisted, tried to get his body between her and the terrorists, but too late.
Bullets struck them both. Sophie felt one punch through her side, then another hit her from behind, exiting out through her left shoulder, and she stepped right off the ledge and into the river.
The last thing she saw as the black water swept her away was Walker tumbling in after her, bullets zipping into the current in pursuit.