Chapter 5
Jake stood ten yards from the drill rig, unable to move forward. The flames had spread out over the bottom of the rig, fed by a ruptured fuel line, and the heat washed over him, taking his breath away. Sweat dried on his face, and his skin felt suddenly tight, stretched over his cheekbones. Only thirty feet away, Greer was almost completely entombed in the tangle of tendrils, which were moving slowly over his body, prodding, assessing. One of the coils had wound itself under the bloody bandage on Greer’s forehead.
It didn’t make sense. The tentacles—which was how he thought of them now, not roots—should have withered under the heat. Greer’s face should be blistered and peeling. Then it came to him: They’re on the ground. All the heat’s up high.
He dropped to his belly and began to wriggle forward. The heat did not dissipate entirely, but it became manageable, about at the upper end of what he had experienced in various saunas and sweat ceremonies when he was younger. He inched toward Greer on his stomach, his knife out in front of him. He could feel the ground vibrating under him as the inferno raged ahead and above him. He didn’t like being on the ground at all, and he supposed Greer was already beyond help. It was the sight of the coiled growth under Greer’s head bandage that propelled Jake forward, the indecency of it, like a hand thrust under a lady’s dress.
As he neared, the coils around Greer contracted, tightening their hold. At the same time, he felt something ripple under his belly, under the ground. He pushed himself to his knees and was immediately met with a wave of heat. He flattened again, falling to his elbows. It wasn’t just the heat; the air was noxious and unbreathable just inches above his head.
“Greer? Greer, can you hear me?”
Greer’s head moved a fraction of an inch, and then it snapped back into its previous position, the coil under Greer’s bandage contracting. The blood that had plastered his face was gone, and even his beard seemed cleaned of the gore it had been streaked with only minutes ago.
It drank it, Jake thought. It’s a goddamn bloodsucker.
“Easy,” Jake said. “I’m going to cut you loose.”
The knife blade had no more than touched the surface of the first tendril when the entire mass of gray coils surrounding Greer contracted. Greer’s scream was overlaid with the sound of cracking bones and joints. Jake withdrew the knife, and the coils relaxed.
All except one. A thick ribbon emerged from underneath Greer’s belly, slightly darker than the others. It moved upward, the pointed end nosing along Greer’s flannel shirt and coming to rest at his throat. It lay there, pressed against the throbbing pulse under the stubbly skin of his neck. It was a threat, simple and awful: Leave me to my feeding.
Jake glanced around him. The tripod lay on its side a few yards away. Perhaps he could get the harness around Greer and yank him free. No, he would never be able to get the harness through that Medusa’s head of writhing tentacles. And even if he could, it seemed the tentacles would simply crush Greer before he could be pulled free. What, then? The drill rig was engulfed in flames, and there was nothing there but hot steel and flaming paint and fuel oil. His eyes happened across one of the cans of diesel fuel on the far side of the rig. He squirmed over to it, Greer groaning some entreaty to him as he crawled away. Jake couldn’t tell if he was asking for help or if he wanted Jake to save himself. It didn’t sound like either request, though; it sounded like a different kind of entreaty. Two small words, choked out of Greer’s tortured body.
“Kill me.”
No, Jake thought. We’re not there yet.
The plastic fuel container was hot to the touch, the sides bulging out from the interior pressure. Jake shook it, and dark fuel sloshed against the sides. A quarter full, perhaps a couple of gallons. He dragged the container back to Greer, who was still moaning, his fingers twitching inside the grip of several smaller tendrils. Jake unscrewed the spigot and hot air rushed out, the smell of oily hydrocarbons so thick he thought the can might explode in his hands. But that was the thing about diesel; it didn’t explode as easily as gasoline. It burned, though. It burned very, very hot.
He crawled around Greer, soaking the ground with the fuel oil about three feet from his body. When he had completed the circle, he crawled back toward the flaming rig, trailing the can behind him. Greer moaned something at him again, but Jake didn’t turn around. If the tentacles crushed Greer, so be it; this slow consumption, if that’s what it was, was more awful than the quick crushing death the coils could obviously deliver. And Jake thought the threat was simply that—a threat. Whatever this creature was, it obviously preferred to keep its prey alive so that it could feed at its own pace. It might kill Greer, but it would only do so if there was no other way to keep him in its grip.
Jake took a deep breath and got to his feet, then threw the last dregs of fuel in the can into the inferno. The yellow container crumpled instantly in the heat, and the flames danced outward, flickering at the trail of diesel. For a moment Jake thought that was it, that the ground was too saturated with mud and water. Then the trail lit up, starting near the rig and quickly racing around Greer’s body, a low, guttering flame like St. Elmo’s fire. The heat spiked up, and even lying flat on the ground, Jake had to wriggle backward, gasping for breath. The grass around him burst into flames. The diesel had done more than he’d thought it would, acting as a thermal catalyst for the superheated grasses that hadn’t yet burned. Greer screamed again, braying in pain; it was as though he could finally get enough breath in his lungs to make the kind of noise his body demanded.
I killed him, Jake thought. I just burned him alive.
But the flames died down as quickly as they had sprung up, and when they had subsided, he saw that Greer, his face and arms red and covered with heat blisters, was very much alive. And the coils were almost gone. All but one had retreated into the ground. The remaining tendril was shriveled and darkened, no more threatening than a dormant grapevine. Jake waited a moment to let the heat dissipate, then crawled forward and clutched Greer’s wrist. The skin slid over the flesh of the wrist, bunching under Jake’s hand, and Greer’s screams went up an octave.
Jake wormed backward, yanking Greer after him. The ground was cooling rapidly, and he could feel the earth moving under him again, rapid and erratic movements, nothing like the smooth rippling he’d felt moments earlier.
He kept moving, trying to ignore Greer’s screams. He needed to get Greer into the river, to stop the heat from destroying any more of his tissue. The air reeked of diesel smoke and burnt hair and skin. He didn’t look at Greer’s face, instead focusing on the wrist and arm he held in front of him. His lungs were scorched, and his throat and mouth felt like he’d gargled boiling liquid. They went forward in lurches; Jake first, then yanking Greer along behind him. In a moment or two he could risk getting to his feet, and then he would be able to hook his arms under Greer’s armpits and—
Greer’s scream turned into a garbled choke. Jake spun around and saw a tendril already retreating back into the ground, the tip soaked with blood. It had punched a ragged hole in Greer’s windpipe the size of a quarter, the open wound spurting blood into the air. As soon as Jake stopped pulling him, more tendrils swarmed over Greer; others moved toward Jake. There was nothing erratic in their movements now; they had been momentarily disoriented, but now the mission was clear: they would not have their prize taken.
A small puff of dust erupted from one of the darker tendrils and spread into the air.
Jake got to his feet, dizzy and nearly blinded from the heat. Greer would soon be dead; the blood was coming out at an incredible rate, squeezed from his body by the coils of tentacles encircling his body. Jake stumbled forward a few steps and looked back. The tendrils were not pursuing him. They were bunched around Greer’s throat, twisting and coiling around the crimson pool. Jake backed up, watching through watering eyes as Greer’s lifeblood drained from him and was just as quickly absorbed into the gray coils, which changed color as they swelled from their feeding.
He gagged, breathing in more of the dust that had come from the tip of the darker tendril. It tasted bitter, like bile. He turned to wobble across the valley, trying to stay on the rocks wherever he could. The ground was very soft.
He could hear Warren and the others calling for him, but he couldn’t see them. He swiveled, feeling as though his brain was lagging a quarter second behind his eyes. What vision he had left continued to narrow, two long tunnels of light surrounded by a pitching and whirling darkness. The ground tilted underneath him, and his legs felt suddenly weightless. He had felt this way only once before, hit in the head by a binder chain in a logging camp in Whitehorse.
He forced one foot in front of the other. He wasn’t sure what direction he was going, but he needed to keep moving or he would be pulled into the earth, embraced and devoured as Greer had been. He moved onward but his pace slowed; he had wandered into a stretch of softer ground. He labored to free one boot, then the other. He could feel his strength fading as his vision shut down. Did it matter? If he had seared his eyes, if he was going to wander through the world blind, did it matter whether he died now or later? Anger at his own weakness surged through him, and he yanked his boots free and stumbled forward. A second later he felt someone at his side, propping him up.
“Come on,” Rachel said, turning him ninety degrees to the right. “Follow me.”
* * *
When he woke, it was to darkness, and for a moment he felt the panic close in over him, smothering him with a blank and awful certainty; he had indeed gone blind. And then bits of light appeared in the darkness, pinpricks of brightness. After a few seconds the panic retreated, and he saw that the bits of light were in an old and familiar pattern: the long handle and scoop of the Big Dipper. His eyes drifted up, tracing the line from Merak through Dubhe, the last two stars on the Dipper, which led to Polaris. From there he picked out the fainter stars of the Little Dipper, Deserae’s favorite, Polaris forming the end of its handle. She had even written a poem about the North Star shortly after they had moved north, the words scribbled on the piece of paper that was still tucked inside Jake’s pack.
’Round and ’round its eternal pivot,
the star that guides the world its anchor.
Scooping up the darkness one night at a time,
twirling around the center of us.
She was not a poet by nature, although he had told her more than once that she saw things more clearly than most did, that she had within her some keener perception of the world worth sharing. She scoffed at this, but did not object when he retrieved the little poem from the wastebasket, smoothed the wrinkles, and tucked it into his pocket.
The aurora was out, a thin green glow over the rocks to the north. There was no moon.
“Jake?”
He turned his head and saw Rachel and Cameron squatting next to him. Their faces were covered in shadows but their features were clear; he had not cooked his eyeballs, then. Warren and Parkson stood a few paces back from the edge of the rock pad, talking in soft voices. Hans and Jaimie were huddled together, not moving, the starlight and aurora shimmering off Hans’s balding head. Jake swallowed, wincing from the pain in his throat, and pushed himself to a sitting position. It felt like he had a terrible sunburn.
Rachel held out a canteen. He took several small swigs, grimaced, and handed it back. She dabbed a piece of cloth into the throat of the canteen, upended it, and handed him the damp cloth. He dabbed at his face, then his arms. His skin was streaked with mud, and he reeked of fuel oil.
“Greer?” Jake said.
Rachel looked away. Jake turned to Cameron, who shook his head. “We can’t even see where he was anymore.”
Parkson had to be in pain from his dislocated ankle and possibly a broken arm, but he was upright, balanced on one leg as he talked to Warren. Hans’s shoulders were hunched over, and he hissed in pain as Jaimie adjusted the crude bandage around his arm. Everyone is doing something but me, Jake thought. He pushed himself to his feet and the world tilted. He lurched forward, pitching into the outspread arms of Cameron and Rachel. The dark northern night revolved around him.
“Hey,” Rachel said. “Where do you think you’re going?”
He shook his head. “Dizzy.”
“You breathed in too many fumes,” Cameron said. “Your throat was almost closed up by the time we made it over here.”
“We?” Jake said.
“Cameron came out and helped,” Rachel said, “and if he hadn’t been carrying an EpiPen, you’d be dead right now.”
“Huh?”
“I’m allergic to wasp venom,” Cameron said. “I carry a pack of epinephrine with me when I’m in the field. You must have breathed in so much smoke that the toxins were closing up your throat.”
Jake let them set him back down onto the rock slab. This time when Rachel handed him the canteen he drank deeply. His stomach felt queasy as it filled with water, and he inhaled, letting it settle. Making it settle. He took another drink. He was dehydrated, and burn victims needed lots of water to heal, to get back to full physical and mental capacity. He would be of no use to the group if he couldn’t move or think clearly. He took stock, moving his ankles and knees, then his wrists and elbows. His skin was bunched and red, but they looked to be first-degree burns, more an annoyance than an actual injury.
Boots scraped on the rock and he looked up. Warren stood a few feet away, his hair plastered with mud. His face, however, was wiped clean, and his expression was calm, almost serene. “You going to be all right?”
Jake took another drink, then screwed the cap onto the canteen and handed it back to Rachel. “I’m fine.”
“Good,” Warren said, and crouched down on his knees so that he was face-to-face with Jake. “You want to tell me what the hell that was out there?”
Jake looked from Warren to Parkson, who stood a few feet off, then over to Cameron and Rachel. They were all looking at him as though he was going to let them in on a really good secret. “Serious?”
“Listen,” Warren said. “There won’t be any repercussions; we just want to know what we’re up against. Greer is . . . missing, Jake. This is serious.”
“Are you for real?” Jake said, pushing himself to his feet. Warren’s face tilted and straightened, and the rest of Jake’s vision came into focus a second later. He felt his legs gaining steadiness underneath him. There was really only one thing better than water for clearing his head, and he felt it coursing through him now, anger turning into rage, hot and bright. “Stand there, tell me this is serious?”
“If you knew about this—”
“If I knew about what?” He took a step forward, the sound of his boot hitting the rock very loud in the silence. That was followed by another scrape as Warren fell back a step. “You think I would’ve been wandering around this valley like a goddamn tourist if I knew it was going to rise up and try to fucking eat us?”
There was no sound except for their breathing. Warren had reset his feet and seemed ready to step back up into Jake’s face. Jake waited for it. He kept seeing Greer’s eyes bugging out in pain and surprise as the tendrils punched through his trachea and gathered around his lifeblood like hogs at a trough. Warren had been somewhere in the distance, safe on his rock pad. Now here he was, telling Jake he would be forgiven if he would just pony up some information.
“He doesn’t know any more than we do,” Cameron said at last. “Back off and let him get some rest, Warren.”
“He knows something,” Warren said. “As soon as I told him where we were going, that I wanted him to lead us to Resurrection Valley, his rate doubled.”
Their eyes, lit only by starlight and the faint glow of the aurora, swung back to him. Jake felt his anger spike up another notch. These city people, with their suspicion and their need for information, their need to assign blame, as though he was the one who had suggested going into this godforsaken wilderness in the first place. They were like children, blundering around in the woods with all the answers, then bawling when the real world didn’t play by the rules. He felt rage building up inside him, the culmination of his irritation and anger, an eruption that would lead to action that would simultaneously distance himself from this group and set the matter straight on who was in charge.
“It’s alive,” Jaimie said. Her voice was calm, almost serene. They turned to her.
“What?” Warren said.
“There’s life underneath us,” she said, looking up. Her handsome face looked even stronger in the shadows of the starlight, but her eyes were very shiny and wide, and at the moment she looked like a young, scared girl. “More life below than above, sometimes.”
“Enough,” Warren said.
“It knows we’re here,” Jaimie said, her voice still calm, but her eyes darting out from the group to survey the wet, boulder-filled valley. “And now that it has a taste, it’s not going to stop.”
“Tend to Hans’s arm,” Warren said. “And shut up with that nonsense.”
Parkson stepped into the middle of the rough triangle that had formed between Jake, Jaimie, and Warren. “Everybody needs to settle down,” he said. “Jake saved my life, got me loose from whatever the hell is out there.” He gestured out over the valley floor, silent and barren. “If he was watching all of it happen from up on the ridge, I might think differently. But he was right here, down in the slop with us.”
Cameron cleared his throat and looked at Jake. “So what do we do?”
Jake looked out over the valley. From somewhere deep in the woods above them came the baritone call of a great horned owl. The air still smelled of fuel oil and smoke, but Jake couldn’t tell if it was from his clothes or the remains of the drill rig. His shoulders settled a fraction of an inch. He turned and looked up the side slopes of the valley, which were streaked with mudslides. His eyes went back to the group, Parkson with his bad foot dangling off the ground, Hans with his dislocated shoulder. “What time is it?”
A green glow on Warren’s wrist lit up his bearded face. “A little past midnight.”
Jake did the math. The long days of summer had been shrinking for over two months, and it would not be light enough to see well for five hours. It would be a cool night, but not dangerously cold.
“Your satellite phone,” Jake said to Warren. “Call in for help.”
Warren shook his head. “It’s on the solar charger, back at camp.”
“Then we stay here until it’s light enough to see,” Jake said. “At dawn, I’ll go for the campsite, see if we can get in touch with someone.”
“Who did you have in mind?” Warren asked.
“Well,” Jake said, “we got a dead guy half-buried out in the mud out there, and two men hurt. You got a chopper in here to drop off the drill rig, you can get another one in for medevac.”
Warren turned away, looking up the slope toward the tents. Jake waited for him to say something, but Warren was silent. Jake followed his gaze up into the darkness. The camp was over the lip of the ridge, not visible from the bottom of the valley. No more than a couple hundred yards. He’d be able to stay clear of the softer ground if he took his time and waited for good light. There were several stretches where he would have to cross without relying on rocks for stepping stones, but he would be able to cross those quickly. Whatever was in the ground did not appear to be especially quick.
The owl called again, booming out the question its kind had been asking for countless millennia.
Who? Who?
Cameron and Rachel sat down on the rock, huddled close for warmth. Parkson sat down a little way off, and Rachel motioned for him to move closer. He slid his butt along the stone until he was against Rachel’s other side, who put an arm around him and said something about a sandwich that caused both men to laugh softly. Warren stood off on his own, still looking up the valley. Jake was tempted to sit; huddling close to a stranger for warmth would not be a new experience. But the night air was clearing his mind even more, and he knew if he warmed up he would relax slightly, and that meant he would lose some of the edge he was just starting to regain. Even half-loopy and sunburned, he was best prepared to stand watch for the night.
Stand watch. And against what?
He looked down at the mud-splattered group. Somebody’s teeth were chattering, and the sandwich pressed tighter together. After a few minutes the chattering subsided. Warren was still standing on the northern edge of the rock pad, and Jake supposed that was a good place for him. He didn’t know if the tendrils would seek them out, if they could sense the vibrations the group sent down into the earth, or could feel the warmth of their bodies. He supposed anything was possible. He supposed, also, that some of the stories he had heard as a child were not entirely fiction after all, that the bad country was not named that because it was muddy or devoid of game. That his father’s people understood there were places in the wilderness it was best to avoid, and if you had to visit them, it was wise to tread softly.
There’s life underneath us. He heard Jaimie’s words again, echoing in his mind like the calls of the owl. More life below than above, sometimes.
Above them, the Little Dipper scooped away at the darkness.
* * *
He had no watch and knew only that it was somewhere in the deepest part of the night when he heard the voice.
Warren was still standing guard on the north edge of the pad. He had been pacing from one edge of the low escarpment to the other to stay warm, and now he paused at the same time the sound reached Jake’s ears. Warren was nothing but a silhouette, the black shape of a man backlit by the meager starlight, his head cocked to the side. The aurora had either faded or had been covered by clouds to the north. Rachel, Jaimie, and Cameron were breathing deeply in their small huddle. Parkson was still sitting with them, but Jake heard his breath catch for a moment and knew he was awake and had heard the noise as well.
Warren’s head pivoted. “Was that—”
“Shhh,” Jake whispered. The hair on his forearms and the back of his neck, already pushing out against the cold, began to tingle. Up until now the night had been very quiet; the only sounds were the breathing of the group and the light rustle of the northwest wind through the long grass. There were no sounds of the night creatures, as common in the northern woods as the constant hum of traffic had been in his campus apartment in St. Paul, the freeway only blocks away. His uncle Henry had told him that most animals had once slept at night, eons ago, and it was only when people learned to kill them so well that they were forced to adjust to moving about on the dark side of the earth’s turn. But there was nothing prowling tonight. Even the owl had fallen silent.
Jake took in a shallow breath, then another. His pulse was pounding in his ears.
“Helllp.”
Warren sucked in a breath and took a step back from the edge of the rock pad. Jake hissed at him to be still. Parkson, who had twisted around at the sound, went motionless as well.
“Helllp meeeee.”
It was coming from the darkness to the north, somewhere in the direction of where Greer had fallen. A scabrous, coarse whisper. Warren reached into his pocket and produced a small LED flashlight. The thin beam swung out into the darkness, tracing the contours of rocks and casting long fingers of shadow where it passed over the tall grass. The beam paused at a lump in the ground, just at the edge of the flashlight’s power. The whisper came again.
“Pleeeessse helllp.”
“Jesus Christ,” Warren whispered, steam puffing from his mouth. He looked up as Jake joined him. “I thought he was dead.”
“Give me that.” Jake took the flashlight from Warren and trained it on the lump. It was fifty yards away, only partially visible through the matted grass and low rock outcroppings. It was impossible to see any details, but the voice was clear enough, if raspy and weak. Jake’s mouth went sour as he thought of the hours-long struggle that had occurred in silence out in the soggy floodplain, Greer slowly pulling himself free from those waxy snares, half drained of blood and burned across his body. Clinging to the stubbornness of life.
Jake felt for his knife. He had spent a good hour sharpening it against the smooth edge of a stone, straightening out the invisible teeth until the edge bit into the back of his thumbnail without slipping.
The whisper came again, this time slurred and without meaning. More of a whimper than a whisper, Jake thought. He can’t have much left. Greer must have crawled a good distance toward the rock pad, but he was either out of strength or he was ensnared by more tendrils. Jake started forward. Warren caught his arm.
“Give me the light,” Warren said, his words smoking out into the night air. “I’m coming with.”
“You leave me out there . . .”
Warren kept his hand extended.
Jake stared at him, but there was nothing to discern except the faint white of his eyes, the same intense but fundamentally calm expression. It would be difficult to carry Greer back alone and keep the light on the rocks. He placed the flashlight into Warren’s palm. “Let’s go.”
They stepped from rock to rock, Warren lighting the way behind him so that the flashlight beam cast long shadows from Jake’s legs out in front of them. Behind them they could hear Parkson rousing Rachel and Cameron, followed by Jaimie and Hans. Jake followed the flashlight beam from one rock to another, moving a few feet ahead of Warren. Moving this way reminded him of when he used to traverse the Little Glutton River in the summer with his friends, the rocks slimy and slippery at first when the river dropped, then crusting over. These rocks were slimy, too, and they weren’t very large. The rock pad was the only area large enough to serve as a haven. Once they freed Greer, there would be no place to rest until they made it back to the pad.
Just keep moving, he thought. It’s strong but it’s not fast. You’ll be back before it even knows something is moving.
“There he is,” Warren said, jabbing the flashlight beam. “My Christ.”
Greer was entombed in a nest of cobwebby filaments. He lay on his stomach with his arms outstretched and his head facing away from them. The filaments were much smaller than the tendrils they’d encountered earlier, no thicker than pencils and fuzzed over with a moldy growth. Thicker coils encircled his legs and torso. His neck and head were crusted over with a furry mat, creeping over the burnt skin on the back of his neck and into his heat-crinkled hair. His clothes were half burned off, and patches of heat-damaged skin showed through the holes, revealing more gray tentacles under his shirt.
Jake knelt down and gripped Greer’s shoulder, where the mold was not too thick, and shook him. There was no response. He scrambled around to the other side. Warren followed, stepping lightly from one rock to another and then training the beam directly on Greer’s face.
Jake recoiled. The mold had grown deep into Greer’s eye sockets and nostrils, and the flesh on his cheeks was dissolved, eaten away almost to the bone. A few stray hairs from his beard were encased in a jellylike substance. The muscle that remained was devoid of blood, almost translucent, as though he had been lying there decomposing for weeks instead of hours. Behind him, the flashlight beam went bobbing off into space as Warren made a series of retching noises.
“Greer?” Jake shook him lightly, peering closer in the sudden darkness. “Can you hear me?”
Warren spat several times behind Jake, and the flashlight beam came back, wavering over Greer’s ruined face. Greer lay there openmouthed, his tongue and teeth still intact, the rest of his face unrecognizable. Jake touched a finger to the side of Greer’s neck, where several larger tendrils were still pressed tightly into the wound in his throat. The flesh under his fingers was cold and still.
“He’s dead,” Warren said. “Let’s go, for Chrissakes.”
Jake withdrew his hand and wiped his fingers on his jeans. There was nobody else out here who could have called for help, and even if there was . . . it had been Greer’s voice, a gravelly baritone with a Southern accent, unmistakable, even in a whisper from death’s door.
Jake held out his hand for the light. Warren protested again but Jake did not respond, just remained there with his hand outstretched behind him. After a moment, Warren placed the flashlight into his open palm.
Jake passed the light over Greer’s chest. Two thick coils were looped under the smaller filaments, pressed tight against Greer’s ribs. Another tendril snaked inside the entrance wound in Greer’s throat. Jake saw Greer’s throat bob, and a wild thought raced through his mind, simultaneously filled with relief and horror:
Alive! He’s still alive!
Then the tendrils moved again, and he understood.
The two coils on Greer’s throat contracted, squeezing stale air out of his mouth. At the same time, the tendrils wound inside his throat flexed and twisted, making Greer’s pale throat bulge. A second later Greer’s mouth opened grotesquely, the mandible creaking. Without thinking, Jake brought the flashlight up and saw the tendrils working inside the back of Greer’s throat, spread out in his larynx like tiny, pale tentacles.
“Helllp mee-eeee.”
Like a puppet, Jake thought, feeling blood draining from his face. Except the strings are on the inside.
“Helllp mee-eeee . . . plllleeeeassse . . .”
Now the tone seemed different, no longer pleading but sly, mocking, as though Jake were in on some great joke, an inside joke that only the two of them could fully appreciate. The mouth closed and opened, and it came again, the same plea, the coils around his chest squeezing out more air. No puffs of steam came from Greer. Dead man’s breath. Jake’s thoughts were wild and jumbled. Dead man’s breath and dead man’s words and my Christ it’s inside him and eating him and—
More life below. More life below than above, sometimes.
Warren’s hand was on his shoulder, jerking him back. Jake fell on his butt, and he saw one of the tendrils in the air where his face had been a second ago. The tentacle slithered back into the dark ground. Warren helped him up and they stumbled backward, their feet seeking purchase on the rocks. The flashlight beam swung crazily in the night air, and all Jake could think was get back, we need to get back—
Behind them, a scream cut through the night air. There was a thud and a grunt, and then another scream. It was Rachel’s voice.
“No! Oh my god, it’s got him!”
In front of them, Greer’s voice huffed out something that sounded like laughter.
The scream came again, and then Warren gave Jake a rough shove and they were running back toward the rock pad, to the sound of something being dragged very fast over the stones in front of them.