Laying atop her bed of bones, Special Agent Maggie Carlisle fought to remain conscious. Intuition told her that to fall asleep now would mean to fall asleep forever. She had to be approaching the point of total dehydration, and without much ventilation in the pit, carbon dioxide poisoning was also a strong possibility.
Carol—her partner in the pit—had passed away in the night. Maggie had heard her stop breathing, and upon checking, she’d been unable to resuscitate.
Now, laying there thinking about how much longer she could possibly live without water, she thought of the blood coagulating in Carol’s veins as she decayed. But still she refused the idea of cannibalism. It went against every fiber of her being.
Then again, she hadn’t killed the woman. In fact, she had spared her when she had the chance. It just so happened that Carol must’ve been slightly more dehydrated than she had been at the onset of their ordeal. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But if she was going to do that, she should’ve done it at the beginning before the flesh had a chance to decay. She shoved the thoughts from her mind. She would rather die having been able to say that she had never eaten a person then the other way around.
She had tried to prepare herself for death as best she could, but she supposed that there was never really anyone who was completely ready. She still had things she wanted to see and do. Things she wanted to say. Most of all, she had never truly accomplished the goal she had set out to achieve. She may have found her brother’s killer, but she still didn’t know her brother’s fate, and that bothered her immensely. Perhaps more than anything. She had to trust that Marcus would pick up the trail and finish what she had begun, but she had never been adept at trusting people.
Maggie felt like someone had attached thousand-pound weights to her eyelids and wondered how long it’d been since she’d slept. It felt like she had been trapped here for weeks, but she knew that it couldn’t have been more than a few days. Otherwise, she would’ve already been dead of dehydration.
When a blinding light shined down from above and stung her eyes, even through her closed lids, Maggie thought that she had died and was being raised up to the next plane of existence. A part of her had been relieved it was over.
She heard the voices of two men.
Angels? she wondered.
Then, one of the men swore in Spanish, and the pair then started arguing about who is going to be the one to go down in the pit and retrieve her. Her foggy brain started making connections, and she realized that these men could be here to rescue her. Rolling over, she turned her face toward them and reached up. Her throat felt too dry to speak, and so she merely croaked deeper in her throat to get their attention.
In the dim light above, she could see the faces of the two men. One was a handsome bronze-skinned young man, well-built and clearly the leader of the two. The other was merely a pile of bones with skin stretched over it.
As Maggie raised her arm and moaned up at them, the skinny one said, “Zombie!”
The other man slapped him across the back of the head.
The handsome one said, “We’re coming down, lady. We have water.”
Those had been the sweetest words that Maggie had ever heard, and so she merely laid her head back onto her bed of bones and gently sobbed. Although, in her dehydrated state, she couldn’t produce tears and felt like she’d been eating sandpaper, which made her cries sound like the wheezing of an asthmatic.