The soldiers ran away as soon as they got the chance. They retreated back the way we had come, leaving behind a stream of choked obscenities. I think Floyd would have run, too, if I hadn’t been there to stop him. And Charlie… I don’t know what Charlie would have done. His face was calm despite startled, wide-open eyes.
“C’mon,” I said, pointing to a door in the left-hand wall. “Taylor’s still out there. We’ve got to find her.”
“But… but Danny,” Floyd said, his voice searching, desperate. His eyes remained fixed on the dead body. His face had gone paper-white. “What happened to Danny?”
“I don’t know,” I said, omitting all the stuff I did know, all the stuff I’d seen—Weasel’s fingers, Taylor’s father, merged flesh and broken form—that might shed light on the situation. “The city. The city happened.” It was a statement I’d made before, and it still seemed to hold true.
Unless it’s me and not the city. Unless I happened. My presence, my being here—melting Danny, punching out his heart.
Then I grabbed Floyd’s forearm and pulled him across the room. I cut a wide berth around Danny’s broken form and steered us clear of the piles of twitching spider parts.
Charlie followed.
We crossed through two more rooms, then back through the maw of an earthen tunnel. Once again heading down.
There were wires in the walls here, poking intermittently from the dirt. Not neat, straight lines like the ones we’d found beneath our neighbor’s house, but branching and skewed, like veins in the walls of an organ, as if they’d developed here over time to push blood through the bowels of the earth.
I headed straight through an intersection, then turned left through another hub. More passages followed. I was moving at random, stopping every now and then to listen for sound in the dark, looking for something to guide me through this maze. But there was nothing, and I just kept moving. No sound. No hint. No clue.
Once I looked back and saw Charlie drawing an arrow in the wall with the blade of his shovel. Marking our path.
Then we were in another hub. There was a lantern perched atop a folding metal chair here; it was lit, supporting a tiny guttering flame. The walls danced in flickering light.
I was ready to plunge forward through the mouth of another tunnel, but Floyd grabbed my arm and pointed toward something on the floor, half buried in the dirt. He dropped to his knees and started clearing away some of the muck. It was a messenger bag—tan canvas smeared with mud, a ripped and reknotted shoulder strap.
“This is Sabine’s,” Floyd said, a hint of awe in his voice as he brushed aside dirt, revealing a large rectangular patch sewn into the fabric. The patch read: ART SAVES! I remembered my last glimpse of this bag—on the screen of the video camera, draped over Sabine’s shoulder as she disappeared into the shattered wall. It had caught on the edge of the hole. She’d had to reach back to set it free.
Floyd’s hands were shaking as he upended the bag, sending loose paper, pens, and a can of spray paint spilling to the floor. “What happened to her?” he asked. “You said she was with Mama Cass.” This was the lie I’d told Taylor back at the house. She must have passed it on. “But if this is here… where’d she go?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
But I wondered: Could she be down here? Still alive?
I didn’t think so.
Floyd’s shoulders started to shake, matching his palsied hands. I opened my mouth to tell him something reassuring—I’m sure she’s fine, she just lost her bag—but Charlie interrupted. “Shhhhhhh,” he urged. He was standing at my shoulder, and when I looked back, I found his eyes fixed on the tunnels up ahead, darting from one to another. His hands worked back and forth on the handle of his shovel. “Do you hear that? Do you hear that sound?”
I held my breath and listened. After a moment, I picked out the sound of shouting in the distance. Then there was a low, ominous growl, echoing far, far away.
The sound of wolves.
The sound of shouting and wolves.
Photograph. Undated. Amanda and the wolves:
The picture is framed in the horizontal, perfectly level. All browns and blacks, contrasting white bathed in orange.
It is underground: a dirt cave with a ten-foot ceiling, about twenty feet across. The space is illuminated from the left, where an irregular opening spills bright orange light into the earthen room. There is another tunnel in the right-hand wall, this one filled with darkness.
At least twenty wolves clog the far end of the space. Twenty muzzles face the camera, bright eyes glimmering in the half-light. And, standing in their midst, near the far wall: a woman. Naked, breasts bared, waist-deep in furred mammals.
The woman is blond and dirty. A wolf sits at her side, perhaps the largest in the room. Her hand rests on the scruff of its neck, and the animal, in turn, has a paw raised up against the woman’s side. This is the only animal that is not facing the camera. Its muzzle is turned to look up at the woman’s face.
The woman’s expression is placid—no harsh lines or hunched-up muscles. Her eyes match the wolves’ perfectly; the left one is buried in darkness—a glint of metallic orange shining out from the shadows—and the right one is bright and wide.
There are no bared teeth—on the wolves or on the woman—but the wolves look tense, their muscles coiled with a sharp animal alertness. They look ready to spring, ready to bite and shred and tear.
Floyd dropped Sabine’s bag, and we once again plunged into the dark. At first, I wasn’t sure if I’d picked the right tunnel, but a shout—louder this time—confirmed my choice.
A name, raw and angry: “Amanda!” It was Mac’s voice up ahead. I recognized the hoarse, bass growl.
We emerged into another unlit hub and paused, once again waiting for a guiding voice. My head spun as I tried to catch my breath.
And again: “Amanda!”
Charlie darted out ahead this time, leading us into the rightmost tunnel. The tunnel jibbed and bent, and then there was light up ahead. I could see it—not a steady light but flickering, strobing against the dirt walls. I could smell ozone burning in the air.
We came out into a wider corridor, still dirt but about six feet wide, much wider than the narrow boreholes through which we’d been running. Up ahead, there were two figures standing at the threshold of another, even wider space. Another hub, I guessed. The light was brighter here. We didn’t really need our flashlights anymore.
It was Mac and Taylor, standing at the end of the tunnel. Mac had Taylor gripped in a sleeper hold, with Taylor’s arm waving above her shoulder as he wrenched her back and forth in that incapacitating embrace. They were facing away from us, into the attached room, and as we approached, I could hear Mac growl into Taylor’s ear: “Make her listen! Make her come here!”
Taylor let out a sob. The sound—so pathetic and broken coming from such a strong woman—weakened my knees and almost sent me sprawling to the floor. But I managed to stay on my feet. I continued forward, shoving the flashlight into my pocket and wrapping the baseball bat in a tighter two-handed grip. The feel of the hardwood between my fingers gave me strength, and suddenly I was filled with an intense rage.
Charlie stopped in the tunnel up ahead, pausing in indecision about fifteen feet from its end. I shoved him out of the way and continued on.
Neither Mac nor Taylor saw me coming: Mac remained focused on the room beyond the threshold, and Taylor couldn’t even look back over her shoulder.
“She’ll listen to you,” Mac growled into Taylor’s ear. “Make her—”
And I swung.
The bat slammed into the side of Mac’s knee. Tendon gave way, and he crumpled to the ground, pulling Taylor down on top of him. I bent forward and slid the barrel of the bat past Taylor’s head; she was still in his grasp, clenched tightly against his chest. I pushed the bat through Mac’s beard and slid it right up against his Adam’s apple… then I shoved him hard against the floor. He gagged as I applied more pressure.
I bent forward and rested my weight against the bat’s handle.
“I owe you a fucking shot to the head,” I hissed. “And if you make me do it, I’m not going to be laying down no fucking bunt. I’m going to drive your head out of the motherfucking park.”
His hand loosened on Taylor’s neck, and she pulled her way free, immediately recoiling in disgust against the tunnel’s far wall. She let out another sob and buried her face in her hands. I kept the bat extended out toward Mac as I moved carefully to her side. Before I could put my arm around her shoulder, however, she pulled back once again, shaking her head.
“No, please,” Mac said from his place on the ground. The crazed expression suddenly fell from his face, and his eyes filled with tears. “Please… You’ve got to just… Please!… Amanda… Amanda.” And his eyes spun back toward the brightly lit room on the other side of the threshold.
I stayed where I was, but Floyd stepped over Mac’s legs and looked out into the room. “Dean,” he said, looking back at me after a handful of seconds, his eyes wide, his voice filled with wonder. “You’ve gotta see this shit.”
Floyd and Charlie kept an eye on Mac while I peered into the room.
It was a disorienting sight.
I barely recognized Amanda. She was standing among a crowd of wolves on the far side of an oversized hub. They were pressed tightly around her; it looked like she was standing waist-deep in a furry, attentive pool. Since we’d last seen her, she’d lost all of her clothing, and she was now dressed in nothing but streaks of mud—intricate markings, purposefully drawn, like patterns of pigment in fur—across her cheekbones, her breasts, her belly, down the length of her arms.
I took a step into the room, and the pack of wolves tensed forward. A low groan filled the hub, a faint subvocal growl filled with warning and menace. Bright light was flooding into the room from one of the connecting corridors, and two dozen sets of fangs glittered sharply in the orange glow. I felt a twinge of pain in my hand and pulled back instinctively. Once bitten …
Amanda moved her arm, reaching forward slightly, then pulled it back toward her stomach. In response, the wolves settled onto their haunches, sitting almost in unison.
“Amanda?” I said.
She didn’t respond. Her eyes were wide, curious, but completely uncomprehending. They were the eyes of an animal. An attentive animal.
“Amanda, it’s me, Dean. Remember me? Remember taking me to the park, finding the tunnel. The wolves? Remember looking for your dog—” I tried to remember its name, finally managing to fish it up from the depths of my memory. “Remember Sasha?”
Her brow crinkled slightly at the name, and she reached down to touch the wolf at her side. The wolf showed me its teeth briefly—a tiny warning—then glanced up at Amanda’s face. It raised a strangely jointed paw and touched her side, as if it were offering her comfort.
And there was silence. And the room was still. Her face flickered from that tiny questioning expression back to placid calm.
I raised the camera to my eye and took a quick shot. It was an amazing, improbable scene, and my hands just reacted—a nervous gesture, really, something to occupy my eye, my hands, and a detached part of my mind.
“She’s gone,” Taylor said in the tunnel behind me. “Mac and I have been here for the last fifteen minutes. He’s been quizzing her, coaxing, trying to get her to remember who we are. Who she is.” There was anger and disgust in her voice. “But she doesn’t remember. They all just stand there. And they won’t let us get anywhere near.” She hawked up a glob of phlegm, and I heard her spit into the dirt at my back.
“Face it: Amanda’s gone,” Taylor repeated. “And there’s just this… this empty shell in her place. This animal.”
“No!” Mac roared. He rolled up onto his knees and pushed me aside, nearly sending me sprawling to the floor. He moved fast. “Amanda!” he yelled.
None of us tried to stop him. None of us saw it coming.
In a matter of moments, he was up on his feet and colliding with the wolves, trying to wade through the sea of fur and muscles and teeth, trying to reach Amanda on the other side. I saw her cringe back in fear, and the wolves surged forward, putting themselves between Mac and their mistress. That’s what she is, I realized, that’s what she’s become.
And then they were on him.
The room filled with growling and a single shrill howl. Fangs flashed as jaws clamped down on Mac’s arms and legs, pulling him to the ground. Shaking muzzles. Tearing flesh. I couldn’t hear him over the scrabbling claws and deep-throated growls, but I saw his mouth flash open. I don’t know what he was trying to say. I don’t know if he was trying to call out Amanda’s name once again, or if it was just an incoherent howl of pain and anger as the wolves tore chunks of flesh from his body. I saw one angry muzzle dive in and clench shut around his face, locking tight and shredding his flesh back and forth before finally pulling back with a mouthful of cheek and lip, leaving behind blood and a glimpse of pale white bone. Then Mac was gone, lost beneath a blanket of writhing fur.
The frenzy went on for nearly a minute before Amanda stepped forward into the edge of the fray. She made a noise at the back of her throat. It wasn’t a growl, more like an oscillating whine. The pack slowed its frenzy, then backed away one by one. The final wolf had a large chunk of Mac’s arm dangling from its blood-drenched muzzle as it stepped back.
Amanda didn’t even glance at the slab of shredded meat and jutting bone. She just turned, and the entire pack turned with her. They ran into one of the connecting corridors, soundless and graceful.
And they were gone.
I think it might have just been my imagination, but at the last moment, just before she disappeared from sight, it looked like Amanda dropped to all fours and started bounding forward on hands and feet. In that blur of activity, however, I couldn’t be sure.