Текст книги "The Release"
Автор книги: Shelbi Wescott
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 16 страниц)
“Go up the ladder,” Grant instructed. “Boiler room is on the inside of the gates. It’ll be easy, as long as Spencer doesn’t leave the office. If he goes on the move, we should abort the trip and head back.”
“Agreed,” Salem said.
Back they trudged to the journalism room where the door was kept ajar with the doorstop. It was easily ten degrees cooler in there with the open roof funneling in wind and elements. The trio worked to move the tables back under the skylight and then drag the ladder upward.
Grant went first, pulling himself up to the roof with sheer upper body strength, his legs following after. Lucy went next, bracing herself each time the ladder wobbled under her weight the higher she climbed. When she reached the top, Grant lowered his arms and pulled her up and she scrambled to the hard surface the second her legs could catch the side of roof. For a prolonged moment, she rested on the cool roof, flat on her belly against the tar. Then she stood and blinked.
Scanning the landscape, Lucy’s shock caused her to nearly stumble backward through the hole in the skylight. She regained her composure and took a step forward. The sky was altered, filled with the bright yellows, purples and pinks of an early-morning sunrise even though the sun had been up for hours. Above the colorful hues, the rest of the sky was dark and dense with smoke, and as Lucy opened her mouth to call down to Salem she could feel a sharp taste on her tongue and in the back of her throat. Everything around her took on a subtle orange tint—as if she were wearing thin filtered glasses. The effect of the colors and the smoke and the orange created a dreamlike atmosphere—otherworldly.
She clamped her mouth down and took a tentative step forward. Then another. Walking to the edge of the roof and peering down on to the parking lot below to the dozens and dozens of deserted cars, dead bodies, discarded backpacks, and other personal items littering the area. It was then Lucy realized the earth was strangely quiet, just like Clayton had said. There were no planes in the sky and no cars rushing down the street. The screams and torment of the survivors from yesterday were all gone. Only a few sporadic sounds remained—a crash, a sudden car alarm—and their appearance was jarring, unexpected, frightening, causing each of them to jump and seek out the source with their hearts pounding with fear.
She closed her eyes and listened to the wind. From miles and miles away, she heard the distinct sound of a dog barking.
Then she realized with sadness that she must have imagined it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
They climbed down into the boiler room and out into the small walkway that connected the room with the main hallway. With their hearts racing and their ears trained on the intercom, they moved with cautious precision. And when they rounded the corner to the hall, Grant leading the front, Salem huddled at Lucy’s elbow a few steps behind, they all stopped short and gasped.
Splayed out on the tile was a dead man. He had brown hair and was wearing a blue button-down shirt, jeans, and a walkie-talkie was still in his hand. A thick key ring with at least fifteen silver keys dangled from a belt-loop. The man still looked like a man, but his skin had a greenish and cloudy quality along his bloated cheeks and extremities, as if he had been submerged in a vat of soured milk.
This decomposition was not normal. Not even the Ebola virus could arrive without symptoms, kill in minutes, and reduce the body to rotting tissue within an hour. Lucy knew if her father was around, he would be looking at this virus with curiosity, examining it with a scientist’s eye, and she longed for his strength and whatever answers he could give her. Not having him within reach was alarming—she had questions. Who would answer them?
It was difficult to look away, despite the disgust. Grant coughed into his shoulder and then leaned forward, inspecting and assessing the body. He dropped down and squatted, turned his head away from the stench, and started to reach forward, his eyes watering.
“What the hell are you doing?” Salem asked.
With one quick motion, Grant unhooked the silver key ring and swiped it off the belt-loop with a small tug. The keys jangled in his hand and he held them up triumphantly. “Master keys. Locker keys. All keys. This,” he jangled them, “is a treasure.”
“I wonder why his body was left here,” Lucy said out loud.
“One of the last adults to get sick, probably.” Salem crossed her arms over her body and looked up and down the hall with nervous, shifty eyes. “Come on, I feel exposed.”
“Wait,” Grant said and his shot up to the cameras. “Where’s Spencer?”
They all strained to listen, but the office was quiet.
Then they heard the ring of a telephone. One long ring, another long ring. Then Spencer answered it—off somewhere in the office, away from the microphone.
“The phones!” Lucy exclaimed and she reached her pocket, scrambling. Pulling it free, she stared at the screen, waiting for dormant text messages to start pouring through. A beep signaled that she had a message and Lucy clicked on it quickly. Salem’s name popped up. I’m in the building. Journalism room? But that was all.
“What? What did you get?” Salem asked, leaning over to look at the screen.
“Just you. From yesterday.” Lucy didn’t even try to mask her disappointment. She dialed Ethan’s number. After five long seconds, the call clicked in. “It’s ringing! It’s ringing!” she said and she took two long strides back down the side walkway toward the boiler room, shoving her left hand over her left ear out of habit, even though there wasn’t any noise to drown out in the background. After four rings, it kicked her to voicemail. Ethan’s voice on the message was bright and chipper—and so clear, like he was standing right beside her. She wanted to cry.
“Ethan? Ethan. It’s me. I’m at the school. I haven’t left. I’m still here. If you make it here, I’m in the—” the phone kicked her off. Lost signal. Lucy growled and shoved the phone back into her pocket. Salem was looking at her and she tried to smile.
“He’ll hear it. He’ll get the message,” she encouraged.
Grant had positioned himself directly beneath a speaker in the hallway; his head upturned, his eyes squinting.
“Who could he possibly be talking to?” Grant said as Salem and Lucy joined him, stepping around the dead janitor in the process.
“Family?”
“No. He’s angry. Can you hear the tone?”
Grant was right. The conversation happening halfway around the school and just out of range of their intercom was not a happy one. Spencer’s voice raised and lowered, with growing levels of intensity.
Occasionally they heard a snippet.
“I will control that. Only me,” Spencer had snapped once. Then a few seconds later, “No. I will not help. But we can talk.” Lucy, Grant, and Salem exchanged puzzled glances.
Then there was nothing. A lost signal, an angry hang-up, they could only speculate what ended the discussion and who was on the other end of it. But they now heard Spencer opening and shutting drawers and files with a fury, shouting to himself as he went: “No. My school. My rules.”
Salem lowered her head from looking at the ceiling and scowled. “I don’t like this.”
Grant took one look at the camera. “Me neither, but while we know where Spencer is…” he pointed to the red light blinking at them, “let’s get what we need and go.”
The three of them bolted into the cafeteria—running together against the wall; trying to stay on the outskirts as much as possible, crawling behind tables and using stacked benches for cover. Out of all the areas in the school, the cafeteria was most covered with cameras. Every corner boasted a device—sometimes several—and there were limited blind spots. Ducking behind a metal food cart, the trio the scooted to the back of the cafeteria, where the industrial refrigerators hummed.
None of them had entered the kitchen before and they stood in awe of the prep area and the pantry, the freezers, and the endless rows of stainless steel pots and pans. Sterile and polished, everything gleaned brightly.
“I never actually thought any cooking happened in this kitchen,” Grant mused. “Like these have to be just for show.” He pinged a hanging saucepan with a flick and drew back, rubbing his nail.
Lucy walked over to the walk-in freezer and unlatched it, opening the door wide—a cloud of cold air billowed up at her as she walked inside. She was instantly freezing as she rummaged around boxes of frozen peanut butter and strawberry jelly sandwiches, the kind with the crusts removed, all the ingredients jammed into a bread pocket. The frozen options were limiting: Meat patties, chicken nuggets, pre-cooked French fries, burritos. Lucy didn’t know how they would cook the frozen items or if there was some cooking rule on letting a frozen meat patty defrost in a refrigerator for an unspecified amount of time. That was a question for a mom or the Internet and neither of those things were readily available.
“Take what you can carry,” Lucy instructed the others.
A drawer near the back yielded industrial size garbage bags and Grant handed one to each of them so they could start collecting food. They flipped them open, spreading the top wide and started filling it with anything that could be stored, consumed, and transported with ease. Salem grabbed milk cartons and sandwiches and then she turned her attention to a metal rack that held small bags of pretzels and corn chips.
“What about the fresh stuff?” Salem asked, palming an orange.
Grant shook his head. “Too risky.”
“How long does it take to get scurvy?” Lucy asked.
“Like sailors or whatever?” Grant shrugged. “Months?”
Salem dropped the orange back into the crate. She took a few steps and opened up a refrigerator and examined the shelves stocked from top to bottom with juices and water in plastic bottles. She smiled and started dumping then two at a time into her bag.
The bags began to drag on the floor, heavy from an abundance of food, snacks, and bottled water.
“This should last us. What a goldmine,” Grant said excitedly.
“A statement that has never been said about a school cafeteria in the history of school cafeterias,” said Salem. She hauled her bag over her shoulder and started to walk forward, hunched over from the weight.
“I wish we could get into the vending machines,” Lucy said. “Swedish fish and red vines, chocolate chip cookies, and peanut butter cups.”
Spencer’s voice erupted above them, the cafeteria speakers echoing in the empty space. They jumped and it reminded them that their time was limited. Each heaving their loot, they began to work their way back to the boiler room—taking slow and deliberate steps, like cartoons figures tip-toeing away from a snoring enemy.
They climbed back up the metal ladder embedded into the boiler room wall and pushed open the small square on the ceiling that allowed them roof access. Then they skipped and ran back to the skylight in the East Wing, keeping their bags hoisted on their backs as they slid down the opening, their feet blindly searching for the ladder, kicking this way and that until the wooden steps materialized and guided them back down to safety. Then Grant carried the ladder down and shoved it up against the wall and slid the tables away as well. The skylight still offered a wayward outsider entrance, but they still hoped the long drop on to the tile floor was enough of a deterrent.
Without a word, they meandered across the hall like weary roommates arriving home from a shopping trip. Grant swung the door wide, the girls sliding inside as he fumbled for the light. Lucy dropped her grocery bags and walked to the far corner. She sat down on one of the small red couches, her bag between her legs, and she opened it wide, rummaging around, counting and assessing.
Her cracker breakfast left much to be desired and Lucy couldn’t resist the thought of thick peanut butter and sweet jelly; she grabbed a sandwich, still partially frozen, and began to gnaw on it, succeeding in breaking off pieces of bread and hardened jelly between her teeth, and she rolled it around her mouth, warming it with her tongue.
As if she had reminded each of them that they were hungry, Grant and Salem also descended upon the bags like a pack of wolves. They crouched over their plundered food and began to eat it on the spot. Grant opened a bag of pretzels and a water bottle and Salem downed a bottle of juice, each of them depositing their garbage in the corner.
“We’ll dump our garbage next door,” Lucy suggested. “Grab a bag and then lock it up in the wood shop or something.”
Grant dangled the keys. “This might help,” he replied. “Locker keys.”
“Nice,” said Salem, making a grab for them, but Grant whisked them out of her reach.
“What do we need?” Lucy asked. She surveyed the room again. They had two small couches and a big leather chair, a small wooden desk with the coffee maker, a half-empty bookshelf, a large built-in cupboard with paper cups, a stack of computer paper, and a box of old t-shirts advertising a canned food drive from six years ago.
She turned to Grant. “I want a classroom key. I want my backpack.” Grant wiggled a key free and slapped it into her upturned palm.
“I’ll open all the lockers in a section and we can go through them piece by piece. Save anything essential, right?” Grant asked.
They nodded.
They made the trek down to the English hall. Lucy let herself into Mrs. Johnston’s room and went straight to Ethan’s backpack, slipping it up over her shoulder, holding on to the strap tightly. More than anything, Lucy wanted to be reunited with her pictures. She looked around the room and assessed the familiar quality of it. Everything now seemed so foreign, so strange, and so empty. Pausing by Mrs. Johnston’s desk, she scanned the pictures, the notes from students and the ungraded papers.
She hoped that Mrs. Johnston made it home. Hoped that her family was waiting; hoped that she had water and food and a plan. Some people deserved a happy ending, Lucy thought. And Mrs. Johnston was one of those people. She stopped for a second and opened up Mrs. Johnston’s desk drawers. She nabbed a bottle of ibuprofen, but couldn’t find anything else of use—various office supplies, a thank you note, a tube of lipstick, and a nail file. She left the remaining detritus undisturbed.
When Lucy exited the room, she saw Grant opening lockers wide with the key and Salem swooping in to plunder. They worked as a team, standing side-by-side, yanking and pulling, flipping things over and tossing it to the ground.
It felt so wrong. But it was also so necessary.
Maybe the items in the lockers were important, but these were still artifacts of someone else’s life, tucked away for them to discover and judge. Within minutes Grant and Salem were tittering over some of their finds: Packs of condoms, a locker turned shrine for some overly auto-tuned pop star. Salem unearthed a collection of phones and music devices, treasure trove of technology, stuffed in a shoebox under unused textbooks and half-eaten sandwich.
Grant spun to Lucy. “Hey, I unlocked a row over there,” he pointed to a section that included Lucy’s own locker. “Want to start on those?”
Lucy gave pause to the instructions; she took a long look at Grant and Salem’s tag-team duo. Right then, Salem shrieked as she pulled out a pair of bright pink thong underwear and held it between her pointer and thumb fingers and she tossed them at Grant, who sidestepped away from them as if they contained the virus. The chumminess bothered her, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. She couldn’t command them all to stay morose and depressed, it wasn’t healthy. It was fine to smile, find distraction, but still Lucy couldn’t escape how tactless the playfulness felt.
Stewing, Lucy walked over and pulled the first door open wide, letting it crash a little louder than she might have wanted. Then she went to the next, then the next, and then the next: Garbage, books, binders, chewed-down pencils, magnetic mirrors. Love notes from boyfriends, girlfriends, lunch bags, rotten fruit. The more lockers she searched, the more she realized how unsurprising the items were. When her classmates were reduced to things in a locker, they were impossible to differentiate from one another.
She stopped and leaned her head against one of the doors. It moved under the pressure and she could feel the metal digging into her forehead.
“Find anything? Salem called to her. Then without waiting for an answer, “Oh, gross…Grant…look at this one…”
Lucy raised her head from the door and sighed. She went to the next locker and rummaged through the usual assortment of items. Then she shoved a paper bag out of the way and realized that it didn’t budge. She picked it up, unnerved by the heaviness, and looked inside. It was then she caught the shiny flash of silver and the black handle. Roaming around at the bottom of the bag was a handful of copper bullets, clinking against each other.
In the background, Grant and Salem expressed amusement and intrigue over someone’s large collection of American flags. They found a small pill bottle filled with Vicodin and high-fived at the find.
Lucy reached into the bag and took the gun in her right hand, and she let the bag fall to the floor where it fell to her feet. It was a revolver, like the cowboys in Westerns used to shoot. She examined it, rolling her hand over and she noticed the tremors in her fingers. She had never held a gun before, never felt the weight of it against her skin. Lucy recalled, with embarrassment, when her mother first dropped her off at Salem’s house for a play date, she took Mrs. Aguilar aside and asked brusquely if they had any guns in the house. “No. Of course not,” Mrs. Aguilar had answered in return, her face struggled against showing her offense. Only then did Maxine leave Lucy, kissing her for a second too long on the forehead and whispering instructions to call if she got homesick.
They did not own guns. Her father did not hunt.
And here she was, holding this gun and wondering—what did it mean? Why was it here?
Hidden in a lunch bag, with bullets.
Who did it belong to?
Lucy pondered the danger of it all, and she tried desperately to place a person at this locker mere feet from her own. Who opened it? Who sat under it in the morning? Had she ever been in danger?
But then the realization poured over her: Whoever brought this gun to school was likely dead now. Their intentions—to intimidate a bully, self-harm, bragging rights to friends—didn’t matter anymore. She pondered putting it back in the locker and shutting it back up, burying it under a geometry book and gym socks, hidden out of sight. Then Lucy realized that this could be a blessing. She spun and held the gun resting in the palm of her hand.
“Sal? Grant?” Lucy called, aware of the rise in the timbre of her voice. “I found something,” she said and turned to her friends.
“Is that a—” Grant started and he took a step. Sal turned around. She was holding a giant fleece blanket in one hand and a bulk container of hand-sanitizer in the other. She opened her mouth to speak, but then her head snapped quickly to the right.
They all heard the clank and rumble of the gates as they moved upward, unhooking from their magnetic bases. They were exposed. Lucy’s eyes darted to the camera and it was trained directly on them.
“The intercom is off,” Grant shouted and he scrambled forward to collect the items he had set aside. “We didn’t even notice…dammit…we didn’t even notice!”
Spencer had spotted them. He had been watching them and he knew they were there; knew they were hiding. But more disturbingly, he knew they had a gun.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Shit!” Grant yelled and he tugged Salem’s arm toward the East Wing hallway, pinning a collection of confiscated locker items to his side. “Lucy, come on!”
Lucy leaned down and grabbed the paper bag of bullets and darted forward, her bare feet slapping against the floor. But instead of turning up the narrow hallway, Lucy ran straight past them and down the English hall, toward the opening gates and toward Spencer.
“Are you crazy?” Grant called after her. “We gotta get out of here.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the camera and its subtle shift following her. She slowed at the turn and then peered around the corner.
“Wait,” she yelled to her friends, her voice was shrill and panicky. “Don’t go anywhere!”
Salem and Grant stood waiting at the edge of the hallway, ready to run, but Lucy kept peering around the corner. It was a long hallway to the main office and security office, roughly one hundred feet, but she had a perfect view. Unless Spencer was lying about being alone, there was no way he had time to man the cameras and also bolt after them.
“He’s still in the security office, just watching,” Lucy called to her friends.
“You sure?” Salem called.
Lucy nodded. “He put the gates up so we would run…so he could watch where we ran to.” Her heart pounded as she kept her eyes trained on the hallway, watching for Spencer’s lanky body to come barreling down upon them.
“I have an idea,” she called back to them. “Go to the lab, put the tables back and the ladder up. Then wait by the door for me. Don’t leave the lab until I come for you.”
Grant shook his head, just once, a quick and sudden shake and stepped back out into the hallway. “What? You’re bait?”
“I’m bait,” she replied and then drew in a tight breath.
Salem opened her mouth to protest, but Grant saluted her. “Good plan,” he said with admiration. The tone encouraged her, helped stay her shaking hands a bit. Lucy didn’t have a real plan other than to draw Spencer out of the security office so she could get them safely in their hideaway without detection. And if that didn’t work, she was fresh out of back-up plans.
Grant and Salem darted out of sight.
Lucy took a deep breath and with her back to the camera, she dropped the gun back into the paper bag. She crumpled up the top and then held it tightly in her hands. The gun was not an asset if Lucy didn’t know how to use it. She knew that Spencer was armed and she was not, but it was a risk she had to take.
She slid back out of view and pressed her back against the wall. The camera was on her. It moved, zoomed in, zoomed out. Spencer was no doubt watching Salem and Grant lead him to the journalism room, but there was Lucy, unmoving, a sitting duck. He had to wonder why.
For a second she wondered if Principal Spencer recognized her. If he knew her name or her year in school. She wasn’t an athlete or a drama kid. She never took a student council class and despite Salem’s pleading, she never wrote for the newspaper. Before all of the madness started, Lucy assumed that she would graduate from Pacific Lake with relative anonymity. She would be the person her classmates years later would sort-of remember as that “one girl in that one class”. People would try to pin down a list of defining characteristics, but they couldn’t.
Then she heard the echo of a door shutting. She peeked around the corner and saw a flash of movement and a blur of gray and black. She glanced at the camera and stood up, she sprinted forward a few steps and then turned—the camera had stopped following her. At that moment, she could recognize the loud pounding of feet racing down the extended hall. Her breath catching in her chest, she made a dash for the East Wing.
And that was when she heard the shot.
A blast echoed down after her and Lucy jumped.
She ran wildly, hitting her shoulder against the wall as she turned the corner, her body unable to keep up with her feet. Lucy ran up the East Wing hallway, around the corner, and up to the lab where Salem stood guard in the doorway and Lucy yanked her out, motioning for Grant to follow, but he was still carrying the ladder into place, holding it with outstretched arms, wobbling forward with obscured vision.
“Who has the keys?” Lucy asked, out-of-breath.
Salem shook her head and pointed at Grant.
They heard Spencer’s footsteps pound down English hall and then heard him turn into the East Wing hallway. Like a honing pigeon—he knew where they were. A second shot rang out and the blast seemed much louder and menacing than before.
Lucy ran back into the lab, terrified that they were too late. Her plan was failing, instead of leading them all into security, they were going to be caught and shot by a crazy man.
“Keys Grant! Keys!” she whispered, cognizant that Spencer could now hear their voices echoing. But Grant was positioning the ladder under the skylight with both hands and unable to grab them. “Hurry, hurry!” Lucy commanded and Grant stepped back, dug into his pants, and pulling out the jangling janitor’s keys he ran toward the door.
Salem was wracked. Her face was flush with spotty red circles and her hands had gone ghostly white. Lucy opened her mouth to talk, but Salem shook her head violently to stop her. Spencer was close.
They all heard him and his shoes on the tile in the East Wing. He was walking with purpose, but no longer running, as he stopped to peer into rooms. The art room door had been propped open with a garbage can and Lucy only now registered the luck of that. As they pushed themselves to become one with the wall, they listened as he yanked the door open and then disappeared inside.
“Now,” Lucy mouthed and Grant opened the supply closet door. They flew inside. Shut the door and locked it without a sound. And sank to the ground.
“He’s going to find us, he’s going to find us,” Salem mumbled.
“Stop,” Lucy said and crawled over in the darkness to her friend.
A sliver of light was all they had—illuminating a few centimeters of carpet beyond the door and nothing else. Lucy waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but they never did. It reminded her of her freshman photography class, when Kyle Ingwood took her into the tiny rooms where they unrolled their film, and tried to kiss her in the complete darkness, his lips groping the air and then the side of her chin before finally landing on her lips. Photography class suffered extinction at the hands of budget cuts the following year and Kyle never spoke to her after their messy make-out session in the dark.
But she still could taste the dark in that room. With her eyes wide open, she could not register anything around her; the thickness of the dark was oppressive.
Pitch-black.
No outlines of the couches or of each other’s bodies as a reference as the room pressed down on them. It weighed on them like a heavy blanket—the sound of waves inside a seashell hummed near their ears. Lucy struggled to take a breath, her head pressurized like she was in an airplane.
Spencer was done with the art room and he paused outside the woodshop. They collectively held their breath. And Lucy had to cover her mouth to keep from screaming when they heard the rattle of the doorknob into their hideout. He turned it once and then twice, pulled on the door, found it locked, and soon gave up the idea. Spencer then must have seen the door ajar to the journalism room, because they heard the door creak open, and without warning or fanfare he was walking away from their hiding spot. For a brief second, the fear of discovery left them like a deflating balloon.
They heard the tumble of the ladder as it crashed to the floor and hit the desk along the way, then the scraping of desks, the push and screech of metal on tile. And afterward: Nothing, just silence. They waited to hear him exit, waited—holding their breath—to see if he would examine every room in the East Wing. After a long moment, the journalism door swung open, hitting the wall with blunt force and then shutting with a distinct click. Spencer’s heavy footsteps walked away from them—away, away—until they couldn’t hear anything anymore.
“Is it safe to turn on the light?” Salem asked.
“No,” Lucy answered. “Not until we know he can’t see us for sure.”
“The cameras in the East Wing don’t show this door,” Salem added. “I don’t want to sit here without being able to see...it’s suffocating.”
Lucy waved her hand around until she felt the cotton of Salem’s shirt and then felt for her hand, grabbed it, and gave it a squeeze. “He might come back.”
“We’ll wait,” Grant said, his voice floated to them from somewhere near the door. “We have no intercom now. No way of knowing what’s happening out there. So, we wait.”
They listened intently, but couldn’t hear a sound.
For minutes, long hour-like minutes, they waited.
Lucy curled up on the floor, the scratchy carpet rubbing against her cheek, as she felt her body melt against the fibers. Even though she struggled against it, Lucy found herself succumbing to sleep. She wished she would will herself to stay alert, but sleep dragged her down into a fitful abyss.
She dreamed Spencer found them. Yanked them out by their hair and dragged them to the auditorium where the boy who had died right in front of her was inexplicably alive, but bleeding out his nose and eyes. The blood pooled at his feet, thick, red, and sticky and his mouth was moving, but no sound came out. As they were pulled past him, his arms shot up he reached for Lucy’s kicking feet.
Defying physics, Spencer hoisted them all on stage and tried to deposit their broken and tired bodies into the dressing room, which was filled to the top with bodies like a hall closet shoved with piles of junk and clothing. But Friendly Kent sent them away. “No room. No room. No room.”
So, Spencer grabbed them back and took them to the pool. The cement cavern was now a mass grave of tangled bodies. He threw them into the sea of limbs and blood. Lucy tried to get out, flapping her arms forward and gaining leverage against the dead, but she couldn’t make any progress forward. The dead pulled her down into them and she sank, as if their mushy decomposing bodies were quicksand or a riptide. Frantic and calling for Grant and Salem at intervals, Lucy gripped a body and the head rolled over to her.
It was Ethan.
She screamed and pushed his bloated features away. Her scream echoed, carrying on for ten full seconds and it appeared to trigger something as select tiles in the ceiling slid out of the way, creating cavernous black holes.
