Pandemonium

I could see nothing but black, feel nothing but cold. Terror was a white noise, a static roar. I tried to drown it out with inner shouts, chants of Oh fuck Oh fuck and then The Shug will save me The Shug will save me . . .

I touched bottom, ass first, and then the bottom gave way. I sank into mud, silky and unknowably deep. Fresh panic coursed through me. I twisted, trying to bring my feet up, and then slid onto my chest. My face pressed into the mud, and I recoiled in horror. I couldn’t take that. I couldn’t die suffocating in mud.

I convulsed like a fish, finally ended on my side, in mud as deep as my breastbone. I lifted my helmeted head, shook it to clear the mud from my eyes.

I opened my eyes but there was nothing, black in all directions. And silence.

No splash in the water above me, no cloud of white as Toby came for me through the silty water. Toby wasn’t coming. The Shug wasn’t going to save me.

The Shug is a monster. That’s its job. Terrorize people, kill them, enforce the rituals. It doesn’t rescue people. It doesn’t retrieve cats from trees, fight fires, show up for potlucks. That’s not part of the bargain, no matter how many fish you nail to the door. The deal is, if you make the sign, the angel of death passes by your house. The angel of death doesn’t pull you out of the pool, or cut through the steel of your car door and carry you out of the ravine. It’s the fucking angel of death. My chest burned; my ears pounded. It took all my strength to keep my lips clamped shut. I searched the water for some sign of movement—if not the Shug, then Lew, somehow escaped from the Human Leaguers. Come on, Lew. You’re running through the forest, you’re at the pier, you’re diving . . .

There. Floating in the middle distance, a quavering circle of deeper black.

The black well.

As I watched, it blossomed, rushed toward me, filled my vision. The hole was bottomless, a twisting tunnel that branched and split into an infinite number of side shafts, but there was something waiting at the end of each of them. The mouth hovered above me, or I hovered over it, ready to fall, the gravity sucking at me like a whirlpool. It was a door, a gate—to something. Death, or the Hellion’s cage inside my head, or some false paradise generated by my oxygen-starved brain. I didn’t care, as long as it was somewhere else. I let go, and fell.

10

Oh my God, did you shoot him? The commander didn’t say to—

Shut the fuck up, Bertram, I didn’t fucking touch him!

For God’s sake just get him up, pull the chair up—

I don’t understand. Del never said his brother was epileptic . . . Everyone shut up! It’s a trick, dammit. Don’t fucking go near him!

It’s not a seizure.

—please, at least hold his head so he won’t—

What’d she say, “say-zure?”

I could feel him. There, in the dark, I reached for him. I reached and I grabbed—

Light.

An expanse of braided carpet, stretching like a plain. Voices: O’Connell, Louise, Bertram, other men. I’m telling you, don’t go near him!

Black boots appear, large as houses. A giant’s hand. Another male voice, closer: If this is a trick, we’re going to Taser you, do you understand? Can you talk?

I—

Lew’s voice. Resonating oddly, a microphone turned too loud in a small room.

I’m drowning, the voice said.

He struggled, trying to throw me off, and I clamped down tighter, tighter still, like the bear hugs he always used against me to end our wrestling matches.

His arms were stretched backward, wrists touching, bound in hard plastic.

Flex.

Lew’s arms flexed.

“You’re not drowning,” the guard said. “You fell over.”

Pull.

The arms yanked away from each other. Plastic snapped. The pain speared up the arms.

Ignore the pain. Grab him.

The hand seized the guard’s ankle, pulled. Small bones popped. The man screamed, hit the ground.

Get up.

The perspective lurched. A Human Leaguer in midnight camo, firing. The Taser dart embedded somewhere out of sight. The leaguer pulled the trigger, pulled it again. His expression changed from anger to confusion.

Punch.

The fist knocked the gunman back into a wall. The framed photographs clattered to the floor, coughing glass. Bertram, still in helmet and pack, seemed to be in shock, his eyes on the man who’d collapsed against the wall. Louise pressed far back into the couch. O’Connell, beside her, wore a tight-lipped expression that could have masked anything: fear, shock, anger.

“And who are you?” O’Connell asked.

Lew’s hands pulled the dart-tipped wire from his chest, tossed it aside.

“I’m dying,” Lew’s voice said.

Run.