The Cabin in the Woods

ELEVEN

Maybe it was the screaming and the thumping against the toughened glass that had vented her terror and calmed her a little. Or maybe she’d just seen so much that there was really no alternative other than to remain calm. Her heart still thrummed faster than usual, but she felt removed from the reality she’d always been a part of and comforted by. Talking boys with Jules, going out for a drink with friends, running each morning around her neighborhood, college, exams, worrying about how she looked and whether she needed a haircut and what shoes to wear to the party next Saturday… this was all from a world so distant to her now that she could barely comprehend it anymore.

Everything that was safe and normal had been blown away, and Dana could not imagine it ever settling down again.

I’ll always know, she thought. This will always be here, whether we get out or not. The puppeteers had their hooks in her now, and even if she did manage to escape she suspected the strings stretched too far for her to break.

Marty was still holding her tight. She looked over his shoulder, and knew that he looked over hers. They had each seen things that the other hadn’t, but she didn’t want to know. Maybe much later, if they survived, when they huddled together in dorm rooms while their new, distant friends enjoyed themselves and lived normal lives… maybe then they’d talk of what they’d seen, and try to make some kind of sense.

But not right now.

The elevator was descending again. The walls visible through the thick glass walls were now rough stone. As they jarred to a halt and a mechanical whirring noise sounded somewhere far away, Dana wondered just how the hell any of this was possible.

Comprehension hit her like a brick.

This was not possible.

And was it really the first time she’d allowed herself to think that?

The door slid open onto a small, metal-lined lobby. Clean, unfurnished, clinical. A guard was aiming a gun at her face. He shifted quickly until he aimed at Marty, and jammed his foot in the door. He wore a black suit, black mask and goggles, and his mouth and nose were enclosed behind very modern-looking breathing apparatus. It gave his voice an electronic taint.

“Out of the elevator!” There was a pause, a quiet moment when everything was held suspended. Then, “Step out of the elevator!”

“Why are you trying to kill us?” Dana asked. It was a helpless, hopeless question, and she imagined him saying, I’m only following orders. But the guard just acted as if he hadn’t heard.

“Step out! Just the girl!”

“Just me?” she asked. Marty’s hand tightened around hers, their fingers interlocking. He squeezed as if to say, No fucking way. She squeezed back.

“Do it!” the guard shouted. He stepped forward, edging into the elevator, and Dana heard Marty shifting slightly behind her.

Something scrabbled across the floor, moved between her feet and grabbed the guard’s foot.

Judah’s arm!

The guard jumped, looked down, and shot at the arm. The explosion was staggering in the enclosed space, and Dana’s hearing was blasted to little more than a faint, distant hum. But she took the moment and used it, and while the guard’s gun was aimed down she shouldered into his chest and drove him back against the metal door jamb.

His head swung up and back and cracked against the metal, and he slid down slowly to lean against the elevator’s side wall.

Marty snatched the gun from the guard’s hand and picked up Judah’s blade.

“Good work, zombie arm!” he shouted, and his voice was fading slowly back in. Dana could see from his pained smile that his hearing had been numbed by the gunshot, as well.

A steady hum was growing. She rubbed at her ears, and it sounded as though she was doing it from the inside.

“Won’t last long!” he shouted. “Come on.”

The small lobby opened out to house seven other elevator doors. Dana shivered as she thought about what might have entered or exited those doors, but they were all closed and silent for now, and the panels above them remained unlit. There was a small, abandoned guard’s station just along from the elevators, and past that a corridor led off to a right-angled turn.

From beyond there, Dana was sure she could hear several sets of heavy footsteps approaching.

Marty pointed that way, then to his ears. She nodded. There was no escape route, other than back into the elevator in which they’d descended… or into a new one. But where the hell might they all lead? she wondered.

Before they could decide which way to go or what to do, a voice came from a speaker built into the wall above the elevators. It was clear and calm, surprisingly intimate. And it started to explain.

“I am The Director,” it said, “and this has gone terribly wrong. I know you can hear me. I want you to listen.”

Marty pressed his finger to his lips, shaking his head slowly. Don’t speak, don’t answer. Maybe this was just another trick. But the voice was soothing in a strange way, and if it could offer any reason why this had happened, there was no way she couldn’t listen.

“You won’t get out of this complex alive,” The Director said. Dana swallowed, chilled by the calmness in her words, but the idea did not surprise her. She’d been thinking it herself. “What I want you to understand,” she continued, “is that you mustn’t try. Because your deaths will avert countless others.”

The heavy footsteps had ceased now, and she could hear the furtive shuffling of people approaching along the corridor. They’d be close soon. Close enough to shoot. But the voice had her pinned like a butterfly to the air, and Marty seemed the same. Their hands tightly linked, they continued to listen.

“You’ve seen horrible things: an army of nightmare creatures. And they are real. But they are nothing compared to… to the alternative.” That was the first kink in her voice.

She’s afraid, Dana thought, and she’s trying not to show it. And that was almost as terrifying as everything else she had seen.

Marty nudged her and pointed along the corridor, where shadows shifted slowly against the wall. Someone was just around the corner.

“You’ve been chosen to be sacrificed for the greater good,” The Director continued, voice firm and confident once again. “Look, it’s an honor. So forgive us… and let us get on with it.”

Marty handed Dana Judah’s blade and hefted the gun, then headed to the empty guard station. She followed close behind. They had maybe seconds in which to act, and much as all she wanted to do was shout—Screw you, Come and get us!—she knew that Marty was thinking straight.

Did they really think that asking them to lay down and die would make them go any easier?

As Dana reached back to close the door behind her, there was a shattering burst of machine-gun fire. Bullets struck the door and pushed it closed, and when the handle clicked up she turned the latch, locking it.

Screaming, shouting, she fell back against Marty, and they huddled together behind the metal door. The top half was glass, but it must have been of the same toughened construction as was used in the elevators. Bullets ricocheted off of it, leaving little more than tiny white impact stars where they struck.

“They’re fucking shooting at us!” Marty shouted. Dana couldn’t think of any suitable response, so she raised her middle finger at the door.

Fuck them.

Marty lifted himself a little, looked through the glass and ducked back down again. A fresh salvo of bullets thudded into the door, the sound horrendous, and he had to cup his hands around her ear to make himself heard.

“Five of them, big guns, mean—”

The shooting stopped suddenly, and he screamed his next word into the shocking silence.

“—motherfuckers!”

“Right on,” Dana said. She glanced around the guard room, wondering whether there was anything they could use to help themselves, or if there was another way out. And then she saw the control panel at the back.

It quite obviously controlled all of the eight elevators outside. There were eight monitors, and beneath each were at least three dozen switches. The images switched every three seconds, and each one showed a monster in its elevator pod. A couple she had seen before, but most of those she saw were new.

“Sweet Jesus, how many are there?” she muttered. And the evidence here suggested that their numbers were almost beyond comprehension. Beside the buttons were dials, and above and below them small banks of switches.

At the far end of the panel was a small red button on its own. A wire grille covered it, presumably to prevent it being pushed accidentally by someone settling down a mug of coffee or a book. And the single, etched word above it read, “Purge.”

Dana nudged Marty, but he’d already seen. He was pale beneath the blood that smeared much of his face, and his eyes had grown more serious than she’d ever seen. He needs a joint, she thought. She experienced a sharp, intense pang for the brief time she and her four friends had spent together happy. It hadn’t lasted nearly long enough.

“An army of nightmares, huh?” she said. She stood and moved to the console, her appearance above the door’s metal lower half prompting a renewed round of shooting. She watched the guards for a couple of seconds through the scarred glass, wondered how long it would last before shattering, and then raised her middle finger at them.

This time, they saw.

“Let’s get this party started,” she said. She plucked away the wire guard, hovered her hand over the Purge button and glanced at Marty. He said nothing. She hit the button.

From outside the shooting ceased, and they heard the gentle hum of elevator doors opening.

Dana darted to the window and Marty crouched beside her. The five guards were no longer looking or aiming their way. Instead, they were crouched in the lobby pointing their guns toward the elevators and whatever might emerge from them.

She moved to the viewing panel, and waved to Marty to join her. There was a pause during which she had time to see the hundreds of spent bullets and casings scattered across the floor, and to think, They really make this glass to last.

And then she saw movement at one of the elevator openings.

A blue tentacle probed out, a hundred tiny toothed mouths opening and closing along its length, and the guards opened fire.

In a flash the elevators disgorged their inhabitants. A werewolf, a strange alien creature with a dozen sharpened limbs, mutants, a robot with flaming hands, and others that moved too quickly for her to see… they streamed through the hail of bullets and struck the guards, taking them apart in sprays of blood and flesh, burning them, melting them with acid jetting from mouths or other body parts. In seconds the lobby became a bloody mess, and the bullet scars on their viewing window were splashed with blood and scraps of meat.

“Holy shit,” Marty said, ducking down and pulling Dana with him. She tugged back, wanting to see— sick fascination, wonder, perhaps a need to feed her nightmares—but relented soon enough. Moments later they heard limbs slapping and scrabbling across metal, and then silence fell.

“Do you think…?” she whispered. Marty shrugged, so Dana rose again until she could just peer over the top of the sill. She was just in time to hear the elevators ping again in unison and seen the doors slip open. The things that came out this time were slower, more lumbering than the first wave, and they soon settled down to a warm meal.

Sitting back down beside Marty, she closed her eyes and concentrated to hold down the vomit.

“Dana?” he whispered.

“Zombies. And other things. Eating what’s left.”

“Well, at least they clean up after themselves.”

“What are we gonna do?”

“Get out of here,” he said, leaning close to her. “Somehow. Sometime. But not while those elevators are opening every few seconds to let out… ”

“So let’s sit and wait for a while,” she said. “Maybe they won’t know we’re here.” “Maybe.”

They held hands and waited in silence, listening to the sounds of growling and grumbling, and things being dragged across the floor. Occasionally the growls rose into angry shrieks as whatever was out there fought over a tasty morsel, but mostly the feast was performed in silence. Dana supposed there was plenty enough for all of them.

At regular intervals the elevator doors opened and disgorged something else into the complex. They heard footsteps, the hard clack of claws, slimy sliding things, the flutter of leathery wings, and the ghostly howl of creatures that should never be.

Perhaps ten minutes after the first guards met their ends, they heard the pounding of footsteps and a scream of terror as several more arrived. Dana closed her eyes and tried not to hear, but the elevators pinged, the doors hummed open, and it all started again.

Wet things struck the door.

People screamed.

Dana and Marty hugged, thinking perhaps it would never end, and they’d die in here of starvation and terror as the elevators pinged, and things continued to stalk from the nightmares where they should have remained.

“There’s still a chance,” Hadley said. “Really. Still a chance. Maybe we’ll get lucky and… ” But he trailed off, and Sitterson heard his own hopelessness echoed in his friend’s voice. As they worked feverishly at their control panels—trying to contact people beyond their reach, searching for reasons why this was happening—images flickered at random across the viewing screens.

And the images they saw were of chaos and death. Sitterson had just seen a lab worker with whom he’d sometimes enjoyed drinking taken down by a mutant, thrashing as the stick-thin red thing held his arms and vomited onto his face and head. After an instant of motionless shock the man had started writhing and kicking as wisps of smoke rose from his eyes, mouth, and nose, and his head began to melt.

The mutant had sat back for a while, and then it commenced feeding.

Another camera in a corridor deeper in the complex showed a group of workers—lab technicians and administrative staff—fleeing in panic, moments before a horde of flying, scuttling, running monsters came after them. Sitterson tapped keys to track their progress from corridor to hallway to balcony, before the monsters fell on them at last. He watched only until he was certain that none would escape, and then he moved away to give them privacy in their deaths.

A lab worker was knocked from a high balcony in the rotunda, plummeting to his death. Sitterson switched cameras.

A female guard ran screaming from a strange, floating witch-like woman, her long gray hair trailing behind her like exhaust fumes, her spindly fingers catching the woman’s hair and tripping her back. The guard shot a whole magazine into the witch’s face with no effect. The witch grabbed her head and lifted her from the ground, opening an unnaturally wide mouth that closed around the woman’s face and sucked the life from her.

As the woman visibly deflated in her black uniform, the witch’s hair darkened from silvery-gray to dark gray, strands thickening and becoming more lustrous. She cast the shriveled corpse aside and floated away in her search for more.

Sitterson flipped through image after image, skipping past various levels and rooms, hallways and lobbies throughout the complex. One stairwell camera showed a long, steady line of zombies descending the flights, and he tapped a few keys to see where they were going. He wished he hadn’t. A group of people had taken refuge at the base of the stairwell, barricading the doors against the horrors from outside but not considering the fact that they could descend, as well.

The zombies marched down to feed, and the people died badly

A vampire resembling the classic Nosferatu ripped the throat from a screaming woman, splashing the security camera lens with blood.

“Kevin,” said Hadley.

“Where?”

“Corridor three-B.”

“Who’s Kevin?” Truman said from by the door, but they ignored him. If he watched, he’d see soon enough.

Sitterson brought it up onto one of the big screens.

Kevin.

He remembered seeing this man before, knew what he could do, but even so he was briefly taken in by his appearance—quite, calm, normal-looking, he walked amongst the chaos seemingly unperturbed by the terrible things he saw. All around him people were being killed, eaten, torn apart, melted, shriveled, exploded, digested or crushed, and his gentle smile never seemed to change.

But then an injured guard caught his attention. He stopped, knelt by the man’s side, and exsanguinated the man in a matter of seconds.

“Elevator lobby,” Hadley said. “Got, some unblooded coming through.”

“Unblooded?” Truman asked.

“Things that haven’t been used yet,” Sitterson explained. “They’ll be even more bloodthirsty than the rest.” Hadley had brought up a view of the elevator lobby, where the walls were painted red and piles of body parts were scattered across the floor. There were still zombies chewing on bones and rifling through heaps of intestines.

The elevators opened and a man with spinning saws in his head emerged. From another open door, a woman with fire smoldering in her mouth and dripping from her nose. And more, and more, and Sitterson couldn’t understand how any of this was happening.

There were safeguards. Truman started talking into his intercom, his voice quivering in panic. He’d drawn and checked his sidearm, and Sitterson almost laughed at that.

Hasn’t he even been watching?

“Lead Officer Truman to Sec Command, requesting immediate reinforcement. Code Black. Repeat: Code Black. Where the hell are you guys?”

“Why aren’t the defenses working?” Sitterson said, working his control panel. “Where’s the fucking gas?”

“I think something chewed through the connections, in the utility shaft,” Hadley said.

“Something which?”

“Something scary!”

The light flickered and went out. The screens went dead. Sitterson heard a faint cry from Lin down in the control area, and then footsteps as she made her way up to them.

Something hit the door hard enough to buckle its three-inch metal lining.

It’s all going to hell, he thought.

“We can’t just stay here and—” Dana whispered, and then something smashed through the window behind them and stuck against the wall above the control panel. Glass showered over her head and shoulders. She let out a startled cry and jumped up, Marty by her side.

The thing unfurled its leathery wings and turned its head around on a long neck to look their way. A huge bat, with an almost childlike face… a small dragon, with smoke curling from one nostril… she guessed it really didn’t matter which.

The dragonbat growled fire.

“Shit!” Dana hissed. She flicked the lock’s latch and opened the door, backing away from danger even knowing that there might be worse behind her. Marty came with her, gun raised and pointing at the dragonbat thing, and she wondered if he’d even ever fired a pistol.

They slid along the wall away from the guard’s station and scanned the scene around them. The noises were clearer now that they were out of the booth— growling, chewing, wet crunches as skulls were cracked, sucking, drooling, and dripping. The guards were dead and the monsters were eating.

One thing looked their way—it had four eyes and a mouth like something from beneath the sea—and Dana froze. But it dipped its head back to emptying a guard’s holed skull of brain matter and fluid.

Dana hadn’t dared draw a breath since leaving the guard’s booth. And she might have remained frozen there, dinner-in-waiting, if Marty hadn’t grabbed her hand and dragged her toward the corridor that led from the lobby. Things shifted and ate, and just as she thought, Why aren’t they interested in us? a huge, boil-covered monstrosity stood before them and roared.

Boils burst across its body and misted the air, and Marty shot it once in the eye. It staggered back against the wall and slid down, dead.

Dana caught her breath now and ran, Marty by her side. She heard his own heavy breathing, and tried to ignore all the terrible, impossible things around them. They stepped over a body with its guts and organs removed, almost slipped in something wet and warm, and then they were in the corridor leading away from the lobby. Bullet holes pocked the walls here and the entire hallway was a mess of blood and dead bodies. A guard sat against the wall, his eyes wide open and no apparent injury on his body. But Dana has never seen anyone more dead.

As they reached the turn in the corridor Marty said, “When we get around we run as fast—” But he was cut off by a terrible, piercing screech.

Dana couldn’t help looking back, and she saw the dragonbat winging at them from the guard’s station, fire gushing from its mouth and clawed wings ripping at the air.

They took the corner at speed, running straight into a man in a long white lab smock and with a terrible cut to his scalp. He glared at them but didn’t seem to see, and as he pushed past them the dragonbat struck him in the chest.

The impact was immense. It powered him against the opposite wall, cracking plaster and splintering wooden studs, casting them both through to the space hidden beyond. The fracture was illuminated by a burst of flame, and the man’s screams quickly boiled away. The dragonbat rocketed from the hole again, meat and stringy stuff hanging from its mouth. Marty leaned across Dana to protect her and raised the gun, but the creature ricocheted from the walls and disappeared down the corridor, leaving scorch-marks wherever it touched.

They stood, and Dana couldn’t help herself; she took three steps to the hole in the wall and looked inside.

The man lay dead beyond the fracture, a cauterized hole in his stomach where his guts had once resided, hands curled in like dead spiders. His mouth was open in a silent scream, and smoke drifted up past his shattered teeth. But it was something else that caught Dana’s attention.

“Now what the hell is this…?” she muttered.

The corridor beyond was hacked through solid rock, vague tool-marks visible in the walls as if it had been carved long before machines had been available. The floor was uneven and home to dark puddles, and the curved ceiling was fissured and shadowy. Age seeped from the walls and hung in the air, and she felt as if she were breathing lost times.

“Whatever it is, I think it’s our only way,” Marty said. “Look.” From the direction of the elevator lobby, several lurching creatures were coming their way, all teeth and claws. And from the corridor, a flowing fireball burnt its way toward them. Walls warped and cracked beneath its heat, and already Dana could feel the skin on her face stretching in anticipation of its touch. Without hesitation she grabbed Marty’s hand and stepped through the hole, pulling him after her.

Something was hammering at the door, and Sitterson knew it would soon be inside. Hinges squealed. Metal bent.

Emergency power flicked on, and the lighting was low-level, most of the power being fed into life support. Ha! That phrase had flashed across Sitterson’s main computer screen and he’d choked on laughter. Life support!

Truman stood his ground, gun in one hand and his microphone in the other, and Sitterson had to admire the guy’s persistence as he tried to call in reinforcements. Didn’t he see the fucking screens? he thought. But in a way he was jealous of Truman’s defense mechanism. Holding onto routine, and order, and procedure… they were insulating him against the terrible truth. That things had fallen apart, and their true descent had only just begun.

The three large screens flashed to life again, and carnage appeared intermittently across them, images changing every few seconds and virtually all of them displaying something ghastly…

A clown skipped and leapt toward a barricade behind which several guards hunkered down, firing again and again into the advancing thing. Bullet after bullet struck it, but its baggy clown’s trousers and tent-like shirt seemed to absorb the projectiles. When a few rounds took it in the face its head flipped back, but then its make-up seemed to flow as the holes disappeared and its gleeful, horrendous grin reappeared. It carried a large curved blade in one hand, but the image flashed away before Sitterson saw the blade put to use.

“The door’s going to give!” Truman said.

“Go get me a coffee!” Hadley called, his laughter high and desperate.

A unicorn gored a scientist against a wall, its horn probing through his stomach and chest, grinding, tearing, and his spurting blood painted its gorgeous flowing mane red.

“We’re fucked,” Lin said. There was a time not too long ago when Sitterson had intended doing just that to her, yes. He considered going to her and holding her now, but that would have seemed just foolish.

A werewolf fell on a woman, dragging her down beneath a camera’s eye and standing again with blood and flesh across its face and the woman’s tattered scalp in one giant paw.

“Top hinge has gone,” Truman said.

“How many magazines you got?” Sitterson asked.

“The regulation three.”

Of course. The regulation three. Not like Truman to hide a few more around his person, was it? A grenade, perhaps? A secret nuke?

A group of goblins drove one of the complex’s golf carts along a narrow corridor, running people down and reversing over them, aiming for their heads, bursting them, then stirring their extended fingers in the resultant mess before driving on, cackling gleefully and giving the camera the slimy finger.

“Hey!” Hadley said, pointing at the main screen. Anna Patience Buckner emerged from an elevator into the bloodstained lobby.

“Well, why should she miss out on the party?” Sitterson muttered. The mystery of how she’d found her way down from the surface really did not matter now.

The door bent inward, and smoke started pouring into Control.

“Time to go,” Sitterson said quietly. He nudged Lin and pointed at the carpet beneath his desk, which he pulled up to reveal a code-locked trapdoor.

“But—” she said, nodding at Truman.

“He’ll buy us time,” Sitterson said. Hadley joined them, a submachine gun nursed in the crook of his arm.

“Where did you—?” Lin began.

“Personal life insurance.” His voice was high-pitched and uncertain.

“Just make sure I have time to open this fucking thing,” Sitterson said. “Oh look, the scarecrows are here.”

Truman was firing into the face of a straw man who was climbing through a wrenched gap between door and frame. The bullets passed through the scarecrow’s head without any effect, and he lashed out with long bladed fingers, catching the soldier across the forearm. Truman cursed and stepped back, firing again at the creature’s chest. More climbed in after him, four in all, and as the soldier changed magazines one of them bit into his left bicep.

He screeched and tore his arm away, losing a good weight of muscles and flesh in the process.

Hadley let rip with the machine gun. A scarecrow danced and jittered as the bullets ripped through him, writhing like a marionette. then laughed and advanced on the shooter.

“Our monsters have a fucking sense of humor?” he shouted. “Since when? I didn’t know about this!” He fired some more, concentrating on the scarecrow’s legs and amputating one at the thigh. It fell over and started to crawl.

“I need ten more seconds!” Sitterson said.

“Running out of time!” Hadley snapped back.

“It’s on emergency lockdown! I’m bypassing…”

“Come on, come on!” Lin said, pressing herself against his side, breasts squashed against his arm. He glanced at her and saw that her hair band had come loose, hair spilling over her right shoulder.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “you’re gorgeous!”

“Oh,” Hadley said from somewhere behind him. “Right. Grenade.”

Sitterson glanced back at the melee by the broken main door. Truman had dropped his gun and was batting at the scarecrows as they sliced and bit him, and in his right hand he held a small black object. He bit away the pin and held it up.

“Son of a bitch,” Sitterson mumbled, “that’s against regulations.” The grenade exploded.

He sprawled across the trapdoor, Lin spilling from his back and crying out as she struck the console.

Burning straw started to drift down around them and Lin looked past him at his desk.

“Hadley!” she shouted.

“What?” Sitterson snapped.

“Blast… blew him over…” She stood, shaking her head as blood leaked from her left ear. Burning straw landed in her hair and she waved it absently away.

Sitterson stood and leaned over his ruined console, resting his hand in something that had once been part of Truman. Down in the main control area, smoke drifted as the main door fell open, and Hadley was crawling slowly for the stairs back up to Control.

But something followed him. Something dark, swimming through the smoke as if passing through water, a fin breaking the surface, black hair visible here and there, black eyes, its wet black mouth opening wide, and Sitterson knew what was to come. If it hadn’t been so ridiculous he might even have laughed.

The merman closed on Hadley and turned him over, placing a huge webbed hand around his throat.

“Oh, come on!” Hadley said, and the creature bit off his face.

Hadley’s gone, Sitterson thought, falling to his knees and turning back to the trapdoor. “Steve’s gone.”

“So will we be if—” Lin said, and then the trapdoor gave an electronic buzz and its red-lit panel showed green. “Got it!” he swung the heavy trapdoor open and turned to Lin with a grin, about to say, Ladies first.

A tentacle appeared from the gloom and wrapped around her throat, constricting so quickly and powerfully that her tongue protruded, eyes bulged, and she spat blood as she was whipped back out of view. Sitterson fell sideways into the hole, hands around his head to lessen the impact.

He landed in a small chamber and stood quickly, reaching up to close the trapdoor, expecting something to fall on him at any moment and go about destroying him. We were so close, he thought, and he actually felt tears welling as he swung the trapdoor shut and locked it from within.

Maybe he was the last one left. Control was gone, the whole complex was infested, but the Virgin and the Fool might yet be alive.

“I can stop all this,” he whispered. The chance was minimal but it was still there. And he had nothing left to do.

To his right, a ladder led through a hole in the floor. It would take him down into the deep corridors, into places he had been watching on the screens as they crawled with monsters and impossibilities. But he had no alternative. He had to find the Fool and kill him, before he himself was killed.

He lifted the pendant from within his shirt and kissed it. Perhaps they would view this as their greatest entertainment, and he would be lauded. But he shook his head as such foolishness. Nothing about him mattered. Whatever the outcome, things had changed beyond redemption. Even if he did manage to reverse the situation, there would be a whole new set of rules and demands after this.

He began his descent, sliding down four long, staggered ladders before landing in a tunnel. To his left it disappeared into the gloom, and somewhere down there he saw shadows flexing and heard things feeding. So he took off his shoes and turned right, padding softly to a corner and sweeping quickly around, thinking what he would do when he saw—

The Virgin. He ran right into her, and she set a fire in his stomach. He looked down at her hands. They were wrapped around the hilt of Judah’s blade.

“I…” she said. “I’m sorry…

Behind her, the Fool stood aghast. They were both covered in blood, their own and others, and the boy was badly wounded. Sitterson couldn’t help feeling some measure of respect for their bravery

But this had never been about bravery.

“Please… kill him…” he said to the girl, nodding at Marty as he felt his knees giving way. “Please!” The pain possessed him, stealing his sight and smell and leaving him only with hearing as the darkness came for him. He fell, the blade still protruding from his stomach.

Could have been worse, he thought. The kids’ panicked breathing faded away, even though he was sure they still stood over him.

Yeah… I could have died a whole lot worse.