Page 103 of The Most Dangerous Games

“—some of you lose your own.”

Alek’s stomach turns. He’s enjoying this.

The next bomb blast comes then.

This one throws them all off their benches and to the floor, the blast sounding and feeling impossibly close, the whole room feeling like it’s been concussed.

The bench Alek was sitting on skids.

The lights flicker once.

The walls and ceiling come crashing down on all of them.

Patrick Arrasmith

67.

Jack knows the sound.

Not just “bomb.” Not just “close.”

This is a strike meant to kill people underground.

He’s almost certain it’s a bomb known as a bunker buster, designed specifically to attack underground shelters like this.

Chunks of concrete and plaster and steel plates rain down on them along with the shrapnel that has penetrated the ceiling. People shouting and diving for cover where there really isn’t any. Waiting for it to be over.

They feel the sky is falling on them, even this far underground.

Alek is closest to Jack. He quickly pulls her underneath a nearby metal bench, which becomes a temporary shield. It’s enough to deflect at least some of the falling debris until the chaos of the moment is over. Someone yells in pain and then stops yelling.

When the blast finally passes, and Jack thinks it’s safe, he crawls tentatively out from under the bench. The silence that follows is worse than the noise had been. His shoulders are hunched. He checks Alek with a quick sweep—blood? limbs? eyes focused? She nods. Alive. He stands into smoke so thick it turns the emergency lights into weak halos.

Across the room, Rupert has both hands on Tipton’s shoulder, shoving him sideways. A chunk of concrete lands where Tipton’s head was a second before. Tipton stares at Rupert for half a beat, like he doesn’t know what to do with the idea that a fourteen-year-old just saved his life.

Jack makes his way through, climbing over some debris nearly as high as his waist, to the middle of the room.

Not a game, he thinks. Just war.

All of them different and all the same in the end.

It’s then that he sees a huge piece of steel almost completely covering two people on the floor, neither one moving.

As Jack moves toward them, Wyatt’s voice tears through the dust.

“HANNAH!”

68.

After Jack and Wyatt both stumble through the debris they see Conner Lynch underneath the plate—half covered, half crushed, his body angled like he tried to become a shield. Hannah is alive beneath him. Her red hair is spread across the floor. She’s trying to wriggle out, but she won’t yank herself free because she’s staring at Conner’s face, waiting for it to move.

Conner, who had graduated with honors at West Point and been a football star, and then a rising star in Congress who people thought might be president someday.

His neck was wrong.

No part of him moving.

“Let us help you,” Jack says.