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“Wait for Malachi?” I said, and I didn’t mean for it to sound like a question, but it did.
“Fuck that noise. Help me with these things—get them up, come on. ”
Nick was yanking at the beams that had fallen down with us. They had half buried themselves with the weight of their collapse, but he dug them out and wrenched them forward, setting them upright and then changing his mind.
“What are you doing?”
“I was thinking barricades, but there aren’t enough of these. There might be enough to stack and climb though, so help me out here. They’re slow, but they’re coming. ”
“I know that, thank you!” So I did what he said, and I grabbed two or three, whatever I could hold. And they were all slippery, but I held on tight and scored a few splinters, didn’t let go of them. I swung them around and gave them to Nick, who was arranging a stack like a baby’s blocks.
Everything sank, though. No matter what we put down there, it slid, slipped, and squished down into the mud. So we stacked it higher. We piled it for all we were worth, and when we had everything we could stand on, it still wasn’t enough.
And they were coming.
I held the flashlight in my mouth. It tasted like earth and dead things, but I was afraid to drop it, too afraid to wedge it into the wall or put it down. Even without looking, I could see them writhing at the edge of the flashlight’s beam, at the fringe of the light’s circle, where the ribs of the tunnel were weak and crumbling as they clutched them, reaching forward, pushing past, slogging through.
“Malachi!” I screamed up at him, but the word was warped around the barrel of the flashlight.
“Hurry up!” Nick added. We couldn’t hear anything up there to suggest he’d come back, but we weren’t above hollering for help at that point, so we did. We blew our lungs out with the effort of it; we yelled until we were hoarse, and until the foul-smelling crew was too close to ignore.
“Up. ” Nick braced himself. “Up—maybe I can lift you from here. Then you can help pull me up. Come on. ”
“No, I’ll lift you. ”
“This is no time for feminism, babe. I weigh more than you do. Pure mercenary. Come on. ” He locked his hands together and held them low.
Christ, they were close. I could see their eyes, scooped out empty sockets that saw nothing. I could hear the gushing gasps leaking from their chests like they were squeezed out of old bellows. All that blackened, barbecued skin peeling in pieces, and all those broken fingers clawing forward—they moved so slow, but it was a horrifying kind of slow, a slow that will never stop. It was a slowness that you could run from your entire life, and you would run your entire life, because you’d have to.
I nodded at Nick, because he was right—and because it would only be a matter of minutes before they were on us. Maybe a matter of seconds.
I wiggled my feet free of the mess on the ground and pulled myself onto a pair of two-by-fours that offered something like stability. And from there, I jumped—putting one foot into Nick’s locked fingers and letting him lift me.
I caught the rotted edge of the floor above and it came apart in my hands. I flipped backwards from the inertia of my flight, and I landed on my back—half on the boards and half in the mud. The mud half hurt less.
“You all right?”
“No, but I will be. ” I accepted his hand when he offered it, and I let him help pull me up, back onto our little island of detritus. “Try again. It was close. ” I shook my shoulders, trying to loosen the pain that knotted there, coiled between the bones in my neck and my arm.
He held his hands back down and I took a deep breath.
He threw, I grasped. I caught the edge again and it held, or part of it held. Part of it fell away. I scrambled, digging in with fingernails, with fingertips, with slapping palms and kicking feet, pumping knees.
Beneath me, Nick’s hands were fighting to help—to give me something to push against. But it wasn’t working. I could feel myself sliding; too much weight remained over the edge and there wasn’t enough to cling to. And the floor above wasn’t stable enough. It wouldn’t hold me. I knew it wasn’t going to hold me.
Then, bursting through the window where we’d all made our entry, came Malachi.
“Get low!” I told him. “Lie down—spread your weight out! It won’t hold us otherwise!”
He did as he was told, and he did it fast—lying as flat as he could and holding out his hands just in time to give me one last thing to grab before toppling back into the pit. His fingers wormed their way around my wrists, and he’d anchored his feet somewhere beyond where I could see. He wiggled me back away from the edge. The floor objected like mad. The boards cracked and threatened collapse with every elbow jab and every knee knock.
But it held, and he had me out.
“Where’s Harry?”
“Couldn’t find him!”
“That’s all right—that’s fine. We’ll do without him. Help me—help me get Nick, he’s still down there. ”
