Not Flesh Nor Feathers

“Wave it around. Go on. Lean down in there, or give it to me and let me do it.”



“I’m looking,” he swore, swiveling the beam and apparently not meeting any resistance with it. “There’s nothing there yet, nothing right there, anyway.”



I didn’t know if that was good or bad. On the one hand, we’d arrived ahead of them; but on the other hand, we might need to get closer to them to really stop them with improvised explosives like ours.



“I’m going down there,” I told him, even as he was already stepping around the pit to stop me.



“No you’re not.”



“Watch me.”



“Don’t be an idiot.”



“I have my reasons.”



“I bet you do. If one of them is trying to get me to make a spectacle of myself on your behalf, you’re almost there, darling. But you are not going down in there. We’ll set these off up here, or light them and drop them, I don’t care. But there’s no good reason whatsoever to risk going down there.”



“I want to try to talk to them. I want to see what they want.”



“You already tried that, and it left you a blubbering, weepy mess. I’d prefer not to see that again, if it’s all right with you. It worried me.”



“But that was different,” I argued.



“Different how?” he demanded.



“Those were different dead people. I’ve got a theory and I want to see if it holds up. The more we know, the better chance we have of stopping them for good—not just covering them with dirt and hoping for the best.”



“Eden, this is—”



“Hear me out, okay? Whatever they’re capable of, it’s got nothing to do with omnipresence. They can’t be in two places at once. The ones up there holding the attention of the police and the firefighters—they might be some kind of distraction, and these guys are up to the real trouble.”



I kicked at the nearest set of boards and they collapsed into the pit under their own weight. They clattered down like giant pixie sticks, and the noise of their fall was shockingly loud. The noise of the approaching others did not dim or slow. They may as well not have heard it, or if they did hear it, they surely did not care.



Reassured by the loudness of the falling debris, which sounded close relative to the wheezing, stomping approach of the things under the city, I took the light back from Nick and beamed it down myself.



“It’s not very deep,” I said.



“Probably deeper than it looks. How do you plan to get back up once you’re down there? And do you think you can do it fast enough to clear that five hundred feet?”



“I told you, I don’t think five hundred feet is a strict requirement under these circumstances. And it looks like I can probably hoist myself on up, if there’s someone up here to help me out.”



“Motherfuck,” he spit. “Hang on, then. The bags.”



“Yeah, the bags.”



He grabbed them both and put one over each arm. I didn’t realize what he was doing until it was too late to stop him. “If it’s going to be one or the other of us, it might as well be me.”



“What are you doing?”



But he had already hit the wet, sucking ground down below. He sank a few inches; I could hear the slurp of the mud taking his feet. He staggered, went one hand down into the mud, and recovered himself.



“What the hell are you doing?” I screamed at him, because we’d already established that the zombie things didn’t care if we were there. Whatever they were coming after, we weren’t it—which wouldn’t necessarily stop them from tearing us limb from limb when they caught us.



“This, you crazy woman. And I say that with nothing but pure affection,” he added. “But for one thing, I’m taller than you and I’ll have an easier time climbing out; and for another, I’m trying to be the hero here and keep you out of trouble. Let me, already. And throw me the flashlight, I’m going to need it.”



“Taller than me? By like—an inch, maybe. And when did this become about—”



Before I could finish it, I knew something was wrong—really wrong. I felt a crack underneath myself. I felt the tiny, awful give of something that ought to be holding me up. I felt it decide that I was too heavy, and that this wasn’t going to work out.



But I didn’t have time to jump. I tried, and the jumping only made it worse.



When my feet pushed off the wood flooring objected all the more, and broke all the faster. I fell fast and hard, and no matter what I grabbed for, all of it fell with me—down almost on top of Nick, who was swearing loudly and colorfully.



I landed shoulder down. Nothing broke my descent except for the mud, because, hero or no, Nick didn’t have time to get under me to help cushion the fall. The consistency of the stuff beneath us couldn’t fairly be called “floor,” but might, with a measure of semantic slipperiness, be described as “ground.” It was more mud than anything else, at any rate.



Even in my ungraceful entry, I hadn’t let go of the flashlight. It was blacked out with earth, though, so I wiped it on my jeans and realized that my hand was bleeding from some wound I didn’t remember getting. I might have scraped it while falling, or rather, while reaching for something to stop me.



The wound stretched across my fingers. It was ragged and nasty, like it’d been caught on a nail.



“Beautiful. Just fucking beautiful. I swear to God, woman—if we get out of this alive, I might have to kill you.”



“Check it out,” I told him, ignoring what he’d said. “Look, let me show you, what I told you about. Look at this.”



I held my hand out, palm forward, to show him the bloody scratch. I could feel it tingling, already. It was closing, and I closed my eyes, like that would speed up the process or at least distract me from how weird it was. I didn’t want to look at it myself, but I held the wounded hand out while I pointed the flashlight at it with the unmarred set of fingers.



“Is now really the time for . . . holy shit. You weren’t kidding.” He slogged through the earth and took my hand in his, aiming it up so he could see it better. He wiped it on his shirt, across his stomach, then held it up again—this time with the light. I let him take it from me to get a better view.



All around us the echo of that awful, struggling approach banged off the walls in a terrible way. And from there, down by the source, the smell was overpowering—a constant head full of decaying things crawling with rot and insects.



I pulled my hand away from him, but I let him keep the light.



“What are we going to do?” I asked.



“Eden?”



That voice again, from up above. This time, I was definitely not imagining it. Nick pointed the light up and there, holding one hand up to his eyes, was Malachi.



“Mal? What? What the hell are you doing here, what . . .? And, get away—get away from the edge! That’s how I got down here. Back up!”



“Harry said you’d be coming back down to the Read House, and I wanted to see you before we left. I saw you just now, down there. I tried to get your attention, but you ran off so fast. Hey, who’s that?”



“That’s Nick. Nick, that’s Malachi.”



“That’s—wait a minute. That Malachi?”



“That’s the one, yeah. Hey, Malachi, I’m actually real happy to see you. We could use a hand here. Is there a rope or anything? Anything at all like that up there that you could use to help us out?”



He looked around, that shaggy blond head bobbing left to right, and not meeting with any resistance in the form of potentially helpful objects. “No. I don’t see anything like that. What’s that sound? And what’s that smell?”



“It’s—shit, Malachi. Not now. Later, okay? Now we need out. Or we need a way to get out quick. Where’s Harry?”



He looked a little hurt, but I was feeling too worried by the nearness of the sucking, sloshing feet to get worked up about it. “I lost him back at the Choo-Choo. Well, no. Probably around the Read House. He knew where I was going.”



“Is there any chance you could—”



“Eden,” Nick said my name with a note of panic kept loosely in check.



“Get Harry. You should try to get Harry—or any of the feds or cops you see running around out there. Go get them, and bring them here. We’re about to need some very serious assistance.”



“Eden,” he said it again. He was waving the flashlight back towards the dark end of the tunnel. The walls were propped here and there with big square beams—the kind you see in old mines—but they looked like they’d fall apart if you touched them with your fingertips. They were so waterlogged and old they couldn’t possibly be offering much support.



And there, in the back—at the very, very edge of the light, maybe thirty or forty feet away from us, there was motion. Movement, in jerks and short reflections of the light on slime.



“Malachi, hurry!”



He scrambled above us and I heard more creaking, cracking; and I was afraid for a few seconds that he’d surely drop down to join us at any second. But whatever he was walking on held, and he crashed through the hole in the wall, almost certainly widening it with his body to get out so fast.



“Come on, superhero. Do something,” Nick said, taking a mud-anchored step back against me.



“For example?”



“Talk to them. They’re dead. They’re different dead people, remember?”



I tried. I tried for all I was worth—concentrating, as Dana had tried to tell me last year. She’d worked with me some, trying to give me focus for it, and I wanted to think I’d improved.



But I couldn’t make any kind of contact with them at all. I didn’t even sense them as present; they weren’t there, except that they were crawling towards us and gasping, wheezing, grimacing along the tunnel.



“I can’t,” I breathed, trying to lift one foot out of the muck and put it behind the other one—trying to retreat as far as I could, even though there wasn’t any room, really. “I can’t. There’s nothing there to talk to.”