Both of us freeze.
The Scavengers, too, freeze. Their footsteps stop; their voices fall silent.
And then the light seeps through the archway: a creeping, sniffing animal, roving the ground, ravenous. Julian and I don’t move. He pulses my hand, once, then releases it. I hear him shift the backpack from his shoulder and know that he must be fumbling for a weapon. There’s no longer any point in running. There’s no point in fighting, either—not really—but at least we can take a Scavenger or two down with us.
My vision goes suddenly blurry and I’m startled. Tears sting my eyes, and I have to wipe them away with the inside of my wrist. All I can think is—Not here, not like this, not underground, not with the rats.
The light widens and expands; a second beam joins it. The Scavengers are moving silently now, but I can feel them taking their time, and enjoying it, the way a hunter draws his bow back the last few inches before releasing an arrow—those final moments of quiet and stillness before the kill. I can feel the albino. Even in the dark, I know he is smiling. My palms are wet on the knife. Next to me, Julian is breathing heavily.
Not like this. Not like this. My head is full of echoes now, fragments and distortions: the heady smell of honeysuckle in the summer; fat, droning bees; trees bowed low under the weight of heavy snowfall; Hana running ahead of me, laughing, her blond hair swinging in an arc.
And strangely, what strikes me then—in that exact second, as I know with solid certainty that I am going to die—is that all the kisses I have ever had are behind me. The deliria, the pain, all the trouble it has caused, everything we have been fighting for: for me it is done, washed away on the tide of my life.
And then, just as the beams of light grow to headlights—huge, blinding, bearing down on us, and the shadows behind them unfold and become people—I am filled with desperate rage. I can’t see; the light has dazzled me, and the darkness has melted into explosions of color, spots of floating brightness, and dimly, as I leap forward, thrusting blindly with my knife, I hear shouting and roaring and a scream that bursts through my chest, whines through my teeth like the reverberation of a metal blade.
Everything is chaos: hot bodies and panting. There’s an elbow in my chest and thick arms encircling me, choking out my breath. I get a mouthful of greasy hair, a blade of pain in my side; foul breath in my face, and guttural shouts. I can’t tell how many Scavengers there are—three? four?—and don’t know where Julian is. I am striking without looking, struggling to breathe, and everything is bodies—hardness and enclosure, no way to run, no way to break free—and the slashing of my knife. I hit flesh, and flesh, and then the knife gets wrenched from my hand, wrist twisted until I cry out.
Enormous hands find my neck and squeeze, and the air goes out of the tunnel, and shrivels to the point of a pen in my lungs. I open my mouth to gasp and find that I can’t. In the darkness above me I see a tiny bubble of light, of air, floating high above me—I am reaching for it, fighting my way out of a thick, consuming murk—but there is nothing but mud in my lungs and I am drowning.
Drowning. Dying.
Faintly I hear a tiny drumming, a constant pitter-patter, and think that it must once again be raining. Then there are lights blazing again on either side of me: dancing, mobile light, twisting and live. Fire.
Suddenly the circle around my neck breaks. The air is like cold water washing into me, making me gasp and splutter. I sink to my hands and knees, and for one confused second I think I must be dreaming—I fall into a stream of fur, a blur of tiny bodies.
Then my head begins to clear and the world returns from the fog and I realize the tunnel is filled with rats. Hundreds and hundreds of them: rats leaping over one another, wriggling and writhing, colliding with my wrists and nipping at my knees. Two gunshots explode; someone cries out in pain. Above me there are shapes, people, grappling with the Scavengers; they have enormous, smoldering torches, stinking like dirty oil, and they scythe through the air with their fire like farmers cutting through fields of wheat. Various images are frozen, briefly illuminated: Julian doubled over, one hand on the tunnel wall; one of the Scavengers, face contorted, screaming, her hair lit up with fire like one of the torches.
This is a new kind of terror. I’m frozen on my knees as the rats rush around me, drumming me with their bodies, squeaking and slithering and whipping my skin with their tails. I’m sickened and paralyzed with fear.