The man plodded toward us, every step pain. His body was naked and swollen, his skin the greenish gray of olives. The veins in his arms and legs bulged purple. His stomach jutted out, bloated past capacity, the flesh stretched so thin that a wide grinning tear had ripped open beneath his navel. The wound had bled severely judging by the crust dried over his groin, but it was not bleeding anymore. He was dry, worse than dry, every inch of him flaking like dandruff except for the one place dandruff belonged, his scalp, which was bald and covered in scabs.

"Dad."

Carl Rascoe's head turned to Billy. His eyes, one black and one white and both shriveled into tiny prunes, sat far back in their sockets. He opened his mouth, revealing blistered gums and a tongue that resembled corroded steel. There were shreds of pink and white plastic caught in his teeth. His mouth hung open, breathless, and I saw how fat his throat was. His windpipe and Adam's Apple showed through the skin like a face pressed against a hanging bed sheet.

"Dad," Billy said again, softer.

Carl started toward his son, but his left foot caught on the safe and he tipped, falling with the great sluggishness of a Redwood. Billy backed away from him, still holding the package of explosives in his hand. PETN. The white packages were PETN. The pink were ANFO. My eyes went back to Carl's wide mouth, to the shreds of white and pink plastic between his teeth.

"Oh God," I said, understanding.

He'd eaten them.

All of them.

At the sound of my voice, Carl groped at me across the ground. The oven mitts had come off, and the nails on his fingers were long and cracked. I knew exactly how those nails would feel curling into my skin. I shoved toward Billy, who shoved toward Ash, who continued to shine Colossus on the blind man, frozen.

"Ash!" I said.

She shook her head like someone getting rid of a cobweb, then dodged into the gap between the driller and wall. The light escaped with her. Behind Carl, the mouth of the tunnel grew. Darkness gobbled up the safe along with his legs. His top half crawled after us, dragging its belly through the rocks. I followed Billy backwards into the gap, pressed in on all sides, my feet trailing out in front of me. Carl's hand pawed over my ankle. Before it found a grip, I gave one last push and passed out of its reach. Then Ash and Billy gripped me under the arms and yanked me clear.

"Thanks," I panted.

On the other side of the driller, Carl rose from the ground. He did it with the effort it took most men to climb mountains. Upright, swaying, he turned his enormous belly against the wall and pushed into the gap after us.

"There's no way," said Ash.

Way or not, he was coming. Inch by squeezed inch. Wiggle by wiggle. Where his skin rubbed against the damp rock it left a pale gray smear, like a slug's trail. He'd grind his body to the bone to get through, I realized, and he would get through. If it took him hours, if it ripped his stomach wide open and spilled his guts over his feet, he would get through. This was nothing next to the damage he had already done to himself, trapped down here in the dark. How long had it taken him to starve? How long before the only feeling left in him was the pain of hunger?

There was a grinding lurch behind us. The gate of the cage tried to close, only to pull back as it discovered Bitchmaster sitting in the way.

"That's Nip calling," said Ash. "Come on!"

Billy stood motionless beside me, staring at his father. I knew what he was thinking. It might have been a coincidence that Carl, the man with the strongest connection to the God-thing beneath Honaw, the man who had backpacked explosives down to the basement on the day all this started, had gone onto feed himself those same explosives until he ruptured his stomach and packed in his throat and made his own body the backpack. But I doubted it. I doubted it very much.

This was a message, a letter for help from deep below, and its envelope was marked return to sender. The Beast had been watching us. It had been watching us since the very beginning (since, perhaps, I reached into a dying bear's throat on the highway) and it had known we would come. There was not just an eye in the mountain. There was a mind. A consciousness the likes of which no human mind could hope to understand. The Beast had communicated with Carl in its hidden cavern. It had dug into his head and uncovered the memory of an egg from Carl's childhood, and it had used that memory to make a guardian of him. It was connected to us, like we were connected to it. It knew our secrets and our fears and our potential. It saw us, and it saw inside of us, and now it was showing us. Here was the end that it needed, the end that all of Honaw needed. Here, right here, buried under the skin of Carl Rascoe.

"What are you two waiting for?" Ash screamed from the cage. "Let's go!"

I looked at Billy. I had made a choice for him once, one I had no right to make. He's a real twat, but he's family. Do you get what I'm saying? He's family. The day of the earthquake, when the Beast opened its mouth and rocked the whole mountain, I had abandoned Billy's father for him. I had left the old man running in the woods. I would make no such choice again.

"It's your decision," I said.

"What's his decision?" Ash said.

Billy looked down at the white package in his hand. Reaching back, he passed the package to me. Then he stepped up to the driller. His father groped at his sweatshirt. Billy gripped him by the wrist and began to pull. The nipple peeled off Carl's flaccid left breast like a child's sticker.

"What are you doing?" Ash shouted.

The cage gave another lurch. I pocketed the PETN and pushed back across the ground as fast as I could.

Carl's entire arm was free now. Billy tugged on it in grim silence.

"What is he doing?" Ash said as I climbed up into Bitchmaster.

"He's bringing the bomb."

Ash started to speak and then covered her mouth.

"It won't be quite as powerful," I said. "I'm sure the powder lost a little something inside him, but not much. No. I think the powder sucked more from him than he did it. He's so dry, Ash. He's so, so dry."

Carl's first leg left the gap.

"How much heavier do you think he is than the last time we saw him?" I said. "Fifty pounds? A hundred?"

"That's not possible. He couldn't eat, not all of it. It would have—"

"Killed him?"

Ash shook her head. "But how do we—"

"We wrap him in blankets. We tie those blankets so tight he can't move. Then we pour gasoline on them. As for the fuse, we'll figure something out." I touched the package of PETN in my pocket. "He ate the primer, too. We'll have to be careful with him."

With one final wrenching tug, Billy pulled his father loose. Carl's stomach bounced heavily, widening the tear beneath his navel. He reached for his son, but his son had already turned away from him.

Billy walked toward us slowly, calmly.

"He deserves to die."

There was no spite in his voice, no anger, no sadness. It was a flat-line on a heart monitor. He boarded the cage, stopped beside Ash, and waited there as his father took step after plodding step through the bloody steam. The gate lurched again, again, again until I finally wheeled myself backwards off the track and Carl followed me in, Level F closing off behind him.

♫

We played keep away as the cage rose, Ash and Billy pushing me in circles across the damp grates, Carl lurching after us. Around and around we went, no sound between us but the whine in Bitchmaster's wheels. It was a tiring game. Something landed onto the cage at Loading Station B. Three more crashes followed, THUDTHUDTHUD, rattling the whole compartment and shaking red drops from the ceiling.

Ash grabbed the wall for balance. "What was that?"

Voices whimpered down through the grates overhead. They called out, but not in words. They were too broken for that.

"It's the moaning shaft," Billy whispered. "Just like Mike and Gabriel said."

I barely heard him. The music had stopped, and up above the children had returned to the clearing.

"Nip," I breathed.

____ ____

Author's Note:

4 updates left!

Things go pretty fast from here on out, so you might want to hold on tight.