Not Flesh Nor Feathers (Eden Moore 3)

“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.