Page 135 of Confessions of the Dead

“Stu, you knew exactly when those bombs would go off. You can lie to yourself all you want, but you knew then just like you know it now. You did it anyway.”

“I didn’t set ’em off. I just placed ’em. I—”

“You knew.”

Matt jerked his head toward the girl who looked a lot like Emily Pridham. “Go ahead, touchhim. If you think you got some right to pass judgment on all of us, give him what he’s got coming, too. Why should he get a pass?”

She processed all of this without any hesitation, as if her brain were working on a level far beyond the rest of them. She stepped toward Stu Peterson, but he jerked away.

“That’s not the deal! That ain’t how this works!”

“Maybe he’s right, Stu,” Rodney said. “Maybe it’s time you get yours. Don’t you worry, I’ll take care of things from here.”

He’d shifted the barrel of the Colt; although it wasn’t pointingdirectly at Peterson, he’d edged it closer. He smirked at the girl who looked like Emily Pridham. “What do you say? Maybe you and I finish this? I think you’ll find I’m a little easier to work with. Maybe we can come to some kind of understanding, and you give me a pass this round?”

Stu Peterson’s face grew bright red. “We’ve all got our station, Rodney. There ain’t no changing. There’s only the same. Over and over, the same.”

Rodney shrugged. “Maybe we make up some new rules. Feel it out as we go.”

Eli McCormick rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Rodney, just once can you play by the rules? Why you always got to muck things up?”

Rodney rolled the Colt toward him, but not before McCormick managed to fire, putting two in Rodney’s chest.

Confusion washed over Rodney’s face as he looked down at growing red spots in his shirt, then his legs buckled and he collapsed.

Dead.

Peterson glared at McCormick. “That’s not—”

Matt jumped up.

He gripped the barrel of Peterson’s shotgun and shoved it to the side as Eli McCormick twisted his weapon toward him, thumbing back the hammer.

107

Buck

EMILY WAS ALONE, THENshe wasn’t.

Rodney Campos was standing next to her.

That didn’t make a lick of sense, none of this did, and when Buck blinked, he half expected Rodney to vanish as quickly as he appeared, but he didn’t.

Twenty paces ahead of them, Emily and Rodney rounded a corner and Buck found himself moving faster, trying to catch up, Riley and the boy on his heels.

When they rounded that same corner, the three of them found themselves in an enormous underground cavern. The frigid air was so cold it seemed thick enough to touch. Every inch of Buck’s body ached with it—joints, muscles, tendons—all slowing, becoming less responsive, and he realized this was hypothermia setting in, ice stealing the life from his limbs. The walls of the cavern were covered in that same black mold they had found in the Pickerton place, but here it was alive, crawling over the stone and ice, moving with purpose, excited. Stalactites and stalagmites,every inch of the cavern walls was alive with it, and Buck had an unsettling thought—it looked like they were wandering the belly of some beast.

“We can’t stay here.”

The words left his mouth between chattering teeth in a voice he barely recognized, and when he risked a look back, he caught a glimpse of Robby with his arms around himself, trying to keep warm, and failing.

Riley seemed oblivious to the cold. Her eyes were wide, filled with bewilderment, and the oddest thing was happening with her skin—the names were glowing. All of them clearly visible in the dim light.

He needed to get them out of here. If they died, it would be on him.

When Buck turned back around, Emily and Rodney had stopped moving. They were standing at the edge of what could only be described as an underground lake. The waters were frozen, a mix of that black over ice, but they inched up the rocky shore, as if attempting to crawl out, and Buck realized that might just be what that black stuff was doing—it was crawling out of the lake, up the walls, and out the cavern. It was escaping this place through the hole punched out by that tree. This insane and horrible world was somehow leaking out into their own.

The three of them reached the edge of the lake, and Riley let out a sharp gasp, pointing below the surface. It took Buck a moment to understand what she had found because it simply couldn’t be true, but as he stared, it remained—Ellie was several feet below the ice, one hand grasping up, her mouth open, caught in a silent scream. Buck thought she was frozen there, until she blinked.

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