Chapter 32 - The Girl in Green

We made it back through to the entrance of the caves, our flashlights bouncing around the tunnel. There was no convincing the two of them to turn the flashlights off, and honestly, I just wanted to get out as quickly as possible. I was not sure any of us could stand to be in the dark with the monster out there.

Soren stayed a good way away from me. I guess I couldn’t blame him since I had the knife, and I’d made stabbing motions in his direction. But more than that, I couldn’t help but feel that he held me responsible for Madison’s death.

He wasn’t wrong.

A sound echoed from below in the tunnel. Next to me, Barlow stiffened.

Soren wandered down the tunnel in the direction of the noise, his flashlight beam bouncing around the sides of the walls.

“Um, guys?” Soren said. “There’s something down here.”

Too loud. Much too loud.

The monster knew we were here.

“Madison?” Soren called.

He shined his flashlight down the tunnel, training its beam on the ground.

There was an unbroken smear of blood leading down the tunnel.

I held my hand over my mouth to keep from gagging. I’d witnessed Madison’s death, but it still didn’t feel real to me. Seeing the quantity of blood, little bits of bone, and viscera made it real.

Soren made a horrible strangled noise. “Madison!” he yelled. He plunged down the tunnel.

“Soren, stop!” I hissed. “Come back!”

My harsh whisper echoed sibilance across the tunnel, and I expected my voice to come back to me, mocking.

Soren stopped, turned around, and shined the light directly in my eyes, blinding me momentarily.

“I can’t leave her down there,” he said. “I have to know.”

“Madison, wait!” a voice cried out.

My voice.

Soren took a tentative step forward.

“That’s—you?” Barlow said.

He studied my face in the gloom as though he momentarily wondered if I was real. I didn’t blame him.

“There’s someone down here,” Soren said. “What if Madison . . . ?”

“Madison is dead,” I said. “I watched the thing rip her in half.”

Soren flinched.

“Madison, wait!” the voice cried out.

“What about Ava?” Soren said. “It could be Ava.”

“It’s not Ava,” I barked, not trying to be quiet anymore.

The monster knew where we were.

Soren walked down the tunnel slowly, but decisively.

“Soren, what are you doing?” Barlow said, his voice echoing strangely.

“She needs our help,” Soren said, his voice a choked sob. “She’s hurt.”

The tunnel descended more rapidly, then he turned a slow corner, and his flashlight beam disappeared into the darkness. Barlow shot me an alarmed look and then bounded after him.

I understood. The thing had tapped into Soren’s soul and was making him feel things. She’d done the same to both of us.

I hesitated, just for a moment, and then I walked down the path after them both.

“Soren?” Barlow called.

As I rounded the turn in the tunnel, the smell of rotten meat hit like a hot wave, and I gagged as Barlow’s flashlight traced a pile of corpses before coming to rest on Soren. I couldn’t tear myself away from the half-illuminated outline of the carnage. Most of the bones were ancient, picked bare and piled high, decades of the dead brought to the same spot. Near the top of the pile, a twisted form barely recognizable as human spilled blood over white bones. Her viscera were missing. Black hair tinged purple at the ends mercifully covered most of a bloated face.

Layla.

Madison’s legs, still clad in gray sweats, lay on the very top of the pile, one shoeless foot protruding at an obscene angle. A nest of blond hair told me that the top half of her torso was underneath her legs, disconnected from the rest of her, perhaps devoured.

Soren stood close to the pile, near a figure huddled against the wall, shivering in fear.

It was Ava. Her jeans were torn, her bedroom hair mussed into a dark tangle. She sniffed and rubbed her hand across her mouth, smearing her pink lipstick. Battered and bruised, but whole.

A perfect replica of Ava. For a moment, I felt a rush of hope.

Ava . . . standing near of a pile of rotting bodies?

I’d heard her head hit the concrete with a crack, heard the sound of the monster dragging Ava’s body away.

This wasn’t Ava.

“Ava?” Soren said, inching closer to her. “Are you okay?”

“Soren, move away,” Barlow said. “Slowly, okay?”

I moved forward, the knife in my hand.

“But it’s Ava,” he said. “She needs help.”

Soren’s words were slow, as if he were drugged. The monster had her claws in his mind, slowing his reflexes, clouding his brain.

“That’s not Ava,” I said.

Barlow stood behind Soren, holding his flashlight like a club, ready to swing.

Ava looked up, hair falling over one eye. The other eye, empty and haunted, like the girl in green I’d first seen in the dining hall crying out for help.

“Madison, wait!” Ava said.

My voice.

“What?” Soren said.

The thing lunged at Soren, hands turning into claws, mouth opening impossibly wide, ripping deep into Soren’s shoulder.

I ran forward and stabbed at the monster but missed, worried that I would hit Soren instead. Barlow connected a direct hit with his flashlight, but the monster kept moving, pulling Soren away with impossible speed.

The light from Soren’s flashlight ping-ponged around the tunnel and then fell in a beam across the pile of bones and dead girls.

Soren’s screams melded with Barlow’s horrified shouts, and my own voice, no longer my voice, maybe the monster’s. Barlow trained the flashlight on the monster.

The thing wearing Ava’s face looked up, still in the beam of the flashlight. She opened her mouth and ripped out Soren’s throat.

It was too late to save Soren, and I bolted back up the tunnel. The squeak of my shoes echoed down the tunnel like a warning shot.

Barlow wasn’t following me.

I turned back. Barlow stood by the monster, ready to take another swing.

“Come on!” I yelled. “You can’t help him now.”

That seemed to shake Barlow. He bounded up the stairs alongside the incline, the sound of running behind me.

The incline of the service tunnel seemed to stretch on endlessly, but after thirty seconds of dead running, the open door to the hospital corridor came into view, the empty square glowing red with the exit sign.

We scrambled along the corridors of the hospital, past rooms filled with junk and nothing useful, no locks on any doors and no reassurance that a lock would hold anyway. The thing galloped up the corridor behind us, impossibly fast.

“We’ll never make it to the boiler room before it catches us,” Barlow yelled. He turned past the nurses’ station into the nearest room and I followed him in.

My heart sank.

We were in the operating theater.

One way in and one way out. Coach Mullins and Ms. Burton had come through a staircase, but like an attic ladder, it was pulled up flush to the ceiling. There was no way to open it from here.

Barlow and I threw our shoulders against the double doors to hold them closed. I scoured the room looking for something to block the doors. The gurneys were too small and too lightweight, but the sheets? Maybe I could tie the door shut.

“Hold the door,” Barlow said.

He grabbed a sheet off the nearest gurney, looped it through the door handles, and tied it tight a moment before the monster hit the door.

Barlow pulled back. The doors buckled, revealing a gap between the doors. I finally found the courage for the knife, stabbing through the gap blindly, feeling the knife connect with something on the other side, a howl of pain my reward.

I stayed at the door, ready to stab at the monster again when it threw itself against the door. “This isn’t going to hold!”

“I’m trying to find a way out,” Barlow said.

I glanced over my shoulder to see Barlow searching the walls for another exit or some kind of hiding place.

I stabbed through the gap in the doors but the monster had gotten wise, and it pulled back when I stuck my knife through. It was fast and it had learned. It put a claw through the fabric and ripped.

“It’s not going to hold!” I said.

Barlow tipped one of the operating tables over and pushed it up against the door. He leaned against the table, holding the door closed.

Suddenly a loud pop and a creak came from above us as the metal stairs descended from the ceiling.

Kenzie appeared halfway down the staircase.

“Hurry up!” she yelled as the monster threw itself against the door and the sheet began to tear.