Part Seven: The Prairie and the Darkness

Description

He listened as the scratching at the metal door ceased, but took no heart from it: they’d only refocused their efforts on finding another way in, of that he was certain. Nor could he bear the thought of what would happen when they finally broke through—not the terror and pain of them gutting him like a fish, for Katrina would only wound him, he knew, but the inconceivable horror of walking the earth like them. Like a zombie. Like a dead man walking a dead planet. So, too, would they know then, having added his consciousness to theirs. They would know that Barley Hot Springs lay just beyond the Santiago River, which he suspected they could swim, and that nothing in the others’ experience would have prepared them for an attack from the rear. No, no, he couldn’t under any circumstances allow that—it alone was enough to justify what he couldn’t help but see as a surrender under cowardice, a spitting in God’s eye. For there was no God, otherwise the Flashback could never have happened. There was no light to counter the dark, no paladin to counter the Bandana Man, no magnifying glass to focus the sun. There was only the lights in the sky and a world gone mad, only death and pain and suffering without end—and time itself, which had been scrambled like eggs. He repositioned the rifle so that it pressed against his forehead then slipped his thumb across its trigger.