The Anomaly(89)

When I had a bead on where most of the noise was coming from, I ran over and threw myself into it.

At first I was probably hitting Pierre as much as Dylan, but then I worked out who was who and started punching as hard as I could. Pierre was hitting him, too, but then Dylan sank his teeth into my forearm, so I elbowed him in the face, grabbed him around the throat, and slammed his head into the ground.

While Dylan continued to resist, punching me in the stomach again and again, Pierre grabbed Dylan’s shoulders and was helping me lift his head up and smack it back down again. We kept going until there was no resistance, no fight coming back.

Only as we stopped, panting, did we realize that we’d both been shouting, screaming at Dylan, or each other, or something.

Pierre fell back. I remained with my hands locked around Dylan’s throat. “Molly? Are you okay?” I said finally.

“I’m okay.”

“Find the phone. I dropped it.”

I heard her shuffling around in the darkness behind me, sweeping her hands over the rock floor. “Got it.”

She turned it on, came back to where I was. Stood over me and shone the light down.

Dylan was dead. He was very dead. It was awful and horrifying and it was something that I had done. The hair on the top of his head—hair that I remembered noticing, about two million years ago, was starting to thin—was attached to something that now bore only passing resemblance to the shape of a human skull. One eye was half-open. The other wasn’t. They were no longer in line with each other.

I let go of his throat. My hands ached.

I heard an intake of breath from Molly. I assumed she’d only just caught sight of the full extent of the unpleasantness. But it wasn’t that.

“I’m fine,” Pierre said.

But he wasn’t. He’d been shot.





Chapter

52



Molly helped me lift Dylan’s torso so I could get his shirt off. Then it took us several minutes to tear the shirt apart, yanking at it like two exhausted old people, and find a portion that wasn’t covered in gunk. Pierre tried to help but I told him to sit still and stop bleeding on us. Eventually we had something that could serve as a bandage.

The bullet—the only one Dylan had time to fire before Pierre slammed into him—had hit Pierre in his right shoulder, then seemed to have glanced off the bone, thankfully without continuing into his rib cage. So, yeah, it could have been worse. On the other hand, it was a total mess. A bad, churned-up mess, and bleeding freely.

And we had a long way to climb.

Molly had done first aid at some point in the past and so I held the light and mainly let her get on with it. While she fashioned a second piece of shirt into a basic sling, I pushed myself to my feet and shone the light up the corridor. But it didn’t seem like Dylan had brought anything up here with him. No sign of a bag or even water.

When Pierre was as bandaged as he was going to get, he stood up. He swayed a little, but rested his other hand against the wall. Caught his breath.

Molly looked at him dubiously. “How’s it feel?”

“Fine.”

“Pierre,” I said.

“Yeah, okay, it hurts. What do you want from me?”

“Can you climb?”

“Yes.”

“Effectively?”

“What the hell else am I going to do, Nolan?”

I stood in front of him. “Listen, Pierre. You’ve just done the single bravest thing I’ve seen anyone do, ever. You saved my life. Molly’s too.”

“I didn’t.”

“Yeah, you did. Are you serious? Dylan was done talking. I was looking that guy in the eyes and I know we were about to be only the most recent in a long line of people he’s killed. There was nothing there, Pierre. No fear, no indecision, no qualms. If you’d stayed safe, back in the darkness, like anybody else in the world would have done—like I would have done, if I’m honest—then ten seconds later we’d have been sprawled on the floor with holes in our heads. You stopped that by being ridiculously, stupidly courageous. By being dumbass brave.”

Pierre looked away. I reached out, grabbed his chin, yanked it to face me again. “But now you’re done,” I said. “You don’t have to do it again, okay? I’m telling you not to. Because the next thing is getting down that shaft, and I’m not letting you try it if you don’t think you can. Because it’ll be dangerous to you, and dangerous to us, and I’m done losing people.”

I had no idea I was going to shout that in his face until it had echoed flatly against the tunnel walls.

“Okay,” he said quietly.

He stepped back, rotated his head around his neck. Lifted his right shoulder experimentally. Winced, but did it again. Extended his elbow out, and then back.

“Hurts like hell,” he said. “But nothing’s tearing. Or not tearing worse. Feels kind of like after a dislocation.”

“You’ve dislocated your shoulder before?”

“I’ve played a lot of beach volleyball, dude. It happens.”

“So you think you can climb with it?”

“I’m sure I can. And I’m sure of something else. It hurts plenty now, but soon it’s going to start hurting a lot worse. I’m good to go, Nolan. We need to do this right now.”