And still the darkness was deepening. The crash site was far, far behind now, and the subdivision, up atop the rise, was sliding off to his left as he angled away from it.

His foot snagged on something—a shrub or a root—and he cried out as he felt his center of gravity pitch forward, damn near sending him sprawling. He recovered, kept running, but now he could hear the men crashing through the grass behind him, so close he was afraid to look again. He kept his eyes fixed straight forward. And yet—

He could see nothing. Nothing at all. He shut his eyes for a second and found it made no difference. The world was a void either way.

He glanced to his left and saw the lit-up sprawl of the subdivision due north of him. The glow of its streetlights bled out onto the slope to a distance of maybe a hundred yards. He was just outside that glow, still moving southeast, angling farther from the light with each stride.

He found himself beginning to veer back toward that light without consciously deciding to. There was simply no choice in the matter: running in total darkness was asking for disaster. In any case, it didn’t hide him from his pursuers—not when they were this close behind him. They could hear him. He could damn well hear them.

He made the turn smoothly as he ran—curving to his left, coming around, until he was running dead-on north, with the suburb splayed out before him at the top of the rise.

It lay 150 yards away from him, the ground directly ahead still deep in the black.

All at once his breathing sounded strange in his own ears. A second later he realized why—it wasn’t his breathing.

One of the pursuers was that close. Two or three feet back—it couldn’t be more than that.

The ragged hissing—in and out, in and out—got louder by the second.

One hundred yards to the subdivision now. The long grass in front of him was just faintly visible again.

Fingertips brushed the back of his shirt, making his heart want to flip up into his throat.

He flailed and leaned forward, like a runner shoving his chest out toward the finish line ribbon.

High up the slope, along the edge of the subdivision, the loping figure of one of the afflicted crossed someone’s back yard. It was a man, tall and stocky, wearing an undershirt and jeans. In the glow of a rear patio light, the man dropped to a crouch and looked around, his movements spastic. He was maybe seventy yards away, straight ahead.

At Sam’s back, the pursuer’s fingertips swiped again, much more than a grazing pass this time. He felt his shirt fabric ripple, the fingers hooking into it and trying to take hold, before they slipped away again.