The floor opening up, a hole gaping under his feet, and through it, Walker looked down at the thing crawling out of this dark crack in the world, dragging itself into view. Something ageless, something from before man’s primacy, neither God nor devil but some red, flayed-looking creature with gelid pools for eyes. Its head jerking toward Walker’s point of view, jaws snapping open and shut with what was not—could not be—any human language.

Walker, turning, looking deeper into the hole to see how the chasm teemed with others just like the thing that had climbed out. The gap seemed to be crawling with them, thousands of inhuman prisoners like the one he’d just released.

Slapping the book shut.

Looking up again at the boy on the bed, little Frank Snow’s eyes opening.

The boy pulling the breathing tube from his mouth.

Raising his head to look at Walker.

Lips moving to form words.

“Thank you.”

Walker screaming, backing up, falling prostrate before the unfathomable enormity of his error—

Mike jolted backward, the book flinging him sideways into a brick wall, where painful awareness shot through him. Vision instantly clearing, he looked around.

He was in the hospital operators’ office, the book open, the microphone switched on in front of him.

He had been reading from the page.

CHAPTER 46

46.

When the PA speaker started crackling, the voice reading, Jolie looked up from the map.

Mike? What…?

The note she’d found here had told her to stay put in this chair and no matter what was asked, not to speak except for that single sentence, “Look at the camera.” At first Jolie thought Snow was just using her to torment Sarah. See? Here I am, in the middle of all this, getting reamed six ways to Sunday by your husband. Crazy, huh?

But Mike had flat-out refused to do that. It had been his idea to take a close-up picture of the porno magazine couple instead, one where you couldn’t see their faces. It probably won’t work, Mike had said, but that’s all I’m doing. Freak out all you want, Jo, I’m not doing it. I’ll find another way out for my family.

And in the end, all that chivalry hadn’t mattered for shit. When Jolie saw Calhoun grab the kid off the nurses’ station counter, she realized all she and Mike had done was create a distraction. Whether the image in the picture was clear or not, they’d ended up doing Snow’s bidding anyway.

She’d been about ready to get up and run when she saw the map. Snow had left it for her under the chair, the hand-drawn blueprint on the Bible page that had brought her up here in the first place, like some mocking reward for doing what was asked.