Walter swallowed. Or tried to.

“I don’t know,” he whispered.

24

Cole cradled Riggs in his arms and sobbed. He held his old friend’s neck, pressed Riggs’s face up against his own, and cried as hard as he ever had. His body shook from the effort. Snot, saliva, and salt mixed on his lips as his moans turned into screams—mad, inhuman sounds that barely registered in his ears as his own voice.

He wanted to pound his friend’s chest. He wanted to rip his own open. He wanted to claw out his heart and pack snow inside. Anything to fill the gaping, burning, crushing void he’d created there.

Deep down, something yelled at him to undo it, to bring his friend back. It wrestled aside the angry beast that had taken him over, giving him instructions on CPR, telling him it wasn’t too late. But before he could think to begin, the door burst open, filling the room with harsh light and forcing him to bring his goggles back down.

Cole turned and saw that his inhuman screams had summoned men dressed up as animals. And something odd seized him. That beast within took over, and Cole fell into a dream-like state untouched by time, a nightmare of slow and fast in which he was but a passenger riding along inside someone else’s skull. He felt a body around him, but it wasn’t his. That body jumped up, taking him along with it, elevating his view. He watched the body’s fists fly at a face.

You aren’t supposed to punch that hard, he felt like telling the body, but the arms kept going straight out, impacting a skull, trying to punch straight through it.

Blood splattered and leaked out from between the strips of fur cover-ing the man’s face; Cole watched the mangled hand hit again, knowing it was broken. Not knowing it was his.

The other man swung his arms as if he held an invisible bat. The person Cole occupied—whose brain he resided in—seemed to jump back reflexively. The torso of the man with the bleeding face flew apart, his insides spilling out like red ropes soaked in oil.

The nightmare slowed down even further as the opened man collap-sed, and Cole’s bodily vehicle slipped in the mess. The man with the invisible bat swung again, his black goggles seeming to pop with rage.

Cole felt himself duck inside the skull, willing the man he was occupy-ing to get low. They crashed down as one, and the invisible blade made a noise above. He watched as two arms—arms he should recognize as his own—scrambled ahead, swimming through the blood and mess on the decking, trying to reach the dangerous man with the invisible blade.