I knelt there, staring at the faces. Even though the screen was tiny, I could somehow see them all with incredible clarity and detail. To the small scars on the arms of the woman, to the stitches on the baseball the little boy was throwing up into the air and catching in a worn leather glove.

Every.

Single.

Detail.

It froze me.

No, that’s not right. When you freeze, it’s like all the heat dies in the universe, all the way down to the atoms in your molecules. This wasn’t that. This was hotter. I could feel actual heat, as if I crouched next to something burning.

Like a house.

Like bodies.

Like hope.

I squeezed my eyes shut and sagged against the wall.

“Please,” I begged. “Please, please, please…”

I did not open my eyes until the heat dwindled, dwindled, and faded completely. Even then, I couldn’t move. My heart was racing, and shivers ran down my arms and spine. I was in a deep hole, and there was no rope to use so I could climb out. There was only a little light, but it was fading.

No, that wasn’t right, either. It was not that the light was growing weaker but that the dark shadows all around me were getting stronger. Overwhelming the light, dominating it, consuming it. There was so little of that light left that I knew it couldn’t last. The Darkness was winning.

“Please,” I said again, but in that moment, I couldn’t tell if I was begging for mercy, for the light to flare, or for the darkness to come and take me, body and soul.

Then …

Then I felt pressure against my elbow and only then dared open my eyes to see Ghost nuzzling me, his doggy eyes filled with concern.

My mouth was dry, and my eyes were wet. I had no exposed skin for Ghost to lick, so he kept pushing at me with his nose. I reached for him with arms that weighed ten thousand pounds. I pulled my dog to me and wrapped my arms around him and clung to him.

The screen on my computer showed an empty stretch of hall. No one there. Of course there was no one there. Tears burned behind my eyes. Ghost pushed his whole body against me, whining so softly only I could hear him. Trying to tell me that he understood. That he was there for me. That I wasn’t alone.

“It’s okay, boy,” I said. “It’s all okay. I’m okay.”

Ghost never cared that I told those kinds of lies.

I did not want to let him go, but I had to. The clock in my head was ticking, and we were deep in the badlands here. Ghost backed away a pace but stayed close as I struggled to get my shit together. It was getting harder and harder to do that.