“There’s no escaping this place. People have tried. We’re not alone here. Soon as your eyes adjust you’ll see them. Some are dead. Some close to it. Occasionally one wakes up on the pile, crawls down the heap. Or makes a run for it. Like me. They catch you. They’re everywhere. And when they have you that’s when they come up. Lay their eggs. Some don’t lay eggs at all. I watched two of them attack a heavy-set fellow two piles over and…” His voice drifts off and he licks his lips. “Here.” A dry whisper.”You wanna see something?”

He gestures with his head.

Skelly follows his gaze up.

The floor is all dark shapes, and at first she thinks the ceiling is, too.

But soon as she realizes the reality, Walt confirms it. “It’s a map,” he says. “Took me a while to figure it out. Lot of it is just nonsense, what I guess must be tunnels or passages folding in on each other. But in the middle of it is something I know all too well – the subway map. Just Manhattan, not the boroughs, but you can see their curves, how some are together and then breakaway. Can almost make the shape of the island. Like Manhattan’s circulatory system. It’s almost… arterial.”

Skelly tries to parse it. A map. Of the underground of the city. Or at least, what’s just beneath it – what in the Underworld they’d call the “Shallows”. She can see the pocket where the town of Daisypusher sits. A lot of the tunnels are thin and small, noodles and tapeworms tied into one another. But along the far eastern side of the map runs a big fat line, like a pipe. And another thick line is carved at the top of the island and runs into it, and a third one comes in toward the bottom but doesn’t seem finished. Where this tunnel ends is a symbol like Skelly’s never seen before: a triangle with what looks to be a mouth in its center.

She points the thick lines out. Asks what they are.

“I was trying to figure out the same thing, but then I realized–”

A scream cuts the air like a hatchet. A woman’s scream. Walt reaches up, pulls her low to the pile, hisses, “Look.”

A young woman stands atop a pile of corpses. She’s far enough away Skelly can’t make out much about her face, but she sees the woman turn and shake and begin to flail, head cast back so far the scream rises out of her like smoke from the burn barrels.