People shoved past Harold.

Someone’s shoulder butted him back into the wall of crumbling concrete.

The screams of the dying were getting closer.

Harold started running, sandwiched between two women, their elbows punching into his side as they raced ahead of him toward the diminishing firelight.

He didn’t think they had that much farther to go. Three, four hundred yards at the most before the tunnel opened into the woods.

If they could make it outside, even half of them—

The torch in the distance vanished with a shout.

Instantaneous dark.

The screams tripling in volume.

Harold could taste the panic in the air.

Some of it his own.

He was knocked down in the stream of water, feet trampling over his legs, then his body. Tried to get up, got knocked down again, people scrambling over him like an obstacle, someone stepping on his head.

Rolling out of the way, he climbed back onto his feet.

Something streaked past him in the dark.

It reeked of decay.

Several feet away, a man begged for help over the sound of bone and cartilage crunching.

Harold’s nerve flattened under a veil of crushing disbelief.

He should go.

Just run.

The poor bastard beside him went quiet, and now there was only the sound of the monster devouring its kill.

How could this possibly be happening?

Fetid breath hit his face.

Inches away, a low growl began.

Harold said, “Don’t do this.”

His throat felt suddenly hot. His chest turned wet and warm. He could still breathe, and he felt no pain, but there was so much blood jetting out of his neck.

Already he felt light-headed.

Harold sank down in the freezing stream as the beast opened his stomach with a swipe.

There was only a distant, blunted pain as the abby began to eat.

All around him were the moans and cries of the dying, the scared.

People still rushed past him in the dark, fighting to get to safety.

He didn’t make a sound.

Didn’t fight back.

Paralyzed by shock, blood loss, trauma, fear.

He couldn’t believe this was happening to him.

The thing ate him with the intensity of a creature that hadn’t fed in days, its rear talons pinning him down by his legs, front talons nailing Harold’s arms to the concrete.

And still no pain to speak of.

He was one of the lucky ones, he figured.

He’d be dead before the real pain hit.

ETHAN

ETHAN

—Pure human suffering and terror.

Chaos.

Ethan shouted, “Don’t stop! Keep going!”

Thinking, Had another group been run down in an adjacent tunnel?

Unimaginable.

To be overtaken down here.

People climbing over one another to escape as the monsters reached them.

Torches dropped.

Extinguished in the stream.

Devoured in the dark.

Up ahead, the torchlight in Ethan’s group had disappeared.

Ethan said, panting, “Where’d they go?”

“I don’t know,” Hecter said. “The light just vanished.”