Then images of the attack began to draw gauze over his mind again. He just wanted to go home, now. It was over, wasn’t it? It was all over. He should go home before darkness drew the snakes.

But he couldn’t move. He let more tears—streams of them—run over his face and he found some comfort in those tears. Nobody could see him. Soon though, he would have to do something.

Soon.

TANYA COLLAPSED to her rear end, thoroughly stuffed with dread. She’d spent long chunks of time walking the box with her fingertips. The minutes faded into hours, but they could actually have been only seconds. It was that kind of feeling: a strange confusion staring relentlessly into midnight, but knowing morning must have come. And gone.

She had found no way out.

Besides the small crack around the trapdoor, her fingers had felt only parallel lines separating exactly eight stacked boards on all four sides of this crate. She’d estimated each board at eight inches in height. That would make the box just over five feet deep and roughly the same in length. Five by five by three, she thought. A good size for a grave. Big, actually. Now the Egyptian tombs— there were some serious graves.

But this couldn’t be her grave. Not really. She was only seventeen! And her father had meant to save her, not bury her alive! She began to cry in steady streams. Her shoulders shook with the emotion as she wept.

Oh, God. Why? What have I or my father or my mother ever done to deserve this? Why would you allow them to die? Just tell me that, if you are so loving and so kind.

She lifted a dirt-packed nail to her lips and chewed. The dirt ground between her incisors, like tiny pieces of glass that sent shivers down her back. They were so innocent, her parents. So loving and patient. They gave their lives for others. For her.

Please, Father, save me. I will do anything.

Tanya’s mind began to crumble. She had come to the end of her senses. There were no more meaningful tasks to occupy her fingers. Her nostrils were stuffed with the musty smell of decay; her ears heard only weak sobs; she could taste nothing but her own leaking mucus.

A thousand pinpricks of light flashed in her forehead, like star bursts on the Fourth of July and she thought it might be because her brain was tearing loose from its moorings. Her hands trembled like those of a very old man in desperate prayer and her eyes began to ache. They hurt because they had rolled back into her skull, from where they had a better seat for the fireworks. Her mouth yawned, exhaling stale air.

Then she heard the screaming.

It started low and distant like an approaching train blowing its horn, but quickly grew to a shrill screech, as if the train had thrown on its brakes and slid uncontrollably forward.