The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [67]
And then something shuffles below me where the light doesn’t reach. A low rustle and slide like something being dragged across the floor. I jump up, jamming my shoulder against the railing, which throws me off balance.
My arms pinwheel the air for something to hold on to and just as I start to fall I finally grasp the railing, feeling it slide through my hands as my feet slip out from underneath me.
The metal-rimmed edge of the concrete steps slams into me as I tumble, pain digging into my hip and shins until I’m able to get a grip on the railing and stop my fall. I gasp for breath, trying to get my feet back under my body in the darkness, when I feel something brush my ankle.
I scream and kick out, hoping it’s some sort of animal but knowing that it’s not worth taking the chance. I drag myself up the stairs by the railing with one hand, and pull the knife from my pocket with the other, all the while screaming “Abigail!” hoping she’s close enough to hear.
Something pulls me back to the darkness, yanking at my pants, and I kick again, twisting back and swiping the knife through the air even though I have no idea where to aim.
Just then a bright light appears at the top of the stairs and my sister comes sprinting toward me. She takes the steps two at a time, the circle of her lantern’s gleam widening until I can see what I’m fighting: the torso of an Unconsecrated man, nothing left below his waist and a long gash across his neck as if someone tried to decapitate him but was unable to sever the spinal column.
Long skinny fingers twine around my foot, trying to pull me back and himself forward. He tugs and jerks, his grip so tight it’s almost impossible to shake loose.
I lean against the stairs and kick at his face with my free foot again and again, feeling the crunch of his nose, watching his eye socket cave into his skull, the eyeball inside squishing like an overripe grape.
But still he fights—mouth opening and closing, sharp broken teeth glistening.
My sister makes it to my side and swings the lantern high before bringing it down hard on the Unconsecrated man’s arm. Glass crashes and shatters. Flaming oil spills out, coating his body and spraying my pants. Quickly I beat out the embers on me before they can burn through the material and blister my skin.
The Unconsecrated man isn’t so lucky. Flames devour his hair, eating away at his tattered old clothes and flesh. I gag at the stench of black smoke roiling up the stairs as I grab my sister’s hand and haul her back up to the daylight.
Thankfully, the entire stairwell is concrete and the fire’s contained to the plague rat’s body, twitching and fighting against the consuming blaze. Up on the main floor I thrust my sister toward a broken window so that fresh air sweeps over us both.
We sit there panting, the two of us. I pull up my pants and examine the bruises already blooming across my shins from when I fell. My hands shake and my hair smells like burned meat, which makes my eyes water.
I wonder how long the man had been down there, downed until he sensed living human flesh. Perhaps he was a remnant of one of the wheels to power lights or lifts, but either way, if he’d bitten me and I’d bled out I could have been isolated enough in this basement to come back as a Breaker.
“You okay?” my sister finally asks after she catches her breath. I nod. “Next time perhaps we should take a lantern with us to begin with,” she suggests, and I smile.
“A bigger knife too,” I add, which makes her laugh.
We’re both quiet a moment, still recovering from the incident. I slump into a broken chair, my sister sliding to the floor by my feet, her back braced against the wall. She takes my knife, absently wiping the blade across the thick hem of her pants to clean it.
Her face is twisted in thought and finally she sighs, setting the knife aside.
“What is it?” I ask her.
She glances up at me almost guiltily, and then back at her fingers fidgeting in her lap. “You love Elias.” She says it as a statement, not a question.