His heart tripped painfully in his chest. He gasped a breath to the right, and he forced his arms to work the proper pattern: right, left, right, left, keep time, keep balance. His legs seemed heavier than they’d felt in his lifetime, his muscles chilled into non-compliance, but he was able to manage a light kick. For several minutes he did nothing but move, and he was able to keep his head in the game until an all too familiar sound began to echo through him—the squirm of digging maggots, the suck of something drawing out of thick mud, the drumbeat of another heart. An impossible set of sounds, and completely made up. They had to be. He wasn’t close enough to, well, anything, anyone, to inspire such a thing.
Coming for you, Eddie.
He didn’t know the whine he heard was his own until he c
