Slowly, trembling, I pried it out of his rubbery fingers. And I’d dutifully posed every time he’d ordered me to.

Still, Jack had been so proud of it, of the snapshots he took. Couldn’t even get the pictures off of it, not without a computer – and no one around here had a computer. I’d always ragged on him for being so attached to that camera. Even the digital camera still feverishly clutched in Jack’s hands was slashed with red. My cheap old pocket watch was caked with it. I was wearing more of his blood on my ratty waistcoat than remained, still as a stagnant pond, in his own veins. The elevator was covered in Jack’s blood. The coppery scent of the blood on them nauseated me, and I leaned back, my screams echoing back to me through the endless mineshaft.

I slid down the wall of the elevator and buried my face in my sticky, itching hands. Mad, animalistic, discolored, broken and battered from throwing themselves after their prey, each one thrashing like a person trapped beneath a frozen pond might struggle against the ice in desperate search of air.all teeth and hunger. Everything had happened so quickly, it’d seemed like there was no time to scream. I hadn’t screamed when I’d had to run from them, or when I fought them, or when I’d dragged Jack to the elevator, blood bursting from the hole in his neck. I hadn’t screamed when the monsters had descended on us. The dam broke, and I finally started screaming. He looked like some kind of hellish funhouse clown.

Jack sat calmly beside me as I heaved, his bloody eye sockets and the gaping wound in his throat mocking me, mocking my attempt to rescue him. Before I knew it was coming up, I doubled over and retched through the grated floor. The glass-paned lantern dangling from the ceiling flickered wildly as the kerosene within dwindled, as if it were attempting to ward off its own death with bursts of exaggerated life.ĭread became a solid, burning thing within me, something twisting my own flesh to its will, speeding my heart and making my skin slick with sweat. I hit it again and again, wailed my fist on it. I pulled myself to my feet and pushed my best friend Jack aside, hitting the button that controlled the elevator. Trapped thousands of feet below the earth’s surface and hundreds above the bottom of the shaft, dangling in a dimly lit ten-by-ten foot cage over the black bowels of the very mine I had been so relieved to get work in. When the elevator groaned to a stop in the middle of the rocky shaft, I knew I was buried alive.

Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel