Matthew turned away, reached out and found Kelly’s warm hand waiting for him.

Something heavy crawled up his legs. He shifted his weight, tried to turn and see, but he’d lost control of his muscles, and could only lie there, flipping his head side to side. “What the fuck is that!” he screamed, bile surging to his throat.

“Relax, relax,” Kelly said, caressing his head. “It’s your son. It’s little Kelly. He’s here.” Kelly looked down where Matthew could not see, where it felt like a hundred small hands were pawing at his legs and back, reaching for him, tugging at him incessantly. A thousand desperate fingers ripping him away.

“He wants to be with you,” Kelly said. “It’s really quite adorable.”

Matthew smiled at this, relieved. His son. He was here. Little Kelly was here. A miracle.

Kelly moved his face closer, tilting Matthew’s chin to look at him. Matthew looked.

“Kelly?” Matthew croaked, his head flat against the concrete block that served as his death-bed pillow.

Kelly’s eyes were bursting supernovas.

Something long, cold and wet slithered around Matthew’s neck and squeezed, the tail of the thing flicking against his dry lips and crusted facial hair.

“Yeah, buddy?” the thing called Kelly said, his face exploding into light.

The hands raced across his body, patting him, pinching him, slipping inside his clothes to reach flesh. His throat was being squeezed more and more tightly. A second cold scaly tendril slid down his collar and moved across his chest like wet midnight. His guts were a flurry of movement, a voracious bubbling dance of tiny bodies fighting to be inside him. He wanted to reach for Dee’s hand one last time, devoured by an incredible regret that he could not help her. But his hand would not move, the control of his body snipped from the commands of his mind as neatly as a cut string. “Kelly,” he breathed, followed by a drooled trickle of ashen blood.

“Save me.”

9

JIM WAS THE first one to see the hand.

The search dogs had been barking like it was the end of the world, but the team knew at this point they weren’t looking for survivors. They were looking for bodies. Still, it was important to keep protocol and not rush things. No point in anyone getting hurt trying to free a corpse. That, and if anyone was still breathing in all that mess, Jim thought, dropping his cigarette as he watched the crane wheel into position, its bent metal arm swinging a hook the size of a small child, they’d likely prefer it the other way ‘round.

The engineers had found an especially ugly slab of concrete – a structural pillar, one of them had announced with a grimace – lying atop a pile of what used to be a small office building. The building had stood two doors down from the bank Jim went to when cashing his checks on a Friday. He’d walked by the building at least once a week for the last three years and never took notice of it, not until it was reduced to a pile of ruins by the second-worst earthquake in California history.

Thousands dead, all across Los Angeles and the Valley region. Highways had twisted and collapsed, buildings fallen in on themselves, explosions, fires, death everywhere. Jim and his team had been told to focus on assisting Burbank Police and Fire with the clearing and salvaging, and they’d been doing it around the clock going on almost four days straight. Jim hadn’t seen his family in all that time, sleeping on work sites, the giant sulfur work lights replacing the moon outside the smeared windows of run-down construction trailers. The purr of diesel generators were a constant white noise that had an effect similar to ocean waves when you were tired enough, at least that’s what he told himself.

The dogs, however, did not get much chance to sleep.

They were walked in four teams of six-hour shifts, around the clock, twenty-four hours a day, trained to sniff out flesh, bark when they sensed a body.

They barked plenty.

Over the last few days, Jim’s team had found a total of thirty-seven souls at six separate sites. Of those thirty-seven, Jim figured around ten would live to see their next birthday. And half of those would be forever disfigured, a few horribly so. That’s what was under all this destruction, all the crushing weight of concrete versus flesh and bone, the remains of a lost battle in which the frail bodies of man stood no chance.

When the dogs began their morbid barking, Jim had been smoking and studying the pink and blue peaks of the Verdugo mountains, praying for a night of quiet as the red sun blazed in the west. But damn them, they had called for him again. Didn’t even get to Amen, he’d thought sourly.

Jim walked over as the engineer grappled the giant crane’s hook to the eye nut and cable they’d so gingerly drilled into the slab. The men all stood back and the dogs snarled and Jim yelled for them to be pulled back. The hoist creaked as the chain ratcheted slowly upward, servos straining against the immense weight. The slab lifted, and the first thing Jim noticed is that it wasn’t a flat slab, or a pillar, but a bearing pad with three feet of column still hinged to it. No, it wasn’t flat under there at all. It had a fat projecting middle, which greatly decreased the odds for whoever was down there rather significantly.

Jim stepped forward first, as was protocol.

That’s when he saw the hand, followed by the man it was attached to. Based on where that man’s body lay, the protrusion of the concrete pad must have been settled quite neatly into the square of his back.

Likely crushed him on impact, Jim thought, and spat.

“MEDICS IN NOW! Swing that slab, Tom,” he yelled, pointing at the large chunk of concrete hovering over their heads. “Swing it the fuck out of here.” When it was safely rotated away from the rescue crew, Jim took two steps closer to look at the man’s body, and knew he was long gone.

As the medics ran up behind him, Jim studied the surrounding debris and saw a flash of something else.

“We got two of ‘em,” he barked, yelling for the ambulance to drive up. One of the men asked if he’d need two ambulances, and Jim shook his head. He looked back toward the site, where the medics were rushing up the side of a wall of debris to inspect the man.

“There’s a dress,” he yelled at them. “A blue dress, right there. You see?”

One of the medics nodded and Jim turned, not wanting to see this part, his job done for now.

Two women in yellow jumpsuits ran by carrying a long wooden backboard painted bright yellow but stained and scuffed with blood and death.

More goddamn corpses, he thought, sad and tired. How many more days, he wondered, how many more hands would he see lifting themselves from the twisted skeleton of their newly broken world?

He turned to stare once more at the jagged, pastel-stained peaks and grimaced, hating their solidity.

MATTHEW’S FIRST SENSATION when being pulled back to consciousness was that the horrible weight on his back was gone. The second thing he noticed was the noise.

Was that... dogs? he wondered, somewhere in the soft fuzzy nowhere of his working mind. And machines?

Then: VOICES!

Matthew felt the sun’s warmth on his face, and his eyelids glowed so fiercely he was terrified to open them, fearing the severity of the open sky would blind him forever. Then, as if by some miracle he was too far gone to fully appreciate, there was someone there, squatting next to him, talking to him, asking him questions.

Matthew didn’t open his eyes, but he turned his head toward the voice. He opened his mouth and tried to say that Yes, he could hear them, and Yes, he was very much able to acknowledge that he was alive, if they could only help him up and perhaps get him some water.

Oh, and for the record, he thought numbly, I’m, uh, pretty badly hurt. He wasn’t sure how bad, but it was bad, and he preferred not to dwell on it. He also wanted to apologize for the vomit and shit and piss and blood that had been spat from his body in different ways, at different times.

What came from his mouth was more of a groan, and a breathy hiss.

“Jesus Christ, this guy’s alive!” a man yelled, a young man’s voice. He sounded thrilled, and Matthew felt so good that hear that he was truly alive. Hallelujah, boy-o!

“Listen, mister, we’re gonna get you help, okay?”