Encouraged, he doubled his efforts. Light widened around the horizon as the edges of his lids stretched the gummy substance that bound them, then burst through as they broke apart. Not the blaze of the rising sun, but a wan, diffuse sort of light. He forced his lids to separate further and the light began to take form through the narrow opening, breaking down into shapes and color. Vague shapes. A paucity of color. Mostly grays. His pupils constricted, bringing the images into sharper focus.

He was looking down along a body. His own body, lying in bed, naked atop the sheets. Hazy, but he knew his own body. Thank God, it had all been a dream. He tried to turn his head to the left, toward the light, but it wouldn't move. Why couldn't he move? He was awake now. He should be able to move. He slid his eyeballs leftward. The bedroom window was over there somewhere. If he could just—

Wait…the walls—rounded. The ceiling—convex. Concrete. Concrete everywhere. And the light. It came from above. He forced his eyelids open another millimeter. No window—the light was coming through a grate in the concrete ceiling.

The stillborn scream from a moment ago came alive again and rammed up against his throat, pounding at his larynx, crying to be free.

This wasn't the bedroom. It was the pipe—the drainage pipe! It hadn't been a dream. It was real. Real!

Hank fought the panic, beat it down, and tried to think. He was still alive. He had to remember that. He was still alive and it was daytime. The things from the holes were quiet in the daylight hours. They hid from the light. He had to think, had to plan. He'd always been good at planning.

He shifted his eyes down to his body. His vision was clearer now. He saw the gentle tidal rise and fall of his sparsely haired chest, and further down, on his belly, he spotted the bloody wound where the queen millipede had spiked him and injected him with her poison. The neurotoxin was still working, obviously, paralyzing his voluntary muscles while it let his heart and lungs go on moving. But it didn't have complete control of him. He'd managed to open his eyes, hadn't he? He could move his eyeballs, couldn't he? What else could he move?

He pulled his gaze away from his abdominal wound and searched for his hands. They lay flopped out on either side, palms up. He checked out his lower limbs. They were intact, slightly spread with the toes angled outward. He could have been a sun bather. His body was the picture of relaxation…the relaxation of complete paralysis. He returned his gaze to his arm and followed it down to the hand. If he could move a finger—

And then he noticed the webbing. It was all around him, running in all directions, crisscrossed like gauze. It curved away from each arm and leg like heavy-duty spiderweb and ran out to the wall of the drain pipe where it melted into a glob of some sticky looking gelatin smeared on the concrete. He looked down as much as his slit perspective would permit and realized that he wasn't lying in the pipe, he was suspended in it. From the horizontal lie of his body he guessed that he was resting on a hammock of web across the diameter of the pipe.

Hank marveled at the coolness of his mind as it analyzed his position. He was trapped—not only paralyzed, but effectively and securely bound in position. The web hammock, however, was not entirely without its advantages. Long, uninterrupted contact with the cold concrete would have made it difficult for his body to maintain its temperature; the webbing also kept him out of the water, thereby preventing his flesh from breaking down in the constant moisture.

So in a very real sense he was high and dry, but also bound, gagged, and paralyzed.

Hung up like a side of beef.

That last thought impacted with the force of a sledgehammer. That was it! He was food! They'd shot him full of preservatives and stored him away alive so he wouldn't decompose. So when pickings got slim above ground, they could come down here and devour him at their leisure.

He willed down the rising panic. Panic wouldn't help here. They'd already paralyzed his body. Allowing fear to paralyze his mind would only make matters worse. But that one cold hard fact battered relentlessly at his defenses.

I'm food!

That rogue cop lieutenant would get a good laugh out of that: The hoarder becomes the hoard. Even Carol would probably appreciate the irony.

But I'm alive, he told himself. And I can beat these bugs.

He knew their pattern. They'd probably stay dormant all day and crawl up to the surface to hunt during the dark hours. That was when he'd get free.

But first he had to regain control of his body. He already controlled his eyeballs and eyelids. Next was his hands. If he was to get free he'd need them the most. A finger. He'd start with the pointer on his right hand, concentrate all his will and energy into that one digit until he got it to move. Then he'd proceed to the next, and the next, until he could make a fist. Then he'd switch to his left.

He glared at his index finger, narrowing his vision, his entire world to that single digit, channeling all his power into it.

And then it moved.

Or had it? The twitch had been almost imperceptible, so slight it might have been a trick of the light. Or wishful thinking.

But it had moved. He had to hold onto that thought. It had moved. He was regaining control. He was going to get out of here.

With climbing spirits, he redoubled his concentration on the reluctant digit.

WFAN-AM

dead air

MONROE VILLAGE, LONG ISLAND

Alan rolled his wheelchair along the network of cement paths that encircled Toad Hall, heading from the back yard to the front. Off to his left, to the west, he saw smoke rising over the trees. Not near smoke, from the Shore Drive neighborhood, but further away. From downtown Monroe, most likely. He'd heard stories of roving gangs, looting, burning, raping. They hadn't shown up out here, but perhaps that was just a matter of time.

Strange how things had worked out. He'd always imagined that if the world ever descended into anarchic nihilism, the violence and chaos and mob madness would occur at night, screams and flames hurtling into a dark, unseeing sky. But given the current situation, human violence was confined to the daylight hours. The night was reserved for inhuman violence.

Alan turned from the smoke and inspected Toad Hall. The old mansion had absorbed another merciless pummeling last night but, like the valiant, indomitable champion that she was, she remained on her feet.

The injuries were accumulating at an alarming rate, however. Her flanks were cut and bruised and splintered, her scalp showed through where her shingles had been torn up. She could still open her eyes to the dwindling daylight, though. Most of them, at least.

Which was why Alan was out here now. A couple of the storm shutters had refused to roll up this morning. Even from the inside Alan could see that they were deeply dented, more deeply that he'd have thought possible from a bug attack, at least from any of the bugs he'd seen so far.

Which meant there might be something new under the moon, something bigger than its hellish predecessors and consequently more dangerous to the little fortress Toad Hall had become. He coasted to a halt and stared as he rounded to the front.

The dents in the steel shutters were deeper than he'd realized. And they'd been scored by something sharp and heavy, with the weight and density of a steel spike.

But it was the rhododendrons under the shuttered windows that bothered him more.

They'd been trampled flat.

Alan rolled across the grass for a closer look. These were old rhodos, maybe fifty years old, with heavy trunks and sturdy branches, kept thick with healthy deep green leaves through Ba's magical ministrations. Tough wood. Alan remembered that from the times he'd cut back the rhodos around his old house before it burned down.