"Fuck this," said Harlen, getting out of his desk and backing up until he reached Dale. His lips were trembling almost uncontrollably as he whispered to Dale, "I knew I never liked school."

Together they leapt the first row of desks, wading through mounds of fungus toward the back of the room. The Soldier glided effortlessly to their right. The corpse of Tubby Cooke lowered its face to the algae and disappeared under it like a child crawling under its favorite blanket.

Dale and Harlen leapt to the top of adjacent desks, ducking their heads to avoid the pale egg-sacs above them. Mold clung to their jeans and sneakers in long strands.

Dr. Roon looked impatient and snapped his fingers. The entire building seemed to hold its breath as Van Syke and the Soldier crawled over the first row of desks. Downstairs, there was the sound of a gunshot.

Mike had come into the central hall of the basement assessing his losses: the flashlight was broken, he had lost one of the squirt guns filled with holy water and smashed the second one when he had rolled on it coming out of the tunnel, his pants were ripped at the knees and soaked in the front and back-the squirt guns-and the only advantage of that, he thought, was that no vampire-thing was going to bite him in a crotch damp with holy water.

Despite the windowless basement, he found that he could see once his eyes adapted to the glow-both from the phosphorescence that seemed to be seeping from the walls and the brighter glow of the burning lamprey-thing in the central hallway.

Mike presumed it was dead. Its flesh was charred in a thousand places, embers burned where its entrails should be, and the maw had quit opening and closing. He presumed it was dead but he gave it a wide berth, creeping past against the wall, staring in some awe at the mass of debris the dying thing had shoved in front of it for the length of the basement hallway. Heavy clouds of smoke and the smell of burning fish rose from the carcass.

Mike decided to assess his resources as he climbed the sticky stairs to the first floor. He had Memo's loaded squirrel gun and four extra shells left; the rest had been fired or lost in the hasty exit from the tunnels. He was bruised and bleeding and shaking from head to foot, but otherwise fine. Mike stepped over the shattered door into the main hall on the first floor of Old Central.

Mike had only a few seconds to stand blinking, taking in the changes that a few weeks of summer had wrought in the old school, staring up at the pulsing red sac of legs and eyes forty feet above him in the now-open belfry. He had taken a step and put his foot down on Dale Stewart's Savage over-and-under when a motion in the shadows froze him in the act of crouching.

Something was moving toward him from Mrs. Gessler's second-grade room, moving and making soft mewling noises. The sound had almost been lost in the sudden creaking and groaning of the building as the storm outside rumbled and whined.

Mike dropped to one knee, quickly raised the Savage, and tucked it under his left arm as he held the squirrel gun ready, barrel up.

Father Cavanaugh came out of the shadows, making soft noises that might have been attempts to speak. Its lips were gone and even in the faint light Mike could see the crude stitches where Mr. Taylor, the undertaker, had sewn the gums together. It might have been trying to say, "Michael."

Mike waited until it was seven or eight feet away and then lowered the squirrel gun and shot it in the face.

The blast and echoes of the blast were incredible.

The priest's remains were knocked backward across the resinous floor, the body rolling against the overgrown banister of the stairway while parts of the skull went elsewhere. Essentially headless, it rolled to its hands and knees and began crawling back toward Mike.

In a state of perfect calm, his body handling the motions while his mind dealt with other things, Mike shifted the squirrel-gun grip to his other hand, broke the breech of the Savage over-and-under, checked that the cartridge in it had not been fired, set the barrel of Dale's shotgun against the back of the priest-thing just as its fingers reached his sneakers, and pulled the trigger.

The obscenity that resembled his friend writhed on the sticky floor, its spine visibly severed, as Mike backed away, pulled two of his four remaining cartridges from his pocket, and loaded one in Memo's gun and one in Dale's. His foot touched plastic and he looked down to find the radio under his toe. He raised it, brushed the strands of goo from it, keyed the transmit button, heard the welcome static, and shouted into it.

Kevin answered after his third call.

Thank you, Sweet Jesus, prayed Mike. He said into the radio, "Kev! Blow it! Now! Blow the goddamned place!" He repeated the orders and then dropped the radio as he heard Dale's voice screaming from the second floor. Choosing the guns over the walkie-talkie, Mike bounded up the stairs as fast as he could climb.

The webs and node clusters and very walls were shaking and trembling around him, as if the school were a living thing on the verge of awakening.

Mike almost lost his footing and went down on the cluttered, sticky stairway, found his balance, and jumped onto the second-floor landing. The red light from above was growing stronger by the second.

"Mike! In here!" screamed Dale's voice from beyond a screen of black fibers where the door to Mrs. Doubbet's room once had been. There was a sudden growling as if a pack of starved dogs had been let loose.

Mike knew that if he hesitated two seconds he would never have the nerve to go in there. Cocking both weapons, he went through the opening low and rolling.

I

FORTY-ONE

The lamprey was going to beat them to the front door.

Cordie Cooke was doing her damnedest to steer the tanker in a straight line down the forty yards or so of sidewalk to the front door. One of the left rear tires sounded like it was shredding rubber and was making the rear end of the heavily laden truck veer and fishtail. Kevin alternated among pounding the dashboard, trying to raise Mike again on the walkie-talkie, and urging Cordie on.

The remaining lamprey reached the graveled spot near the north door, dove deep one last time, and reared up as the truck came bouncing down the last fifty feet of sidewalk toward it.

Kevin saw the flimsy boards on the stairs where Dale and Harlen must have thrown them, knew immediately that they couldn't hold the weight of the truck for a second, and then realized that they had to get the hell out of here. Impact was seconds away.

His door was jammed stuck.

Kevin spent only a second wrestling with it before sliding across the seat into Cordie, shoving her against the driver's door while fumbling across her lap for the door handle.

"What the fuck you think you're ..."

"Jump! Jump! Jump!" Kevin was screaming, pounding against her. The truck slewed left but both Cordie and he grabbed the wheel and realigned it just as the lamprey came up out of the ground at them like some giant jack-in-the-box.

Cordie slammed the door handle and they both went out, hitting gravel hard enough to knock one of Kevin's side teeth out and break his wrist. The girl grunted once and rolled onto the grass unconscious as the truck and lamprey collided at forty-five miles per hour and the maw of the thing went through the windshield like a javelin.

Kevin sat up on gravel, arched his neck in pain as his right wrist gave way, hobbled on knees and his other hand to Cordie, and started dragging her backward just as the truck and unreeling lamprey struck the front porch.

It was not a straight shot after all. The truck's left front fender hit the concrete railing and smashed the cab sideways just as the first two steps stopped the front axle cold, collapsing what was left of the cab onto the lamprey as four tons of steel tank jackknifed vertically over the porch and speared through the boarded-up front doors.