Allen asked, “What about the upstairs block? Is that way safe?”

Above them there came a splintering crash, then a loud stumble of decomposing feet rumbled on the floors of whatever lay upstairs. No one asked again if it might be safe.

Varney pointed his guns at the straining door and said, “We have to go down. ”

“Wait,” Lucy told him.

Swakhammer returned from the piano corner door to the west tunnel entrance, dragging a railroad tie behind him with one hand and shoving his mask over his head with the other. Squiddy ran to his side and picked up the dangled end of the squared-off log, and between the men they lifted it and shoved it against the door, into a set of slots that held it flush there. Almost immediately, a clattering crack echoed through the bar, accompanied by the splintering stretch of wood that might not hold. The new brace was straining; the brass and steel fittings that lifted it up were leaning away from their mounts.

“What can I do to help?” Briar asked.

Lucy said, “You’ve got a gun.”

“And she can shoot it,”Swakhammer vouched as he dashed toward the back of the room, where he picked up a metal bar and used it to pry up a section of the floor in a big square sheet. Varney took over and propped it with his hip. Swakhammer returned to stand back-to-back with Lucy, his guns aiming at the west tunnel door.

“There you go,” Lucy told her. “You can take a defensive position and shoot for the head of anything that makes it through that door. Nothing else will slow them down.”

“East tunnel’s no longer uncertain,” Frank declared as he whipped the door shut and dropped a metal bar down to latch it. It shut with a crash that sounded in time with another hard push from the other side of the main entrance.

“The subbasement’s intact!” Swakhammer declared. “Do we hold the fort or bail? It’s your call, Ms. Lucy.”

“It’s always my goddamned call,” she swore.

“It’s your goddamned bar.”

She hesitated, and the front door shattered in slow motion, giving way from the middle beam outwards. “Frank, you said—”

“East way’s blocked, ma’am.”

“And that way.” She cringed as one full door slab cracked and a festering eyeball appeared behind it. “It’s hopeless, ain’t it?”

Briar lifted the rifle up to her shoulder, squinted, and fired. The eyeball vanished, but in a moment, another one took its place.

Lucy said, “Nice shot. But God knows how many more are behind him. We’ve got to bail. Bloody goddamn hell. I hate cleaning up after those things. All right. Yes. Everybody out. Varney, you hold the door. Swakhammer, up front. Everybody else, down the hatch behind the bar. You too, Miss Wilkes.”

“No. I’m staying with you.”

“Nobody’s staying. We’re all going to run for it.” Without looking over her shoulder, Lucy said, “The rest of you bastards had better have one foot in the tunnel and the other on a banana peel. When I turn around, I don’t want to see a soul except for Varney holding up the lid.”

Briar chanced a look and saw the scuffle that matched the scrambling sounds behind her. Frank, Ed, Allen, and Willard were gone, and Varney was half kicking, half shoving the still-groggy Hank down the hole.

“All clear,” Varney announced as Hank fell to the bottom with a yelp.

“Good,” Lucy said. But then a whole chunk of wood came smashing out of the door frame and into the bar, and three waving, stinking, grasping hands came reaching through it, prying and yanking at the other boards that stood between them and the emptying room. “After you, Miss Wilkes.”

Swakhammer swore loudly and turned his attention to the door behind the piano. “Behind you!” he warned.

Briar said, “Mr. Swakhammer, I’ve got plenty in front of me!” and she fired again.

Swakhammer ran to the east tunnel door and leaned against it, pressing his back firmly and digging his feet into the wood-grained floor. The east entrance was failing every bit as fast as its western counterpart.

“We can’t stay like this!” he said, and ripped himself away as the first writhing, twisting fingers tried to drill themselves past his armor. He whirled around and cocked the pistols, and fired them at the door with less aiming than Briar had summoned. The blasts hit as much wood as rotter, loosening the barrier even more. A foot broke through the bottom beam and kicked back and forth as if feeling around for something.

“Go!” Briar shouted, preparing the rifle again and firing at anything that wiggled behind the broken places in the doors.

“You first!” Lucy ordered.

“You’re closer!”

“All right!” she agreed. Lucy threw herself around the bar’s edge and dove for the hole in the floor.

When Briar heard a definitive dropping of the one-armed woman down to some lower corner below, she turned just in time to see Swakhammer’s masked face only feet away from hers, and coming in quick.

He seized her arm and grabbed it so fast, and so hard, that she almost shot him by accident; but she lifted the rifle with her unencumbered hand and towed it behind her like a kite as Swakhammer dragged her down to the hole.

The doors broke one after another; the western main entrance and the east tunnel collapsed inward, and a flood of reeking, broken bodies came cascading into the interior.

Briar saw them in snatched glimpses. She didn’t slow and didn’t hesitate, but she could look, couldn’t she? And they were coming with a speed she could scarcely believe from corpses that could hardly hold themselves together. One was wearing half a shirt. One was wearing nothing but boots, and the parts of its body that would otherwise be covered had come sloughing off — revealing gray-black bones underneath.

“Down,” Swakhammer insisted. He jammed his hand onto the top of her head, and she ducked to follow the shove of his palm.

She almost fell, mirroring Hank’s sloppy toppling; but at the last moment her hand snared the top rung and she swung down in a gangly slide, knocking her knees against the walls and the ladder edges. She stopped at the bottom and slipped, then regained her footing. Her naked hand splashed down onto the floor and she hoped her gloves were in her coat pockets. Otherwise, she didn’t know where they’d gone off to.

A hand lifted her by the elbow, and in the darkness she saw Frank’s concerned face above her. “Ma’am,” he said. “You all right?”

“Fine,” she told him, rising to her feet and moving away just in time to keep from getting landed on by Swakhammer, who dropped down into the deeper chamber with a stomp and a splash.

He reached up and locked his hands around the underside handles. “Lucy,” he said, and he didn’t need to say anything else.

She was already there, her mechanical fist cinched around a trio of steel bars that could’ve been anything before they were used as braces. Lucy passed them up to Swakhammer one at a time, and he held on tight with one hand while he threaded the bars through the handles with his other one.

From above, fleshless fingers picked angrily at the cracks, but there was no outer hole and Swakhammer had brought the crowbar down below. As a last gesture of defiance and security, he jammed the prying device into a handle and let it serve as an extra brace.

While the hands and feet of the dead things stomped and scratched above, Briar tried to scan the tunnel’s atmosphere and figure out where she was. Surely this was the deepest she’d ever been beneath the world, below a basement and down into the bowels of something else — something lower and wetter. This place was not like the finished, brick-lined tunnels that Swakhammer had led her through in order to get to Maynard’s; this was a hole dug beneath a solid place, and it unnerved her. It reminded her of another hole beneath another solid place. It made her think of a spot beneath her former home where a catastrophe machine had burrowed its way out into the world, and back again.