Plague

held them pinned.
    Digging like worms. That was the nightmare reality. Drake and the piggy digging in a nightmare, digging dirt, pushing it aside, compressing it to buy half an inch of clearance.
    Dark, that dream. Utterly dark. No Sammy sun. No light.
    He remembered thinking in the nightmare, thinking, “There’s no air.”
    Buried alive, there couldn’t be any air. No light and no air, no water, no food, forever and forever.
    It had taken a long time before his mind had cleared enough for him to realize the wonderful truth: he was dead . . . but alive.
    Unkillable. Buried in the damp earth and yet somehow alive.
    And then, hard-won freedom of a sort. The nightmare was no longer one of being buried in the earth but of walking the earth. He would be in one place, and then quite suddenly, in another. It took him a while to realize what had happened. The piggy was a part of him. They were joined, connected. Melded into one creature with two minds and two bodies.
    Sometimes Drake and sometimes Brittney Pig.
    Sometimes himself, and other times that little idiot with her lunatic visions of her dead brother.
    Then the fight with Sam, the burning, and yet he had survived.
    Unkillable.
    “You’re a monster, Orc! You know that, right?” Drake shouted the taunt. “People look at you and they throw up. You make them all sick.”
    Trapped. For now. In this dank, gloomy basement. Nothing down here but a wooden work table. They had cleaned the place out, Sam and Edilio and the rest. Barely a nail left behind on the concrete floor.
    A roomier grave than the one he’d shared with Brittney Pig before. Here there was air. But Drake no longer needed air.
    They shoved food in, and Drake ate it but he didn’t need it.
    Unkillable.
    What could not be killed could not be imprisoned forever. Just a matter of time. Orc was a stupid drunk. Howard was a clown. Drake would have already dug his way out—he had loosened a section of cinderblock wall, working at the mortar with a piece of broken glass.
    But he had to be careful not to leave any clues for Brittney to find when she emerged.
    That meant working slowly. Putting the piece of glass back in the sweepings right where she would expect to see it.
    In the meantime as he worked and waited he howled threats up at Orc. There were two ways out of this trap: working on the wall, and working on Orc’s mind.
    “Hey!” Drake shouted. “Orc! If I whip that last bit of skin off you, what do you think will happen? Might as well get rid of it and be all gravel. Why pretend you’re still human?”
    Orc stomped the floor, which was Drake’s ceiling. But he did not come down to do battle.
    Not yet. But he would eventually. Orc would snap. Then Drake would have his chance.
    Through the wall or through Orc: one way or the other, Drake would escape.
    He would go then to the Darkness. The gaiaphage would know how to kill the Brittney Pig and let Drake live free.
    “I’m going to kill you!” Drake screamed.
    He whipped at the walls, whipped at the ceiling, screamed and kicked and whipped in a lunatic frenzy.
    Until at last, exhausted, his whip hand bleeding, he fell to his knees and became Brittney.
    “Brittney Pig,” Drake slurred as his cruel mouth melted and twisted and became the braces-toothed mouth of his most intimate enemy.
    Lana, too, felt the dark distant mind of the gaiaphage reach out for her.
    She woke, eyes open quite suddenly. Patrick was beside the bed, panting, worried, wagging his tail uncertainly. He could tell, somehow.
    “It’s okay, boy, go back to sleep,” Lana said.
    Patrick whimpered, but then went back to his bed, turning around a couple of times before settling himself in.
    The gaiaphage could no longer trick her into believing it had a voice. Those days were gone. But it could still touch her with a tendril of consciousness. It could still remind her of its presence, and of her connection to it.
    This must be what it was like to be a victim of some awful crime, and to know that the person who did it to you was still alive, still looking for a way to do it again.
    The gaiaphage lusted after Lana’s power. Using her power it could do miraculous things. Like replace an amputated arm with a snakelike whip.
    But she was no longer quite so weak.
    “Anxious, are you?” she asked the cool night air. “Down under the ground nibbling on your uranium snack?”
    The Darkness did not answer. But Lana felt her instinct was right: the creature was anxious.
    But not