The gunfire was deafening and my head swam from colliding with the floor—I couldn’t quite get a mental lock on anything, my eyes swimmy, my head lolling. My side burned like a fresh tattoo, and blood spread across my hip and crotch where my underwear was drinking it up. My back was killing me where the bullet had burned me earlier.
I slipped and almost fell. Some bestial scream erupted to my right and I jumped. Bang! A dark shape backflipped into a wall.
They ushered me into a doorway where Walter was leading his father down a narrow corridor. People jostled ahead of us in the dark as we ran, cutting the soft and grainy light ahead into a thousand tumbling shapes. Simian ghosts careened around us, pulling at our clothes, trying to pull us apart.
Bang!
Bang! Bang!
The constant gunfire, again and again, roared down the tunnel in constant lion-roars, again and again, bang bang bang, flat and sharp and cutting into my brain like a scalpel.
Snapshot scenes passed in front of me, illuminated by muzzle-flashes: Walter looking over my shoulder, fear in his eyes. Clayton grimacing in pain. The screaming doll-face of a Wilder, swooping out of the dark. Normand reloading his revolver.
Shadows and men divided themselves and divided again as we ran, chasing someone’s torch. They flickered a square dance across my eyes to a music that threatened to tear me to pieces from the inside out: a symphony of hag-screams, howling maniacs, the percussion of guns.
“Are we okay?” I remember saying. My face was wet. My clothes were wet.
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