"Five!"
"Come on, Will!" Elliott snapped, her head bobbing up above the lip of the Pore.
"Four!"
Absolute confusion reigned as they each tried to speak to him at the same time, but through it all Will only heard the seconds as they twins coldly announced them, nearing the end of the countdown.
"Three!"
"Will!" Chester yelled, yanking at the rope in an attempt to pull him closer.
"Will!" Cal was screaming.
"Two!"
Will staggered to his feet.
"One!"
"Zero!" the twins said simultaneously.
"Your time's run out."
"The deal's off."
"More needless deaths you've notched u, Will!"
Will heard Cal shouting and spun around.
"NO! WAIT!" his brother was shrieking. "I WANT TO GO HOME!"
He'd jumped out from behind the menhir and was waving his arms, in plain view of the Limiters and bathed in the full beams of the spotlights.
Right in the firing line.
Cracks of multiple rifle shots came from all around the upper reaches of the slope. So many in such a short space of time, it sounded like a speeded-up drumroll.
The barrage struck Cal all over his body with a messy, deadly precision. He didn't stand a chance. As if swatted by a huge invisible hand, the bullets' impact swept him off his feet, leaving a momentary red trace airborne in his place.
Will could only watch as his brother flopped in a broken heap by the very edge of the Pore, like a puppet whose strings had all been cut. It was as if it had happened in grisly slow motion. The bounce of his brother's arm as it hit the damp ground, the fact that he was only wearing one sock — Will absorbed even the smallest details.
Then Cal's body simply tipped over the edge. The rope around Will's waist snapped tight, the sudden tension yanking on him and forcing him several steps forward.
Bartleby, who had been waiting obediently where Cal had left him, scrabbled up in a whir of long limbs and burst after his master, vanishing from sight over the lip of the Pore. The drag on Will from the rope increased, and he knew that the cat must be hanging on to Cal's body.
Shots sizzled through the light beams, which switched back and forth so rapidly that they gave a stroboscopic effect. The bullets fell around him, like a metal rain, whining and ricocheting off the menhirs and flicking up sprays of dirt at his feet.
But Will didn't make any attempt to hide. With his hands pressed against his temples, he screamed with every last drop of air in his lungs, until all that was left was a rasping croak. He swallowed down more air and screamed a second time: The word Enough! Was just discernible through it. As his howl came to an end, a deathly hush filled the place.
The Limiters had ceased firing.
Chester and Elliott were no longer yelling to get his attention.
Will swayed where he stood. He was numb, oblivious to the rope as it bit sharply into his waist.
He didn't feel a thing.
Cal was dead.
This time there was no question in Will's mind. And he might have saved his brother's life if he'd surrendered to the twins.
But he hadn't.
Once before, he'd thought Cal was gone for good, and Drake had performed a miracle and resuscitated him. But now there were no reprieves, no happy endings. No this time.
The intolerable weight of responsibility he bore crushed him. He, and he alone, had been responsible for destroying many lives. He saw their faces. Uncle Tam. Grandma Macaulay. People who had given everything for him; people he loved.
And he couldn't help but believe his father, Dr. Burrows, was lost to him, too. He would never see him again, not now. Will's dream was finished.
The lull was brought to an abrupt end as the Limiters opened fire again, the barrage even fiercer than before, and Chester and Elliott resumed their panicked shouting as they tried to get through to him.
But, as if the sound had been turned down, Will wasn't hearing anything. His glazed eyes drifted over Chester's stricken and desperate face, mere footsteps away, as his friend yelled with all his might. It had no effect — even his friendship with Chester had been taken from him.
Everything he'd relied upon — the certainties underpinning his uncertain life — had been knocked out from under him, one after another.
His brain burned with the horrific image of his brother's death. That last moment blotted out everything else.
"Enough," he said, quite steadily this time.
Cal had lost his life because of him.
There was no avoiding it, no room for excuses, no quarter.
Will knew it should be him hanging there, punched full of holes, not his brother.
It was as if something was being stretched and stretched in his mind, creaking and bellying from side to side, until it was so close to the breaking point that it would fracture into tiny, sharp fragments that might never be pieced together again.
He struggled to stay upright as Cal's deadweight pulled at him. The Limiters continued to fire, but Will was somewhere else, and none of it mattered anymore.
He took a single stride toward the Pore, allowing the weight to draw him on.
From the top of the stone steps, Chester came toward him, holding out his hand and hoarsely shrieking his name.
Will looked up and saw him as if for the first time.
"I'M SO SORRY, WILL!" Chester yelled, then his voice became strangely calm as he realized Will, at last, was listening. "Come here. It's OK."
"Is it?" Will asked.
Just for that second, it was as if they were insulated from all the horror and fear that surrounded them. Chester nodded and smiled briefly back at him. "Yes, and so are we," he replied, his words heavy with meaning. "I'm sorry."
A tiny germ of hope was born within Will.
He still had his friend — all was not lost, and they would get themselves out of this somehow.
Will took another step, reaching out his hand toward Chester.
Faster and faster, closing the distance between them, the rope pulling him forward: By the very edge of the Pore, he was just about to take hold of Chester's hand.
At the top of the slope, the Rebecca twins shouted simultaneously.
"Good riddance to him!"
"Bust out the big guns!"
The heavy artillery bucked into life. The Limiters' bank of howitzers spat massive shells that swerved like fireballs, leaving flaming red trails behind them. The whole slope was lit up with their blazing light, and the sound was deafening.
The shells struck, splitting any menhirs in their path and throwing up huge curtains of dirt, smashing into the paved platform and lifting the flagstones like a gust of wind scatters a pack of playing cards.
Will was thrown forward, knocked senseless by the blasts. He sailed straight into the pitch-black, clean over his friend's head.
If he'd been conscious, Will would have seen Chester's flailing arms and legs as he grabbed at anything he could in a last-ditch attempt to prevent himself from being dragged over by the rope that bound him to Will.
And he would have heard Elliott's screams as she, too, was yanked into the Pore after Chester.
If Will had been capable of thought, he would have felt the dark air rushing around him as he plummeted down and down, his dead brother somewhere beneath him, and the other two, still howling and screaming, up above. And he would have been terrified by the odd sections of masonry and rubble from the pulverized menhirs that were falling all around them.
But there were no thoughts, just a black nothingness in his mind, identical to what he was plunging through.
Will was in free fall, his ears popping mercilessly and his breath stolen every so often by the rush of air as he shot through it, reaching terminal velocity.
On occasion he collided with Elliott, Chester, and even Cal's limp corpse, the ropes twisting around their limbs and torsos in random arrangements to bind them together, and then untwisting as they floated apart, as if they were dancers in some macabre aerial ballet. Every so often Will's trajectory took him to the side of the seemingly endless Pore, where he either crashed against the unforgiving rock or, curiously, hit softer matter — which, had he been conscious, would have caused him a great deal of surprise.