Elias woke with the taste of vomit in his mouth. He sat up, groaning. "Jesus..." He screwed his eyes shut against the light but it didn't seem to help.

"Man. My head..." Robbie lifted himself from the driver's seat, only he didn't look like Robbie, not properly, every inch of him glowed with its own white light, Elias could only catch the outlines of him.

"You look ... freaky."

"You too..."

Elias raised his hand and found it to be every bit as brilliant as Robbie, as though it had been dipped in molten silver. "Billy?" Suddenly his attention turned to what was outside the car rather than inside. And the answer to that appeared to be nothing. Utter blackness. "Kia?"

Kia lay beside him on the rear seat, also glowing but more faintly. Her eyes were closed and for a moment he thought she'd stopped breathing.

"What happened out there?" Robbie asked.

"What happened in here?" Elias asked back.

Robbie put his face to the window, cupping his hands around his eyes. He jerked back as if stung. "That's all kinds of messed up!"

"What's out there?"

"You really don't want to know. Not Aspiration, that's for sure. You need to wake Kia up. She must have done this."

Gingerly Elias took hold of Kia's narrow shoulders and shook her. "Kia! Wake up!" The girl hung limp in his grip.

"That's no good! Do it harder. Slap her if you have to." Robbie sounded even more panicked than when Billy had been holding a gun at the window.

"What's out there?" Elias asked.

"Man, I have no idea. It's bad though. Real bad."

Elias shook Kia harder and shouted for her to wake.

"Slap her!"

"Really?"

"Just do it."

Elias gave Kia a half-hearted slap across the cheeks, more of an enthusiastic pat. As their skin made contact a single thought pulsed through him, the same thing on repeat: dark world, dark world, dark-

"She's taken us through to where it's all coming from," Elias said. "It's like Mr Davis was saying. A dark world that sits in the same space as ours."

Something splatted against the rear windscreen and in a heartbeat was gone again, something smaller than a hand. The light bleeding from Elias's body showed it for just a second, it reminded him of the dissected rat he'd once see on the front bench after one of Mr Davis's biology lessons for a class of older kids, the skin pinned back, the organs on show in a welter of raw flesh.

"Did that thing have ... wings?" Robbie asked. He had Thorne's handgun out now and was waving it about rather erratically.

Elias placed the palm of his hand on Kia's cold forehead. "What should we do?"

Go. More of an idea than a voice. A weak, tenuous connection. A direction came into his mind, and a distance.

"How?" Elias asked.

"How what?"

"Ssshh! I'm talking to her."

"What did she say?"

"I missed most of it while you were asking questions!" Elias tried again. "How do we get there?" But Kia had sunk somewhere beyond his reach.

"What did she say?"

Elias turned to look his friend in the eye. "She's gone, but we have to go that way." He pointed out over the hood of the car. "And this light coming out of us ... it's our lives ... and it won't last long."

Robbie's light flickered. "And then?"

"Then we won't have lives anymore."

Elias sat for a moment staring at his glowing hands while Robbie chewed that one over.

"How can we get ... there?"

Elias steeled himself then put his face to the door window, cupping his hands to channel his lifelight out into the dark world. It wasn't like seeing, more like a confused dream. There were distant jagged mountains, a chaos of night stuff, and ... things ... moving. Small winged things wearing their organs on the outside buzzed to and fro. Further out, as if drawn by the light but reluctant to venture in were larger fliers on ragged wings stretched between bony spars, great bats perhaps but trailing coiling wire-like tendrils. And, as Elias watched, right on the very edge of his vision, something, larger than a horse but sharing more with the spider and the crab, unfolded itself and launched up to skewer one of the bat-things, dragging it down to thrash amid the smokiness of the ground. "I vote against walking."

"We can walk." Robbie counted off the options on his fingers. "With one of us carrying Kia. Or we can push the car with her in it." He had plenty of fingers left over.

"Or," said Elias. "We can stay here and hope dying this way isn't so bad, and we can get it over with before one of those things starts chewing its way in."

"Or!" Robbie leaned forward. "We can drive." He turned the key.

Kaff! Kaff! Kaff!

Elias, drew his knees to his chest and rocked back on the rear seat. They were an infinitesimal glowing dot on the surface of an entire world of darkness and soon that speck would die.

"Can you smell that?" Robbie asked.

"No." Elias didn't care. He had no room for more horror.

Robbie sniffed. "It's gas. You sure you can't smell it?"

"No."

"Lean forward."

Rather than argue Elias leaned forward and sniffed. "Yeah. It's gasoline."

"My dad had this happen." Robbie sounded excited. "After a fender bender. The fuel line came loose. Car wouldn't start."

"So ... what? We might go up in flames or choke on fumes before those things come in and eat us?"

"No, doofus, it means we might be able to fix it. A loose fuel line you can just jam back on. I mean ... if it's broken somewhere under the car we're screwed, but if it came loose where it joins the engine I can pop the hood and you can just lean in and fix it."

"Me?"

"I've got to be ready to drive."

"I could drive..." Elias didn't want to wait to die but going out there wasn't an option.

"You don't know how."

"It looked pretty easy, and you didn't do so great at it last time... Besides, I don't even know what a fuel line looks like or where to put it."

"Dude, I'm just telling you what my dad said. I didn't see him do it." Robbie drew a deep breath. "But if you won't..." He reached for the door.

"No." Elias didn't understand how friendship worked. He didn't understand the forces that would push him out of the car into the claws of monsters rather than let down a boy who almost broke his nose last fall over an argument about a skateboard. Intellectually he knew that whatever random collection of boys had been in his class at school he would have found friends. Robbie was just a roll of the dice. But he was Elias's roll. This was his life. What had been given to him and what he had taken, and if he were willing to toss it aside because of fear, then what was any of it worth. If their friendship wasn't special then neither was the life he was trying to protect.

"Elias?"

Elias looked up at the glowing shape of his friend. "Huh?"

"Zoned out on me there, buddy."

"I'll go."

"We'll toss for it." Robbie fished out a quarter.

"Heads," Elias said.

Robbie flipped the coin and showed it. Tails.

"Can you even drive here?"

"Dunno. Not without the engine going, for sure."

Trying not to think about what he was doing Elias grabbed the door handle and bundled through into the dark world. The immediate sensation was neither of heat or cold, simply pain. Where Elias had been glowing before he now blazed, shedding brilliance in all directions. He slammed the door behind him and started round to the front of the car, arms raised to fend off any of the flying meat-bugs. Looking down he saw to his surprise he stood on asphalt. Close by his foot lay the barrel of Billy's gun, sheared off. Further on, just before the asphalt gave way to a darkly smoking surface the toe of a sneaker, leaking blood. Kia had clearly brought slightly more than just the car with them.

Where the road surface ran out the ground beneath his feet felt yielding but not like mud. More like flesh.

Elias reached the front and set his hands to the hood. The pink paintwork wasn't bubbled and corrupted as it would have been beneath the dark tide, but here and there something had stripped it away entirely in what looked like slug trails, the silvery metal below grooved rather than smooth.

The hood lifted easily. One of the meat-bugs flew by close enough for Elias to feel the flutter of its wings, though they made no sound. He yelped in terror but couldn't hear his own voice. Without warning the ground trembled beneath him, and turning he glimpsed, distant but still too close, the foot of something far larger than any elephant lifting as it stepped away, the owner invisible at the top end of a massive leg.

Swearing silently Elias returned his attention to the engine in front of him. It looked more complicated than he remembered engines being, brilliantly illuminated by the lifeforce bleeding out of him. He leaned in, reaching for any tubes or hoses he could see, pulling to find a loose one. The stink of gasoline reminded him that apart from that there was no smell to the place. No sound, no smell, no breath of wind, only the silent horrors moving about him, as though drawn by the light but also held back by it, or just cautious. For now.

He fumbled among the dark greasy engine parts, rubber hoses that smeared black dirt across his shining skin, sharp unyielding angles, something that cut his thumb, and then, against all odds, a dangling rubber tube stinking of gas. Energised by something other than terror now Elias hunted for somewhere to connect it. He found a likely looking port and wedged the business end of the tube into the open socket. After a few desperate moments struggling to marry the two there was a click and they connected.

Before Elias could straighten up something brushed against his leg and a moment later it felt as if the back of his knee had been injected with hot acid. Screaming silently he collapsed to the fleshy ground, his hands touching the foul stuff, invisible now beneath the black smoke that hung around it, impenetrable even to his light.

Even in his agony Elias couldn't allow his face to touch the surface beneath his hands and that desire was all that kept him from collapsing completely as the pain sang through him. Still screaming he crawled around the side of the car, dragging the injured leg. Moving the limb was the last thing he wanted to do but the thought that he might get stung again kept him going.

Hardly able to see he found the door handle by touch and climbed in. Suddenly his shrieks of pain filled the car. He collapsed into the footwell, shuddering all over. Robbie lunged over the back seat and managed to slam the door.

"Jesus! What happened?" Robbie flinched back as one of the oversized bugs slapped wetly into the door window.

"-try it-" Elias croaked.

Kaff! Kaff! Kaff!

Elias felt tears rolling down his cheeks. "Again..."

Kaff! Kaff! K—rrrrrRRRR! The engine caught and started.

"Drive..."

"But-"

"Drive!"

"I can't see! You left the hood up!"

"Do it!" Seeing wouldn't help.

The engine roared and the car moved forward with a peculiar slewing motion as if the wheels were seeking purchase on ice.

"OK... we're mo-" A soft impact cut Robbie off, the car bumped over whatever it had hit and carried on. "Where are we going?"

"Keep going." Elias got the words through gritted teeth. The direction Kia had imprinted on him fought through the agony.

Twenty seconds later something hit the raised hood with a wet sound and after that the engine began to labour.

"Keep going," Elias rasped. "To the left a little."

"Left," Robbie muttered. "Check."

"Enough. Straight on."

"How far are we-"

"Not far." Elias could feel the shudder of the engine now and imagined some horror sprawled across it, throttling a line or chewing on something important. "Enough! Here."

Robbie stepped on the brake and they juddered to a halt. "What now?"

"Have to ... wake her." Elias almost screamed the last word. It felt as if all the skin had peeled back from his leg, flaying it from ankle to thigh.

"How?" asked Robbie, helpless.

Without warning a long black spike punched through the car's roof, bright metal tearing around it. It plunged into the rear seat not far from Kia's head. The tips of a set of claws appeared around the roof's edge.

"How?" screamed Robbie.

Elias reached for Kia. "Sorry." And placed his trembling hand flat against her neck. How much of his pain reached her he didn't know but it was enough to bring her shrieking back into consciousness. A moment later the roof ripped away with an awful squeal and blackness poured in.

"W-where?" Elias screwed his eyes tight against the brilliance.

"It's OK. We're back! On Deer Hill, I think."

Elias could see two dark shapes moving against the light. "Kia?"

"I'm here." She opened the door.

Together Robbie and Kia helped Elias out onto the road. The car sat curiously in the street, its wheel and part of the front buried in the asphalt as if the road had been poured around it.

"Can you walk?" Robbie asked.

"No." Elias fumbled his penknife onto the ground. "Let me see it. My leg."

Gingerly Robbie used the knife to slice up along the side of Elias's jeans. Elias had been expecting raw flesh weeping corruption along the whole length of the limb. Instead there was a neat black hole in the back of his knee and a mottled blackness had spread to cover a hand's width around it. "You can't imagine how much it hurts." He couldn't keep the whine from his voice.

"We'll get the stuff," Robbie said. "We'll come back for you."

"Hide him." Kia pointed to the overgrown front yard of a nearby house.

Robbie nodded and together they started to drag Elias.

"Slowly! Jesus!" Elias found tears rolling down his cheeks.

"Got to get you out of sight," Robbie said.

"We shouldn't split up. It never goes well in the movies." Elias tried for humour.

"If we're spotted we need to be able to run," Robbie said. "We'll come back. Honest."

And so, tucked into the shade of a large hedge, Elias went over what they needed from the tanning salon. Robbie was handy with mechanical things and could cut and splice a mains cable. The main problem would be transporting the tanning beds, or halves of them, along with as many sunlamps as they could find.

"You have to do this fast," Elias said. "We need to cross to West Hill before the tide starts rising." He lay back, clutching his leg, and watched them go. The other reason for haste he'd left unstated. He didn't know how long he had. With the midday sun on his leg the pain had lessened a little, but here in the shade it had started to build again and the area of darkened flesh seemed larger. What it would do once darkness fell he shuddered to think. Already he could hear a whispering at the back of his mind, an excited babble, too faint to make out any words. And a bitterness edged his thoughts. Robbie should have gone to fix the fuel line. It wasn't fair that he should be running around while Elias lay and suffered. Where was the justice in it? Robbie and Kia together, leaving Elias poisoned and dying. The shame Elias felt at these ideas was less because they were evidence of the taint rising in him and more that they might be all his own.

Elias edged out so he could rest his leg in the sunshine. They had reappeared at the same level they'd left Pike's Hill, with both the high and low tideline quite far below. Though by midnight Elias wouldn't put long odds against the spot he was lying being fathoms deep. And before the tide, the taints would come roaming, walking out of the black waves. And he might not even last that long. Either a crazy would get him or he'd become a crazy himself. That set him thinking of Mr Davis. They needed his generator but Elias had no desire to see what their old teacher had become three days after sticking himself on a tainted bramble.

Robbie should have gone. Wasn't Robbie always the brave one. And yet this time he'd hung back, like he'd known what was coming and had left Elias to take the bullet. An image of quietly lifting that gun from the back of Robbie's waistband and shooting him through the stomach filled Elias's mind. Elias shook the idea from his head, horrified at how good it had felt there.

Time passed and twice Elias shuffled along to keep his leg in the sun. The pain gave him no peace and he hunted the windows of the surrounding houses for any sign of life.

The man came up the street rather than from one of the doorways. Elias's eye was drawn by the strange swaying way he moved up the road, swinging from one side to the other but mounting neither sidewalk. A tall thin man in a long coat too hot for the season, a black glove on one hand, a baseball cap pulled low across his face. Elias lay deathly still.

The man drew closer, sniffing and muttering. It looked as if he would pass on by near the middle of the road but as he drew level his head swung around and he began to sniff in Elias's direction. The whispering at the back of Elias's mind grew urgent, sharp as needles. Terrified, Elias inched further into the hedge's shadow, but as his leg moved from sun to shade the pain flared and the whispers became a roar.

"Brother?" The man advanced in Elias's direction, something ugly in the way he shambled. He reached the sidewalk and took off the baseball cap to reveal a face scraped raw by fingernails, and bleeding eyes fixed upon Elias. A wide grin revealed blackened teeth. "Soon."

"No!" Elias groaned, addressing the word to the voices in his head.

The man raised his hands, clutched into claws. "I can help."

Elias gave a cry and pressed back but the hedge resisted.

A moment later something large and dark rushed in and the man vanished with a wet crunch.

"Get in!"

Elias found himself looking at a blue pickup truck with Robbie leaning out of its window.

"I ... I can't get ..." Elias rolled into the sunshine, whimpering with pain.

Robbie and Kia jumped from the truck. "Quick! They're coming." Somewhere behind them, further up the hill, shots rang out.

Between them Robbie and Kia grabbed Elias beneath the arms and dragged him to the truck, ignoring his agonized cries. It took all of Robbie's strength to hoist Elias into the cab. He climbed in over his friend, grabbed the wheel, and had the truck accelerating before Kia had even got the door shut behind her. The truck bumped over the body of the crazy they'd hit as they drew up. More shots rang out and behind them in the flatbed glass shattered.

"Shit! Shit! Shit!" Robbie drove on, swerving around an abandoned car.

Elias managed to lever himself upright. His leg felt as if it were being peeled and the voices in his head were so loud it was hard to hear what Kia was saying beside him. A few hundred yards ahead the black sea stretched out in a hungry void, and between them and it row upon row of tainted houses, the streets lined with rusting hulks, the gardens grown strange.

"Hang on!" The truck smashed through a barricade sending debris flying. A moment later it smashed through a second, this one made brittle and rotten by the tide. Tainted began to break from the shadows of the houses. One leapt from a thick, twisted hedge, leaving strips of skin to decorate it. She threw herself into the truck's path, screaming, and was gone in a thud and a red spatter across the windscreen.

"Kia! Get ready!" The truck barrelled on toward the darkness, picking up speed.

They hit the blackness without impact save for Kia being thrown back into her seat with a gasp, eyes wide.

For Elias it was more a revelation. He didn't see the expected bubble with the darkness beyond. Instead he saw everything, the lower slopes of Deer Hill laid bare before him, appearing largely undamaged. The agony in his leg had vanished, replaced by a delicious warmth spreading up through his body.

"Kia!" Robbie barked, his voice a saw through Elias's brain. "Reach out. You can't do this on your own!"

Kia was struggling to work her magic. She lunged across Elias to set her hand to Robbie's arm, drawing on his strength. Elias only watched, confused. There was no need to fight the darkness. Everything looked fine.

The truck crossed the main street at the bottom of Deer Road and swerved around debris outside the Dunkin Doughnut. As they began on the rising grade Elias saw with horror that the whole top half of West Hill was burning, not just here and there but the solid white and orange blaze of a tinder dry forest during wildfire.

The truck swerved to avoid garbage cans and clipped the curb. Kia, who had for some reason been arching herself over Elias's lap, lurched against him and her bare arm touched his. In the same moment the veils tore from Elias's eyes and he saw both of them, Robbie and Kia, as they truly were, white demons, hideously wrought, their mouths twisted in mocking leers, the hate shining from their eyes.

The need to kill them both became a physical force. Elias howled, bringing his elbow down on Kia with all his strength then reaching to claw at Robbie's face.

"What are y-" Robbie's protests turned into howls of pain. The engine roared and the truck swerved across the road, out of control. At the same time Kia's foul magic weakened and Elias could feel the true world surge forward, the one she had been keeping from him, now pressing on the outside of their vehicle.

Elias fought hard, tearing at Robbie, but somehow the monster kept a hand on the wheel. The inferno above them grew closer by the moment as the truck accelerated, smashing a parked car aside and ploughing on. Elias could feel the heat of that hellish day above them, reaching down through the protection of the tide.

"Nooo!" The engine cut out. Robbie smashed a forearm across Elias's face and regained the steering wheel. "No! Jesus!"

Elias struggled to throw Kia off him so he could get a proper hold of Robbie. The truck was slowing now that the tide had drowned the engine, and the squeal of wheel rims on asphalt filled the cab, the tires shot, but still the thing kept rolling up the hill on the last dregs of its momentum. Suddenly fire filled the cab and all Elias could do was scream and burn.

"Hold him steady."

Elias found himself on the ground, cheek pressed to the too-hot sidewalk. "Help!"

Duct tape bound his wrists, his ankles felt similarly secured, and Robbie's weight pressed him to the floor. From the corner of his eye he could see Kia, one hand pressed to the back of his knee, the other holding a large magnifying glass. Black smoke was rising from his leg. He screamed, his throat raw, and tried to throw them off.

"Hold him!"

Strangely the pain, though bad, was less than it had been when they dragged him to the truck. "Help!" He couldn't manage much of a yell.

"Shut up! They'll hear!" Robbie hissed, voice tight with the effort of holding Elias down.

"What is she doing?" Elias could feel a warmth flooding him. His head filled with Kia's touch, a white handprint swimming across his mind's eye. "What..."

"Quick!" Robbie desperate.

"Done." Kia sounded weak.

Robbie rolled from Elias immediately and from the sidewalk fired three shots that left their ears ringing. A tainted collapsed nearby, one blistered hand sprawling into Elias's eye-line, smoking in the sunlight. Another howled in pain further back until a fourth shot silenced it.

"One bullet left," Robbie said.

Kia moved to slice the tape on Elias's wrists. She looked terrible, her eyes sunken and surrounded by black halos. She had been skinny when they found her. Now she was skeletal, flesh shrunken around her bones.

Elias on the other hand felt better than he had in ages. Heavy with guilt over the high price Kia had paid to keep them safe he helped her up. "Thanks." It seemed too small a word. He scanned the margins for more taints. The dark tide lapped just yards behind the truck.

"You good?" Robbie rose from the sidewalk, the side of his face bloody where Elias's nails had torn him.

"I..." Elias twisted to see the back of his leg. The puncture wound was an ugly burn now but the blackness had gone. "It almost got me."

"Come on." Robbie went back to the truck. The tide had left it in a sorry state, paintwork scorched, tires perished, engine smoking. Robbie went round the back. "Thank God!"

"Thank Kia," Elias said, gazing at the collection of lamps and sunbeds. Kia's bubble of protection had shrunk when Elias attacked her and broke her contact with Robbie but somehow she had kept them safe, and chosen to save their cargo rather than the vehicle itself.

"We need to get this stuff out of here as quick as we can."

Elias glanced up the hill. They had a hundred yards to clear the high tide mark and the danger of taints, at least in daylight. After that they 'just' had to avoid crazies and any survivors who were still circling the hill hoping that an escape route would magically appear before them. Beyond that they had to find somewhere safe among West Hill's decreasing acreage to build the light-boat.

"Let's take this one first." Elias took hold of the end of a sunbed. It looked worryingly heavy, a dozen or so UV tubes running along the inside of both curved surfaces. He lifted it with a grunt, uncomfortably aware of the dark sea stretching away at his back. "Robbie?"

"Coming." Robbie turned from the black waves and came to help. They carried the thing between them, one at each end, getting it down slowly, careful not to stumble on the pitted road surface. The lamps were precious. Replacing them on West Hill would be impossible. "Go easy..."

As Robbie backed toward the tideline to let the sunbed clear the deck something surged forward, the blackness mounding around it like water around a surfacing shark. The thing that broke clear, smoking with darkness, had Billy Cesar's wicked grin amid the horror of a flayed face.

Robbie went down as Billy tackled him. The sunbed fell with a crash and a thousand tinkling pieces of glass scattered across the road, Robbie's gun among them, skittering beneath the truck.

Elias went for the gun, throwing himself down among the shards of the bulbs and crawling after it beneath the truck. Now that it lacked tires the vehicle sat close to the ground leaving little space for Elias. Behind him screams and maniacal laughter tore the air. He wriggled forward scraped from above and below, gasping for breath. Straining fingertips touched the gun's grip as a wail of awful pain rang out. Some kinds of agony make something inhuman of a voice. It could have been any of them screaming, Billy, Kia, or Robbie.

It took an age to drag himself clear of the truck, gun in hand. Billy had Robbie on the ground, close to the tide, choking him. Kia stood above them, beating at Billy with a length of wood. It looked heavy enough to do serious damage but Billy only howled and kept on strangling.

Billy lifted Robbie's head from the ground by his throat and hammered it down again. The crack of impact released Elias from his paralysis. He had one bullet, blurry vision, and an inability to hit targets in any contest of skill. He ran forward as Billy lifted Robbie again. Kia's next blow broke her piece of timber across Billy's skull, gaining his attention. He fixed her with two blood-filled eyes projecting such hatred that she shrank back. In the same moment Elias tripped and sprawled across the rough surface, hitting the ground just ahead of Billy and Robbie with a tooth-rattling jolt. Billy, almost close enough to touch, grinned at him, tilting his head to the side in enquiry. Together both of them looked at his right hand, stretched out on the asphalt before him. Bloody fingers still clutched the gun. Elias raised it and fired.

Click.

Billy's grin broadened. Elias remembered something about a catch and fumbled with the weapon as Billy rose from Robbie's limp form, and towered above them both, smoking gently in the dazzling sun.

Elias fired again. This time the bullet spat out and his hand jerked. Billy hardly flinched. Elias had wasted the shot and they were all as good as dead. Billy stood a moment longer then fell back, blood spraying from his mouth.

Elias got to his knees and stared at the boy's corpse, ignoring Kia who hurried past him to Robbie's side. The bullet had taken Billy just beneath the lower lip. Elias felt no guilt, only a trembling relief.

Finally he turned away. Kia had Robbie sitting up, hunched over. Elias went to join them, slowing at the sorrow on Kia's narrow features. "Is he..."

"Fucked." Robbie husked the word through a bruised throat and held up his left hand. Blisters beaded the fingers and a shadow like ink in water mottled the flesh. "Hurts..."

"He rolled you in?" Elias asked, his chest tight with fear. "Kia can fix you... Where's the magnifying glass? It hurts like hell but-" He was babbling.

"No." Robbie pushed himself away from the girl. "Look at her."

"She can! Of course she-"

"It would kill her." Each word was a struggle but Robbie wasn't letting Kia near him.

"And this will kill you!" Elias shouted.

"We fix ... the lights," Robbie said. "Enough light." He held his throat with his good hand. "Will fix this."

And that was that. Robbie wouldn't let Kia near his hand and Kia lacked the strength to make him.

"Have we got enough left?" She asked, peering into the flatbed. "For the boat? Do we have enough now?"

Elias looked over what remained. He wanted to say that it depended on how many of them the boat had to carry. Instead he said, "Yes."

The house they chose lay closer to the high tide mark than Elias would have liked but also further into the inhabited area than he wanted. He thought that they would have no chance of lugging all the stuff from the truck to the house unchallenged, particularly past the barricade at the end of the street, but it seemed that people must have grown tired of staring at their imminent doom and had retreated into the grander homes further up the hill.

An old man with a walking frame watched them from the yard of a rundown house further up the street. The sort where you think the owner must have died years ago. He watched and did nothing so they ignored him and sweated back and forth with the beds and lamps.

Elias had scouted the place out. They'd had to break a window to get in and Elias had a long shallow cut on his arm to show for it, but the payoff was out the back. Because of the gradient the flat roof of the carport out the back was at the same level as the ground floor. A set of deck chairs had alerted Elias to the fact that the roof was easily accessed from the house.

Where to build their boat had been a puzzle Elias had been chewing on ever since he thought of the idea. They needed a flat, level surface, and for it not to be too exposed. A flat roof was ideal, but how to get a generator up onto a roof? Now they could wheel it in the front door and out the bay window onto the roof. They could do the majority of the work in the house and then bring the pieces out under cover of darkness to assemble them.

Robbie had found a hardware store close to the tanning salon and helped himself to all the equipment he'd lacked when they were building the tree house only three days earlier. In addition to yards of duct tape, some of which he'd used on Elias earlier, he got a collection of power tools, a circular saw, a nail gun, and a drill that could drive screws in.

"No way we can get this built before the tide reaches this place unless we get power first and can use these babies." Robbie patted the saw with his good hand.

Elias knew that there was more on the clock than running out of time in which they could use the house. If they really needed to they could try to move further up the hill. The urgency was also about how much time Robbie had. The pain showed in his eyes and in the way he moved with such caution so as not to knock his left hand. He would be hearing the whispers already. When night fell the taint would spread faster and they'd have a crazy on their hands.

"You get started on the work. There's some timber in the garage and you can use the bedframes and planking from upstairs. Kia and I will go get Mr Davis's generator. We can syphon more gas for it from the cars in the street."

"How you going to get a thing like that back here? They weigh a ton and you can't drive."

"Dude, neither can you! It'll be on wheels, remember? And it's downhill all the way. We'll just have to manage."

Robbie shook his head. "They'll see you. Even if they don't recognise you – which they will – someone will still try to take it off you. Everyone is going to want power. I bet it's gone already. And if it hasn't it'll be because Mr Davis has gone full taint and is killing everyone who comes near!"

"If someone tries to stop us Kia will have to make them forget."

"Kia's barely able to walk. She can't do it. Look at her!"

"So we find another gun and I shoot anyone who tries to stop us in the face? Is that what you want?" Elias found himself shouting.

Robbie slumped, then shrugged. "They're all going under anyway. You'd be doing them a favour."

"I'm not shooting anyone!" Else. Anyone else. Elias's brain refused to let go of the image of Billy Cesar toppling back, spitting blood and teeth. "We have to do this. We have to try. There aren't any other choices. It probably won't even work, even if we do get it all together. But what the hell else do we do? Steal some beer and watch movies til the tide comes in and kills us?"

"Can't watch movies." Robbie shook his head, the ghost of a smile on his lips. "No power."

Elias paused, finding the courage for an admission. "I don't even like beer."

"Me either." Robbie's smile turned real.

Reaching Mr Davis's apartment wasn't as hard as Elias had anticipated. It took a while though. A fire was burning unchecked in Kings Street and when the wind blew their way a thick pall of smoke drifted across the hillside allowing them to advance through backyards. At one point Elias and Kia crouched for what must have been an hour, hidden behind a tool-shed while a man and woman had a screaming match on their back porch. The man had a knife and the woman was daring him to use it. Both threw every name under the sun at each other along with any jagged piece of their former lives together that they thought might wound the other. The fight even touched on Kia. The man wanted to go hunting for the "witch's girl" while the woman thought they should burn Mrs Eaves at the church and beg God for mercy. In the end it was the wind that brought mercy, at least for the children, the acrid smoke driving the battle indoors and allowing Elias to escape over the fence, followed by Kia.

The door to Mr Davis's apartment building stood open and blood stained the front steps. Elias glanced into the dark interior and moved on around the outside to the work shed where he knew the generator was. Like Kia he ran doubled up and close to the wall so as not to seen from the windows of the apartments.

The whole yard and the buildings overlooking it were all strangely silent. No birdsong, no screams or gunfire, and no rumble of a generator at work. Only the thick cable running from shed to building gave Elias hope it was still there.

"That's a big lock." Elias had forgotten the massive padlock though he'd seen it before when Mr Davis had once driven the science club up West Hill to see his laser working.

"The key will be in there." Kia looked up at the curtained windows of Mr Davis's living room.

"We could smash it off," Elias said.

"Then we might have to deal with him and everyone else."

"I'd rather meet him out here than in there." At least outside there would be somewhere to run. "Elias spotted a brick close by, maybe used to prop the door open, and lifted it, ready to hammer the lock.

"No." Kia shook her head. "A lever. Robbie said a lever is better than a hammer."

"When?" Elias found himself jealous of a conversation he'd missed. He'd thought himself too scared to fit anything but fear into his mind. He shook the foolishness from his head. "Find a lever then."

Kia found a hefty screwdriver in a neighbour's shed and together they pried away the door clasp which proved far less sturdy that the lock. Elias led the way into the workshop's gloom. The place smelled of stale food and car exhaust. Shelves lined the walls, overburdened with all manner of mechanical and electronic junk. A dirty sheet covered something the size of a really big TV in the middle of the floor, cables running out beneath it. Elias nodded to it.

Slowly, as if worried it might bite, Kia advanced on the object and pinched enough of the cover for her to pull it away. With a flinching movement she whipped it clear. The generator looked as shiny and new as the ones in the Samsons store down in Scottsville. It even came with a built in handle so it could be tilted back and moved about on two decent rubber-tired wheels.

"Hello, Elias."

The children spun about and in the same motion Elias threw himself against the door, slamming it in the awful face, awful both for the diseased mottling that made it look like the victim of a garrotting, and for the familiarity in those blood-filled eyes. Kia hammered the bolt home with admirable speed but Mr Davis made no move to force his way in. Instead as they stood there, hearts pounding, heaving in their breath, they heard a gentle thump as if he had sat down with his back to the door.

"You can be my house guests." His voice came through the door, even and filled with gentle amusement. "I can listen to you try to swim when the tide comes in."

It took several hours for Elias's focus to shift from barricading the entrance to trying to get out. All that time Mr Davis sat against his workshop door speaking quietly about terrible things. First rambled disjointedly through talk of the dark world and the beings that dwelt there.

The children sat in the dark and windowless workshop, hopeless. Here and there the daylight found a chink in the overlapping planks of the walls, giving just enough illumination to make out the shapes of things. With his eye pressed to the wall below the lowest shelf Elias could even make out the sun sinking toward the rooftops as Mr Davis turned his monologue toward the dark tide and how the world below would soon forget that things had ever been any different. They would forget just as the world had forgotten its former glory so many times before as each dark tide rose and swallowed it, washing away layer by layer the remnants of a golden dawn and making a myth of paradise. As he told this tale the teacher walked slowly around the workshop and a curious tearing noise accompanied him.

But most of all Mr Davis spoke of the many ways he wanted to make Kia and Elias suffer before they died and how they should let him in so that he could apply his tools to the task. He said all this with an apparent lack of malice and the obvious assumption that being peeled and salted by him would be far preferable to still being alive when the tide rose through the floor.

Eventually, with the sun gone behind the buildings, Elias and Kia found enough resolve to force a way out and to try to pit the weapons they had been manufacturing, mostly by touch, against their captor. Unfortunately they found the door resisted their best efforts to get out. It had some small give in it but Mr Davis's weight proved greater than their combined strength.

"You were always a good boy, Elias," Mr Davis said after they paused from their last efforts to force the door. "I think I'll just burn you. Yes, that would be easier. Far less messy. Burn the whole workshop down. You can be like Vikings in their burning boat. You can sing for me." They heard him stand. "You stay there. I have some gasoline back in my kitchen."

"Jesus..." Elias looked around the increasingly dim confines of their prison.

"Help me." Kia struggled with the generator.

"Help you do what?"

By way of answer Kia started to wheel the generator toward the door.

"A battering ram?" Somehow the idea of using the thing they had come for to bust them an exit had not occurred to him. Maybe his need to preserve it had discounted the possibility before it rose to a conscious level. "Let's do it!" He took his place beside her. "Back it up!"

They charged the door and impacted with a horrendous crash, doubling over the handle as the generator shuddered to a halt.

"Again!"

The second impact left the door splintered and slightly ajar. Elias rushed to investigate. A band of masking tape several layers thick secured the door. Mr Davis must have wrapped it around the whole workshop as he circled them earlier on. The stuff had resisted their ram but Elias could reach it now. He sliced through the band with his penknife and ran out.

"Wait. You need this." Kia remained in the dark shed.

"We need it! It's not like we're leaving you behind." Elias glanced toward the houses. Mr Davis would be back any moment and it was too late for their plans, surely? That monster would be coming out to set them on fire and instead of running he was heading back into the place he just escaped from? They had probably broken the damn thing anyway, smashing it into the door. Even so Elias found himself going back in. Hope is an awful thing.

They made it out of the yard. The generator weighed a ton but once they had it moving it wasn't too hard to push over smooth ground. In the twilight the street looked ominous. Here and there candlelight showed in a window. The flames of a distant fire licked above rooftops. The first scream of the night rang out, a guttural sound full of terror. And somewhere down the hill the black sea had begun to rise. From behind them in the yard a roar of anger.

"Run!" Elias hissed. And against all his instincts to simply sprint away he kept his hold on the generator handle and pushed harder.

"Open up! Open up!" Elias hammered on the front door of the house they'd occupied.

A curtain moved and a flashlight shone out through the broken bay window. "Elias?"

"Of course it's fucking me! Open the fucking door!" Elias stared back up the dark street. Something had been chasing them. They'd run too fast and for a hundred heart-stopping yards the generator had dragged them quicker and quicker down the hill. It was only when Kia's legs failed to maintain the sprint required to keep pace that her fall brought the generator onto its side and with sparks flying behind them they slowly ground to a halt. They'd overshot their mark and stopped a scant five yards from the advancing tide. A tainted had shambled from the black waves but somehow Kia had turned it aside while Elias struggled to right the generator in its trolly and push it back toward the house. Now they both stood panting and torn at the front step.

"Hurry!" Elias shouted again, staring up the street for pursuit. Turning back he found himself facing the barrel of a shotgun, Robbie behind it, swaying, his eyes bloodshot. The hand on the stock, the one that had touched the tide, was wrapped in a stained tea towel. Just like Mr Davis's had been.

Elias reasoned that Robbie would shoot him or he wouldn't and that being shot would be better than being left outside. He turned his back on his friend and started to drag the generator in. "Help me! It'll take all three of us to get it over this step."

With much grunting and a crushed big toe on Elias's part they got the generator in and secured the door behind them.

"You alright, man?" Elias turned his flashlight on Robbie. "Where'd you get the gun?"

Robbie waved an arm up the hill. His face twitched, exposing teeth.

"You don't look alright." Elias turned to the generator. "Let's get this baby working."

Robbie raised the shotgun but Kia stepped toward him and set her hand to his forehead. Her lip trembled, her eyes narrow with effort. Robbie dropped the gun as if it had bitten him. "That red button ... push it in ... then pull the white handle. Don't yank it. 'S just like starting a lawnmower."

Elias pushed the button and yanked the handle.

Kaff!

"Don't yank it!"

Elias pulled more smoothly, drawing the cord out behind the handle.

Kaff! Kaff!

"Harder!"

Kaff!

"Without yanking."

Kaff! Kaff! Kaff!

"Jesus! Not this shit again." Elias stood up, remembering the car.

"You sure it's gassed?" asked Robbie. "I ... got some. Over there." He nodded to a red can on the dining room table.

Elias hurried over, snatched the can and found the place to pour it. The stink put him mind of their time in the dark world, and then of Mr Davis lurching down the hill to burn them. He finished pouring and replaced the cap.

"C'mon!" Elias hauled on the handle.

Kaff! Kaff! BrrrrRRRrrrr!

Immediately the room began to fill with exhaust fumes. "Quick, get some lamps plugged in."

Robbie had two of the salon's largest sun lamps nearby and both lit with a dazzling brilliance. Kia held his arm beneath the two beams, pulling the wrapping aside. It looked as bad as expected, the fingers almost black. Immediately his hand began to smoke under the light. Robbie cried out, trying to pull away. Elias bear hugged him while Kia held the arm. Elias shouldn't have been able to hold the larger boy, but somehow he found the strength.

While the lamps glared, and Robbie howled, and darkness smoked from his skin, Kia worked whatever magic she had used on Elias's leg. When it was done she fell boneless to the floor and Robbie collapsed to his knees, weeping, his arm scorched but free of the black mottling.

Elias found himself the only one of them left standing. He turned the lamps so their light shone away from the windows. The generator's exhaust was visible in the glare but at least they had a through breeze from the broken window to the open door to the carport's roof.

On the living room carpet a great timber framework stood supported on wooden legs with couch cushions ready in case they failed. Bed planks formed a platform much like the one in the treehouse but far more solid. Suspended beneath the platform hung the four halves of the two sunbeds that had made it to the house, each lined with long bulbs like fluorescent tubes.

"How did you...?"

"I always told you I work better when left alone," Robbie said, still on his knees. "Didn't really need more than hand tools."

Elias hurried to the open door and stepped out onto the roof. He aimed his flashlight down the slope. The tide had reached the edge of the neighbour's yard and one of the tainted was stalking across their lawn. She looked up as Elias killed his light. He heard her hiss in the darkness.

"Shit!" Elias hurried back to Robbie. The taint had looked rather like Rose Dawson. She was no longer pretty. Elias decided to let Robbie keep thinking his sweetheart was on vacation in the mountains. "How much is there to do? The tide's almost here!"

Robbie got to his feet with Robbie's help. "Check on Kia."

"She's fine." Elias had no idea if she was but it wasn't something he had time to worry about. "We need to finish this!"

Robbie slapped his cheeks and geared himself for action. "Right. We need to move the raft onto the roof, without dropping it, and it's heavy as fuck. Then we need to make a pulley that can lift the generator onto it. That's going to take time. We need to pray to God the whole thing doesn't collapse when we set the generator on it, or when I fix it in place, or when we get on. Because if any of those things happen then our lights smash and we're fucked. Apart from that we need to splice the sunbed power lines to longer ones with plugs on the end and ... plug them in. Then we're good to go. The rear bed tilts with that rope. That should drive us forward. And we have the sunlamps to help steer this shit show."

"Right," said Elias, overwhelmed. "Reckon we have an hour, tops. Point me at the first job."

Robbie bent, scooped up the shotgun, and tossed it at Elias. "Told you. I work better alone." He picked up a pair of pliers and a modelling knife. "We got tainted out there, and crazies. You don't have to worry about the neighbour. I shot him just after lunch. You got ten shells there. Just make sure none of those bastards gets in my way."