On the floor of the cave, Stevie lay winded. "I got—I got—I got the wind knocked out of me," he gasped at last.
Relieved laughter. Jason's face appeared alongside Jeremy's. "Looks like you were right, Stevie," he called down. "Looks like a cave or something."
Jeremy jostled the other boys, trying to get a better view. "What's down there, Stevie? Anything?"
Slowly Stevie got to his feet. He took a few unsteady steps. In the darkness something glis-tened, something round and smooth and roughly the size of a soccer ball. He picked it up and tilted it very carefully, so that the light struck it and it seemed to glow in his hands.
"Stevie?" Jeremy called again. "C'mon, what'd you find?"
"Human skull," breathed Stevie. "It's a human skulll"
Jason whooped. "Toss it up here, dude!"
Stevie shook his head. "No way, buttwipe.
I found it. It's mine." He stood, looking around in amazement. "Holy cow. Anyways, there's bones all over the place down here."
He took a few steps back toward the pool of sunlight. He looked down, and saw that he was standing in some kind of oil slick. When he tried pulling his foot up, the ground sucked at the sole of his sneaker.
"Shit," he murmured, clutching the skull to him. "What the—"
And then he saw that the oil was every-where, not just beneath his feet, but seeping up from cracks in the rock. And it was moving. Moving toward him. Black oil oozed up beneath his foot and wriggled down and into his sneaker. The skull fell from his hands and bounced across the stony floor as he tugged at his shorts and stared at the exposed skin of his leg.
Beneath the flesh something moved; a writhing thing as long as his finger. Only now there was more than one, there were dozens of them, all burrowing under his skin and moving upward. And there was something else, some-thing just as frightening: where the black oil passed, his limbs were left feeling numb and frozen. Paralyzed.
"Stevie?" Jeremy stared down into the darkness. "Hey, Stevie?"
Stevie grunted but did not look up at him. Jeremy watched, unsure whether this was some kind of joke. "Stevie, you better not—"
"Stevie?" the other boys chimed in. "You okay?"
Stevie was definitely not okay. As they stared, Stevie's head fell backward so that he seemed to stare straight up at them, and in the glaring desert light they could see his eyes first filling with darkness and then turning com-pletely, u
"Hey, man," whispered Jason. "Let's get outta here."
"Wait," said Jeremy. "We should help him—"
Jason and the other boy pulled him away. Jeremy went with them reluctantly, his foot-steps echoing loudly against the dusty ground.
Sirens wailed counterpoint to the rush of wind over the plain. In the housing development doors slammed as people began to file onto their front steps a few at a time. At the end of one driveway, a spare figure in jeans and dark T-shirt hugged her arms as she sca