Blix woke with a gasp, coughing and sputtering, fighting to fill her frozen lungs with air.

And then something moved. Just under her skin, it slithered through muscle and tendon and bone. It was inside her, writhing snakes of alien awareness, cutting and burrowing, probing at the edges of her mind.

Her stomach clenched, but the presence refusing to let her spew. She hung suspended on the knife edge of an endless spasm, and then, like the last shreds of a half-forgotten dream, the presence faded to oblivion.

She lay panting in the darkness for what seemed an eternity. She and Alf had been trying to… She tried to move her arm, but it was pinned beneath his inert body.

“Alf!” She tugged at her arm. “Alf, wake up!” She pushed into him, pressed an ear to his chest. His heart beat a steady throb against the slow rise and fall of his rib cage.

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What had happened? No way was that nuclear fallout or smoke or dust or anything else that made even the tiniest shred of sense. They’d been attacked. A swarm of biting insects had crawled inside her and were depositing their eggs under her skin. And they were starting to hatch. She could almost feel them, billions of maggots squirming inside her, eating her from the inside out.

“Alf?” She tried to shake him awake. “Hey! Wake up!”

Something moved across Alf’s chest, eliciting a startled shriek. It was inside him, solid and sinewy like the coils of a giant sea serpent rising from the depths of the sea.

“Alf!” She scooted away from him. “Alf, are you awake? Alf?”

A jolt passed through Blix’s body, rattling in her skull like a cymbal. The stairs were vibrating. The whole building was shaking. But it didn’t feel like an earthquake. The tremors were too regular—like the low rumble of a giant, out-of-alignment diesel engine.

A high-pitched scream cut through the darkness. She twisted herself around and was hit in the face with a spray of pebbles and grit.

Then, like something right out of a fairytale, two cross-shaped holes appeared in the cement walls, filling the stairwell with golden light.