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He kept moving his head from
side to side in order to see through the splashing of the
wipers. 'This guy you saw . . . did he say anything?'
    'Er, yeah . . . I think he said "The centre", or something.
I don't know what he meant though.'
    'The study centre maybe?'
    It was only then that Sean made the connection
between what the man had said and the Lake Byrne
Study Centre, where his brother worked part time. It
must have been the muddled state his brain had been in
since the run.
    'I could check everything's all right there when I go in
to get my stuff,' James said. 'You never know, they might
be missing someone. It might be the guy you saw.'
    'I really doubt it.'
    'Why?'
    'This guy looked like he should have died days ago.
He was like a zombie or something. His skin was all
yellow and his eyes were red. He had sores all over his
skin . . . and no one should puke black stuff like that.'
    'Jeez, I hope it really was an hallucination.'
    'Yeah. This thing came out of his mouth too. It was
like a massive slug or a snake or something. Really gross.
Made me turn and run.'
    'I'll bet. Well, maybe we'll find out whether what you
saw was real when we get to the centre.'
    Sean didn't like the idea. He didn't want to find it
was real. He wanted to believe he'd imagined the whole
terrible thing.

CHAPTER 7
    A universe of water. The sound was what shocked
him most. Above the roar of the current and his own
thrashing limbs, there were other sounds – sounds he
couldn't place – sounds that didn't seem to make any
sense. He didn't know how much oxygen he had in his
lungs but it was surely not enough to keep him alive
for more than another minute or so. If he'd had more
of a warning, he might have been able to take a
bigger breath. He refused to believe it didn't matter
any more, that it was irrelevant now. If only he could
reach the bank and haul himself out of the raging
force that had engulfed him . . . But that wasn't his
only concern. The thing that was fastened to his face
was now moving down over his top lip. He had no idea
what it was, or what it wanted, but he wished it would
go away.
    His lungs were heaving, the pounding in his head
was increasing, but he became aware of the bank to his
left. As luck would have it, the current seemed to be
pushing him towards it; as it came close, he reached out
and grabbed a tree root, anchoring himself to it, then
pulling himself upwards with every ounce of strength.
Up and up, and all at once the dull roar was gone, air
and sound exploded around him and he sucked in a
huge lungful of air, then another and another; then the
water rose up and he got a mouthful of it.
    Suddenly the black slug-thing shot into his mouth,
making him choke, then clutch his throat; he lost his
grip on the root and was pulled back under the water.
As he twisted and turned beneath the surface, trying
simultaneously to swim to the side and reach into his
mouth to find the slug, a strange feeling came over
him: a fuzziness, a wave of confusion and something
utterly foreign. There was an awful, alien sensation of
something moving about in his head, as if someone
had reached in a hand and was rummaging around.
He was paralysed now, unable to struggle, unable to
do anything but drift down towards the river bed, his
eyes open, staring, disbelieving, muddy water gushing
into his lungs. His head felt like it was expanding, ready
to burst at any second from the pressure. Incredibly,
however, he didn't feel like he was dying. Quite the
opposite in fact.
    The rain let up a little, and James no longer felt he
was going to crash at any moment. He slowed down,
realizing the lane that led to the research centre
would be coming up soon, and kept his eyes on the road
ahead. Sean saw it before he did – a huge stretch of
water that had collected across the road at the bottom
of the hill; it looked deep enough to swallow them
whole. James slowed the car further and stopped