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tracker, but the prints looked fresh.
    Were his friends inside?
    He tried to remember the shoes they were wearing.
    Antonio had on boots. And Joel had some kind of sneakers on. Mike couldn’t remember what anyone else wore.
    He aimed his light at the prints closest to the door, but they were all grouped on top of each other and he couldn’t distinguish anything. As much as he didn’t want to, he pulled himself inside and followed the prints into the room.
    The first isolated set left chunky marks that he thought could have been created by boots. And there, off to the left, a diamond-pattern print that he was pretty sure came from a pair of Converses.
    Yeah, that’s right. Joel is wearing Converses. The tension eased from his shoulders. It has to be them .
    The prints led through a doorway into another room. Since they all headed in and none back out, he guessed his friends were either still inside somewhere or had found a different exit. He listened for sounds but didn’t hear anything.
    The place was already making his skin crawl, so going any farther seemed like a bad idea. What he could do was go back outside and look for that possible other exit. If there was none, he could wait in the meadow until his friends came out.
    As he turned toward the hole in the wall, he finally allowed himself to fully believe everything would be all right.
    That was when he heard the noise.

E IGHT
     
    Joel
     
     
    J OEL SHUFFLED HIS feet forward in small increments so that when he reached the stairs, his toe tapped the riser instead of slamming into it. He and Leah had agreed that going after Courtney without their lights was a bad idea. Their plan now was to return to camp and get help.
    On the ascent, they stayed to the outside where the treads were wider. At first, the wind whipped against them, forcing them to keep their pace slow to avoid falling backward, but its strength diminished as they climbed, allowing them to gradually increase their speed.
    There was no warning when they finally reached ground level. Joel lifted his foot to take another step but his shoe banged down on the floor.
    “Watch it,” he warned to prevent Leah from making the same mistake. “We made it.”
    Holding her with one hand and keeping his other on the wall, he guided her past the elevator door and into the cold room. The space was as dark as the stairs had been. He tried to remember the layout, but misjudged the position of the bookcase that had been holding the door closed, and collided with it.
    “Are you okay?” Leah asked.
    Wincing, Joel rolled his shoulder up and down. It stung but the pain wasn’t that bad. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
    He felt his way around the bookcase into the next room. There they finally saw dim light coming from the opposite door. Since they’d been in pitch black for so long, it was more than enough for them to see where they had to go.
    Joel squeezed Leah’s hand.
    They were safe.

N INE
     
    Mike
     
     
    T HE LOUD BANG echoed through the open door behind Mike.
    He turned toward it, but then—with visions of razor-toothed monsters and deranged ghosts spinning through his head—just as quickly twisted back toward the hole and ran.
    He successfully hopped over the lip but landed awkwardly and tumbled to the ground.
    He thought he heard a voice, but that might have been the panicked blood rushing past his ears.
    When he pushed himself up, however, he heard another noise.
    But it was not a voice.

T EN
     
    Joel
     
     
    A S JOEL MOVED into the last room, he saw someone leap out through the rip in the wall. Though he couldn’t see the person’s face, he recognized the shape.
    “Hey, Mike. It’s me,” he yelled.
    He ran toward the hole in the wall and opened his mouth to shout again.
    But before the words had even formed in his throat, an intense high-pitched hum he could both hear and feel slammed into him.
    He slapped his hands over his ears, but the noise was so overpowering that his knees buckled and he fell to