Among Us: A Supernatural Novel written by Carver Edlund

A Job to Do

Ow.

Julia slithered up a slope on her stomach. She dug her fingers into claylike dirt, dragging her body along. The dirt squeezed and clung. It fought her. It did not want to let her go.

The thought of being stuck in some hole underground frightened her. The fear lent her strength. Using her toes, she pushed herself forward. She cried out, half a sob and half a groan, as she struggled and strained to get free. Her upper body broke the surface into fresh air. She collapsed on the grass, gasping, exhausted, her legs trapped somewhere behind her.

After a few woozy seconds, Julia twisted so she could check on her knees, see if there was an easier way to get out of the hole.

There wasn't a hole. Her bare legs stretched out, clean and pale against a pebbly riverbank, though—she squinted. Not opaque. Transparent. She examined her hands, her tangled hair pooling around her arms. They flickered and stuttered, here one moment, gone the next, then weakly back, as though running on half power. The riverbank showed mistily through.

She had to pull herself together. Julia shut her eyes, concentrating as hard as she could on self. The wooziness and the tingling in her extremities passed. The sound of water running over rocks became clearer, as did the garbage-like mustiness hovering over everything.

She got uncertainly to her feet. Not for the first time since her death, she stood on the tumbleweed-choked shore of the South Platte River. Moonlight bounced off the water, while the headlights of passing traffic made animated shadows of everything except her.

Last she remembered, like, two minutes ago, it had been daytime on the DU campus. She turned a slow circle. The Gates Rubber Co. water tower rose to meet shredded, silver-black clouds, which, combined with the city's ever-present light pollution, prevented any glimpse of the stars above. Whatever Vahe, or the black smoke inside of him, had done to her, it had hurt like heck. Like dying all over again.

So why was she here?

Distracted, she picked her way along the deserted riverbank, wondering why she never seemed to run into other dead people. Where was everyone? Were they stuck in the hole, too? She didn't realize that something was pulling her along like an iron filing toward a magnet until she passed through a large, thorny bush and saw herself lying tangled in the base of it.

A mile wide and an inch deep. That was the Platte. Kittney must not have realized that the river, though swift in spring, was so shallow here.

Julia's shriek echoed up and down the water, startling a few ducks from the tall grass where they must have been nesting. She clapped her hands over her mouth to keep further screams inside. It wasn't like she could puke. She wished she could, though, which might relieve some of the pressure building inside her ribcage.

Dead Julia, lying half in the water, did not look good. Her blue eyes, filmed with white, stared out of a gaunt, bloodless, wrinkled face. Water filled her open mouth. Her hair flowed with the current like brown weeds, collecting bits of trash. The slit in her throat gaped wide, the skin and the stuff underneath gone translucent and slimy at the edges. Her clothes and her flesh had been rent by her body's descent from the lot above and its tumble over the rocks. One of her shoes was missing. Around her swollen wrist, the paper bracelet from the nightclub was still intact.

Julia knelt. The wristband. There was something odd about it. Like it was glowing? No, that wasn't it.

Like it was buzzing.

She reached out. Just as her fingertips would have touched it, an invisible harness clasped her like thin, iron-hard arms and yanked her backward, into the hole.