Unearthed by Gina Ranalli Page A

standing but operational as well. But, she supposed, what could it hurt to try?
    “His face is getting all splotchy!” Stacy said suddenly. “Oh my God, what should I do?” When Rebecca didn’t reply, she yelled, “Drive faster!”
    Pressing down slightly on the accelerator, Rebecca said, “I can’t drive too fast or the bees will come.”
    “Who cares! Just go!”
    “If they come,” Rebecca tried to explain patiently, “then we won’t even be able to get your friend out of the car.”
    Joe’s breathing became even more labored and Lou let out a long, low whine. Beside them, Stacy began to cry.
    Grim-faced, Rebecca drove on in the direction of the clinic, carefully weaving around abandoned vehicles and the occasional bodies of the dead, both human and otherwise.

CHAPTER 8
    Not only was clinic gone, but the entire northwest corner of town had dissolved into mud, absorbed back into the earth from which it came. What lay beyond the hood of the Rover was a vast black field of empty space, a gorge with no bottom to be seen.
    “It’s getting worse,” Rebecca said. She felt entirely defeated. If Joe was still breathing in the backseat, she couldn’t hear him over the soft sound of Stacy’s gentle weeping. That fact alone let her know that he probably wasn’t.
    She put the Rover in reverse and slowly backed away from that vacant space, not daring to let herself think about the lives that must have been lost in the last twenty-four hours.
    “My baby,” Stacy sobbed. “Oh, God, my poor baby.”
    Rebecca’s heart broke for the young woman as she turned the Rover back in the direction they’d come from. She was about to ask if Stacy had been married to Joe when she felt the back left side of the Rover sink. Both she and Stacy screamed in terror as the land behind the vehicle began to collapse.
    Grimacing, Rebecca stomped on the gas pedal, thanking the powers that be for front-wheel-drive and the Rover lurched forward, the back wheel bumping back up onto solid ground.
    Stacy spun around to look out the rear window. “Fuck!” she shouted. “Drive! Drive drive, drive !”
    Behind them, the new gorge was growing, ingesting the ground and everything on it with an insatiable appetite. Despite driving as fast as she could, the earth was disintegrating no more than a car length after they passed over it.
    “ SHIIIIIITTTTT! ” Rebecca yelled, gripping the steering wheel with all her might. She was dimly aware of the pandemonium happening behind her, the girl screaming, the dog barking, the earth crumpling into nothingness, but she kept her eyes straight ahead, pushing the Rover on, leaning forward towards the dashboard as if it would make them move faster.
    They hadn’t gotten far when another crevasse opened up in front of them, smaller than the one behind, but still wide enough to take them down into oblivion.
    Rebecca jerked the wheel to the right, going off-road, over a median strip, across a patch of lawn and into a small apartment complex parking lot. Swerving around the building, narrowly avoiding parked cars, they exited the other side onto long abandoned train tracks, the Rover’s engine roaring its protest.
    Keeping to the tracks, Rebecca didn’t dare slow down. Parallel to the tracks, the ground was vanishing on one side while the edge of the forest lay on the other.
    “We’re so fucking screwed,” Stacy said, sounding almost calm now. “So fucking screwed.”
    From the right, where the forest was, came the sound that Rebecca had come to know so well: falling trees. Faraway, but certainly not far enough.
    “ Come on !” Rebecca snarled savagely as she saw an opening on the left where there was still a section of ground wide enough to let them pass. The Rover veered that way, its occupants bouncing violently within it, but otherwise silent now.
    As soon as she’d made the move, Rebecca saw that it had been a mistake and hit the brakes, causing the Rover to fishtail and throwing both Stacy and the