Morning Sunlight.

* * *

Jakob's breath was coming quickly, in gasps. It felt so very loud in his ears that he snapped his mouth closed and tried to breathe through his nose. However, even that seemed like a roaring thing in the dead, quiet dark of the PATH. He tried to hold his breath; using all his will to be silent, until his lungs felt like they would tear apart from the burning pain of needing breath. He tried to breath in slowly, shallowly, trying to make as little noise as he could, and he made made a shuddering sound as he did.

If Benedict was still beside him, he had no idea. The man seemed to be so much better at keeping quiet than Jakob was, and Jakob felt like his every shuddering breath was a betrayal of his friend: a call for those things in the dark to come, to take him. He reached out his hand and found Benedict; and Benedict enfolded Jakob's shaking hand in his own, much larger, much more solid-feeling grasp.

Jakob took another shuddering breath, except he felt like the fear that was expanding in his chest had begun to infect his breathing; giving a wheezing edge to it. The sound only served to panic him further, and he started breathing quicker and more deeply. Benedict heard and squeezed Jakob's hand tighter, pulling the boy into him and whispering in a voice that was only a hair more than a sigh "Shhhh..."

"I think we're okay," Benedict said into his ear, with a voice that was very little more than breath.

They had been running for so long down the barely-lit tunnels that they must have lost the shambling raccoon things. Jakob held his breath again and tried to listen in the utter silence. There were no scrabbling noises. There were no dragging sounds. There were no disturbingly human screeches. Could they really be safe?

Jakob swallowed hard, trying to summon the courage to speak, the control to make his voice as small as it could be. Finally, he put the question to Benedict.

"Are we safe?"

In the dim light, so dim that Jakob couldn't be convinced that he wasn't imagining it, he thought he could see Benedict looking around, scanning the gloom for a way out of the PATH. He stopped looking, his eyes seizing on something, and he smiled, looking down to Jakob, who was no encircled in his arms.

"Yes."

He shifted his grip on the boy and took him by the hand, and they started running again further down the hallway. Benedicts boots were striking the tile as they hurried through the darkness, and in that cavernous place, they made far more noise than Jakob was comfortable with. No Benedict! he thought. It's too loud!

An other worldly screech tore through the stillness, as if in support of Jakob's thought. It screamed like an infant being tortured, and it just kept on screaming. When Benedcit hoisted Jakob from the ground, and his hand clamped over the boy's mouth, only then did Jakob realize that it had been him who drawn out the end of that scream. He stopped, even though there wasn't much point with the end of Benedict's scarf shoved into his mouth, but above the sound of the man's footfalls, he could already hear the chorus starting up somewhere that was getting ever closer: one screech, and then another, and then two more. He could hear the sounds of their progress now as well: the scrabbling of claws on tile; the dragging sounds of their bloated, furry bodies slithering across the floor. They were close—oh, so close.

Benedict had come to a hard stop, with an impact that would have jarred Jakob's teeth into one another, had his mouth not been full of scarf. The fact that Benedict had stopped, that the monster raccoon things were getting closer all the time, made Jakob want to scream again, and he started hyperventilating through his nose. There was another jarring impact, and then another, and he wondered if this was it, if the raccoon things had Benedict and were in the process of tearing him apart. There was another impact, and Benedict grunted, but this time there was also light: a grey sliver of the outside that burned like a sun in this darkness. Again and again Benedict threw himself into what Jakob now realized was a door, each impact pushing the door further outwards and letting in more of the grey light. It was starting to spill into the PATH way, and it was glinting greenly off something off in the dark.

EYES!

Jakob began to thrash, and then Benedict saw it, too. He started to hit the door harder and faster. One of the things blocking it on the outside gave a lurch that felt like real progress, and before Jakob could protest, Benedict was cramming him through what little gap he'd managed to make between the door and the frame, into a tight concrete stairwell outside. Jakob fell through, and something crumpled beneath him to break his fall.

It was the dusty remains of a skeleton, the skull closeby, gringing up at the grey sky. In the instant, Jakob had little time to worry about landing on a corpse for the threat to Benedict, who was still trapped on the other side of that heavy steel door, seemed more real. Jakob grabbed the handle on the outside and began to tear at it with all his might, kicking out blindly at the layer of detritus that had shored up at its base. Pain flashed in one of his toes, but at the same time the door swang further outwards. Still not enough. He could hear Benedict's frantic breathing and grunting on the other side of the door, hear the raccoon things beyond him, swelling into a crescendo of squeels and scratching. Jakob was screaming, too, trying to channel the madness he felt at the edge of his mind into adrenaline, into more strength to tear open the door that stood between the life of his friend and certain death at the hands of the raccoon things.

The door lurched again, and Benedict managed to cram one shoulder through it, hand outstretched. Jakob grabbed for the hand and, without thinking, began pulling savagely at it. He felt a pop, and Benedict cried out in pain. Jakob slackened his pull on his friend's arm for an instant, and suddenly it felt heavier in his hands. Benedict went on crying in pain, and this seemed to only embolden the raccoon things behind, which had now grown so very loud that they must be about to fall upon Benedict. Jakon realized that he must have done something to Benedict's arm, so, without giving it much more thought, he braided his fingers into his friend's jacket, and started pulling at his body, trying to wrench it out of the gap in the door. Jakob was screaming in frustration, Benedict was crying out in pain, and the raccoon things beyond the door were shrieking their victory. The cacaphony was such that Jakob thought it was about to split his head in half.

And then there was a thunderclap that put all the noise before it to shame. Benedict fell limp in Jakob's hands, and all noise from him ceased. The noise from the raccoon monstrosities behind the door reached a screeching, mewling, sawing fevered pitch.

BOOM

BOOM

Two more thunderclaps that reverberated and bounced back and forth in the concrete confines of the stairwell, and all hint of sound or motion beyond the door was gone. Even with the shock of the thunderclaps, Jakob had still held his deathgrip on his friend, and now that he'd gone limp, Jakob found that he could easily drag Benedict through the door. He hauled him out into the stairwell, and as he moved out of the gap in the door, the heads of one of the monstrous raccoons fell through, into the space between the door, jam, and concrete wall. With the way that the thing's milky eyes lolled and its molted, greenish tongue hung from its mouth, it was clearly dead.

However, the panic was still so near in Jakob that he lashed out with the foot he'd already injured kicking debris from in front of the door. He connected with the rusted steel of the door, and the force of the impact powered the heavy door into the creature's massive skull with a sickening crunch. Jakob kicked again and again and again at the door, willing with his whole body for the thing to close, to seal off the abominations beyond that had killed his friend. Through tears and screams, he kicked and kicked at that door, Benedict's dead weight sitting heavy across his chest and lap. Jakob didn't stop kicking, even when the thing that had once been a monstrous head was a slick red ruin of bone and flesh, and the heavy door had seized on the ruin, refusing to close any further. Jakob continued kicking, not feeling the way each successive impact jarred all the way up his leg, his shoe making a dull banging noise on the steel of the door.

"Ye can keep knocking, Cully, but I reckon that there big bad wolf be beyond the point where he be letting yeh back in!"

Jakob was pulled out of his fury and bitterness by a realization that hit him like ice water. He felt the cold of it spread spread through his veins as he slowly turned, craning his neck around to look up to the concrete lip at the top of the short stairwell, at the man perched there with a smoking firearm that would have been comedically large if it hadn't been sitting in the hands of a madman.

"It be fine teh see yeh again, mi fine lad, and how be ye on this fine Core morning, my wee trig cove?"

It was the Ticktock Man. The Ticktock Man, who was meant to be dead: shot by Benedict and his old revolver; the Ticktock Man who they had fled from what felt like aeons ago. And now he was here—

And now he just saved my life by taking Benedict's.

Jakob didn't know what to do, so he just sat there, numb, dead to the world, with Benedict's limp frame, which was actually dead, pressing down on him, pinning him in the scatter of concrete and bones. He sat there as Ticktock's men bounded down the crumbling concrete steps to him, dragging him up off the ground, taking hold of Benedict's limp arm and hoisting his corpse off Jakob with all the respect you'd show a sack of waste.

And then Benedict cried out, wheeling wildly and striking one of the skypirates with his other hand. Jakob just sood there, agog. The Ticktock Man, high above, cackled wildly.

"Careful, mi hearties! That limp fish seems to still have some fight left in 'im!"

* *

The remaining pirates, other than the one that Benedict had knocked cold when he lashed out with his still-good arm, managed to subdue the man easily enough (for that wasn't so hard when someone was nursing a dislocated shoulder) and drag him up out of the stairwell and onto the street level. Jakob they had less trouble with, for he spent the whole of it staring at Benedict as if he'd just witnessed a resurrection, which, in his eyes, he had. No sooner were they extricated from the stairwell than they were forced down onto their knees before the Ticktock Man, who had made himself at home on a conveniently throne-like pile of rubble, next to the carcass of something very large and very recently dead that the skypirates had clearly been hunting when they stumbled upon Jakob and Benedict.

The Ticktock Man was grinning from ear to ear, as if his mirth was liable to split his very face in half. So pleased was he that the Core had conspired to return his prizes to him now, at his hour of need, when he was readying himself to unlock the secrets burried beneath it.

Benedict was still raging, thrashing back and forth, realizing that they'd been captured by skypirates, but not yet realizing which skypirates in particular. He caught sight of the Ticktock Man and froze in place, succumbing to the pirates and falling to his knees, his eyes locked on the pirate king before him.

The Ticktock Man laughed again.

* * *

# # #

NANO VICTORY!

I know it's not much of a novel yet, but I just, finally, made it past the 50,000 word deadline, right on November 30th. I'd take time for reflection and blahdyblah, but, unfortunately, Hanukkah calls, and dem latkes ain't gonna eat themselves!