The pounding was getting louder.

No... "pounding" is the wrong word—it suggests actions sharper, more concerted and forceful than what they were hearing. "Thudding," maybe. The dull thud of bodies being thrown against the doors and against each other—it was getting louder, along with the formless moans, the dry scritch of fingernails. Toby twisted Chris's shirt more tightly in his fist as they watched first one pale hand, then another snake in through the crack beneath one of the doors and curl around the bottom.

The two of them spun in circles, looking around the room. There was no way out. But there had to be a way out. The alternative...

"Mmuunngh."

"That sounded like Sister Pete," Chris muttered.

Toby didn't want to think about it. He was tearing everything he could reach away from the walls, dumping books from the shelves and then overturning any bookcase that hadn't wasn't already barricading a door. For good measure, Chris added the librarian's desk to the front of the door that seemed to be in the most danger of breaking in and began to pile chairs on top of it.

"Aah!" Toby cried out.

"What? What is it?"

"Look!" An air vent had been concealed behind one of the bookcases, which went a long way toward explaining why it was often so stuffy in the library. The opening was just barely large enough for a grown man to fit through.

"Get it the fuck open, and do it fast." The door hinges were starting to creak ominously, and one screw had popped out and rolled across the floor. There had to be at least twenty bodies being thrown against each door now.

Toby ran the tips of his fingers around the edges of the vent, worked a couple of fingernails beneath it, and pulled. It wouldn't budge. Of course it wouldn't budge. It was screwed tightly into the wall in six different places.

"Got a Phillips-head screwdriver on you?" he asked, and then fell to a sitting position on the floor, giggling hysterically.

"Fuck..." Chris began pulling out all the desk drawers, searching for something they could use and doing his best to ignore the way the desk was now jerking noticeably with every loud thump.

"Man, this never happens in the fucking movies." Toby was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. "People need to get into an air duct? They just take off the grate and climb right in..."

"Stop it!" Chris barked, and the moaning outside swelled in response. "Try...I don't fucking know, try hitting it with something."

Toby reached for the closest chair, used it to struggle to his feet, and then swung it at the grate as hard as he could. The chair was awkwardly shaped, and it took a few tries before he could even successfully make contact with anything other than the wall. Each time he did connect, the impact seemed to rattle every bone in his body but inflicted almost no damage on the grate.

"What is this thing made of, fucking titanium?" He threw the chair across the room and kicked the grate viciously, then fell to the floor, rubbing his foot. Again, he began to giggle. "Boy...you'd almost think the room was designed to not let people escape from it."

Chris made another quick survey of the mess around him. The contents of the drawers had all been emptied on the floor. There was no screwdriver. Nothing that could even be used as a half-assed screwdriver—or a half-assed crowbar, or a sledgehammer, or anything else that might get them the fuck out of there.

He crossed the room and knelt in front the grate, feeling the stale, cool air flowing out from behind it. There's no way we can get there, he thought, as he ran his hands over the cold metal. Toby hadn't even been able to dent it; the only damage he could see were some scratches and chips in the enamel it had been painted with.

There's no way out of here.

He turned to Toby, taking hold of his shoulders and shaking him. "I ain't gonna end up like them. You hear me? I ain't going out like that."

Toby wasn't laughing anymore, but his face was still wet with tears. "Me neither," he whispered.

They both winced at the sudden ping of metal giving way. The doors all seemed frighteningly close to popping off their hinges.

"You know what we have to do, Toby." He curled a hand around the back of Toby's neck and kissed him, tasting the old, familiar taste of his mouth and the salt of his tears. Toby pressed his hands against Chris's cheeks and kissed him back, for the first time in months. The last time ever.

"Nnnngggguhhh!"

They both flinched. That one was definitely Ryan O'Reily.

Toby closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "How..."

"I can—" Chris swallowed hard. When he spoke again, it was in a whisper that Toby had to strain to hear. "I can...make it quick. Break your neck. It only takes a second—you won't feel anything. And then..." He shifted his gaze to a long, thick extension cord across the room. "Then I'll take care of myself."

Toby rested his forehead against Chris's. "Do it."

Chris exhaled and nodded, but his hands wouldn't move. The only thing his body wanted to do was sit here with Toby, to touch him and smell him again.

"Wait. Chris..." Toby leaned away from him a little and stared up at the ceiling. "Do you hear something?"

"Like what?" But he did hear it. A steady, rhythmic whumpwhumpwhump, starting to drown out the noise outside the room.

Toby grasped him by the arms. "It's a helicopter. No...I think it's more than one."

Next came the explosions. The noise at the doors faded, became less organized. The moaning never stopped, but different voices—human voices, yelling and barking orders—gradually began to overcome them. Then there was the crack of automatic gunfire and a whooshing sound, and the groans became feral screeches. Putrid smoke started to fill the room, seeping in through the cracks around the doors.

"Hey!" They jumped to their feet and climbed on top of the desk. "There are people in here! Living people!"

* * *

By the time their last barricade had been dismantled and the soldiers had taken them into custody, almost all of the moaning had stopped. In the hallway outside the library, charred bodies were piled nearly knee-deep. It was impossible not to look at them and remember the people they used to be; even after the flamethrowers, even with significant parts of their bodies gnawed away, so many of them were still eerily recognizable.

"Either of you get bitten or scratched?" The sergeant's questions were hard to understand; his voice was muffled by a heavy-looking gas mask.

"Fuck no," Chris replied, eyeing the rifle that was trained on his head.

"Are there more of you? Hiding?"

"I don't think so." Beecher swallowed and turned away from the sight of Gloria Nathan's hand, lying a couple of inches from his left foot. The three fingers that hadn't been eaten away were twitching spasmodically, clawing at the floor.

Four more soldiers approached, hopping nimbly over smoking human remains as they jogged down the hall. "This area is secured, Sarge. No more survivors."

"Okay, stay put until I say otherwise. Roast anything that moves." He shifted his attention back to Toby and Chris. "You two, follow me. Our docs are gonna look you over, and then we're putting you on a DOC bus to Lardner." He took a second to look around them, his eyes finally resting on the body closest to his feet. One of its arms had been eaten down to the bone; the rest was burned beyond recognition.

"Guess they didn't really need to get a whole bus, huh?"

* * *

After being stripped, prodded, and thoroughly examined at gunpoint, Toby and Chris were finally dressed in orange jumpsuits and led onto a nearly empty bus. It was a DOC bus, exactly like the ones that had brought them to Oz in the first place—except that the driver was a soldier, and two more soldiers sat in the back, rifles resting on their laps.

"That it?" The driver eyed the two of them suspiciously. "Where are the rest?"

"There ain't no 'rest.' These are the only live ones we found."

"Jesus H. Christ."

"Got that right."

The driver gave them one last look, then turned away and put the bus in gear. They had to be waved through two makeshift security checkpoints before they were finally on the road and on their way to Lardner.

At first, they could do nothing but stare wordlessly at one another. The crushing weight of the things they'd seen made it feel impossible to say anything at all. They were alive; everyone else was dead. Everyone else. But they had walked out of Oz as whole, living, breathing human beings. They had been within minutes of being otherwise, one way or the other—but they had made it out alive. And they were together. Safe, and together. These basic facts kept turning and sharpening and presenting themselves to them from different angles as their minds worked at accepting them in their entirety.

"Chris." Toby stared down at his hands as he twisted them restlessly within his handcuffs. "Do you... I mean, were you really going to..."

"I... Fuck." Chris crouched in his seat until he was able to rub his forehead. "I couldn't have watched you turn into one of those things. No fucking way."

Toby nodded without looking up. "Some things are worse than death...maybe a lot of things."

Chris turned in his seat to face him as best he could. "There ain't nothing I wouldn't have done, Toby. For you. You know that."

Toby could feel the intensity of Chris's stare even before he met his eyes and saw it. "Yeah," he whispered. "I do know."

They moved closer to one another, close enough to feel each other's warmth, and never stopped drinking in the sight of the green, living landscape as it rolled by.