rained. When he dragged the last rancid moldcrept corpse through the wall of the sinkhole and down the dark and dripping corridor daylight had already broached a pale gray band in the weeping sky eastward. His track through the black leaves of the forest with the drag marks of heels looked like a small wagon had passed there. In the night it had frozen and he came up through a field of grass webbed with little panes of ice and into a wood where the trees were seized in ice each twig like small black bones in glass that cried or shattered in the wind. Ballard’s trousercuffs had frozen into two
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