The engine roar diminished and died. Silence folded around him, a
black, thick blanket.

* * * * *

Dane got heavily from his seat, oppressed by the vast soundlessness,
and pushed through curling plants that caught at his heels. The sound
of his passage was like crackling thunder. A decaying door was marked,
in faded, almost undecipherable letters, "Emergency Stairs." It was
half open, and Allan squeezed around its edge. Spiral steps curved
down into blackness. He hesitated a moment. He could _feel_ the awful
silence, the emptiness below was a pit of death. Anthony's words came
back to him, echoed in his ears: "We seven are the only living humans
left on Earth."

In that moment, out of the pitch-black well of soundlessness, a scream
shrilled! No words, only a red, thin thread of sound, rising, and
falling, and rising again out of depths where not even a living mouse
should be! It came again, ripping the silence--a woman's scream,
high-pitched, quivering with fear!

Allan plunged down into the darkness, caroming from wall to wall as he
half ran, half fell, down the twisting stairs. Another sound
reverberated from unseen walls, and Dane realized that it was his own
voice, shouting.

His feet struck level floor. A pale rectangle of light showed before
him, and he dived through it. He was in a corridor, dim-lit by
phosphorescent fungi that cloaked the damp walls. He halted, at
fault. The long hall stretched away to either side, cluttered with
grimed bones, slimy with mold. By the age-blistered name cards on
closed doors he knew himself to be on a residential level. But which
way should he turn? Whence had come that scream? He crouched against
the wall, his heartbeats thudding loud in his ears, and listened for a
clue.

A muffled sound of scuffling came from his left. Allan whirled toward
it and sped down the corridor. He was breathing in great gasps, and
the air he breathed was thick and musty. Too late to stop, he saw a
slick of green slime on the floor. His foot struck it, flew out from
under him, he fell and slid headlong.

Something stopped him, something that crunched sickeningly as his
sliding body crashed into it: two skeleton forms, clasped in each
others' arms, moldering fabric hanging in rags from them. They lay
across the threshold of a door, and just within Dane heard snarls,
snufflings, bestial growls, the sounds of a struggle. Something
thumped against the door and fel