could get, and the basement promised the deepest quiet, the most certain solitude.
He heard a clink and rattle from within the HVAC vault, and he whispered, “
Although the women and children disappeared from this room, the quickly reached consensus held that the Cupp apartment was no more dangerous than any other place in the Pendleton. As far as they knew, Sparkle, Twyla, the sisters, and the kids had left of their own free will, for some reason that might have to do with the strange sludge on the floor. They also reached agreement that the less they made a group target of themselves, the more survivors there might be when the transition reversed. As long as each group possessed a gun and a flashlight, everyone would be equally prepared for an attack.
In consideration of Silas’s familial tremors, he gave his pistol to Padmini, for it turned out that she was an accomplished shooter. She said that everywhere you went these days, there was a
Bailey with his Beretta—and Tom Tran with the flashlight—would set out to find the missing … if they were anywhere to be found. When he checked his watch and saw that the time was now just 6:28, Bailey found it difficult to believe that only a little more than three hours earlier, he had been at his desk, concluding the day’s work, when the intruding silhouette of what must have been the thing that later bit Sally Hollander leaped across his room and then seemed to disappear through a wall, which had motivated him to load and carry his pistol.
Iris had not fled to the familiarity of their apartment, or if indeed she had done that, she had then left at once upon discovering the place as changed as everywhere else in the Pendleton. Sparkle and Twyla searched the other two apartments in the south wing of the second floor, and those rooms were likewise deserted.
“She’s okay, somewhere okay,” Twyla assured her as they hurried along the hallway toward the stairs.
And Sparkle paid it back: “So is he, you’d feel it, know it, if he weren’t.”
They hadn’t said anything like that previously, and Sparkle thought they needed to say it now because they were trying to keep their hope from sinking in a sea of dread.
They were almost to the stairs when she heard the elevator car humming-hissing in the shaft, just around the corner. The indicator board showed it coming down from the third floor.
Maybe Winny wouldn’t get in the elevator again, after what had happened to him, but Iris might be in it.
“Maybe not,” Twyla warned as Sparkle pressed the button.
A moment later the locator bell dinged, the doors slid open, and in the stainless-steel car stood Logan Spangler and the Cupp sisters.
The HVAC vault in this ruined Pendleton was exactly the kind of place that any kid’s mother told him ten thousand times to stay away from: row after row and tier after tier of hulking old machines, any one of which would crush you if it tipped over, busted-out boilers, discarded tools with sharp edges, rotting machine platforms with splintery boards, loose ends of electrical conduits bristling with bare wires that might or might not carry enough live current to french fry your eyeballs in your own body fat, more rust than an acre of junkyard cars, mold and mildew, rat skeletons and therefore ancient powdered rat poop, lots of bent nails, and broken glass. In other circumstances, it would have been the coolest place ever to explore. “Other circumstances” meant without monsters.
After one clink and a following rattle, Winny hadn’t heard anything more except the faint squish of his rubber- soled shoes when he stepped in one kind of scum or another. If Iris had taken refuge here, she was being quieter than a mouse, because a mouse would at least squeak. Of course she was quiet most all the time. This was nothing new for her. Winny had been around her only since shortly before the leap, and a few times when their mothers met in the hallway and stopped to chat for a moment, and she had usually been as quiet as furniture.
A couple of times, he had wondered what it must be like to be the way Iris was. He found it hard to get his head around the idea. He figured basically it would be really lonely. In spite of his mom always being there for him, Winny from time to time was overcome by loneliness, and it was never a good feeling. He supposed the lonely that he felt was a tiny fraction of the lonely that Iris lived with all her life. That thought always made him sad. He had wished that he could do something for her, but there had never been anything a skinny kid with his own problems could do for her or for anyone.
Until now.
Winny prowled through the machines, past metal shelving units containing moldering cardboard cartons. The shelves were festooned with something that looked like barnacles, wobbly because of the weight of those colonies. Everything in the big room seemed to be precariously balanced, ready to tip over if you sneezed or looked at it too hard.
He was squishing through something that smelled like old German cheese, making very little noise but just enough to mask, for a few steps, the sound that something else began making in another part of the room. When Winny passed through the last of the squishy stuff and heard the other noise, he became very still, head cocked, listening. The noises were stealthy, coming in short bursts, as if something didn’t want to call attention to itself. They were dry and quick, somewhat like crisp autumn leaves rustled along a sidewalk by a light breeze. With the third flurry of sounds he realized they came from overhead, not directly above, toward the farther end of the vault.
The yellow light here wasn’t as bright as in the lap-pool room. Where there were shadows, which was nearly everywhere, they were so thick and velvety that it seemed almost possible that you could take hold of them and pull them around you like a cloak of invisibility.
He couldn’t just freeze there, listening to the overhead rustle draw nearer and nearer in brief spurts of activity. He had to find the girl and get out of there before something raveled down from the high ceiling and bit off his head. He dared breathe,
