His heart racing now, he hurried toward the next gurney and a moment later was shining the light on the face of the person lying on it.
Laurie.
“N-no—” she stammered, trying to twist her eyes away from the glare of the light. “Don’t—”
Ryan shifted the light away from her eyes. “It’s me!” he whispered as loud as he dared.
For a moment Laurie didn’t react at all, but then she slowly turned her head toward him. Her lips worked for a moment, and then words began to come out, slowly and weakly.
“Find Mom,” she whispered. “Find her, Ryan. If you don’t, I’m going to die.”
Night lay like a shroud over the city, and as Ryan gazed out his window at the park, the first thing that popped into his mind was what had happened to his father there. Ever since that night, Ryan had hated even the thought of going out alone after dark, terrified of what might happen to him. But tonight there was no choice.
He’d wanted to leave right after he found Laurie — in fact, he’d wanted to take Laurie with him. But she was so weak she could hardly even talk, let alone get off the gurney and follow him through the maze to—
To where?
That was the thing — even if Laurie could make it, he didn’t know where to take her.
He didn’t even know how to get out of the building. In fact, he didn’t even know
Once he’d figured out she couldn’t make it up even the first flight of stairs, he’d wanted to just stay with her, but she’d kept arguing with him. “You have to find out how to get out — you have to find Mom. If you don’t…”
Her words had trailed off, but she hadn’t had to finish for him to understand.
They’d both die, like Rebecca.
So finally he’d promised Laurie he’d find a way out, then gone to see if he could keep his promise. The first place he’d tried was the door at the far end of the corridor he’d come into as he came down the last flight of steps. He’d approached it slowly, stopping every few steps to listen for anyone who might be coming, for the closer he got to that door, the farther away he was from the stairs that were the only other way out. But there had been no sounds, and finally he’d come close enough to the door to try its knob.
Locked.
Locked, and with no keyhole.
He’d gone over every inch of the door, using up two whole batteries, searching for a way to open it, but except for the knob, there was nothing at all on his side of it. No hinges whose pins he might be able to pull, or a place where he could try to pry it open if he could find a crowbar somewhere. When the batteries had started to fade, and he’d seen what time it was, he’d given up on the door, but instead of going straight back to his room, he’d explored as much of the maze of corridors as possible.
And found no way out.
On the first floor, there’d been only one narrow corridor, with only one door. Or at least he thought it was a door. It hadn’t had any knob or lock or anything else, but it looked like it might slide if he could just figure out how to release it. But when another set of batteries began to fade as he searched for anything that might open the door, he finally gave up, knowing he’d never find his way back to his room if he ran out of batteries.
He hadn’t had enough time to explore all the passages on the upper floors, and when he’d dropped back into his closet, he’d only had one set of fresh batteries left.
It wasn’t more than five minutes after he got back that a key turned in his lock, and there stood his stepfather, his dead eyes fixed on Ryan. “You will apologize to Miss Shackleforth.”
Ryan did it, carefully making his face look like he was really, really sorry for what he’d done.
He sat through dinner, forcing himself to eat, pretending he believed his stepfather’s story that Laurie was having a sleepover with one of her friends.
He didn’t ask which friend; instead he acted like he didn’t care.
At eight, he told his stepfather he was tired, and was going to go to bed early, and when Tony came in to tuck him in, he didn’t object. And he asked if he could go visit his mother in the hospital the next day.
“We’ll see,” Tony told him. Then he left, closed the door, and just as Ryan had been hoping, locked it.
Now Ryan was looking out into the night, and the courage he’d been working up all evening was starting to ebb away. Taking one last look out the window, he patted the batteries in his jacket pocket, checked for the keys and the black laundry marking pen and his pocketknife, then stuffed some extra pillows under the covers, just in case Tony came back for a look. Turning all the lights off, he went into the closet and climbed up the shelves one more time. Lifting the trapdoor carefully, he pulled himself through, then re-closed it.
Using the flashlight as sparingly as he possibly could, feeling his way along the passages that were now familiar to him, he began working his way upward. This time he ignored most of the side passages, going only far enough down any of them to determine that there were no stairs leading further up, for tonight he had a single goal.
To get out.
And if there were no way out through the basement or the first floor, there was only one thing left: the roof.
He was on the ninth floor — which he was pretty sure was the top floor — when he ran out of stairs. The last flight of steps seemed longer than any of the others, and when he finally came to the top, the passage only ran for about thirty feet before it ended at another passage that ran perpendicular to it.
He shined the light in both directions, but neither seemed any more promising than the other, and finally he started down the one to the right. It ended after about fifty feet, and there was another perpendicular passage. He explored the corridor in both directions and found dead ends both ways.
He went back the other way; passing the corridor he’d originally come through, he found a second transverse at the far end.
Both ends of this transverse ended as abruptly as the first.
No way out.
His heart sinking, he started back toward the passage that would take him to the stairs leading downward, but then, just as he was about to start down the steps, he remembered how he’d gotten into the passages in the first place.
Shining the flashlight upward, he began going back through the passages one more time, this time in search not of a door or of stairs, but of another trapdoor.
He found it at the very end of the first passage he’d explored. At first he wasn’t sure what it was — it looked like a ladder that was bolted to the ceiling. But when he examined it more closely, he could see that it was hinged at one end, and that there was what looked like a rope going up through the ceiling at the other end.
He stretched, trying to reach the ladder, but no matter how hard he strained, his fingers couldn’t even come close to touching it.
Taking off his shoes so he’d make as little noise as possible, he jumped.
And still didn’t touch the ladder’s lowest rung.
A stool — that’s what he needed. But where was he going to get one?
His desk chair?
But how could he even get it up through the trapdoor? And if he dropped it, and Tony Fleming heard the noise—
The flashlight was starting to get weak, and he reached into his pocket for the last set of batteries. Then, as he was deciding whether to change them now, or wait until the others were completely dead, an idea started forming in his mind. Stripping off his jacket — a thin nylon one whose big pockets had been more important than its lack of warmth — he tied a knot in one of the sleeves, then dropped all the batteries he had into the sleeve. Twisting the jacket as tight as he could, he grasped the end of the other sleeve so that he had a sort of makeshift rope with a weight at one end. It wasn’t very long — maybe four feet total, but if he could sling the weighted end over the bottom rung of the ladder, he just might be able to pull it down.
He hefted the jacket, giving it an experimental swing. If he wasn’t careful, the sleeve with the batteries in it would thump against the wall or the floor and—
He decided he didn’t want to think about that.
