reach high management and cause some college boy with nothing better to do to try to make a name for himself by “tightening up plant security”. Tom knew that any changes in the security system were likely to begin with the removal of old fossils like himself.
“Who discovered the break-in?” Tom asked.
“Nick Moore did. He said he was looking back there for empty crates, but I say he was looking for a quiet place to sit on his lazy ass and smoke dope. Anyway, he’s the one who found the broken window.”
Tom nodded and frowned down at his shoes while tucking his shirt in. Then he looked up at Shepler sharply. “Does anyone upstairs know about this yet?”
“Nope. And they ain’t going to, either.”
“Well, I think you ought to take me down there and show me where it happened.”
Shepler took a deep drag on his cigarette, as if it were his last. The tip flared orange then dimmed. He exhaled in a big smoke-filled sigh. “Alright,” he said resignedly.
They headed through the boiler rooms to Tom’s tiny office first to find a flashlight for Shepler to carry. There was no question of turning on the overhead fluorescents. The management was clear on that-no one was to waste the power it took to fire them up without some major reason. And that certainly did not include the convenience of a couple of night employees. By the time they had reached Tom’s office and crowded inside, Shepler was already puffing as if he had just run the hundred. Tom silently thanked himself again for never having taken up smoking and began rummaging behind his desk for the flashlight.
Shepler picked up a book laying open and face down on Tom’s desk. He read the cover and gave a barking cough into his closed fist. “You still read this shit, Riley?” he asked holding up the book.
Tom glanced up from behind his desk. The book was a copy of Jack Vance’s Maske: Thaery. The sight of his book in Shepler’s bony hand, moist from recent bouts of coughing, pulled Tom’s face into an immediate scowl. With an effort he contained himself. He noticed that Shepler had already managed to close the book and lose his place. His nostrils flared in annoyance.
“Didn’t know you were a literary critic, Shepler,” he remarked, letting loose on the sarcasm.
Shepler snorted, put the book down on the desk with a negligent toss and stepped out of the office into the hallway. He hitched up his drooping pants and said, “Don’t need to get all butt-hurt about it.”
John Shepler was a man who had better things to with his time than read books. Tom doubted that he read the text on his favorite porn sites. He found a suitable flashlight and a set of fresh batteries in his top desk drawer behind a box of extra-large paperclips. He locked up his office and handed the flashlight to Shepler, who took it without looking at him. Tom got out his own and they both headed toward the stairs in silence.
The break-in had occurred way in back of the dingiest, most cluttered portion of the brewery’s very dingy and highly cluttered basement. Tom was intent on the window the moment Shepler put his light on it. Leaving Shepler in a narrow aisle-way formed by towering stacks of moldering cartons, he climbed over a worn-out bottling machine caked with dust and grease.
When he reached the window he examined it closely. A cold gust of wind ruffled his hair and whistled over the opening. The window had been smashed alright. The reinforcing wire netting inside it had been torn through in the middle. As he examined the window his eyes narrowed and his lips drew taunt to one side. The glass seemed to be broken outward, rather than inward. The wire in the glass was twisted and left hanging outside the basement.
He quickly stooped and played his light on the small drift of snow that had leaked through to lie between the keys of broken IBM typewriters and on the stained cement floor beneath them.
“What is it?” Shepler asked.
Tom didn’t answer immediately. He brushed an open patch in the thin layer of snow on the floor. Delicately he probed the crunchy mixture of frozen air and water.
“There’s no broken glass here,” he said, speaking half to himself.
“What?”
“There’s no glass on the inside. We’ve had a break-out, not a break-in.”
“You sure, Riley?” Shepler asked, sniffing and wiping his hand on his sleeve. The basement was quite cold compared to the plant floor above. Tom stood, brushing off his knees, and examined the window further. His frown intensified. “This is too small.”
“What’s too small?”
“The hole. It’s too small for a man to squeeze through. Only a kid could do it. Only a small kid.”
“Well, so what? So we had a kid in the plant and he hid for a while and then broke his way out.”
Still frowning, Tom climbed back over the bottling machine and rejoined Shepler in the aisle-way. He took a good hard look around, playing the beam of the flashlight in a circle around them. The probing light revealed festoons of cobwebs and leaning stacks of forgotten office furniture, heavy machinery, newspapers and wire. A lone black rat dropped off the back of a typing chair and scrabbled back into the rolling hills of crates against the far wall. It was an industrial graveyard.
Shepler snatched up a half-crushed coke can from the pre-Coke Classic days and even the pre-diet days and tossed it at the scurrying rat. He missed badly.
“That’s odd,” muttered Tom, looking after the rat as it disappeared in a loose mound of junk.
“Sure is,” said Shepler, “I don’t usually miss that bad.”
“No. I mean the rat. That’s the first one I’ve seen down here. Would’ve expected a few more.”
Shepler snorted. “And you’re complainin’?”
Tom shook his head. Another small mystery. They were beginning to pile up and he didn’t like that. “Anyway, we’ve found where kid broke out, but what about where the kid got in?”
Shepler looked at him and sighed. The sigh turned into a hacking cough that shook his hunching body. He cleared his throat, then hawked and spat into a nearby carton. “I suppose we should search the place for it,” he admitted grudgingly. With Tom and his flashlight in the lead, they carefully made their way further back into the basement. When they got near the back wall the going became more difficult. They soon found spaces between towering piles of cartons and heavy old-fashioned machinery that they could not easily squeeze past.
“This is bullshit,” Shepler complained while trying to pull his shirt loose from a protruding segment of pipe. His elbows jostled a pryamid of boxes and sent a 7up bottle that had been left on top of them down to the cement floor with a crash. Shards of clear green glass sprayed a set of metal bookshelves, clattering and tinkling.
“Look, you stay here and guide me,” suggested Tom. “I want to have a look at what is behind that boiler over there.” He gestured toward the west wall with his flashlight.
“Sure,” Shepler muttered, continuing to tug at his shirt and sweat. When he had freed himself, he sat down with a grunt onto a crate and lit up another cigarette. He sucked on it heavily, wheezed and blew out a gust of smoke with a satisfied sigh.
Tom frowned and considered reminding him of the dangers involved in smoking around old equipment, but then reconsidered. It wasn’t worth it, Shepler would only glare at him with those half-shut piggy eyes of his and continue smoking anyway. He turned to pick his way toward the boiler.
As he came closer he became more sure, and when he finally crested a pile of worn out machinery he was certain. Yes, there was something behind the boiler, some kind of opening. An alcove in the basement wall, perhaps. His flashlight showed the opening as just a black patch in the wall behind the boiler. You could only see it from a certain angle. Tom stood up straighter and shined his light back the way he had come. He gauged it to be 200 yards back to the stairs in the other room. You couldn’t even begin to see that far. The basement was piled clear to the ceiling with junk. He wondered how they had gotten through fire inspections all these years. He suspected pay-offs or brother-in-laws. It was always one or the other.
He turned and made his way around the boiler to shine his light into the blackness behind it. What he saw there made him gasp and draw back.
“What did’ja find?” asked Shepler. Tom smiled at the quaver in his voice.
But the hole behind the boiler made his smile slide away to nothing. It was more than an alcove. It was a room. A forgotten room at the back of this ancient graveyard of brewery junk.
“Found some kind of room back here,” he said back over his shoulder. His voice was hushed. Unlike the stacks and piles of trash in the main room of the basement, this room was nearly empty of debris. A freezing hand tickled his stomach and gave a playful squeeze. How long had it been since anyone had been back here? Twenty years? Since the war? Before that? He knew that the building had been around for a long time and had been a
