There was silence for a moment—I didn’t know what to say, I never knew what to say, not when it came to Taylor, not anymore—then a loud peal of laughter rang out at our backs. I turned. It was Floyd, standing in the middle of the corridor, braying like a moron.
“Fuck, I … I’m sorry,” he said, trying to rein it in. He seemed confused and genuinely abashed at the inappropriate laughter. He managed to hold it in for a moment, then it burst forth once again. So shrill. So totally out of place.
The laughter echoed in the empty hallway, filling the space like blood pooling into a deep wound.
We found the stairwell and started to make our way up, toward the street.
There was no longer any light here. No overhead fluorescents, just the thin beams of our flashlights. Charlie’s parents’ lab had been one floor down in the research facility, but there was no door on the first landing here and no door on the second. I leaned out into the center of the stairwell and peered up toward the top of the shaft. There was a dim light up there, at least ten floors above our heads. The research facility hadn’t been that tall.
As we climbed, the light from my flashlight revealed more words spray painted on the wall.
First: IN ITS PLACE. And then, on the next landing, OUT, followed by an arrow curving up toward the top of the stairs. As soon as he saw the word and the arrow, Floyd let out another shrill laugh.
“There is no out,” he whispered, the laugh still in his voice. “It’s just this, right? This place. And us. And the stuff that followed us in.”
“That’s enough, Floyd,” I growled. “You’re not helping any.”
He laughed again, and I grabbed his forearm. He jumped at my touch and pulled away. There was fear in his eyes. And confusion.
On the next landing, we found a door. It was the first door since the basement, at least six landings down. The door was steel gray and smeared with grime—smoke grime, the exhaust of machines, layered thick and sticky against the metal. I opened it and found a hallway on the other side.
The hallway was a foreign place. Not the research facility; I was sure of that. It was no place I’d ever been. To the left, doorways stretched down both sides of the corridor, each about fifteen feet apart. About half of the doors were open, spilling muted red light onto the waxed floor. There was the smell of antiseptic in the air and, underneath it, a pungent touch of sweat and decay. It was a thick smell. I could almost feel it gathering on my skin, like pollen or lacquer.
Taylor stepped past me and let out a surprised breath. “It’s the hospital,” she said. “ICU.” It took me a moment to parse the initials, at first hearing them as out-of-place words: “I see you.”
I turned to the right, and sure enough, there was a nurses’ station just down the corridor, and a line of rolling gurneys pressed up against the wall. There was a whiteboard posted behind the desk, listing room numbers, patient names, and ailments. 503, MARTIN HELDER, CIRRHOSIS—LIVER FAILURE. 504, EUNICE WEST, ANEURYSM— SHUNT. 505, PETER WILMORE, TRAUMA—FRACTURED PELVIS, RUPTURED SPLEEN, BROKEN LEG/ARM. 506, RICHARD SCALLEY …
It went on and on, scrawled in messy mismatched ink. Patients who were no longer in their rooms—the hospital now empty, evacuated and populated by nothing but silence.
I stepped toward the nurses’ station and then stopped.
“Fifth floor,” Taylor said at my back. There was absolutely no emotion in her voice, just muted, disconcerting calm. “We could find a window and jump out. Like that soldier. Remember the soldier?”
I nodded. I remembered the soldier.
“There’s got to be an exit,” I said, standing motionless in the middle of the corridor. My body felt heavy, exhausted, and I didn’t want to move. “Another stairwell, maybe, with an exit on the first floor. Or we could make a rope, lower ourselves to the street.”
I saw her nod out of the corner of my eye. Then she turned and peered down the corridor, first to the left, then to the right.
“Where’s Floyd?” she asked. “Where’d he go?”
My stomach dropped. I turned and found the corridor empty. It was just Taylor and me, the stairwell door shut at our backs. Floyd was gone. He’d disappeared.
Frantic, I pointed her down the corridor to our right, then headed left on my own, peering into each of the rooms in turn.
It didn’t take long to find Floyd. He was in the third room down.
It was a standard double-occupancy hospital room. The bed closest to the door was hidden behind a curtain, and I found Floyd seated on the second. He was perched motionless on its far edge, facing the window. The sky outside was bright red. While we’d been underground, night had become day, and the sky had lit up once again— with spores or blood, I didn’t know.
“Floyd?” I prompted.
He didn’t respond.
I crossed to the foot of the bed and looked at his face. He blinked and continued to stare at the window. He seemed to know I was there, but he didn’t engage, didn’t acknowledge my presence. I didn’t press it. I didn’t try to force his attention, didn’t grab his shoulders and start shaking, didn’t slap his face and shout bracing words.
I stepped up to the window and peered out at the city.
It was an unfamiliar landscape—still Spokane but worse, battered and beaten. I-90 was visible a couple of blocks away, to the north, but it had suffered. Chunks of concrete had collapsed from its edge, diminishing its surface, and the entire Monroe overpass had fallen to the street below, leaving a wide gap in the interstate’s length, filled with boulders and jagged lengths of rebar. And the destruction didn’t look recent. All the buildings in sight had taken damage. Collapsed walls lay across sidewalks and streets, road surfaces had buckled and crumbled, streams of muddy water wended their way through eroded asphalt.
Time had passed somehow. The city had aged. And it had aged badly.
The sky was deep red, roiling in violent waves.
There was smoke in the distance, up north—several columns, billowing thick and black.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Floyd asked, his voice slow and emotionless. I turned and looked at him. His face was impassive, but his eyes swam, refusing to spill but filled with tears. “He’s here. This is hell and he’s here, waiting for me. Just out of sight. Always here, around the next corner. And there’s no escaping it … no way out.”
Floyd slowly lowered himself onto his side, briefly curling his legs into a loose fetal position at the edge of the mattress. Then he rolled onto his back and settled his head on the pillow, fixing his eyes on the blank ceiling.
I looked up and saw Taylor standing in the doorway. There was relief on her face as she regarded Floyd. Then she saw the window.
She made her way to my side and peered out at the devastated landscape. She didn’t look for long; she turned away from the window and lowered herself onto the edge of the bed, taking a seat next to Floyd’s knees. She was sitting in the exact same position in which I’d first found Floyd. Her shoulders were slumped, her face expressionless.
“I can’t do this, Dean,” she said. “I can’t be here anymore.”
“We’ll find our way out, get back to the house.”
“I mean Spokane,” she replied, her voice flat, lifeless. “I can’t do this.” She nodded toward the window. “I can’t do
I nodded. And I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t ask about her father, her mother, her obligations; I didn’t ask about the things that had been keeping her here. I didn’t want to change her mind.
“We’ll go,” I said. “We’ll go to California … or Seattle, or Olympia, if you like. We can find Terry, maybe help him with his book.”
