There is no blast door. We come off the last step onto a cement floor; cement walls; a long basement hallway. It’s cold, noticeably so, an easy ten degrees colder than upstairs; cold and dark and utterly silent. The smells of old stone, of mold and standing water, and underneath that a more recent scent, an acridness like something burning somewhere nearby. As we look around the empty room our headlamps cut overlapping slices of yellow gloom from the darkness.
It’s nothing. It’s just plain nothing. It takes a moment or two for me to identify the feeling creeping up into my bones while I’m standing here, staring at this long empty quiet hallway. It’s disappointment is what it is, a low cold disappointment, because some part of me had wondered. At some point without meaning to I had allowed some faint bubbles of hope to form and rise. Because of all of it—not just the damn helicopter, but all of it: the impressive geographic reach of this group, from New England to the Midwest; the Internet capacity, Jordan nonchalantly hacking an FBI database on a dial-up connection while the rest of the world is in rapid regression toward the Stone Age; those mysterious heavy crates Atlee Miller saw being trucked down here on Wednesday afternoon.
Some idiot part of me was expecting to find a hum of activity. A rogue government scientist in a white coat barking out orders. Last-minute preparations for launch. Beeping consoles and screens filled with maps, a world beneath the world, humming along, preparing for action. Something from James Bond, something from Star Wars. Something.
But it’s nothing. Cold; darkness; a bad stink; spiderwebs and dirt. Under the staircase there’s a cheap wooden door, hanging open to a tiny room: fuse boxes; mops; a black potbellied furnace, silent and rusted.
Where are the people? Where are my buddies Sailor and Tick and Delighted, where are the brilliant revolutionaries, vanguard of the future? Where have the spiders scuttled off to?
Cortez, for his part, seems unfazed. He turns to me in the strange wavering light of the headlamps, and his spooky excited grin is still in place. His face looks chopped up and put back together.
“Who knows?” he says, reading my mind. “Maybe they went out for milk.”
My eyes are slowly adjusting to the dimness. I look up and down the hallway.
“Okay,” I say. “How do you want to do this?”
“We’ll split up.”
“What?
I turn back sharply to him and our two pools of light form together and I see that his eyes are wide and flashing. There’s definitely something going on with him, I saw it up at the top of the steps, some new eagerness coming to life in his head, taking center stage.
“I’ll go thisaway,” he says, like the sheriff in a Western, pokes his thumb off into the darkness and starts moving.
“No,” I say. “Wait. What? Cortez.”
“Just holler. Just do Marco Polo. Don’t worry.”
Don’t worry? “Cortez?”
This is insane. I stumble after him but he’s moving fast, swallowed up in the surrounding darkness. He’s got some plan, he’s following some star that I can’t see. A wash of panic rushes up from my stomach, a rush of fear, deep anxiety, as old as childhood. I don’t want to be down here alone.
“Cortez?”
4.
I take big careful steps along the gray floor, my back pressed against the rough concrete, my light bobbling in front of me like I’m an anglerfish. My gun is in my right hand. Eyes seeking, trying to adjust. Walking through a shadowland, through a photographer’s negative, shining the light. A few bulbs dangle bare and functionless from the ceiling, among a tangle of sagging, rusted pipes. A bare stone floor, uneven, cracked in long lines across the foundation. Spiderwebs and spiders.
The layout of the police station basement appears much like the layout upstairs, a single long hallway broken by doors. There are just fewer of the doors down here, spaced farther apart. It’s like this world down here is the corpse version of the world upstairs, the decaying mirror image of what’s above. Like the building died and was buried down here, underground.
Somewhere down the hall I hear the creak of a door, a footstep: steel boot heel on concrete. Another footstep and then a quiet rustle of laughter.
I whisper sharply. “Cortez?”
No answer. Was that him? The door creaks again, or maybe a different door. I turn slow, 360 degrees, watch my semicircle of light bobble across the darkness, but it doesn’t find him. What was he laughing at? What’s funny? I don’t know if he’s still somewhere in the hallway, on the far end of it hidden in shadow, or if he’s slipped through one of the doors.