She looks at me. She opens her mouth like she’s finally going to answer. Then she freezes. She cocks her ear. And I hear it.
Engines. Tires snarling on gritty pavement.
Someone in this ghost town is alive.
We emerge from the courtyard just as the vehicles disappear around a corner: two windowless white cargo vans, unmarked except for the geometric mandala stenciled on their sides.
My mind clicks dry like an unloaded gun. Did they really follow us a hundred miles from the border? Or were they already here?
I glance at Julie. Her face reveals nothing, just a trembling, round-eyed blankness.
She runs after the vans.
I shout, “Wait!” but I know she won’t, and I’m already following her.
The vans pause in the middle of the next block, and two more pop out from a side street to join them. These ones have windows, and just before they all drive off in a line, I catch a glimpse of their cargo. People. About a dozen in each van, packed together like miserable ride-share commuters.
This isn’t a search party—at least not for us. We have stumbled into other business.
Julie follows the vans’ cloud of dust. It curls through a route that’s clear of debris, like a well-worn animal trail in a forest, leading deeper into the city. I keep trying to catch her eyes, hoping to decipher her intent, but she stares straight ahead, utterly opaque. And then, just as the dust is getting too vague to follow, we emerge from an alley into the back lot of a large building, and the vans are right in front of us.
For a moment I worry Julie will charge at them like they’re figments in a dream, but she’s lucid enough to duck behind a dumpster. Gagging on the smell of whatever’s inside, I listen to barked commands and shuffling footfalls. The vans are backed up against the building, blocking my view of their activity, but it’s clear they’re unloading passengers. A minute later the doors bang shut and the vans drive off and we’re alone in the empty parking lot.
“Julie,” I whisper. “Need to go back. Get the others.”
She shakes her head.
“We don’t know what’s in there. Can’t just—”
She leaps to her feet and marches toward the building. Gritting my teeth, I go after her, attempting to channel Abram Kelvin and Evan Kenerly and all their militant paranoia, scanning windows for snipers and maximizing my situational awareness. But everything is quiet.
Julie stops in front of the entrance. The entrance is a staircase. A steep, narrow well leading down into darkness.
She descends.
“Julie, wait!”
Her legs sink into the shadows, then her waist, then her shoulders.
“Julie!”
For an instant her head is disembodied, a mass of golden hair floating on a black pond. Then the blackness swallows it.
I TEETER ON THE EDGE of the staircase, frozen in irrational panic. I can’t see the bottom. It’s just a flight of stairs, just the storage basement of some dull municipal building, but it stretches. It deepens and steepens until it’s no longer a staircase but a bottomless well, its slick stone walls lined with hideous books, blood writing and claw etchings, cold and damp and—
I don’t want to go down there. But Julie is down there. Whatever it is I’m afraid of, she’s alone with it.
I plunge into the depths.
My legs buckle under me when I reach the bottom, finding solid floor where they expected another stair. A memory from childhood, step after stumbling step, learning the art of walking—except it’s not from childhood. Long legs in black slacks, stumbling through a forest, away from a dead woman—
“Julie!” I hiss.
“What?” Her voice echoes back to me through the narrow tunnel, soft and toneless like the mutterings of a sleepwalker. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I notice a pale glow bobbing ahead.
I run up alongside her. She holds a flashlight limply, illuminating her feet and not much else.
I decide to try an indirect route. “Where’d you get the flashlight?”
“It was Abram’s.”
She keeps a brisk pace, just short of a run, her eyes fixed on the pavement that passes through her oval of light.
“You stole his flashlight?”
“Sometimes I steal things.”
I hesitate. “Why?”
“Because the world steals from me. It takes everything.” She blinks twice, and I notice her eyes are wet, despite their blank stare. “Feels good to be on the other end for once.”
She stops. The passage has opened up into some sort of basement storage area. Stacks of boxes aged into brittle papyrus, ancient beige computer monitors—the typical contents of an office building, with one notable exception: a rolling steel tray piled with scalpels and hooks and scissors and saws, all sticky with dark fluid. The floor is thick with dust except for a trail of footprints that leads to an upward staircase.