The first two levels of the stairwell were bare, unpainted concrete, the floor number of each new level stenciled in large, bright fluorescent spray-paint over the doorway leading off the stairs. It was a fair bet that no hotel guest or tourist was ever supposed to see these areas, they were probably just for the maintenance and hotel staff, hence the lack of even a coat of paint. Their boots scuffed the uncarpeted steps as they made their way cautiously downward.
A second security door, easily opened by a crash bar on their side, marked the transition from utilitarian to Vegas kitsch, the naked gray concrete walls and floors suddenly replaced with a nice, if slightly worn, carpet and peach-painted walls.
“Hold the door open,” MacAlister told Reilly as he shined his flashlight through the doorway toward the opposite end of the corridor. A table with a vase full of fake flowers rested against the wall on the next landing down. MacAlister grabbed it, tipped out the plastic roses, and placed it between the doorjamb and the door to keep it open.
Even with the thick layer of carpet beneath their feet, their footfalls still echoed ominously through the stairwell as they descended through floor after floor.
The lower they got, the more cloying the air became and Emily found herself intermittently having to wipe a combination of perspiration and humidity from her forehead with the arm of her jacket before it dripped into her eyes. She could feel the slick dampness of sweat under each arm and along the small of her back.
“Where the hell is all this moisture coming from?” she whispered.
“It’s like a tropical rainforest out there,” said MacAlister after they had descended past the eighth floor. “Most of the moisture must be coming from… hold it!” His arm shot out to block Emily’s progress.
Ahead of them, the stairwell had disappeared, leaving only a ragged lip of ripped carpet and empty black space.
“Careful,” said MacAlister as Emily moved closer to the edge, shining her own puny flashlight down into the darkness. It barely penetrated.
“Let me borrow your light,” she said to the Scotsman. MacAlister’s more powerful flashlight illuminated a gaping hole that dropped down the remaining eight levels to the ground floor of the casino. She could see a pile of concrete, debris, and the glint of scattered and crushed slot machines far below. Thick red vines and creepers twisted through the rubble.
“What the hell would cause that kind of a collapse?” Reilly asked.
Emily swung the flashlight down to one ruined floor then the next. The concrete-and-steel rebar that jutted out from each shattered level looked odd to her. There were none of the sharp edges or points Emily would have expected to see if the collapse had been caused by stress, instead, the edges of the exposed floors below her looked worn, rounded even, as though it had been eroded away by water or friction over a significant period of time. She shined the light up the walls; there was no sign of any water damage on the walls or staining on the carpets.
“Look at that,” Emily said to MacAlister, pointing to the exposed face of the level beneath them as he stepped in close to her, his hand holding onto the metal banister attached to the wall for support. “That doesn’t look right to me.”
MacAlister took the flashlight from Emily’s hand and focused it on the next level down, slowly running the beam along the broken concrete edge of the floor and then up the supporting wall to their level. The wall was pockmarked with tiny dimples. Each dimple had some kind of powdery residue in it.
“It looks pitted,” he said finally. “Almost as though it’s been worn away by rain or some kind of attrition. Maybe it’s a result of the storm? Internal stresses? There could have been a water pipe running along this floor that burst, maybe?”
“Maybe, but there’s no sign of water damage,” said Emily. “And I doubt that even if a water pipe had broken above us that it could have done this kind of damage this quickly, could it?”
MacAlister moved the light over to illuminate the wall next to where they stood. It too was dimpled and pitted. The holes were roughly circular, less than a half inch wide and about the same depth. They reminded Emily of bullet holes.
MacAlister probed one of them with a gloved finger, disturbing a fine powder the same gray color as the concrete. The wall flaked away under the pressure of his probing fingers, crumbling to dust. He pressed harder and a ragged slab of the wall a foot high and two feet wide slipped away and fell to the carpet, disintegrating and scattering like sugar across his boots when it hit the floor.
“Shit!” MacAlister spat. All three of them took an involuntary step away from the edge of the precipice. “It’s like it’s just crumbling away.” There was nothing left of the slab of wall that had fallen other than the powder.
“Could just be a bad concrete mix,” Reilly suggested. “I doubt there were many building codes when they built this place back in the sixties or seventies. Could just be cheap material.”
“Whatever the reason,” MacAlister continued, wiping his hand on his trousers, “there’s no way we’re getting across that hole. We’ll have to find another way down.”
The trio doubled back up to the landing on the ninth floor and slipped through the door into the main hallway. A corridor of rooms, some with the telltale sign that their occupants had transformed and escaped through the locked doors, extended out in front of them.
MacAlister shined his light down the corridor, illuminating an EXIT sign at the far end.
“Let’s give that one a try,” said Mac.
They began walking toward the other stairwell, their shadows leaping and dancing along the walls like gibbering demons.
“Well this brings back memories,” said Emily quietly.
“Of what?” asked MacAlister.
“I’ll tell you about it sometime.”
“Over dinner?”
Emily laughed, “God, you’re persistent. Sure, over dinner.”
“So, it’s a date then?”
“Don’t push your lu—” Emily felt the floor move beneath her feet. For a second she thought she was okay, that it was just something loose, but then she felt the floor shift and crumble, and she fell into darkness.
Emily’s head was filled with darkness and noise.
She heard Thor’s panicked bark and MacAlister yell a curse. She saw his hands reaching for her as the floor beneath her crumbled beneath her weight. Her hands flailed for MacAlister’s outstretched hand but all she found was empty air as she dropped through the floor and into the blackness below. She exhaled a shocked half yell of surprise, half scream as she fell, her arms and legs windmilling in a vain but gallant attempt to fly.
She landed with a jarring thump on the level below, her legs crumpling to the floor, quickly followed by her ass as she inelegantly flopped to the ground with a gusty oomph, the air knocked from her lungs.
For a moment, she lay there, stunned, disoriented, and shaken, spitting dust and bits of concrete from her mouth, but thankful she was still alive. She had only fallen about ten feet through the ceiling and onto the next level, her descent slowed enough by the crumbling floor to not have gained too much momentum.
Carefully, she began to feel her way around, her hands automatically moving in the darkness to where she sensed the wall should be. She felt the warmth of the wall beneath her fingers… then it too crumbled under the pressure of her hand and she felt the wall disintegrate. Disoriented in the darkness, she fell sideways, following her hand as it pushed through the plasterboard of the wall like it was wet paper and, she guessed, into the room that must lie beyond it. She coughed twice in rapid succession as she inhaled the dust, then hacked it up and spat onto the floor.