She started to walk with her hands and arms outstretched in front of her. Almost immediately, she tripped and fell. When she squatted and ran her fingers along the floor, she found a jagged block of concrete, three feet by four feet. She traced its edges and then stepped around it. As she inched forward, her numb feet crushed against pebbles of glass with each step and bled. Water dripped on her face. She kicked a piece of scrap metal that clanged on the cement and hissed in pain. She bent down and picked up an L-shaped joist, heavy and rusted. She nestled it in her fist and felt better that she had something she could use in self-defense.
Her hands touched a smooth wall ahead of her. She explored it with her fingers and felt lines of grout between square tiles. With her palms flat, she followed the wall, letting it lead her steps. She found the opening of a door frame where the wall ended, but the doorway itself was blocked with a sodden, rotting stack of wooden planks at least three feet high. She stopped, squinting, trying to see if there was an escape route on the other side of the doorway, but the interior was black.
Beyond the doorway, the wall continued, and she followed it until her fingers bumped into a new wall, made of plywood, not tile. She had walked herself into a corner. She turned, making her way along the perpendicular wall, moving more quickly than before. Her hands missed a wooden beam propped against the wall at waist level, and before she could stop it, the beam toppled noisily to the floor. She froze, expecting him to come for her, anticipating a cone of light stabbing through the darkness.
Nothing happened. Only the rats continued to stalk her.
Kasey grew bolder as she wondered if he had left her entirely on her own. She decided that time, not noise, was her biggest enemy now, and she stumbled quickly along the wall. Water dripped louder and faster, and her fingers banged into cold pipes hanging from the ceiling like spider webs. She collided with a concrete I-beam and weaved around it. The wall ended, and she took two steps into open space, in the middle of a dark nowhere.
She heard something close by. Soft, like a distant hiss. Wind.
The outside world wasn't far away. She steered for the sound and realized she was near a boarded-up window, and on the other side of it was freedom. Her fingers frantically examined the frame, looking for a spongy weakness where the water had softened the wood. Snow pecked against the window an inch away from her. She could feel the cold.
'Let me out,' she whispered.
Before she could punch through the heavy plywood with the metal joist in her hand, she ran out of time. She heard voices. His voice.
Down the long, black tunnel, she saw light streaming through the cracks.
Maggie climbed out of her yellow Avalanche outside the Buckthorn School. The moon, which was no more than a haloed glow behind the gray clouds, illuminated the desolate ruins. Snow drifted against the tan brick walls and weighed on the flat roof. The school, or what was left of it, was sheltered by two giant oaks with spindly branches that looked like witches' fingers. Every window was shuttered with heavy plywood. Every metal door was looped with chain and locked shut.
She imagined the school as it had been after the war, beside a dusty dirt road, surrounded by corn fields, with farm boys dropped off at its doors in shirts and ties. That was long ago. Now it was forgotten, falling down, eroding a little more with each bitter winter. After thirty years of abandonment, the animals and the weather owned it. That was what attracted explorers like Nick Garaldo.
Maggie saw a tall, athletic man in his early thirties approaching her truck. He wore a black fleece jacket, and he shoved his hands in his pockets and gave her a cocky smile. He had a backpack over one shoulder.
'Nieman?' she asked.
'That's me.'
'Thanks for sticking around,' she told him.
'No problem.' He gestured at the school with a flick of his head. 'You want to go inside?'
'Let's take a walk around the perimeter first.'
'Sure thing.'
He led her across the field, which crackled with snow, oak branches, and dead leaves. The ground sloped sharply downward as they hiked around the western wall. She shuffled down the hill in her boots past a cluster of towering spruce trees. Where the ground flattened, they were at the rear of the school. The lower level was open to the elements. She poked her head past the exposed concrete pillars and studied the mess of bricks and pipes.
Nieman turned on a flashlight and pointed it at the ground. 'Those are the pistachio shells,' he said. 'That means something to you, huh?'
'It does. Keep that light on them, will you?'
Maggie bent down. The ground was littered with shells, and she noticed that they weren't covered with dust and that their color was still bright red. Nick Garaldo had been here recently. She stood up and asked, 'Have you noticed any evidence of intruders recently? Anyone prying back the window coverings or tampering with the locks?'
'No, nothing like that. The place is sealed up pretty tight.'
Maggie nodded. The wind shifted, swirling snow down from the roof of the school and into the debris of the lower level. She smelled the sweet, cold air, but somewhere in the eddy of the breeze, something else came and went. It was so fleeting she wasn't sure if it had really been there, or if her senses had imagined it.
She backed up into the field behind the school and looked at the upper level, which was boarded shut with a wall of plywood covering the rear windows. Nieman eyed her curiously.
'Something wrong?' he asked.
'I'm not sure. Did you smell something?'
He shrugged. 'Lots of dead animals inside. Raccoons. Dogs. Squirrels. Rats. They don't pay me to play animal control officer.'
'Yeah.'
The stench that had flitted through her nostrils was vile and fresh. She stood in the field as the choppy currents of the storm fought with each other, and when the air blew directly toward her across the roof of the school, the smell hit her again. This time, it lingered, and even in the crisp night, it made her pinch her nose shut.
This was no dead squirrel. This was a corpse smell, the kind of revolting gas that a body gives off when it's shut inside with the dead air.
'What the fuck is that?' Maggie asked.
Nieman sniffed the air. 'Shit, you're right. That's new. It wasn't like that over the weekend.'
'Let's go. Somebody's dead in there.'
She led the way this time, back up the hill and around the corner to the front of the school. Four concrete steps led up to a series of steel doors. Here, where the wind didn't reach them, she didn't notice the smell. She felt an urge to hurry, but she knew the urge was irrational. If Nick Garaldo was inside, he wasn't alive.
'Open this up, will you?' she asked.
Nieman hunted for the key to undo the lock that held the chain together on the doors. When he found it, he unlocked the padlock and slid it in his pocket. He let the chain fall on the steps. Maggie pushed past him, swung open the door, and bolted inside. Nieman followed, letting the door swing shut behind him.
She stopped, because she couldn't see. The world turned black.
The smell suffocated her. Locked inside the ruins, the stench multiplied like a runaway strain of bacteria, turning the air rank. It was so sudden and overwhelming that she could barely breathe, and she wanted to bend over and vomit. She clapped her hand over her entire face, trying to keep out the smell, but it wormed inside her anyway.
'Oh my God,' she screamed. 'Turn on your flashlight!'
Nieman didn't answer. Maggie reached out in the dark to make sure he was there, and as she did, she heard her phone ringing in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw on the caller ID that it was Troy Grange.