No door, just an arch. But it was dark in there, horrible, forbidding. Like the entrance to the cave of some voracious beast. Such darkness… as if someone had hung a blanket on the other side of the doorway. It bled into the bullpen, tendrils of it, a creeping midnight fungus.
Fuck it.
Lou waltzed right over there, reached inside along the wall. He found a switch right away, turned it on.
It was sort of a duty room, he guessed.
There were more desks, a podium, lockers against the wall. Nothing threatening, only his fevered imagination this time creating monsters out of whole cloth.
But if he didn’t have the right, then who?
There were places for them to hide, of course: under tables, behind cabinets. There were always places. But his sense of perception was getting preternaturally sharp by that point. A tool of instinct reborn in a world of computers and biotechnology gone to ruin.
No, this place was safe.
He made a quick inspection, hoping for something, anything, that might give him a clue to this horror show and how it had happened. But there was nothing. Duty roster on the podium. Scraps of paper here and there with crabbed phone numbers or license plate numbers, addresses, descriptions of vehicles.
No, no answers here. Only more questions.
Beyond the row of lockers, set in a little ell, there was a heavy steel door with a wedge of safety glass in it two-thirds of the way up. There was a red sign to the right of it that said:
WARNING
AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY
CONTAINMENT AREA
Containment area?
Lou went up to it and looked through the glass. It was brightly lit within. There were what appeared to be three or four small holding cells. Probably kept the bad guys here until they were delivered to the county lock-up.
He was about to turn away when he saw a shadow shift in there, in the far cell.
Was he really seeing it?
He pressed his face up to the cool glass. Yes. Someone was in there, hunched in the corner. He kept watching them. They made no aggressive or questionable movements.
What was there to worry about, really?
They were in a cell for chrissake.
Only in movies did maniacs or monsters burst through iron bars.
Lou opened the door and there was a loud buzzing sound from an alarm.
He knew if he went in and let the door close behind him, there would be no getting out; as a safety precaution, he saw, you needed a second party to let you out from the other side.
Good he noticed that.
He let it close and found a chair, dragged it over there. He opened the door, that damn buzzing rattling him again. He put the chair in front of the door. But it was heavy and made to close automatically. It dragged the chair with it, but could not close all the way.
He climbed over the chair and into the containment area.
Cells against one wall, a small desk opposite with a keypad on it. Sure, the buttons opened the cells. If he didn’t touch those he was safe.
He walked to the far cell.
Some guy was hunched up in the corner. He wasn’t moving.
Lou found his voice. “Hey,” he said. “You in there.”
The head snapped around.
Some young guy, unshaven, face slack, eyes darting from his skull. “You… you’re not one of them?” he asked like he couldn’t believe it.
“No, I’m normal. You?”
The guy was on his feet and up to the bars so fast Lou stepped back. “Jesus Christ… oh shit… get me out of here before she comes back. Hurry.” He pressed his face to the bars, looking nervously towards the door. “If she comes back, she’ll kill us both. I’ve been pretending I was dead every time she came in here. Come on, man! Don’t just fucking stand there!”
Lou went over to the desk, to the keypad. He pressed one button after the other. There was a buzzing and the cell doors each made a metallic clicking sound and opened an inch or two.
The guy came running out, grasped Lou happily by the shoulders.
“I’m Steve,” he said.
“Lou.”
“Okay. You got a gun. Good. Might need it.” He kept casting a wary eye towards the door as if he was expecting the Devil to waltz in any moment. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, twenty-three years old, but his eyes were ancient. “Drunk driving. They threw me in for drunk driving. And then that shit happened… oh for Christ’s sake, did the world end? What happened?”
“I don’t know. I got here a few hours ago,” Lou told him, the idea that it had only been a few hours sucking the wind from him, “and, well, everything’s gone crazy here. But, no, the world hasn’t ended. Just Cut River. It’s gone.”
Steve looked like he needed to cry badly. His eyes were wet, his lips trembling. “We have to get out of here, man. We gotta be gone when she comes back.”
“She?”
Steve looked exasperated. “She’s… well, shit, there’s no time for that,” he said, pulling Lou to the door. “I’ll explain later if we make it out.”
Out the door they went into the duty room.
Steve was holding Lou’s arm like a frightened child. He started blabbering about how terrible she was, how she’d slaughtered the prisoners that weren’t infected. How she’d released the ones that were. How he’d played dead every time she came around, mimicking the coma the infected ones went into at the end, right before they woke up—
“How about we just be quiet?” Lou suggested, the guy’s frantic, droning voice getting under his skin.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Steve said. “You’re right, you’re right.”
Lou figured this woman was probably another psycho and he knew how to deal with them, thank you very much… at least he hoped so. Then he started wondering if guns would stop them. But he put that from his mind. They were flesh and blood (he hoped), they were alive. Sick, contaminated, insane, but still living. Yes, they would die. If you asked them the right way, they would die just fine. He had the .38, but something a little heavier would have been nice.
“Do you know where they keep the guns?” he asked Steve.
“No. I mean, there’s gotta be a weapon’s locker around here somewhere, but it’s not something they tell us convicts about,” he said, half-joking, half-serious.
“Don’t suppose then, you’d know where the keys to those cruisers outside are?”
Steve nodded happily. “Sure. They’re right in the cruisers.”
“They leave the keys in ’em?”
“Small-town, man. Nobody steals too many cars here and especially not a patrol car for chrissake. What would be the point? Kind of obvious aren’t they?”
Lou shrugged.
Well there, at last, was something he could use. If the keys were in them and the radios were working, then he could contact the state police or drive out of town and probably both. It was a plan.
As they eased out into the bullpen, Steve said, “Unless, you know, one of them got to the cars. It’s possible. They’re not stupid, you know. Not at all.”
They made it out of the police station and started down the long, shadowy corridor. Steve was still stuck to Lou like a wart on a witch’s ass. Lou kept trying to give him the hint by trying to gently push him away, but it did no good.
As they moved quietly down the hallway, Lou was struck by the emptiness, that awful pressing, confining sense of claustrophobia that he was a mouse in a maze, every movement being studied, the walls trembling, ready to crush him at any moment.
They made it to the entryway and the front door was standing open, blackness and damp blowing in. And that stopped Lou dead because he was certain he’d closed it behind him. He could’ve sworn he had… hadn’t he? It was all such a muddle in his brain it was really hard to say.