by Sam Sisavath
Chris had to still be alive. Why else would the Raggedy Men drag her out of the classroom and carry her through the school? If they were going to kill her, they would have just done it right then and there.
You don’t know that, the voice from the back of her mind said. They could have killed her already. You might be looking for a dead girl.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it? There were too many coulds and mights and ifs involved for her to just pack up and leave now.
She’s not Emily, the voice said.
No, she wasn’t, but she was still a kid who needed help, and if Ana didn’t do it, who would?
But to do that, she had to find Chris first. That was the easier of her problems.
“There’s a warehouse near the center of town,” Sullivan had said. “Next to a strip mall with some phone stores, a Subway, and a pawn shop. Warehouse is the biggest thing in the area; two stories, steel all around. You can’t miss it.”
The place might have been hard for Sullivan to miss, but she hadn’t seen it while she was moving around Talico yesterday after fleeing Keenan. At least Sullivan had been kind enough to give her a general vicinity.
“There’s a warehouse near the center of town…”
So that was where she had to go. The center of town. Which meant she wasn’t going to be able to hide out in the barbershop forever. The warehouse wasn’t going to come to her, after all.
Ana changed up her grip on the Remington shotgun. It was a heavy sucker, and even if she were to run out of the four shells, she’d still be able to use it as a blunting weapon. One swing could probably take off a head or two. On a regular human being, anyway. Would it be just as effective against someone the unnatural size of a Raggedy Man?
Only one way to find out.
The back alley behind the barbershop looked a lot more inviting and navigable in the morning. The floor was as filthy as it had felt when she was walking across it last night. It took a while to get where she needed to be, and she got lost more than once, coming up on dead ends that forced her to backtrack. But she was always moving south, toward where she imagined the “center” of Talico to be.
Then she found it, exactly where Sullivan had said it would be.
“Next to a strip mall with some phone stores, a Subway, and a pawn shop. Warehouse is the biggest thing in the area; two stories, steel all around. You can’t miss it.”
He was right about that last part, too. Now that she was staring at it from a good half block away, it was hard to ignore the sunlight gleaming off the corrugated metal sides and the slanted roof that ended in a triangle at the middle. There were writings on the side—red and white and maybe black letters—but they were faded, and except for random letters here and there, were impossible to fully make out.
So there it was. The warehouse. Now all she had to do was go in there and find Chris.
Gee, that’s it?
So she continued on, still using the back alleys as cover. She stopped to listen for possible Raggedy Men presence more often now, reasoning that the closer she got to her target, the more threats would be lingering nearby. But the noises remained the same—ambient winds and the occasional squeaks of machine parts turning after all these years.
But no voices. No footsteps.
And no Raggedy Men.
Where were they? They hadn’t been shy about showing themselves yesterday. And why should they be? This was their city, and they had numbers on their side. They’d taken out Chris’s group and Sullivan’s all in the same day.
So where were they this morning? Or was that it? Were the Raggedy Men still asleep? Were they sleeping this very second inside the warehouse she was walking toward? That might explain it, but so could a hundred different other explanations she hadn’t even thought of yet.
The question continued to nag at the back of her mind as she continued toward her goal, only pausing twice to give herself some rest. Her legs weren’t throbbing nearly as much as this morning when she first woke up, and the continued numbness along her left arm was a lot better than the burning sensation from last night. She still hurt everywhere, but it wasn’t the same kind of paralyzing pain as when she was fleeing the school.
That’s an improvement, I guess.
Finally, after a lot of careful skulking to make sure she wasn’t seen or heard or followed, Ana reached the alley that looked straight across the street at the warehouse. She kept out of sight by crouching behind a big, battered blue Dumpster and peering out.
It was some kind of car salvage yard, surrounded by a chain link fence that had mostly fallen either due to lack of maintenance or was purposefully pulled down. There were hundreds of vehicles in the front yard that were visible to her, many of them gutted and sitting in spots where they had been parked years ago and never moved again. The front of the warehouse had four windows across the second floor, every single one of them broken. Two twin doors were open, revealing dark interiors and little else.
Something about the place, with its wide-open doors, left her with a bad taste in her already dry mouth. It was like they were inviting her to enter, to find out for herself what was inside. Almost as if they were daring her.
What am I doing? This is stupid.
She told herself that Chris wasn’t Emily, that she’d done enough for the girl. She’d saved her life yesterday. Wasn’t that enough? Why did she have to go in there just to find out if Chris was even still alive?
Ana told herself all of that even as she got up and moved away from the Dumpster—except instead of going backward and finding the first exit out of Talico, she went forward toward the street.
I’m sorry, Emily. I know I said I wouldn’t do anything stupid, but I can’t just leave her in there. I have to know if she’s still alive. I have to know.
She wasn’t sure how long she kneeled at the mouth of the alley and waited for something to convince her to turn around and head back. It could have been a few minutes or a few hours, but her legs were half-asleep when she finally stood back up and took the first tentative step out onto the sidewalk.
The empty streets greeted her, along with the strip mall to the right. A Subway shop with broken windows, the storefronts of three phone retailers in a row, and a pawn shop with security bars over its door.
But none of those places were of any interest to her. She only had eyes for the warehouse across the street. The gate into the place had fallen off its rollers and lay on its side. There was nothing that even looked remotely like protection, nothing to keep her from waltzing right into the compound and into the warehouse within.
It was so inviting. Maybe too inviting.
She sighed and jogged across the street.
Twenty-Three
It’s a trap.
It has to be a trap.
Except no one popped out from behind one of the metal husks that littered the yard in front or to the left or right of her when she stepped over the fallen gate. No one showed their faces—covered in rags or otherwise—when she made it ten, then twenty meters farther into the place. And there were still no signs that anyone was even around when she darted behind an old brown minivan missing all except one tire.
She pressed against the cold exterior of some soccer mom’s old car and peered through the cracked driver-side window, across the front seats, and out the equally broken front passenger side window.
There, the open twin doors into the warehouse. The big two-story building where she would find Chris.
…Unless the girl was already dead.
It doesn’t matter. I have to find out. I have to find out for sure, one way or another.
She stared at the opening, at all the blackness on the other side. There was so much darkness that she found it odd none of the broken windows along the second floor had been able to allow enough morning sunlight to brighten the place. All she wanted was just a little bit of light to see with, to get a feel for what was waiting for her in there.
Right now, there was just…nothing.
A big, fat, dark nothing.
Turn around.
This is a trap.
Chris isn’t in there.
If she is, she’s probably dead.
You shouldn’t be here.
Turn and run.
Now.
Now, woman. Now!
She did finally move—pushing off the van, before going around the beat-up and rusted front grill, then jogging toward the warehouse.
You’re crazy, the familiar voice said from somewhere in the back of her mind. That’s what you are. You’ve gone off the deep end.
She gritted her teeth and kept moving until she was at the doors. Instead of going straight, Ana flattened her back against one of the walls next to the opening and sucked in a deep breath full of morning chill. She changed up her grip on the shotgun, then slipped her forefinger into the trigger guard and rubbed it against the trigger.
She reminded herself that the Remington had four shots and was semiautomatic. That meant all she had to do was keep pulling the trigger. Four times, anyway. After that, she would be down to the Smith & Wesson.
Simple enough.
Ana took one hand off the shotgun and reached back until she could feel the foreign metal of the handgun back there. This was her life now—depending on guns. Not her own guns, either, but a stranger’s. A killer.
Remember when your biggest worry was keeping the knife clean?
She stepped away from the wall and spun around until she was facing the opening. She peered inside, her face behind the iron sights of the shotgun. Her breath came out in waves, forming bursts of white clouds in front of her. Her heartbeat had picked up noticeably, and it took some effort to slow it back down.
Now that she was standing directly outside the doors, she could better see the warehouse’s interior thanks to sunlight from above. After passing through all the junk in the yard, she guessed she shouldn’t have been too surprised by the maze of shelves, vehicle parts, and leftovers of the previous world stacked in multiple piles in front of her. Another junkyard—except this one was inside the building.
The individual piles—dozens and dozens of them, spread out across the interior, some reaching as high as the slanted ceiling above—began a few feet from the door and seemed to extend all the way to the back, however far that was. There was no pattern to where things went that she could see; clothes and tires here, cracked windshields and oil-stained rags there. It looked very much like someone had gathered up all the refuse from around Talico and brought them in here and just tossed them randomly. She wondered if she could find some more shotgun shells or guns somewhere in all the metal.
You should be so lucky.
She took the first hesitant step into the warehouse, the shotgun leading the way. There might not appear to be any logic to where things were placed, but there was a pathway around the stacks of junk that stood out. Sunlight gleamed off hubcaps and reflected off glass around her, and each time she passed by a seemingly precarious pile, Ana was afraid the whole thing might topple and bury her underneath their weight.
She pressed on, wary of the slightly loud sounds she was making with every footstep, but she had to keep reminding herself that they were only “loud” because she was listening for them and because there was absolutely no other noise inside or outside the building this morning. That lingering silence, more than anything, further convinced her that there was no one here—no Raggedy Men and no Chris—and that Sullivan had either lied or been mistaken.
The urge to turn and run away was strong, but she couldn’t force herself to follow through with it.
She had to know. She had to know.
It took a while, mostly because she was being overly cautious, before she finally found an ending to the pathway. She guessed she was either at the very back of the warehouse or somewhere near the middle, not that she could really tell given the towers of trash stacked in front of her, creating a giant wall of rubbish. Again, the prospect of being caught underneath a landslide of refuse made her shiver slightly.
But it wasn’t the “wall” that had caused her to stop. It was the rectangular opening embedded in the floor in front of her, like some kind of trapdoor, with concrete steps leading down into…darkness.
So, so much darkness that when she leaned forward and squinted, all she could make out were more gray steps with seemingly no end in sight.
She paused her breathing to listen, but the only sounds were her heartbeat thump-thump-thumping in both ears. Ana glanced over her shoulder, back along the path she’d come. She couldn’t see the doors from her current position, which made sense because she’d turned two or three times (or more?) to follow the winding “road.” She was at least comforted by the fact that she had a clear way to locate the exit again; all she had to do was run back along the path.
Not exactly the Yellow Brick Road, but I guess it’ll do.
She faced the opening again. It looked like an original part of the building and not something that had been put there recently. Which made her wonder what the original owners of the salvage yard had been using it for. Maybe some kind of storage basement, though she didn’t quite understand why it was just…there in the middle of the warehouse. Of course, there could have been walls around it at one point—maybe even a back room—and those could have been torn down or never put up.
There were a lot of possibilities, and she could spend days running them all through her head, but none of them would get her any closer to finding Chris.
If the kid was down there.
If she was even still alive.
If that asshat Sullivan was telling the truth.
She sighed, changed up her grip on the shotgun for the tenth time in as many minutes, and took the first step down the dark hole in the floor.
The darkness was suffocating, like stepping into the bottom of the ocean where the sun was a stranger and light had no hope of surviving.
It was either that, or her mind was running on overtime.
But it was dark enough that she had to be careful about every step, which meant glancing down before taking each one as they appeared. That was difficult to do while trying to also keeping the shotgun aimed at whatever was waiting for her down there.
Whatever, or whoever.
This is a bad idea. This is such a bad, bad idea.
Not that she could stop and turn around and go back into the light. (Run back into the light, girl! Back into the light right now!) Not as long as she still had questions about the place, about Chris…
Every step forward and down seemed to require more effort than just breathing. It would have been so easy to turn and run. There were so many reasons for her not to be down here, not to keep going any farther.
But she didn’t stop, because she couldn’t. Not while there was a chance Chris was alive. She would never be able to live with herself if she abandoned the kid now. She would never be able to look her sister in the eyes.
This is for you, Em, whether you know it or not.
The only sounds were her heartbeat’s continuous thumping in her ears. Her footsteps, by comparison, were a million miles away. The absolute silence coming from whatever was in front of her didn’t help to calm her nerves whatsoever. If anything, it only encouraged the fear and doubt and paranoia.
Five steps…
Six…
She stopped at number eight when she began to make out…something from all the blackness before her.
There were no lights down here, but her eyes had begun adjusting just enough to the darkness for her to make out concrete walls. When she glanced left, then right, she saw two more walls.
A room. It was some kind of room.
A basement? It made sense. A big warehouse like this would have a basement to be used for storage.
The floor was flat, gray, and scarred with heavy—and very recent—foot traffic. Small dots and splatters of various sizes covered the parts of the basement that she could finally make out. They were dark, either blue or black.
Blood. That’s blood.
That should have been all she needed to stop. No one had seen her yet. No one even knew she was down here. All she had to do was turn and walk back up the way she’d come. She could find a way to live with this, to justify it, and Emily would understand.
Wouldn’t she?
Shut up. You know you’re not going to do it. So just get it over with.
Ana took another step down.
Then another one.
Finally, the bottom was there. Unyielding concrete, gray and ugly. She put one, then the other boot down on top of it, and paused.
There was light behind and above her, but it died (Bad choice of words!) about halfway down the steps, leaving a pool of blackness all around her. But her eyes had adjusted enough for her to make out the four walls. The spaces around her were empty, and except for the blood splatters, it could have been any basement anywhere—
A door. It was black (metal?) and stood out from the monotonous gray wall directly in front of her. There was no doubt where she had to go next, because all she had to do was follow the line of old dry blood toward that door.
She glanced back at the steps behind her, leading up to the light. The morning glow was so warm and inviting, and all she had to do was turn…just turn…
She continued toward the door instead.
It was metal, as she had guessed, and dented from top to bottom and side to side, and there were more old, black (blood) splatters on the floor and walls around it.
Despite its damaged appearance, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the big shiny metal lever that kept the door closed. Of course, just because it looked intact didn’t mean it would actually work when she put her left hand on it and pushed down—
The damned thing moved just fine.
Better than fine, actually, like someone had kept it well-oiled with WD-40 every other day. It turned smoothly, and the door would have swung wide open if she had let it, but Ana held onto the lever as she pushed forward and eased her way through, lifting the heavy Remington with her right hand.