Condemned: A Thriller

by Michael McBride

  The gate in the fence stood open, a broken padlock hanging from the latch. The sheets of wood that once barricaded the front doors leaned against the wall to either side, still decorated with No Trespassing signs.

  I passed through the gate and stared into the dark entryway for several minutes. He was in there. Somewhere. Watching me from the anonymity of the shadows, waiting for me to…to what? To kill him? To talk him into turning himself in? What was his endgame? He’d asked me that very question before, and in its answer lay the key to understanding why he had betrayed everything he believed in.

  Sirens wailed in the distance. Tires screeched. Life in the city, such that it was, went on without us, as though we had stepped outside its chronology and existed in our own little world of what could have—and should have—been.

  I turned on my flashlight and shined it through the doorway. The white light only penetrated the darkness so far before terminating in a pale glow sparkling with motes of dust. I switched to the red filter, which wasn’t nearly as bright, but afforded me better overall vision once my eyes adjusted. It also gave me a better impression of the vast space.

  I passed through the entryway and into a chamber so large I could see neither the walls opposite me nor the ceiling. It smelled of mildew and urine. I heard the patter of water dripping through the roof from somewhere far ahead. My light reflected from standing water all around me, above which tiny insects swarmed. I placed each step as gently as possible to minimize the splashing sounds that betrayed my location even more noticeably than the red beacon I held in front of me.

  I felt naked without some sort of weapon and regretted not taking Dray up on his offer, but if it came down to having to use it, I honestly didn’t know if I’d be able to pull the trigger. Regardless of his plans, though, I had every intention of bringing Dray back out with me.

  Pillars spray-painted with letters lacking style and artistic flair covered gigantic columns, which cast long shadows that moved as I walked, as though attempting to sneak around behind me. I wasn’t familiar enough with the layout to navigate in the darkness. As it turned out, I didn’t need to be. A sulfurous smell materialized from beneath that of the stagnant water. It grew stronger with each step until it became all I could smell and defined itself as a stench with which I was becoming increasingly familiar.

  I covered my mouth and nose with my left hand, for all the good it did me. My stomach lurched, but I’d absolved it of its contents already and no amount of heaving could bring up what wasn’t there.

  Shadows moved at the periphery of my light. By the time I was close enough to clearly see the shapes, I could already hear the buzzing sound of their wings. Flies crawled on the walls and swirled in the rectangular entryway to the vaulted retail arcade, where travelers in another era could pick up flowers and cigars or get a shave and a haircut. Now it was a rotten place reminiscent of the underside of a freeway overpass. Mold grew from the crumbling ceiling, fallen chunks of which crunched underfoot as I entered the cavernous space.

  I stopped and listened for any sound to betray Dray’s location, but heard nothing over the drone of flies and the hollow echo of dripping water. At least a dozen doors interrupted the opposite side of the arcade, each framing a rectangle of darkness so deep as to appear fathomless. All of them led to the main concourse on the other side of the brick wall and were equally alive with swarms of flies.

  I knew what waited for me on the other side and wanted nothing more than to turn around and let Aragon and her people handle this, but I owed it to Dray to play this one out as he’d intended.

  Just the two of us.

  I was about to go through the closest doorway when I caught a flash of color from the corner of my eye. I turned to see that one of the fifty-foot-tall arches had been painted with flames that stretched all the way up to the ceiling. Skulls adorned the walls to either side. Even from a distance I could tell they weren’t human, yet I didn’t find that fact remotely reassuring. Their snouts were long and pointed and filled with teeth readily identifiable as belonging to cats and dogs. There had to be fifty of them, all staring at me through hollow sockets that seemed somehow sentient. The bones were spattered with the same paint as the flames. It clung in dried droplets to the undersides of their jaws and the tips of their teeth.

  I realized with a start that it wasn’t paint at all, but rather a copious amount of blood flung at the wall with considerable force to create the pattern.

  The threshold had the same overall effect as Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, which, in a way, was exactly what this was. This was the gateway to Dray’s hell, a place of suffering of his own design.

  That was where he would be. Just on the other side of this horrible orifice, waiting for me to pass through.

  I swallowed hard and looked as far as the red light would allow, past the flies and into the impregnable darkness.

  With my heartbeat thundering in my ears, I took my first steps toward oblivion, knowing with complete and utter certainty that there was no turning back now.

  TWENTY -SEVEN

  I felt the gentle flow of air against my face as I advanced. The temperature dropped several degrees, causing the hackles to rise on the backs of my arms and neck. The darkness brightened so subtly that I didn’t recognize it until I entered the concourse and saw the hint of the night sky through the gaps where the skylights had once been. The bare steel girders and peaked roof framed a space like a giant attic above a room as wide as an ice rink and as long as a football field, its walls and doorways and interior windows defined by the slightest hint of moonlight. There was a stack of gas tanks against the wall to my left, rusted and partially concealed by an old tarp. The graffiti on the walls was ill defined and spectral, much like the shapes strewn across the floor.

  Human shapes.

  Flies buzzed around them, alternately alighting upon and taking flight from the filthy clothing and exposed skin. I knelt over the closest one and surveyed the room around me before looking down at the corpse. It wasn’t like those from the previous murders. The body wasn’t blue-eyed or blond-haired. Neither was it white or female. The black man lay on his stomach, his left arm stretched out above his head, his right leg flexed. The back of his jacket was discolored by blood and torn where the bullets had caught him high up between his shoulder blades. Flies crawled in his nose and ears, along his tattooed neck. His face was swollen and purple, but his eyes had yet to completely lose their luster. He couldn’t have been dead for very long. Long enough for the blood to dry and the smell to summon the flies, but not long enough for them to lay eggs in his remains. A day. Maybe two.

  I stood and turned in a circle, shining my light all around me, my blood rushing in my ears. The beam only went so far, and yet I counted at least eight more bodies in that thirty-foot radius. All of them sprawled on the ground. Some on their sides. Most on their chests. There were tattered, rumpled blankets on the floor. Sections of cardboard. Newspapers and trash. A scattering of charcoaled wood and debris around a carbon-scored starburst. Crumpled Mountain Crest beer cans and cigarette butts. Brass casings that reflected the red light.

  And I understood what had happened.

  These people had been in here when he arrived. In this awful place. For whatever reason. They’d run…but not fast enough.

  I did my best not to envision Dray walking into the concourse and coldly shooting them in the back as they desperately took flight.

  Their clothes were new and expensive. They wore their jeans cinched around their thighs. Some baggy, others tight. Massive sneakers. Brown work boots. Black T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts. Flat-brimmed ball caps. Hair in braids and dreadlocks. Every inch of exposed skin was tattooed. Not one of them could have been older than twenty-two at the most. Little more than kids.

  They were the inevitable consequence of the marriage of abject poverty and hopelessness. They were predators who preyed upon the weak and unsuspecting. They were the bane of a policeman’s existence, the petty criminals who ter
rorized neighborhoods once filled with the laughter of children and now crackled with arsonists’ flames. They were the reason the city’s population continued to fall and the economy seemingly worsened by the day, and yet they were only a symptom of the disease, a product of the contagion that had taken root long before their birth. This city had made them in its image, perpetuating a self-fulfilling prophecy of violence and decay that could end in only one way, and that was with everything going up in flames.

  I could positively feel Dray’s pain. They were the living embodiment of the city to which he’d devoted his life, and in the end, it had taken everything he had. No matter how many cases he solved or how many killers he put behind bars, there were always more ready and willing to take their place. So many that the prisons were forced to adopt a revolving door policy that locked them up among monsters and put them right back out on the streets, worse than they were before. I can’t imagine how demoralizing it must have been, to seek justice for victims and their families, only to find that there could be none. That the rest of the state, the rest of the country for that matter, turned a blind eye to the horrors consuming this once great city. And why? Because the bottom line was that no one cared about black people killing black people. It wasn’t news; it was background noise.

  But he could leave all of that evil behind when he went home. Close the doors and lock them against the reality he left behind when he punched out. Until his sanctuary was violated and his entire existence fell apart. Worse, no one seemed to care. Not the papers. Not the news. Not even his best friend since he was a kid.

  “I know you’re here.”

  My voice emerged as little more than a whisper. The acoustics amplified it and twisted it into a voice I hardly recognized as my own.

  I walked slowly through the maze of bodies. My footsteps made a sound like peeling tape on the filthy ground, now sticky with blood that was nearly invisible in the red light. The top layer of the spatters and pools was dry and crusted, the underneath just damp enough to come away on the tread of my shoes. I scrutinized the farthest extent of my beam for any sign of movement, but probably wouldn’t have been able to separate it from the shadows cast by the swirling flies. It was all I could do to ignore them as they buzzed around my head and alighted brazenly on my bare skin.

  I detoured around the body of a man in a hooded sweatshirt, his entire back discolored by a giant bloodstain. There was a hole at the base of the hood, where the bullet must have taken him through the neck or the base of the skull. His arms were crumpled under his chest, his legs sprawled out in such a way that the toes of his work boots touched.

  “It’s just you and me, Dray.”

  My voice seemed to come from all around me at once. In its heyday, the ruckus of voices and train whistles inside this concourse must have been as disorienting as it was deafening.

  I stepped over the body of a kid who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and yet tattoos crawled up his neck and over the line of his jaw. In life they might have made him look dangerous; in death, contrasted by his pallid skin, they made him look even younger than he probably was, like a child dressing in his father’s clothes and pretending to be an adult. Only rather than going off to work at the assembly plants, these kids terrorized their own neighborhoods and were responsible for seemingly indiscriminate killings and the tragedies the media lumped under the more palatable heading of collateral damage and filed away in the back of the local section. These were the people you crossed the street to avoid and with whom you didn’t dare make eye contact. They represented the fall of the city and its abandonment of hope. And, in the end, they embodied the element that had robbed Dray of his wife.

  This might have been his hell, but, in a very real way, it was mine, as well.

  “Talk to me, Dray. You think I don’t understand?”

  My voice echoed away into the darkness. The water continued to leak through the rotting roof with a metronomic plink…plink…

  I held completely still and listened for the sound of breathing other than my own, any sound to betray his location. There was no doubt in my mind that he was in here with me, and yet I couldn’t wrap my mind around why he wasn’t talking to me. Why summon me here otherwise?

  I moved slowly toward the far side of the room. My feet continued to make a crackling sound on the tacky blood.

  Shrick…shrick…

  The central doorway in the rear wall was larger than all of the others and at the back of a deep recess once barred by an iron gate the ticket-taker would roll back when the time came to board. The gate was long gone and the doorway was filled with darkness so thick my light couldn’t penetrate it from a distance. Beyond it lay the ramp leading underground beneath the rails and to the stairways to either side that ascended to the platforms, which they razed years ago.

  Again, the doorway was framed with the skulls of animals, their teeth bared and their bones spattered with blood. Only rather than flames, the walls were positively covered with a curtain of dried blood, like rain on a windowpane. The sheer volume was stunning. It looked like someone had hurled buckets of it above and to either side of the doorway, where it ran down the bricks and to the ground. The pool at the base of the walls and across the threshold glistened in the red light.

  This was what he’d done with all of their blood.

  It was his invocation to Hecate.

  I approached slowly, conscious of the fact that I was walking into a bottleneck with the entirety of the dark concourse at my back.

  “Dray!” I called through the doorway. The echo carried away from me beneath the ground.

  I risked another step closer.

  “It doesn’t have to end like this. You and me. We can work this thing out.”

  The air seeping from the underground was markedly cooler and smelled of mildew and damp earth, which was vastly preferable to the stench of rot in the concourse and chilled the sweat trickling down my back.

  “Talk to me, damn it!” I shouted.

  My voice reverberated like a clap of thunder and died a silent death beneath the grating plink…plink…

  My heart rate accelerated. I clenched my trembling free hand into a fist. Why wasn’t he answering me? Something was wrong with the way this was playing out, something that made every muscle in my body tighten and each breath sound like I was shivering.

  I walked to the edge of the pool of blood. In the crimson light it looked as innocuous as a puddle of rainwater.

  That was exactly how I tried to think of it as I took my first step into it and passed through the doorway beneath the watchful animal skulls and entered darkness as cold and silent as a tomb.

  TWENTY -EIGHT

  Sparkling gravel was all that remained of the marble once lining the ramp. Rivulets of blood ran down the rust-stained concrete only so far before gravity conceded to the process of drying. My footsteps echoed away from me.

  Shrick…shrick…

  I could barely see the bottom of the ramp, where my light reflected from standing water. Ahead of me, the sound of dripping. Louder.

  Plink…plink…

  My heart jackhammered. My pulse rushed in my ears. My breathing, fast, agonal.

  Shrick…shrick…

  Rusted pipes stood from the water at odd angles from islands of concrete and moldering plaster that fell from the roof. I saw the paired wheels of an abandoned baby stroller, rusted orange and flaking. Four buckets rested on their sides, partially filled with the reeking water, their rims crusted with dried blood. They were the metaphorical bowls from The Aeneid in which he caught the blood from his victims’ throats, which he had used in his own twisted way to invoke protection from the gods on his journey into his own hell.

  Plink…plink…

  I tried to call out for Dray, but no voice formed. My mouth was dry. Too dry to swallow.

  Shrick…shrick…

  I stopped. Stared at the reflection of my light on the still water, like the sunset on a lake of blood.

  A thoug
ht eluded me. Something my mind cried out for me to pin down. All of my survival instincts screamed like raw, exposed nerves beneath the passage of a sharp blade.

  I lifted my left foot.

  Slowly.

  Shrick…

  Looked at the print where it had been. The faded, partial impression of the tread of my shoe. Nearly indistinguishable from the rust-stained concrete.

  Behind me.

  The partials leading down toward me from the blood in the doorway faded with each step I took.

  Ahead of me.

  There was nothing on the ground but the marble detritus and rotten debris.

  I clicked on the white lens and washed out the ground. The reflection from the water illuminated concrete walls plastered with graffiti and ribbons of rust. Shadows appeared where none had been before.

  Plink…plink…

  I shined the light on the ramp. The rocks and rubble cast long shadows down concrete bereft of any footprints like the ones I had just made. I shined the beam back up the ramp behind me, then hurriedly shut it off before my eyes acclimated to the light.

  In the utter darkness, I pored over the mental image of what I had just seen, as though it were a photograph already beginning to deteriorate. My tracks were darker, thicker nearer the top of the ramp, only that wasn’t what set off alarm bells in my head.

  It was the fact that mine were the only tracks leading down here.

  Plink…plink…

  I turned the dial on my flashlight lens before clicking it on again. I couldn’t afford to sacrifice what little night vision I had. The blue light made the blood and footprints turn black. They stood out like beacons from the ground, while the green beam did little more than highlight the contours of the walls. I recalled the advertisement for the tactical light I’d uploaded to my site. It featured DIAL—diode illumination adjustable lens—technology, which meant it allowed the user to dial in the best color for any situation. White for general use, red for preserving night vision, green for reading maps, and blue for identifying fluids.