John said, “Holy shit. What are you doing here?”
I said, “John, back up…”
The little girl looked at me and said, “Don’t be scared.”
“Anna?”
She nodded.
John said, “You know her?”
“Don’t lower the gun, John.”
“Do you want to hold it? I’m not pointing a shotgun at a toddler.”
Anna said, “Why are there so many holes on that gun?”
I said, “What do you want?”
“I can take you to see Amy.”
“Is she here?”
Anna nodded, silently.
John and I exchanged a look.
Quietly, he said, “Okay, I admit she’s pretty creepy.”
I whispered, “Man, if this was a horror movie the audience would be screaming for us to get the fuck out of here.”
“Well, they’d be thinking it. They wouldn’t scream it unless they were bla—”
“She’s downstairs,” interrupted Anna. “Your dog is here, too. Get in.”
John said, “Uh, no. If we go down, we take the stairs.”
Anna shook her head. “There are no lights in the stairs. We should stay away from the dark.”
I swallowed and said, “Because of the shadow man.”
She nodded. John whispered, “Jesus Christ.”
To John, I said, “I’m gonna leave it up to you.”
He clearly had no idea. This was so obviously a trap. And we so obviously had nowhere else to go.
John asked Anna, “Where is she? What floor?”
“The second basement. Mr. Bear is down there, keeping a lookout.”
“Okay, and is Mr. Bear a—”
“It’s a stuffed bear,” I said, answering for her.
“Right.” John said to me, “We do it this way. You wait here. For two minutes. I’m taking the stairs. If there is something waiting for us, I’ll find out how it likes buckshot. Then you head down on the elevator and I’ll meet you there. Then if she, uh, attacks you, you only have to last for two floors. Against a toddler.”
Anna said, “I think we should all ride together.”
John was already heading to the stairs. I took a breath, steeled myself, and stepped into the elevator with Anna. I hovered my finger over the “B2” button, and counted to a hundred. I braced myself for the sound of shotgun blasts, or screams, or anything.
Nothing.
I hit the button.
The door closed.
Anna stood to my left, motionless, looking forward the way people do on elevators. The elevator rumbled and we were heading down, and down. A tiny, soft, warm hand curled around mine. I looked down at Anna and she smiled up at me.
We jolted to a stop.
The light went off.
The little fingers squeezed around mine. I slapped at the door and yelled, “JOHN! HEY!”
No answer. Anna’s hand squeezed tighter. Strong. Too strong.
I punched buttons on the panel. Nothing. I kicked at the door. I tried to pull my hand away from Anna’s grip and I couldn’t.
The fingers changed. I felt them melt under my grip, fusing together, becoming something like a snake or a tentacle—
* * *
The light blinked on. I wheeled on Anna and she was just a little girl with little girl hands.
She said, “The lights do that sometimes.”
I stared hard at her. Her eyes were the picture of innocence. The door opened, and John was there, aiming a shotgun at my face.
I said, “Don’t shoot. The, uh, light went off. We all clear here?”
“Yeah.”
Anna led the way out of the elevator, stopping to pick up a teddy bear that looked like it had been bought and sold in three different garage sales over twenty years. She clutched it and headed down the hall.
* * *
I recognized the corridor and the rust-pitted steel doors, and the smell of shit. I followed Anna and John followed me. He had the shotgun by his ear, aimed at the ceiling, trying to look in every direction at once.
We turned a corner, passing more doors. We reached the end of the hall and a bullet-riddled maintenance door that had been barricaded from this side, metal bars laid over it with fresh welds locking them in place. There were empty bags of cement and masonry tools scattered around the hall, and I wondered if on the other side of that door I would find a steam tunnel sealed with fresh brick and concrete.
Anna turned left, down another hall. Then it was through a doorway marked ANNEX, which opened to an impossibly long hallway that seemed too long for the building. We headed down, our footsteps echoing endlessly in both directions. The walls were covered with a faded mural, depicting huge, smiling faces that may have been clowns or mimes. Time and moisture had peeled the paint in patches, so that huge swaths of the colorful landscape were corroded and eaten away, the smiling inhabitants unaware that the very fabric of their world was crumbling. Graffiti artists had painted signatures and anarchy signs and cocks. Along the wall to my left, in huge letters, was the phrase:
THE END IS NOT NEAR
IT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED
WE JUST DIDN’T CARE
Anna looked back and me, and smiled. Invisible ants raced up my back.
I glanced back at John and saw on his face that he had already realized that what was up there, whatever it was, was not Amy. What was up there was bad news, and it was only a matter of how we would deal with it. We were not in control of the situation. We were never in control. The last of the working emergency lights was only halfway down the hall, and the light faded long before we reached the end. Our own echoes followed us down, and down, into the darkness. Anna slowed down and I once again felt the tiny, warm hand in mine. We walked together and at the end of the dark hall I could see a closed door, with light pouring from the bottom. Just like people describe in near-death experiences—the long passage with a door of light at the end.
“Amy is in there,” whispered Anna. And in that moment, I decided that this was probably right, but not in a literal way. Whatever was waiting behind that door was, almost certainly, the quickest way to see Amy. Or at least, to join her, if there is no such thing as seeing in that place.
We reached the door. Anna let go of my hand and said, “It’s locked. Only she can open it. Call for her.”
I said, “Amy?” but thought it was too soft for even Anna to hear. I cleared my throat and said it louder.
In that moment, I realized I was smelling something, a scent totally out of place in this rotting, forgotten building. A scent I had smelled a hundred times before, one that was sparking memories that triggered a wave of sadness.
I heard the latch turning on the door.
70 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
The smell was microwave popcorn.
The door opened and there was Amy, her handless left arm curled around said bag of popcorn. Her eyes got huge behind her glasses and then her arms were around me and we were crushing a popcorn bag between us. She was sobbing and pressing her face into my chest so hard her glasses had gone askew. I squeezed her and ran my hand through her hair and whispered to her that it was all right, that everything was all right.
I have no idea how long we stood there like that, or how long John and Anna stood there and waited. All I could think was how much I wished, for the second time, we could just freeze a moment and run credits over it.
John said, “Sorry that took so long. I had to ramp something.”
Amy pulled away and wiped her eyes and said, “Oh my God you won’t believe what I just did. I got hungry and I used a microwave to make this and it tripped a breaker that I guess runs out to the generator and if the computers had been on that same breaker we would have lost everything.”
She gathered herself and said to John, “I never doubted you.”
John said, “Now there’s a lie. But I don’t blame you.”
I said, “Shit, I’m still doubting him.”
Amy looked down at Anna and said, “You and Mr. Bear did good. We’re all here. Even Molly’s here.”
She was. Curled up on the floor, under a desk. Holy shit did that dog get around.
“How did she—”
I was talking to Amy’s back. She was scurrying across the room to a desk where she had set up no fewer than five computer monitors and three keyboards. There was a box of donuts and a pot of coffee going. It looked like she’d been working here for a week.
Amy said, “Okay, this setup looks ridiculous but I finally figured out they had different parts of the security set up on different workstations and there was no way to monitor them all without running back and forth across the room. I had to crawl around and reroute network cables and—anyway, all of the security robots around the quarantine are offline, they’re in maintenance mode and as far as I know they can’t be reset remotely, so that should be taken care of. The UAVs, the drone things, I think they’re okay. It’s—it’d take a long time to explain but I e-mailed a guy and got that taken care of. All that is the good news. The bad news is—wait, the good news is that I know how they’re blocking the cell phone signals, it’s not done through the provider level or anything, they have a jammer somewhere, probably outside of city limits, it’s a big thing called a warlock jammer, a TRJ-89, it sits on the back of a truck. The bad news is that I can’t shut it down from here. There’s an actual crew manning it, that’s why I think it’s outside of town because REPER pulled all of their staff out beyond city limits but they’re still manning the jammer because it’s really, really important that nobody in town be able to call out until they drop the bombs.”
Amy stuffed a handful of popcorn in her mouth.
I said, “Right, they’re going to bomb the quarantine at noon.”
She shook her head so hard that her hair went slapping around her cheeks.
Around a mouthful of chewed popcorn she said, “Huh uh. They’re going to bomb the whole town.”
1 Hour Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
John said, “Even that Cuban sandwich place?”