December Park(152)

Up ahead, Adrian’s flashlight dipped out of view once again.

I ran my light along the floor, spotlighting his footprints in the inch-thick soot. “Adrian!”

Something moved under the floor.

My body seized up like an old lawn mower engine. I heard my friends’ feet scuff to a stop behind me. I let my flashlight’s cone of light hang in the air, illuminating clouds of dust that roiled slowly like the eyes of hurricanes.

“That’s just the building creaking,” Peter whispered. “There’s no one beneath us. This place makes the noises sound like they’re coming from different spots.”

“Okay,” I managed, though, at the moment, I wasn’t sure what I believed.

Michael and Scott sidestepped ruptured potholes in the concrete floor. Michael nearly lost his balance and grabbed one of the bowing struts for support. This was followed by a dry crack as the strut snapped in half, causing Michael to fall forward. Above, the unsupported side of the shelf pitched down like a slide, and the large, square items it had been holding began tumbling down.

“Scott!” Peter cried, his voice cracking.

Scott backed up against the wall as the items crashed down. The sound was like artillery fire. Bits of masonry cracked against the concrete floor. Metal rods tumbled down after them, hammering across the floor and striking Scott, who was covering his head and face with his arms. The rods were sharp and rusted, and they drew blood from Scott’s arms as they rebounded off him.

Peter and I rushed over to Scott, stepping over the metal rods as they rolled across the floor. We had to pry his arms away from his face. His eyes were squeezed shut.

“You could have been killed,” Peter breathed into his face.

Scott nodded.

I turned his lacerated arm up to examine it. His injuries looked superficial, but there were enough of them to cause me to wince. In my mind’s eye, I was still watching the slabs of masonry sliding down the shelf toward Scott’s head.

“I’m okay,” he said, gently tugging his wrist free of my grasp. “Just . . . just freaked out.”

Michael was facedown on the floor beneath the canted shelf, which had turned into a makeshift lean-to over him as it broke.

“Mikey,” I called, “you okay?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t look up and his voice was muffled.

Peter grabbed my wrist and turned me to face him. “We’re gonna get killed in here.”

At the far end of the room, Adrian’s flashlight crossed the open doorway only to disappear again.

I opened my mouth to shout at him, but I couldn’t find my voice. My tongue felt like a gym sock stuffed with sawdust. Instead, I started down the length of the room.

“Angie,” Peter called.

I held up one finger and continued walking.

This time, my friends did not follow.

When I entered the adjoining room, I walked through what felt like a web of string. It caught in my eyelashes and my hair. Swatting one hand out before me, I realized it wasn’t a web of string but a massive cloud of flies. They rebounded off my face and neck, thumped against the damp fabric of my T-shirt like pellets fired from a toy gun. The ones that got tangled in my hair bit my scalp. I shuddered and nearly dropped the flashlight when one blew into my mouth.

As I coughed and spat wads of phlegm onto the floor, Adrian coalesced beside me like a ghost through the murk. When I looked up, bleary-eyed and nauseated, his goofy trademark grin radiated in our flashlights’ beams. “Look,” he said, directing his light at an angle toward the ceiling.

I blinked and saw that we were in another large room, only this one had no windows. Stone columns ran from floor to ceiling at random intervals. Industrial chains hung from the rafters. I counted seven, and each one concluded in an angry iron hook. The chains were affixed to pulleys bolted to the beams, which would allow them to swing. They looked no different than the chains on the construction barges at the Shallows, and perhaps these had even been scavenged from them.

“They must weigh a thousand pounds each,” Adrian mused.

“Why are they here?”

“You know,” Adrian said, his voice adopting an overly casual tone that set me on edge. “Like at a slaughterhouse.”

Adrian repositioned his flashlight to illuminate a stack of sodden mattresses, the different color fabric resembling the alternating bands of minerals in a wall of stone, on the floor beneath the chains. There was mold growing on them, and even from this distance, I noticed massive black beetles creeping along the stinking mound. More flies choked the air, so many of them I could hear their miniature chain saw buzzing.

Adrian went over to the mattresses, then immediately pulled a face. “They stink.”

“No kidding.”

“Like, bad.”

I walked up beside him while small hard things thumped against my shins. I aimed my beam down and saw enormous striped crickets with legs like pistons catapulting off the floor. One the size of a silver dollar clung to my left kneecap. Repulsed, I swiped it off and actually heard it strike the floor.

The mattresses were stacked too high for us to see the top of the pile. The beetles scuttled away to avoid our flashlights.

Something caught Adrian’s eye, for he brought his face close to one mattress corner and inhaled. Even in the poor lighting, I saw the spores of mold filtering into his nostrils. Then he pinched the bottom corner of the mattress between two fingers— “Don’t do that,” I warned him.