Cruel World(144)

He moved away from the entrance, watching the small window the entire time, waiting for movement to slide past it.

They closed in on the other set of doors. Just as he was about to swipe Roman’s card across the reader beside them, Ty paused, holding Denver back.

“Momma, I don’t like it here,” the boy whispered. Quinn and Alice turned to him. He looked so young in the dimly lit lobby, so small.

“I know you don’t, honey,” Alice said, shooting Quinn a look. There was something there and gone in her expression. Unease. He felt it too. The whole building gave off a chill as if the temperature had dropped below zero the moment they stepped through the doors. They shouldn’t be here.

Quinn faced the doors again and swiped the card.

The locks clicked open.

They pushed through the doors into a hallway twice the width of the first he’d seen. The same strange shadow grew on the ceilings and floors as well as the walls. At first he had the wild impression that roots from some gigantic tree had invaded the building, shoving tendrils further and further inside. The shapes were humped and irregular, their ends coming to rounded points, all heading toward the doors they entered through.

“What the hell is that?” Alice said.

“I don’t know.”

There were offices to either side, and at the very end of the corridor another door without a window waited. Quinn leaned into the first room to the right and slid his hand along the wall until it met a switch.

He flipped it up.

Light bloomed within the office, spreading part way down the hall.

Alice sucked in a breath.

The ‘roots’ were gnarled tangles of white growths, their surfaces pocked with spongy holes and sharp protrusions not unlike a coral reef. Quinn moved to the center of the hall and knelt beside a patch of the material. He reached out and was about to touch it when Alice spoke.

“Quinn, don’t.”

He glanced at her, standing in the office doorway, light outlining her as she clasped Ty to her side. He drew his hand back but leaned closer to the floor. The growth gave off a faint odor of decay, dry but still potent in a way that a rotting vegetable smells when forgotten in the rear of a pantry. He ran his gaze across the protrusion where it met other coils that joined and became a larger mass that disappeared through broken sheetrock and disturbed ceiling tiles. Its composition nudged something in his mind, almost coming into the light before drifting away. His eyes narrowed in concentration, and all at once recognition tightened every muscle in his body.

The substance on the floors, walls, and ceilings was bone.

He rose and stepped away from it, wiping the hand he’d almost touched the osseous growth with on his pants. Alice found his eyes, questioning him as he turned and shook his head. He looked around the large office. It was made to be a comfortable space, the walls a calming beige trimmed with browns and tans. An executive leather chair sat before a sprawling desk that held a touchscreen computer console mounted within the wood at an angle comfortable to anyone sitting in the chair. There were large cardboard boxes on the floor filled with white confetti that he soon recognized as shredded papers. When he opened the desk drawers, only empty space met him, files hanging limp and thin on their rails. The same went for the file cabinet in the corner of the room. Every paper in the office had been destroyed.

“There’s nothing here,” he said, sliding the last drawer shut. He moved to the computer screen, bringing it to life with a fingertip. Username and password bars appeared, a curser blinking in the first box. Quinn stared at the screen, his fingers hovering over letters. Slowly he curled his hands into fists, arms shaking.

“Let’s check the other office,” Alice said, guiding him away from the mocking screen.

The opposite room was smaller and less elegant but yielded the same results. Shredded paper was strewn across the floor in twisted and torn strips as if the person performing the task had been in an extreme hurry, treading amongst the fallen fragments. He tried the computer console in the smaller office and attempted every combination of letters and numbers he could think of that had any significance to his father. None of them worked.

He picked up a stapler and wound his arm back, ready to throw it through the glass of a painting hanging on the wall, but Alice grasped his wrist. Gently, she brought his hand down, and he loosened his grip on the stapler.

“There’s nothing here,” he said, shoulders going slack, his strength seeping away with his anger. “They scrubbed everything.”