Chapter 14 #2
"And she walked past me," he said. "Straight past. I was standing right where I'm standing now with the .45 in my hands and I shouted at her, and she did not turn her head. She did not look at me. She walked the length of this room and she went to the back wall."
He pointed.
"And she stood in front of that stairwell door," he said, "and she put her hands flat on it. And she stayed like that for about two hours."
Liam's blood went to ice.
"Doing what?"
"Nothing." Marcus's voice was very small. "She stood there with her hands on a locked door and she did not move, and I stood twenty feet behind her with a pistol pointed at her back for two hours and I could not make myself say a word."
"Why not?"
"Because she was talking," Marcus said.
"To who?"
"To the door," Marcus said.
Nobody breathed.
"And then?" Liam said.
"And then she went back out," Marcus said.
"Out through the corridor. And I thought she'd gone. And an hour later I found the outer door propped open with a boot and her pack laid out on the floor with everything in it, and I have been sitting in here since with a loaded pistol waiting for whatever came next."
Liam turned and ran for the corridor.
"Liam!" Isaiah shouted.
"She's out there—"
"Liam, wait—"
"She's out there, Isaiah, she's been out there for eleven hours in a city full of—"
And Cully said, "No she isn't."
Liam stopped.
The boy was standing at the mouth of the corridor with a lantern in his hand, and his face was the color of ash, and he was looking at something on the floor.
Liam went to him.
And looked.
On the smooth concrete of the corridor floor, in the hard white light, running the whole length of it from the outer door to the inner one, was a track.
It was mud.
It was black cove mud, the same mud Liam had knelt in under the willows, and it had come in on the soles of a pair of boots and dried in a long double line down the corridor.
Two lines. Going in.
And two lines going back out.
And then, thirty feet from the outer door, the outgoing lines stopped.
They stopped in the middle of the corridor, in the middle of a clean concrete floor, with nothing around them.
And beside them, at the exact place where they stopped, was one boot print, and then another, and then another, going back the way she had come, and they were bare.
She had taken off her boots.
"She never left," Cully whispered. "Liam. She never left. She walked back down here and she took her boots off in the middle of the corridor and she went back in."
Liam turned around.
He looked down two hundred feet of white corridor, through the inner door, across a room full of racks and vials and a humming gray cabinet, at the stairwell in the back wall with the red light on it.
And standing at the top of that stairwell, with her back to them, with her hands flat against the steel, barefoot, in a torn shirt with a wound in her side, was Chloe Buck.
She had been there the entire time.
She was six feet from where Marcus Vance had been standing, and none of them had seen her, because she was behind the great gray battery cabinet, in its shadow, in the only place in that entire white room where the light did not reach.
Liam could not move.
"Chloe," he said.
She did not turn around.
"Chloe."
Nothing.
Marcus Vance made a small strangled noise and backed into a rack of vials, and glass rattled, and James Wilford took his Bible out from under his arm and held it against his chest with both hands like a man holding a shield.
Liam walked toward her.
"Liam, don't," Isaiah said.
"Stay there."
"Liam—"
"Stay there, Isaiah."
He crossed that room one step at a time with his hand nowhere near the Beretta, and he stopped ten feet behind her, and he stood in the white light and looked at his friend's back.
Her feet were bleeding.
She had been standing on cold concrete with no boots for eleven hours and the soles of her feet were split and there was blood on the floor around them, dried, in the shape of two feet.
She had not moved.
"Chloe," he said. "It's Liam."
"I know," Chloe said.
Her voice was perfectly normal.
It was so perfectly normal that Liam's knees nearly went.
"Turn around," he said.
"I can't."
"Chloe, turn around and look at me."
"I can't," she said, and her voice cracked, and there was something underneath it now, something raw and terrified and very far away. "Liam, I've been standing here since four in the morning and I can't take my hands off this door."
Liam went cold to the bone.
"What?"
"I can't take my hands off the door." She was crying now.
He could hear it. "I got them off once. I got them off for eleven minutes and I ran and I put the map down and I wrote on it and I came back because I was coming back anyway, and I took my boots off because I could feel it deciding to leave without me and I thought if I, I thought—"
"Chloe—"
"It wants what's down there," Chloe said.
The whole room seemed to tilt.
"It's been standing here for eleven hours trying to open a door it can't open," she said, "and it is very, very patient, and it has been talking to me the entire time."
"About what?"
Chloe Buck laughed.
It was the worst sound Liam had ever heard.
"About you," she said.
And she took her hands off the door.
And she turned around.
And Liam Perry looked at his best friend's face and saw absolutely nothing behind her eyes at all.
"Hello, Liam," said the thing in the willows, in Chloe's voice, smiling with Chloe's mouth. "I've been so looking forward to this. Would you like to know what it's really been doing to your camp?"