5. Good Bones… Bad Situation - Finn
Five
Good Bones… Bad Situation - Finn
Well… this is a shitshow.
The thought echoed in my head as I dragged the old metal toolbox across the basement floor.
The basement smelled of 140 years of Boston winters. The foundation walls were thick and uneven, patched by different hands across different decades. Copper pipes rattled overhead every time someone moved upstairs.
Solid construction, though. Built before contractors started cutting corners—before hollow-core doors and the shortcuts that made modern houses look pretty and fall apart fast.
Good bones.
I’d take that right now.
Libby hovered a few feet behind me, her fingers working the cuff of her cardigan.
She was a little shorter than Fiona—five-four, maybe five-five—with a soft, rounded build that settled at the hips and midsection the way a house settles into its foundation.
Her oatmeal-colored cardigan, pilled raw at the elbows, a loose thread dangling from the left cuff she kept worrying between her fingers, stretched slightly across her stomach and hung off her shoulders like it had given up trying to fit her years ago.
Dark hair, pulled back into a bun that had mostly lost the argument with gravity, with whole sections coming loose, gray-streaked wisps plastered to the damp skin at her temples and the nape of her neck.
No makeup. The circles under her eyes weren’t today’s; they had a settled, sunken quality that had moved in permanently, an exhaustion that stopped being acute and became chronic.
Frumpy.
That’s the word my brain supplied. I let it sit there for a second and felt vaguely like an asshole about it.
Not wrong—simply an observation that said as much about me as it did about her.
She looked like a woman who’d stopped thinking about how she presented to the world somewhere around the time she’d started raising a teenager alone and holding everything together with both hands and no help.
There was something almost stubborn about it, as if she’d decided, consciously or not, and stuck to it.
I didn’t know if I respected that, or if it made me sad.
My mind wandered while I worked.
Not my type. The thought, laced with its usual confidence, simply sat there, doing less work than it normally did.
I’d always gone for women who seemed like they were running late to something more important.
Libby was softer, older, a decade-plus ahead of me at minimum.
A woman I would have clocked and moved past without a second thought on any other day, in any other version of the world that had existed even two days ago.
But her eyes.
She looked at me directly—a bright, vivid green that didn’t quite fit the picture I’d already assembled.
I met her gaze for half a beat, watching her sort through the toolbox, before looking away.
I looked back. Her eyes noticed everything but gave nothing away.
I wasn’t sure if that was kindness or simply a long-ingrained habit—the difference, I’d learned, was harder to spot than most people admitted. I returned to the toolbox.
“You sure that’s the right box?” she asked, her voice tight with nervous energy.
“It’ll do.”
I popped the lid. Inside were decent tools: a hammer with good weight, a handsaw that still held its teeth, framing nails, and a screwdriver with a handle worn smooth from honest use. Her husband knew what he was doing.
A few pieces of scrap pine leaned against the wall. I pulled them free, one by one, checked for rot, and stacked the usable ones on the workbench.
Then I spotted them: two eight-foot two-by-fours, tucked behind a forgotten tarp. Leftover from some long-abandoned project. Pale wood. Warped, but they would work.
“Score,” I muttered.
“What?” Libby asked, stepping closer.
“Nothing. Just got lucky.”
I grabbed both boards and carried them to the cellar doors. Old double doors, set at a forty-five-degree angle against the foundation wall, opened out to a concrete stairwell. An entry point someone with no survival instinct would find.
I measured the span by eye, positioned the first two-by-four horizontally across both doors, and braced it against the frame.
The first hammer strike cracked through the basement like a gunshot.
Bang!
I winced. The sound bounced off the stone walls, amplified by the enclosed space, and rolled upward through the floor joists into the house above.
Everything went quiet upstairs.
No footsteps. No voices. No movement.
Everyone was listening. Everyone was holding their breath, waiting to find out if that sound would bring scratching at the walls.
I held still. Head tilted. Ears straining.
Five seconds.
Ten.
Nothing from outside. Just the faint creak of old wood settling, the distant bleed of sirens, and once a sound that stopped before it finished.
“Keep going,” I murmured.
I drove the remaining nails in fast. Short, controlled strikes—still too loud in the confined space, but speed mattered more than stealth now.
The second two-by-four went up below the first. Four nails at each end, sunk deep into the door frame’s timber.
I stepped back and tested the brace with both hands. Pushed hard.
The doors flexed a quarter inch and stopped dead.
Solid.
Someone would have to splinter the wood before the bracing gave. That bought time.
Next—the basement window.
Narrow. Maybe fourteen inches wide, eighteen tall. A rectangle of dirty glass; gray daylight from the alley above. Too small for a grown man.
A determined corpse would fold itself through that gap without a sound.
I grabbed a scrap board and drove the nails in fast.
BANG… BANG… BANG.
Each hit punched through the silence, echoing off stone walls. I drove the last nail flush and stood, hammer still in hand, not quite ready to put it down.
The board swallowed the window, and daylight vanished. The basement dropped a shade darker, the single bulb overhead working harder to fill the space.
Cellar doors braced. Windows sealed.
A small, cautious thread of relief wound through my chest.
Good bones, after all.
I set the hammer on the workbench and wiped my forehead with my forearm.
The kitchen door still needed reinforcing. Seven windows. The dresser.
Hours of work yet. All of it in silence.
I pocketed the nails and headed for the stairs.
Above me, the floorboards muffled a question from Lily, her voice small and uncertain. The specific words were lost, swallowed by the old wood.
But Libby’s response came through—muffled, steady, warm despite everything.
“We’re going to be okay, baby.”
I paused on the bottom step.
She didn’t know that. Couldn’t know that. Had absolutely no evidence to support it.
She said it anyway.
Because that’s what mothers did. They absorbed the worst of it so that no one else had to.
* * *
Two hours later, my arms hung heavy, shoulders burning. Moving quietly cost three times the energy of moving fast, and the debt had come due.
But the house stood as secure as I could make it.
The back door was braced. Every ground-floor window was boarded from the inside, and second-floor alley windows were sealed.
From the street, the brownstone would look dark and abandoned—the same as every other house nobody had come home to.
With luck, whatever moved through the city after nightfall would keep moving.
I leaned against the kitchen counter, working my hands open and closed, trying to push the stiffness out of my fingers.
Hunger had gone past discomfort and curdled into what resembled irritation—or maybe that was just easier to call it.
The last real meal had been dinner with Fiona the night before.
The afternoon’s golden light had begun to fade. Shadows pooled in the kitchen corners. Outside, the city had gone completely quiet.
Darkness was coming fast. And darkness meant trouble.
I moved to the doorway and looked into the living room.
The three of them sat scattered across the space—Fiona on the edge of the couch, Libby rigid in the armchair, Lily on the rug with her eyes fixed somewhere past the middle of the room.
Nobody spoke. Lily’s fingers worked at the hem of her sleeve in a slow, repetitive pull—the same motion her mother made with her cardigan cuff.
“We need to move rooms,” I said, keeping my voice just above a murmur.
Three heads turned.
“Why?” Lily asked. Her voice came out smaller than she probably intended.
“It’s getting dark.” I nodded toward the boarded-up windows. “If we use lights in here, the gaps in the boards will act like beacons. We need a windowless room, or one we can black out completely.”
Libby straightened slightly. A long pause—longer than the question seemed to warrant—then her words came out careful and measured, as if she’d weighed each one.
“There is one. My husband’s old study. Back of the second floor, hasn’t been touched in years.”
She stopped, and the room held the silence around her.
“You don’t use it?” I asked.
“No.”
Her eyes dropped to her hands. Her mouth opened, then pressed into a thin line. For a second, the skin around her eyes tightened, a flicker of old pain, and then her jaw set. By the time she looked back up at me, the mask was back in place.
“We’re going to need it tonight,” I said quietly.
She swallowed and nodded. “I understand.” The words resigned, like a door she’d spent years keeping closed had just run out of reasons to stay shut.
“We kill every light,” I continued. “Stay quiet, stay together. Nobody moves through the house alone.”
Fiona nodded once. Lily pulled her knees tighter to her chest but didn’t argue.
Libby pushed herself upright from the armchair. She smoothed the front of her cardigan once, then again. Her hands dropped to her sides, and her gaze went to the doorway for a moment before she looked at any of us. “Follow me.”
We moved upstairs in single file. The house creaked way too loudly. At the top, Libby led us down a short hallway and stopped at a door at the far end.
Her hand closed around the knob and stayed there.
The pause stretched. Her shoulders locked, her spine went rigid. Her thumb moved once across the brass of the knob—slow, almost unconscious—the way you’d touch something you already knew by heart.
Then she turned the knob and pushed the door open.
The study inside sat completely undisturbed.
No windows. Floor-to-ceiling shelves held old books and medical journals stacked in boxes.
A faded rug, a heavy desk, the chair tucked in so precisely it looked like someone had stepped away five minutes ago and expected to return.
The air held the stillness of a room that hadn’t been breathed in for a very long time.
“This works,” I murmured.
I reached past Libby and switched off the hallway light. Darkness settled over all of us. As my eyes adjusted, I looked at her.
Her face had drained of color, going beyond the baseline exhaustion I’d already noted, into something raw.
Her green eyes, vivid even in the gloom, focused on a place the dead outside couldn’t touch.
It was as if watching a ghost stare at its own grave, and whatever put her there wasn’t finished with her yet.
Libby slipped away to gather bedding. Lily went further into the room looking at the shelves. I waited until both were out of earshot, then turned to Fiona and dropped my voice to a whisper, barely moving the air between us.
“What am I missing?”
Fiona watched the empty hallway for a moment before answering.
“Not really my story to tell,” she whispered back.
I didn’t push. Instead, I looked at the study: the desk with the chair tucked in just so, the shelves undisturbed for what must have been years, the door Libby had stood outside with her hand on the knob, her whole body braced as if she expected it to hit back.
I let out a slow breath.
It didn’t need to be her story tonight, anyway.