Chapter 16

Obviously, I wasn’t going to let Jacob embark on this fool’s errand alone. “Hold on, I’m going with you. Just lemme grab a fresh battery.” I pried a couple out of the remote we’d found in the break room, hefted a fiberglass panel, and followed Jacob out the containment room door.

As we hustled down the hall, I considered suggesting we slow down. But since Jacob was capable of jogging in 90-degree Chicago weather (with a million-percent humidity) I plowed on ahead. We didn’t pause ’till we got to the janitorial closet with the false back…and Jacob grabbed a towel from one of the shelves to mop his sweaty brow.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked as he toweled the back of his neck.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m coming down with something.”

I pressed the backs of my fingers to his forehead, then checked mine for comparison. “Huh. You don’t feel all that hot.”

“I can’t tell if I’m too hot or too cold. I’ve never felt anything like it.”

Uh-oh. I sure hoped Big Boy Leonard wasn’t the only one having a heart attack. “We should sit down. Just for a couple of minutes.”

“We have to keep going.” Jacob considered what he’d just said, then amended it to, “I have to keep going.”

I reached for him again, but this time instead of checking his temperature, I cupped his jaw and encouraged him to look at me. “I get it, Jacob. Believe me, I do. You’re not the only one kicking yourself for leaving Clayton to fend for himself….”

I’d been about to add that the cannery was a safe place for him to be, but before I could finish my thought, Jacob said, “Then you understand why I need to do this,” shoved open the secret door, and went striding off down the long, dark hall to the exit.

The hall was narrow and the fiberglass slab I carried was ungainly. It smacked against the wall as I hurried along behind Jacob, flashlight beam bouncing around wildly, hoping to make him see reason. “What are you going to do once you get out of here?” I demanded. “You’ll have no car. It’s stuck in the lot. I guarantee no one’s going to let you flag them down for a ride. So, what then? You’re going to walk home? That would take a couple of hours even on a good day, let alone this crazy monsoon.”

But Jacob had his mind made up, and damn it, he was determined to see his ridiculous plan through. We banged along down the hall ’till the final doorway. Jacob set down one of his two panels and used the other to shove open the door. I supposed I should count myself lucky that he didn’t just bound out of there and leave me in the dust, but I was the one carrying the flashlight, and he let me catch up.

Good thing he did.

The stairwell looked the same as we’d left it—a couple of inches of water, stairs leading up, and a single frayed power cable hanging to one side, threatening to make repeaters out of both of us.

But something new greeted us this time: a single rat floating on its back. Very big. And very dead.

Better than a live one, no doubt. Yet the possibility that it had been electrocuted gave even Jacob pause about splashing through the puddle.

“Listen to me,” I said. “The situation sucks. Neither of us wants to be here. And we’re freaking out about leaving that poor kid to deal with this whole shit show on his own. But you know how you’d feel if anything happened to him? Think about how I would feel watching you charge off to the rescue and having you end up like Darnell.”

Jacob was very still, tracking the movements of the rat as it circled gently in the current of the seeping water.

Was he seriously still considering vaulting those stairs?

Fine. I’d bring out the big guns. “You think Clayton’s traumatized now? What if he found out you died trying to get to him?”

Even by the light of my trusty pocket flashlight, I could see Jacob blanch as he stepped back to let the emergency door swing shut. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get going. It’s a long walk back.”

“Wait. Let’s stay put—just for a minute.”

“I hope you’re not getting any bright ideas about rappelling up that stairwell with nothing but your car keys and a spool of dental floss.”

“No, nothing like that.” Jacob rolled his shoulders. “I’m just starting to feel a lot better now that I’m out of that stuffy room.”

And I was feeling a lot better without the constant peopling required of me in close proximity to a couple of opinionated strangers. I leaned back against the wall and slid down to sit on the floor, and Jacob came and sat beside me.

I looped an arm around him and pulled his head onto my shoulder. He did seem a lot less sweaty now. What a relief he was feeling better. “We are getting out of here,” I said. “We just need to make it through the wait.”

He settled more snugly against me. “First thing I’ll do when I get home is put Clayton in the car and drive him straight back up to Wisconsin.”

Normally I would have agreed. But was it really fair to the kid?

“Hold on now,” I said. “We don’t want his memory of his first overnight in Chicago to end like this, do we? We should at least get him a hot dog and let him show us his stupid video games. Besides, did it ever occur to you that Barbara had a reason for dropping him off—other than to prove a point?”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe she needed the house to herself for a few days because she wanted to hook up with a guy. And maybe she didn’t drop Clayton off at your parents’ because she didn’t want them asking any questions.”

“But Barb isn’t that good of an actor. She really was ticked at Clayton and trying to prove a point. Too bad, though. Maybe if there was a man in her life, she’d be a little less tightly wound.”

Or differently wound, at the very least.

I sure as hell was, now that I had Jacob. I wrapped my arm around his head so I could work my fingers through his thick hair and pull him even closer. Even at a goofy angle, we managed to fit together.

My other hand was on my knee, gripping the flashlight loosely. Jacob reached over and toyed with my wedding band—a habit he’s picked up this past year that secretly makes me unaccountably proud of myself.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “I know exactly how we can pay Barbara back. Doodlebug, or whatever his name was. What if Wisconsin was his forever home?”

I felt Jacob’s silent laugh against me. “That dog must be going nuts. Poor thing. I can’t imagine what this thunderstorm would sound like to him—probably the whole world coming to an end.”

While Jacob was displaying sympathy toward the dog, I noted that he didn’t suggest adopting it ourselves, for which I was profoundly grateful.

“What about you?” he asked. “What do you want to do when you get back?”

I considered the question.

When it came right down to it, my wants were pretty simple. Just the desire to be left alone, to my own devices, with the man I love…though I was serious about giving Clayton at least one decent Chicago memory to take back home with him. He’d been to Navy Pier plenty of times before, so that was out. Then, what—the Blue Man Group? If there were tickets to be had on such short notice. There’d been nonstop ads playing for a new escape room in Bucktown…but given the current situation I was in, could I even trust myself to find my way out of a cardboard box?

I was pondering if a trip to Chinatown would pass muster when Jacob jerked away from me with a sudden hiss. “Get up,” he said urgently.

Cripes—more rats? I swept my flashlight beam up and down the hallway as we scrambled to our feet. Nary a rodent to be found…but then I spotted something even worse: A puddle creeping out from beneath the emergency exit door.

“We’re well below the water table.” Jacob wiped a wet hand on his shorts. “And any pumps that keep the place dry would run on electricity.”

Which meant we might soon find ourselves ankle-deep in lightning-infested water.

I was so freaked out by the thought of having my subtle bodies zapped out of my physical shell by a fucking puddle that I forgot to be impressed by what a trooper my flashlight had been all this time. It didn’t start flickering again until we were within sight of containment.

“We’re taking on water,” I announced to Jibben as I slammed through the door. “That soaker-upper stuff you used on the saline—how much more do you have?”

“There’s a whole case of spill mats in the cupboard right behind you.”

Hopefully we wouldn’t need any of them at all, let alone an entire case, but better safe than sorry. I opened the cabinet and was greeted by a wall of unreadable boxes, and when I aimed my flashlight at the massive pile of cardboard, the beam started to flicker in earnest. We found the spill mats by the strobing beam, and Jacob got to work tearing open the box. Meanwhile, I paused to switch out the battery with the one from the remote.

Better.

For a few minutes, anyhow. Once we trooped back out into the hall and barricaded our position with gel pads, the damn thing was flickering again. Jibben didn’t need to tell me to conserve what was left of the battery. With a muttered curse, I hurried back to containment, flicked it off and stuck it in my pocket.

To say the others were looking a little worse for wear would be putting it mildly. Jibben’s leg was black and blue for the span of his entire thigh, and it was swollen about half as big again as the other one. He had one of those emergency cold packs pressed against the massive bruise now, but it seemed inadequately small.

Alisha, meanwhile, was huddled in the far corner, hugging her knees to her chest. Her eyes were so big I could practically see the whites all around. “How far along is that water?” she demanded.

“Nowhere in sight,” Jacob said in a calming voice. “We’re just taking precautions.”

“Well maybe you should take some more. Do you know how far underground we are? This place’ll fill up faster than a port-a-potty at a free kegger.”

Jibben said, “It’s statistically improbable that the flooding will last much longer. I’m sure repair crews are already on the scene. It just makes more sense to utilize what time, energy and resources we have to prepare for the worst than to sit here and do nothing.”

That probably would’ve sounded a lot more comforting, had his right eye not been winking like all get-out while he said it.

Like Alisha, I was none too keen to be stuck in a freaking basement, either. Especially knowing what else was lurking around down here. Two dead bodies: Darnell, relatively fresh. And Dr. Chance, long dead and frozen…hopefully not starting to thaw.

And those were just the ones I knew about.

I’d bet there was valium to be had somewhere in this underground warren. Not for me—I didn’t intend to give a stray habit demon anything to latch onto—but for Alisha. It was a stretch to think a spy from National had been lying in wait for months, moving boxes and sexting with Darnell while she counted down the days to infiltrate the building. And yet, I’d done my own share of spying—so, how sure could I be that she truly was a civilian, and not just a phenomenally dedicated spy?

I’d need to play it cautious with her. Just in case.

But if Alisha was nothing more than a random courier—she was having one hell of a shitty day.

“Help me with these boxes,” I told her, mostly to get her mind off the situation, but also because the clutter was starting to get to me. For every useful item we’d dredge up, it seemed like there were a dozen more entirely useless things to wade through. Hopefully, we wouldn’t be down here long enough to discover a use for dozens of boxes of rubber gloves and a bunch of old electronics manuals, and I was eager to get them back in the cupboards where they belonged.

I felt better once the cabinet was repacked and the room had some semblance of order. I’d moved on to straightening out the papers on the stainless steel work table when the light began to flicker.

Only it wasn’t my flashlight this time.

It was the emergency lantern.

“I don’t think so,” Alisha said, as if she could intimidate the light into behaving.

We all held our breath, hoping against all hope it was a fluke of some sort. It stayed steady for a moment…then flickered again.

Reluctantly, Jibben said, “We should turn it off and conserve power.”

“And sit here in the dark?” Alisha demanded—and given how she and I were on the same page about so many things, I really did hope she was just a regular person caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. “If a puddle creeps into the room, it won’t go announcing itself, now—will it?”

Jacob pulled out another gel pad and laid it across the threshold. I’d wager the seal on the door was tighter than the one around our shower, but why take chances?

As we all stared at the gel pad expectantly, the emergency lantern flickered again. “I thought that battery was supposed to last all night,” I said with no little annoyance.

Jibben gave a helpless shrug. “So it claimed on the box, but there’s no telling if a battery is defective until it’s put to the test.”

From here on out, I was never leaving the house again without a backup and a spare.

No one was happy about the plan to switch off the lantern, but if we didn’t do it voluntarily, battery drainage would take the decision out of our hands. So we pushed all the chairs toward the center of the room in case the seams around the walls began to seep, and we gave Jibben the go-ahead to cut the light.