I didn’t fully realize until this moment how very close to death I had been. “Yeah, I still want to do this.”

He nods. “Let’s see if ICU or NICU has power.”

“Nick-you?” I should have paid more attention when Mom talked about her workplace.

“Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.”

“Oh. That’s not depressing or anything. Actually, the last thing in the whole world I want to see right now is a whole ward full of . . .”

“Okay, let’s skip the NICU. We should try to find the generators. There might be leftover fuel drums we can hook up.”

As we head deeper into the wide, dark hallway, I say, “You know a lot about this.”

“My mom worked in a hospital.”

“Mine too. The heart hospital connected to this one, in fact.”

“I spent more time at Riverside than I should have.” His echoing voice makes the hallway sound cavernous. I look around nervously, but I resist the urge to shush him. “Momma made me and my sister volunteer after school,” he continues. “While she was paying off school loans. Cheaper than childcare. Each shift got us a free meal in the cafeteria.”

A dead woman lies sprawled in the hallway, and we carefully step over her legs. The floor beneath my boots is slippery. A lump beside her resolves into a dead crow as my flashlight sweeps across it.

I’m relieved when our path begins to brighten, thanks to a skylight down the hallway. I ask, “How did you find time for—”

Emmaline growls, a split second before something clatters, echoing down the hallway toward us.

Trey reaches out with the tire iron to block my path.

“Could be animals,” I whisper. “Dogs or birds.”

He doesn’t budge. We stand still as statues, listening.

Footsteps approach. A slow, heavy one-two, one-two.

Trey yanks me into a dark side hallway and ducks down. I crouch beside him, my arm around Emmaline. I’m not sure why we’re hiding, but when he flicks off his flashlight, I do the same.

I didn’t get a good look at our surroundings as we dashed into the cover of darkness, except to notice a gurney across from us with a vague child-sized lump under a hospital blanket. And as we crouch here, the unmistakable scents of old urine and decomposition prick at my nose. Emmaline huffs, then starts to sniff in earnest. She’s not interested in the corpse, though. Instead, her whole body is rigid, keyed in the direction of the footsteps. I tighten my arm around her neck.

Our dark hallway begins to glow.

It’s subtle. Soft. Blue-white. Not like a flashlight beam at all. As the footsteps get closer, the glow brightens.

Emmaline jerks forward under my arm. I ruffle her fur to calm her, but she whines.