He nudged the rat with the tip of his work boot, keeping his flashlight pointed at it. It was the third one he’d found since entering the hospital via the broken window in the ER waiting room. What had killed them all? Why were they down here in the first place? He was beginning to think Tanglewood hadn’t been much of a health-care facility even when it still had patients in it, six months earlier. No wonder the place had gone out of business.

Dave had been in a lot of old hospitals; it was his thing. His uncle Walt ran a salvage business outside of Harrisburg, and there was big money to be had in some of these old facilities, if you got there before the other scavengers did. Old equipment, tools, furniture, all of those things were good, but Dave knew if you could get to the pipes down in radiology, you’d struck the mother lode. And at twenty-six, Dave Kellogg was all about the mother lode.

He checked the photocopy of the plumbing schematic that a friend in the Lebanon County Assessor’s Office had made for him, and studied the distance from here to the basement. Once he got there, it was simply a matter of locating the right pipes. The ones that ran from the water main to the darkroom were the ones he wanted. In a hospital as old as this one those pipes would be lined with an inch-thick residue from decades of developing solutions used in X-rays. To the untrained eye that runoff would present itself as unremarkable black grime, but when Mike boiled those pipes at his uncle’s shop, he knew full well what he’d get: pound after pound of pure silver nitrate. Take that shit to auction and you’d walk away with some serious cheddar. Enough for a new car, better clothes, finer women, and the quality of life a guy like him deserved. Silver wasn’t everything, but it was a hell of a start.

Following the map, he started down the stairs. They were covered in grit and his boots made soft crunching sounds as he descended. Once he found what he was looking for, he’d go up and get the sledgehammer and wrenches out in the truck. No sense in—

He stopped and cocked his head, listening. Down at the bottom of the stairs, on the other side of the door, he’d heard something rustling. If it was a rat, he thought, it was a damned big one.

And if it wasn’t a rat…?