Her car keys were still attached to it.

19.

Only when Sarah was once again back in the main lobby, with tortuous slowness, did her eyes began to adjust. Somewhere not far away, she realized, light was trickling into the darkness. The darkness devoured it hungrily but not entirely, leaving a faint haze of thirdhand illumination she could see only because of the black totality surrounding it.

She carried her son toward the waning ghost of late evening light. In the ER waiting room the last threads of the twilight were trickling between the cracks of the boards nailed over the windows. She could just make out the first set of doors leading to the ER exit.

Though her arms were starting to get tired from carrying Eli, she held him even closer as she approached the door and pushed on it. It didn’t move. She pushed again. Locked.

But that’s impossible. If it’s locked…if there’s no way out…

She thought of the jingling keys she’d heard earlier. Whoever it was had locked them in. She knew who it was, but couldn’t bring herself to think his name.

Around her the room turned black.

Eli squirmed in her arms, wiggling one hand down into her purse. A moment later she saw something flickering between his fingers. Its faint glow felt somehow vast and powerful. Sarah stared at it.

“Honey, what is that?”

“The Express,” he said. “It will help us find Daddy.”

“Can I see it?”

He handed over the little toy train with the miniature lightbulb, willing as always to share his toys with any adult who showed the slightest interest. She held the Express out, peering through its tiny brightness. She thought of downstairs, car keys no use to her now if they were locked in, but—

What about her cell phone? She groped in her purse but couldn’t find it. Had she left that downstairs, too? The cell reception from the hospital was notoriously terrible, but she had to try. She didn’t have a choice.

The man who had locked them in had gone the other way, away from the doorway through which he’d come. Hiding behind the information desk with Eli, listening to the diminishing sound of the keys, Sarah had as much as heard it as seen it. She’d seen it with her ears.

“Where are we going, Mommy?”

“Back down.” She drew in a breath, feeling her resolve strengthen. “So we can call for help.”

20.

Fists throbbing, out of breath, Steve Calhoun took a single uncertain step backward through the ER waiting room, the lines on his face etched by the cigarette glowing from his lips. He paused to look down at his scraped knuckles but could only make out a pair of pale blobs, blobs that should’ve been holding his keys.

Clumsy. Stupid. Just like your father.

After concealing himself in a supply closet on one of the upper floors, hoping that Snow would just get his freakish escape over with and flee the hospital so that life could go back to normal, Calhoun had finally decided that it was time to leave his hiding place when the power went out. Coming down and finding the ER entrance locked, he had spent the last ten minutes pounding on the plywood sheets that the workmen had nailed over the windows. At first it had seemed like an easy enough thing to knock the plywood loose—it was, after all, only plywood—but that didn’t turn out to be the case. He’d tried kicking, punching, and ramming his shoulder into it, and it didn’t budge. Now he was considering picking up some heavy object, one of the end tables full of magazines, maybe, or a wheelchair, and throwing it through. Even if it didn’t work, throwing something would feel damn good.