In the dark Eli was right next to her, clutching her hand and holding the train dutifully up over his head to shed its faint illumination. The first room they entered was stacked with boxes, some wooden crates, some cardboard packing. Everything wore a thick, greasy layer of dust. There was an entire box of old telephones, their receivers tangled hopelessly in a snake pit of coiled cords. Another box held hundreds of pairs of old eyeglasses. A third, smaller box was full of tiny, putty-colored objects that she realized were hearing aids. Sarah lifted her gaze, and what she saw next brought a sharp squawk of fright to the very cusp of her lips. She yanked Eli up alongside her where she could cover him with both arms.

“Ow, Mommy, you’re hurting me! You’re—”

His voice broke off as he saw where she was looking. Hanging from hooks above the boxes was a row of small bodies. Their arms and legs dangled limply, heads angled toward the floor, eyes and mouths gaping open. White X’s had been painted broadly across their tiny breastbones.

She looked at the blank eyes, the open mouths. They were pediatric mannequins, she realized—dummies used to teach CPR. To their left, she made out the silhouettes of adult dummies suspended from hooks of their own, the figures masked in darkness.

Dull relief dropped into her stomach, and she breathed again, temples throbbing. She crossed the room to the door opposite her, where the radio crackling was louder still, and it occurred to her that Frank Snow might be in there with a police radio, that maybe he had taken it from McPhee. He would be standing in the darkness just beyond that door, waiting for her.

The tiny train light disappeared, Eli’s fingers slipping from her hand.

“Eli?” For the second time in as many minutes, fear found her throat and squeezed. “Eli? Where are you?”

Thirty seconds later, she heard his voice up ahead, near where the radio noise was coming from. And not just his voice. Someone was speaking to her son through the radio.

The train light floated ten feet in front of her. His small face appeared beside it like a half-moon. “It’s okay, Mommy. The door’s open.”

“Get back here.”

“But—”

“Now!” she ordered, panic making her voice harsher than necessary, and as the light bobbed dutifully toward her, the radio noise came with it. Eli was holding the walkie-talkie in his left hand, frowning at it.

“Where did you get that?”

“I found it through there,” he said, pointing through the open doorway. “I was trying to tell you—”

“Let me see it, please.” She took the radio, fumbling with the knobs. “And the Express, too.”

Eli handed it over with a sigh. Sarah squatted down so that she could wedge the walkie-talkie between her knees and hold the train light close by, freeing up her right hand to decipher the half-dozen knobs that sprouted alongside the rubberized antenna.