“Daddy?”

Mike stiffened. From somewhere, unbelievable but unmistakable, came the voice of his son. Then, as if to confirm what his mind could not quite accept, he heard it again, louder:

“Mike?”

He sucked in a breath, gasped as if somebody had punched him hard in the gut. Then he turned, dropped the keys and cell phone, and ran. Eli’s cry was still ringing in his ears as he burst out into the hallway, the flashlight’s pale oval jigging and flying along the far wall like a bouncing ball in an old-time movie house sing-along. He supposed it was stupid, no, knew it was stupid, putting himself out in the open like this, but he couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to. When you trip, you fall down; when your son cries out from the darkness, you come running, because—

“Eli!” he bellowed, voice ringing hugely down the hall. “It’s daddy! Where are you?” He spun around, aimed the flashlight the other way. The hall was quiet now, empty. “Eli?”

At the far end of the corridor Mike saw a large soiled linen cart parked at the corner. It was one of the industrial-sized carts that normally held four hundred pounds of bagged sheets and towels: as big as a small garbage Dumpster, and Mike was fairly certain that it hadn’t been there earlier, when he’d talked to Dr. Walker by the coffee machine.

No, you’re positive it wasn’t, and you know it.

Worse, something about the way the linen cart sat there made it look as if someone had just pushed it around the corner a moment before his arrival. The flashlight beam reflected off a pool of something dripping through the bottom of the cart. Mike imagined he could hear the faint plip…plip…plip of droplets echoing through the long open hall.

What he didn’t have to imagine was the sound of his son’s voice. It was coming from inside the cart.

“Daddy? Mike?”

Mike started forward.

It wasn’t long before he could see things sticking up out of the top. One of those things was a human hand. Another was a foot with a shoe still attached to it. The shoe was brown and worn down at the heel. Now the dripping sound was not just in his imagination; he could hear it with agonizing clarity.

Plip…plip…plip.

There were four bodies stuffed into the cart. Mike saw blue uniforms, soaked black. Inside it the police officers were packed together, one upside-down, two mashed face-to-face, like some hideous cartoon parody of commuters on a rush-hour subway car. One of them, who looked like the big cop, Oz, stared out at him flat-eyed, mouth slightly agape.

Static burst from the radio clipped to the cop’s belt, and from the speaker, Mike heard his son’s voice blasting out at high volume: “Daddy …Mike…”

Mike grabbed the radio, pulled it free, and keyed the mic. “Eli, it’s Daddy. Can you hear me?”

“Daddy …Mike…”

“Where are you, honey?”

“…Mommy…Sarah Hughes…Daddy…”

Mike almost hit the “talk” button again and stopped, listening to Eli’s voice coming from the dead cop’s walkie-talkie.