“What are we going to do?”

“We’re getting out of here.”

“What about…”

“It’ll be okay,” she said. “I promise.”

Eli nodded. That was enough, more than enough. She rose to her feet, lifting him onto her shoulder, holding the flashlight under her arm, and the love he felt for her at that moment was transcendent.

She carried him down one hallway into another, through a doorway that Eli realized was his daddy’s work area, MRI. His head began to feel impossibly heavy. He wanted to ask where they were going next, but the steady rocking motion of her gait was like a sedative lulling him to sleep. Right now all he wanted to do was rest in her arms.

In MRI, she picked up her car keys and her cell phone. She pushed a button on the phone. Beep. “Damn it,” she murmured.

“What’s the…” matter, Mommy, was what Eli intended to ask, but in the middle of the question, he fell asleep.

33.

Mike’s decision to return to the basement was brought on by the realization that it was the last place he’d heard his son’s voice; even if it was just through the police radio, it was still the only lead he had. Unspeakable things had transpired since then, but he couldn’t permit himself to think about those things. He had to go back down and look for Sarah and Eli.

He went down the stairs, shining the flashlight on the registration desk, listening to the tapping and creaking sounds of his feet on the linoleum. Going left would take him to shipping and receiving, past an entirely alternate wing of laundry and food service areas sprawling for what seemed like whole acres. To the right was MRI, CT, X-ray, where he’d been when he’d heard Eli through the walkie-talkie.

He started down the hallway again, keeping the flashlight low and wishing for the hundredth time there was a way he could use it without revealing his position. This was one of five long corridors running parallel to one another, conjoined by a honeycomb of smaller subspecialty offices, changing bays, and diagnostic suites with multiple entrances and exits. Limited to a dying flashlight, he was lucky to keep from driving his head into a wall.

He stopped, snapped the light off. There was the sound of something coming, metal dragging concrete, a rusty knife, or—

He chose his escape at random, jumping through the door and shutting it behind him. He made himself count to three hundred in the dark, extremely slowly. When he still didn’t hear any sound from the hall, he turned on the flashlight again.

The file room.

It was huge, occupying what felt like a full corner of the ground floor. On every wall, towering stacks of thousands of individual patient records waited for the transportation crews that would ship them to new facilities. Shelves rose up to an industrial skyline of dead light fixtures. In the center, an abstract geometric shape formed by desks and tables contained several computers, copy machines, and phones. Mike hadn’t spent much time among the desks. The bifocal-wearing bitch-goddesses who captained the hospital from behind those rectilinear slabs always seemed to be not-quite-whispering about whose whore daughter had gotten a black eye from her ex-con boyfriend, or whose baby was born with a hole in its heart because its mother had freebased while pregnant.