My tires spun against the whitish dirt, spraying it out behind me in a telltale cloud. I wasn’t approaching quietly, but there was nowhere to park down on the street, where the asphalt disintegrated into a deep ditch instead of a shoulder. About fifty yards up the hill, I pulled up next to the bulldozer and shut off my car’s engine.

Another bulldozer and a couple of trucks shared the spot with me, and though I didn’t see anyone manning them I could see they’d been busy. The foundations of two small buildings lay in rubble, and a third was half-demolished.

When I got out of the car I was greeted by silence, and again I had to remind myself that I was barely a stone’s throw from civilization. “Hello?” I called out. “Is there anyone here?” Birds scattered from the treetops, but otherwise I received no reply. It was a Saturday, after all. I shouldn’t expect to see any workmen.

“Hello?”

My scuffed old combat boots crunched in the gritty mess of weeds, pebbles, and crushed concrete. Beside one of the machines were scattered a few pieces of broken tile. I picked one up and turned it over in my hands. It was black and charred, as were the others. One smokestack held its ground, marked in construction-worker spray paint with a bright orange X that signaled its days were numbered. “The furnace house,” I said to myself. They’d started their demolition with the charnel rooms.

I tossed the tile into the square pit beside the smokestack and turned my attention to what remained. A gymnasium squatted beside one of the buildings I recognized from Dave’s pictures. I approached it first, but found it locked with a thick chain. I might have wandered around the fringes to see if I could gain entry, but the door on the other structure had fallen off its hinges, and the open doorway beckoned.

On, then, to easier conquests.

I paused at the tattered threshold, a pang of nervousness seizing my chest.

“Hello?”

No one responded and no human sounds approached or retreated, but my own breathing was loud in my ears and my heart knocked heavily against my rib cage. And just on the edge of my peripheral hearing . . . what was that? I could swear I heard an echoing heart, a repeating, lurching breath that mimicked mine.

“It’s this place,” I said, stronger than a mumble. “It’s this creepy-assed place. There’s nobody here.”

A brownish lizard ran up the doorframe and darted inside, but everything else was still. Somewhere in the distance I thought I heard water dripping, but I could have been mistaken. I shook the half sounds out of my head and forced myself to proceed.