Such destruction.
Pointless.
Vi climbed back over the barbed wire fence.
So tired. So cold.
Think, Violet. Think.
She scanned the houses and buildings in the distance.
Nothing moved in the gray, steady rain.
She had Jennifer’s knife hidden up the right sleeve of her tracksuit, the butt of the handle resting in her palm. It had made descending the slippery ladder more difficult, but now she had it, and she prayed he hadn’t noticed.
He was watching her, she was sure of it. Had to figure on surveillance cameras everywhere. Maybe someone helping him.
She could make a run for it, try to reach civilization, but he had her son. Had Andy.
Vi jogged across the road toward a brick building with a fifty-foot chimney on the far end.
Time to get out of this freezing rain.
“Turn left,” Luther said.
Or not.
She veered away from the abandoned factory.
“Now run,” he said.
She accelerated, the shuddering footfalls driving pain through her right ear, where she was beginning to suspect that Luther had stitched the earpiece into her skin.
Otherwise, it felt good to run, the exertion warming her against the chill.
She ran down the street for several minutes before he spoke again, passing ruined automobiles and more rotting houses.
“The housing project. See it?”
“I see it.”
“That’s your destination.”
The building loomed fifty yards away, rising above the oaks whose brown leaves had fallen and become rain-plastered to the pavement.
“What’s in there, Luther?”
Violet crossed the street and stopped out-of-breath where the sidewalk entered the courtyard of a six-story structure that resembled a crumbling L.
“Did I tell you to stop?”
She went on past a collapsed swingset and an overgrown sandbox, its only remnants the two-by-six board frame. A few toys had been left behind—a front-loader, a big-wheel missing its big wheel, plastic green army men scattered in the grass, casualties from some long-forgotten war.
She approached the double-doored entrance which had been leveled years ago, the building’s windows glaring down like a hundred black eyes.
Over the threshold into a darkness that reeked of mildew and decay.
Her wet shoes tracked over the peeling linoleum, and the farther away she moved from the entrance, the darker, more claustrophobic it grew.
Where the lobby intersected with the first-floor corridor, she stopped.
Up and down the hall—pockets of black offset by pockets of dismal light that filtered in from outside.
“Where am I going?” she asked, but no answer came.
She let the hunting bowie slide out of her sleeve and into her hand.
The fear paralyzing, all-consuming.
For a long time, she stood listening.
Water dripped.
The soft moan of wind pushing through one of the upper corridors.
And then...snapping. Cracking.
Woodsmoke.
Violet followed the smell into darkness and then out again.
Daylight passed through the open door of what had been an apartment and struck a wall covered in graffiti.
Clothes and toys and all manner of garbage littered the corridor.
The scent of woodsmoke was getting stronger and now she could see firelight flickering across the wall at the end of the corridor.
Darkness falling with surprising speed.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.
Luther spoke into Violet’s ear, “Tell him you want to stay the night. You have a lot to learn from him.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Tell him or I will rip Jennifer’s baby apart right now.”