Poison Most Vial (17 page)

“We need to be outta here,” she said.
Cross the field
, she thought. She was five or six, running outside, tall stalks of corn scratching at her skin. A forest of them, no end in sight:
Get to the road
. How had she found that road?

“Ruby, I can't go no more,” Rex said after another ten minutes of climbing. He was behind her, sitting back on his knees. He could barely hold on to the garbage bag, his hands were so raw.

She sat back, too. Done. There would be no road. This was it.

She reached down and pulled up a panel, stared through the opening. Gloom. She may as well have been staring into a well. No choice now; there must be a floor down there. Ruby lowered herself down—her hands were every bit as raw as Rex's—and hung in space for only a moment. Her hands could not hold her.

The fall down could have been ten feet or ten inches. All she knew was that she was on the floor, blessed solid floor,
calling out to Rex, catching the bag of garbage, and down he came, flat on his back.

“You OK?”

“I look OK to you?”

Rex rolled over and practically hugged the solid floor. Pushed to his feet.

Ruby looked around. The dark eased, barely, and she saw rows and rows, big rows, of something extending to the ceiling. Walls? She reached up and touched one—and it moved slightly.

“What are these stupid . . . ,” she said, moving in front of one of the huge things, reaching up to feel it—and felt a heavy thump on her head.

“Aaaagh!”

“Ruby! Fight him off, fight him off! There're bodies everywhere!”

“Be quiet already. I got it on the floor,” said Ruby. “It's a book, not a zombie, you lunatic. You're screaming like a girl.”

“You screamed first, also like a girl,” said Rex. She could see the wide whites of his eyes bobbing in the darkness. “Books? Oh, don't do that to me again, false alarm like that. I been traumatized ever since
The Toolbox Murderer
.”

The smell, the weight, the very size of the room: It was a submerged storehouse, an underground graveyard for dead books. Stacks and stacks, row upon row.

“The morgue,” Ruby said. “This has to be it. Stacks of books, not bodies. We're here, in the land of legend.”

“And we best be outta here soon,” Rex said. “We made too much noise already.”

They zigzagged into one stack and out the other side. Into another and out again, and another and another.

Ruby stopped midstride. “Oh no.” The ceiling panel—had she replaced it? “Rex,” she said.

“Ruby, how we ever gonna get outta here?” he said.

“I don't know, but we gotta keep moving, just like you said up there in the pipes.”

“OK, I got a little more left. But we need to look for something to tell us where we are.”

The morgue was dark and looked the same in all directions. Pick a direction and go to the nearest wall: That was the only plan Ruby could muster. She heard Rex's breathing behind her and timed her steps, three and one, three plus one, as if she were on her way to school and everything was all right.
The light never changed; neither did the stacks. And then they did.

“What this?” Rex said.

“It's—I don't know. Like a clearing.” Stacks radiated outward at angles. “Can you see anything?”

“Yeah, I see a combination wig and milkshake shop. What you think? I'm looking at the same thing as you.”

“I thought if we just followed the stacks till we hit a wall . . . But now, which way?”

“Place is a maze, not a morgue. Pretty soon the bodies gonna come to life, and then it's
Toolbox Murderer
all over again.”

“Forget the zombies. We're gonna need something to eat and drink. I'm starving, and we're getting nowhere.”

“Just don't cannibalize me, all right? Must be some rodents down here we can catch.”

“Rex, this is serious. Unless someone turns the lights on, I don't know how we're getting outta here.”

“I know, Ruby. I'm trying to lighten it up. Mrs. Patterson's always talking about how wonderful it is to get lost in books; I don't think this is what she means. Let's just try another row and see where it goes.”

It led to yet another clearing, again with rows of movable shelves angling off in all directions.

Rex threw up his hands. “OK, I give up, this isn't working.
I'm done wandering. How we gonna make this place go away and not come back?”

“We're not,” Ruby heard herself say. Her subconscious brain must have been working. “Not tonight. Nobody's about to find us down here, either. The place is too big.”

“What are you saying exactly?”

“Sleep.”

“Here, in this spooky ole place?”

“You want to go back up in those pipes? I don't.”

Rex only nodded, dropped his garbage bag, and sank to the floor. Ruby pulled down a bunch of books and placed them around their spot like land mines, to trip up anyone who might approach.

Rex balled up the garbage bag and offered it to her as a pillow. She took it. He arranged two soft, moldy tomes for himself, put his head down, and was out.

Ruby wished vaguely that she had an alarm clock. That she could call her dad. And Rex's parents. That she could . . . could . . .

And then all was dark.

Later Ruby jerked her head up, eyes blinking, her brain still trying to match the dark swaying shapes of the book stacks with something in her memory.

It came back slowly, and with it the recognition that her
eyes were now more adjusted to the darkness. She could make out books, even some titles (
On the Principles of Physiology in Crime Investigation
) and saw Rex fast asleep next to her.

She sat up abruptly, wide-eyed. They'd been there the whole night. It was morning. Her dad must be terrified. And Rex's parents.

“Rex,” she whispered. Nothing. “Rex, T. Rex, Theodore Rexford, Esquire.” She shook his shoulder.

“Huh,” he said. “Stop.”

Ruby cleared the area and explored a little. It was a cavernous underground space. The shelf structures were on rollers so that, heavy and creaking, one could move against another, like giant sliding dominoes.

“Did you hear that?” Ruby asked.

“What?”

Both were silent, listening. A soft snap, crackle, and pop; the place was like the woods. Then—something. Was it a door? Hard to say for sure. No other sound came for minutes.

Ruby put up a hand for more silence. Now they both heard it, barely audible beneath the creaking heartbeat of the stacks: breathing. Labored breathing.

Someone else was in the morgue.

Rex reached down to pick up the garbage bag and the two poised to run—but where? Running would be foolish if they
had no idea where the other person was. Ruby again held up a hand.
Stay down
.

The breathing came closer. Now movement—a clumsy sound, seemingly only a few stacks away.

Ruby eased a book out of the stack to her left and peeked through in the direction of the sound. No view. Rex did the same from another angle. He shook his head. Ruby crept forward. The breathing, now a wheezing sound, was very close. Ruby slipped out another large book. This time she saw him: a man, tall, in a uniform, or was it a suit? He was turning into the space next to theirs, so close she felt dizzy.

And down he went, tripped by one of the land mines. Rex sprang to his feet. He took two steps back and threw himself against the stacks between them and the visitor. The great old bookcase lurched, books cascaded down on all sides, and it rolled forward.

“Dammit!”
said the man on the other side.

Ruby and Rex backed up, counted to three, and rammed again. The great metal panel shuddered and groaned like some dying animal.

More books crashed down on the other side, and the tall man was struggling to get up, it looked like. Ruby grabbed the garbage bag and turned to run. Rex put a hand on her shoulder. “Wait,” he said.

He led her around to the aisle on the other side of where
the man was trapped, and Rex bull-rushed again. More books crashed to the floor, accompanied by yelling and cursing. The man was caught in a landslide.

Rex moved to the next stack, and the next, ramming one against another, burying the intruder as if in a deck of giant cards.

“OK, that's enough,” he said, and the two fled down the aisle, in and out of stacks, again looking for some way out. And again the underground library seemed to have neither beginning nor end, neither north nor south.

“Stop,” said Ruby, out of breath. Their pursuer would push himself out soon; maybe had already. “We need to think. Think. Look at the stacks; what do they say?”

Wildly, Rex looked at the numbers on each stack. “M456–M897, N76–N890 . . . What on earth do they mean?”

“There're dates, too,” Ruby said. In parentheses, below the codes it said (1900–1910).

“So what, Ruby? This place is too huge.”

“No, I'm saying let's go upward in dates—which way is 1920? Do you see any?”

“No—I mean, yeah. I think through there it says 1920–1930. See it?”

Cutting between more stacks, out the other side, Ruby saw it was 1950–1960, and they charged ahead. “We got to get to the present! Run!” said Ruby.

When they reached 1990, they saw a wall, but no door.
“There's got to be one, or we're done,” Ruby said. She went one way in the great hall and Rex the other.

“Here!” said Rex, trying to whisper. A door. He yanked it open, Ruby behind him.

Finally. Back in hallways. But where?

“I should have snagged that stupid map from Simon,” Ruby said. “Now what?”

“More thinking, that's what,” Rex said. “There're numbers over all these doors. I say we do the same thing we just did to get out—to the smaller ones.”

“Why smaller?”

“Why not?”

Down the hall they went—LL245, LL240—and the hallway soon dead-ended into another hall, and to the right Ruby saw a change in the light. A window.

“Rex, c'mon, look over here,” she said. She had no interest in wandering under DeWitt if there was a shortcut out.

It was a garden window, no bars this time, still too dark to tell what was on the other side. Rex rattled the frame and pushed it up. She slipped through first. Rex handed up the garbage bag and squeezed himself through, turning to close the window behind him.

A deep window well. Ruby pulled herself up just enough to see over the lip of the well—and groaned.

“Oh no, I don't believe this,” she said.

A low, smoky sky leaked just enough light to reveal the courtyard behind the forensics lab, where it all began.

The window was directly across the yard from the lab, and for a while Ruby and Rex stood in the window well side by side, their heads just above ground level, staring at Rama's office. A desk lamp was on, though nothing moved inside.

“This is the way it would have looked to the killer,” Ruby said.

More than that
, she thought.
Maybe the person hid right here in the well. Completely out of sight, a short stroll to the office, no windows in the lab faced the yard except Rama's. In through the veranda and gone. Then what?

“Got to be another way out,” she said. “The person had to have a way out that didn't go through the back of the lab.”

“And not through that fire door, either, or you end up running into Mr. Rama coming back from the bushes.”

Probably not back through the window, either
, Ruby thought. The corridor was too risky, the chance of being seen in there. “You'd want to get out without going through any of these buildings, if you could,” she said.

The shadows in the courtyard were gradually melting away in the dull dawn light. The early shift of staffers would be arriving soon, Ruby knew. The pair squinted out into the yard and saw nothing. No other doors, no unbarred windows, no secret passageways.

“We're gonna need to climb out and look, Ruby.”