Neil stopped at the landing of each floor and opened the door to the main work room. They all mirrored one another—a massive expanse with nothing but occasional support beams to break up the shadows and give any sense of depth to the room. The walls on the right side were entirely bare brick, and the left were massive, probably antique glass windows that in the daytime would at least make this place not so spooky.
The floors were a mess that hadn’t survived the test of time as well as the walls had. The second and third levels were okay. But the fourth was littered with broken floorboards and swatches of dark on dark, suggesting areas had simply begun rotting away.
Neil opened the door to the fifth-level floor and flashed his beam inside. I hiked up the next several steps in order to get a better vantage point over his shoulder. In the silence between us echoed a snap, a crack—
“Seb!”
I lunged forward, throwing myself up the stairs, which was not an easy task, just as a portion of the wall and roof over the stairwell literally caved in on itself, effectively separating the two of us.
“Jesus,” I whispered, trying to suppress a cough from the hundred years of dust now in the air.
“Seb?” Neil called again, voice muffled through the collapsed brick.
“Shh. I’m okay,” I said in a low voice.
A portion of his face appeared through the debris. “Don’t move. I’m going back downstairs. There’s doors on the other side of each room—it’s probably a matching stairwell. I’ll come around to meet you.”
“What if the boogeyman gets me?”
“Don’t move,” he replied with a touch of exasperation.
Neil’s steps receded until I was alone between the fifth and sixth floors. Stay here.Like hell. I held up Cope in my hand, only to realize his jaw was… somewhere in the wreckage behind me. I’d lost it in my juggle to save the bolt cutters.
“Shit.”
I hesitated for about a nanosecond before continuing up the remaining steps without the mandible. I reached the landing for the sixth floor and, with one hand feeling along the wall, found the threshold for the main work area. The door was slightly ajar, which, considering all the floors before had been securely closed, was warning enough for me. Gripping Cope and bolt cutters big enough to kill a man, I slipped inside.
This level was above the rooftops of surrounding buildings. Sickly city glimmerings and fragile moonlight mixed together and filtered in through the bay windows. The floor was illuminated enough to make out the odd machine here and there. Textile tools probably. Definitely from a lifetime ago.
And there, second support beam deep, closest to the windows, was the crumpled figure of a man.
Myman.
I was so close. I wanted to run toward Calvin with open arms and save him from this hellhole. But the floor was likely to be as dangerous as the others. So I carefully, silently, slid along the wall behind me, reached the corner, and then moved the same way along the windows. In passing each plate of glass, I blocked out the light enough to silhouette my figure on the dusty floor. Eerie, with the cutters and Cope in either hand.
My teeth chattered from the cold, and my breath came out in shaky puffs. But I reached Calvin. Tears ran down my face as I dropped my belongings to the floor and bent down beside him.
“Calvin?” I whispered. It took considerable strength to hoist up a completely limp brick wall. “Cal? Honey?” I hefted him around enough in order to rest his back against the pillar. I put my numb fingers to his neck and checked for a pulse.
Alive. I could barely feel it. But he was alive.
I moved my hand to his cheek, stroking the cold, pallid, bristly skin. “Calvin?” I tried again, a bit louder.
I watched his face carefully. One eye twitched. Then both. In a droopy, drugged-out manner, they slowly opened. He didn’t seem to register at first that I was me or that I was even a person crouched in front of him. But then he jerked suddenly, tried to bring his arms up to fight, before I realized they were tied around the back side of the beam.
“Calvin.” I took his face into both hands, holding him firmly. “It’sme.”
Calvin stilled. His breath was shallow. “Baby….”
I smiled as if it were the very first time I’d heard that nickname. “Hey. How are you?” I whispered.
Calvin let out the saddest attempt at a laugh. “Tired.”
“You know,” I said, quickly wiping my cheeks with the sleeve of my coat and grasping for a playful tone, “if you didn’t want an extravagant wedding, you could have said so. This is a little extreme.”
Calvin smiled, even as his eyes fell shut. “Get… me home. Please.”
I leaned forward and kissed his chilled, chapped lips. “Copy you, Major.” I got up, knees cracking as I collected the bolt cutters, and moved behind the beam. I snipped the zip ties off Calvin’s wrists, and his arms fell to his sides.
