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The door beside her opened, and light from the hall poured in, momentarily blinding her. The stab of pain into her head at the light was almost too much to bear. “I heard you call out,” Nate said, but Laura was already turning away from him.
“She’s here,” she said, leaning down, hurriedly moving forward with shaking hands and legs, looking for any sign of disturbance, any mark on the floor. There was a caved-in sofa, no mark in the dust beside it. It hadn’t been moved. Neither had the armchair, the seat fallen in on a lopsided angle. Laura stumbled behind it, looking for a sign at the back of the room.
“What? Where?”
“I don’t know—under the ground,” Laura said, continuing her frantic search of the room. She kicked up the corner of a bedraggled old rug, and a clump of the fabric came apart from the whole. It was rotting. No way it had been moved any time recently. She felt sick to her stomach, the pain in her head was so bad. She had to keep going.
“Under the ground, like, buried?” Nate asked. He didn’t ask her how she knew. He never did. That was the blessing of having Nathaniel Lavoie as a partner: he never asked. He just trusted her. Any other partner would have forced her to either confess or lie her way out of things by now. But Nate trusted her “gut instinct,” and even as he asked the question, he, too, was turning to search the rest of the room.
“Buried in a—a box,” Laura told him, turning frantically and racing for the door. There was nothing here. The living room was empty. Somewhere, somewhere in the house, she was there… Laura crossed the hall, almost tripping and then using the momentum to fall to her knees, tracing her hands over the floor in every direction as she moved.
“Like a coffin?” Nate raced after her, yelling as he took off for the door at the end of the hall. The kitchen, probably. The door Laura had chosen led to a dining room, at least judging by the table and the single chair, and one or two pieces of rotting wood that hinted at other pieces of furniture long since gone.
Laura’s eyes traced patterns in the dust. Footsteps, all over the room. Maybe he’d taken the chairs elsewhere, or used them as firewood in the night. He’d been in here, a lot. Was that a disturbance in the dirt floor? Laura scrambled toward it. No—it was packed tight here, tight like the passage of time and many feet had done it. There was only a scuff where some old chair had been driven into the ground as it was broken up. God, why couldn’t she think? Her head was throbbing—if she could just think—
“Hey? Do you hear me?”
Laura’s back stiffened. Nate. He was waiting for her response. In a moment, if she didn’t give him one, he would call out her name.
She stood and bolted for the kitchen, pure adrenaline and fear driving her legs forward, crashing toward where she’d heard his voice. This was it, she knew. This was the moment she had heard in the vision. It had to be. If they didn’t get to her now—
Laura burst down the hall. Nate was standing by a group of rotting wooden cupboards down around a rusted oven, surrounded by discarded trash and bits of broken furniture. The second she saw it, she knew. There was a whole row of busted cupboard doors, and then one that just so happened to be intact, carefully closed while all the others hung off their hinges. Not only that, but the area around it was a little less dusty and cluttered, the door just a little more clean. Laura didn’t have the time to examine it for other signs, but she knew they would be there.
She dove forward, falling to her knees on the floor. She slid a short distance closer to the intact cupboard, completely out of control. She yanked the door open as fast as she could, looking inside for exactly what she knew she would find. The dirt here was less tightly packed, a slightly different color. It had been disturbed recently.
“She’s here!” Laura half-screamed, frantic, seizing hold of the first thing her hands fell on. A section of corrugated iron that looked like it had once been the roof of a chicken coop or something similar. The whole roof was lying in shattered pieces on the floor, close by the oven, but this piece was the right size to scoop dirt out of the way.
Laura set the piece of iron to the ground and dug a deep gouge through the earth, throwing a clump of soil behind her. Nate barely dodged out of the way with a grunt, then set to his own knees, tearing at the remaining corrugated sheet to fashion his own digging implement.
Laura scrambled to the side to let him in, shouldering her way in through the other broken cabinets and tearing a rotted wooden board out of the way. It came away soft in her hands, leaving another opening into the space where Nate had started to dig. She scooped another mound of earth from her new position inside the ruined cabinets, still seeing nothing below the dirt.
On his second frantic dig through the earth, the iron glanced off something that made a dull thunk.
“Laura!” he called, drawing her attention to the discovery—but it only made her blood go cold. That was the sound she had been waiting for. The sound that meant the girl’s time was almost up. Even now, she was breathing her last struggling breath.
Laura cast aside the corrugated iron and began to work with her hands, scribbling at chunks of loose dirt and flinging it out of the way. The object in the earth was some kind of metal lid. Laura hoped and prayed there was no lock, invisible under the rest of the dirt. As Nate dug another shovelful that exposed even more of the metal object, she dug her fingers through the earth at its sides, scrambling for the edge. Finding it, she pulled with all her might, lifting both dirt and lid until there was a thin space beneath it.
Space for precious air to flow inside.
She heard a faint cough from inside and gasped with relief, struggling to lift the lid further. It was jammed under more earth at the far end, where they hadn’t yet managed to clear it. Nate pushed more of the dirt out of the way, his thick arms bulging as he strained to lever the lid up.
It wasn’t coming.
He swore out loud as his fingers unearthed a lock, attached to the far end of the metal box—the coffin, Laura’s mind recognized with horror. This would be a coffin if they didn’t get her free.
“Hold on,” Laura said, hoping the girl would hear her. “Just hold on! We’re getting you out!” Her fingers were aching from the strain of holding up the lid, the sharp metal edge biting into her skin. Laura didn’t care. She would endure the pain for as long as it took. She wasn’t going to let the girl’s only source of air disappear.
Nate pulled his gun out of the holster at his hip and used all of his strength to bring the grip down against the lock, yelling with effort as he did it. Reverberations shuddered through the metal, making Laura bite down on her own lip against the pain in her hands. She tasted blood. The lock budged, just slightly. It was probably the only thing in the kitchen that wasn’t falling apart with rust. Nate hit it again, another scream of effort ripping out of his throat.
The lock came away. Laura wasted no time. She pushed upward firmly, using all of her strength to lift the lid on the box.
As it opened in front of her, Laura could finally see the girl. She was lying there on her back, just like in Laura’s vision. She was dirty and dusty, crying and gasping for air. Laura swallowed back a sob herself. Nate took the strain of the lid as she reached down, spreading out her arms to either side, enveloping the girl in an embrace as she lifted her out of the metal box and into her arms.
“You’re okay now,” Laura said, cradling the girl against her chest as she half-tumbled out of the cabinets and back into the more open space of the kitchen. “It’s okay now. You’re safe. You’re safe.” She panted for breath even as the girl did, screwing her eyes tight shut while the kid couldn’t see her face. Tears streaked down across her cheeks, relief and horror and the delaye
d force of the pain in her head. Above them, she heard Nate taking out his radio, standing a few steps away to bark out the news to the rest of the team and request an ambulance.
And it should have been a happy moment. A moment in which Laura felt she had won. She had saved the girl’s life, right as she was on the brink of losing it. She had used her vision to stop a death. The death of a little girl, just like her own daughter.
