shit together.
“Are you cold?” Somers said, noticing Nico’s jersey shorts and tank for the first time.
“Toasty,” Nico said. Then, eyeing Somers, he said, “Maybe I should let you borrow something.”
“Oh this? Just something I had lying around.” Somers maneuvered around Nico, looked as far into the darkness as he could, and asked, “Where’s Mitchell?”
“What?”
“Mitchell. Is he here?”
“Oh.” Nico looked even paler. “Shit.”
“What does that mean?”
“I—I saw some blood when I woke up. It was, you know. Fresh. Still wet.”
“Shit,” Somers said.
“He kept him here, didn’t he?” Nico said. “He kept Mitchell here until he was ready to torture him or blow a hole in his head or whatever he wanted to do to him. And then he stuck me in here. This is like his storage place, isn’t it? This is like his fucking refrigerator where he keeps his snacks.”
“Let’s not jump to any conclusions.”
“Mitchell’s dead,” Nico moaned. “And I’m next.”
“That’s jumping to conclusions,” Somers said. “What else did you see? Have you explored everywhere?”
“Uh, no. This place is insanely fucking creepy. This is where he . . . where he killed them, right? The first guys, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. He’s going to kill me. He’s going to kill us. Oh my God.”
“Nico, hey. Look at me. Right here. Yep, look me in the eyes. He is not going to kill you, ok?”
“We’re here, and we’re trapped, and he’s going to kill us. He’s going to cut my face off and put bees in my head and—”
Slapping always worked in the movies, and Somers had to admit to a powerful desire, over the last two years, to slap Nico once or twice. Instead, though, he took the younger man by the shoulders and squared their bodies.
“He is not going to kill you,” Somers said, softly, slowly. “That’s a promise, ok? From me to you. He’s not going to hurt you again. But right now, I need you to hold yourself together for a little bit longer. We need to find a way out of here.”
Sniffling, Nico wiped his eyes and said, “You can’t promise that. He’s got us here, and he can do whatever he wants to us, and—”
“I will shoot that motherfucker between the eyes if he so much as pokes his head in here again,” Somers said. “How does that sound?”
Nico sniffled a few more times. “Pretty good.”
“Damn right. Now, I need you to talk to me. What happened? How did you get down here?”
“What day is it?”
“Friday. Sometime between three and four in the afternoon.”
“I’ve been down here for two days? What the fuck?”
“Nico, you’ve got to understand, the police hadn’t even started looking for you. Nobody was sure you were really missing—nobody except Hazard and Marcus, to be fair. By now, Marcus will have filed a missing person’s report. They’ll be taking this seriously; you’ve been gone for too long. Once they start looking, they’ll be able to track you here. I did.”
“Well, where are they? Why aren’t they here with you?”
“I, um.” Somers was glad for the darkness as his face heated. “I’m kind of on the run.”
Nico stared at him for a moment. Then he started to laugh. He laughed so hard and for so long that he had to sit down on the steps, and then he kept laughing until it sounded more like sobs. Somers let him go for a while, watching, and then he turned and moved slowly through the closest area of the sub-basement.
On his last visit, Somers hadn’t really had time to pay attention to details. He remembered the luminous limestone under the beam of his flashlight. He remembered the moisture beading on top and glowing like exposed bone. He remembered the soft rise and fall of the bees’ murmuring. Now, though, as his eyes adjusted, he began to make out details. New details. Details he was sure hadn’t been here in the weeks and months following their discovery of Phil, Rory, and Mitchell.
A camera, for one thing. A red light flashed steadily on the front of the camera, which was mounted twenty yards down the main corridor of the sub-basement. Somers tried to inspect it from different angles, but the light was too poor. He tried adjusting the camera, thinking to point it down and away—no reason in giving the Keeper voyeuristic pleasure or additional information—and was surprised when the camera came free from the wall. He found an adhesive strip on the mounting, tacky and slightly damp from the moisture