The Hole (20 page)

It was a door, opened outward, and as he reached it he felt a change in the air, knew it lead to the heart of the massive warehouse. That was where they’d hunker down and wait.

“We’ll go to the other side, away from here,” he whispered back to Evajean. He heard her exhale. “Ready?” he asked.

“Uh huh.”

The floor was concrete and cold, and hurt his knees. He stood up and walked straight across from the office door. Soon, his finger tips punched into thick plastic wrap: a pallet of cardboard boxes, wrapped for shipping. He sidestepped to the right, keeping his hands out, and when he found the edge of the pallet, continued forward again. They walked for some distance along this corridor between the stacks, Elliot still leading, Evajean still a pace or two behind.

Then there was corrugated metal and they had reached the far wall. Elliot put his ear to it and heard nothing but his own breathing and Evajean shuffling her feet.

“It’s cold,” she said.

“It’ll warm up,” he said. “When the sun comes up.”

“How long are we going to stay?”

“As long as we need to. Until it’s dark again.”

Evajean put her head near the wall and listened. “That’s all day,” she said.

“If that’s what it is.” He began walking again, turning right along the wall. “This way,” he said. “Let’s find a spot, maybe between some of the pallets.”

“We’re going to stay here all day?”

“I don’t know. If we have to.”

“Hope’s asleep,” she said and he could tell she was annoyed. She didn’t like this plan and he had to admit, as he found another corridor and turned into it, that he was starting to feel a little stupid for leading them into the situation in the first place. Did he really expect them to just sit here for ten or twelve hours? With no food and no water? It might be better to just go back out there and fight.

“We’ll stay for a while,” he said, revising. “Just long enough that maybe they’ll have started looking for us. I want them away from the truck when we go back. It’s three of them and only two of us.”

“I know,” Evajean said.

Ready to ad lib more as needed, they pressed themselves into a narrow opening between two of the stacks of boxes and sat down. They were both silent for several minutes. The dog began to snore.

“Tell me about you,” Evajean said. The tone of annoyance was gone.

“Me?”

“We’ve been traveling- God, has it only been a few days? But, anyway, we’re doing this trip, it feels like to the bitter end, and I don’t know anything about you. Except that you had a wife and had a daughter and you moved to Virginia, what was it, a couple of years ago?”

“Three,” he said. “It was three years ago this November.”

She nodded. “So tell me about yourself, Elliot Bishop. We’ve got a while sitting her ahead of us, there’s no way I’m going to sleep, and I want to know it all.”

So he did. He told her about graduating from college with a degree in art history because he didn’t know what else to take at the time. The degree had been a bust, art historians not eagerly sought to fill job openings, but he’d got Clarine out of the deal. They’d met his junior year, while he was working part time, late night door duty at one of the dorms, and she was a freshman.

“She was locked out. Left her key in her room,” he said. “She pounded on the door, something like one in the morning, and I let her in. And you know how someone can just glow? You see them and there’s this light? It was like that with Clarine. She glowed. So I let her in-”

“‘
So
‘ you let her in?” Evajean said. “You mean you wouldn’t have if it weren’t for that glow?”

Elliot laughed, then winced and brought his voice back down to a whisper. “You know what I mean,” he said. “It had been raining and, well, girls always look so good like that.”

This time Evajean laughed. “I’ve been told,” she said.

“Since she didn’t have her key,” Elliot continued, “I had to let her into her room. And on the way over, we chatted and when we finally got there and she was about to go in, I asked her out. We went out that weekend and that was it. I was hooked.”

Evajean sighed. “Love,” she said.

“Yeah,” Elliot said.

“And you got married.”

“After Clarine graduated. She wanted to wait, wanted to have school out of the way before starting her new life.”

“What was school for her? You were art history…”

“Psychology. I don’t know why. I never really figured that one out, but she studied it obsessively for four years, graduated, and never touched the stuff again. We had Callie and I started the business with my brother, the landscaping, and that went well for a while, with Clarine staying home and me working. We lived okay.”

“Why’d you move?”

“Not sure. It was Clarine’s idea. One day, we were having breakfast at IHOP, and she said, ‘Let’s move.’ And she talked me into it. It took a while, but she did.”

“Why Virginia?”

“That’s what she wanted. Said it was a nice place, that she’d visited as a girl. They’d rent a cabin in the summers and she loved it. I found a job with another landscaping business, we packed everything up, and then we were in Charlottesville.” He leaned back against tight plastic wrapped around the pallet. “And that’s it. We live there until- We were in Charlottesville when this all started.” Elliot tapped Evajean on the arm. “Now it’s your turn.”

“Oh, there’s not a lot to tell,” she said.

“Like I-”

“I didn’t go to college,” Evajean said. “I wanted to, because I had an older brother and he didn’t, neither did my parents. First in the family would’ve been nice.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Things come up, you know? I was ready to, I’d done well in high school, and then my brother, Harley- Can you believe that name? Harley? My mother, she always said it sounded nice, that they wanted to give him a nice name, but I think, until she died, that she was sort of embarrassed by it. Like it made her look bad to have picked such a silly name. And my dad, well, he was one of those guys who lets the woman run things. A hold out for those days when the men brought home the bacon and the wife managed everything in the house, everything about the children.”

“Your brother…?”

“Oh, him. Yeah, Harley was in the army and he was over there in the gulf war. The first one. Drove a tank. And he got shot. It wasn’t that he was going to die, but it was pretty bad and they had to send him home. Mom and dad were getting old and with mom not working, it was tough with the bills. The army paid some of it, but they had to feed him and take care of him and it was too much for just my mom to handle. If Harley could’ve worked, he would’ve. He’d joined the army because he wanted to be, I guess, he’d call it ’self-sufficient.’ He wanted to support himself.”

“That’s tough,” Elliot said.

“Yeah. And so there wasn’t any way I could go away to college and leave them all like that. I got a job at a bank as a teller, and that’s where I met Henry. He was a teller, too. Started a month after I did. We’d get windows next to each other and we’d chat when things were slow. He was one of those guys you could tell were going to do something big someday. He was only at the bank while he figured out what that was.”

Evajean scratched the dog’s back. Hope stood up in her lap, wavered, and fell down, exhaling loud and long.

“Is that when you two…”

“Got together? Yeah, the chatting lead to dating and then we were living together. This was in California. And when we got married, we discussed moving, starting new somewhere else. Harley was doing better, he was working, and my father had retired. They were all doing fine off social security, so moving was a good idea. Henry had some family in Virginia, an aunt, and so that ended up being pretty much our top choice. We came out here, I got another bank job, and he started his internet stuff.”

“That’s random,” Elliot said.

“From bank to internet? Yeah, I suppose. But he’d been studying the stuff for a while and it was easy to find work in it. So that’s what we were doing when all this started. I was at the bank and he spent his time earning money from an office in he basement.” She shifted her leg out from underneath herself and settled into a new position on the floor. “It was good,” she said.

“It’s weird,” Elliot said.

“What is?”

“This. Your story, my story. They’re so normal. We’re normal people and we’ve done normal things. Nothing fancy and extravagant. So why us? Why are we still here?”

“That’s not what you’re really asking,” Evajean said.

“What do you mean?”

“That’s not what you’re asking. What you really want to know-and I mean, come on, Elliot, I want to know, too-what you want to know is why someone like me,
how
someone like me who’s so normal, so really
boring,
would end up doing what I did back there.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“
Yeah
,” she said.

“I just think- I just wonder why us? Why you? Is it random? We already talked about this, kind of, but it doesn’t feel random. And if it’s not random, wouldn’t you think it’d be people more, I don’t know, more exciting than us?”

“No,” she said. “No, I think it’d be someone exactly like us, because I don’t know what it is. I wasn’t there for what happened to me, you remember? I didn’t see it like you did. So when you say ‘it’ and you wonder it’s us, I really know how to answer that. Why does anything have to be different than it is?”

“It doesn’t-”

“Because, Elliot, there are crazies out there and we’re hiding here in the dark and I’m just glad it was us, because I got my dog, and I’m alive. That’s more than I can say for, well, for most other people.”

Elliot didn’t know why she was doing this. He’d just been talking and they’d had a conversation like this before. She’d seemed interested then. He couldn’t nail her down, couldn’t figure out what here angle was on all this. Of course, she was scared-he was, too-and that could explain a lot.

“I’m sorry,” he said, though, again, he didn’t quite know what he was sorry for.

“Do you think they can hear us?” she said. “Should we stop talking?”

“Okay,” he said. “I don’t think they can hear us, not through this, but, yeah, we should probably stop.”

And so they did, and for the next hour or two, Evajean pet Hope and Elliot let his mind trip through snapshots of better days, building montages of Callie and Clarine and what it was like to be simply happy. He needed to go to the bathroom and his stomach made noises a couple of times, but he buried that in these pictures from his past.

It was during memories from Callie’s forth birthday party-when his daughter had very nearly set her shirt on fire by reaching across the cake to grab a plastic Barbie standing in the frosting and he and Clarine had yelled and made sure she was okay and then laughed-when, from across the warehouse, the metal wall thumped and shuddered.

Hope barked and Evajean said, “Jesus!” Elliot jumped up and almost slipped on the smooth concrete. He stood there, not moving, barely breathing, and next to him Evajean whispered to the dog, calming it. Were they inside? Elliot wondered. Was that thump from inside the warehouse?

Then a sound came from the office. Elliot knew it and immediately imagined the scene that caused it. The crazies were dragging furniture across the floor.

Evajean said, “Is that-”

“Yeah,” Elliot said. “That’s them.” He pushed off the boxes behind him and walked out into the corridor that lead toward the front of the warehouse. “Wait here,” he said.

“What are you doing?” This was whispered, forced, like she didn’t want to ask, but couldn’t stand not knowing.

“I’m going to go see. It’s- If we have to run, I want to know what our chances are.”

He left her and walked. He could hear her breathing, and then talking to Hope. Elliot couldn’t make out words, but knew Evajean was trying to comfort herself by way of the dog.

What was he doing? Passing boxes, hands sweeping from front to sides, he made his way, between the rows of pallets, toward the office. He knew Evajean was back there, wanting to call out to him and tell him to stop, to not be so stupid, but she was too scared to make the noise.

When he was closer, he could hear them talking to each other. It was that same language and he wished to hell he could understand it. Still, from the tone he could tell they weren’t arguing-they were planning. Elliot crouched low next to the boxes. It was too dark to be sure, but he figured he was twenty feet from the door to the office.

And then lights came on. That door, once just a grey square, burst into yellow light. Elliot flinched away from it, then darted back behind some of the boxes. Where’d they get lights? Then he remembered the ones he’d left in the back of the truck. The crazies had stolen his flashlight.

He didn’t think they’d seen him-he hadn’t seen them-but he held his breath anyway, waiting for the sounds of pursuit.
Right,
he thought.
Okay. There are three of them-unless more have shown up-and two of us. That’s not terrible odds, not in the dark, not with the element of surprise.
Except he couldn’t count on Evajean being much of a fighter. And chances were good the damn dog would make noise and give them away long before they were close enough to strike. The crazies had found them, though, and he needed to do something.

He started back to Evajean, this time down a corridor not in line with the office. He didn’t want them to see him from the doorway. They were still talking as he moved away and eventually he was far enough he couldn’t hear the crazies anymore.

Evajean heard him coming. She whispered, scared, “Elliot? Is that you?” He stayed quite until he was a little closer-and a little further from the office-but used her voice as guidance. Then he answered her and Evajean told him how relieved she was, how terrifying it had been not knowing where he’d gone or if the crazies had found him. What she wanted to know, though, what she pressed him on what whether he had a plan for getting out of this.

“Maybe,” he said, leaning close and keeping his voice down. “If we go along this wall and then along the far one, we can come up on the office from the side.”