Page 8 of Johnny

No one alive and nothing much to see, either. Some of the rooms have desks and file cabinets. I go

in and check one, peering into the cabinet, find no trace of the files that might’ve lived there, do that

one more time with a second room, just to pretend I’m being thorough, and again find nothing.

But as I make my way further down the hallway I smell chemicals. Bleach, I think. Like I’m in the

gym downtown back home and I’m making my way towards the pool.

There’s no pool down here. Just residual clean-up.

I check all the rooms on the main level, then take the stairs down and start methodically checking

lower levels, finding pretty much the same scenario. Bleach, empty, waste of time.

But I’m here and there’s no point in doing a second-rate investigation, so I keep going. At least

when I leave I’ll be able to tick this island off the list of places to look once and for all.

They won’t be back.

This island will sit empty forever now. They will never sell it and they will never rebuild it. It

will be erased. The end.

The last level is four stories below the surface. Deep enough that the coolness you normally find in

a cave is missing and in its place is a stuffy kind of heat. The heat of the earth.

The lowest-level hallway is short, so I absently calculate I’ll be back on that boat heading back to

Nassau to catch a jet in just under thirty minutes if I jog back to the dock.

But then I hear rustling.

“Hello?” I say. “Is anyone here?”

Nothing.

“Charlotte?” I call, then whisper, “Mom?”

It’s stupid. She is long gone. But that little kid inside me still hopes.

Or maybe I’m just insane.

No reply.

Rats, maybe. The door was open.

A clinking noise. Like chains.

Not rats.

I walk forward towards the noise, my single beam of light pointed at the end of the short hallway,

landing on another, slightly open door.

“Hello?” I ask, stopping just outside the door.