Broken glass crunched beneath their feet.
A stench of rotted wood filled the hallway.
Carla’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, as Kelly and his men waved their flashlights. The entrance hallway looked smaller than she remembered.
It was covered in dust, debris, and shattered glass.
She saw discarded sardine and tuna cans, rusted and empty.
Old wooden ammunition crates with Russian markings lay scattered about, as well as spent cartridge cases. A scrunched-up rotted blouse lay tossed in a corner, next to a man’s shriveled green sock.
This was the hallway through which women were dragged for interrogation or rape or beatings.
Just inside the hallway on the left was a main office, the door’s frosted glass pane smashed.
Shavik’s office, no doubt. She felt a chill down her spine.
Strange that still she could not remember a single thing about their meeting on the evening before she escaped.
Perhaps it was just as well. Even the thought of being face-to-face with Shavik repulsed her.
As they moved deeper into the building, more light began to filter from shattered windows and shell holes in the roof. Kelly and his men turned off their flashlights.
Carla saw a thick layer of dust cover the ground, some of the walls caked with graffiti. “Murderers go to Hell!” “Walk with the devil, die with the devil!”
They passed rooms with rusted metal beds, no doubt where the guards raped women. On some of the walls crude sexual symbols were drawn.
They came to a crossroads of corridors.
Two led left, and two right.
Kelly shone his flashlight. Mounds of bomb wreckage choked one corridor on each side, blocking them with fallen masonry and rubble. Bombs had shattered the ceilings, and electrical cables hung down like thin black snakes.
These two corridors looked impossible to penetrate.
Shafts of light filled the other two corridors, some of the doors along the passageways missing or smashed off their hinges.
Carla felt her breathing quicken, her pulse drumming in her ears.
Kelly gestured with the flashlight. “Do you remember which one?”
“I . . . I think it’s this way.”
She picked her way down the left corridor, Kelly and the others following.
Where a door was closed, Carla opened it, the hinges creaking.
In several rooms were rusting steel filing cabinets and shattered furniture. Behind one door was an electrical switch room, the wires a mess, hanging like spaghetti.
But no janitor’s closet.
“I was wrong. This isn’t the one. I has to be the next corridor—the one that’s blocked.”
Kelly shouted to his colleagues. “Go get the JCB digger, boys! Knock down the front doors if you have to, but get that bloody thing in here, pronto.”
• • •
Carla moved back to the mouth of the next corridor. It was blocked by a huge mound of wreckage.
She felt certain this was the one that led to the closet.
She began to lift pieces of debris from the mound. A shower of ceiling plaster and dust fell from above.
Kelly said, “Steady on, girl. I don’t like the look of that ceiling. It could cave in. Wait until the digger arrives.”
But she was barely listening. She grasped a shattered plank of wood and cast it aside.
“Didn’t you hear me?”
Ignoring Kelly, she moved a slab of ceiling plaster next. She worked furiously, in a kind of fearful desperation.
Kelly tried to stop her but she pushed him aside forcefully. Outside, they heard the JCB start up, and then came a crashing sound, as if the men had rammed the digger through the entrance doors.
Carla kept working, frantically. She coughed and sputtered.
The plaster dust was like a film of talcum powder, and it covered bumps of debris on the floor. Her right foot hit something hard, shaking off some of the dust—a soldier’s old boot.
Then she stepped on something soft.
She nudged it with the tip of her shoe, and saw a flash of blue and red. A shiver ripped through her heart.
She dropped to her knees, brushed the dust off the object.
She recognized the Thomas the Train motif, the little blue engine with huge eyes and a smile.
“What’s wrong?” Kelly asked.
“My—my brother’s backpack . . .” Her breath came in gasps as she examined it.
The zipper was open. Fear pounding her chest, she turned the rucksack upside down. The contents tumbled out.
A rusted tin of sardines. A shabby pair of boy’s underwear and undershirt.
A shiny stone, a piece of string. The kind of things infinitely important to a small boy.
A 1986 silver dollar coin in a plastic case.
The last thing to tumble out was a piece of a blue material.
Luka’s comforter.
His blankie . . .
She squeezed the piece of cotton, began to tremble, a cry building inside her, and her eyes felt wet.
She scrabbled again at the debris, grasping huge chunks of masonry. A noise roared in her ears as the men arrived with the JCB.
Kelly grabbed ahold of her shoulders. “Please, move back. We’ll have it cleared in no time.”
The machine’s claw plowed into the mound. In no more than two minutes it cleared a path through the rubble, leaving only a cloud of choking dust.
They seemed the longest two minutes in Carla’s life.
She was trembling so much she could hardly breathe, from the dust, from dread, and she had to hold her sides.
Once the digger broke through, the driver backed it up, leaving a gap wide enough to step through.
Kelly turned on his flashlight. A corridor lay beyond.
Doors either side. Some ripped off their hinges, others intact.
“Stop! Stop the bloody machine . . . !” Kelly made a cutting gesture to his neck.
The driver killed the noisy engine.
Silence engulfed them.
Kelly, his face covered in dust, his arm over his mouth and nose, looked back at Carla.
Her eyes were wide, afraid.
Without a word, she grabbed the flashlight from Kelly and stumbled through the gap.
• • •
The flashlight sliced through the dusty air like a silver blade.
She saw that the debris had been right up against a door.
She shone the light on its grimy engraved sign: DOMAR.
She remembered the word.
Janitor.
She gripped the handle, twisted.
The closet door wouldn’t budge. Debris was scattered at the bottom of the door and she kicked it away.
She jerked the handle again. It still didn’t move.
Kelly was behind her now. “Here, let me try . . .”
He turned the handle, yanked hard, and Carla heard a splintering crack. The wood appeared to be jammed or swollen in its frame.
Kelly yanked again. The door creaked open an inch or two, then stuck.
Before Kelly could yank it again, Carla slid the fingers of both her hands into the gap of the door frame and pulled with all her strength.
The door groaned and cracked open.
A moldy odor hit them. Carla couldn’t speak. She felt bile rise in her throat and clasped a hand to her mouth to muffle a gasp.
“Step back, Carla. Do as I say, please,” Kelly urged, and tried to pull her away, but she fought him off desperately.
Inside the storeroom she saw the mummified remains of several children.
Some were curled up on the floor; some were standing. Their empty eye sockets were huge gaping holes, and their features were beyond recognition.
The bodies still had hair and clothes, but the garments were shriveled up, a mottled brown color. One of the bodies was of a little girl, her long hair plaited down to her waist.
Another was a little boy with dark locks. Carla felt a strange fluttering in her chest, as if her heart was about to stop.
She gave a cry that sounded like a strangled moan.
Then she sank on her knees to the floor and screamed.
For her mother, for her father, for Luka.
A terrible scream that seemed to echo throughout the building, like a cry from all the souls of all the dead who had ever perished there.