Farther back in the room, just one other light glowed. There were dozens of dangling light fixtures, but none of them were on; most of the bulbs looked broken.
The man stood. His chair slid back an inch, the sc.r.a.ping sound echoing off the boiler room’s concrete walls. He took in a long, slow breath through his nose, then exhaled out his mouth in a cheek-puffing expression of relief.
“Can I help you?” he said.
His eyes … there was something off in them. The man radiated excitement, like he wanted to jump and dance and scream, yet he stood stock-still.
“Uh, no, thanks,” Cooper said. “I’m just looking for my friend.”
The bald man smiled. He nodded. “A friend of yours is a friend of mine. We’re all friends now, right?”
Cooper didn’t know what to say. What was this man’s deal? Something about his eyes, how they glowed with intensity, with … joy. Joy, yes, but something else as well — this man looked more than a little crazy.
The dangerous kind of crazy.
“Sure, buddy,” Cooper said. “We’re all besties, whatever you want. My friend is six-two, about two hundred pounds, looks like he’s forty.” Cooper tapped his own left shoulder. “Brown hair about to here?”
The smiling man smiled some more. His front right tooth looked chipped. There was a fresh cut on his lip, the flesh torn and exposed. Cooper wondered if the two wounds happened with the same punch.
“I’ve seen a lot of people,” the man said. “A lot of people came down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. Some left. Some stayed.”
Cooper quickly looked left, right — were there others down here? He’d been scared in the stairwell, but he’d been alone. Now his stomach pinched and twirled. His hands shook. This was a bad scene, as bad as bad got. He had to get out of there, but he wasn’t leaving without Jeff.
He lifted his phone to dial Jeff’s cell again but saw that he had zero bars — no connection in the boiler room.
Cooper put the phone in his pocket. “See anyone wearing an AC/DC T-shirt? A black one?”
The bald man nodded. “Oh, sure! That guy’s here. He’s resting.”
Cooper’s heart raced. He could get his friend and get the h.e.l.l out of there, leave this two-cards-shy-of-a-full-deck Wisconsinite behind.
Cooper forced a smile. “Can you show me? I’d appreciate it.”
“Sure,” the bald man said. “We’re all friends now, right?”
“All friends,” Cooper echoed. “Total BFFs.”
“Huh? Bee-eff-eff?”
“We’re friends, I mean,” Cooper said. “Show me?”
The man walked deeper into the poorly lit bas.e.m.e.nt, past the gray boilers. Cooper hesitated. This was a mistake. He was going to follow a strange, whacked-out man into Freddy Krueger’s home turf?
You f.u.c.king owe me, Jeff. I hope you’re okay, so I can kill you myself.
Cooper followed the bald man in the blood-speckled white shirt.
As he walked, he scanned left and right again … and he saw shapes. Shapes back in the shadows, where the floor met the wall, around and even underneath the boilers. The shapes were … people? Sleeping people covered in dark blankets, maybe?
There were two more smaller boilers beyond the first pair. After the last boiler, the white-shirted man stopped and turned. He smiled that something-is-wrong-with-me smile, then gestured toward a bulky shape, covered in a blanket, resting at the base of the cinder-block wall.
It took Cooper a moment to see something in that shape, to see a person’s face.
Jeff’s face.
His best friend in all the world, his business partner, his brother, and yet the sight of him suddenly repulsed Cooper. Jeff’s face looked … bigger. Swollen, sweaty, with big threads from that blanket clinging to his jaw, his cheeks. And the body beneath that blanket … bloated, misshapen … too large.
Something deep inside of Cooper told him to stay the f.u.c.k away from Jeff. No, not just stay away, more like turn and haul a.s.s out of there.
No. He would not leave. That was his friend. Jeff was sick. Really sick, obviously, something way beyond drinking himself halfway into a coma and finding a quiet place to pa.s.s out.
Cooper took a step closer, leaving the strange man facing his back.
Those threads on Jeff’s face … they weren’t threads.
Because it wasn’t a blanket.
Jeff was encrusted in some kind of dark-brown clay, or maybe a stiff foam. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open. The material curved up over his left cheek, split into tendrils that threaded up into his hair: a twisted delta of that strange mud cupped Jeff’s head like a mother cradling a child.
Then, Cooper saw something that took his mind a moment to register. Half covered by that material, there were two left hands. No … three of them. There were two people in there with Jeff, two small people. Cooper saw a shoeless, skinless foot sticking out, a foot with black, shriveled skin … almost like the foot of a mummy.
Cooper’s chest tightened and tingled. Was Jeff dead?
No, his lips were moving, just slightly — he was still breathing.
“Jeff,” Cooper said. “Bro, can you hear me?”
“Of course he can’t,” said the bald man. His words faded away into the boiler room’s shadows.
The situation hit Cooper with a sudden, gripping clarity — a city going crazy and he was in a dark bas.e.m.e.nt, a strange man with a psycho grin standing right behind him. Had this man put Jeff here? Had he covered Jeff and those other people with this brown goop?