City of Shadows

Chapter 40

20 September 2001, Harcourt, Ohio

It was an abandoned elementary school they ended up looking at. Many of its windows were boarded up and covered with fading graffiti, and those that weren’t, were either broken or smeared with foggy green blooms of moss. The playground beside the main entrance foyer sprouted tufts of grass and weed between fissures in the tarmac. Along one side, a row of gently rusting bicycle racks emerged from a bed of several years’ worth of windswept autumn leaves.

The fact that the school was a couple of miles outside the nearest town and — apart from a gang of kids goofing around at night with cans of spray paint, some time long ago — it looked like no one had been here recently, coupled with the fact that it still had a tappable link to the power grid, made it pretty much a perfect temporary place for them to set up shop.

Actually, they’d found it quite by chance. A stop at a diner in the middle of one-strip town, Harcourt. A blink-it-and-miss town in the middle of Ohio’s faded industrial heartland — the rustbelt, some called it. By the look of the lifeless smokestacks and fenced-off warehouses, it had once been a very promising industrial town. Bob had pulled over on the gravel car park in front of the diner and they’d gone in for a toilet and breakfast bagel break.

The diner was empty apart from them and one young waitress in a green check dress and apron slumped across the end of the counter reading a newspaper. SpongeBob and Patrick quacked and guffawed from a TV on the other end. Rashim smiled at the sight of that.

After bringing them the pot of coffee and breakfast they’d ordered, the waitress found a reason to loiter by their table — wiping down others nearby, changing ketchup bottles and salt cellars that didn’t need changing — clearly bored witless with her own company and intrigued by the diner’s first and only customers that morning.

Her name was Kaydee-Lee Williams — at least that’s what the plastic name tag on her chest said.

It was Liam who broke the ice and asked her about the town. She was pitifully keen to answer. ‘Oh, Harcourt’s, like, totally dead. Been dying for years. Ever since they closed down the auto-parts factory. That’s all this town was really, a place for a couple of factories to go.’ She shrugged. ‘When the auto parts started getting made in China, the factories closed. Just like that. Simple.’

She told them how the town’s population shrank each year. There was no future here, people were moving away, particularly families with young children. That’s how they learned about the school in Harcourt, Green Acres Elementary. The school Kaydee-Lee said she’d once been to. No need for schools any more in a dying town, she’d said.

Maddy looked at it now. It would suit their immediate needs. It still had a live power feed that they could tap into. The local electricity company apparently hadn’t bothered to disconnect and mothball the junction box. Instead, it had obviously been cheaper just putting up some hazard signs with risk disclaimers all over them.

The town itself also had a pretty decent hardware store they could use, and they’d passed a big retail park a dozen miles back along Interstate 70. Maddy had spotted a CompUSA, a Best Buy and of course the obligatory mega-sized Walmart.

She looked up at a grey sky. Over halfway into the month, September’s late-summer promise was fading already, and tumbling autumn clouds vied with each other to be the first to drop their load on Green Acres Elementary.

‘Let’s get our stuff inside,’ she said.

Half an hour later, they’d emptied the SuperChief of all the things that had once made the archway in Brooklyn their home. And now ‘home’, or at least their temporary home, was a classroom with mouse or maybe it was rat droppings on a scuffed linoleum chequered floor and school desks and bucket chairs stacked along a cork-board wall still decorated with curling pieces of paper. Thumb-tacked pictures drawn in crayon and felt tip. Childish scrawlings that spoke of happier times here. Blue skies and suns. Mom-an’-Dad-an’-Me pictures with tents and barbecues, summer fairs and parades.

Outside it was finally raining. The tapping of heavy, greasy drops on smeared windowpanes and somewhere inside the school building they could hear an echoing drip-drip-drip where a part of the roof was failing.

Maddy offered them her best morale-boosting cheerleader’s smile. ‘It’ll be a bit comfier once we get ourselves sorted out. I promise.’

Liam remembered the moment he’d first awoken in the archway — a dark place. All damp bricks and crumbling mortar. And yes, just like now, the tap-tap-tapping of dripping water from somewhere out in the darkness. He’d thought it a horrible place to wake up. For a moment even wondered if it might be an odd version of Heaven. In which case he’d vowed to have a word with the first priest he came across.

If truth be told, his first impression of the archway hadn’t been that great. It had appeared to be every bit as grim and unwelcoming as this place. But they’d made it a home.

‘Aye, we’ll get some bits and pieces in here to make it nice.’

‘That’s right.’ Maddy stepped across the classroom and reached tentatively for a light switch. She grimaced as she flipped it, half expecting failing wiring and the progressive corrosion of damp to collude in electrocuting her. Instead, several frosted glass panels in the classroom’s low ceiling flickered and winked to life.

‘See? We got some power! So, we’ll go get a kettle, a heater, camping stove. We’ll be living like kings before you know it.’

Sal nodded. ‘Just as good as the old archway.’ Taking Maddy’s lead, she smiled. Slightly forced. ‘And at least we don’t have to listen to the trains running overhead all the time.’

Actually, Liam had found that regular faint rumble comforting. Stepping outside into that dark, rubbish-strewn alleyway and listening to the restless noises of Brooklyn had been a somewhat reassuring thing. A sign that life was ceaselessly going on all around them.

Here in this abandoned school, they could just as easily be the last people on Earth and not know for sure one way or the other until they drove into town. And even then, given how lifeless Harcourt had looked on their way in, they’d not be certain.

‘Come on, guys!’ said Maddy. ‘We’ve got a ton of work to do if the agency’s going to be up and running again.’

‘Aye,’ Liam shrugged. ‘Under new management, so it is.’

Maddy grinned. This time not her forced make-the-troops-happy smile. This time a genuine grin of excitement. ‘Yes! Exactly what you just said, Liam. We’re Under New Management. Us! How cool’s that?’

‘We’re really going to change the world?’ asked Sal.

‘Yup…’ Maddy wiped dusty hands on the front of her jeans. ‘Now doesn’t that sound like a better job description? To make the world a better place, rather than just keeping it the same ol’ same crud? Huh?’

Rashim squatted down beside SpongeBubba, amid the plastic bags they’d carried in. ‘A better world?’ he muttered to himself. He was already checking through the more delicate parts of the displacement machine’s components. He held a circuit up in front of the lab robot. It dutifully extended a sensitive graphene-tipped sensor and began to test the integrity of the board.

Rashim looked up at the others. ‘Anything that isn’t the world I left behind works just fine for me.’

Sal gave that a moment’s thought. ‘Making a better world does sound good.’

‘Aye,’ Liam grinned. ‘Aye, it does, so.’

‘Then let’s make busy,’ said Maddy. ‘Highest-priority tasks first, ladies and gents. I need a coffee.’