Brian Freeman - The Burying Place

'Let me out,' she whispered.

Before she could punch through the heavy plywood with the metal joist in her hand, she ran out of time. She heard voices. His voice.

Down the long, black tunnel, she saw light streaming through the cracks.

Maggie climbed out of her yellow Avalanche outside the Buckthorn School. The moon, which was no more than a haloed glow behind the gray clouds, illuminated the desolate ruins. Snow drifted against the tan brick walls and weighed on the flat roof. The school, or what was left of it, was sheltered by two giant oaks with spindly branches that looked like witches' fingers. Every window was shuttered with heavy plywood. Every metal door was looped with chain and locked shut.

She imagined the school as it had been after the war, beside a dusty dirt road, surrounded by corn fields, with farm boys dropped off at its doors in shirts and ties. That was long ago. Now it was forgotten, falling down, eroding a little more with each bitter winter. After thirty years of abandonment, the animals and the weather owned it. That was what attracted explorers like Nick Garaldo.

Maggie saw a tall, athletic man in his early thirties approaching her truck. He wore a black fleece jacket, and he shoved his hands in his pockets and gave her a cocky smile. He had a backpack over one shoulder.

'Nieman?' she asked.

'That's me.'

'Thanks for sticking around,' she told him.

'No problem.' He gestured at the school with a flick of his head. 'You want to go inside?'

'Let's take a walk around the perimeter first.'

'Sure thing.'

He led her across the field, which crackled with snow, oak branches, and dead leaves. The ground sloped sharply downward as they hiked around the western wall. She shuffled down the hill in her boots past a cluster of towering spruce trees. Where the ground flattened, they were at the rear of the school. The lower level was open to the elements. She poked her head past the exposed concrete pillars and studied the mess of bricks and pipes.

Nieman turned on a flashlight and pointed it at the ground. 'Those are the pistachio shells,' he said. 'That means something to you, huh?'

'It does. Keep that light on them, will you?'

Maggie bent down. The ground was littered with shells, and she noticed that they weren't covered with dust and that their color was still bright red. Nick Garaldo had been here recently. She stood up and asked, 'Have you noticed any evidence of intruders recently? Anyone prying back the window coverings or tampering with the locks?'

'No, nothing like that. The place is sealed up pretty tight.'

Maggie nodded. The wind shifted, swirling snow down from the roof of the school and into the debris of the lower level. She smelled the sweet, cold air, but somewhere in the eddy of the breeze, something else came and went. It was so fleeting she wasn't sure if it had really been there, or if her senses had imagined it.

She backed up into the field behind the school and looked at the upper level, which was boarded shut with a wall of plywood covering the rear windows. Nieman eyed her curiously.

'Something wrong?' he asked.

'I'm not sure. Did you smell something?'

He shrugged. 'Lots of dead animals inside. Raccoons. Dogs. Squirrels. Rats. They don't pay me to play animal control officer.'

'Yeah.'

The stench that had flitted through her nostrils was vile and fresh. She stood in the field as the choppy currents of the storm fought with each other, and when the air blew directly toward her across the roof of the school, the smell hit her again. This time, it lingered, and even in the crisp night, it made her pinch her nose shut.

This was no dead squirrel. This was a corpse smell, the kind of revolting gas that a body gives off when it's shut inside with the dead air.

'What the fuck is that?' Maggie asked.

Nieman sniffed the air. 'Shit, you're right. That's new. It wasn't like that over the weekend.'

'Let's go. Somebody's dead in there.'

She led the way this time, back up the hill and around the corner to the front of the school. Four concrete steps led up to a series of steel doors. Here, where the wind didn't reach them, she didn't notice the smell. She felt an urge to hurry, but she knew the urge was irrational. If Nick Garaldo was inside, he wasn't alive.

'Open this up, will you?' she asked.

Nieman hunted for the key to undo the lock that held the chain together on the doors. When he found it, he unlocked the padlock and slid it in his pocket. He let the chain fall on the steps. Maggie pushed past him, swung open the door, and bolted inside. Nieman followed, letting the door swing shut behind him.

She stopped, because she couldn't see. The world turned black.

The smell suffocated her. Locked inside the ruins, the stench multiplied like a runaway strain of bacteria, turning the air rank. It was so sudden and overwhelming that she could barely breathe, and she wanted to bend over and vomit. She clapped her hand over her entire face, trying to keep out the smell, but it wormed inside her anyway.

'Oh my God,' she screamed. 'Turn on your flashlight!'

Nieman didn't answer. Maggie reached out in the dark to make sure he was there, and as she did, she heard her phone ringing in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw on the caller ID that it was Troy Grange.

'Troy—' she began, but then someone slapped the phone from her hand, and she heard it shatter on the concrete floor.

When she tried to shout, the words died in her throat as a steel wire encircled her neck.

Stride and Serena barely spoke on the drive across the empty night highways. He drove fast. They both felt the urgency of time and of not knowing what they would find when they arrived. He concentrated on the road, which was slick with snow, but every now and then he stole a glance across the front seat at Serena. He knew she felt his eyes, but she never looked back. Her face was in dark profile beside him.

'Watch out for deer,' she warned when they entered a long stretch of highway bordered on both sides by thick forest. 'They come out when you least expect it.'

'I know.'

He thought about the advice that Minnesota drivers learned in school. Don't steer for deer. Drive right over them. Kill them. Better them than you, because you're more likely to kill yourself trying to avoid them. He'd hit deer a few times over the years. Each time, he told himself it would be different if he slowed down, if he kept his eyes on the road, if he used his high beams. But it didn't matter. You couldn't stop deer from running, and if they crossed the road at the moment you were there, you were going to have a collision. The best thing to do was come out of it alive.

They come out when you least expect it .

Serena wasn't talking about deer. She was talking about the two of them. Or maybe the three of them. Their collision.

He knew that, at the end of the day, she didn't care about Maggie. Serena had known all along about Maggie's feelings for him, and she had dealt with them for better or worse. What mattered was whether he could walk away from the accident alive. Whether he could walk away and leave Maggie behind. That was what she was waiting for him to say. He didn't know if she could live with the idea of him working side by side with Maggie every day, but the first step was his. He had to tell her. I love you more. I want you to stay.

He thought about Maggie. He could still feel her in his arms. After all their years together, it had been strangely easy to glide across a line from friends to lovers. His feelings for her had become entangled with their history. That was why he couldn't say what Serena wanted. He couldn't lie to her when he didn't know what he felt. By not saying anything, he knew he had told her something she didn't want to hear.