HOUGH COLD-NUMBED AND ALMOST USELESS, MY HANDS EXPLORED the skull. From habit, my brain catalogued detail.

Large mastoids and brow ridges. Male. Edentulous.

“Who the bloody hell cares?” I screamed in frustration.

My cry sounded flat, deadened by brick and trapped silence.

I looked at my watch. The glowing hands now formed an acute angle pointing left. Two twenty? Four ten? Afternoon? Night?

I thought of my daughter. Wondered what Katy was doing at that moment. Harry. Ryan. Tried to imagine what was happening at the lab.

Surely I’d been missed by now. Surely a team was coming. Right, coming where?

“Help! Please!”

My throat felt raw. I coughed.

“Hello! Anyone!”

A bout of trembling gripped me. I hugged my body, felt my arm bones knock my ribs. My skin was cold and clammy to the touch.

Like a corpse at the morgue.

Panic flared anew.

I’m going to die. Alone in a dark tomb. No one will know where I went. Where the flesh is rotting from my bones.

I thought of the tweaker who’d frozen to death on his porch. How long could I survive before hypothermia killed me?

I hated my captor. Hated him for me. For Katy. For Harry. Hated him with a fury born of years spent with the battered dead. Hated him for the throat-slashed wives. The cigarette-burned babies. The bedsored grannies.

“Who are you?” I shrieked.

Forget him. Activity brings warmth. Warmth brings life. Use the anger. Move. Get out.

I took a deep breath.

Took another, shifting to my nose.

The musty smell was stronger here. Mold. Mildew. Creatures long dead.

Setting the skull on the floor, I rolled to my belly and began dragging myself forward, using the odor as a guide.

My raw elbows screamed. My injured leg spasmed.

Ignore the pain.

Arm-thrust. Pull.

Arm-thrust. Pull.

Soft echoes suggested a more enclosed space. A wall ahead?

Six thrusts, then my chest landed on bulk. Propping on my right elbow, I explored the object with my left hand. Gingerly. Careful not to move it.

Lumpy L, scaly with mold. Underside flat with a heel-shaped protuberance at one end.

A boot.

I reached left.

A second boot lay beside the first.

Heart hammering, I danced my fingers upward over mold-crusted fabric that crumbled at my touch. Running beneath the fabric were long tubular objects. I recognized their shape. Their meaning.

Leg bones.

Dear God, I was feeling up a corpse.

I pictured the body.

Swinging my legs right, I inched upward along the side of the torso, blindly probing in the darkness. My fingers picked out heavy round buttons.

I counted. Visualized. A jacket?

I applied pressure with my palm.

The jacket overlaid a series of rigid arcs. Lumps and knobs. A collapsed rib cage. Vertebrae.

I tried lifting the jacket’s lower edge. My effort kicked up a tsunami of scent, rank and earthy and reeking of death.

I changed to breathing through my mouth.

Elbowing and kneeing in reverse, I cleared the boots and shifted left.

Beside the first, my trembling fingers encountered a second set of footwear. Trousers. Another jacket. A fleshless skull, spiderweb hair clinging to the crown.

Again, I hitched backward and dragged myself left.

A third corpse lay head to foot with the others. Or had, until the skull detached and sought new ground.

My hands recoiled in horror.

Mother of God! My prison was a crypt, more frigid and black than I could have imagined possible. Filled with complete and utter silence.

And decaying bodies.

Questions kaleidoscoped in my brain. Hysterical. Pointless.

How long? How many? Who?

Using my bound legs, I hitched myself aft of the third corpse and dragged myself left, hands fumbling in the dark.

Irrational, but I had to know.

Beyond the first three dead I found four more.

Brailleing for clues, I determined that everyone had been entombed wearing boots, belted pants, and jackets with heavy round buttons, probably metal. Four jackets were adorned with medals and insignia.

Dead soldiers?

It didn’t matter. What did matter was the possibility that I’d soon join their ranks.

My breath began to catch, my chest to heave.

Reason weighed in.

No tears! Think!

A single word exploded in my brain.

Edges!

A desperate ghoul, I raided the dead and placed my booty in a pile. Medals. Buckles. Insignias. Three lower jaws with the front teeth in place.

Shifting to a hunch-sit, I spread my knees, leaned forward, and began sawing at my ankle bindings. One cord was all I needed.

One.

One.

How long did I gnaw away at those ropes? Long.

As with my wrists, it finally happened. A gentle yielding of pressure. A pop. My legs flew apart.

Electricity exploded from neuron to neuron.

I wanted to scream.

To shout for joy.

To kill the bastard who’d done this to me.

I wanted to escape.

Rounding my back, I massaged and flexed both ankles.

When blood flow returned, I eased onto all fours.

Not bad.

I flexed a knee, testing the injured leg.

Tender. Tolerable.

During my corpse crawl, I’d noted that the dead had been placed with their heads or feet to a wall. Apparently, I was at one end of the tomb.

Might a door be at the other?

Arms and legs rubber, I crawled toward the spot where I’d first regained consciousness, left hand periodically skimming the brick. One step. Five. Twelve.

Twenty steps. My outstretched palm smacked brick. Another wall was meeting the long wall at ninety degrees. I’d reached the other end of the tomb.

I began sidestepping right, hand groping for a door.

Sudden horrifying thought. If the bodies had been simply bricked in, there’d have been no need of a door. No one was ever entering again. Or leaving.

My tortured brain rode another illogical wave. Poe. “The Cask of Amontillado.”

But Montresor was caught.

No. Fortunato died. Alone. Underground.

My movements became frenzied. Sitting on my haunches, I hand-swept the brick in wide jagged arcs.

Someone put you here. There had to be a way in.

There has to be a way out.

I almost gasped when my fingers brushed something set into the masonry. Flat. Smooth.

Wood!

I groped for a handle.

Zip.

A latch.

No go.

My frozen fingertips were sending little to my brain. I rubbed my hands together fast. Some feeling returned.

I began anew, more slowly. More carefully.

Eventually, my trembling fingers picked out an irregularity. Traced it.

My brain tallied the tactile, threw up a visual. A crack, outlining a door maybe two feet square.

Frantic, I began clawing at the gap with my nails. The narrow space was packed with a hard, crumbly substance.

Think, Brennan!

Fumbling back through the dark, I gathered my macabre assemblage. Then I scramble-crawled back to the door and began hacking and gouging.

Periodically, I’d roll to my back and hammer the wood with my feet. Or throw my weight from all fours, connecting with a shoulder or hip.

Sounds filled the stillness. The clink of my pirated tools. The tick of mortar falling on brick. The wheeze of air in and out of my mouth.

I was sweat-soaked and panting when the door finally popped free and dropped with a clunk.

I inched to the edge and peered out.