Creepers

3

Balenger's muscles relaxed. Knowing there'd be other tests, he watched the creepers fill their knapsacks. "What time are you going in?"

"Shortly after ten." Conklin hooked a walkie-talkie to his belt. "The building's only two blocks away, and I've already done the reconnaissance work, so we don't have to waste time figuring how to infiltrate. Why are you smiling?"

"I just wonder if you realize how much your vocabulary is like the military's."

"A special-ops mission." Vinnie clipped a folded knife to the inside of a jeans pocket. "That's what this is."

Balenger sat on a cigarette-burned chair next to the door and took more notes. "I found a lot of material on the professor's website and the other major ones on the Net, like infiltration.org. How many urban-explorer groups do you think there are?"

"Yahoo and Google list thousands of sites," Rick answered. "Australia, Russia, France, England. Here in the U.S., they're all over the country. San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis. To urban explorers, that city's famous for its maze of utility tunnels known as the Labyrinth. Then there's Pittsburgh, New York, Boston, Detroit-"

"Buffalo," Balenger said.

"Our old stomping grounds," Vinnie agreed.

"The groups often flourish in areas with decaying inner cities," Conklin said. "Buffalo and Detroit are typical. People flee to the suburbs, leaving grand old buildings without occupants. Hotels. Offices. Department stores. In many cases, the owners simply walk away. In lieu of taxes, the city assumes ownership. But often the bureaucrats can't decide whether to demolish or renovate. If we're lucky, the abandoned buildings get boarded up and preserved. In downtown Buffalo, we sometimes infiltrated places that were built around 1900 and abandoned in 1985 or even earlier. As the world moves on, they stay the same. Damaged, yes. The decay is inevitable. But their essence doesn't change. With each structure we infiltrate, it's as if a time machine takes us back through the decades."

Balenger lowered his pen. His look of interest encouraged the professor to continue.

"When I was a child, I used to sneak into old buildings," Conklin explained. "It was better than staying home and listening to my parents argue. Once, in a boarded-up apartment complex, I found a stack of phonograph records that were released in the 1930s. Not long-playing vinyl, what used to be called LPs, with a half-dozen songs on each side. I'm talking about discs made of thick, brittle plastic, easily breakable, with only one song on each side. When my parents weren't home, I enjoyed putting the records on my father's turntable and playing them again and again, scratchy old music that made me imagine the primitive recording studio and the old-fashioned clothes the performers wore. For me, the past was better than the present. If you consider the news these days-elevated threat levels and terrorist attacks-it makes a lot of sense to hide in the past."

"When we were undergraduates in a class the professor taught, he asked us to go with him to an old department store," Vinnie said.

Conklin looked amused. "It involved some risk. If any of them had been injured, or if the university found out I was encouraging my students to commit a crime, I could have been dismissed." His pleasure made his face look younger. "I guess I'm still marching against the rules, wanting to raise hell while I'm still able."

"The experience was eerie," Vinnie said. "The department store's counters were still there. And a few pieces of merchandise. Moth-eaten sweaters. Shirts that mice had chewed on. Old cash registers. The building was like a battery that stored the energy of everything that happened inside it. Then it leaked that energy, and I could almost feel long-dead shoppers drifting around me."

"Maybe you belong in the University of Iowa's creative-writing department," Rick kidded him.

"Okay, okay, but each of you knows what I mean."

Cora nodded. "I felt it, too. That's why we asked the professor to keep us in mind for other expeditions, even after we graduated."

"Each year, I choose a building that I feel has unusual merit," the professor told Balenger.

"Once we infiltrated an almost-forgotten sanitarium in Arizona," Rick said.

"Another time, we got into a Texas prison that was abandoned for fifty years," Vinnie added.

Cora grinned. "The next time, we snuck onto an abandoned oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Always excitement. So what building did you choose this year, Professor? Why did you bring us to Asbury Park?"

"A sad story."