Quantum

21

‘Hey, Darrell, you ready to go back to work?’

Darrell Jones walked over to where Bud Vesper sat in the excavator and hesitantly peered down into the pit. ‘Did they get all those dead fuckers out of the hole?’

‘After knocking my schedule off by a week, they better have. Fuckin’ med school.’

‘Med school?’

‘Yeah. Up until the late 1800s, the med school had a couple of buildings down here. The Gross Anatomy building stood right about where we were digging.’

‘That arm I found looked a lot fresher than the 1800s.’

‘It wasn’t. The university sent a pathologist down here to collect what we’d found. He told me the reason we didn’t find bones was that the parts were too pickled to rot and buried too deep for anything to eat ’em. The guy also said that back then there were rumors about the med school robbing fresh graves to get their cadavers. He assured me that they don’t do it like that anymore.’

‘I should hope the fuck not!’

‘Anyway, they’re all gone now and on their way to a decent burial.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ Jones said as he picked up his story pole and began climbing down into the hole.

By midafternoon Vesper had widened the excavation along the side of West Engineering, but as he dug closer to the old building, he began to encounter construction debris.

‘I’d like to beat the crap out of the guy who left all this shit down here,’ Vesper said as he pulled out another bucketful of shattered bricks.

Vesper lowered the hydraulic arm back into the hole. When it hit bottom, a loud hollow sound echoed from below. Jones quickly motioned for him to pull out. Vesper parked the bucket off to the side, shut the Cat down, and walked over to the edge of the hole.

‘What the hell did I hit now?’

‘Beats me, Bud, but it sure sounded funny.’

‘Might be a branch off the steam tunnel. What’s the invert elevation?’

Jones placed his story pole down in the hole and eye-balled the depth.

‘It’s about thirteen off the original grade.’

‘Too deep for a tunnel. What the…’ Vesper thought for a moment as he looked at the masonry, trying to envision the whole structure from the exposed fragment. The rubble they’d cleared appeared to be confined to a circular area ten feet in diameter. ‘I gotta check something.’

He climbed out of the hole and walked over to the site trailer that served as his local office. He flipped through a set of drawings he had for the project until he found the campus master site plan. Vesper located the area they were working in, and there, next to a dashed circle, read a note: STACK REMOVED 1948.

‘It’s a fucking smokestack,’ Vesper growled.

Shaking his head in disgust, he picked up the phone and called Murrow.

‘Hey, Fred, it’s Bud. How’s that contingency fund holding up?’

‘What is it now?’ Murrow sounded as though he could use an aspirin.

‘Nothing much, just the foundation of a goddamn smokestack that was yanked out back in ’forty-eight.’

‘How bad?’

‘The architect wants to put a column right smack on top of the goddamn thing. Looks like there’s a cleanout tunnel coming out of one side. Sounds hollow, so it won’t bear the weight. The whole thing’s gotta come out.’

‘Okay, Bud, but take it easy on me. At the rate we’re going, the contingency money will be shot before we even get the foundation in.’

‘I’ll be gentle. See ya, Fred.’

Vesper clipped the phone to his hip and returned to the latest discovery.

‘What’s the story, Bud?’ Jones asked.

‘Once upon a time, there was a big old smokestack right here.’ Vesper pointed at the ring of shattered masonry. He then walked about ten paces west. ‘The stack was connected to the boiler house, which sat right about there. When they demolished the stack, they chopped the tree down but left the stump. I talked with Murrow, and he gave the okay to rip it out.’

‘Then let’s rip.’

Vesper climbed back into the cab of his excavator and carefully began digging out the edges around the stack’s foundation. It took almost two hours to expose the base of the demolished smokestack. Vesper widened the trench he’d dug around the stack on the side opposite the presumed access tunnel.

Vesper rammed the bucket into the bricks; a fissure opened in the brittle mortar joints, and two more hits widened the crack that ran top to bottom. Vesper then dug the teeth of the bucket into the upper lip of the cylinder and drove it downward, peeling away the masonry shell. Broken bricks spilled out of the fractured vessel amid a cloud of dust and ancient ash.

Jones signaled for Vesper to wait while he took a look inside — with their recent luck, he was afraid of what they might find. He switched on his flashlight and pointed it into the tunnel. The dust was still swirling but slowly settling.

‘No steam pipes, no wires. So far, so good,’ Jones muttered to himself. ‘Nothing but broken bricks on the—’

Jones dropped his flashlight and jumped back from the darkened opening, cursing.

Vesper leaned out of the excavator. ‘Hey, Jones, what did ya see?’

‘Sweet mother of Jesus! I just do not fucking believe this. I’m working in a goddamn graveyard! I don’t need this shit, I really don’t!’

Jones was pacing in a circle. Vesper could see panic in the man’s eyes. He leapt from the Caterpillar and ran over to the tunnel.

‘Darrell, you okay, man?’

‘I thought you told me all the dead people were gone! You said we weren’t going to find any more! You fuckin’ promised me, Bud!’

‘I swear, man, I thought we got ’em all.’

‘You know how I feel about this shit,’ Jones said, slowly recovering his composure while his heart was still trying to pound its way out of his chest.

Vesper nodded, then turned to investigate the latest discovery. He crouched down and peered into the dark tunnel and saw Jones’s flashlight lying on a pile of shattered bricks, its beam pointing down. Vesper picked up the flashlight, rotated the bezel for a wide beam, and aimed the light down into the darkened space.

About six feet ahead he saw a body lying prone on the floor of the tunnel. The fully clothed figure of a man looked as if it had been cast aside, like a rag doll, the arms and legs unnaturally askew. Off to one side lay a dust-covered leather briefcase and a rumpled hat.

Somehow, Vesper thought, I don’t think the med school put this guy down here.