Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls by Wendelin Van Draanen Page B

daughter, and since there’s a side door, I whisper, “This way!”
    So we duck through the side door and escape.
    And we wind up in a weird closet-like area with three
other
doors.
    “Now what?” Casey asks.
    Billy goes into announcer mode. “Behind door number one we have an old man in a coffin. Behind door number two?”
    “I think it’s the office,” I say, trying to get my bearings.
    “That leaves door number three or door number four. Samantha Keyes, what is your destiny?”
    I can hear Little Miss Nosy Bob out in the other room, whining, “There! They went in there!” and I know that if I don’t move quick, my destiny is to be busted.
    So I toss a mental coin and go through door number three.
    It was definitely not my lucky day.

We find ourselves inside a sort of industrial alcove. There’s a stainless-steel counter and sink to our right, cabinets on our left, and the floor is just cement.
    It’s not a dead end, though. There’s a wide opening past the cabinets, and from the amount of light coming into the alcove, it seems like it must go to a much bigger room—one I’m hoping will lead us outside.
    I can hear an odd kind of whirring, ticking, running-water sound coming from around the corner. It’s like someone’s taking a shower with a metronome going. I also notice a smell. It’s not super strong or anything, but it does remind me of … I’m not sure what.
    Then we peek around the corner.
    I choke down an “Aaah!” and right away I know what the smell reminds me of.
    Biology class.
    Only here, instead of frogs, there’s a human body.
    Actually, there are two bodies—a dead one, and an
alive
one working on the dead one.
    The alive guy is faced mostly away from us, and he’s wearing lots of clothes—blue scrubs that tie in back over aregular shirt and slacks, latex gloves, a hairnet, and a surgical mask.
    The dead guy, on the other hand, is face up and wearing
no
clothes.
    Well, except for a little white towel across his groin.
    The dead guy’s on a big steel tray on a wheeled stand near a sink, and the whirring-ticking-shower sound seems to be coming from a machine on a counter near the sink. It looks like a cross between a big stainless-steel blender and a glass cooking pot. It has knobs and a gauge on the base, and the glass part is about half full of a pinkish orange liquid. There’s also a long rubber tube that goes from the base, across the counter, and up to the neck of the dead guy.
    “Can we
please
go back and try door number four?” I whisper, because I’ve seen more than enough. Besides, I don’t know how we’ll ever make it past the scrubs guy to the door on the other side of the room without being seen.
    Billy and Casey are all for that, but just as we’re turning to go, the door we’d come through starts to open.
    Casey grabs me by the hand and hauls me around the corner and inside the corpse room, and out of reflex I grab Billy by the wrist and bungee him along. The next thing I know, Casey’s pulled us through the partial opening of a big steel door and is shutting us inside.
    It’s cold inside this big steel closet.
    And dark.
    And the room feels like it’s
purring
.
    Casey hadn’t closed the door all the way, and now hestarts inching it back open so we can see what’s happening out in the room. The sliver of light that comes in through the crack makes it so we can see around us, too, and what I discover is that this closet is deep.
    And has shelves.
    Long, wide shelves that are stacked floor to ceiling on both sides, leaving an aisle down the middle.
    Shelves that are almost all full.
    “Are those
bodies
?” I whisper to Billy. I mean, they may be wrapped up, but from the shape and size, what else could they be?
    “I’m not feelin’ too good,” he whispers back.
    So I lean forward and whisper to Casey, “I think we’d rather be busted than stay in here!”
    But Casey doesn’t even answer me, and since he’s watching and listening so intently to