"10-4, detective, but—" the young man on the other end of the radio stopped, sighed audibly, and stated in plain language, "Look, we've combed the footage several times. There's no capture of whoever you saw in the woods. It's a chest cam, remember. The angle just wasn't there."
Beckett huffed, irritated. She replied by rote when the tech signed off the private channel and switched back to whatever one he was working in otherwise. She did the same, but was really only partially aware of the letters and numerical values and being uttered by ESU in their alien jargon relating to the field of engagement and the teams' movements through it.
It went as close to silent as it ever seemed to get when everyone came to a halt within the first floor west stairwell. Peeled and cracking beige walls dirtied what daylight managed to eke through grimy windows and rebound its way to the gloomier interior. A narrow, revolving metal staircase led up and down from where they stood. It was too cramped for more than two people to navigate comfortably and looked like every bit its age. An ESU member gripped one of the mooring beams that extended above and below and leaned inward to look down. He jerked sharply away when the metal groaned and shifted. It swayed slightly with tortured squeals that tumbled below and reverberated back up at them in a series of deeper groans. Dust trembled loose from above and fell in a slowly descending cloud.
"That's great," Hawkins muttered, waving a hand before his scrunched visage.
"Shit," the same agent grumbled by way of agreement. "The whole thing has shattered its anchoring brackets, Sarge. The ones above seem to be holding, but otherwise, it's hanging loose."
"Unnavigable?" Bielsa asked.
"Not necessarily, but it'll make one helluva racket." He looked back at the CSU technician. "You don't get seasick easily, do you, kid?"
Hawkins groaned miserably.
"Kirkland, Castle," Beckett spoke into the radio on the secondary frequency. "Callback on six."
A moment later she heard the ESU Lieutenant's voice come through, but it was difficult to hear over the howling of the wind. "Go, Six."
"It's Beckett. We're at the west stairwell. It isn't looking good. Is there another way down?"
"No—uh, negative," Castle answered after a brief pause.
She could almost peer into that fleeting gap before he'd spoken and see Kirkland gesture for the author to relay the data on their behalf. An attempt at putting her mind at ease amidst her partner's absence from her side. It was embarrassing to be coddled even in such a diminutive manner. It worked like a charm. Rick's voice was a welcome gust of warm reassurance.
"The stairs are functional," her wayward shadow continued. "We used both the east and west ones during the initial sweep-and-clear. The latter is in ugly shape, but we took it slow and it did the job. That cave-in split both sublevels in half. More completely than I'd imagined earlier, I mean. There's no easy way across either floor within itself and the debris in the way is a mix of timbers, stone, and broken glass." He paused amidst a particularly forceful gust that made her wince from its volume through the radio. "Beckett?"
"I'm still here."
"Listen, don't attempt making a path across like Finch did, okay? If all of this structural damage is as recent as we suspect, there's no reason to assume it has settled into a stable position." The implied image of a loose concrete slab shifting in its set and sliding out from underfoot or crashing down on their unsuspecting heads left no room for disagreement.
"10-4. That's all. Beckett out." She shook her head while regarding an expectant Sergeant Bielsa. "The second sub-level's east entrance is locked and damaged from the pictures we saw at the precinct and there's no way across to the west entrance from that side in any case. It's this path or nothing."
"We'll take it two at a time and leap-frog this puta," the other began in clipped reply. "The first pair steps off at the next landing to secure it while the next pair goes by. Hoffman—you and me first, then you two, docs, then the hot ticket and Beckett. You two on our six," she added with a glance at Ulan and Eamon.
Logan—the 'hot ticket' as it were—showed no reaction other than to shift the set of his pack more comfortably across his shoulders in preparation to move.
"Casey, Greene," Bielsa added to their final pairing, "this room is your baby." They nodded.
"You placed me in the order twice," the officer who'd checked the stability of the staircase previously said with a feigned frown of confusion at Bielsa. Hoffman. Beckett couldn't recall his first name. Jeff? Geoff.
"Mierda, no," the woman replied in grim amusement. "We all know where you belong. Ándale, meat-shield. Ahora."
"To deflect and swerve," Hoffman chimed back in a blatant skew from the NYPD motto, but the banter waned to a sharp grimace as the narrow-featured man eased onto the hanging spiral staircase. The structure held the burden without apparent trouble, but his weight elicited a few long, nerve-grating squeals. "It actually feels okay. Lotta sway but zero bounce, for what that's worth."
"Anyone else inside knows exactly where we are now," the Sergeant said with an impatient wave of one hand. "Go."
It would have been difficult to state which was worse afterward: eventually following the others down the staircase with its awful racket and sickening pendulum motion, or waiting for her and Logan's turn in the brief interims of the others' advances. Every idle moment grated on the detective. Each step taken was one farther away from the man she worried about more than herself. It felt like longer, but once they were moving the descent progressed quickly enough and without mishap. Deeper into gloom they went and more thickly into the stench of dampened rot. By the second sub-level, they were navigating purely via flashlight beams again. It felt like the temperature dropped by several degrees.
Castle's descriptions of the hospital were spot-on. The main hall may have been invitingly open, but beyond that point, the corridors and rooms closed into narrow and stunted spaces. Swarming blackness compounded the sense of constriction as they continued. The second lower landing, like the first, was smallish and square with an empty door frame.
"This is beginning to feel like an intentionally antagonistic design," Hawkins observed aloud. "A hospital like this should be running two wide main halls on each floor spanning three strips of rooms: one at either exterior wall for patient housing and a central series of utility, medical, and office suites. You could argue the arrangements and create separate isles of dormitories and medical wings based on their respective functions, but the basic layout would still maximize efficiency in either case. This is an aberration. The last place you want to administer whimsy like this is in an asylum. The very foundation of mental health is a sense of personal security. Who could ever feel safe here?"
"Not me," Hoffman muttered from their fore.
"Ulan, Eamon: bottom of the stairs," Bielsa instructed neatly into the gap afterward and the others moved ahead with the twins watching like pillars of shadow in the waning glow of light behind.
A mass of tumbled materials ended the pitch-black passage prematurely thirty feet ahead. Within their section of it, a narrow path was cleared, probably by Finch. Debris sat piled in heaps at either side. It necessitated filing through one-by-one. The deceased urban explorer's structural band-aid remained in place too; a single metal beam against the right wall, a thoroughly rusted, broken piece from a larger whole, which stood as a repurposed support strut beneath naked and cracked wooden beams.
"Our predecessor was very determined," Hawkins murmured. "That H-beam is rolled steel. A section that size probably weighs around two-hundred pounds. I'm… Hmm. I'm uncertain how he managed to lift the broken section of ceiling and stabilize it long enough to insert a makeshift brace. That seems like a two-man job at the very least." He stood under the ragged hole and squinted upwards while directing his flashlight beam into the gap. "Strange to see the beam shored off at the top end like that too. Steel is immensely strong. Its failure threshold is around thirty-six thousand pounds per square inch. It looks like it was...I don't know." He frowned deeply after admitting as much. "Some kind of torsional force perhaps, though how that might've occurred is anyone's—"
Bielsa, her expression flat, grabbed the CSU technician by the back of his tactical vest and reeled him a few awkward steps away from the source of intrigue. "Let's not stand under the hole, huh, Doc? I'd rather not see the missing half of it come down and make a mess out of you."
The dark-skinned young man grimaced and nodded ready agreement. The ill-fitting tactical helmet bobbed at his crown and slid down over his brow. "Y-yes, of course. You can call me Joe, by the way."
The ESU agent started to bite back something swift and sharp but hesitated as realization dawned and blinked at him instead. She lifted an eyebrow.
"Or, uh, Doc is fine. Yeah." Joseph cleared his throat and retreated to the back of the group.
They continued toward the aged, unchained doorway that was their goal ahead.
As the agents were stacking up at either side of it in preparation to enter, Beckett heard Lanie amusedly murmur to Hawkins. "'You can call me Joe?'" She snorted stealthily. "Since when?"
The other's deeper skin tone concealed a furious blush, but his scrunched posture gave it away.
"Beckett?" Bielsa murmured.
"Count it off," the detective answered quietly while taking her place in the line-up, weapon in hand and the other grasping Logan's right shoulder.
Their fore cycled from three fingers to one in a silent count. Then Hoffman pushed through the decaying portal with his MP5 raised and ready. The others streamed in behind him like a quietly moving wave of black. They branched apart, two-by-two, to fan out left and right as they advanced.
The miasma of decay was much stronger at its source. It was like hitting an invisible wall.
"Oof—fuck," Bielsa expelled, but it didn't slow her down.
It was a large room even with the massive rectangle of the pool assuming the dominant portion of its space. The whole floor had been deeply dug into its earthy home with a twenty-five-foot ceiling across its two-hundred-foot length and seventy-foot breadth. Their torchlight, diffused by distance, barely illuminated the far walls enough to glean any detail. What it did touch conveyed the same message of precarious ruin. Piles and piles of debris lined the room's outer circumference. Bowl-shaped, the exterior build-ups fed into smaller doses of tumbled down disheveledness towards the interior. All of it bristled shattered studs, chalky remains of crumbled plaster, and flaky scraps of tar paper. Nature had invaded here too, but nothing lived. Scattered leaves crunched underfoot and branches snapped from their parent boughs littered the area.
The swimming pool at the center of it all felt like it bore the pull of a singularity. She could discern where the darkness loomed more densely at its center. Unseen, coldly discarded corpses rose up in an irregular conical formation. Even a strictly peripheral awareness threatened to seize up her limbs and lock her into a blank-faced, stupefied stare. It felt like every dead pair of eye sockets thereat was watching them move. Waiting for attention. Look at us. Witness what they did. Have you ever even imagined such callousness as our grim fates?
Somehow Beckett managed to resist the urge and kept pace with Logan.
Hoffman succumbed to the inexorability of the lure. His voice spilled out like blood gushing from a mortal wound. "Oh, god." It shook audibly when he swiftly added in a more plaintive tone, "Oh, fuck me."
"Muévelo, Officer!" Bielsa snarled with a hard elbow striking the man in the back.
Her companion stumbled and almost fell. He staggered to a halt, threw up in a sudden, ghastly spout, stumble forward several more steps and burst with nausea for a second, more violent time. Whether by grisly luck or determination he kept shambling forward even as it was happening.
The horrible sounds of his struggle almost undid Kate where she stood, pale and quivering with her jaw clenched, sucking hard breaths through parted lips. She and Logan had stopped to cover the wavering duo from their side of the room. No one living was visible beyond their small group. Thank God. We'd probably be fucking dead.
"E-Right," Hoffman choked aloud and spat. "Moving."
"E-Left," Logan rumbled like a deeper echo. "Movin'." His voice was surreal even in a succinct delivery. A stroke of eerie calm within the turbulence of the moment. Same as Bielsa resumed doing with her companion, Beckett maintained a guiding grasp on the mercenary's shoulder and accompanied, step-for-step, with her weapon half-raised around his right side.
Entry right and left referenced passages on opposing sides of the floor about midway of its length, what had to be the men's and women's locker rooms and showers. Neither were equipped with doorways. The white bricking simply ended and turned inward to admit visitors.
When Logan stopped abruptly in his tracks she collided into a flush press against his back.
Damn it. He smelled good. Some kind of aftershave or cologne. Subtly applied. It could have been the cheapest brand on the market and it would've smelled like heaven given the fouler odors which prevailed at the time. "What is it?" she snapped, perturbed by the injection of appeal while backing off.
"Maintain position." He started to move on but stopped short again when she automatically began to accompany. Kate wasn't attempting to be obtuse. The other's tone mislabeled the message: it didn't sound like he was trying to give her an order and so she didn't comprehend the necessity to remain. A turn at the neck laid those gas-flame blues upon her, but they weren't narrowed in anger. They bore a neutral width and shone like polished sapphires in the torchlight beaming from her vest.
"Wh—" Her voice fled from her throat. Just like that. Gone like a bird startled from its leafy home and shot into the sky. Away, away, away while she stared down at what an altered angle of his torso permitted a glimpse of.
The tiled floor leading into the locker room was relatively clear of detritus, almost the white it had originally been except for widespread brownish discolorations. It was layered with dirty footprints leading into the chamber. Varied sizes, all barefoot. So many. It was a bewildering mass of impressions further obfuscated by slim lines that cut through the stains in more pallid tracks of cleaner white.
For one precious moment, she thought they might have found survivors after all.
Then she realized the brownish hues weren't some kind of mold or grime.
Blood. Old, dried bloodstains. And the long unbroken tracks streaking through it were drag marks where the heels of the dead had skimmed uselessly along during their removal and consignment to a makeshift mass grave.
Beckett was hurtled into the past. She saw herself, Rick, and Deputy John Autry standing at the head of narrow cement stairs leading from a barn floor into a concealed subterranean sprawl. Stairs smattered with childishly small hand and foot imprints ascending clumsily in blood, widespread in an achingly clear retreat of blind terror. She smelled again the time-worn wood, hay, and a combination of oil and diesel fuel. She could feel the lingering perversion and madness of Llewellyn Matthews where he had been his truest self in all his irredeemable maliciousness. She heard Castle's grasping attempt to explain the enduring trail of his ages-old flight: I-It's part of the story.
"It's the kill room," she heard herself say, hardly audible.
"Wait here," Logan deposited again more quietly and moved inside without another word.
And she did. For all the urgency which sought to propel her into being a worthy witness on behalf of the world's victims—for all of her self-administered conviction not to flinch in the face of adversity—the detective voluntarily stayed behind for the very first time in her entire law-enforcement career.
For five full seconds.
The mercenary glanced partially backward again at the sound of her boots following. He stared for a silent span and took account of the desolate determination in her eyes. Then, at length, turned to continue. He did not attempt to dissuade her again.
A/N: I'm going to put this here and beg the indulgence of the reviewer that initially broached the subject. It's not my intent to call anyone out for sharing their impressions, which I think many will sympathize with, at least to some degree. It's a legitimate concern and it deserves to be addressed.
So. Yes, I imagine Kate has entertained a passing thought about sleeping with Logan. Don't we all think about sex when we're around someone we're attracted to? That doesn't mean it's ever gonna happen or even that we genuinely want it to. Biology influences us. It does not rule us utterly. I think it's been made pretty clear who Beckett agonizes over and worries about within her heart. Now, if getting distracted here and there renders every example of her concern, care, and shameless attraction for Rick so meaningless as to be casually discarded...well, that's a bit much. At that point, you're no longer reading my story. You're writing your own version atop it.
We all do that to some degree, of course. I sure do. It's not my intent to chastise. After all, it's no accident that you're concerned, now is it? What I will say, though, is that I can only tell my version of this or any story. The one you tell yourself based on the platform I provide...that's up to each of you. Make it a good one if you can.
While we're here... Let me add this woefully belated and narrowly related word of caution, because I don't want there to be any further confusion about my particular style of storytelling. There are plotted scenes that lay ahead, in Apprentice and in either one or two more tales slated to follow it, that are going to be a lot harder to read than a few brief exchanges with one good-looking mercenary. I loooove a lot of the fluffier stories some of the other writers here have concocted about this show, but I rarely feel compelled to write them. I crave darkness to balance the light. These characters are going to struggle dearly under my care. They will face the mostly-AU-pasts I've given them. They will confront temptation in more than one of its guises. And unless I completely miss the mark along the way, you will have cause to doubt them. Shout at them. Shake your goddamn phone or computer screen and rail at them. I'm going to rip their hearts out and I imagine some unpleasant part of me will smile while I do it.
But we will get to the finish line if you're inclined to endure alongside me. My hazy versions of the characters we love will get there, in a fashion. I don't promise 'happy' endings. This isn't a Disney classic. All I can promise is to try to make the journey worth the effort in the end.