A/N: once again thanks for your kind reviews and happy reading.

Chapter 38

Nina took a slow, deep breath, trying to gather her nerves. She was about to go head-on with a bunch of ghosts and that always took something out of her. To be perfectly honest, she was afraid. "Well," she thought, "like that guy from that last Matrix movie said, knuckle up." "You guys may want to hand me the sledgehammer and then back up," she told the men. "This is going to get messy and I don't want to hit anyone."

Wordlessly, the hammer was handed to her and then Mac, Danny, and Flack backed off so they were out of range of the hammer. Danny kept the lantern trained on the wall so she could see what she was doing but stayed out of her reach.

She grunted as she swung the hammer and it connected to the wall solidly. The wall gave. "Joe and Anna?" Nina asked.

"Yeah?" Joe asked.

"Tell your parents (grunt) we're coming in (grunt) and we mean no harm. Tell them (grunt) the world hasn't ended (grunt) and we have proof. Tell them (grunt) it's time to move (grunt) into the Light," she instructed the children, grunting each time she swung the hammer.

Anna and Joe nodded seriously and vanished.

"You're almost through," Danny said.

Nina swung the hammer once more and the wall gave, crumbling away in a shower of brick, dust, and stale air. Breathing hard from the exertion, she set the hammer down against the wall and gestured for the lantern, which Danny handed her. "Ready or not, here we come," she muttered.

She stepped into the room...

and found herself facing at least twenty ghosts, mostly adults and a combination of male and female.

"What the hell?" Danny breathed as he followed her before moving aside to let Mac and Flack enter the room. What the hell was right. The room they were in was reasonably large, large enough to accommodate about two dozen people. In orderly rows were wooden benches and what looked like a wooden pulpit at the head of the room. Four rooms appeared to branch off and old light fixtures could be seen hanging from the ceiling.

Not seeing the ghosts, Flack and Danny and Mac branched off to check out the rooms. It was in the second room, the one adjacent to the pulpit, that had Flack swearing loudly. Throwing a glance at the ghosts, Nina joined Mac and Danny and stood at the doorway, staring.

The room turned out to be some kind of meal hall, with orderly benches and tables. On the benches and the floor were the mummified remains of nearly two dozen people; men, women, and children.

"Please," Nina mumbled, her heart beating faster, "please don't let there be any babies here."

"It doesn't look like it," Mac assured her, sweeping his light around.

"What happened to them?" she asked.

"There doesn't appear to be any visible wounds or injuries," Danny reported, studying some of the bodies up close.

"They look like they all sat down to breakfast or something and something went wrong," Nina said, looking at the items on the table. Cups were scattered about and the empty plates and utensils looked like they had been pushed about. There were a few people on the floor but most were still seated on the benches, either slumped against each other or on the table.

Taking out his latex gloves and putting them on, Mac picked up one of the metal cups and sniffed at it. It was faint but it was there; a faint, bitter almond-type smell. "Cyanide," he said. "They drank cyanide."

"It was fast, I hope," Nina said, not liking the idea of the children suffering through a poisoning.

"Acute cyanide poisoning is pretty fast and it affects the heart but it can affect the brain and cause seizures or comas," Mac said. "That could explain why there are some people on the floor."

"Why?" Nina whispered sadly. "Why did they die like this? There was no need to."

"Nina," came Joe's quiet voice. She looked down and spotted him standing beside her. "I'm over here," he said, moving to one of the benches and indicating the body of a small child leaning against what Nina assumed was his father. The body wore the same clothing that she could see Joe wearing, right down to his cap, which she spotted on his lap. The body of a girl Nina deuced to be Anna, sat next to him, slumped over the table, her hand loosely clutching the cup. Next to her sat a female Nina deuced to be her mother.

Nina went over to Joe and Anna's remains, her eyes filling with tears. "Oh, baby, I knew I might find you, but I didn't think I'd find you quite like this," she whispered sadly.

"Nina, is that Joe and Anna?" Danny asked. She nodded. "Damn."

"What's going on here?" a male ghost demanded, coming to stand next to Joe. "Why are you here?"

"This is Nina," Joe said, taking his father's hand. "She can see us and she says the world didn't end and she can prove it too."

"What do you mean?" the man asked, puzzled. "Reverend Cameron said the world would end and we would be safe down here until such a time that a sign was shown to us that it was safe to emerge again."

"Sir, when did you come down here?" Nina asked.

"December 31st, 1903," the man said, bringing his son closer to him.

"The world didn't end, sir," Nina said. "In fact, it's gone on. It's August 16th, 2008 right now," she said, "and yes, the world is still pretty scary but it's a big, bright world full of things you'd never thought possible."

"Show him the map," Joe encouraged her.

Nina brought out the subway map and laid it on the table. Joe's father studied it and several other people crowded around it, exclaiming.

"Is Lady Liberty still in the harbor?" one man asked.

"She had a massive repair job done in the early 1980's but yeah, she's still there and still standing," Nina said. She looked around at the gathering crowd and said, "Look, ladies and gentlemen, the world didn't end. It's still out there and it's huge."

"Who are they?" one woman asked, indicating Mac, Flack, and Danny, who were poking around the eating area.

"They're friends and members of the New York Police Department. They're good, honest men and they followed me down here to try and help me find you," Nina said.

"And that's not all we found," Mac said, studying a body seated at the head of the table at what Nina assumed was the front of the room. "I'd say we just found Reverend Cameron."

And at that announcement, the room temperature suddenly dropped drastically. Nina's head snapped around and Danny and Flack suddenly looked up from their examination of the room.

"That's not all we found," Nina said, scanning the room and watching as the ghost children suddenly began huddling closer to their parents and the adults began to back away from the map on the table.

"GET OUT!" a voice suddenly roared, causing everyone to jump, even the three men.

And with that, Nina found herself being flung across the room violently, to slam against a nearby wall.