“People like you. People who can’t come out into the open. But they’re different from you in one way: they don’t have five hundred dollars … and a lot more besides, if I read you correctly.”

“It’s going to cost me plenty,” Jason said acidly, “to get my ID cards. Probably all I’ve got.”

“She won’t overcharge you,” the clerk said as he brought his quibble to a halt half on the sidewalk of the alley. Jason peered out, saw an abandoned restaurant, boarded up, with broken windows. Entirely dark inside. It repelled him, but apparently this was the place. He’d have to go along with it, his need being what it was: he could not be choosy.

And—they had avoided every checkpoint and barricade along the way; the clerk had picked a good route. So he had damn little to complain about, all things considered.

Together, he and the clerk approached the open-hanging broken front door of the restaurant. Neither spoke; they concentrated on avoiding the rusted nails protruding from the sheets of plywood hammered into place, presumably to protect the windows.

“Hang on to my hand,” the clerk said, extending it in the shadowy dimness that surrounded them. “I know the way and it’s dark. The electricity was turned off on this block three years ago. To try to get the people to vacate the buildings here so that they could be burned down.” He added, “But most of them stayed on.”

The moist, cold hand of the hotel clerk led him past what appeared to be chairs and tables, heaped up into irregular tumbles of legs and surfaces, interwoven with cobwebs and grainy patterns of dirt. They bumped at last against a black, unmoving wall; there the clerk stopped, retrieved his hand, fiddled with something in the gloom.

“I can’t open it,” he said as he fiddled. “It can only be opened from the other side, her side. What I’m doing is signaling that we’re here.”

A section of the wall groaningly slid aside. Jason, peering, saw into nothing more than additional darkness. And abandonment.