Seize the Night

murky red light in the cab, and then I was suddenly afraid I'd be confronted with that impossible vista of stars and cold black space I'd seen beyond the stairwell door. The elevator cab was just an elevator cab. Empty. “Move!” Doogie urged.
    Roosevelt and Sasha already had Bobby on his feet, virtually carrying him between them, while trying to minimize the strain on his left shoulder.
    I held the elevator door, and as they took Bobby past me, his face twisted with agony. If he had been about to scream with pain, he repressed it and instead said, “Carpe cerevisi.”
    “Beer later,” I promised.
    “Beer now, party boy,” he wheezed.
    Slipping off his backpack, Doogie followed us into the big elevator, which could probably carry fifteen passengers. The cab briefly swayed and jiggled as it adjusted to his weight, and we all tried not to step on Mungojerrie.
    “Up and out,” I said.
    “Down,” Bobby disagreed.
    The control panel had no buttons for the three floors that were supposedly below us. An unlabeled slot for a magnetic card indicated how someone with the proper security clearance could reprogram the existing control buttons to gain access to lower realms. We didn't have a card.
    “There's no way to get farther down,” I said.
    “Always a way,” Doogie demurred, rummaging in his backpack.
    The corridor was bright. The loud throbbing sound grew louder.
    The elevator doors rolled shut, but we didn't go anywhere, and when I reached toward the G button, Doogie slapped my hand as though I were a child reaching for a cookie without having asked permission.
    “This is nuts,” I said.
    “Radically,” Bobby agreed.
    He sagged against the back wall of the cab, supported by Sasha and Roosevelt. He was gray now.
    I said, “Bro, you don't have to be a hero.”
    “Yeah, I do.”
    “No, you don't! ”
    “Kahuna.”
    “What?”
    “If I'm Kahuna, I can't be a chickenshit.”
    “You aren't Kahuna.”
    “King of the surf,” he said.
    When he coughed this time, blood bubbled on his lips.
    Desperate, I said to Sasha, “We're getting him up and out of here, right now.”
    A crack and then a creak sounded behind me. Doogie had picked the lock on the control panel and had swung the cover aside, exposing the wiring.
    “What floor?” he asked.
    “Mungojerrie says all the way down,” Roosevelt advised.
    I protested: “Orson, the kids we don't even know if they're alive!”
    “They're alive,” Roosevelt said.
    “We don't know .”
    “We know.”
    I turned to Sasha for support. “Are you as crazy as the rest of them?”
    She said nothing, but the pity in her eyes was so terrible that I had to look away from her. She knew that Bobby and I were as tight as friends can get, that we were brothers in all but blood, as close as identical twins. She knew that a part of me was going to die when Bobby died, leaving an emptiness even she would never fill. She saw my vulnerability, she would have done anything, anything, anything , if she could have saved Bobby, but she could do nothing. In her helplessness, I saw my own helplessness, which I couldn't bear to contemplate.
    I lowered my gaze to the cat. For an instant I wanted to stomp Mungojerrie, crush the life out of him, as if he were responsible for our being here. I had asked Sasha if she was as crazy as the rest of them, in truth, I was the one who was kooking out, shattered by even the prospect of losing Bobby.
    With a lurch, the elevator started down.
    Bobby groaned.
    I said, “Please, Bobby.”
    “Kahuna,” he reminded me.
    “You're not Kahuna, you kak.”
    His voice was thin, shaky, “Pia thinks I am.”
    “Pia's a dithering airhead.”
    “Don't dis my woman, bro.”
    We stopped on the seventh and final level.
    The doors opened on darkness. But it wasn't that view of starry space, merely a lightless alcove.
    With Roosevelt's flashlight, I led the others out of the elevator, into a cold, dank vestibule.
    Down here, the oscillating electronic hum was muffled, almost inaudible.
    We put Bobby on his back, to the left of the elevator doors. We laid him on my jacket and Sasha's, to insulate him from the concrete as much as possible.
    Sasha fiddled in the control wiring and temporarily disabled the elevator, so it would be here when we returned. Of course, if time past phased completely out of time present, taking the elevator with it, we'd have to climb.
    Bobby couldn't climb. And we could never carry him up a service ladder, not in his