“Y’all mean clear the way?” he said.
“I confess I was thinking along those lines, yes.”
He grinned. “Deeelighted.”
“Great.” Laura stepped toward Harv. “Just let me check on our friend here before we go.”
They’d released Harv’s hands from behind his back and used a couple of zip ties to secure his left wrist to one of the hut’s support struts. Marie had rolled one of the desk chairs over so he wouldn’t have to sit on the floor.
“Comfortable?” she said.
He gave her a sour look and lifted his left wrist as far as the zip ties would allow, which wasn’t very far at all. “Really? You’re really going to ask me that?”
His ingratitude irked her. “You know, it would have been a lot easier for us to simply secure you there and leave you standing with your hands behind you.”
“I’m still a prisoner.”
“I wouldn’t look at it that way. Just consider yourself restrained from causing any mischief at the console and making any unauthorized phone calls.”
He looked away. “Whatever.”
“As you said, the cavalry is on its way. So are the staties and the locals. Just a question of who gets here first.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m gonna be in such deep shit.”
“Don’t blame us. Your bosses started all this when they kidnapped our friends.”
She left him stewing. He looked so miserable she almost felt sorry for him. Almost. Too bad his job would wind up as collateral damage but, after all, he had pulled a gun on them.
She and the others exited the hut and filed along its flank, then past the junkers behind. Cy led the way, followed by Tanisha and Marie, with Laura bringing up the rear. She let the others go ahead as she searched among the wrecks and scrap metal until she found a length of steel reinforcing rod.
“A weapon?” Marie said when Laura caught up.
“A poker.”
Marie gave her an odd look but said no more.
When Cyrus reached the pines he plunged in among them without hesitation.
“How far?” he called over his shoulder.
“The tunnel from the elevator to the occupied area was a good quarter mile,” Tanisha said. “The hatch should be a couple of hundred feet beyond that—a straight line from here.”
Cyrus and Tanisha trained their flash beams ahead. When vines strung across their path, Cyrus would hand Tanisha his flash and grab handfuls; the vines fell away. Same thing when a fallen sapling or low branch blocked their way: He’d grab it with both hands, arms spread wide, and the wood between would fall to the ground.
“I finally found a use for this gift,” he said. “Pathfinder.”
“More like pathmaker,” Laura said.
He laughed. “Even better!”
After what seemed like a two-mile walk but obviously wasn’t, Marie stopped and pointed down. “We’re directly over them.”
“And directly under them,” Tanisha said, pointing up.
Laura looked up and reflexively recoiled at the sight of a half dozen pine lights, ranging in size from Ping-Pong to beach ball, gliding in random patterns overhead. They made her uneasy. What would make light coalesce into a ball like that? Apparently she wasn’t the only one affected. The surrounding woods had gone dead silent.
She shook it off. Couldn’t worry about swamp gas or whatever now. She’d reached the last leg of this journey—but the most difficult and dangerous. Harv had been undertrained and barely motivated. She doubted the next line of defense would fall so easily.
“Okay, everyone,” she said, “I’ve got a feeling the hatch will be massively overgrown. The diagram made it appear to rise a couple of feet above ground level, so look for a mound of vegetation between the trees.”
Marie turned on her flashlight and began to search. Laura followed close behind. She had a feeling about Marie. She was the finder, after all …
Sure enough, her beam found a mound of twisted vines about three feet high, surrounded by mature trees.
“I think we’ve got it,” Laura said.
Cyrus and Tanisha hurried over as she started poking her steel rod through the living weave.
“Now I get it,” Marie said. “Very clever.”
On the third poke she was rewarded with the clank of metal on metal.
“Has to be it!” she said. “Now let’s get to work clearing the—”
She jumped at the sound of more metallic clanks, this time coming from the underside of the hatch. Someone had started banging on the inner surface.
28
Rick peeked through the door’s tiny window, hoping to see an empty hallway.
No such luck.
Watts—sans his coverall—and Woolley were marching his way, looking a little bleary-eyed in the red flashing light—a dozen feet away and closing like the Earp brothers headed for the O.K. Corral. They flanked a new guy wearing a security coverall and carrying a semiautomatic. No sign of Greve anywhere.
He glanced at Stoney and Moe. “We’ve got company.”
“Greve?” Moe said, her voice quavering.
“No. The hired help. You two stay out of the doorway.” He didn’t mention the pistol, but he wanted them out of the line of fire should things go south. “I’ll reason with them.”
He opened the door and immediately the blare of the hallway Klaxon washed over him. When the new guy saw Rick he raised the semiautomatic to waist level.
Stoney must have been peeking because he burst out behind Rick and raised his hands in a stop gesture.
“Hey, wait, guys, just wait! You know me. And Jon, you know the rule about guns down here!”
“This isn’t for you, Stoney,” Jon said as he waggled his pistol. “It’s—”
Although Rick had wanted Stoney out of sight, his presence was causing a convenient distraction, allowing Rick to plow ahead with his original plan. A guy with a gun expected people to pause or hesitate when they saw it. But instead of slowing or stopping, Rick increased his pace without breaking stride, knocking Jon’s weapon aside as he barreled into him and head-butted him in the nose.
The pistol discharged, the bullet ricocheting off the floor. As Jon reeled back, spurting blood, Rick ripped the pistol from his hand and smashed the grip against the side of Woolley’s head, then aimed a chop at Watts’s throat.
But Watts was ahead of him, covering his already injured throat with both hands as he stumbled away with a hoarse cry of “No! Don’t!”
Quick survey: Jon on his knees with his hands over his face, blood seeping through his fingers. From the looks of Woolley, he hadn’t fully recovered from his dose of sedation, and the blow to his head seemed to have banished what little fight he’d had left in him. He leaned against the wall, looking sick as he pressed a palm against his bleeding scalp. Watts continued his wobbly retreat down the hall.
“ ‘Reason with them,’ huh?” Stoney said. “What school of philosophy is that?”
“Hard knocks?”
“I guess so. Plenty of times I’ve heard people say, ‘Didn’t know what hit them,’ but I’ve never seen it. Now I have. Damn, you’re a ballsy son of a bitch.”
Rick shrugged it off. “It’s all training and attitude. These guys may think they’re hard guys but they’re in the same class as rent-a-cops. And they aren’t killers.”
I, on the other hand …
“But Jon there had a gun.”
Rick checked the pistol. An HK VP9. Nice piece. He eased back the slide to check the chamber and found it loaded.
“And Jon thought just having it was enough—his first mistake. His second was expecting me to act a certain way. When I did something else, he wasn’t prepared. He flinched. He who flinches loses.”
He realized Watts had now wandered about thirty feet down the hall. “Hey, Watts! Get back here!”
Without looking back, Watts increased his pace. Rick aimed and fired. The bullet kicked up a puff of concrete an inch from his left foot.
“The next one goes in your ass.”
Watts turned and began walking back.
All right, what to do with these clowns to keep them out of the way? He wished to hell he had his zip ties but they were gone. Somebody had cleaned out his pockets after he was gassed.
He pulled Jon to his feet and waved the HK under his nose.
“Empty your pockets onto the floor. You too,” he told Watts as he approached.
He indicated to Stoney to make Woolley do the same.
The sight of Jon’s pistol in the wrong hands seemed to have a demoralizing effect. No one argued.
When he was satisfied all their pockets were empty, he checked room one, labeled Storage, and found it full of junk. Room two proved empty so he herded them in there, but not until Stoney had checked for signs of the Anomaly. Once he gave the all-clear, Rick locked them in.
“Anulka was in eighteen,” Moe said.
“You two get her,” Stoney said. “I’m going to check the other side of the hall. We know the Anomaly went through two of those walls. I want to see if it stopped anywhere.”
“Watch out for Greve.”
“He’s got no beef with me.”
“Yeah, but does he know that? Just be careful, okay?”
Stoney seemed all right, but Greve was totally out of control. Who knew what he was capable of right now?
Pistol ready, Rick motioned Moe behind him and pressed himself against the wall as he unlocked the door to room eighteen and eased it open a few inches. Greve had to know Rick would come eventually for the nadaný. What better place to lie in wait than one of their rooms?
“Annie?”
“Rick? Oh, Rick, thank God!” She rushed up to the door and pulled it wide open. “I heard shots and—” She froze when she saw Moe. “What’s she doing here?”
“She’s okay–”
“She’s one of them!”
“Greve is off the deep end, so she’s changed sides.”
“Who’s Greve?”
“You’ve already met my former boss,” Moe said. “The kidnappings, the shock collars, they were all his ideas.”
“You trust her?” Annie said.
Rick couldn’t say exactly why, but he knew Moe had been crushed by Iggy’s death—couldn’t fake that. And sometimes you had to go with your gut, so …
“Yeah, I do. And you can too.” He kept checking up and down the hall. Still no sign of Greve. Where was he hiding? Or had he found a way out? “Damn shame they caught you, though. They rough you up any?”
She shook her head. “The two guys up top seemed so proud and amazed they’d caught an invisible girl that I don’t think it ever occurred to them. And what’s his name—Greve? He wasn’t exactly gentle when he shoved me back in the room here, but nothing serious. He was more anxious to find whoever let me go—and he seemed to have a pretty good idea it was you.”
“He found me. But what matters now is getting you out of here. And that means finding the emergency exit.” He turned to Moe. “Stoney said an exit shaft runs up from the conference room. Where’s that?”
Moe’s expression turned dubious. “From the conference room? No way.”
Rick needed to see for himself. “Show us.”
Rick checked the hall for Greve and, finding no sign of him, let Moe lead them to a larger space with a big conference table. The food-wrapper-filled wastebaskets, refrigerator, and microwave said it doubled as a break room.
Folders littered the table. He stopped by its corner and scanned the room.
Moe said, “I spent many an hour in here bored out of my skull. I’ve stared at these walls from every angle and I can tell you there’s no emergency exit here.”
“Then why did Stoney say there was?”
“Want to know what I think?” she asked, but didn’t wait for a reply. “I think Doc Stoney has spent too much time back there with the Anomaly. I think it’s scrambled his brain.”
Just to be sure, Rick quick-walked the perimeter of the room, kicking the walls and banging them with the heel of his fist.
“Solid,” he said, returning to the two women. “All solid as rock.”
“Then we’re trapped?” Annie said.
“Has to be an emergency exit,” he said. “I refuse to believe they built this place without one. I’ll do my damnedest to get you out of here, but first we have to locate Ellis.”
“Hey, don’t forget Iggy,” Annie said.
Shit. No way to soft-pedal this …
“Iggy’s dead.”
Annie’s hand shot to her mouth as she staggered back. “No! Ohmigod, no! Who’d do …? No!”
“She died in my arms,” Moe said, puddling up again.
“But why? Who on this fucking Earth would want to kill Iggy?”
Rick and Moe spoke in unison. “Greve.”
“But why?”
“Long story,” Rick said. “I’ll explain when we get out of here. Right now—”
“Hey!” Stoney’s voice echoed from down the hall. “Hey, you gotta see this!”
29
Greve stood inside the bunker’s storeroom with his ear pressed against its locked door. He’d heard a couple of shots in the hallway and had got the impression that Jon and his fellow security men had failed to contain Hayden and the rest.
Well, no surprise there. A security job here at the bunker had always been considered a sinecure, a position given to trainees and those nearing retirement, because nothing ever happened here. Until today.
He’d hidden when someone looked in the room. Now that the voices had died away, he got busy clearing a path through the piles of junk.
Shortly after the discovery of melis and the Pentagon’s decision to invest in researching its potential, the bunker had undergone an internal facelift. Greve remembered the old and faded signage directing to the emergency exit … signage that had never been restored after the paint job. Same with the signage on the entrance to the escape shaft. It had receded to a flush, unadorned, rarely noticed panel in a rear corner of the conference room.
And then they moved the conference room to a larger space. The original room became a storage area for anything that didn’t fit or couldn’t find use elsewhere. People moved on from the bunker—many to prematurely terminate their own existence—and their replacements had never seen the old conference room, and never knew the space had ever been used for anything other than storage.
After squeezing and sliding past desks, chairs, cabinets, and even old mattresses, he finally reached the rear corner where he found a tall, four-drawer filing cabinet backed up against the wooden panel that acted as the door to the escape route. Pocketing his pistol, he pulled on a drawer handle and found it full of stuffed manila folders. The bunker had gone digital years and years ago, yet some people couldn’t part with their paper files. Damn them.
The cabinet was too heavy to lift, so he began removing the drawers and laying them wherever he could find a reasonably flat surface. He’d just pulled out the last when he sensed movement behind him. He turned in time to see the Anomaly emerge from a wall at perhaps three feet off the floor and dissolve everything in its path as it raced across the room to disappear through the opposite wall.
Greve stared in disbelief as desks and tables and chairs collapsed with the sudden loss of a leg or other support. The Anomaly had put holes right through them—all without a sound.
The thing was running amok. If it kept up this pace of destruction, it would make Swiss cheese of the bunker, destabilizing the walls. With uncountable tons of packed earth above it, the whole structure would collapse in a rush. He couldn’t see anyone surviving that.
Which prompted an abrupt change in plans. He couldn’t stay here. He didn’t have to worry about anyone knowing his secret—they’d all be dead soon. So escape became the prime directive.
Grunting and groaning, he was able to tilt the empty cabinet this way and that, rocking and swiveling it back and forth on its corners until it resettled in a spot far
enough from the panel to allow him to pry it open. It came loose with a deafening screech.
He pulled his Luger and waited to see if anyone responded from the hallway. He thought he heard voices shouting and a woman scream somewhere in the distance but it wasn’t repeated. Nothing close by. He turned back to the panel and eased it open just enough to let him past.
The air inside the round concrete shaft felt at least ten degrees cooler and smelled damp and musty. He felt along the curved wall till he found a light switch. He flipped it but nothing happened. Wiggling the toggle up and down a half dozen more times didn’t improve the situation: still no light.
Well, what did he expect? Without maintenance, the decades-old bulbs had either burned out or the switch contacts had corroded past the point where they could conduct a current.
And, with no idea he’d be in a situation like this, he hadn’t brought a flashlight.
With only faint, indirect light from the storeroom seeping past the panel to guide him, he found the rungs of a wrought-iron ladder set into the wall and trailing fifty feet up into the darkness above.
A long climb, and he was hardly in peak condition. Back in the day, when he’d made a point of staying in shape, he wouldn’t have given the climb a second thought. But as his years advanced, he’d become sedentary and deconditioned.
Not like I have a choice, he thought.
He started to climb. The ladder was narrow, the rungs dusty and probably a little rusty as well, all of which would make for a precarious climb in the light. Rising into an increasingly Stygian darkness, it became downright dangerous. Here and there the ladder shook, as if some of the inserts that fixed it to the wall were loose. The farther he climbed, the lower his chances of surviving a fall. But he pushed on.
Greve noticed the air in the shaft warming, which he took as a good sign. And sure enough, his ladder soon ran out of rungs. He’d reached the top—or so he hoped. He felt around in the dark and found what seemed like a platform.
Of course. That made sense: Climb to the platform where you could stand and open the hatch.
He levered himself onto the platform, gave himself a moment to catch his breath, then stood and felt around. Another short length of steel ladder rose to the upper lip of the concrete where a round, solid steel hatch capped the shaft. He had two major concerns now. One, was the hatch locked down along with everything else? Two, if not locked down, after more than half a century of neglect, would it be so overgrown that he’d be unable to open it?
The Void Protocol Page 29