Wolfen (25 page)

Sinna met his gaze, pale as a sheet, lips turning blue.
“There’s light,” she said. “And heat.”

Randy nodded in frantic agreement.

“Besides.” A hard shiver made her go rigid. “A facility as
sophisticated as this one must have tons of useful stuff. We might find
something to repair the mule.”

Bryce swallowed down a desperate growl. “It could be hours
before the storm passes. Can you handle being underground for so long?”

“Can you?” she countered.

Her steady gaze centered him. She smelled of rain and cold,
but the soft underlying thread of fear was faint. Sinna wasn’t scared. Why
would she be? She didn’t remember.

Bryce took a deep breath to calm the fuck down.

It didn’t work. His veins throbbed with a steady
whump-whump-whump
,
like a weird air pressure fluctuation. He couldn’t shake it. “Ten minutes.” He
could hold it together for that long; enough to warm up, but no more.

Randy clapped his hands with glee. “It’s this way!”

They followed the weasel back the way they’d come, to
another branch of the hallway. He ran ahead, stopping every once in a while so
they could catch up, hopping in place as if he’d had too much coffee. His gaze
never settled. He kept making weird whiny noises, and when he wasn’t whining,
he talked—a lot—like an attempt to make conversation, but very little made any
sense, and he often answered himself without waiting for a response from Bryce
and Sinna. It made for a constant stream of background noise that wasn’t easy
to ignore.

Bryce kept an eye on Randy in case he was leading them into
a trap. Without proper air currents, Bryce’s nose was all but handicapped; he
scented whatever was in his immediate vicinity, but that was it. He kept back
at a distance, trying to see farther ahead, but Randy’s weaving back and forth
was distracting and Bryce couldn’t concentrate. Their footsteps echoed, making
it sound like they were being followed. His hackles hadn’t settled since he’d
stepped foot into the compound, and he was pretty sure they wouldn’t until he
was back out again.

“How are you doing?” Sinna murmured.

He grunted, and Sinna hid a smile against his side.

A few yards ahead, the polished interior ended abruptly at a
tunnel that had been dug in preparation to expand. Where fluorescent lights
didn’t reach, a series of electric lanterns hung from hooks, wires stretching
between them like streamers. It was still better than the hallway. At least
with solid earth beneath his feet and rock to either side, Bryce could pretend
it was a naturally formed cave rather than that hell hole back there.

The tunnel led to a hollowed-out cavern, just like Randy had
said it would. A decent-sized room with a nine-foot ceiling and blankets
serving as a door. An electric heater warmed the area from one corner, and a
worn-out couch sat in the other. Metal racks were propped against the wall,
holding stacks of books, some old DVDs, board games, and an ancient radio that
was obviously busted.

The throbbing was worse here, and Bryce realized it wasn’t
in his head.

Sinna touched the rock, frowning at him. She felt it, too.

What the hell was it?

“And this is Annie,” Randy said, introducing a filthy
porcelain doll with one eye missing and paint chipped off of her lip. “And
Emma.” The other doll was naked, made of plastic and rubber, with hair
half-torn out, half-sticking up. She smiled at nothing, faded eyes staring off
into space.

Sinna edged around the creepy tea party setup to the heater.
Bryce hung back, scoping out the terrain. Only one way in or out of the room; a
possible death trap if the weasel wigged out on them.

“How did you find this place?” Sinna asked. Good girl. Get
him talking.

“I fell in and they hired me,” Randy said distractedly, then
turned to frown at her. “How do you find places?”

“How long have you been here?” Bryce asked to break his
stare.

“Twenty years.”

“That long?”

“Two days. No?” Randy giggled that nervous laugh of his. “My
calendar broke, see?” He pointed to the cracked face of a wall clock. So much
for information.

“Oh-kay.”

“Do you know how big this place is?” Bryce asked. Did he
even know what it was, what it would have been used for?

Years ago, when they’d landed in California for the first
time, the kids had been sequestered in holding pens, but they’d still heard the
soldiers talk. No one had ever mentioned going south. They’d always talked
about north, Montana and the aboveground den. It made no sense. Even
unfinished, this facility would have been much better suited for survival. Why
hadn’t they come here?

Randy’s eyes glazed over. “Sometimes you take a wrong turn
and it never ends.”

Bryce and Sinna looked at each other. Sinna, squeezing water
out of her hair, made swirling motion around her ear with her fingers. Yeah,
she got that right. “Do you know who built it?”

Randy blinked, gaze turning cagey as it darted between them.
“Why?”

Bryce hitched a shoulder. “Curious.”

Randy scratched his head. “Aliens.” He yanked out a book and
it fell open onto the floor, glossy pages settling left and right of the spine
with two wavering up in the middle. A black-and-white image caught Bryce’s eye,
and as Randy continued to rifle through his things, yammering on about space
ships and experiments, and how the dolls appointed him custodian before the
neighbors had moved in, Bryce picked up the book and stared at an image of a
scientist and a child no more than three years old. The little girl looked
confused, disinterested, her head turned sideways and eyes staring off into
space, but her hands were raised to clumsily mirror the whitecoat. Underneath,
the caption read:
Subject Gamma 1 learning American Sign Language.

Old resentment left a bitter taste in the back of Bryce’s
throat. The photo illustrated the only formal education the den subjects had
ever been granted: communication. Those children deemed safe to socialize had
been taught five different languages at the same time, including ASL, so they’d
understand the international crew of orderlies and whitecoats when they talked.

There’d been bookshelves built into the playroom walls,
filled with classical literature and textbooks on every subject under the sun,
but no one had ever taught from them. The whitecoats’ preferred method of
measuring intelligence had been to observe which books a subject chose to
read—if any—and how often.

Bryce snapped the book shut and read the back cover.

WE STAND ON THE SHOULDERS OF GOD

AND BUILD ON THE PILLARS OF MAN

TO DOMINATE THE LAWS OF NATURE

IN THE GENESIS OF ETERNAL PERFECTION

At the bottom was an image of a soldier and three
straight-faced scientists in full regalia posing for a photograph, and a
dedication:
In Memoriam: General Aleksandr Vukovich, Dr. Akira Saito, Dr.
Rajab Nejem, and Master Sergeant Belinda Creedy – the pillars of the
Delta-Omega Project.

“Yahtzee!” Randy shouted, toppling several boxes off the
rack to take one out.

Bryce tossed the book aside. “We should go.”

“What, why? But! We have. You know. Things. Uh… Games!”
Randy held up the box and rattled its contents. “We can play so many games!
There’s this one, and this one, and…not this one. This one is out of dice.
Hmm…”

“Let’s go, Sinna.”

“Five more minutes!” Randy stomped his foot, then laughed.
“The five minute game! I love that one.”

“Sinna, come on—”

“You will
sit
,” Randy suddenly snapped, baring his
teeth in a rabid snarl, “and you will
play
.” He was clutching a scalpel,
wrist turned outward toward Sinna and the heater, but his crazy eyes focused
solely on Bryce.

Instinct took over. Senses went on high alert, but while
that blade was leaning toward Sinna, Bryce did not engage. The
whump-whump-whump
became louder to his ears, an almost-sound that made his skin crawl and his
teeth itch from the inside. It was incessant, and it was everywhere, all around
him; a rhythm to slowly drive him mad.

Watchful and wary of Randy, Bryce slowly raised his hands in
surrender. “All right. I have a game we can play.” When Sinna began to rise by
slow degrees, he twitched his hands to stay her. Randy was too close.

“You do?” Randy’s eyes went owl-wide.

“Yeah, it’s called Maze.”

Randy gave a knee-slapping laugh. “Maze! That’s a good one!”
He danced in place, scalpel clutched in both hands. “How do you play it?”

“It’s kind of like hide-and-seek. You close your eyes, count
to fifty…”
And I wring your neck.
“And Sinna and I run and hide.”

Randy giggled, and taunted in a sing-song voice, “I’ll find
you.” He stared at Bryce for a moment as if he’d spaced out, then he ran past,
yelling, “You’re it!” Bryce heard him laugh as Randy raced down the corridor,
counting so loudly his voice echoed. “One, two, three…five-six-seven-ten,
fifteen, twenty-five…”

Fuck this shit.

Bryce grabbed Sinna’s hand and ran the other way. Raw stone
gave way to concrete, and then they were at the door they’d entered through. He
ran past it, looking for another way out. The memory of Chernobyl was forever
seared into his mind, but this place was just different enough to turn him
around. He ran to the end of the hall, expecting an escape hatch to be marked
in the ceiling.

It wasn’t. Bryce swore, backtracked, and tried another way,
all the while listening to Randy count. “Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight,
fifty!
Where am I?”

The line on the walls changed from green to blue, branching
off to red in one section. Bryce avoided that one. Red meant danger zone.
Convert holding pens. Instead, he took the path left, staying to the blue
section.

“Hey,” Randy called, “where are you?”

“He’ll come after us,” Sinna said.

“Let him.” Bryce would enjoy ripping the weasel’s head off.

“
Get back here!
” Randy roared, stomping after them in
pursuit.

Bryce squeezed Sinna’s hand tighter and kept going. He
passed intersection after intersection where the corridor branched off, glanced
through doorways similar enough to an exit that it messed with his head. He
almost ran them into a wall like that, and he swore, brandishing a bowie knife
in his free hand.

Sinna reached across him and pulled out its matching double.
“How do we get out of here?”

“We think our way out,” Bryce said. He wasn’t a master
strategist like Aiden, but he wasn’t an idiot, either.
Think, goddammit!

Okay. Okay.

This place was unfinished, emergency exits unmarked. They
probably didn’t even exist yet. But he knew for a fact there was one guaranteed
way out: the convert pens. Bryce had seen it in the blueprints they’d brought
to Montana—a vertical shaft for easy feed delivery, tall and smooth enough so
the monsters couldn’t climb up and out, but it had a safety door and a hidden
latch mechanism to drop a chain ladder from the top in case of a breach. It’d
have been the most logical way to bring in equipment. It
had
to be
there.

“Come on,” he said, and he raced back to the red corridor,
despite his gut screaming in silent alarm.

Randy scraped his scalpel over the wall around the next
corner down. “Where aaaaareeee youuuuuu…?”

Red on the walls. Not far now.

Bryce frowned, slowed, and his eyebrows twitched together in
confusion. “Do you smell that?”

“I don’t smell anything.”

Could his mind be playing tricks on him?

He breathed in again and growled.

Goddamn psychotic son of a bitch!

Converts. He smelled converts. And the closer they got to
the pens, the stronger their stench became.

“Stay close.” Bryce moved forward with caution. Randy was
now hollering at the top of his lungs; they still had a pretty good lead. The
crazy bastard was taking his time, like this whole thing was a game. A few feet
ahead, the corridor branched off in two directions.

“Which way?” Sinna whispered.

He didn’t know. The smell was more concentrated here, and
Bryce couldn’t tell which way it came from. For all he knew, they could run
smack into a convert, or find the utility shaft, or find the shaft
behind
the
convert. Bryce wouldn’t put it past this guy to pull a stunt like that.

“Marco! Polo!”

“Left,” Sinna said.

Fine. He went left. The wiring in this section was faulty.
The fluorescent lights flickered, the hallway dark, and rife with shadows.
Daytime or nighttime, Bryce could see like a hawk, but his eyes needed time to
adjust between light and dark. This flickering made him dizzy and disoriented.
He shook his head, blinked hard, and squinted, but it did little good.

“I don’t like this game anymore!”

Something hissed beyond a corner ahead.

Bryce stopped. Too late to turn back now. “Remember how the
Haven converts were different?” he whispered.

“Yeah…?”

“They’re not all like that.”

“How do you know?”

He didn’t. “I just do.” He believed. Had to. It was the only
thing that kept him going forward.

“Annie and Emma are very unhappy with you!” Randy shouted.
“They made their fancy tea—
and it’s all gone cold!
”

A convert screeched in agitation.

“Oh, no.” Sinna stopped, tugging on his hand to hold him
back.

Bryce looked her square in the eye. “Trust me.”

She looked absolutely terrified—pupils dilated, nostrils
flaring. She was breathing too hard, and her hand had grown cold. But she
pressed her lips together and nodded, following him around the corner.

Bryce bit back a foul curse.

There it was, the utility shaft—a thick metal door at the
end of the hallway, with a huge red exit sign painted across its center.