14 (28 page)

“You know what gets me?” said Nate. “This place is so neat.”

Tim smirked and puffed another cloud of dust off the combination dial.

Nate shrugged. “It hasn’t been used in a while, but look at it.” He gestured at the table. “All the chairs are pushed in. The table’s cleaned off. Everything’s filed away on the desk. Whoever was working here didn’t leave in a rush. They took their time when they were done here.”

“Not like the message on your wall,” Veek said.

“Right.”

“What are you thinking?” asked Tim.

Nate looked around the room. “I’m wondering if whatever was going on here wasn’t just a brief thing. What if it was going on for years? The date on the calendar’s four years after the date on the cornerstone.” He gestured at the lockers and the desk. “You don’t set up all this for a weekend project. Probably not even for something you’re going to spend a few months on. I think people were
working
here. All this...this was somebody’s full-time job. They had time to clean up, and they expected to come back. Son of a bitch.”

Veek tilted her head at him. “Yeah?”

He glanced at her, the vault door, and then at Tim. “Could that lock have six numbers?”

Tim nodded. “Class ones can still be set to six digits today. It doesn’t even change the mechanism that—shit. Do you have a picture of it?”

They looked at Veek. She tapped and swooshed at the screen of her phone, then held it up. On it was one of the images from her wall.

66–16–9—4—1—89

“Read them off to me,” said Tim. They tried it once, but the handle refused to budge. He spun the dial a few times to reset it and started again. This time he turned in the opposite direction for each number. The dial settled on the line next to
90
and he gripped the handle again.

The dull steel resisted for a moment, then swung up. They felt the vibration as bolts that had rested for decades shifted inside the door. The clang echoed through the room and made the floor tremble.

“Not ominous at all,” said Veek.

Tim pulled the handle. The vault door drifted forward inch by inch. The hinges groaned and sent another vibration through the floor. Nate and Veek added their weight. A foot of steel swung away from the wall before musty air spilled out from behind the door. It was warm. It smelled hot.

They stepped back to look at what they’d revealed.

“Well,” said Nate after a moment, “we should’ve seen that coming.”

Inside the vault was a small space, not much bigger than a closet. Half the floor was a circular opening like a manhole. The edge was a smooth curve of metal, hammered over and riveted in place. Bolted to the back wall of the closet was a metal ladder leading down through the hole.

Nate leaned forward and switched the flashlight on. Veek squeezed in next to him. The beam sank into the hole and formed a circle of light a few yards below. “Looks like it doesn’t go far,” he called back to Tim. “Maybe twenty feet, tops.”

Veek looked around. “Ahhh,” she said. She straightened up and hit another pushbutton switch just inside the vault door.

Down in the hole, a light came on. They could see another dust-covered metal floor.

Nate handed her the flashlight and grabbed the rungs.

“Hang on,” said Tim. “We don’t know what’s down there.”

“That’s why I’m going down,” said Nate.

“Just take your time and be careful, ace. Just because we’re on a time limit doesn’t mean we should rush. This has all been here for over a hundred years. It’s not going anywhere.”

Veek looked at him. “What are you worried about?”

“I’m worried that a ladder’s damned easy to booby trap. Whoever built this place wanted to protect it.”

“I don’t think we need to worry about traps,” Nate replied. “Like I said, I think people were working here. You don’t booby trap the office if you’re expecting to come back the next day.”

“Depends on the office,” said Tim.

Nate smiled and swung out onto the ladder. It was flecked with rust but took his weight without a sound. He looked over his shoulder and locked eyes with Veek.

“Right behind you,” she said.

He climbed down through the manhole. The inside was a circular tunnel of steel. He paused on the ladder to glance over his shoulder and saw a line of shadows he was pretty sure were rivets. He had a brief moment of claustrophobia, but a moment later the shaft opened up into the next level. His feet touched the floor and the first bead of sweat ran down his temple. It was warm down below, and the temperature shift was like stepping out of an air-conditioned store on a hot day.

The lower room was the size and shape of Nate’s kitchen. The metal tube he’d climbed down through extended a foot and a half through the ceiling. The walls were bare metal. A single bulb lit the room, connected to two thin wires twisted into one. The bulb looked swollen and had an odd shape to it. The glass was clear and he could see the filament glaring inside of it.

The entrance to a wrought-iron spiral staircase filled the other half of the room. It sank down into the floor and out of sight.

Veek came down out of the tube. “Oh my God it’s hot.”

Nate dabbed at his forehead. “I don’t think it’s that bad,” he said. “I think it’s just the sudden change.”

She shook her head as she stepped off the ladder. “It’s that bad,” she said. “I hate the heat.”

Tim let go of the rungs and dropped the last few feet to the floor. “Been worse places,” he said, looking around the room. He squinted at the light. “That’s not a standard bulb.”

Nate shook his head. “If upstairs was old, I’m guessing this is older. No one’s opened that door in a hundred years, I bet.”

They gathered around the staircase. With its steep curves, the bottom was nowhere in sight. Nate stretched his neck out and looked as far as he could. There was light shining around the phone-pole-like center of the stairs. “It’s made of rock,” he said. “This isn’t a finished tunnel, it’s just cut into the ground.”

Veek looked around the room. “We’re three stories down now, right? The sub-sub-basement.”

Tim nodded. “We’re probably about level with the base of the hill,” he said. “Maybe even a little lower.” He pulled something out of his pack and held it on his palm. “Compass still doesn’t work.”

“Well,” said Nate, “do we keep going?”

They looked at Tim. The older man glanced at his watch. “We’ve got a little over thirty-five minutes left,” he said. “Going up always takes more time than going down. Let’s say we’ve maybe got fifteen more minutes before we need to head back. Hang on a minute.” He slid his pack off his shoulder and pulled out a large bottle of water. “Everyone take a hit.”

Veek took the bottle, cracked the plastic seal, and chugged three big swallows.

“You really came prepared, didn’t you?” Nate said. He took the bottle from Veek and let it pour down his throat.

“I was a kick-ass Boy Scout,” Tim said. He wiped off the lip of the bottle with his hand and took two big swallows. “Let’s see how far we can get.”

Nate led them down the staircase. Veek was behind him, one hand on his shoulder again. Tim brought up the rear. It only took a few steps for Nate to realize the spiral staircase would get dizzying if they moved too fast.

A pair of twisted black wires ran along where the steps connected to the stone. Every ten steps or so the wires split off and ran up to a crude alcove chopped out of the rock just above head height. A bulb sat in each one on a ceramic base. One or two of them had frosted glass blocking the alcove. Some just had shards.

“Fifty steps,” said Veek after a couple of minutes.

Tim let his foot come down heavy. “Yep.”

“I’m glad you guys thought to count,” Nate said.

“You’re in front,” said Veek. She patted his shoulder. “It’s your job to block the crossbow traps.”

Tim made a grunting sound that might have been a laugh. “You feel that?” he said.

Nate stopped. “What?”

Tim had his hand on the center post of the spiral staircase. He waved at them to do the same. Nate set his palm against it. Veek reached out with cautious fingers.

A vibration echoed through the post. It was low enough it didn’t spread out into the air, but strong enough it couldn’t be denied. Nate shifted his hand, then took another few steps and shifted it again.

“It’s like high tension lines,” said Veek. “The way they make the air buzz.”

They exchanged looks and continued down.

A few moments later Veek called out sixty and then seventy. The thought crossed Nate’s mind that one hundred was a good landmark to stop at. Maybe they’d be able to leave a mark of some kind.

He took another lopsided step around the curve of the staircase and saw the bottom in the light from the stairwell. Another two steps and he was standing on dirt and stone. Veek and Tim appeared on either side of him in the gloom.

On the wall was a square of wood. A large knife switch was mounted on it, one of the blocky, Y-shaped ones used by mad scientists to activate doomsday machines and bring monsters to life. It was in the down position.

Nate stepped past Veek and heaved the switch up. The contacts crackled. Light overthrew the darkness.

“We
are
in a Scooby Doo cartoon,” murmured Veek.

They were in a mine shaft. Nate had never been in one before, but the tunnel matched every mine shaft he’d ever seen in films and television shows. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all carved out of the earth and all flowed into one another. Every seven or eight feet an arch of thick timbers braced the tunnel. He could see one place where three arches stood right next to each other.

More of the thin, twisted wires ran along the tunnel. They hung on nails in the timbers and in some places a thin spike had been hammered into the wall. Every other arch had a light bulb hanging in a small cage. Of the eight or nine Nate could see down the length of the tunnel, at least five of them were burned out.

“I counted seventy-eight steps,” said Tim. “Yes?”

“Yeah,” huffed Veek. She blotted her forehead with her hand. “Could I bug you for some more water?”

“It’s what I brought it for.” He slid the backpack off his shoulders. “Seventy-eight steps, about nine inches each,” he said as he handed her the bottle. He closed his eyes and did some mental math. “That’s...fifty-eight and a half feet. Another five stories down.”

She swallowed some water and wiped her mouth on her arm. “Wow.”

On the left side of the tunnel were several cables, each one as thick as a fire hose. They were coated in what looked like black rubber under all the dust. A length of twine was wrapped around them to form a loose bundle, or maybe just to keep them neat. Nate prodded the bundle with his foot and felt a tingle of electricity. The movement made the twine collapse into bits and one of the cables flopped onto the floor with a
thwack
of dead weight.

“They’re live,” said Nate.

“So that’s why we’re not on the grid,” Veek said.

Tim looked at the cables. “Maybe. We don’t know which way it’s flowing. Maybe there’s something at the end of the tunnel that needs a lot of power.”

“Occam’s razor,” she said. “Going up makes more sense.”

“I think Occam would’ve kept his mouth shut if he lived in our building,” said Nate. He followed the cables back to the spiral staircase. The bundle slipped under the steps and ran into the hub. “The center post doubles as a conduit,” he said.

Tim had set the water bottle down on the floor of the tunnel. Once the liquid stopped rocking he crouched to study it. He moved it a few feet and stared at it again. Then he shuffled a few feet and set it down a third time.

“Checking to see if it’s level?” asked Veek. She had her phone out and was snapping photos again.

He smiled. “Clever girl,” he said. “Yeah, and it’s not. It’s still heading down. I’d guess it’s a five or six percent grade.” He see-sawed his fingers in the air. “Maybe a little more, maybe a little less.”

Nate stepped back to join them. “How are we doing for time?”

Tim glanced at his watch. “You’ve got about thirty seconds to do whatever you want.”

“What if we just went a little ways?” Veek waved down the tunnel. “We could just go to the bend.”

“The bend?” echoed Nate.

She held up the phone. “Digital zoom. The tunnel either stops dead or takes a turn about fifty yards ahead.”

“Let’s go take a look,” said Nate.

“Let’s not,” said Tim. He tapped his watch. “We’re pushing it now. We should be heading back, not walking downhill.”

“It’s just a fifty yards,” said Veek. She wheezed as she spoke.

“Fifty yards downhill,” Tim said.

“You’re right,” said Nate. “We don’t want Oskar finding out what we’re doing. We should go back and wait. He’s going to be gone for almost five days.”

Veek frowned. “What if he’s not?”

“He will be,” Nate promised her. “Besides, you’re not looking that great.”