Nick shrugged. “Two minutes maybe? Ten? No way to be sure.”
Actually, it was four. The access road dead-ended at a chain-link fence, which stretched left to right in front of them for as far as they could see. Every few feet, at shoulder height, red-and-white signs had been posted on the fence, reading:
DANGER HAZARDOUS WASTE SITE UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY LIKELY TO CAUSE DEATH DANGER
“We’re here,” Nick said simply. He made a sweeping motion with his arm, the latex gloves making his hands look oddly artificial. If there was one stupid mistake he didn’t need to make, it was to leave fingerprints.
No one replied for a long moment as they took in the message from the sign. Carolyn grasped her son’s hand and squeezed.
“I’d feel a lot better if that guy Thorne was here,” Travis grumbled. The stinging no-confidence vote drew a look from Jake, but Travis held his ground. “No offense.”
Jake let it go.
“So what do we do now?” Carolyn asked. “We can’t drag this equipment a mile into the woods.”
“There’s a gate right here on the fence,” Travis observed.
Nick shook his head. “No, they’ve got an alarm on the gate. We need to snip our way through.”
Jake twisted his face incredulously. “They alarm the gate, but nothing happens if you cut the chain-link?”
Nick laughed. “Who in their right mind would want to break in, Jake? It’s not like there’s anything to steal, you know. The alarm just makes sure that the gate gets locked back up in case somebody has to come in to do something.”
Amid the pile of equipment sent ahead by Harry Sinclair’s New Jersey connections were two long-handled bolt cutters, which made quick work of what people with right minds purportedly would never do. When they were finished, the hole was just barely big enough for the car.
Jake winced at the sound of metal dragging along the paint.
Once through the hole, Nick steered the car back onto the roadway, which continued on the other side of the gate. Half a mile later, as advertised, they arrived at another fence and another gate. Nick threw the transmission into park and turned in his seat to face the rest. “Here we are,” he announced. “Just your garden-variety certified hazardous waste exclusion zone.”
“We’re in the middle of the woods,” Travis objected. “I thought there were supposed to be a bunch of storage buildings.”
“Look again,” Carolyn told him, pointing. “They’re here. They’re just overgrown.”
At its heyday, this part of Arkansas had been mowed flat, turned into a grassy flatland extending from horizon to horizon; perfectly level but for endless rows of storage magazines which arose from the ground like so many swells in a grassy green sea. From the air, back then, the place would have looked like a mogul field on a ski slope, only green; and constructed at intervals that were far too precise and with lines too straight to have been a random creation of nature.
Today, from the ground, this part of the facility was so overgrown that nature had camouflaged everything. Trees now grew where roadways used to be, and thick undergrowth-kudzu, mainly, cohabitating with countless other varieties of the region’s most hearty bushes, vines, and creepers-had long ago choked out any ground cover as fragile as grass. To the casual observer, these woods might have been around since the beginning of time, untouched by any human. On closer examination, though, beyond the thick tapestry of leaves and the random angles of the foliage, the repeating pattern of the land became obvious, rising and falling at precisely the same height and precisely the same interval. Like staring at one of those computer-generated 3-D art creations, the longer Travis examined his surroundings, the more the place began to look like the explosives storage facility it once had been.
The image solidified in his mind the instant he saw the first of the concrete-filled steel blast doors, set back in an overgrown tunnel, precisely in the center of one of the earthen mounds. Having seen one, it became easy to see others; dozens of them just by pivoting his head.
“Whoa,” he breathed, his tone alive with wonderment. “This place is unreal.”
“Are we safe, Nick?” Carolyn asked.
Nick’s head bounced noncommittally. “Well, I wouldn’t want to build my dream house here, but it should be pretty safe, yeah. Certainly for the short time we’ll be around.” He opened the door and stepped out. The others followed as he walked up to the fence and cut a hole big enough for people to pass through. That done, they all climbed to the crest of the nearest mound. “See there?” Nick asked when he got to the top. They all followed his finger. Two rows away, they could just make out a brownish black stain against the bright, fall-colored foliage. “That’s where we’re going,” he said.
“God Almighty,” Jake said, clearly overwhelmed. “It’s a moonscape.”
“Pretty close,” Nick agreed. “Won’t get much to grow there for the next hundred years.” He looked first to Carolyn and then to Jake. “Ready to rock and roll?”
“Um, guys?” Travis said, an odd look on his face. “I–I don’t know how to work any of the equipment.”
Jake smiled and rumpled the boy’s hair as he descended the steep hill. “That’s good,” he said. “Because you’re staying here.”
“I am not!”
Jake stopped midway and made his smile disappear. “It’s not because you’re not good enough, Travis, or not smart enough or not strong enough. It’s because we only have three sets of gear. You need to stay back and keep an eye out for the security people. If you hear anything, you’ve got to let us know.”
Travis looked for a moment as if he might argue but ultimately said nothing, choosing instead to help unload the car.
Deputy Sheriff Sherman Quill mumbled audibly to himself as he pulled his nightstick out of his Sam Browne belt and slid it into its spot next to the driver’s seat. I hate going out to this place.
Ever since he joined the force, Newark Industrial Park had been the bane of his existence. Every time he turned around, there was some damn thing going on out there, and with only the two of them in the department, he handled fully fifty percent of the calls. For some unfathomable reason, the local teenagers-local, hell, he’d arrested them from as far away as Little Rock-found it to be a romantic spot.
To date, no one had been stupid enough actually to climb the fence and get it on, but they’d come damn close, giving themselves away by jiggling the lock on the gates. But for the coils of razor wire along the top of the fence, he had little doubt that people would be scaling the thing every day. Crazy kids.
Now he was on his way to “check the place out,” whatever the hell that meant. Apparently, some hotshot FBI lady had called the chief and told him to expect some kind of trouble out there. If Sherman had heard correctly-and he must have, else why would the chief have said it twice? — the same people who started it all way back when were returning to do it again.
“Don’t make no sense,” he grumbled, putting his ten-year-old Ford in reverse. “Ain’t nothin’ left out there to burn, for God’s sake.”
Damned entertaining thought, though, getting his hands on the son of a bitches who squeezed all the life out of this town. Sherman’s family had come from these parts for generations; even stuck around during the bad times in the sixties, when Sherman himself was coming up as a teenager. People used to stick around, because sticking around was the thing to do. Now the kids were flying out of Newark as soon as their wings were big enough to support them. The luckier ones got to go to college somewhere and then get decent jobs. For the others-folks like Sherman, who struggled through high school with just enough Cs and Ds to warrant a diploma-it was damned difficult to find something that paid enough money to keep food on the table. As it was, downtown Newark had all but closed up. Places like the health clinic stayed open just because the state said they had to. God knows they had enough business to go around, just none of their patients had any money to pay their bills with.