When he got to the end of it, he found he had less than a dozen sheets in the keeper pile. Cursing, he swept a line of cans off of a nearby shelf and sent them clanging to the floor.
“What the hell is going on in there?” Dutch called.
“Nothing! Nothing! That's what the hell is going on.”
“Then you and me better split, good buddy. We're not meant to be visitors.”
AJ gave the stack on the floor another go, not really looking. Then he stopped. Dutch had said something there, something about…
Visitors.
The piles of discard lay strewn across the floor, but he began digging through them with renewed fury. He created a new trash pile in the sink, a metal tub filled with dishes and old food that would have attracted a thousand bugs anywhere but here. He tossed in equipment lists, old memos, hand-written notes, and… and he stopped just as he was about to throw in a visitor's report. The Aeschylus was private property, and it was legally hazardous. All visitors were documented, both at the home office, and here at the site. He pulled a sheet from the list. The paper had been filed a week before, showing a chopper that had come in with men from the east coast office. Three men, to be exact. Two of the men were environmental microbiologists like Gideon. They had been given a task to analyze and document the first appearance of the fungus. It looked like much of their report was missing, but it had all been declared “unharmful” and “non-invasive,” and the entire thing had sign-off from the third member of the party: Valley Oil's head of legal council. Head of legal council, here on the platform. The microbiologists had stayed on The Aeschylus, but the third party had departed shortly after.
“Dutch!” he called. “Dutch, get in here!”
But his friend wasn't responding. AJ's voice drifted out into the open air, dying on the high ocean winds.
5
“What is this place?” the girl murmured.
Mason looked at her and then back at the hole. Some kind of basement sprawled beneath him, the earth ripped open at his feet. To his right, one of the base watch towers lay crumpled and burned on the ground. A nearby bunker had its insides blown to the outside. The rest of the base wasn't much better: broken doors, scorched concrete, spent shell casings from another era crusting the earth like seeds. It remained as they had left it, whoever they were. Like the oil platform, however, the inhabitants were gone. Long gone, by the looks of things.
“Whatever it was, it's dead now,” he said.
“Where is everyone?”
“Take a look at this place. You tell me what you think.”
“It doesn't tell us anything about Gideon's friends though, does it?”
Mason turned and saw Christian reemerging from the fence. He was wet, the bottoms of his pants dripping. He gave a single shake of his head, and Mason nodded.
“We're not going any further without taking a swim. Can't skirt around the edge out there any more.”
“So?”
“So this is it.”
“It?”
“Now you're just being dense. I kind of liked that about you when we first met, but now, you're just pissing in my soup.”
“But we haven't found anything!” She looked around stubbornly.
“Why don't you take a look at that gate there and tell me what you see?”
When they had been at the docks, the path leading into the hills had been overgrown with the fungus. But if that had been overgrown, the main gate here was infested. There were more growths than he could count, bent and twisted and gnarled like old oaks.
“More of them,” she said. “There's no way through.”
“That's right.”
She shook her head, taking another walk around. “They have to be here. Gideon said so.”
“Gideon is whacked out of his mind. And if you think we're going to stay here and dig through those things at the gate, so are you.”
The girl might not get it, but he did. This was the end.
El fin.
And a grand end it was. No chopper. No Reiner. No goddamned fucking workers, and no goddamned fucking answers.
He turned to the nearest bunker. Without knowing he was going to do it, he threw down his rifle and kicked the closed door. The metal shuddered under his weight. It didn't solve a goddamned thing, but it felt good. Mason smashed it again, and before he knew it, he was hammering at it with kick after kick, slamming his heel into the door. The metal bent and shuddered, but it didn't give.
He looked back at the woman, and she was scared. She was right to be scared, stupid cow that she was.
Mason turned to Christian and made a give me motion with his fingers.
Christian reached into his pack, pulled out a breach charge, and tossed it to him. Mason caught it with both hands. He slapped it on the remains of the door, pushed the button to arm it, and then rolled around to the side of the bunker. The door blew inwards, sending shrapnel and thunder across the terrain.
“What the hell do you think you're doing?” Kate yelled.
Mason laughed. She tried to sound angry, but it wasn't working; she was still too scared.
“See if there are any more locked doors here, would you Vy? We'll give them a good once-over for the lady before we head out.”
The woman looked like she was about to say something else, but when Mason bent and picked up his rifle, she paused. “Now, they know we're here,” she said finally. “I bet they heard that all the way back at the platform.”
“Isn't that what you wanted?” Mason asked. “If anybody happens to be alive and wants to be saved, I bet they'll come running, don't you?”
“I don't know.”
“Yeah, well, I do. And we ain't gonna find shit.”
The anger was on him now, fierce and unbidden, but there was nothing to be done for it. He'd just have to ride it out.
And so would she.
He pushed past her into the open doorway. The other side was lined with shelves and boxes and, to his surprise, rifles. It looked like they had stumbled into the middle of a supply bunker.
“Nice,” the girl said, looking at the munitions. “You could have blown us sky high.”
“I didn't, so shut your mouth.”
They stepped past the wreckage of the doorway and into the body of the room. They were greeted by a pair of corpses wrapped arm-in-arm on the floor, almost perfectly preserved. It was an oddly touching sight.
“There you go,” Mason said. “Nothing but bodies.”
“These aren't blackened like the others,” she said. “And I'd say they've been dead a long time. Probably suffocated, if that door was sealed.”
“Well, they didn't die of food shortage,” Mason said, looking at the cans stacked nearby. He couldn't read any of them. Mason could speak Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and a little Spanish, but not German. That was the wrong war.
“What happened here?” she asked.
At one time or another, Mason had been all around the world. He'd been through hellfire and darkness, and he always managed to find his way back. He had a high tolerance for the unexpected, as any team leader did. But his tolerance for the totally fucking strange was just about to hit the red. This place was abandoned except for two stiffs wrapped around each other like a couple of homos, and the only clue they had were more of those goddamned tentacles. Something had torn this place apart, but he was becoming less and less interested in what that something might be.
Christian appeared in the doorway. “Nobody else here, boss.” He noticed the two corpses on the ground but didn't comment.