He nodded. “Sometimes I wish I could meet Him. God, I suppose, or whoever made me. I’d probably ask them why they made me broken. Why nothing inside me works right, and how to fix it. Am I meant to be broken this way, perhaps? Does this serve a purpose? But even if I met my maker, I don’t think I’d get an answer. They wouldn’t know. I don’t think there’s any fixing anything. Not really. Not for long.” He took a breath and then hopped up to sit on the wall, balefully staring out at the sea. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“The sea. All that water. I still remember the first time I saw the sea. I was a young man, back in India. Barely more than a boy. I’d traveled to the coast, all by myself. I’d heard of the sea, yes, but hearing about it is different from seeing it. You can’t grasp something that big just from someone mentioning it to you. You have to see it. And when I did I didn’t know what to think. It stunned me, something that big. I wondered then if there was anything worth doing. You know?”
“Worth doing?”
“Yes. In the face of that. If there was anything you could do that could mean anything. Because it could always be swallowed up. Swallowed up and gone.” He was quiet, his pale face drawn and his mouth a thin line. “I thought all the bad things I’d done didn’t matter and all the good things I could do would never matter either,” he said. “It was all the same next to the ocean. Those waves. They don’t know anything about you. They just know how to sweep you away.”
The ferry arrived less than ten minutes later. It was a tiny thing and wouldn’t have been able to hold more than a dozen people very comfortably. For once Samantha let Hayes do the negotiating. When he pulled out his billfold the captain’s eyes bugged out and he agreed to do whatever Hayes told him.
The ride was short. Spinsie’s coordinates were almost exact. There was a nice little inlet on the shore where it would be perfect to dock a small boat. Hayes discussed how long the captain would stay, and after paying the man they stepped off onto the rocky shore.
They walked for several miles. As the light slowly faded the countryside was sunk into shadow. They did not know what they would do once they got to wherever they were going. They just knew they had to see.
“I’ve never been in the country here,” Samantha said. “What is this part called?”
“I have no idea,” Hayes said.
“You don’t?”
“No. I never really cared to learn.” He stopped. Then squatted to the ground. “Look,” he said softly.
“What?”
“There. Down the trees to the shore. You’ll need to get down.”
She did. It took some searching to find it. It was a small pier, the wood wet and shining, bobbing on the gentle waves.
“Boat’s long gone,” Hayes said. “But that’s probably where it started.”
They found a little gravel road that ran from the pier up into the hills. Hayes sifted through the gravel and pronounced it recently used, then squinted up to the countryside but could not see where it led. They followed it quietly, walking in the grass to cover the sound of their footsteps. They wound through the pines up into the hills until they came to a chain-link fence built behind a ring of the trees. A rusty gate hung slightly ajar, kept closed by a band of rusty chains. Hayes squatted and took out some picks and went to work on it. Somewhere in the lock’s heart the pins sank together, and he pulled the lock free and opened it up.
At first there were only trees beyond the fence, yet as they walked they saw flat white light shining across a large clearing ahead. They crept to the tree line and looked out. It looked like a bunker, small and flat and cement. Unmarked. Doors small and hidden. Hayes pulled out his spyglass and scanned the clearing. Then his eyes shot wide and he grabbed Samantha and flung her to the ground and clapped his hand over her mouth.
Her first instinct was to struggle, but when she heard it she quieted. A motor, low and buzzing. She heard the tires sighing through the wet grass and saw the headlights flashing on the trunks overhead. The sound of the tires stopped but the engine went on. She strained to hear anyone coming. As she did she noticed Hayes moving, slowly reaching into his vest and pulling out a pistol. He held it with the nose pointed through the grass and then did not move, waiting.
The seconds dragged on. Then she heard the whisper of the tires again and the headlights swung away. Neither of them moved. Then Hayes released her, eyes still fixed on the retreating car.
“Where did you get a gun?” she asked softly.
“Brought it with me, of course. I don’t think you saw, but they had a few as well.” Then he turned to her and said, “You know, you don’t have to come any further if you don’t want to.”
She sat up and looked back over at the building. “What do you think’s in there?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s good.”
“I don’t either. Do you think we can get inside?”
He raised an eyebrow. Then he smiled and nodded.
Hayes led her in a strange pattern across the clearing, ducking and weaving, pausing here and there. It seemed erratic and mad, and she was not sure what he was doing until she realized there were men patrolling the outskirts of the field, walking back and forth with rifles under their arms.
“It’s not guarded well,” he whispered as they moved. “Probably because they never expected anyone to come here.”
At the end they stopped and crawled low until they were near the building itself. Samantha saw it was set low in the ground. Mostly windowless, except in certain places near the ground level. Hayes led her to the closest wall, then sank down low and began pushing at the handle of one of the windows, murmuring to keep a lookout. He managed to shove it open but it wedged itself stuck halfway.
“We’ll have to try another,” he said softly.
“I can fit,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“We can find out.” She maneuvered her legs around and pushed them through, then slid all the way past the gap, her dress rising up above her knees.
When she landed she was worried that her feet would make some sound, but the floor was bare cement and she made no noise at all. She let her eyes adjust and saw she was in some enormous dark storage room. Crates and boxes were filed away along the walls with little paths running between them. The ceiling was low and cramped and she had a hard time seeing the rest of the room, yet somehow the layout felt familiar.
“You all right?” Hayes whispered above.
“Fine.” She turned back to begin to work at the window when she noticed an insignia on one of the boxes. She stooped to look at it and traced her fingers over the ink.
“Well? Are you getting this goddamn window open or not?”
Samantha frowned, then reached up and twisted the handle around to let the window open fully. Hayes slipped through, silent as a leaf falling on the forest floor.
“Look,” she said, pointing at one of the boxes.
He squinted to see. When he finally saw the imperial M on the side he nodded grimly and said, “Well. It’s as we thought, then.” He looked up and around the basement. Then suddenly he froze and tensed up like an animal hearing a gunshot ripping through the trees.
“What?” she asked.
“There’s… there’s something else here,” he said. “In here with us.”
“What else? What do you mean? More guns?”
“I… I don’t know yet. Something. I can hear it.”
“Should we go?”
Hayes swallowed and shook his head. “N-no. No, I have to see. I have to see what this is.”
“But why?”
He was quiet for a moment and then said, “Because it’s talking to me. Or trying to. It knows we’re here, Sam.”
They walked off into the boxes toward the back, where a dark stairway down loomed. Besides the sound of his shuffling feet and the slight moan of a distant fan the storage room was silent.
They moved down the stairway and came to the next floor. Down below they saw yet more crates with strange shapes covered in tarps between them. She wondered if they should peek under their folds, but for some reason she was afraid that the things underneath would wake and fall upon them. They were sleeping, or perhaps waiting for somebody to stumble by. Like an ancient museum, all shut down while it waited for its next visitors.