“Damn,” Danny said through the radio. “Harold Campbell has a sick sense of humor. I think Vera is about to barf in her seat. How far down is this place?”
“Three klicks, give or take.”
“Sonofabitch.”
The road turned slightly a minute later, then went straight for another half mile. They were moving so slowly now that she lost track of how far they had come, especially as all the trees looked the same, and one patch of dirt road looked like the other dozen or so patches of dirt road. She spent most of her time clinging to the handle above her door to keep from being flung onto the dashboard or against the window.
Danny’s voice came through the radio again: “Are you sure you know where we’re going?”
“Pretty much,” Will said.
“We’re driving down the Devil’s own version of a dirt road because you’re ‘pretty much’ sure?”
“Relax, I’m sure. We had to travel back and forth to the building site the entire time I was working with Tom, and you got used to it. It’s Route 19 all the way to the end.”
“You mean there’s an end to this? It doesn’t keep going until we fall off a cliff or, even better, straight into Lake Livingston?”
“It’s coming up. Have faith.”
“I have faith in you, bub. I just don’t have faith in this road ending. Ever. Or us surviving it. Did I tell you Vera just barfed into Carly’s lap?”
Without warning, a large shaft of sunlight poured through the trees in front of them, and suddenly the Tacoma was past the hellish road and moving on a soft, even patch of dirt again. She breathed a sigh of relief despite herself.
They entered a wide-circled clearing surrounded by hurricane fencing, parts of which looked like they had come tumbling down a while back, while the rest stubbornly held on, if just barely. There was a gate in front of them, but it too had come down probably a while ago, and Will drove the Tacoma over it, passing an unmanned guard’s shack along the way. Intercoms and cameras, still perched on top of poles that had fallen, were now half-buried in the soft earth.
And there, in the middle of the rough circle, was a concrete structure. It was ten feet high and looked like a big, ugly rectangular box, resting on top of a wider slab of concrete that extended thirty yards out to either side. The block itself was long, maybe about ten yards in length and five yards wide. There wasn’t anything there that looked like a door, or windows, or any kind of entrance whatsoever.
There was only the block of concrete in the center. It looked rough and ugly and inhospitable, the kind of building that didn’t have any personality or cared to have one. The structure screamed plain, nothing that millions of dollars had bought.
Will stopped the Tacoma in front of the structure. “That’s not the whole thing,” he said, as if reading her mind. “That’s just the entrance. The facility is underneath. I was one of the guys pouring concrete on a building that takes up half of this circle. This patch of dirt under us? It was poured in later to cover the facility.”
He turned off the engine and grabbed his M4A1 from the back seat, then climbed out of the Tacoma. She followed him outside just as Danny pulled up in the Ram alongside them.
Danny leaned out of his opened window and grinned. “Okay, you got me. It’s here. There, now you can get in the ‘told you so’.”
“Told you so,” Will said.
“Happy? Good. Now stop beaming like a virgin on prom night — it doesn’t become you.”
She gave the structure another long look as Danny and the others piled out of the Ram. Up close, it still didn’t look all that impressive. If anything, it was the opposite.
It was a big lump of concrete in the middle of nowhere. No, that wasn’t really true. They were somewhere — in the middle of a clearing surrounded by old, dark trees, hiding dark things inside. Did sunlight even penetrate the thick crowns of those trees? How many ghouls were in there now, watching them at this very moment?
The structure did look a bit bigger than she had initially thought, and the concrete was a lot smoother the closer she got to it, as if it had been sanded down to take out all the edges. It looked almost like marble, and if she looked hard enough, she could see their rough, tired reflections on the surface.
“What is it?” Carly asked behind her.
“It’s a door,” Will said. “Think of this as the top of a very big pyramid. There is a much bigger structure underneath that is only accessible through here.”
“How do we get in?” Lara asked.
Will felt along the smooth wall of the structure before finding what he was looking for. Kate saw it, too — a small round lens embedded inside the surface, covered by thick clear glass. Will tapped on the glass with his knuckles and they heard a solid but dull echo.
“Camera?” Danny asked.
“Security camera,” Will said. “One of many embedded in the structure, in case the perimeter surveillance cameras went down.”
Looking closer at the structure, she could see small cameras embedded along its sides. There were four on this side alone, and she imagined there would be others on the other three sides as well.
Will was saying: “In theory, there should be someone on the other end of that camera looking at us right now.”
“In theory,” Carly said. “What if there’s no one inside? You said it yourself, Will, you weren’t even sure if Campbell or anyone else would have had time to make it to the facility.”
“I think there’s someone in there,” Will said. He tapped the glass covering again, and this time spoke directly to it: “If you can hear me in there, you need to open up.”
“How can you be so sure?” Lara asked.
“The fence,” Will said. “And the gate. And the footprints.”
“Footprints…?”
She took a step back. Barefoot tracks covered the dirt ground surrounding the structure. The more she expanded her view of the clearing, the more tracks she saw. There had to be hundreds. They had come from all around, converging on the structure like moths to a flame.
Ghouls.
Danny said, “They’ve been here. Last night, from the look of the tracks. And the nights before that.”
“So where are they now?” Carly asked, sounding suddenly nervous.
“Probably in the woods, waiting for the sun to go down. The foliage looks pretty thick in there.”
Of course they’re in the woods, Danny. Where else would they be? They’re all around us, just waiting…
She instinctively glanced at her watch. 1:14 p.m.
Will was tapping on the glass over the security camera again while talking directly to it: “I know you’re reluctant, but you need to let us in. We can help. We have supplies. Weapons. A doctor.”
She noticed Lara look up, surprised to hear that last part.
“I know there’s a lot of room down there,” Will continued. “More than enough for a few hundred people. My guess is there’s not a few hundred down there, so there’s plenty of room left for us. We can pay our own way. We’ll salvage supplies in the day, help pull security at night. This isn’t a zero sum decision. You’ll gain everything and lose nothing.”
Will paused, as if waiting for whoever was behind that camera lens, if indeed there was anyone — she had her doubts — to absorb what he had already said.
She tried to see if the camera was moving, but couldn’t detect anything.
“You need to understand that we’re not going anywhere,” Will said at the camera again. “We can’t. This is our objective. You need to understand our situation. You know what’s out here. You’ve seen it yourself. So you need to open this door.”