“So the C4 wouldn’t have taken the Door out?” he asked.
“Probably not,” Ben said.
“So why’d you open the Door?” Danny asked.
“I couldn’t take the chance,” Ben said. “Who the hell knows what you two morons would have tried blowing up next if I didn’t open it. Besides, I figured what the hell, you had three women and a kid with you, and they didn’t look like they were being dragged around against their will.”
“So why did you come around the corner full-bore?” Will asked.
“We didn’t. At least, that wasn’t the plan. I told those two morons to follow my lead, but by the time we were around the corner and they got a look at you two, they decided to take aim, and it was all over. Rest assured, I’m never giving guns to them again.”
“We almost killed you.”
Ben sighed. “Trust me, I know.”
They were inside the Control Room, a four-by-seven-meter room accessible by a stainless steel door, like all the important rooms in the Operations area of the facility. It had a row of small monitors along one entire wall that looked out at the circle clearing on the surface above them. There were four cameras on each side of the four-sided structure, capturing every inch of clearing from top to bottom, including the trees beyond. They could also zoom in and out by manipulating a toggle stick on the control board. There was sound, but the volume was down.
A big LED clock kept time on the wall above the monitors.
Rick, perched on a swivel chair in front of the control board, was responsible for monitoring the cameras. He was sixteen, not seventeen as Will had guessed in the hallway earlier. When it had looked as if there wasn’t going to be any shooting, Rick had started laughing, then leaned against the wall and put his hands in his face and started hyperventilating.
Will was glad he didn’t have to shoot the kid. He would have felt bad about it.
“We saw tracks,” Will said. “All around the clearing when we arrived.”
“Yeah, they come here at night,” Ben said. “Don’t stay long, though. Once they see that the Door is still in place, they disappear. But every night they show up, like clockwork.”
“From where?”
“We’re pretty sure they’re hiding in the woods. God knows where. We’ve never found the stones to go in there looking for them.”
“Probably a smart idea.”
“There’s smart and there’s good luck trying to find volunteers to go with you. Even in the daytime, it’s dark as hell in those woods.”
“No kidding,” Rick said. “You’d never get me in there.”
Will told Ben about their encounter at the Cleveland Savings and Loan Bank just down the 59 Highway.
Ben listened intently, then nodded. “Makes sense. It would explain how they could do all of this in one night. If they had a command and control structure in place from the very beginning…”
“Makes you feel optimistic about your chances, doesn’t it?” Danny chuckled.
“Out there? Not so much. Down here? I’d give you even odds.”
“Thank God for Harold Campbell,” Rick said. “I remember when he first came here, with work crews coming and going at all hours of the night, for years. Most people in town loved it, though. He brought a lot of business with him.”
“He probably greased plenty of city officials, too,” Ben said.
“Goes without saying,” Will said. “How long did it take him to finish this facility?”
“Four years,” Rick said. “People weren’t so happy after that. Business dried up real fast after his workers left.”
Ben glanced over at Will and Danny. “You guys look like shit. We got hot showers in the Quarters and plenty of rooms to pick from, feel free to grab whatever meets your fancy. There’re only twenty-four of us down here and this place was built for 100, but you probably already know that.”
“I skimmed a floor plan or two when I was here,” Will said.
“You actually helped build this place?” Rick asked.
“I poured some concrete and put in some electrical wiring, that’s all. Most of the real hard work happened after I left.”
“Is it everything you hoped for?”
“It’s actually a lot bigger than I had envisioned. A hell of a lot bigger, actually.”
The facility was thick slabs of concrete from top to bottom, with a distinctive half-circle layout. It was designed to complement the circular nature of the surface above, or at least, half of it. The Control Room was located on the right side of the complex, designated Operations, with the living quarters on the left, designated Quarters. Using the Entrance Hallway in the center as a marker, Will sectioned off the two distinctive sides — east and west, with the Entrance Hallway exactly in the center, leading to the stairs that led up to the Door.
There were maps of the facility, with a helpful You Are Here indicator, along the walls every twenty-five meters. Not that he needed them. Once he created a layout of the facility’s half-circle in his head, it was easy to navigate the place. Everything was slotted where it should be — sleeping areas, Cafeteria, and Gym in Quarters, with the Control Room and other work areas in Operations.
The place was designed with military efficiency, something he knew Harold Campbell prided himself on, even though, according to Tom Lerner, the man never actually served. But that was all right. Will knew from experience that some of the most ardent supporters of the military style had never sniffed the barracks of boot camp.
The soft rumbling of the facility’s power source was audible everywhere he went. It vibrated through every inch of the facility, and he heard it when he first stepped down through the Door, though he didn’t know what it was at the time. It wasn’t a particularly loud sound, and after a while he stopped noticing it.
Unlike Operations, laid out to accommodate the big rooms like the Cafeteria, Turbine Room, and Green Room, the Quarters section looked like a maze, with hallways that turned left and right and back again. The rooms were evenly spaced out along three major hallways, with communal bathrooms at the end of each one.
Danny had chosen living quarters with Carly and Vera in a room designed for a family, with a queen-size bed and a smaller single bed that could be unfolded from a crate. It was big enough for all three of them, and Carly had hung a sheet between the two beds for privacy. The room was in the back, near the bathroom. Without really thinking about it, Will and Lara had also chosen their rooms near Danny’s, essentially sticking together.
Kate was the exception.
“I’m going to have to start making up excuses to send Vera off on errands,” Danny said.
“Try not to give the poor girl nightmares.”
“No promises.”
“That’s not creepy at all, man.”
After a few minutes of wandering around the hallway by himself, committing the layout to memory, Will found Kate in her room, somewhere in the middle of the old residents of the facility and the newcomers.
There were other single rooms around them, and in the two hours since they entered the facility, Will met ten of the twenty-four people calling the facility home. The rest were scattered about the place, already in the midst of daily routines. They seemed like decent enough people, and he was glad they hadn’t turned the Entrance Hallway into a bloodbath. It would have surely soured everyone’s disposition.