The teens crept quietly out of the room where they had been held captive and found themselves in an empty corridor. The walls of the corridor bowed outward with doors set into recesses carved into the walls, further adding to the tunnel like feel of the base. The door they had come through was placed in the middle of the hallway, which ran for fifty yards in either direction before terminating in identical ‘T’ intersections.
Tom lowered himself to one knee and the others copied him, arranging themselves in a circle.
“Are you sure the way out is to the left?” Tom asked Matt quietly.
“No, I’m not,” Matt admitted. “That’s just the way everyone seemed to go when they left the room. And we need to be careful. They have a security force down here that’s armed with more than tranquilizer guns.”
The weight of the pistol in Shay’s waistband attested to the truth of his words.
“Exactly where are we, anyway?” Amanda asked, glancing around nervously.
“From what I was able to get from different people’s minds,” Matt said, “I think this place was originally a bomb shelter for some military base that used to be here a long time ago. We’re a couple hundred feet underground. The government rehabbed it and turned it over to Dr. Brooks to use for his original research. It’s something called a black site. Officially, this place doesn’t exist.”
“I thought the government shut his project down before we were born?” Shay said.
“They did,” Matt agreed. “But I overheard him one time thinking about somebody named Titus who helped him regain access to this place a few years ago. The government thinks it’s still shut down.”
“We can go into the history of this place another time,” Tom said. “Right now we need to focus on finding a way out of here.” He looked both ways down the hallway. “Reed and Dimitri, you two go to the right and check out that end of the hall. Just take a look around the corners and let us know what’s down there. I’ll go left with Matt and check out that end. The rest of you wait here until we figure out which way we’re going to go.”
As Reed and Dimitri headed one way, Tom and Matt moved in the other direction. As they neared the end of the corridor, Matt tapped Tom and motioned that he sensed someone ahead to the right. They crept the last few feet to the end of the corridor and cautiously peered around the corner. Several yards down the crossing passage there were two guards posted in front of a door on the other side of the hall. Both men were dressed in the same type of black uniform Ramona had worn and both were carrying nasty looking rifles. In the other direction the corridor was completely empty. After a few moments they drew back around the corner.
“Are you getting anything from them?” Tom whispered.
Matt shook his head. “Nothing useful. One guy is thinking about the dried-out chicken they had for dinner and the other one is wondering how long the heightened alert is going to last. Dr. Brooks must have put the base on alert when you guys showed up. But I’m not getting anything about a way out.”
“I’d rather not try to get past these guys,” Tom said. “Those guns look like some kind of assault rifles. Let’s get back and see what Dimitri and Reed found.”
Tom and Matt crept away from the corner and tiptoed back to the group by the door. When they saw that Dimitri and Reed were not with the others, Tom looked to the far end of the hallway but didn’t see them there either.
“Where are they?” Tom whispered as he knelt down beside the others.
“They went around the corner,” Manny said.
Tom frowned darkly. “I told them to just look around the corner, not to—”
At that moment Dimitri popped into their midst.
“Time to go!” he said, breathlessly.
“What—?” Tom began.
Before he could finish his sentence Reed appeared at the end of the hall running at full speed, a look of sheer panic on his face. An instant later a pair of Dobermans came tearing around the corner right on his heels. Both dogs had the sleekly powerful build that was typical of the breed, although one seemed unusually large. Even though their teeth were bared, the dogs were eerily silent as they pursued him. The only sound they made was the rhythmic clacking of their claws on the floor. Somehow, their silence was more intimidating than if they had been barking and growling. These were trained, killing animals.
Tom and the others sprang to their feet. Amazingly, no one turned to run even though the sight of the dogs charging at them gave most of the teens a weak feeling in their knees. Almost as if they could read each other’s minds they understood that there was no time to run and nowhere for them to go if they did. Instead they each took up defensive positions and prepared to meet the fury of the attacking dogs.
Then, as the teens steeled themselves, Shay stepped forward and raised a hand toward the charging animals.
“Oh, please,” Shay said in an annoyed tone.
The dogs seemed surprised by her presence. As Reed sprinted past her for the safety of the group, the dogs slowed to an easy lope. Shay knelt down and smiled at the dogs.
The Dobermans stopped within arm’s reach and sat in front of her, tail stumps drumming against the floor. After a moment Shay began to pet the pair, receiving energetic licks in the face in return. This went on for half a minute before she finally stood and turned back to her friends.
“Zeus and Apollo, these are my friends,” Shay said. The dogs stood and stared at the group of teens. “Guys, this is Zeus and Apollo. Come and let them smell you.” After a moment’s hesitation Paige came forward and lowered her hand toward the dogs. Each dog sniffed the back of her hand, their stumps wagging. At Shay’s encouragement the others came forward one by one until the dogs had sampled the scent of each of the teens.
“I explained to Zeus and Apollo that we are not their enemies, unlike the mean people who keep them locked up down here,” Shay said as she reached down and scratched behind the ears of one of the dogs. “You wouldn’t believe what they do to these poor babies.”
“Those are some pretty big babies,” Danny noted.
“Yes, but they’re just big loves, aren’t you Zeusy?” she said as she bent and affectionately scratched the larger dog’s head. Not to be left out, Apollo slipped his head beneath Shay’s other hand to elicit some head scratching for himself as well.
“Can Zeus and Apollo help us get out of here?” Tom asked.
“I’ll ask them.”
Both dogs turned to stare at Shay for the next several moments. Then they began to bounce excitedly. After a while Shay straightened up.
“That’s what I’d do if it were me,” she said to the dogs.
The dogs looked at each other, then turned and bounded away, disappearing around the corner back the way they had come.
“What was all that about?” Tom asked.
“I convinced them that they didn’t have to listen to their handlers since they treat them so badly. They’re going to find them to, um, express their displeasure at the way they’ve been treated.”
“I wouldn’t want to be one of their handlers,” Danny commented as he stared after the dogs.
“What about the way out?” Tom asked.
“Dogs don’t think the same way we do,” Shay explained. “I described the elevator that brought us down here. They know the ‘magic cave’, as they call it, and they know that’s the way out of the base, but they couldn’t tell me exactly how to get there. Apparently this base is pretty big. They both said the exit is near the ‘outside-inside place’, whatever that is. But they did tell me that the elevator is back that way.” Shay pointed down the corridor toward the intersecting hall where Tom and Matt had seen the two guards.
“Of course it is,” Tom said in a resigned tone. He thought for a moment, then glanced at Paige. “We’re going to need a distraction.”
A minute later Tom led the group toward the end of the hallway where the guards were posted. When they were in position Tom turned to Paige who had agreed to act as decoy for his plan. Her speed and agility
made her the best suited for this role, but that didn’t settle the fluttering in his stomach when he thought about her facing two armed guards.
“Be careful,” Tom told her.
She smiled at him, then on an impulse leaned in and pecked him on the cheek.
“Be right back,” she whispered in his ear.
Before he could react Paige walked around the corner. She strode briskly down the corridor until she had the attention of the guards. Then she stopped suddenly, brought her hands to her mouth and stared wide-eyed at the armed men as though surprised by them.
“What are you doing here?” one of them demanded.
Paige spun around and dashed back down the corridor. She ran past the corner where her friends were waiting and continued straight down the passage. Tom was pressed against the wall just around the corner as he listened to the sound of the approaching guard’s running steps. As the guard reached the corner, Tom whipped a straight arm out to clothesline him. For the guard it was like running into a tree branch. The man’s feet went out from under him and he flipped backward, striking his head on the floor. He was out cold before his feet came down.
Before the guard’s body came to a stop, Manny was racing around the corner yelling wildly. Seeing his partner go flying combined with the unexpected, wild attack had caught the second guard by surprise. Before he could finish bringing his weapon up Manny tackled him, slamming him hard to his back and knocking the wind out of him. As he struggled to get his breath back Manny sat on his chest and punched him over and over in the face until he finally stopped moving.
A moment later, Tom came up behind him, dragging the first guard by one foot.
“Why didn’t you use your power to hold him still,” Tom asked.
Breathing heavily, Manny looked up at his friend and smiled. “Sometimes you just need to punch the crap out of something,” he said, rubbing his sore knuckles.
Tom stared at him for a moment. “Okay.”
The others caught up with them as Manny got back to his feet. Following Shay’s earlier example, Danny and Reed each picked up one of the guards’ rifles. Reed had fired his grandfather’s shot gun a few times while Danny’s entire experience with guns was limited to laser tag and paintball. But how hard could it be to aim and pull a trigger? Now, three of them were armed.
“We need to get these guys out of sight,” Tom said. He glanced at the door the men had been posted in front of. A keypad like the one in the room where they had been held was on the wall beside the door. Pulling Dr. Brooks’s card out of his pocket he held it up and gave Matt a questioning look.
Matt shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
Tom waved the card at the lock, typed in the access code and was rewarded by a green light on the panel.
Just then they heard the sound of a number of booted feet coming from the far end of the hallway. Manny bent down to grab the guard he had knocked out as Tom slapped the door switch. They dragged the bodies inside and the rest of their group hurried in after them just as they heard the guards turning into the corridor.
For several tense moments they crouched quietly behind the door, listening to the sound of approaching footfalls. They couldn’t tell how many people there were but it could have been as many as a dozen or more. In moments they were right outside the door. The teens held their breaths, waiting anxiously to see if they were going to be discovered. Then, the footsteps receded as the guards continued past the room where they were hiding. The group breathed a collective sigh of relief. As the sound of the guards’ boots faded away, Tom bent down and picked up one foot of each of the men they had knocked out.
“Let’s see if we can find somewhere in here to hide these guys.” He started to drag the unconscious men away from the door then stopped as he took his first good look at the room they had entered. Facing him was row after row of floor-to-ceiling electronic cabinets. None of the teens needed Danny’s ability to know where they were.
“I think we found your servers,” Tom said.
Danny was already moving into the room, his hands reaching out to both sides as he extended his consciousness into the ebb and flow of the electronic pathways. As Tom dragged the unconscious men down one of the side aisles, Danny moved deeper into the room.
“This is incredible!” Danny said.
“Can you pick up anything?” Tom asked.
“Oh yeah,” Danny said, excitedly. “I’m running through their files right now.”
“I thought you said it was going to take time to get through their firewalls,” Shay said.
“That was when I was trying to connect through an outside line,” Danny said as he turned in a slow circle, a dreamy expression on his face. “But now that I’m right here, in the same room, I can access…everything.”
“Good,” Tom said. “Then maybe you can find the blueprints for this place so we can figure out the way out of here.”
“What? Oh, right. Just a second.” Danny frowned in concentration. A moment later he looked toward the far end of the room. “There’s an operator’s station back there.”
He led the way through the rows of server racks to the far side of the room and an isolated cabinet. Unlike the other racks, this one had a monitor screen above a flip down keyboard on one side. Ignoring the keyboard, Danny placed a hand on the cabinet and closed his eyes. After a few moments images began to appear on the screen. The images started flashing by faster and faster until they became a blur.
“There’s a lot of files in here,” Danny said. “I just need a moment to find…wait a second.” The images stopped. On the screen was a large O with an unusual dash in its center.
“That’s the symbol for Theta in the Greek alphabet,” Dimitri said.
“Yeah, well this file has a lot of biographical data in it—on us!” Danny said.
Tom ground his teeth in frustration. “We don’t have time to read through this now.” Like the others, he really wanted to know what information Dr. Brooks had on them, but their first priority had to be escape.
“Not to worry,” Danny said. “I’m downloading a copy to my own server back in the clubhouse, and a couple of other files while I’m at it.”
Tom twisted back and looked around the room. “We shouldn’t stay here too long. Any luck with that map?”
A moment later the screen changed again, this time showing a wire-frame 3-D diagram of the underground facility they were in.
“Wow, this place is really big,” Amanda said.
Danny explained, “It was designed to shelter all the people from the air force base that used to be here. The original plans had barracks and support facilities for more than two thousand soldiers. Just a second.” A dot appeared on the image as he spoke. “Okay. That’s where we are. And this,” he said as a second dot appeared, “is where the elevator is.”
“What’s that?” Shay asked as she pointed to an unmarked space near the elevator. It was much larger than any other room in the facility.
“It’s just listed as a training room,” Danny said.
“Looks like there are a lot of hallways we need to pass through to get to the elevator,” Tom commented as he studied the screen.
“We can cut off some of the distance if we go this way,” Danny said. On the screen, a short passage between the room they were in and another room nearby was highlighted.
Tom traced the image on the screen with a finger to orient himself, then looked along the wall to their right. A two-foot square, louvered vent cover was on the wall at floor level.
“You’re kidding me,” Tom said. “Air vents? That’s like something out of a bad movie.”
Danny shrugged. “This is a server room, right? Computers generate a lot of heat so a room like this has to have a way to cool everything down or the circuits fry. The only way to move a large amount of air quickly is through big vents. That one is the cold air inflow.”
Tom stepped over to the vent and knelt down. He could feel cold air coming out of it. He grabbed the edge
s of the vent cover and pulled. There was a short series of pops as the screws holding the cover in place sheared off, then the cover pulled free.
“It’s going to be a tight squeeze,” Tom observed as he looked inside the opening. He could only see a few feet into the vent before the inside was lost in shadow. “And we’re not going to be able to see where we’re going.”
Danny and the others gathered behind him.
“According to the diagram it should be pretty easy,” Danny said. “Go straight for twenty feet, then right for twelve feet then left for another thirty five feet.”
Tom gestured to the vent. “After you.”
Danny got on his hands and knees and squirmed into the opening. One by one the others followed until James and Tom were the only ones left. Neither of them had liked dark, tight spaces ever since the time when their homemade snow fort had collapsed on them as kids. James watched the last of their friends crawl into the vent then offered to let Tom go ahead of him, but his cousin shook his head.
“I need to pull the cover back in place behind us,” Tom explained, “which means I’m going to have to crawl backwards until I can find a place to turn around. If you don’t mind crawling backwards through there—”
“Never mind,” James said. Cranking up his nerve, James got down on the floor and crawled into the vent. Tom followed a moment later, pulling the vent cover back into place behind him.
The trip through the vent did not take long. With Danny in the lead the group followed closely behind each other as they made their way through the cramped space. Halfway through the vents they passed an intersecting passage which blasted them with refrigerated air, but that was the only difficulty they encountered. The biggest challenge was getting the second vent cover off. If they had thought it through Tom might have gone first. As it was, Dimitri was right behind Danny. Once Danny had pushed the louvers of the vent cover fully open Dimitri teleported past him into the room. Between the two of them they managed to pry the cover loose.
As they crawled out of the vent the teens found themselves in a white-tiled room. There was a coldness about the place that had nothing to do with the actual temperature. Half a dozen steel tables were arranged in two rows down the length of the room. On the left wall there were a number of square, steel doors that looked like refrigerator doors. Along the other wall were a series of glass cabinets filled with an assortment of different-sized jars with disturbing-looking things floating in them.
All of the tables were empty, except for one. Stretched out on one of the middle tables was a body. The body was male and naked, apart from a narrow length of fabric draped modestly across its hips. From where they were against the back wall of the room they couldn’t see his face. What they could see was that from throat to groin the body had been split open. The skin had been pulled back on both sides, held open by surgical clamps to allow access to the body cavity while the front of the rib cage had been cut away. Although they could not see inside the body they knew that all of the corpse’s organs had been removed. They knew this because lined up beside the body were all of the internal organs, arranged in a neat line like the pieces of a grizzly jigsaw puzzle.
One by one, as soon as each of the teens saw the body, they froze. To leave the room they needed to go down the aisle between the tables, but no one wanted to get any closer to the corpse.
Tom was the first one to move.
“Come on guys, it’s not like he’s going to get up and come after us,” Tom said as he started forward.
After a moment the others slowly followed. Although they didn’t want to look, they couldn’t help but stare at the lifeless corpse as they filed by. While most of them averted their eyes once they were past, Shay actually stopped to examine the body. She had done necropsies on different animals at school and something seemed wrong to her.
Even though she had never seen a human body dissected before, she recognized many similarities between the corpse’s organs and those from the animals she had examined. One thing she noticed right away was how precisely the work was done. Each organ had been meticulously removed and arranged beside the body. It was as if each one represented a prize and needed to be treated respectfully.
Then she realized what was bothering her. All of the organs had a strange texture to them. Unlike the animal organs she had examined, the ones from this body were not smooth in appearance. For some reason each one had a kind of pebbly appearance, as if all of the cells had ruptured.
As she looked along the line of organs she glanced up toward the head and was surprised to see a pair of eyes in a small tray. Like the body organs, the eyes had been carefully removed and set out for display. They were blue and had an odd, cloudy appearance, as if they had developed cataracts. She supposed that could simply be what happened to eyes after someone died, although none of the animal eyes she had dissected had looked like that.
Then she glanced at the face and did a double take. The body was that of an Asian man. With the lids sunk back into the empty sockets she couldn’t be sure that the eyes did indeed have the typical almond shape, but the hair, the shape of the mouth, nose and cheek bones all pointed to someone of Asian descent.
But she had never known anyone who was Asian to have blue eyes.
“Shay?”
Shay looked up to find Dimitri standing nearby. He had hung back to wait for her while the others continued to the door.
“Sorry,” Shay said as she turned away from the table. “I found something strange.”
Dimitri glanced at the body then back at her. “Can it wait?” he asked.
Shay saw the discomfort in his face.
“Sure, I just wanted…” She paused as something in one of the glass cabinets across the room caught her attention. She walked over to the cabinet and stared. Looking back at her were half a dozen pairs of eyeballs, each pair meticulously preserved in special containers.
“Shay,” Dimitri said, uncomfortably. “We need to go.”
Shay hesitated for a moment before turning away. “Alright.” She took his arm and allowed him to lead her toward the rest of the group.
The others were waiting for them at the room door.
“Okay,” Danny said when they rejoined the group. “According to the map we go right and then take the second left.”
“I’ll go first,” Tom said. “Everybody stay close.”
He tapped the door control and the door slid open.
Standing on the other side of the door facing them was an armed guard, his rifle leveled at Tom’s midsection.
Everyone froze. Tom felt his heart begin to hammer in his chest. He had been able to heal himself from a single stab wound, but he doubted his system could handle multiple gunshots. And the weapon the guard was holding looked like an assault rifle.
The man glared at them for a moment, then opened his mouth to speak. In that instant a dark shape streaked into view, slamming into the man’s body and bowling him over.
Without hesitating, Tom charged into the corridor followed closely by the rest of the group. They saw the guard laying unconscious on the floor a few yards away with one of the Dobermans sitting on his chest.
Shay pushed to the front of the group. “Apollo! Thank you, boy… Yes, you did real good.”
The dog stood and walked over to Shay to receive an enthusiastic head scratching. After several moments the dog began bouncing excitedly then bounded off down the corridor in the direction they were headed.
“He says we’re going the right way,” Shay told the group. “He’s going to run ahead and see if he can find more of the bad people.”
“I’m glad they’re on our side,” Tom said as he stepped past her and picked up the guard’s limp body.
Draping him over one shoulder, Tom carried the guard back into the room they had just come from. He started to simply dump him onto the nearest autopsy table, then thought of a better idea. He carried the guard to one of the morgue cabinets, pulled out the sliding tray and laid him down on it.
That should give him quite a shock when he woke up, Tom thought as he slid the draw back into the cabinet and closed the door.
When Tom came back into the corridor his foot kicked the stock of the rifle the guard had been carrying. He bent down and picked it up, looked at it for a moment, then held it out to Dimitri.
Dimitri glanced at the gun and shook his head. He did not like weapons.
“Hell, I’ll take it,” Magda said, reaching for the gun. Taking the rifle from Tom she examined it quickly, dropped the ammunition clip to check the load, then slapped it back into place. Raising the rifle to her shoulder she sighted along the top of the weapon briefly to familiarize herself with the sights, then set the safety and cradled it easily in her arms.
Tom stared at her with his mouth hanging open. “Maybe I should let you go first.”
Magda giggled and shook her head. “That’s okay. You’re doing fine,” she told him. Her older brother was into guns and she had learned how to handle a weapon from him.
Tom started off and the others fell into line behind him. They moved cautiously through the corridors making as little noise as possible. Their luck held and they didn’t run into any more guards. A few times Matt sensed people ahead of them but they always managed to find an empty room to hide in until the area was clear. It was nearly half an hour later before they stopped several yards short of the corner that led into the final corridor they needed to pass through. According to Danny, the elevator should be at the end of that hallway. But around the corner they could hear the sound of several voices. Moving silently, they crept back the way they had come.
“They know we’ve escaped,” Matt whispered after the group had moved away from the corner. He told them that fifteen guards were stationed in the corridor specifically to prevent them from reaching the elevator. “They didn’t sound a general alarm because they don’t want us to know that they’re looking for us. Apparently Dr. Brooks wants us alive.”
Tom nodded as he considered the situation. There were more than a dozen armed men around that corner. Charging into the fire from all those assault rifles would normally be suicide, but Dr. Brooks wanted them alive. The guards would be reluctant to use deadly force against them, and that might give them an advantage—unless the guards were waiting for them with tranquilizer guns. Tom could shake off the effects of the tranquilizers, at least a few doses, but even if he managed to remain conscious and take out the guards he couldn’t carry all ten of his friends.
He discussed his concerns with the others.
“There might be another way out,” Danny said. “The diagram showed another elevator inside that big room Shay pointed to.”
“You mean the training room?” Shay asked.
Danny nodded. “Yeah. At the far end of the room there’s supposed to be an elevator up to an observation gallery. From there it looked like there was a way up to the surface. Because we were looking for the main elevator I didn’t really study that way, so we’ll have to figure it out when we get there.”
“So how do we get into this training room?” Paige asked.
Danny looked back down the hall they had come through. “Back there on the right. That door should let us into the room.”
The teens crept back along the passage until they reached the door Danny had indicated. Once again they found a use for Dr. Brooks’s ID and passcode. But unlike the other doors they had accessed with the card, this one did not slide open. The door to the training room was nearly a foot thick and circular, like a bank vault. It hummed slowly open on motorized hinges. Through the door was a vast open space that was dimly lit by a few low-powered lights scattered across a ceiling several stories overhead. Sensing no movement inside, they cautiously entered the room.
It was quiet inside the great room, the distant walls barely visible in the shadows. It was larger than a professional football field and so spacious it felt almost like being outdoors. That was when Shay understood what the dogs had meant by the ‘outside-inside place’. In the dim light they could make out few details on the far wall, but there seemed to be something that looked like a shadowed doorway directly opposite them. Danny said that was where the elevator should be. Other than that the room seemed to be nothing more than empty space.
As the door hummed quietly closed behind them, the teens started across the room. The floor was covered with some kind of tough, plastic padding which muffled the sound of their footsteps. They had just reached the center of the room when another detail on the far wall materialized out of the dimness. What had at first appeared to be nothing more than a dark smudge along the top of the wall was now revealed as a series of rectangular patches: windows.
Just then the lighting in the room came on, spotlighting them in the middle of that vast open space.
Chapter Thirteen