Chapter 10

It probably says something about me that, had an actual human head tumbled out of that crate, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Startled? Sure. But, surprised? Hardly. Between the frozen corpses on the other side of the wall, and Jibben’s insistence on getting his shipment into “containment,” I frankly considered myself lucky there were no obvious dismembered body parts in my vicinity.

I shone my light on the styrofoam head. The features themselves were very plain, just a couple of divots where the eyes should be and a slight hump for the nose. It was the type of head you might store your hats on, or maybe park your wig.

But the wig in question was more high-tech than any hairpiece I’d ever seen. A cap of sensors surrounded the styrofoam head like some science fiction swim cap.

I’m not fond of electrodes. I’ve had too many panic attack-inducing episodes involving bleeping monitors and random things stuck to various parts of my body. And despite the fact that this gear was older than I was and looked like something out of a cut-rate student art film, it still made my pits prickle with sweat.

Alisha went right for the head.

“Don’t touch that,” Jibben snapped.

She ignored him, grabbed the thing, and held it up to the light of her phone. “What’s this supposed to be, a Halloween costume?”

“That,” he said loftily, “is none of your concern. You might have been vetted by the courier company, but that’s where your authorization ends. In fact, you shouldn’t even have access to anything other than the lobby so any potential exposure to classified information is limited.”

“Let me get this straight,” Alisha said. “I can’t see but two feet in front of my face, and you want me to go back out to the lobby, alone, in the dark, next to a man I been chatting with lying there dead on the floor. Is that what you’re saying?”

“There’d be safety glass between you,” Jibben offered.

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better? It’s not as if I thought he’d get up and start walking around.”

Though if she saw some of the things we’d seen….

“Who the hell’s in charge here?” She swung around and looked at Jacob in his casual clothes. “That’d be you, Cargo Shorts?”

“Agent Marks,” he corrected her testily. “And, yes. I’m the ranking agent.”

“Then tell this fool I’m not going anywhere.”

Jacob nodded. “She’s right—unless there’s a good reason for us to split up, we stick together.”

Jibben said, “This is a classified facility—”

“And there’s nothing in your containment room to see but a bunch of dark monitors and the boxes she transported here.” Jacob turned to Alisha and added, “But sticking together means following orders and keeping your hands to yourself. This is no place for a civilian.”

She gave an exaggerated shrug. “You don’t need to tell me twice. I just wanna go home.”

Jacob and I dragged the final crate the rest of the way through the door. The containment room was maybe twenty feet square, lined with empty stainless steel lab tables and empty shelves. I’d seen it plenty of my times during my normal rounds, and generally considered it to be a bland, white room. But by the light of the emergency lamp, the pile of random boxes in the center looked positively sinister.

With Jibben and Alisha still bickering in the doorway, Jacob pitched his voice low and said, “Clayton must be scared to death.” God, he sounded miserable.

“He’ll be fine,” I replied.

Talk about a generic platitude.

I tried again. “Look, Jacob, Clayton’s not an idiot. And the cannery’s a pretty massive pile of bricks. It’s been standing for more than a century—so it would take one hell of a storm to blow it down.”

Jacob ground his molars—hopefully his new crowns would stand up to the abuse—then said, “Let’s hope that storm isn’t already here.”

Alisha squeezed past Jibben and reluctantly surrendered the styrofoam head to Jacob. He stuck it on a nearby shelf.

“This isn’t your grandma’s closet,” Jibben snapped as he wheeled himself in, one-footed. “You can’t just put things anywhere, willy-nilly.” He grabbed a clipboard off a nearby table, pulled a pen from his lab coat, and started scribbling. “There are protocols. Procedures. And—”

I cut him off. “And you promised to tell us about this emergency exit if we moved your boxes.” I gestured toward the haphazard pile of crates. “Here they are. Now where’s the damn door?”

Jibben set down the clipboard, then slapped the pen on top of it. I was just about ready to knock him off the chair for telling me the emergency exit was just a fabrication when he huffed and said, “Fine. Let’s go.”

We set off deeper into the lab, with Jacob at the front of the line wielding the emergency light, me bringing up the rear pushing Jibben’s office chair, and Alisha in the middle of the pack. I knew these hallways—I’d walked them earlier today. But now I was all turned around, and our lights made shadows jump in every doorway.

It was a long hike to the emergency exit. The FPMP building is big, but I suspected the guts of the beast range farther than they should. Jibben directed us to a closet marked Storage—the type of thing you’d expect to be filled with janitorial supplies. And initially, it appeared to be just that. Until Jacob activated the switch Jibben pointed out behind a stack of paper towels, and the back of the closet clicked open to reveal a cinderblock-and-linoleum hallway dotted with regularly-spaced emergency lights that were currently dark. The hall stretched as far as our lantern could see.

“Hold on,” I said. “I’ve never done any rounds down here.”

Jibben gave a twitchy shrug. “It would hardly be a secret exit if everyone knew about it.”

I looked to Jacob. “Did you know?”

“It’s the FPMP,” he said simply, in a tone that said, No, but our secrets have secrets—so what did you expect?

The passage was long. Not sure which direction we were walking, but the basement’s top-secret entrails must’ve passed beneath the highways, or maybe the railroad tracks—several long city blocks, at least.

I might have caught a whiff of mildew. Were we near the river? Or was it just the normal seepage of moisture through concrete? I hate being underground even at the best of times, but we’d been walking so long that I was starting to feel itchy about all that earth pressing in over my head. And when a distant rumble vibrated up through the soles of my feet, I could practically feel the whole thing collapsing—ten tons of sodden cinderblock—and burying us all.

We’d been walking for what felt like hours through the dank, dark cinderblock hall when the silence was shattered…by Aretha Franklin.

“R-E-S-P-E-C—”

Alisha fumbled with her phone, her eyes wide with surprise. “My son.” She quickly grabbed the call, cutting off Aretha mid-respect, then answered with a patently unsentimental, “Yeah, what?”

Everyone else whipped out their phone. No bars.

Figures.

“Nothing,” Alisha was saying blandly. “Roads are bad, I might be late…or I might not. We’ll see. No, I ain’t picking you up no McDonald’s, there’s plenty of food at home. Microwave a burrito.”

“He’s got power?” Jacob asked.

Alisha held up a finger, listening, then told her kid, “Well then maybe next time you should tell me you ate ’em all before I go to the store. Guess you gotta settle for a sandwich. And don’t go saying we’re out of baloney, ’cause I know for a fact there’s a brand new pack nobody even touched yet—” her brow furrowed. “Kelvin? You there? Hello—”

Jacob leaned in and said to me, “If Alisha’s house has power, maybe the cannery does, too. This facility must be on a different part of the city’s grid than a residential neighborhood.”

If it was even on the grid at all. I wouldn’t put it past the FPMP to be powered by a giant underground hamster wheel, if that was part of the convoluted contingency plan Con Dreyfus put in place.

Alisha jabbed at her phone in annoyance. “Nothing.”

“I don’t understand,” Jibben said. “Why didn’t you tell him you were—”

“I was what? Trapped in some crazy-assed basement somewhere in a secret government building that doesn’t even show up on a map?”

Jibben frowned. “No, I guess you wouldn’t want to worry him.”

“Worry? Kelvin is a teenage boy—he don’t worry ’bout nothing but shooting hoops, texting with girls, and feeding his face. Whenever I’m working a Saturday shift, I stop home to check on him. All different times. No warning. Otherwise, he’d get the bright idea to throw a party while I’m gone. He’s done it. And I’m not gonna let him get away with it again.”

Was that what parenting a teenager was really like? At least there was no local group of friends for Clayton to invite to an impromptu get-together—and no liquor cabinet for him to raid. As for the porn, well…we’d stashed it all last night. And hopefully he had more pressing matters to attend to than going through our closet.

Jacob locked eyes with me as if he’d just read my mind—not necessarily the porn part, just worrying about Clayton in general—then said, “Let’s get moving. I’d like to get out of here sometime today.”

We slogged along for another good while—where the hell did this hallway let out, Indiana?—when something other than a vast expanse of endless hallway appeared in the beam of our emergency lantern…and we found ourselves at a door.

It was a simple thing. Flat. Industrial. Fitted with the kind of panic bar that didn’t even lock from our side. No keypad, no cameras, no nothing. Just a door.

But it was a steel door—and all of us had Darnell’s encounter with the metal door frame fresh in our minds. If Jibben had been able to stand on his own, I would have thought up some reason for him to be the one to try and open it. It was his lab after all. His door. But he couldn’t even stand unassisted, and we couldn’t expect the one civilian to do it, which left Jacob…or me.

“Jacob,” I said—and when he looked at me, it was obvious there was no way in hell he was about to let me anywhere near it. “At least, uh, open it with the chair so you’re not touching anything.”

Alisha and I lowered Jibben to the floor, I held up the lamp, and Jacob wasted no time in plowing toward the door like a charging bull. I must have expected it to be locked. Given the day we’d had, everyone else was probably thinking the same thing. So we were all stunned when the chair hit the panic bar, and the door flew open wide.

On the other side was a small landing…and a set of stairs going up.

But the best thing about it? The lights were actually on.

We had power.

Jacob forged right ahead...or, at least, he tried. But Jibben had toppled forward to grab him by the cargo shorts—and that guy had one hell of a grip. “Agent, wait! Over there by the stairs—!”

I angled the lamp, and sure enough, in the shadow of the stairwell, a rope of insulated cable was dangling from an electrical panel with its access door hanging slightly askew.

Scary? Sure. Especially with Darnell’s death fresh in my mind. But the landing was wide enough. Surely we were all capable of giving the dangling cable a wide enough berth and make our way up the—

Alisha aimed her flashlight app at the floor, which bounced the light like a mirror.

Sonofabitch. The floor wasn’t just damp—it was covered in water, as deep as the safety door threshold. A good inch. Maybe more. And the frayed end of the cable?

Just skimming the water’s surface.