I imagined us wandering, lost, through these tunnels.
The camera battery would die soon. Without its light, the darkness and dirt would swallow us whole. And then we’d be really and truly lost. We’d be buried alive.
Using our hands. Stumbling blind. Moving deeper and deeper underground.
And what would that do to Floyd? I wondered, peering into the darkness ahead. He was already freaking out. Much more of this and he’d be a complete nutjob, panicked and hyperventilating.
Finally, without warning, we reached the cellar. Floyd let out a loud sigh of relief, breath hitching in his throat. Then he pulled me from the mouth of the tunnel, out onto the concrete floor. When I paused, lifting the camera to view the empty room once again, Floyd continued on without me, dropping my arm and darting ahead into the gloom. His feet made a terrible racket as he stumbled his way up the dimly lit steps.
The door banged open above me, letting light into the cellar. After the darkness, that dim gray rectangle burned like a supernova at the top of the stairs.
When I reached the foyer, I found Floyd sitting with his back against the front door. He was digging through his pockets. After a couple of seconds, he pulled out a pill bottle and spilled a couple of oxycodones onto his shaking palm. He bolted them down and closed his eyes, his entire body falling slack with relief.
“What did you see?” I asked. When he didn’t respond, I tried again: “How about we talk about it?”
“How ’bout we shut the fuck up?” Floyd replied, his anxiety rushing out in an exhausted gasp. “How ’bout we just… shut the fuck up?”
He remained still for a couple of seconds. Then he hugged himself, rubbing at his arms like he was trying to get warm. “I was seeing things,” he said. “I just let my imagination get the best of me.”
“Then tell me what it was,” I prodded.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Dean,” he growled. His eyes popped open, and he fixed me with an angry glare. “This isn’t something I talk about, okay? So shut the fuck up! There ain’t going to be a tender moment here… and no fucking group hug!”
He pushed himself up off the floor and threw the door open, storming out in an angry huff. After a couple of seconds, I followed, tracing his path back through the snow.
As soon as I entered the house, I heard Floyd’s bedroom door slam shut up on the second floor. I thought about following him up but decided not to press my luck. He’d taken his pills. He’d be calmer soon. If he wanted to talk, he’d talk.
“What was that?” Charlie asked, emerging from the kitchen. “It sounded like a freight train running through the house.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just Floyd. I think I pissed him off.”
Charlie nodded dismissively, then turned back toward the kitchen. He paused at the threshold and looked back over his shoulder. “If you want to do your forum post,” he said, “you should get me your computer soon. I don’t know when Taylor’s friend’s going to show up.”
I grunted my assent, then went upstairs to grab my notebook computer. I paused briefly in the hallway outside Floyd’s door. I could hear him pacing back and forth inside his room. Whatever he’d seen down there in the tunnels, he hadn’t escaped it yet. It was still with him, chasing him back and forth, back and forth.
When I got back to the kitchen, Charlie popped open my computer and set it on the table next to his own. He immediately began shuttling through my file system, popping from window to window with uncanny agility. It was too fast for me to follow; his hands were a blur, careening back and forth atop the keyboard. After a couple of minutes, he made an encouraging sound and started typing code into his own machine.
I let him work, turning my attention to the camera.
The camera was getting dirty. Before coming to the city, I’d treated my Canon with great care. It was my prized possession, and I kept it clean, in pristine shape. In the last couple of days, however, I’d let all of that slide. Now I was dismayed to find dings and scratches all along its matte-black body. Not to mention the mud and the layer of grime where I’d been touching it with my dirty hands. I used the hem of my shirt to wipe away most of the mud, then removed the lens cap and turned the camera up toward the light. I could see specks of dirt all across the green-tinted lens, countless dots of black, marring my precision optics. I let out a deep sigh and replaced the lens cap. There was no way I was going to try to clean my good glass with a dirty shirt. I had a cleaning kit upstairs. I’d give it a good working over tonight, before I went to bed.
After I finished inspecting the camera, I turned on the viewscreen and flipped back through the pictures I’d taken in the tunnel. Most of them were worthless. They were blurred, out of focus, or showed nothing but deep brown dirt. The pictures of the junction box, while technically fine, were incredibly boring; they were nothing but industrial detail with absolutely no hint of mystery or art. And the pictures of Floyd in the hub were too dark, his pale face floating in a sea of black, staring off into even more black. He could have been standing in any dark room, cave, or midnight forest.
I zoomed in on the last couple of shots, trying to figure out what he’d seen in those brief camera flashes, but the pictures showed nothing new—just his face, contorted in sudden horror.
I shook my head and scrolled back to a picture of the junction box. “Do you know what this is?” I asked Charlie, holding up the camera for him to see.
Charlie glanced up from his notebook. His eyes swam for a couple of seconds—out of focus, as if he’d just surfaced from a dream—before he finally managed to lock in on the camera. He took it from my hand and studied the image. “It’s a networking hub.” He found the navigation buttons and began zooming in on different parts of the picture. “I don’t recognize the product number. PDL-0001A—I’m not sure what company that would be. It certainly doesn’t look like a consumer model.”
“What does it do?” I asked. “What would somebody use it for?”
Charlie shrugged. “Standard stuff. Connecting computers in a network.” He held up the camera and pointed at the image. “Those wires are heavy-duty coax, so this setup could potentially cover quite a bit of ground. And the LEDs on top? Each indicates a live connection—a computer, another hub, a printer—so there are at least eight nodes on this network. Possibly more if they’ve chained together additional hubs.”
“Would it work for audio? Voice traffic?”
“Sure. You could send pretty much anything down this type of line. As long as it’s digitized.”
I nodded. I’d already guessed at most of these answers; it was all pretty standard stuff. It was this next bit I really wanted to know: “Let’s say you were able to get your hands on one of these lines, in the middle of a network. Would you be able to listen in? Would you be able to hear what’s going down the wire?”
Charlie paused, a concerned look on his face. “Yeah. At least theoretically, you’d be able to sniff out all of the information flowing over the network. You might not be able to understand it if it’s encrypted, but you’d be able to get it.”
I nodded and smiled.
“What is this, Dean?” Charlie asked, moving uncomfortably in his seat. “Is this part of the military’s setup here in the city? Did you take this picture at the courthouse?”
For a moment, I was tempted to tell him the truth. I was tempted to tell him all about Devon’s radio, and the tunnels, and the network hidden beneath the city. But finally I decided against it. He had enough to worry about. Besides, I wanted Taylor to hear it first. When it came to this house, and the people in it, she was in charge. She would know what to do.