She made a sound to remind him she still had a gag in her mouth. The man reached up, untied the cloth, and let it drop to the landing.
“Controls are there,” she said, pointing at three gray buttons just below the lip where the door would nestle.
He reached toward them.
“Wait,” she said. “It’s been a while since it was last opened. The door can come down pretty quick.” She didn’t know if the last was true or not, but an idea had begun to grow in her mind, and for it to work she needed to be the one who pushed the button. “Unless you want to get knocked the rest of the way down, we should get below door level first.”
He pondered this for a moment before saying, “Fine. Let’s move it.”
Once Dani’s head was lower than the door frame, she pushed the middle button, hoping she was remembering correctly.
The first to open. The second to close. The third to lock.
The third would turn the dials back to zero, and the combination would have to be entered again into the matching set of tumblers on the underside of the door, increasing the time it would take the exit to open again. She didn’t want that.
Her plan was to sneak away when he was preoccupied and escape out the top. After she shut the metal door again, that’s when she would scramble the tumblers and lock him inside. Wait a month and he’d be dead for sure. She could then return and do the work she’d come back to the States to do.
As the door swung down above her, she shot a quick glance at the tumblers to make sure they hadn’t reset to 1. With relief, she saw the combo was still in place.
“Hurry up,” the man said, pulling on her belt loop.
She continued down.
The road was so rough at times that Orlando was sure, despite her condition, she could have walked it faster. Though she tried avoiding the worst of it, the bumps and dips still banged at the undercarriage, threatening to rip the axles off. It became so bad that she had to focus all her attention on the tire ruts immediately in front of her, and didn’t notice Orbits’s car until it was right in front of her.
She slammed on the brakes, ready to throw the car into reverse, but the other vehicle appeared empty and a scan revealed no one standing around. She retrieved her gun and stuffed an extra mag in her pocket before climbing out. In her head, she could hear Quinn telling her to stay in the car, but she knew the others might not arrive in time to help Dani.
Keeping an eye on the woods in case Orbits was still around, she moved over to his car and double-checked inside. It was empty.
A quick search of the area revealed fresh tracks leading to the northeast along what was left of the road. Orlando followed them to a barbed-wire fence, where a couple pieces of wood had been braced between two strands, creating a pass-through. She eased her way between them, and congratulated herself when she reached the other side without cutting herself or falling on her butt.
Her celebration was short lived, however, as she was hit with another false contraction. This one was the most intense so far. About the only good thing was that it didn’t last too long, and soon she was moving again. The trail continued through the trees to the edge of a meadow.
She stopped and looked around. Unless Orbits and Dani were lying in the grass, they weren’t in the meadow. She did see something odd. In the center, near two blocks of concrete that peeked up above the grass, was a pile of dirt that looked dark and rich, like it had recently been turned.
She stepped out from the protection of the trees and cautiously approached the pile. What she found was certainly not what she’d expected. A metal door lay between a concrete frame, the dirt clearly having covered it until very recently. She was able to lift it about half an inch, but it was too heavy to move any further. Clearly it was unlocked, but it must have some sort of assist mechanism to get it open.
Maybe she needed to reenter the combination to trigger the opening mechanism.
After smoothing out part of the dirt pile, she wrote in it the numbers showing on the tumblers and then turned the dials, mixing them up. When she was done, she reinput the sequence.
When she input the final number, she heard something hum inside.
“That’s gotta be wrong,” Quinn said.
“No,” Nate told him. He was looking at the phone locator app on his cell. Even though Orlando’s phone was off, she hadn’t pulled her SIM card and they could still track it. Nate pointed out the window. “She went right through there and is about a half mile back.”
“Is it just me,” Ananke said, leaning over Daeng so she could see out his window, “or does that look like a road someone would take at the beginning of a bad horror film?”
Quinn didn’t like the looks of it, either. Orlando should have waited for them.
He switched the Explorer into four-wheel drive and turned down the road.
“Do you hear them?” Ananke asked.
“Hear who?” Daeng said.
“Everyone in the theater yelling, ‘Don’t go that way! Don’t go that way!’”
Quinn pushed the SUV, not worrying about what damage he might be doing to the suspension. Even then, the going was slow, and it took nearly five minutes before Orlando’s sedan came into sight.
“There’s another car in front of hers,” Nate said. “Looks like Orbits’s.”
The Explorer skidded to a stop. Quinn jumped out, gun drawn, and rushed over to Orlando’s car.
Empty.
He circled the sedan, looking for any signs of struggle or gunfire, but there were none.
Orbits’s vehicle was also deserted.
“I’ve got tracks over here,” Daeng yelled. He had moved down the road beyond the two cars.
They all converged on his location.
Nate looked at his cell. “That’s the direction her phone’s in, too.”
Without a word, they headed deeper into the woods.
CHAPTER 40
The spiral stairs had walls on both sides, preventing Orbits from getting any sense of what they had entered.
An old mine? Was there anything to dig for in this part of Kansas? He didn’t know. The last time he’d been in the state was on a road trip with his parents when he was thirteen. All he remembered from back then was that the place seemed like one giant farm.
“This had better open up into something,” he said.
Walking a few steps in front of him, the girl remained silent.
Round and round they went, each section looking exactly like the last. At one point he heard a faint noise coming from behind them. He’d made Danielle stop while he listened, but after several seconds of quiet, he told her to get moving again.
Finally, the stairs ended at another landing. It, too, had a door, though this one was on the wall they’d been circling.
As Danielle reached for the handle, Orbits said, “Wait.” He grabbed the back of her shirt. “Okay, open it. Slowly.”
The door opened inward, so Danielle had to step over the threshold as she pushed it. Orbits dashed in behind her.
“Where’s the lights?” he asked.
Except for the light spilling in from the stairwell, the space was dark.
Danielle stepped over to a box on the wall near the door, identical to the one on the upper landing, and flipped on the switches inside.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then high above them a vapor light flickered to life, and then another and another and another. It took several seconds for them to come to full strength, but even before they reached that point, Orbits could see he and the girl were inside a giant tube, with pipes and steel grating hugging the sides all the way up. The entire floor was clear, though there were scars in the concrete where things had been anchored. Equipment, perhaps?