In the dim light, Ethan’s eyes flicked open. Lopez’s words of hours before drifted through the field of his awareness. Something broke out.
Ethan stared vacantly into the darkness, not seeing the room now but studying at the mental map he had created of the facility. The place had once been a hard-rock mine, which was dug for the extraction of minerals and ores like gold, silver, zinc and so on. To access the ore before the presence of modern machinery, miners were forced to dig decline ramps that descended from the mine entrance in a sort of spiral that circled the deposit. But in those days, haulage of rock to the surface would not have necessarily been performed by mules working alongside the men in the tunnels. Sometimes, vertical shafts were sunk and the ore hauled out via mules turning a mechanical wheel on the surface.
Ethan saw the facility in his mind’s eye again.
The corridors were level, not declining. Those excavations were known as adits, where the ore bodies in the mountain were horizontal rather than vertical and there was no need for ramps or shafts to transport the ore to the surface.
But if this mountain had contained shafts also, they would not necessarily have been used by the construction teams that had built the facility. They would only have used the parts of the mine easiest to access.
Suddenly it all became clear.
The facility sat at the bottom of vertical excavations made into the mountain, making use of the cavities but placing false ceilings. That was why the three central rooms were the same size: the same size as the three ore bodies that had been extracted from the rock, one after the other.
Ethan whirled on the spot. The laboratory was behind him, to the northwest. If the original miners had used a tunnel that circled the ore body in a declining spiral, then it must have run somewhere close by where he now stood, essential ventilation for the shafts themselves.
Ethan walked in between the racks and studied the ceiling, lifting the back of his hand and running it along the seams between the metal panels. It took him only a few moments to find what he was looking for — a soft breeze that felt cool on his skin, seeping down between the panels.
Ethan turned and grabbed the side of the racking, seeing as he did so a boot print in the dust that betrayed where Duran Wilkes must have done the exact same thing. Ethan vaulted up until he was standing on the lower of two adjacent shelves, then reached up and pushed against the panel.
It was heavy, solid metal, but it moved as he pushed, and with a squeak of metal against metal it popped out. Ethan hefted it to one side and then reached up and hauled himself out of the room and up into a low tunnel that smelled of dust and mold and was completely, utterly black.
He reached into his jacket and yanked out his cell, turned it on until the screen glowed brightly and illuminated the tunnel.
It was roughly hewn and descended to his right while ascending gently to his left, curving in both directions as it circled the central columns where the ore had once been.
‘I’ll be damned,’ he murmured to himself, and smiled as he saw Duran and Mary’s footprints leading up the tunnel and away from him. They would probably be clear of the mine and on their way home by now.
Provided the sasquatch didn’t intercept them.
It was then that he smelled something on the air, an overpowering odor like raw sewage and sweat that caked itself thickly across the back of his throat. Ethan covered his mouth and nose with one hand and pressed himself against the wall of the tunnel in the darkness as he looked left and right.
Fear crept like lice on his skin as he searched for glowing eyes in the gloom, but nothing appeared, and he could not hear the deep, heaving breath of the creature despite the confined space in which he was cramped.
A sudden awareness dawned upon him, as he looked at the roughly hewn walls of the tunnel and thought of the immense bulk of the sasquatch. There was no possibility that such a huge creature could have worked its way down through this maze of winding tunnels.
Ethan sat in silence within the tunnel for a long moment, and then suddenly he realized what had happened. The reason why the creature had led them here, had gone to such extraordinary lengths to ensure that they reached this remote mountain. He thought about his mental map of the facility, of where he actually was in relation to the chambers below him.
Another waft of putrid air drifted toward him and he looked left, down the tunnel to where the slim grating of a ventilation shaft glimmered in the faint light from his cellphone. He crept down toward it, trying to make as little noise as possible on the rough floor of the tunnel, until he was able to peer down through the grating and into the room.
It was larger than most of the other subsidiary rooms, and in the faint glow he could see an oven-like structure built from unadorned metal. A wide cylinder extended up from the oven into the ceiling. Ethan looked to his right and saw the open face of the central ore shaft. He guessed that the oven was some kind of incinerator, which made the room he was looking into the one with the locked door.
He peered back down and saw a heavy-looking cage against the rear wall of the room. He tried to hold his breath but the stench was too great to avoid a tight, strained cough.
Instantly, he heard a movement from within the cage. A rustle of wiry, dense fur.
Through the darkness, two silvery discs flashed briefly within the cage, reflecting the pale light from his cellphone.
‘Duran was right,’ he whispered to himself.
This was why they had been herded into the facility.
A low growl came from somewhere within the cage. Ethan backed away from the grating and eased his way down the tunnel until he reached the ore shaft. The ceiling of the locked room was visible as a narrow strip of steel girders that formed the floor of the tunneclass="underline" the rest of the room below him was hacked from the bare rock. Ethan carefully stepped over the girders and passed a vertical cylinder half set into the bare rock wall, an exhaust stack of some kind. He guessed that the locked room must have been some kind of crematorium or similar waste disposal room, most likely connecting to an existing ventilation shaft somewhere above Ethan’s position.
He continued on until he reached the far side of the ceiling, above the door. A pair of thickly sealed power cables extended out from a junction box atop the door structure and turned to his right, passing into a hole drilled into the bedrock. From his position, Ethan guessed that they ran to the main and reserve power generators, providing power to the door itself. With the power down, the door would have remained locked.
But why had it not opened again when he had activated the emergency generators?
Ethan backed out of the tunnel and turned left, following the direction of the cables and searching for another point of access to them.
He found it fifty yards later, directly above the store room in which he had originally been held. In the darkness and his haste to examine the tunnels he had passed by a small access passage that took him to his left until he was directly above the corridor between the laboratory and the containment area at the rear of the facility. There, set inside the tunnel, was a power junction. As Ethan approached he could see that it had been sabotaged.
Both the main and the emergency lines had been hastily severed, the cables frayed, bare metal glinting in the light from his cell. But the junction itself was active, powered by the emergency generators in the containment area nearby. Ethan looked at the floor of the tunnel, picked up one of the two cable ends poking from the bare rock below and examined them. They had not been torn but instead severed by a hacksaw or similar.