He entered the code and unlocked the metal door. Gesturing for Edison to go first, he hurried inside and closed the door. The green light told him that the system had armed itself again. He leaned against the inside to catch his breath and wait for his heart to slow. This was real fear, not the product of misfiring brain chemistry.
Another feeling had joined the fear. A feeling he hadn’t experienced in a long time.
Exhilaration.
Joe let the feeling wash over him. Ever since he’d become trapped inside, his world had diminished. He’d lost his job, his friends, the sky. He tried not to dwell on it and keep going, but his new life had weighed him down in a thousand ways.
Tonight he’d caught a glimpse of something new, something exciting — a mystery that was to be found only in the world beneath. He had to solve it. He had to figure out who Rebar was, why he was there, and how the train car came to be bricked in. It might be dangerous, but he’d risk a lot to keep feeling this alive.
As he followed Edison toward his front door, he couldn’t stop grinning.
Things were going to change for him.
Chapter 7
Rebar watched the man with the yellow dog sprint away from him across the rows of shiny tracks and into a tunnel. He didn’t bother to chase them. They didn’t seem dangerous, just curious. He didn’t have time to bother with them. He had to concentrate on his prize.
He had found what he had long searched for. He wasn’t crazy. He was right. He’d almost given up back there on the platform, but he hadn’t. And now he had found it.
With one dirty hand, he touched the brick wall and muttered a quick prayer, surprised that he still remembered one. This brick train shed wasn’t just the source of the secrets he sought. It was also a tomb for the doctor who had started it all, and a hapless soldier who’d been ordered to accompany him on his final journey. His papers said so, and he would find proof.
He wiped his hand on his filthy pants and picked up the lantern again, then leaned against the cold wall and stuck his arm through the hole. Reverently, he gazed into the room. The lantern light shone on a blue car that had once carried the president himself. The car had been lost for so many years. Everyone had given up on it. But not him. He knew that he would find it. And he had.
The doctor must have been trying to get out. He lay crumpled against the end of the tunnel where they had laid the final bricks. Dark stains on the back of his coat told Rebar that he’d been wounded, probably shot to keep him inside while they finished the wall. He hadn’t given up.
The soldier had obviously chosen to eat a bullet rather than die of dehydration or from running out of oxygen. A brave choice. The other skeleton looked like it belonged to a monkey. It hadn’t been mentioned in the papers that Rebar had come across before.
Rebar climbed through the hole he’d created in the wall and walked over to the long-dead doctor. The man had died before Rebar’s own parents were born. Hard to believe that he might even now hold the secrets to Rebar’s own life and death. Funny.
He studied the white-clad figure on the floor. The man had nothing in his hands, and the ground around his body was clear. If he’d carried anything with him, he hadn’t brought it all the way to this last resting place.
Holding the light at waist level, Rebar turned in a slow circle, looking for clues. The skeleton in the uniform listed against the wall. His skull rested about a foot from Rebar’s boot.
He didn’t have the papers on him, either. That left the train car.
Rebar set the lantern inside, then hefted himself up into the old car. Sooty dust lay velvet thick over everything — chairs bolted to the floor, a cabinet in the corner with an old sink, and empty glass decanters.
He searched the floor, and spotted what he was looking for next to a chair. A grimy rectangle. A briefcase? He wiped the dust off the top with the sleeve of his jacket, uncovering a cracked leather surface.
Rebar lifted it up with trembling hands.
The briefcase’s hinges had long since rusted, and they screeched and broke as he lifted the top off. He stared down at a stack of yellowed papers inside.
He sat down on an old chair that had perhaps once held FDR and began to read. The papers didn’t make sense, yet. They discussed clinical trials, strains of the parasite, side effects. Nothing about a cure. There must be more papers.
A clink outside caught his attention. Probably a train. Or a man working far away.
He couldn’t be sure. He needed to take the papers somewhere safe and hide them until he had time to read them carefully. Before that, he needed to check the rest of the car out to make sure that there weren’t other papers hidden there.
He emptied the papers and maps from his own pockets into the briefcase, smashing them in until he could put the top back on. Then he took off his belt and wrapped it around both halves of the broken case. Nothing could fall out now. He tucked it under his arm and lifted the lantern.
The room was, as he’d expected, empty. He climbed through the hole he’d opened up. He swung the lantern in a slow circle, shadows chasing each other across the walls. No one out here, either. Hadn’t there been a man and a dog earlier? Were they back? He didn’t think so.
The uneasy feeling wouldn’t go away. He took the lantern and walked along an unused track, counting his steps. At just the right spot, as if he’d known it all along, he stumbled over a stack of broken train ties that looked as if they’d been tossed there before the Korean War. Quickly, he cleared a space in the pile, placed the briefcase in the middle, and then restacked the ties haphazardly atop it.
Then he went back toward the car. He would find the other papers, the ones that the doctor must have hidden.
The ones that told how he could be cured.
Dread consumed him. What if they weren’t there?
He half-ran back to the brick tomb and climbed inside. He ransacked the car, finding no papers concealed in the cupboards or fastened under the chairs, nothing on the floor or walls. The ceiling held nothing but a wire and pockmarks from bullets, nothing useful at all.
With a curse, he threw the glass decanters one after another against the thick glass windows. The square bottles shattered, and shards of glass glittered against the thick dust.
He jumped from the back of the train and ran to the doctor’s body, ripping the coat from the skeleton, hands delving into the pockets, searching even his pants pockets. Nothing. He repeated his actions with the soldier’s corpse, pulling them both into the center of the room so that he could see them better.
Sweat ran down his back, and his breath grew tight. Calm down, he ordered himself. Think. The papers had to be here somewhere. After all, the men were trapped in this room. Nothing could have left the room.
He started at the far end of the room and walked from one end to the other, lantern in one hand, peering at the dirty ground. When he got to the brick wall, he turned, took a step to the left, and walked back the other way. His footprints formed straight lines in the dust. He was walking a grid. If it was here, he’d find it.
An hour later, he collapsed on the steps that led up to the car. He’d found nothing. There was no hope. He dropped his head into his hands and wept.
Chapter 8
Ozan hated train tunnels. They smelled like oil and rat piss. The third rail ran electric death along the side of each track. One kick to the wrong spot, and Erol would be alone. Ozan walked on the train ties, both to avoid the third rail and to keep from leaving prints in the dirt.