I listened but the only sound was the low, idling rumble of the Land Rover’s engine. I approached the sentry box, looking in through the window. There was nothing in there except an office chair, a table upon which an Andy McNab paperback lay face down and open, a small TV that was turned off, and the controls for the gate.
I tried the door. It was unlocked. I went inside and inspected the control panel. There was a green button marked OPEN and a red button marked CLOSE. It couldn’t be any simpler. I hit the green button and the gate slowly began to rise up with a mechanical whirring sound.
I went back outside and got back into the Land Rover.
Sam waited until the gate was all the way up and then drove forward. As we drove farther along the path, I looked out of the rear window at the empty sentry box.
“Something wrong?” Lucy asked.
“Just wondering where the guards are.”
“Me too,” she admitted.
The trees gave way suddenly and the track crossed rolling grassland. Ahead of us was the camp. I saw a wire fence that must have been at least twenty feet tall and sentry towers that reminded me of the World War II prisoner of war camps you see in movies. Within the fences was a cluster of olive green tents of varying sizes from big marquees to one-person camping tents, and wooden huts that, again, reminded me of POW camps.
There was a main gate, above which a stenciled wooden sign said CAMP APOLLO.
The gate was open.
There were no guards in the towers and I couldn’t see any movement within the camp.
“Nobody home, man,” Sam said, bringing the Land Rover to a halt just outside the main gate and killing the engine.
“There should be five thousand people here,” Tanya said. “Where did they all go?”
I kept my mouth shut. Tanya and Sam had broadcast a message on the radio telling people to leave the camps and now they were surprised that this camp was empty. Not wanting to return to the earlier argument, I grabbed my M16, opened the Land Rover door, and said, “Let’s go take a look.”
There might still be a computer here that was linked to the survivor database. I could still find out where my family was.
As I stood on the grass, which was still wet from the earlier rain, I felt a sense of unease. I couldn’t put my finger on anything specific that was making me feel that way but I stood watching and listening, ready to scramble back into the Land Rover if something came rushing out of the trees or from the tents.
The others must have felt it too because as they exited the vehicle, they stood silently surveying the area before moving toward the camp gate.
I could hear the sound of my own rapid breathing, but nothing else. Camp Apollo was as quiet as a grave.
“Does anyone else feel like we’re about to walk into a trap?” Tanya asked.
“Yeah, man,” Sam said. He had turned to face the woods, his back to the camp, his eyes searching the shadows beneath the trees.
“Maybe two of us should stay out here,” Tanya suggested.
“No way,” I said. “We shouldn’t split up.” I’d seen more than enough horror movies to know that splitting up was never a good idea.
“Okay, then let’s go,” she said, moving forward warily.
We fell in behind her, weapons pointing in all directions as we made our way to the open gate.
A sudden sound made us all jump and I almost squeezed the trigger of my M16 before I realized that it as just a crow cawing somewhere in the woods.
Great. That was just what we needed right now, a creepy sound effect.
We reached the gate and paused. It was made of the same steel as the fences and was just as tall. A heavy steel bolt had been pulled aside, allowing the gate to be opened.
“It’s intact,” I said. “The gate was opened normally. It’s not like something broke in.”
“Or broke out,” Lucy added.
I nodded.
“Maybe they closed down the operation here and moved somewhere else,” Tanya suggested. Her voice was low and tight and I realized that we were all talking in hushed tones, as if someone might be listening to our conversation.
We proceeded through the gate and into the camp, passing between the unmanned sentry towers.
“I don’t think they went anywhere,” I whispered. “They wouldn’t leave all these vehicles behind.” I nodded toward an area near the gate where an assortment of military vehicles had been parked.
Most of the vehicles were in desert colors, with a few in woodland camouflage. There were Land Rovers, Jeeps, personnel carriers, and a large six-wheeled truck that had a cage welded around its body.
“Mastiff,” Sam said. “I saw some of those in the Middle East. The cages can stop a mortar shell.”
“They wouldn’t leave equipment like that behind,” I said. “Either everyone who was here is now dead or they had to depart quickly and abandon everything.”
“Why would they do that?” Lucy asked. “It doesn’t make sense. If they had to leave quickly, the vehicles would be the fastest way to travel.”
“So that brings us back to everyone being dead,” Tanya said, looking around at the tents and huts.
“Maybe we should leave,” Sam said.
He had a point. Whether the people from Camp Apollo had run away or been killed, one thing was clear: this place was dangerous. But inside one of these huts could be a computer that would tell me where Joe and my parents were. I couldn’t just walk away when I was so close.
“We should take a look around first,” I said. “We might discover what happened here, and we might even find the Survivor Board database.”
Sam shrugged. “Sure thing, man. It shouldn’t take us more than a week to search the camp. There are more tents here than at the Glastonbury Festival.”
“The tents are probably where the civilians lived,” I said. “The wooden huts are likely to be the soldiers’ quarters and offices. We should focus on those.”
He looked at Tanya. I had noticed that in matters of importance, Sam always deferred to Tanya’s judgment.
She nodded. “Sure, why not? We can take a look in some of the huts.”
I led the way to the nearest hut, a long, low building with frosted glass windows and a single door. The others fell in behind me, obviously deciding that since this was my idea, I could go first.
I went up to the door and tried the handle. It turned in my hand and the latch clicked open. “It’s unlocked,” I said. I hesitated, wondering if I was going to push the door open and come face to face with a hut full of hybrids. Maybe they had been waiting in here quietly, willing us to open the door and release them.
Swallowing, I pushed the door and stepped back. The door swung open, slammed into the wall, and juddered. I hadn’t realized that I’d pushed it so hard. My actions were being controlled by adrenaline.
The air that came rushing out to greet me was so fetid that I felt like I had been physically pushed backward by its foul stench. I retched, leaning against the side of the hut for support.
Sam peeked through the doorway, one arm held over his nose and mouth.
He stepped away from the hut, shook his head as if to try and clear it of the memory of what he had seen in there, and said, “That’s some fucked up shit, man.”
10
Sam used the butt of his rifle to break the frosted glass windows all along the length of the hut, letting fresh air inside to replace the stagnant putrescence that had come wafting out of the open door.
After a couple of minutes, my stomach had stopped twisting into knots and we tentatively entered the hut.
It was a morgue. Stainless steel tables stood in two rows that reached from one end of the hut to the other, forming an aisle in the center. The walls were covered with diagrams and charts, put up in a seemingly haphazard manner. Some of the diagrams were crudely drawn, others more professionally. All showed various parts of the human body.