Criss Cross

Chapter 43

The door opened inward and revealed a lit workshop with neat racks of supplies on one side and workbenches and lockers and cabinets on the other. There was no one in the long rectangular space, and the steel door at the far end was ajar.

“Let’s move,” I whispered. “He slammed that door on his way out, but it didn’t catch.”

Single-minded, I started through the workshop, intent on getting to the opposite end and through that door as fast as possible.

Sampson grabbed my shoulder before I could go through.

I spun around, confused and annoyed. John looked stricken as he pointed to a workbench by the lockers. The bow saw was on it. Beside it, there was a reciprocating saw coated in blood and gore. There was blood on the floor below the bench and drops of blood leading toward a locker that was half open.

We walked over a few feet, enough to see a man’s severed head on the shelf inside the locker. He was Caucasian, late thirties or early forties. His dull eyes stared out, and his mouth was frozen open.

We heard another clang, this one above us somewhere.

“Our boy’s getting out of Dodge,” I said. I twisted around and ran through the second door, Sampson right behind me.

We entered a short hallway that had a metal ladder bolted into one wall. I shone my light up it and saw that it climbed into a shaft of corrugated steel that looked like a culvert.

In the flashlight beam, dust and dirt swirled.

“He went up,” I whispered, holstering my pistol and getting on the ladder. “Go back to the staircase, make sure he doesn’t get out of here that way.”

Sampson didn’t argue and went back toward the workshop as I climbed up into the shaft, the flashlight in my left hand. The culvert was big enough to let me through but not so large that it quelled the dreadful feeling of claustrophobia that threated to overtake me the higher I got.

Gritting my teeth, I focused on each rung in the ladder and kept climbing. Twenty feet up, the ladder went through a hole in the floor of another short passage connecting two container cars. When I got up into that hallway, I heard the electric motors on the other side of a door and almost got off the ladder.

But there was still dust and dirt floating down from above.

I kept climbing up and through another short hallway, past a door I felt sure led to the kitchen, and up again into a third shaft. Sweat dripped from my brow when I stuck my head up through the next level, the one that had been locked shut on the stairway side.

The door on my right was not locked, and my curiosity soared as I wondered what Rivers might have in there. But the door to my left was closer.

I lifted the latch, tugged the door open, and felt air rush at me. For several moments, I was confused because of the strength of the breeze and because I wasn’t looking into another container car but down a long, low-ceilinged tunnel.

In my flashlight beam, I could see fresh scuffing and hand-prints in the dust on the tunnel floor. They headed deeper into the passage, which jogged left after fifty feet or so, preventing me from seeing any farther.

My gut response was to crawl after Rivers, keep following him until I caught him.

But my mind seized on the wind hitting my face.

This tunnel leads out. It’s another exit. It has to be.

A voice inside me told me to stop for a second and try to orient myself above and belowground, try to imagine where the passage might go.

Northeast, I thought. Away from his Jeep, toward...the house?

Well, it made sense, didn’t it? Wouldn’t a doomsday prepper want private and secure access to his bunker?

A split second later, I made my decision. Crawling a quarter of a mile in a tunnel like that would take time, and I could go faster if I covered that distance outside.

I jumped back on the ladder, dropped down a level, and ran through the kitchen and out the door to the stairwell. Charging up the stairs, I figured that Sampson and I could get to the car and then up to that house fast — maybe not before Rivers, but very soon after.

When I reached the hallway that led to the main exit, Sampson was by the hatch door with a sour look on his face.

“Son of a bitch locked us in. Please tell me there’s another way out.”