Sam eased the door inward another few inches and took a deep breath, then put his head through the gap and got his first look at the space on the other side.

He stopped worrying about making noise.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The place was deserted.

And destroyed.

Sam stood there a moment with his head through the door, then simply opened it all the way and stepped through. Dani followed, and for a long time they held still, just inside the threshold, staring.

The room they’d entered was good sized, maybe thirty feet by thirty. Three doorways opened off the left-side wall. None of them had doors—they were just empty steel frames—but from his angle Sam couldn’t see into any of the rooms beyond. On the far wall of this first room was a counter lined with computers and equipment that reminded him of the biology lab in his old school. All of it was smashed to pieces. The computers, too. Fragile inner components had been carefully removed and broken to crumbs with a hammer—the hammer was still lying there among the debris.

At one end of the counter stood a wire-mesh garbage basket. A few spaghetti-like strands of shredded paper lay in the bottom, atop an inch-thick mound of ash.

Sam’s eyes covered all of those things in a few seconds, and then he forgot them almost entirely. The room’s right-side wall grabbed his full attention.

It was lined with cages.

Each took up a cubic yard of space.

Each contained a dead animal.

They looked like monkeys of some kind. They were big—the size of a large dog—with slender arms and legs, long snouts, and deep-set, close-together eyes. And jagged teeth—fangs and pointed incisors like those of a cat. They were almost certainly baboons. Sam had seen them on TV, and at the San Diego Zoo when he’d gone with his cousins.

There were eight cages in all. The baboons in the first seven lay crumpled at the bottoms, in various stages of decomposition. Leaked bodily fluids had pooled around them, mostly dried and crusted, but some still gleaming in the stuttering fluorescent light. Sam saw tufts of blood-stiffened fur stuck to the cage bars here and there, and deep gashes on the animals’ forepaws. The baboons in the first seven cages had fought desperately to escape before they’d died.

The baboon in the eighth cage had succeeded.

Its corpse lay sprawled halfway across the sill of the enclosure’s door, which hung fully open, its lock mechanism warped and broken. It looked as if the animal had managed to free itself, only to die of exhaustion before it could take another step.