After a moment Dryden lowered his gaze to the huge rolling door on the front of the barn, which stood open a few feet. The space beyond was dim but not dark; the partly collapsed roof let in plenty of light.

He and Danica crossed to it and stepped inside. They stood there for ten seconds, saying nothing. Dryden saw giant rough-hewn timbers, and scattered debris from the roof, and bird nests and hornet nests and three decades’ worth of wood rot.

“I don’t feel anything at all in here,” Danica said.

“Same.”

Behind them, outside and far away, Dryden could hear the rotors of the chopper beating the air. Like a ticking clock running at triple-time.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The long motorcade returned to the north-south road and continued toward downtown. They reached it a minute later; the Jeep’s driver slowed to a crawl. Dryden swept his eyes over what remained of the place: a line of storefronts and other businesses running up the main drag, across from the rusted shell of an old grain elevator. Every building had sagged and decayed. Here and there, walls had tilted or fully collapsed.

None of it struck a chord with Dryden, though that didn’t surprise him; nothing here looked remotely like it would have in the summer of 1989.

Out ahead, beyond the last of the storefronts, a broad grassy slope led up to the subdivision, which lay entirely east of the road—the half-moon shape, as it had looked from the air. From here, Dryden could see that he’d been right: it was all houses up there, tucked in under the canopy of huge shade trees, the space beneath them cluttered with second-generation growth. Only the houses at the outer edge of the subdivision were visible now, like watchmen just inside the forest, staring out over the open field below.

The procession sped up again as it left the downtown behind, climbing the rise with open land on both sides. Dryden watched the subdivision come up on his right; a moment later they were beside it, slowing again, he and Danica staring into the dark reaches of the woods. The shapes of houses drifted by, deep in the trees, silhouettes backlit by murky sunlight.

The lead Jeep came to a stop at the far end of the woods—the northern edge. Dryden looked back along the length of the motorcade, stretching down to probably the midpoint of the forest.

He heard the chirp of a two-way radio, and turned toward it: Grace had it on his belt, the microphone clipped to his shoulder. Now a man’s voice came through the speaker: “Air to point, over.”

Grace keyed the microphone. “Go ahead, air.”

“No sign of any access point to the underground. We’re going farm by farm now, checked about half of them so far.”