Dryden shone his beam through the right-hand frame first. From where he stood, he could see nothing beyond the doorway but a broad concrete floor.

The room past that doorway is enormous. So big you feel like you’re outside, once you step away from the wall.

He felt certain of that intuition. He also felt no emotional response at all about that giant room—none of the dread that had struck him when he’d first looked down the stairs.

Then he swung his beam to the other doorway, and felt his breathing speed up.

“Try the left one first?” Danica asked.

No. Never. We should turn around right now and go back.

“Yeah,” Dryden said.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

JULY 1989

Sam crawled the last hundred feet through the corn stalks, his eyes just above their tops. His vision was about as dark-adapted as it could get; he could see the Jeep fifty feet north of him, parked beside the tangle of weeds and undergrowth that marked the stairway down into Station 14.

Pierce was there, pacing back and forth behind the vehicle, stopping every few seconds to listen to the night.

Sam listened, too. He heard crickets and frogs, and corn shoots moving in the wind. Nothing else. No sound of Dani and Lauren. Not yet.

It was hard to make out much detail of Pierce beyond his shape. Hard to see if he was holding any kind of object as a weapon. There was just no way to tell.

Sam settled back into a crouch, his feet braced in the soft soil, ready to run toward the girls as soon as he heard them. That was all he had, for a plan. Just get to them first. Get to them and turn them around, and get them the hell out of here. Run away into the dark, before Pierce could murder all three of them.

This isn’t going to work. You won’t hear them coming any sooner than he will. It’s a toss-up.

He ignored the doubt as best he could. Maybe it would work, and maybe it wouldn’t. What else could he do but try?

He thought about that.

Was there something more he could do?

He pressed his hands into the soil, moving them through it slowly, silently. He felt the wide, spreading roots of the corn stalks, and the stems of weeds growing around their bases, and the hard, smooth surfaces of rocks embedded in the earth. Most of them were pebbles. But not all of them. Some were a lot bigger than that.

Dani saw the Jeep a hundred yards ahead in the darkness. She was guiding Lauren through the cornfield, moving east—they had followed an old tractor lane north through the woods, after walking several hundred yards west of the burning chopper and the lit-up space around the subdivision. Past the forest now, they were coming up on Station 14 from the opposite direction they usually approached it from.