The three of them reached the end of the throat-like entry and simply stood there, staring at the room. For thirty seconds, nobody made a sound. The light beams played over the space in a kind of spectral silence.

The floor was strewn with dead animals—almost certainly chimpanzees. They lay scattered here and there, no rhyme or reason to their positioning. They’d simply fallen where they’d died—where they’d been shot. The bullet holes—punched into abdomens and chests and heads—were still visible because the corpses still had their skin. They had not decomposed as they would have in a normal setting. None of nature’s usual means for clearing away the dead—predators, scavengers, parasitic insects—had been available to do the job down here. The bodies appeared to have moldered and dried and caved in on themselves, like tanned hides draped over bones. Every visible face seemed to be grimacing in pain—lips and gums had withered and retracted from exposed teeth.

Dryden moved his beam over the long walls on either side of the chamber; they were lined with cages, all of which stood open. Elsewhere in the room, random things had been left behind: a few metal chairs, a dry-erase board on the wall, with nothing written on it. There was a big steel flatbed cart, with a raised handle on one end; it looked like the kind they had at Home Depot, meant for hauling bags of cement mix and cinderblocks.

Next to Dryden, Lauren had her shirt collar pulled up over her mouth and nose. She had done that reflexively within seconds of seeing the bodies, though in fact there was no reason for it—the room smelled no different than the tunnel had: stale and dry. With every door in the complex torched off, all the air had mingled and intermixed completely, even without the benefit of fans or cross-breezes to move it around. Twenty-nine years of shared stillness had been enough.

“How would this happen?” Danica asked. “Did the people in charge of shutting down Ashland just … kill them? Why the hell would they do it this way? They could have left them in the cages and given them a shot or something. Jesus Christ…”

Dryden had no answer. This space seemed to pull him in two different directions: the room itself set off every recognition alarm in his head—he had been here, no question about it—but the carnage didn’t. However this massacre had happened, he had not watched it unfold.

“I don’t know,” he said softly.