The last thing his flashlight settled on was a stand-alone cabinet against the back wall of the room. It was seven feet tall and just as wide, like a doubled bookcase with doors. The thing was made of cheap particle board with cracked melamine veneer. The big doors stood wide open, revealing a bare interior. Dryden took a few steps closer to it, mindful of the bodies. He shone his light into the cabinet, scrutinizing it.

It didn’t quite fit the room—not his rough memory of it, anyway. It looked wrong. He stared at it a moment longer, then chalked it up to the thing’s emptiness—it would have been filled with supplies in 1989.

Dryden turned and crossed back to where the others stood.

“One left,” Danica said.

Dryden heard an edge of fear in her voice.

“You get a bad vibe about that one, too?” he asked.

She nodded, and—he was sure he saw it—shivered just noticeably.

Dryden glanced at Lauren. “What about you?”

Lauren nodded fast, and Dryden saw that she was still sweating—more than before. He had the impression her nerves were lit up and humming.

What the hell was in that last room?

He raised his light and stepped past them, leading the way back out through the entry channel.

Ten seconds later they were back in the open space at the end of the corridor. They stood facing the fourth doorway, though none of them had shone a light into it yet. The darkness on the other side was perfect, a kind of deep night that belonged to that room alone.

“This is where it comes back, isn’t it?” Danica said. “I can feel it. It’s right in front of us.”

You’re wrong, Dryden thought. It’s behind us. It’s chasing us.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

JULY 1989

Sam was sprinting with Dani and Lauren in the tunnel, bringing up the rear. He kept his attention on Lauren—tried to be ready to grab hold of her if she stumbled. If she tripped and fell now, the seconds they lost would be the ones they couldn’t afford.

They had gone maybe a hundred yards when he heard the door click open behind them. He heard Pierce’s running footsteps a second later, like a fast drumbeat—faster than theirs.

They ran on.

Some kind of stenciled text went by on the left-side wall, gone in a blur before he even registered it. Behind them, Pierce’s footfalls seemed to get louder and clearer by the second.

Up ahead, the line of white lights ended. It was hard to tell what lay beyond—the tunnel seemed to open up into some wider space there.

At fifty feet, Sam saw that the chamber at the end had doors on its opposite wall. Two of them—no, four.