He made one last sweep with the light, and finally seemed satisfied. Still, he kept the gun in his hands—kept it leveled on something Danica couldn’t see from her angle.

He stooped quickly over one of the bodies and unclipped a knife from its waist. He stepped past the corpse and knelt down beside Danica.

“Roll on your side,” he said.

She twisted her shoulders and got herself up onto one of them, exposing her bound wrists to Dryden. A second later the zip-tie parted with the same snapping twang she’d heard earlier.

She pushed off the cart’s deck and sat up, blinking, still disoriented by what had happened. Her ears were ringing, and the air was thick and acrid with the smell of spent gunpowder.

Danica saw Dryden still pointing the machine gun and its light at something out of her field of view—something behind her. She turned and looked over her shoulder.

Ellis Pierce sat upright, his back against the wall beside the doorway. He was shot and bleeding, but still alive.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

JULY 1989

Sam drew back from the shelf unit, stood up and turned, and saw the metal door swing inward. He went back to Dani’s side.

A woman stood in the open doorway, maybe thirty years old. She had on a military uniform—not the dressy kind that people wore to official ceremonies, but the casual type you saw in movies most of the time. This woman’s uniform also had a red cross emblem on the left side of the chest. She was some kind of medic.

Behind her were the two men Sam had heard; they wore the same uniform as the woman. The room they stood in was brightly lit, far more so than the tunnel. Sam could see rolling carts of equipment with the same big red cross on them, and there was a wide corridor leading away, with doorways every twenty feet. The doorways had clipboards hanging on the walls outside them, and farther down the hall stood a rolling gurney.

This station was a hospital—a medical quarters, anyway.

The woman and the two men stood staring at Sam and Dani, confused. Then the woman stepped forward, leaned through the doorway and looked around for anyone who might be accompanying two random kids in this tunnel.

Seeing no one else, she stepped back again and stared at them.

“What the hell is this?” she asked.

Sam glanced over his shoulder, into the dim reach of the tunnel, then turned to face the woman again.

“Can you lock this door so even the code won’t open it?” he asked.

“Who are you?”

“Yes or no?”