“You might imagine,” Dani said, “that Lauren and I were going a little crazy by that point. We knew the whole town was some kind of … mask, I guess. But why? A mask covers something. What was being covered here? And then it occurred to us that our parents must know a lot more than they were letting on. They’d chosen to move here, after all. Maybe they knew everything. So with that in mind … we did something pretty bad.”

They reached the metal structure. Both flashlight beams played over it, and at last Sam saw what it was: an old Army Jeep, like something out of a World War II movie. He also saw why it’d been hard to recognize at a distance. It was smashed. Crumpled in on itself from all sides, as if a giant had picked it up and crushed it between his hands.

Then Sam directed the flashlight over the finer details of the wreckage, and realized that words like smashed and crumpled were a little off the mark. There were no stress-fractures in the metal. No jagged edges. No break-points. All the damage was smooth and curved, even rippled. It looked the way a plastic toy Jeep might look, if someone dropped it into a campfire for a minute or two. This thing hadn’t been crushed. It’d been melted.

Sam’s light beam found one of the Jeep’s doors, where black stencil-painted text had been applied, apparently after the damage. The writing was identical to what he’d seen in the corridor upstairs, though smaller. It read:

MK-II HYENA

NONGUIDED THERMOBARIC ORDNANCE GS-820

BRAVO TEST-18 APRIL 1964

Beneath the blocky stencil text, someone had added with a grease pencil: NICE AND TOASTY!

“The bad thing we did was to eavesdrop on my dad,” Dani said. “I know it’s totally wrong. If I ever have kids, and they do that to me, they’re grounded for a month. But it was all we could think of.”

“Eavesdrop how?”

“Have you ever seen a microcassette recorder?”

“Sure.”

“I used to use one at my old school in Long Beach,” Dani said, “for taking notes. It’s tiny, and it’s the kind that you can set to be voice-activated. It only records when it’s picking up sound.”

Sam nodded. There had been kids who used them at his old school, too.