Lee Child - Make Me

She took his place on the porch and he went inside and found Westwood in a bedroom corridor. He was guarding the inside of what once might have been a linen closet. Now it was full of an angled hatch set at forty-five degrees between the back wall and the floor. Angled at forty-five degrees, because it capped a staircase, presumably. To an underground room, no doubt. It was closed, but like all storm doors it would open outward. So the wind could never blow it in.

Reacher judged the distance, the width of the corridor plus the depth of the linen closet to the mid-point of the angled hatch, and then he went to find the living room, where he saw what Chang meant about a zoo. It was like Peter McCann’s place in Chicago, but ten times more complicated. There were screens everywhere, at least twenty of them, and dozens of keyboards, and tower units, and tall racks of humming components, and piles of hard drives, and fans and connectors and power strips, and blinking lights, but most of all wires, miles of them, some bundled, some tangled, some coiled.

None of which Reacher wanted right then.

He headed onward and found a living area and looked at a sofa. A big old thing. Three-seater, easy. Plus extravagant curlicued arms. Long enough. He half carried it and half dragged it back the way he had come. Into the bedroom corridor. Where he stood it upright and walked it forward and dropped it back down, sideways, jammed between the hatch cover and the opposite wall.

One hole sealed.

Then they stood together on the front porch and figured out where the second hole would be more or less by dead reckoning, and a lot of pointing and gesturing and visual explanation. The house was rectangular, like most houses, which meant the shelter would be too, running in the same direction. Had to be, surely. An architectural no brainer. And human nature said if the main door was at one end, the escape hatch would be at the other end. So the tunnel would follow the spine of the house, perpendicular to the gable wall, running outward under the compound, toward the generator shed, or possibly the smaller building next to it.

The generator shed would make more sense. A poured concrete base, properly engineered, easy to integrate with the mouth of the tunnel. Aboveground was a working environment, often checked. Clean, efficient, and safe. No junk piling up. The perfect escape hatch. For all the right reasons.

But for all the wrong reasons they would choose the smaller building. It wasn’t just nature they hoped to outrun. People too, in a worst-case scenario. There would be no point climbing out in a logical place.

The smaller building had double doors, like an old-style garage. The lock was rusted in the open position, which Reacher felt boosted the building’s case. No lock at all would be safest. Keys could go missing. No point escaping by the skin of your teeth, and then spending the night locked in a barn.

They pulled the doors wide and saw a tangle of junk. Scrap metal, mostly, and some old cans of paint. There was a paint-spattered drop cloth dumped on the floor. Not a working environment. Not often checked. Not clean, efficient, or safe. Not a likely location.

Except.

The tangle of junk was somewhat artful. There was a void where logic and gravity would not have put one. And there were other voids, somehow linked up, as if a person could hustle through one after another, and get all the way outside, double quick.

The main void was right above a slight hump in the paint-spattered cloth.

Reacher pulled the cloth aside and they saw the same kind of hatch they had found in the house. Not angled this time, but set down flat in the floor, and cemented all around.

It was closed.

“Outstanding,” Reacher said.

Chang went to find a truck with the keys in, and Reacher and Westwood got busy shoving metal aside, so she could get it in when she found one. She came back with the same crew-cab they had seen racing out from behind the diner. She drove it in and sawed it back and forth until she had the left front wheel centered on the hatch.

Second hole sealed.

Chang got out of the truck and looked at the metal and said, “What the hell is this stuff?”

Which was a good question.

The metal was all mild steel, some of it square-section tube, some of it solid rod, some of it one-eighth sheet bashed into strange curled shapes. All of it was rusty, and most of it was smeared black in places with some kind of paint or stain. Most of the tube and all of the rod was welded up in what looked like bolt-together sections of fence. Some of them were about four feet by two, and some of them were about four by four, and some of them were about six by three. All of them were dumped and tangled in a ragged pile.

And none of them made sense. The fence they had busted with the backhoe was post-and-rail, made of wood, with barbed wire stapled on. There was no metal fence on the property. None in the whole county, as far as Reacher had seen. Maybe the state. And the sections didn’t match. They were not a uniform size. There was no coherent way to bolt them together. No point in having a fence where one short section was three feet tall, and the next six, and the next four. Plus some of the bolt holes ran the wrong way. Some were aligned vertically, and some horizontally.

Some sections had hinges.

Not a fence.

Chang said, “Oh my god. They’re cages.”

The one-eighth sheet had been cut into strips, and then rolled and beaten and welded into shapes. Rusty and smeared black, like all the rest. There were hinged hoops about three inches around, with U-shaped eyes brazed on.

Manacles.

There were hinged hoops about six inches around, with long spikes brazed on.

Slave collars.

There were crude iron masks, and pincers, and nails.

“The black stains,” Chang said. “I think they’re blood.”

They backed out the double doors and stood in the sun. It felt cold. They turned and looked back at the house. And the suicide suite next to it.

Reacher said, “The next part is strictly voluntary.”

He started walking. Chang went with him. Westwood paused a beat, and then hustled to catch up.

The suicide suite was an outbuilding about half the size of the house. It had a concrete foundation, about knee high, stained orange by rain splashing mud out of puddles. Then came siding made of heavy tarred boards. The roof was shingle. Conventional construction, square and solid, built to last. A power line as thick as Reacher’s finger looped in under the eaves.

No windows.

The door was locked.

Reacher said, “Ready?”

“Not really,” Chang said, in a voice that sounded small and full of defeat. He remembered her leaning close, in the Cadillac driver’s store, looking at the phone book. Looking at M for Maloney. He remembered piles of packages. Two had come direct from foreign manufacturers. German medical equipment made from sterile stainless steel, and a high-definition video camera from Japan. He remembered the guy from Palo Alto, puzzling over the stray chat-room message from the guy named Blood. I hear Mother’s Rest has good stuff . On a board the guy from Palo Alto didn’t recognize. Some other community. An enthusiast site, by the feel of it. Deep down in the Deep Web.

Reacher stepped back and strode forward and punched his heel through the lock. The door smashed inward and bounced back off the wall. He stopped it short with spread fingers and stepped inside.

A vestibule. A smell. Worse than the hogs. Ahead was a small kitchen, with mugs and bottles of water. And wires and cables and plugs and connectors, all piled and tangled, used and forgotten. A working place. To the left was a small lobby with a door on the right and a door at the end. The door on the right was a bathroom. Neither clean nor dirty. An efficient space. Communal. On the wall beyond were coat hooks. A line of four. Loaded, but not with coats.