Paul McEuen - Spiral

Jake had taken a careful inventory of Orchid’s tools. He had been watching her closely, both in the van and now, catching looks when he could. She had on a small black backpack and carried a Glock in her hand. She’d put on thick, wraparound goggles that Jake was pretty sure were equipped with night vision. And she had her gloves. She could shock him with a few taps of her fingers. She could similarly control their cuffs. Jake was pretty sure that two taps of her index finger, one with her ring finger, followed by three with her thumb caused the cuffs to tighten. The opposite sequence caused them to loosen.

If Jake could get to her, knock her out or kill her, he thought he could release the cuffs. But he had to get past that gun. And he had to do it without getting Dylan killed.

Every few hundred feet was another concrete bunker, all long out of use. They’d passed twelve of them so far. He was alert to everything, every sight and every sound. In the distance he heard squawking. Liam had told him there was a pond on the other side of that tree ridge, a stopover for the geese.

A WHITE DEER CROSSED THE ROAD UP AHEAD, A GHOSTLY apparition seeming to float in the darkness, its body as luminous as the moon. When the fences went up around the periphery in 1941, a decent-sized population of deer were trapped inside, and a few rare white deer were among them. Over the years, the depot guards hunted the brown deer, but they left the white ones to graze among the bunkers. Seneca Army Depot now had the largest white deer population in the world. The simplest rule of evolution, of ecology, of ethics. You reap what you sow.

Liam had brought Jake here ostensibly to show him the white deer. Liam put out salt licks, then collected the DNA that scraped off the deers’ tongues when they licked them. It had always seemed a bit odd to Jake: Liam wasn’t a population biologist. The deer were visually striking but nothing special genetically, simply rich in the genes for white fur.

Now Jake understood: the deer were not what had attracted Liam to Seneca Army Depot. The real reason was its isolation and the bunkers. Miles of nothing. Liam had told him that a single guard was responsible for patrolling the whole damn thing.

If Liam wanted to hide a dangerous pathogen, this would be a great place to do it.

“Stop,” Orchid called from behind. She ordered him to veer right. The visibility was better now, the moonlight bathing the white concrete bunkers in an eerie glow.

Jake glanced over his shoulder, saw Orchid herding Dylan before her, the boy scared half to death. She checked a handheld GPS, triangulating in space and time by four satellites flying over twelve thousand miles overhead. Liam must have left a latitude and longitude reading that told where to find the Uzumaki. Orchid’s footsteps slowed regularly each time she checked the GPS. She was checking it all the time.

“Take a forty-five-degree right turn.”

Jake turned. There was nothing. Only empty grass, waist-high. A few chunks of concrete sticking up through the weeds.

“In there?”

“Twenty meters,” she said.

He counted them off, twenty strides, pushing through the tangle of brush and weeds. He stopped when the count was done.

At first he saw nothing but grass and brush, but then he spied a dinner plate–sized chunk of concrete. In the moonlight, he could just make out a rough design etched in the concrete, three lines spinning outward from the center. A spiral.

“That’s it,” Orchid said, glancing down at the page with Liam’s message. “Move it aside and dig.”

Jake held up his hands, still shackled together.

With the gun, she gestured to Dylan beside her, his hands cuffed before him. “Get cute and I shoot the boy.” She tapped her fingers on her leg and the cuff on Jake’s right wrist popped open.

Jake was careful to note the sequence of taps she used.

Jake took the spade and went to work.

After ten minutes, at a depth of maybe three feet, his spade struck concrete. He brushed away the dirt.

“Dig it out,” Orchid said.

Five minutes later, he had it free of the earth. It was a cylindrical plug of concrete, maybe a foot in diameter and two feet long. It weighed about fifty pounds. A piece of rebar stuck out of the top, like a handle.

Orchid said, “I was sure it was in one of the bunkers. I checked nearly every damned one.”

Jake understood. The bunkers drew your attention, but they were decoys. Liam had hidden the Uzumaki in a nondescript patch of weeds. Orchid couldn’t have found this spot in a hundred years. This is what Liam had been hiding, and what he had died trying to protect.

“Give it to me,” she said.

THE ENTRANCE TO THE BUNKER WAS SEALED BY A MASSIVE iron door, ten feet tall and thick as a safe’s door. A larger metal bar sealed it closed, locked by a simple combination padlock. Orchid read him the combination from the sheet of yellow paper. Jake opened the lock and lifted the handle. To his surprise, the door swung open easily, the hinges barely squeaking. The interior of the bunker was dark, but Jake detected a kind of odd glow inside, brightening and fading with the rhythm of a heartbeat.

“Inside,” Orchid ordered.

As Jake entered, the source of the glow became clear. Bioluminescent patches of red, green, and yellow all along the walls, pulsing slowly on and off. The glowing fungi that Liam had left in the letterbox—there were rows and rows of it here.

“Go to the back,” Orchid said.

Orchid flipped a switch, and an overhead light turned on.

The bunker was a half-cylinder, twenty feet high in the center and maybe a hundred feet long, like a submarine cut in half. The floor was swept bare concrete. But it wasn’t empty, like the one that Jake had visited when he came here with Liam. Rows of lab benches lined the walls, some covered with beakers, pipettes, and a few larger pieces of equipment, others with trays of glowing fungi, pulsing red, yellow, and green. It was a smaller, stripped-down version of Liam’s lab back at Cornell. He must have brought it in bit by bit over months. Maybe years. Assembling it on his trips to supposedly observe the white deer.

Orchid directed Jake to set the concrete plug down. Orchid held Dylan close, the gun to his head.

Dylan was wide-eyed, staring at a strange chair in the center of the space. It was made of black reinforced carbon struts, almost like a high-tech electric chair. There were straps on the arms and legs, and there was a terrifying head assembly of bolts and clamps.

Next to the setup was a small metal table. On it, Jake saw a MicroCrawler.

It took him a moment to realize.

This is where she had tortured Liam.

Dylan was transfixed by the chair. He looked scared to death. He seemed to grasp what it was for. He was shaking, in full-blown panic.

He broke for the door.

Orchid caught him with one arm and tossed him back, smashing him into one of the cases holding the glowing fungi. The boy fell to the ground, pulling trays of fungi down on top of him.

Jake took a step toward her. “If you hurt him, I’ll—”

Orchid tapped on her leg and a lightning bolt ran up Jake’s spine. He fell to the ground, quivering, seeing white.

Finally it stopped. After a few seconds he managed to sit up.

Dylan had backed against a wall, patches of glowing fungus clinging to him. His face was empty, hollow, as if the boy Jake knew and loved had disappeared.

“Stay still,” she said to Dylan, “or I’ll shoot you.”

Orchid pointed to the chunk of concrete. “Break it open,” she said to Jake.

Jake slowly stood. He lifted the plug of concrete and threw it down hard on the concrete floor. A corner broke off, but nothing more. The second time was no better. The third time it hit at an angle and split open cleanly, revealing a hollow, spherical cavity inside. Inside the cavity was a large child’s red balloon.