'Yes.'
Schofield finished loading his guns. 'Any final tips, then?' he asked Kevin.
The little boy said, 'I only saw her once, when you were both standing outside my cube. I only sensed one thing about her: she really likes you. So you'd better save her.'
Schofield gave him a wry smile. 'Thanks.'
And then he was away.
He tried the top door entrance first.
No luck.
Caesar had changed the code, manually it seemed. No time for Fairfax to crack that one.
That left only one other option: the Emergency Exit Vent.
Schofield ran for Caesar's abandoned Penetrator helicopter.
It was 10:48 a.m.
Two minutes later, Caesar's Penetrator — now flown by Schofield — landed next to the EEV in a swirling cloud of dust and sand.
The EEV hadn't been hard to find. Mr. Hoeg's lime green biplane — still sitting there on the desert floor — betrayed the exit's location quite unambiguously.
No sooner had the black helicopter touched the ground than Schofield was out of it and running toward the EEV.
He leapt down into the earthen trench and disappeared inside the exit's open steel doorway at a run.
It was 10:51 when Schofield stepped out onto the darkened X-Rail tracks on Level 6, his gun raised.
The world down here was pitch-black, save for the thin beam of his P-90's barrel-mounted flashlight.
He saw bodies laid out before him, shadows in the dim light — the remnants of the previous battles that day.
Air Force vs. Secret Service.
South Africans vs. Air Force.
Schofield and his Marines vs. Air Force.
Christ…
But another thing weighed on his mind. Kevin, of course, had been right. Apart from saving Caesar Russell, Schofield had a far more personal reason for entering Area 7 again.
He wanted to find Libby Gant.
He didn't know what had happened to her after the Sinovirus grenade had gone off up in the main hangar, but he refused to believe that she was dead.
Schofield brought his wrist mike to his lips. 'Fox. Fox. Are you out there? This is Scarecrow. I'm back inside. Can you hear me?'
In a dark place somewhere inside Area 7, Libby Gant stirred, a voice invading her dreams.
'…you hear me?'
She'd been unconscious for nearly an hour now, and she didn't have a clue where she was or what had happened to her.
Her last memory was of being inside the control room upstairs and seeing something important and then suddenly… nothing.
As she blinked awake, she saw that she was still wearing her bright-yellow biohazard suit, except for the helmet. It had been removed.
It was only then that she became aware of a pain in her shoulders. Gant opened her eyes fully — and an ice- cold chill rippled down her spine.
Her entire upper body was bound to a pair of steel girders that had been arranged in the shape of an X. Her wrists were held high above her head — crucifix-style — affixed to the arms of the cross with duct tape, while more thick tape held her throat tightly up against the junction of the X. Her legs — duct-taped at the ankles — were laid out flat in front of her.
Gant began to breathe very very fast.
What the hell was this?
She was someone's prisoner.
As she hung helplessly from the cross, eyes wide and terrified, she slowly began to regain her senses. She took in the area around her.
The first thing she noticed about this place was that there was no electric lighting. Three small fires illuminated the immediate area.
It was in this grim firelight that she saw Hagerty.
Colonel Hot Rod Hagerty sat immediately to her right, similarly 'crucified' — his legs stretched out on the floor in front of him, his arms outstretched on his own cross. His eyes were shut, his head bent. Every few seconds he groaned.
Gant looked at the room around them.
She was sitting underneath an overhang of some sort, in dark shadow; a stagelike structure stood out in the open space in front of her. Some children's toys lay scattered about the stage, amid shards of glass.
It looked as if — once — a glass cube of some sort had encased the stage, but now only half of that cube remained standing.
Gant realized where she was.
She was in the area that had contained Kevin's sterilized living area. Right now, she must be sitting directly underneath the observation lab that had overlooked the cube, beneath the overhang it created.
And then Gant saw the third crucified figure in the room, and she gasped in revulsion.
It was the Air Force colonel, Jerome Harper.
Or what was left of him.
He lay to Gant's left, also under the overhang, his arms taped to a cross high above his head, his head leaning as far forward as the duct tape around his throat would allow.
But it was his lower body that seized Gant's shocked attention.
Harper's legs were missing.
No, not just missing.
Hacked off.
Everything from the Air Force colonel's waist down had been brutally carved away — like a carcass in an abattoir — leaving a gigantic slab of raw hacked flesh around his hips. Indeed, Harper's whole waist region was just a foul bloody mess that ended at the curved bony hook of his spinal column.
It was the most disgusting thing Gant had ever seen in her life.
Her eyes swept the room, as the full extent of her predicament became clear.
She was the prisoner of a monster. An individual who, until today, had been a guest here at Area 7.
Lucifer Leary.
The Surgeon of Phoenix.
The serial killer who had terrorized hitchhikers on the Vegas-to-Phoenix interstate — the former medical student who would kidnap his victims, take them home, and then eat their limbs in front of them.
Gant looked about herself in horror.
Leary — a big man, she recalled, at least six-eight, with a hideous facial tattoo — was nowhere to be seen.
Except for Hagerty and herself, the whole observation area was completely and utterly empty.
Which, in a strange way, was even more frightening.
Schofield made for the stairwell at the eastern end of Level 6.
He had to get to the control room overlooking the main hangar — to enter the termination codes before 11:05; or if he couldn't do that, to capture Caesar and get him out of Area 7 before the nuke went off at 11:15.
He threw open the stairwell doorway — and was instantly confronted by an enormous black bear, caught in the beam of his small flashlight, rearing up on its hind legs, baring its massive claws and bellowing loudly at him!
Schofield dived off the edge of the X-rail platform as the family of bears ambled out of the stairwell — papa bear, mama bear and three little baby bears, all in a row.
