“Sure,” Coach Driscoll said. She grabbed a towel and got it wet.
“My knee,” the boy said.
“Which one?”
“Left. From before.”
“Before?”
He gave a little shrug. “Not my first crash today. Dislocated it.”
While Coach Delger used a pair of scissors from the first-aid kit to cut away his pants leg, the boy looked at Martina.
“What are you guys doing here?” he asked.
“We were at a softball tournament. Got stuck outside the quarantine zone on our way home.”
“Did you win?”
She figured he was just trying to distract himself from his pain. “Second place out of sixteen teams. Not too bad.”
“Go Burros,” he said.
She smiled for a second, then looked down. She wasn’t wearing one of her school shirts. Maybe someone outside was. That must have been it.
“Yeah, go Burros.”
“Who did most of the pitching? You or Sandra?”
Martina wasn’t the only one who was suddenly staring at the rider. Both coaches had stopped what they were doing and were looking at him, too.
“Do I know you?” Martina asked.
“Do I look that bad?”
She squinted her eyes, studying him. “You look familiar, but…”
“Spanish class,” he said.
“Paul?”
“Hey, Martina.”
“I’m sorry, who are you?” Coach Driscoll asked.
“This is Paul Unger,” Martina said, surprised. “He goes to Burroughs, too.”
“What were you doing out there on a motorcycle?” Coach Driscoll asked.
Paul got a faraway look in his eyes, and the small smile that had been on his lips disappeared. “Trying not to die.”
They got the whole story out of him.
As soon as Coach Delger realized he’d come from the quarantine zone, she immediately segregated everyone into two groups: those who had come in contact with Paul, and those who hadn’t.
The hardest part of the story to believe was the deaths of Nick and Lisa. That was until he showed them the video.
It was Martina’s idea, however, to post it on the Internet.
33
Chloe guided Ash through the woods, circling around to the top of the rise behind the building, just beyond the line of motion sensors. After crossing a small clearing, she walked on for another dozen feet, then stopped underthe cover of the trees.
Without a word, she got on her knees and started digging. At first Ash couldn’t figure out what she could possibly be doing, but after she removed a thick layer of needles and branches, she exposed a manhole cover.
“Where does it go?” he asked.
“I have no idea. Just thought I’d randomly show it to you.” She stared at him for a second as if he were an idiot. “Where do you think it goes?”
She was right. It was a dumb question.
“How do we get it open?”
“That’s a better question than the last one, at least,” she said.
She got off her knees and walked over to a tree a dozen feet away. Jumping up, she grabbed one of the low branches and pulled herself onto it. She reached to the branch above her and moved her hands around for a moment. When she dropped back to the ground, she was holding a long metal rod that had an L hook at the bottom.
With a smirk, she stuck the hooked end through a hole in the cover and yanked the disk off, surprising Ash with her strength.
He took a step closer and looked down through the opening. The filtered afternoon light was only able to penetrate a few feet into the dark hole, illuminating just the concrete sides of the tube and the first rung of a built- in iron ladder.
He thought for a moment. Perhaps it was now time to part ways with his guide. “Is it just down and follow a tunnel?”
She scoffed. “No, it’s
“Okay,” he said, revising his plan. “I was just asking.”
Chloe went first, pulling a flashlight out of her pocket he hadn’t known she’d brought along, and he followed. At the bottom was a large, damp tunnel running perpendicular to the entrance tube.
“This leads back to the main building?” he asked.
Chloe grimaced, annoyed. “Do you not listen to me? I already told you it doesn’t.” She huffed out a breath, then said, “Come on.”
She headed to the left, the glow of her flashlight leading the way, then stopped after forty feet and said, “Here.”
She turned her flashlight toward the wall and revealed a big V-shaped break. Ash examined it for a moment. There was an opening through the dirt on the other side of the concrete, not really a tunnel, more of a rift through the earth. Just at the furthest reach of the light he thought he caught a glimpse of more cement.
“This happened during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989,” she said. “You know, the one that took down that freeway in San Francisco?”
He vaguely remembered that from when he’d been a kid. “What’s on the other side?”
Instead of answering, she climbed into the rift and started working her way through the cramped space. Ash knew it was going to be even tighter for him, so instead of crawling as she had, he got on his stomach and pulled himself forward.
The distant cement turned out to be a wall, the break in it not a giant V, but a lopsided oval. As he slipped through the opening and got to his feet, he found himself in a wide space that fell quickly off into darkness beyond the spill of the flashlight.
“Welcome to the Palmer Psychiatric Hospital’s special patient facility. Or what’s left of it,” Chloe said.
She moved the flashlight through the room. There were piles of wood and old office furniture and what appeared to be mattresses. Trash was strewn throughout.
“When they tore down the building, they left the basement,” Chloe explained. “They threw some dirt over the top and let the earth reclaim it. Above us is that clearing we walked through.”
“Why leave the basement?” he asked.
“You ask me like I was there. I wasn’t. I do know, though, that they tore the building down not long after the earthquake.” She paused. “You want my guess?”
He shrugged. “Okay.”
“The hospital was still open then. The people who were running it would have known about the tunnel, and probably thought they could still use this place. It’s nice and hidden from the view of anyone. I wouldn’t have put it past them.”
