Seize the Night

day and night, every boardhead’s dream.”

“Don’t like this onshore flow,” I said, raising a hand in the breeze.

“I’m talking the day after tomorrow. Strictly offshore by then. Gonna be waves so scooped out, you’ll feel like the last pickle in the barrel.”

The hollow channel in a breaking wave, scooped to the max by a perfect offshore wind, is called a barrel, and surfers live to ride these tubes all the way through and out the collapsing end before being clamshelled. You don’t get them every day. They are a gift, sacred, and when they come, you ride them until you’re surfed out, until your legs are rubber and you can’t stop the muscles in your stomach from fluttering, and then you flop on the sand and wait to see if you’ll expire like a beached fish or, instead, go scarf down two burritos and a bowl of corn chips.

“Twelve-footers,” I said wistfully as I opened the man-size entrance in the forty-foot-high door. “Double overhead corduroy.”

“Churning out of a storm north of the Marquesas Islands.”

“Something to live for,” I said as I crossed the threshold into the hangar.

“That’s why I mention it, bro. Boardhead motivation to get out of here alive.”

Even two flashlights could not illuminate this cavernous space on the main floor of the hangar, but we could see the overhead tracks on which a mobile crane — long since dismantled and hauled away — had traveled from one end of the building to the other. The massiveness of the steel supports under these rails indicated that the crane had lifted objects of tremendous weight.

We stepped over inch-thick steel angle plates, still anchored to the oil-and chemical-stained concrete, upon which heavy machinery had once been mounted. Deep and curiously shaped wells in the floor, which must have housed hydraulic mechanisms, forced us to follow an indirect path to the far end of the hangar.

Bobby cautiously checked out each hole as though he expected something to be crouching in it, waiting to spring up and bite off our heads.

As our flashlight beams swept over the crane tracks and their supporting structures, complex shadows and flares of light were flung off steel rails and beams, thrown to the walls and to the high curved ceiling, where they formed faint, constantly changing hieroglyphics that flickered ahead of us but quickly vanished, unreadable, into the darkness that crept at our heels.

“Sharky,” Bobby said softly.

“Just wait.” Like him, I spoke only slightly above a whisper, not so much for fear of being overheard as because this place has the same subduing effect as do churches, hospitals, and funeral parlors.

“You been here alone?”

“No. Always with Orson.”

“I’d expect him to have more sense.”

I led him to an empty elevator shaft and a wide set of stairs in the southwest corner of the hangar.

As in the warehouse where I’d encountered the veve rats and the thug with the two-by-four, access to the floors below had surely been concealed. The vast majority of the personnel who had worked in the hangar — good men and women who had served their country well and with pride — must have been oblivious of the infernal regions under their feet.

The false walls or the devices that had concealed entrance to the lower floors had been stripped away during deconstruction. Although the stairhead door was removed, a steel jamb was left untouched at the upper landing.

Past the threshold, our flashlights revealed dead pill bugs on the concrete steps, some crushed and some as whole and round as buckshot.

There were also the impressions of shoes and paws in the dust. These overlaid tracks were both ascending and descending.

“Me and Orson,” I said, identifying the prints. “From previous visits.”

“What’s below?”

“Three subterranean levels, each bigger than the hangar itself.”

“Massive.”

“Mucho.”

“What did they do down there?”

“Bad stuff.”

“Don’t get so technical on me.”

The maze of corridors and rooms under the hangar has been stripped to the bare concrete. Even the air- filtration, plumbing, and electrical systems have been torn out: every length of duct, every pipe, every wire and switch. Many structures in Wyvern remain untouched by salvagers. Usually, wherever salvage was pursued, the operation was conducted with an eye for the most valuable items that could be removed with the least effort. The hallways and rooms under this hangar, however, were scraped out so thoroughly that you might suspect this was a crime scene from which the guilty made a Herculean effort to eradicate every possible clue.

As we descended the stairs side by side, a flat metallic echo of my voice bounced immediately back to me at some points, while at other places the walls absorbed my words as effectively as the acoustical material that lines the broadcasting booth from which Sasha spins night music at KBAY.

I said, “They scoured away virtually every trace of what they were doing here — every trace but one — and I don’t think they were just concerned about protecting national security. I think…it’s just a feeling, but judging by the way they totally gutted these three floors, I sense they were afraid of what happened here…but not just afraid. Ashamed of it, too.”

“Were these some of the genetic labs?”

“Can’t have been. That requires absolute biological isolation.”

“So?”

“There would be decontamination chambers everywhere — between suites of labs, at every elevator entrance, at every exit from the stairwell. Those spaces would still be identifiable for what they were, even after everything was torn out of them.”

“You have a knack for this detective crap,” Bobby said as we reached the bottom of the second flight of steps and kept going.

“Awesomely smooth deductive reasoning,” I admitted.

“Maybe I could be your Watson.”

“Nancy Drew didn’t work with Watson. That was Holmes.”

“Who was Nancy’s right-hand dude?” Bobby wondered.

“Don’t think she had one. Nancy was a lone wolfette.”

“One tough bitch, huh?”

“That’s me,” I said. “There’s only one room down here that might have been a decon chamber…and it’s full- on weird. You’ll see.”

We didn’t speak further as we proceeded to the deepest of the three subterranean levels. The only sounds were the soft scrape of our rubber shoe soles on the concrete and the crunch of dead pill bugs.

In spite of the pistol-grip shotgun he carried, Bobby’s relaxed demeanor and the easy grace with which he descended the stairs would have convinced anyone else that he was carefree. To some degree, he was enjoying himself. Bobby pretty much always enjoys himself, in all but the most extreme situations. But I’d known him so long that I — and perhaps only I — could tell that he was not, at this moment, free of care. If he was humming a song in his mind, it was moodier than a Jimmy Buffett tune.

Until a month ago, I hadn’t been aware that Bobby Halloway — Huck Finn without the angst — could be either rattled or spooked. Recent events had revealed that even this natural-born Zen master’s heart rate could occasionally exceed fifty-eight beats per minute.

I wasn’t surprised by his edginess, because the stairwell was sufficiently cheerless and oppressive to give the heebie-jeebies to a Prozac-popping nun with an attitude as sweet as marzipan. Concrete ceiling, concrete walls, concrete steps. An iron pipe, painted black and fixed to one wall, served as a handrail. The dense air itself seemed to be turning to concrete, for it was cold, thick, and dry with the scent of lime that leached from the walls. Every surface absorbed more light than it reflected, and so in spite of our two flashlights, we wound downward in gloom, like medieval monks on our way to say prayers for the souls of dead brethren in the catacombs under a