Seize the Night

shotgun, while Doogie and Sasha followed in the Hummer.

Taking a different route from the one I’d chosen the previous night, we proceeded along a blacktop road, across an athletic field gone to weeds, across a dusty parade ground, between ranks of badly weathered barracks, through a residential neighborhood of Dead Town that I had never explored, where the cottages and bungalows were identical to those on other streets, and overland again, to another service area. After more than half an hour at a brisk pace, we arrived at the last place I wanted to go: the huge, seven-story, Quonset-roofed hangar, as large as a football field, that stands like an alien temple above the egg room.

As it became clear where we were headed, I decided it wouldn’t be wise to drive up to the entrance, because the Hummer’s engine was noticeably less quiet than the mechanism of a Swiss watch. I waved Doogie toward a passageway between two of the many smaller service buildings that surrounded the giant structure, about a hundred yards from our ultimate destination.

When Doogie killed the engine and the parking lights, the Hummer all but vanished in this nook.

As we gathered behind the vehicle to study the enormous hangar from a distance, the dead night began to breathe. A few miles to the west, the Pacific had exhaled a cool breeze, which now caused a loose sheet-metal panel to vibrate in a nearby roof.

I recalled Roosevelt’s words, relayed from Mungojerrie, outside the Stanwyk house: Death lives here. I was getting identical but much stronger vibes from the hangar. If Death lived at the Stanwyk place, that was only his pied-a-terre. Here was his primary residence.

“This can’t be right,” I said hopefully.

“They’re in that place,” Roosevelt insisted.

“But we were here last night,” Bobby protested. “They weren’t in the damn place last night.”

Roosevelt scooped up the cat, stroked the furry head, chucked the mungo man under the chin, murmured to him, and said, “They were here then, the cat says, and they’re here now.”

Bobby scowled. “This reeks.”

“Like a Calcutta sewer,” I agreed.

“No, trust me,” Doogie said. “A Calcutta sewer is in a class all by itself.”

I decided not to pursue the obvious question.

Instead, I said, “If these kids were snatched just to be studied and tested, snatched because their blood samples indicate they’re somehow immune to the retrovirus, then they must have been taken to the genetics lab. Wherever that may be, it isn’t here.”

Roosevelt said, “According to Mungojerrie, the lab he came from is far to the east, in what appears to be open land, where they once had an artillery range. It’s very deep underground, hidden out there. But Jimmy, at least, is here. And Orson.”

After a hesitation, I said, “Alive?”

Roosevelt said, “Mungojerrie doesn’t know.”

“Cats know things,” Sasha reminded him.

“Not this thing,” Roosevelt said.

As we stared at the hangar, I’m sure each of us was remembering Delacroix’s audiotape testimony about the Mystery Train. Red sky. Black trees. A fluttering within…

Doogie removed the backpack from the Hummer, slipped it over his shoulders, closed the tailgate, and said, “Let’s go.”

During the brief time that the cargo-hold light was on, I saw the weapon he was carrying. It was a wicked- looking piece.

Aware of my interest, he said, “Uzi machine pistol. Extended magazine.”

“Is that legal?”

“It would be if it wasn’t converted to full automatic fire.”

Doogie headed toward the hangar. With the breeze stirring his blond mane and wavy beard, he looked like a Viking warrior leaving a conquered village, heading toward a longboat with a bag of plundered valuables on his back. All he needed to complete the image was a horned helmet.

Into my mind’s eye came an image of Doogie in a tuxedo and such a helmet, leading a supermodel through a perfect tango in a dance competition.

There are two faces to the coin of my rich imagination.

The man-size door, inset in one of the forty-foot-high steel hangar doors, was closed. I couldn’t remember whether Bobby and I had shut it on our way out the night before. Probably not. We hadn’t been in a clean-up-after- yourself, turn-out-the-lights-and-close-the-door mood when we’d fled this place.

At the door, Doogie extracted two flashlights from jumpsuit pockets and gave them to Sasha and Roosevelt, so that Bobby and I would have both hands free for the shotguns.

Doogie tried the door. It opened inward.

Sasha’s crossing-the-threshold technique was even smoother than her on-air patter at KBAY. She moved to the left of the door before she switched on the light and swept the beam across the cavernous hangar, which was too large to be entirely within the reach of any flashlight. But she didn’t shoot at anyone, and no one shot at her, so it seemed likely that our presence was not yet known.

Bobby followed her, shotgun at the ready. With the cat in his arms, Roosevelt entered after Bobby. I followed, and Doogie brought up the rear, quietly closing the door behind us, as we had found it.

I looked expectantly at Roosevelt.

He stroked the cat and whispered, “We’ve got to go down.”

Because I knew the way, I led the group. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning. Watch out for the pirates and the crocodile with the ticking clock inside.

We crossed the vast room under the tracks that once supported a mobile crane, past the massive steel supports that held up these rails, moving cautiously around the deep wells in the floor, where hydraulic mechanisms had once been housed.

As we progressed, swords of shadow and sabers of light leaped off the elevated steel crane rails and silently fenced with one another across the walls and the curved ceiling. Most of the high clerestory windows were broken out, but reflections flared in the remaining few, like white sparks from clashing blades.

Suddenly I was halted by a sense of wrongness I can’t adequately describe: a change in the air too subtle to define; a mild tingle on my face; a quivering of the hairs in my ear canals, as if they were vibrating to a sound beyond my range of hearing.

Sasha and Roosevelt must have felt it, too, because they turned in circles, searching with their flashlights.

Doogie held the Uzi pistol in both hands.

Bobby was near one of the cylindrical steel posts that supported the crane tracks. He reached out, touched it, and whispered, “Bro.”

As I moved to his side, I heard a ringing so faint that I could not hold fast to the sound, which repeatedly came and went. When I put my fingertips against the post, I detected vibrations passing through the steel.

Abruptly, the air temperature changed. The hangar had been unpleasantly cool, almost cold; but from one instant to the next, it became fifteen or twenty degrees warmer. This would have been impossible even if the building had still contained a heating plant, which it did not.

Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt joined Bobby and me, instinctively forming a circle to guard against a threat from any direction.

The vibrations in the post grew stronger.

I looked toward the east end of the hangar. The door by which we had entered was about twenty yards away. The flashlights were able to reach that far, though they couldn’t chase away all the shadows. In that direction, I could see to the end of the shorter length of the overhead crane tracks, and all seemed as it had been when we’d first come into the building.

The flashlights were not able to probe to the west end of the structure, however; it lay at least eighty and perhaps as much as a hundred yards away. As far as I could see, there was nothing out of the ordinary.

What bothered me was the unyielding blackness in the last twenty or thirty yards. Not seamless blackness. Many shades of black and deepest grays, a montage of shadows.