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 Hallowayhuck 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 heebiejeebies 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 monastery.
The atmosphere would have been improved even by a single sign featuring
a skull and crossbones above huge red letters warning of deadly levels
of radioactivity. Or at least some gaily arranged rat bones.
The final basement in this facility where no dust has yet settled and no
pill bugs have ventured has a peculiar floor plan, beginning with a wide
corridor, in the form of an elongated oval, that extends around the
entire perimeter, rather like a racetrack. A series of rooms, of
different widths but identical depths, open off one side of this
corridor occupying the infield of the track and through some of them you
can reach a second oval corridor, which is concentric with the first,
not as wide or as long as the first, it is nonetheless enormous. This
smaller racetrack rings a single central chamber, the egg room.
you can enter the innermost sanctum. This transitional space is a
ten-foot-square chamber accessed through a circular portal five feet in
diameter. Inside this cubicle, to the left, another circular portal of
the same size leads into the egg room. I believe these two openings were
once fitted with formidable steel hatches, like those in the bulkheads
between watertight compartments in a submarine or like bank-vault doors,
and that this connecting module was, in fact, an airlock.
Although I am certain that these were not biological-research labs, one
of the functions of the airlock might have been to prevent bacteria,