FOURTEEN

It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.

“What did you say?” Richards said, and then he heard-both of them heard-the sound of the alarm. The one that was never, ever supposed to ring, a great, atonal buzzing that ricocheted across the open compound so that it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

Security breach. Subject Containment, Level 4.

Richards turned quickly to look toward the Chalet. A quick decision: he swung around to point his gun at the spot where Doyle had stood.

Doyle was gone.

Goddamn, he thought, and then he said it: “Goddamn!” Now there were two of them on the loose. He quickly scanned the parking lot, hoping for a shot. Lights came on everywhere, bathing the compound in a harsh, artificial daylight; he heard shouts from the barracks, soldiers running.

No time to deal with Doyle now.

He raced up the steps of the Chalet, past the sentry who was yelling at him, something about the elevator, and took the stairs to L2, his feet barely touching the steps. The door to his office was open. He quickly scanned the monitors.

Zero’s chamber was empty.

Babcock’s chamber was empty.

All of the chambers were empty.

He hit the audio feed. “Sentries, Level Four, this is Richards. Report.”

Nothing, not a word in reply.

“Main Lab, report. Somebody tell me what the fuck is going on down there.”

A terrified voice came through: Fortes? “They let them out!”

“Who? Who let them out?”

A blast of static, and Richards heard the first screams coming over the audio, and gunshots, and more screams-the screams men made when they died.

“Holy fuck!” Another blast of static. “They’re all loose down here! The fucking sweeps let them all go!”

Quickly Richards called up the monitor for the sentry post on L3. A broad mural of blood was on the wall; the sentry, Davis, was slumped on the floor below it, his face pressed to the tiles, as if he were probing the ground for a lost contact. A second soldier stepped into view and Richards saw that it was Paulson, holding a.45. Behind him, the doors to the elevator stood open. Paulson looked straight into the camera as he holstered the gun and removed the grenade from his pocket, then two more. He pulled the pins, using his teeth, and rolled them into the elevator. Then he took one more look at Richards, who saw his empty eyes, drew the.45, raised it to the side of his head, and pulled the trigger.

Richards reached for the switch to seal the level, but it was too late. He heard the explosion, ripping through the elevator shaft, and then a second blast of sound as what was left of the car went sailing to the bottom, and all the lights went out.

At first Wolgast didn’t know what he was hearing; the sound of the alarm was so sudden, so completely alien, that for a moment it obliterated all thought. He rose from his chair beside Amy’s bed and tried the door, but of course it wouldn’t open; they were sealed inside. The alarm rang and rang. A fire? No, he reasoned, over the din in his ears, it was something else, something worse. He looked up at the camera where it hung in the corner.

“Fortes! Sykes, goddamnit! Open this door!”

He heard the pop of automatic-weapon fire, muffled by its passage through the thick walls. For an instant he thought hopefully of rescue. But of course that was out of the question; who would rescue them?

And then, before he could generate another thought, there was a great concussive bang, and a terrible roar that ended in a second bang, louder than the first, bringing with it a deep, sonorous trembling, like an earthquake, and the room plunged into darkness.

Wolgast froze. The blackness was total, an overwhelming absence of light, completely disorienting. The alarms had stopped. He felt a blind urge to run, but there was nowhere to go. The room seemed to expand and to be closing in upon him, all at once.

“Amy, where are you? Help me find you!”

Silence. Wolgast drew a deep breath and held it. “Amy, say something. Say anything.”

He heard, behind him, a soft moan.

“That’s it.” He turned, listening hard, trying to calibrate the distance and direction. “Do it again. I’ll find you.”

His mind began to focus, his initial panic giving way to a sense of purpose, the task at hand. Cautiously Wolgast took a step forward toward her voice, then another. A second moan, barely audible. The room was small, not twenty feet square, so how could it be that Amy should seem so far away from him in the dark? He heard no more gunfire, no sounds at all from outside. Only the soft notes of Amy’s breathing, summoning him.

Wolgast had reached the foot of her bed and was feeling his way along its metal rails when the emergency lights came on, two beams that shot from the corners of the ceiling over the door. Barely enough to see by, but enough. The room was the same; whatever was happening outside, it had yet to reach them. He sat by Amy’s bed and felt her forehead. Still warm, but her fever was down, her skin a little damp. With the power out, her IV pump had stopped. He wondered what to do, and decided to disconnect her. Perhaps this was wrong, but he didn’t think so. He had watched Fortes and the others change the drip enough times to know the ritual. He adjusted the clamp, sealing off the flow of liquid, and withdrew the long needle from the rubber stopper at the top of the tube buried in the skin of her hand. With the IV disconnected there was no reason to leave the port in place; he removed this also, pulling it gently away. The wound didn’t bleed, but to be sure, he covered it with gauze and tape from the supply cart. Then he waited.

The minutes passed. Amy shifted restlessly on the bed, as if she were dreaming. Wolgast had the curious intuition that somehow, if he could see her dreams, he’d know what was happening outside. But part of him wondered if any of it mattered now. They were well belowground, sealed away. They might as well have been locked in a tomb.

Wolgast had all but resigned himslf to their abandonment when he heard, behind him, a hiss of equalizing pressure. His hopes soared; someone had come after all. The door swung open to reveal a solitary figure, backlit, his face draped in shadow, wearing only street clothes. As the man stepped under the beams of the emergency lights, Wolgast saw somebody entirely new to him. The stranger had long hair, wild and unkempt, shot with streaks of gray, and a coarse beard that climbed halfway up his cheeks; his lab coat was rumpled and stained. He approached Amy’s bedside with the preoccupied air of an accident victim, or the bystander to some terrible calamity. He’d done nothing so far even to acknowledge Wolgast’s presence.

“She knows,” he mumured, gazing at Amy. “How does she know?”

“Who the hell are you? What’s going on out there?”

Still the man ignored him. An otherworldly feeling seemed to radiate off his entire person, an almost fatalistic calm. “It’s strange,” he said after a moment. He sighed deeply and touched his beard, sweeping his eyes over the barren room. “All of this. Is this… what I wanted? I wanted there to be one, you see. Once I saw, once I knew what they were planning, how it would all end, I wanted there to be at least one.”

“What are you talking about? Where’s Sykes?”

At last the stranger seemed to take notice of him. He regarded Wolgast closely, his face tightening with a sudden frown. “Sykes? Oh, he’s dead. I rather think they’re all dead, don’t you?”

“What do you mean dead?”

“Dead, gone, in pieces probably. The lucky ones, anyway.” He gave his head a slow shake of wonder. “You should have seen it, the way they swooped down from the trees. Like the bats. We really should have seen that coming.”

Wolfgast felt completely lost. “Please. I don’t know… what you’re talking about.”