15. Chapter 15 #2
The hellhounds hit the ground first, Mangus shaking himself, and Athena scanning the tree line. I couldn’t believe how much faster the helicopter made the trip. Last time, we’d driven along the winding switchback road, then come in on foot.
Malcolm turned to me. “Tell me you have a plan.”
“I have an outline of a plan. We don’t know what we’re going to find at the site.”
“Same trail you used last time?” Parker asked.
“Yes. We’re about a mile southeast of the target.” We activated our com-links.
The forest was dense, and we moved in a loose formation. Parker and Freda took the lead with Bart and Cora in the middle, and Malcolm in the rear. The hellhounds went ahead, appearing and disappearing among the trunks like smoke, with Mangus circling back to check on me.
The forest slowly fell silent. No birds chirping or squirrels chittering.
We reached the coordinates twenty minutes later, and I noticed a shallow depression in the forest floor, but there was nothing else there.
No structure, or ruins, or even a clearing.
It was unremarkable in every way except the depression.
I stood in the center of it and turned in a slow circle. “This is it. These are Viggo’s coordinates exactly.”
“I donna see anything here,” Malcolm muttered.
“There has to be something here, we just can’t see it yet.” I pulled my pack off and crouched, pressing my palm flat against the ground.
Parker looked around. “I say we spread out and look for anything that breaks the natural pattern or looks manmade. Check for depressions in the soil or disturbed vegetation that hasn’t grown the way it should.”
The group fanned out, but I stayed where I was. The implant sharpened my focus like a magnifying glass, making everything easier to read. I sent tendrils into the forest floor because whatever was here had to be underground.
Sweat ran down my back and a headache started to form. But I finally picked up something. A deep, low thump from somewhere below and to the north. The rhythm was too regular to be geothermal.
Following the vibrations, I moved in a slow line, and the pulse grew more pronounced. I was a hundred feet from the coordinates when my foot struck something solid that didn’t give. Beneath a thick tangle of deadfall lay a large metal plate.
“Parker, I found something,” I murmured into the com-link, keeping my voice low.
He was beside me in seconds, then Malcolm. Together, we pulled the fallen limbs clear; someone had likely added them to the camouflage. The plate was about five feet square, mounted flush with a recessed pull handle. I realized it was a hatch.
Parker crouched next to me, studying it. “Can you sense any energy from the handle?” I carefully touched the metal, but the vibrations were minor and felt years old. Relief flooded me.
“No one’s touched this in a while.”
Malcolm eyed me. “You can tell how long it’s been since somethin’s been touched?”
“It’s not exact.”
He shook his head ruefully. “You never cease to surprise us.”
He and Bart worked the hatch open. It was heavy, military-grade steel, the underside thick with rubber sealing gaskets that had dried and cracked with age. Cold, stagnant air wafted up, smelling like dirt and concrete.
Below us, a metal ladder descended into darkness. We pulled out our headlamps and switched them on. My beam caught the first ten feet of the concrete shaft, showing water stains and wide, bolted rungs going down another twenty feet to a flat floor.
Freda and Bart stood guard while the rest of us took the rungs down to check out the bunker, or whatever it was. The hellhounds stayed at the surface, but Mangus whined as we descended into the darkness.
The space opened up beyond a blast door into a wide, low corridor with overhead caging that had once held fluorescent tubes, most of them dead and broken.
The concrete walls were water-stained, and the construction was probably Cold War-era, built to withstand a nuclear blast. We were standing in some kind of bunker.
A thick bundle of zip-tied cable ran the length of the corridor, and ventilation units had been retrofitted into the concrete walls, the new metal shiny against the concrete. There was power and ventilation down here.
“Someone plans to use this facility,” Cora murmured quietly, speaking for the first time. Her voice was flat, but I felt her anxiety. She didn’t seem to like subterranean spaces either.
Malcolm stopped at a small black dome mounted at a junction in the corridor, barely visible against the ceiling. He studied it for a moment, not touching it. It was a security camera.
“This is active infrastructure.” He pointed to the cable routing, then to another camera angled to cover the corridor’s approach to the blast door.
I nodded. “This wasn’t cobbled together. Someone is surveilling this Cold War bunker.”
“Looks like they’re motion-activated. We need to pull back and figure out how to get in without triggering them,” Parker muttered.
We climbed back up and moved fifty feet back into the trees.
No one spoke for a few moments as we stood in the shadow of the pines.
Mangus pressed against my leg, his warmth soaking through my clothes.
I reached down and scratched his scruff as I sent a few vibrations outward in a slow, careful sweep.
I didn’t sense anyone, but I could only go so far.
I turned to Parker and shook my head as Malcolm watched us communicate. “The cameras were off,” Malcolm murmured.
He’d crouched against the base of a thick-trunked pine, elbows on his knees. “I’m thinking the bastards haven’t gotten this one up and running quite yet.”
Bart’s easy, wide grin was gone. “Besides the musty concrete bunker smell, there were other scents down there. Anyone know what it was?”
Cora’s quiet voice came from his left. “Formalin, disinfectant, and medical equipment. It smells like a laboratory.”
Freda turned to me. “The same smells as Roswell?”
“It wasn’t strong enough for me to detect.”
Parker put his hands on his hips. “After Roswell and Austin were taken out, Apex lost two black sites in less than a year.”
Malcolm shook his head. “Apex doesn’t close operations. The wankers just relocate them. The bunker is old as dirt, but the surveillance hardware and those ventilation retrofits are no more than a year or two old.”
Absently, I rubbed the scar from their brand on my clavicle. “I think the Commander or someone from Apex plans to use this location as a backup or replacement. It’s in a remote area of a national park where no one would think to look.”
Freda sighed tiredly. “It makes sense. Alaska has the most untouched acreage, but it doesn’t have the population to conceal shifters and supernatural kidnappings.”
“Yellowstone is also located in one of the most seismically volatile areas on the continent,” I added.
Cora tilted her head. “Why is that important?”
The implant hummed as I searched my memory regarding what I knew about this area.
“It produces massive amounts of energy, and Cogs and other supernaturals need energy to use our abilities and magic. That, and the sun, are what essentially power us. The Earth’s core temperature ranges from 4,000 to 7,000 kelvins, and the core pushes heat into the liquid outer core, which then acts as a massive electrical generator, creating our global magnetic field. It’s all energy.”
Cora nodded, but Malcolm and Bart just stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language.
Parker slapped Malcolm on the back. “She’s smart like that. Sometimes she spouts off these scientific facts and makes me feel like a fuckin’ idiot. Don’t be intimidated.”
I ignored them and tried to recall what my father wrote in his journal. Yellowstone sat atop a magma chamber the size of a small state, and the energy moving through the ground was unlike anywhere else he’d measured.
I turned to Parker. “Based on my last encounter with Marlowe, I think he and his people are trying to modify shifters, and even Normals, into high-level Cogs as well as operatives. But they’d need massive amounts of energy to do it. This location makes terrifying, perfect sense.”
Parker and Freda knew this, but the rest of them stared at me in horror, anger and denial bleeding from them.
Malcolm sighed. “I’d say it isn’t possible, except I’ve heard stories about their operatives.”
Parker looked up at the sky. “We’ve got weather coming.”
To the southwest, above the ridgeline, the sky had deepened into dark gray clouds, and the mass was building as the wind shifted. A cold draft carried the warning of a violent storm front moving in fast.
Parker pulled out his satellite phone and checked the weather. “There’s a large cell tracking northeast across the Absaroka Range. It’s due to hit this area in less than an hour.”
Bart whistled. “Looks like a doozy.”
“And an opportunity,” Malcolm murmured.
Freda nodded. “My vote is that we cut the surface power, then infiltrate during the storm. The weather will mask the power disruption if anyone is actively monitoring the site.”
Malcolm grinned. “Lightning surge, downed line. All kinds of explanations that dinnae involve us.”
Parker’s eyes moved systematically through the trees. “I’m going to shift and take a look around before the storm gets here. There has to be another way in.” He stepped back, and that shifter crow magic shimmered around him. Then he disappeared into the forest, Athena following after him.
The implant efficiently and steadily collected and analyzed the data. I let it run. Beneath us lay a buried concrete bunker that the shifters agreed smelled like a laboratory. I settled back against the tree and watched the swollen clouds build over the ridge, dark and heavy with rain.
A storm was coming.