Chapter 12
Liam did not remember sitting down.
He was standing in a square in a dead city with a shovel in his hand and Doyle's words hanging in the air, and then he was sitting on a stone bench with his head between his knees and Isaiah's hand flat on his back.
"Breathe," Isaiah was saying. "Liam. Breathe."
"Eleven hours."
"I know."
"We were eleven hours away." Liam's voice came out of him strange and thin. "Isaiah, we were sitting in the wrecks. We slept. We stopped and we slept and we went ashore for a pot of clams and she was rowing north and we—"
"Liam."
"Eleven hours."
"Liam, look at me."
Liam looked up.
Isaiah's round face was set in a way he had seen exactly four times now.
"You're doing the thing," Isaiah said.
"What thing."
"The thing where you decide it's your fault and then you stop being useful."
Isaiah crouched down in front of him, and his voice was low and hard and kind.
"And I need you to not do that, because Nell is in the ground and Chloe is behind that door and there are twenty-two people standing forty feet away who have nobody left to tell them what to do. So get up."
Liam stared at him.
"Get up, Liam," Isaiah said.
Liam got up.
Doyle took them to the door.
He took them down the ruined stairway on the face of the bluff, six of his men ahead and six behind, and Liam went down that hill with his heart slamming against his ribs and his eyes fixed on the wall of stacked debris at the bottom.
They came around it.
And there it was.
It was smaller than he had imagined.
That was the first thing, and it hit him hard, and it took him a long moment to understand why it hurt so much. Two thousand miles. Four months. Sixteen people sick in a cabin and then thirty and then everyone. A dying man drawing an X on a piece of paper with a hand that would not work right.
And it was a door.
A plain steel door, four feet wide and seven high, set flush into the poured concrete of the hillside, painted gray, weathered, streaked with rust at the bottom edge.
No handle. No keyhole. Nothing on it at all except, at shoulder height, cut into the steel by somebody who had done a bad job of it, four words.
MARCUS VANCE LEVEL 3
Liam put his hand on it.
He stood there with his palm flat on cold steel in the ruins of a dead city and he felt nothing at all, no relief, no triumph, no arrival.
Just cold.
"The panel," Isaiah said hoarsely.
Liam looked.
To the right of the door, set into the concrete, there was a small recessed box behind a plate of glass. The glass had been cracked, spiderwebbed, and somebody had tried to lever it out with a bar and gouged the concrete all around it and given up.
Behind the glass was a keypad.
Twelve buttons. And above them, a small green light.
It was still burning.
Liam stared at it. It was so ordinary. It was the most ordinary thing he had ever seen in his life, a little green LED, the kind that had been on every microwave and every smoke detector and every phone charger in the old world, so common that nobody had ever once looked at one on purpose.
He had crossed a continent to look at it.
"It's on," he whispered.
"It's been on for two years," Doyle said.
He was standing back, arms folded, watching Liam with an expression that was almost sympathy.
"Two years. Never flickered. Never dimmed. That's what it does to a man, that light. You can put up with a lot in a dead world. But there's one thing in this whole city that still works, and it's on a door you can't open, and it just sits there."
Isaiah was on his knees in front of the keypad.
"Liam." His voice had gone strange. "Liam, look at the glass."
"I see it."
"No. Look at it." Isaiah's finger hovered an inch from the cracked pane. "It's dusty. It's filthy. Two years of grime on it, and salt, and rain." He looked up. "Somebody wiped it."
Liam looked.
And he saw it.
Four clean streaks through the dirt on the cracked glass, right across the face of the keypad. Four finger-widths. Fresh. Made by a hand dragging across the pane to clear it enough to see the numbers.
Liam's mouth went dry.
"She was here," he said.
"She was here."
"She stood right here." He put his own hand up beside the marks, not touching, and they were smaller than his. Much smaller. "Isaiah, she stood right here, eleven hours ago, and she wiped the glass and she read the numbers."
He turned to Doyle.
"Tell me what happened," he said. "All of it. Every second."
Doyle looked at the door.
"It was still dark," he said. "Four, maybe half past. My man Renner had the watch at the top of the stair, and he heard something down here, and he came down with a lantern."
"And?"
"And there was a girl standing at the door."
Liam closed his eyes.
"She had a pack," Doyle said. "She was standing right where you're standing. And Renner shouted at her, and she didn't turn around. She didn't run. She just kept doing what she was doing, and he came down the last of the stair, and she pushed the buttons."
"What did the door do."
"It opened."
The words went through Liam like a spike.
"It opened," Doyle said, and his voice had gone thick, and Liam realized with astonishment that the old man was fighting tears.
"Two years. Two years, and a thousand men dead on this hillside, and my sister's boy standing out there in the street shooting at preachers because he couldn't stand it anymore, and a girl walks down here in the dark and pushes four buttons and it swings open like a garden gate."
"And?"
"And she walked in."
"And?"
"And it shut behind her," Doyle said.
Nobody spoke.
The green light burned in the cracked glass.
"Renner ran the last twenty feet," Doyle said. "He swears he was six feet away when it closed. He put his hands on it. He hammered on it for an hour. It's shut, son. It's shut exactly like it was shut for two years, and the light's still on, and there is a girl on the other side of it."
Liam turned back to the door.
He put both hands on it.
And he screamed her name until his voice gave out, and hammered on four inches of steel with his fists until Isaiah pulled him off it and held him while he came apart.
They gave him an hour.
Doyle's men melted back up the stair and left him there, and that was decent of them, and Liam noticed it dimly through the fog and filed it away, because he could not stop filing things away even when he wanted to die.
Isaiah sat down beside him on the concrete.
"Say it," Isaiah said.
"Say what."
"Whatever you're working. You've been sitting here for an hour with your jaw doing that thing. So say it out loud, because I'm the only one here and I'm not going anywhere."
Liam wiped his face.
"She's alive," he said.
"You don't know that."
"I do know that." Liam looked up. "Isaiah, think it through. That door has a code and a lock and it opened for her and then it shut. That's a working system. That's not a broken door that fell shut. That's a door that opened, let somebody in, and locked behind them,
exactly the way it was designed to."
Isaiah went very still.
"Which means it can do it again," he said.
"Which means it can do it again." Liam stood up. "The code still works. It has to. It worked eleven hours ago. Nothing's changed. If I stand at that panel and put in the same four numbers, that door opens."
"Except you don't have the numbers."
And there it was.
Liam looked at the keypad, and at the four clean finger-streaks in the grime.
"No," he said. "I don't."
"Sarah's map is in Chloe's pack," Isaiah said. "And Chloe's pack is on the other side of that door. And you never memorized it, because you were never carrying it, because we agreed at the start that the map went with Chloe and the rifle went with you."
"I know."
"So the only copy of the code in the world," Isaiah said slowly, "is behind the door it opens."
Liam sat back down.
He put his head in his hands.
And then, after a long moment, he laughed. It was a terrible sound and he did not enjoy it.
"You know what the worst part is," he said.
"What."
"It thought of that." Liam looked up. "It's had six days in her head. It knew where the map was. It knew where I was. And it waited until she was strong enough to row and it took the map and it took the girl and it left me on a boat with a rifle and no numbers."
He stood up again.
"It didn't want to open the door," he said. "It wanted to open the door and shut it behind itself."
The Pike men gave them the old fish stall.
That was what Doyle called it, and Liam supposed it had been one once. It was a long low space under the market's collapsed roof, dry, with a stove somebody had cut out of a barrel, and it was the first four walls Liam had stood inside since the blockhouse.
Twenty-two people from Willow Landing spread their blankets on the concrete.
Doyle sent food. Actual food, dried salmon and boiled kelp and a sack of something grainy that Liam did not ask about, and he sent it without being asked and he did not come with it.
That night, Liam took out the pistol.
He had picked it up off the street.
He had not thought about it at the time. He had been kneeling in Nell Rook's blood with his hands red to the wrist, and at some point in the hours afterward he had found himself holding it, and he had put it in his coat, and he had not looked at it since.
He looked at it now.
It was a Beretta.
He turned it over under the lamp. Black, worn at the muzzle and the front of the frame where a holster had rubbed it for years. The slide said 92FS. It said PATENTED, and it said MADE IN ITALY, and it said 9mm Parabellum.
The grips were checkered plastic and one of them was cracked.
Liam had never handled a pistol in his life.
That was the truth of it and he sat with it. Two years in a survivor camp and four months on the road and two thousand miles, and he had never once held a handgun, because Tom Darcy had given him a rifle and a rifle was what he knew.
He looked at it a long time.
Then he pointed it at the floor, away from everyone, and found the button on the left side of the frame behind the trigger, and pressed it.
The magazine dropped into his hand.
He looked at it.