Chapter 13 #2
Halfway down, Cully stopped.
"There," he said.
On the floor, against the wall, was a pack.
Liam knew it. He had watched Chloe Buck sling that pack out of Sarah Vance's cabin on a winter night in Minnesota and he had watched her carry it two thousand miles.
It was empty.
Everything that had been in it was laid out on the concrete beside it, in a neat row, in order.
Fishing line. Hooks. A knife. Dried fish, gone bad. A wool sock. Sarah's page of instructions in her cramped hand. Wynnie's little bag of seeds.
All of it, laid out, arranged, inventoried.
"Somebody went through it," Isaiah said.
"Somebody studied it," Liam said.
He crouched.
At the end of the row, laid out last, carefully, deliberately, was a single item.
It was a photograph.
Liam had never seen it before in his life. It was creased and soft and thumbed to almost nothing, and it showed a girl of maybe ten on a dock with a fishing rod, laughing, and a man beside her with his hand on her shoulder.
Chloe. And her father.
She had carried it two thousand miles and never once mentioned it.
And it had been placed, face up, at the end of the row, where he would find it.
"It's showing us," James Wilford said quietly. "It's showing us that it knows her."
Liam picked up the photograph and put it inside his coat, against his chest.
"Let's go," he said.
The second door was open.
It stood wide, and beyond it was a room, and the room was enormous, and Liam stepped through it and stopped dead and made a sound he did not recognize.
Racks.
Rows and rows of steel racks, running back into the white light, forty feet deep, and on them, in orderly boxes, in cases, in sealed crates, was everything.
Bandages. Sutures. Bags of clear fluid hanging in racks. A wall of small glass vials in foam trays, thousands of them, each with a printed label.
And along the back wall, humming, a great gray cabinet with a green light on it, and beside it a bank of batteries the size of coffins, and a gauge, and the gauge was reading.
Running on its own power for two years in the dark.
Elias Vance had said it with a fever in him, an hour before he died, and Sarah Vance had believed him, and Duncan Rain had called it a fairy tale.
"Isaiah," Liam whispered.
"I see it."
"Isaiah, it's real."
"I see it, Liam."
Isaiah was standing in the middle of the room with tears running down his face, and he was not looking at the racks.
He was looking at the ceiling.
"There's a fan running," he said. "There's a fan running in a building that lost power two years ago."
He laughed, wet and ragged. "Sarah was right. Elias was right. Duncan was wrong. Duncan Rain stood at that fire and told forty people it was a fairy tale and he was wrong, and I've been carrying that for four months."
And then a voice said, "Hands where I can see them."
Liam went absolutely still.
He had not heard anyone. He had not heard a footstep, or a breath, or a scrape, and there was a man standing between the racks thirty feet away and he had been there the whole time.
He was old.
Sixty-five, seventy. Gray stubble. A dirty white coat, an actual laboratory coat, filthy at the cuffs, over three layers of wool. Wire-rimmed glasses with one lens cracked.
And in his hands, held low and level and perfectly steady, was a pistol.
It was enormous.
Liam had never seen anything like it. It was stainless steel and it shone, all-metal, slab-sided, a great heavy brick of a thing with a bore at the front of it that looked, at thirty feet, like a culvert.
"Don't," the old man said.
Liam's hand had gone to the Beretta.
It had gone there on its own. His fingers were on the thumb-break and he had not decided anything, and the old man's pistol did not move at all.
"Son," the old man said, "I have been sitting in this room for two years and I have thought about very little else, and I am telling you that you will not get that snap open before I put a hole in your friend the size of my fist."
The muzzle had shifted.
It was pointed at Isaiah.
"That's a 4506," Isaiah said.
Everyone turned.
Isaiah was standing very still with his hands out from his sides and his round face gray, and he was staring down the barrel of that thing and he was, incredibly, talking.
"Smith and Wesson 4506," he said. "Third generation. All stainless. That's a .45, isn't it. .45 ACP."
The old man blinked.
"What?"
"It's a big gun," Isaiah said. His voice was shaking so badly it was barely a voice.
"It's a really big gun. It weighs about forty ounces empty and it holds eight and it hits like a truck and it was standard for a lot of police departments in the nineties, and it is, sir, currently pointed at my chest."
The old man stared at him.
"You know guns," he said.
"I read a book," Isaiah said.
"What?"
"I read a book, sir. There was nothing to do."
Isaiah's hands were still out. He was crying, quietly, and he did not seem to know it.
"I've got a .40 on my hip and I'm not going to touch it. I'd like you to know that. I am not going to touch it and I would very much like you to point that thing at the floor,
because it's a single action and I can see the hammer's back and your finger's inside the guard and I don't think you actually want to kill anybody."
The room was completely silent except for the fan.
The old man's arm began, very slightly, to shake.
"You said you read a book," he said.
"Yes sir."
"In the—" His voice cracked. "In the world. Out there. You read a book about guns."
"Yes sir."
"Why?"
"Because it was there," Isaiah said, "and I fix things, and I wanted to know how they worked."
And the old man in the filthy laboratory coat lowered a stainless steel .45 to the concrete floor and stood there in the white light with his shoulders shaking.
"Oh, God," he said. "Oh, God. You're real."
Liam took his hand off the Beretta.
"Who are you," he said.
The old man looked up.
And behind the cracked lens, his eyes were wet and red and utterly exhausted, and Liam looked at them and felt something enormous coming and could not stop it.
"My name is Marcus Vance," the old man said. "I built this place. And I have been locked in it for two years and four months and I need you to tell me, right now, before anything else, before I lose my nerve."
He wiped his face with his sleeve.
"Is my brother alive?"