Cries of the Children(112)

“Come on, doctors,” the third person, sounding female, said. “Marty’s due for his next test.”

Marty! The boy Lorraine had mentioned.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Samantha said.

Without hesitation she hooked the fat arm of her cleanroom suit through Wil’s and walked past the “NO ADMITTANCE” sign.

They entered a short hallway and followed it to a small room. In here, red lights glowed warmly. Wil and Samantha looked around themselves in wonder.

“Must be some kind of decontamination unit,” Wil guessed.

“Let’s go,” Samantha urged. “I want to see who Marty is. Maybe he can lead us to Julie.”

Now they entered another hallway. The guard they had seen stood outside the next door. If he had even glanced at their ID badges, they couldn’t tell. But obviously these people had been expecting someone. Wil thought that was a terrible blunder, proving security wasn’t as tight in this place as all its locked doors and secret rooms might make it seem. Well, he thought, a tiny little kid like Lorraine got away easily enough.

He opened the door at the back of the hall and entered a large sterile white room. Flashing lights drew his attention to computers that ran along the back wall. A large table in the room’s center held lab equipment. There were steel drums filled with God-knew-what, oxygen tanks, and EKG monitors. The four or five other people in the room worked busily, their backs turned to the newcomers. Samantha leaned toward Wil.

“What do we do now?”

“Let’s just look around,” Wil said. “I have a feeling we’ll know Marty when we see him.”

Samantha felt a tap on her shoulder and almost screamed. At the last moment, she caught the sound in her throat. Someone beckoned them to a back corner of the room.

“We’ve prepped him for you,” he said. “I’m afraid his vital signs have slackened off since the last time he was examined.”

“Let’s have a look at him,” Wil said.

They walked toward a partition at the back of the room. It was a glassed-in room, the windows covered now by drawn curtains. But suddenly Samantha stopped dead in her tracks. Her hands came up, shaking, to point at something in a large Plexiglas case. Wil looked in that direction and whispered:

“Oh, damn . . .”

It was a wooden box shaped almost like a coffin, and with a glass top.

“That’s the newest one,” the man in the other suit said. “Just dug it out of the gulf a few days ago. It’s the most intact pod we’ve ever found. That’s why LaBerge wanted it protected.”

Within the helmet, his sigh sounded like a windstorm.

“Ten years of work,” he said, “and we still haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly what they’re made of.”

Ten years, Samantha thought. Gordy had said she’d been here ten years ago. On shaking legs Samantha neared the case. Someone was using robotic arms to scrape tiny pieces off the wood at the side of the pod. “He” carefully placed the splinters on slides. Samantha’s eyes were immediately drawn to an unusual knot in the wood. For a split second she thought she saw a tiny face turn to her with a silent, pleading scream.

Their escort tapped her shoulder and pointed to a monitor. An electron microscope stood near the case, and when the slides were placed within it, a strange image appeared on one of the screens at the back of the room. It looked like a chain of long knotted-up balloons.

“Not like any wood I’ve ever seen,” the man said. “How about you?”

“I . . . I’ve never seen wood under a microscope,” Samantha stammered.

With a firm but gentle tug, Wil steered her away. They went to the glass-walled room and went inside.

Marty turned to gaze up at them. Samantha met his eyes, and she began to scream.

Then she began to remember.





53


RACHEL AND ERIC emerged from the tunnel, dripping wet and smelling of seawater, while Wil and Samantha were tying up Wesley Kane. They found themselves in an office filled with file cabinets. Taking the clothes off their backs, they wrung them out as best they could and dressed. Rachel shivered.

“It’s so cold,” she said. “I don’t see how that little girl made it out so easily.”

“I don’t think it was easy for her,” Eric said. He took Rachel into his arms for just a moment, and they tried to draw warmth from each other’s bodies.

“Are you ready?”

Rachel took a few steps. Squeaking noises filled the room like a blaring Klaxon.

“We’ll have to go barefoot.”

Eric and Rachel removed their shoes and hid them behind one of the cabinets. Rachel glanced at the files, wishing she could take the time to look at them. What secrets would they reveal?