“Get down here.”
He joined me a few seconds later.
“Look,” I said, and pointed at the back room. “If that room met the back wall of the barn, its square footage should be one hundred or so. Maybe a hundred and twenty.”
He looked at me in the gloom, and his eyes flashed. “That room is too narrow for that. It’s sixty square feet at the most.”
I nodded. “Exactly.”
We hurried into the room again and examined the wall that should have met up with the barn’s back wall. Ten seconds in, I found a loose board, and when I gave it a tug it swung out, revealing a door handle.
“Bingo,” Trev said.
I tried it, but it didn’t budge. There was a keypad, like all the labs had, embedded in the wall.
“Move over,” Trev said. Since I was playing nice, I did. He punched in a series of numbers, and the door hissed open, finishing with a pop.
I narrowed my eyes. “How’d you know the code?”
“All the labs have an override code. Most likely they were changed after I blew up several of the buildings, but I bet this one hadn’t been, since it looks like no one has been here in years.”
Stairs appeared beyond the door, leading down into total darkness.
When Trev didn’t make a move to go, I snorted and went down first, but not before pilfering the flashlight from his pussy hands.
The stairs seemed to go on forever, winding around on themselves, until finally we reached a steel door. It opened without complaint.
This lab was nothing like the farmhouse lab.
For one, we’d entered onto a metal stairwell that looked down on one wide-open space, like a factory, and two, it went on and on as far as our flashlight would reach.
Trev felt along the wall, grunted, and flipped an old power switch. Fluorescent lights flickered on by rows with a whir and click.
“Holy shit,” Trev said, his voice echoing.
Definitely a lot bigger than the farmhouse lab.
This place was easily the length of a football field, and the width of two. There were sectioned-off labs, some with nothing more than cubicle walls, others fully enclosed.
“I’ve been here before,” I said. Trev gave me a look, so I elaborated because I was still feeling nice. “I had a flashback about this place. Someone had escaped, and I was hunting them down.”
“Par for the course when it comes to the Branch. They’re always holding people prisoner, and people are always trying to break free.”
Trev went first, and the clang of our steps filled the room, bouncing off the back walls and hitting us on the comeback. Once on the floor, we stopped, unable to see across the span of space with the partition walls towering over us. We were mice in a maze.
“You know your way around?” Trev asked me.
“Not really.”
“Well, whatever data remains will be on the system. We just need to find a computer.”
We checked out the nearest exam room first. This one was enclosed, but the two metal exam chairs faced a wall of windows that looked out over a bank of workstations. No computers. The room was completely empty. There wasn’t even a used bandage in the garbage.
We kept looking and checked out a few more exam rooms. Finally we found a computer in a cubicle somewhere midway through the maze. It booted up quickly, but we were immediately blocked with a password screen.
“Tell me you know an override code for this, too,” I said.
Trev sat in the desk chair and ran a hand through his hair. “Unfortunately, no. But… there are a few things I can try.”
I watched over his shoulder for a good fifteen minutes, and everything he tried got him nowhere.
“I’m going exploring,” I said, feeling restless and impatient. “Yell if you get something.”
He grunted as I left.
Every exam room I checked out was almost exactly the same as the last. Some rooms had one exam chair, others two. Never more than that.
I made a right turn down one aisle of cubicles, then a left, and found myself in the back of the lab where a row of rooms had been installed against the concrete wall. Each room had a window that looked in on it. In the third room on the left, I paused, and an image flickered in my head.
A girl. A gun. And me.
I stepped over the threshold, and a feeling of déjà vu gripped me by the head and shook me till my vision tunneled.
There’d been a girl here, crouched on the floor, wavy dark hair hiding her face.
I slammed my eyes shut and tried to remember more.
She was sobbing. “Please don’t kill me,” she said.
My finger was already on the trigger.
I had orders. And the order was to kill.
“Please, Gabriel! I’m not what they say I am.”
“What do they say you are?” I asked.