Spiral

He looked down at the brass cylinder in his hand. Dylan understood. This was the most important task that he’d ever faced. Maybe that he would ever face.

She couldn’t get it. No matter what.

He had to hide.

The big metal door on the bunker to his right was open a few inches. He was drawn to it, a primordial instinct, seek shelter in a cave. He ducked inside, just able to slip through.

It was dark inside, pitch-black. Not like the other one with the glowing Fusarium.

He wanted to pull the door closed behind him, but that would make a noise. Go all the way in. He’d be safe. There was no way she could check them all.

He stepped deeper into the bunker.

The darkness swallowed him.

The bunker was in bad shape, damp and leaky. The smell of mold was strong. He walked with his hands in front until he found the back wall. He moved as far as he could from the strip of moonlight that leaked in through the partially open door.

He crouched down, cold and scared. He listened carefully for any sound, trying not to breathe. All he heard was a steady drip of water. He wanted to go inside himself, to hide far away.

The blackness was absolute. Darker than anyplace he’d ever been.

Otherwise, he would have never noticed them.

On his shirt sleeves were tiny pinpricks of glowing light, slowly pulsing on and off. Bits of glowing fungus were still clinging to his clothes.

ORCHID SCANNED LEFT AND RIGHT, LOOKING FOR ANY SIGN of the boy with her night-vision goggles. She cradled her gloved right hand in her left. The son of a bitch Sterling had broken two of her fingers. She’d kicked him senseless, then had grabbed her backpack and filled it with Connor’s fluorescent fungus, scraping it off the metal trays as fast as she could.

She’d tripped the electronic controller near the main door that activated the self-destruct mechanism, a series of incendiary devices she had placed in strategic positions inside the bunker. She had always planned to destroy Connor’s hideaway. In two minutes, there would be no traces left of anything inside, all of Connor’s work turned to ash. And now Jake Sterling would be ash, too.

She just had to deal with the boy.

He had a head start, and the Seneca Army Depot was a huge damned place. If he decided to hide, she would never find him in time. It would take days to search all the bunkers. And she didn’t have days. She had only minutes. Soon the explosion would go off and this place would be crawling with people. She had to get the cylinder, get back to the FedEx van, and head to the border.

Stick to basics. Keep looking.

Orchid checked up and down the empty road between the bunkers. Which way?

Then she saw something odd. She almost missed it, thought it was a flicker in the noise in her infrared CCDs.

But there it was again. A tiny blinking light. She took off her glasses, and it vanished. It was so faint, she could see it only with the goggles.

She jogged over to investigate. It was a tiny piece of fungus, stuck to a blade of grass. The blinking fungus.

She wiped it onto the finger of her glove. It must be on his clothes.

She scanned the weeds around her. In a few seconds she saw another little glowing patch. Then another, like bread crumbs.

The trail was almost too easy to follow.

JAKE REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS SLOWLY. HE FELT AS THOUGH he’d been beaten with a hammer, every muscle aching and pulsing as he sat up. The room was dark, save for the glowing fungi and a flashing red light near the door.

How long had he been out? He had no idea. He tried to remember what had happened. At first his memories were jumbled, like a jangly, disjointed dream. But after a few seconds his thoughts popped into their proper place. The digging. The cylinder. The struggle.

Dylan.

He jumped to his feet and tried to open the door. He pushed on it hard, looking for a handle but finding none. He threw himself against it. The massive thing didn’t budge an inch.

It must be locked from the outside. He’d never get through it.

He turned to inspect the blinking red light next to the sealed door. A timer. Fifty-four seconds and counting down.

Oh, shit. Jake had been in the 46th Engineer Battalion. They worked with explosives all the time. He recognized the box for what it was: a timer counting down a destruct sequence. Three dots below the numbers told Jake there were three explosives.

He picked up the timer, looking for wires. None. It was wireless, he was sure.

“Damn it!” he yelled, the sound echoing in the sealed bunker. He knew the design-the timer had a fail-safe mechanism so it couldn’t be disarmed once the destruct sequence had begun. Once started, the timer put out a steady signal to the bombs. When the signal terminated, the explosives detonated. If you disabled or destroyed the timing unit, the signal would cease and the bombs would go off immediately.

His only chance was to find the bombs.