Bellows Falls Read Free

I
think
that’s it, but to me they’re just something to step around so I don’t break my neck. I can’t swear there aren’t more.”
    Sammie looked up at me. “You want to lead it?”
    Her deferral was technically in order, since I was the ranking officer, and with her military background Sammie took whatever she was given from the top down, no questions asked. But I knew her better than that.
    “It’s your team, Sammie. Tell me where you want me.”
    I’d already borrowed a vest, but without a helmet I was correctly assigned a backup position. Ben Coven was sent back to the cafeteria after I’d cleared his passage by radio.
    Sammie positioned us as if we were taking a street, house by house—in homage to the eerie layout. The Retreat’s “torture chambers” and “secret caches of human bones” were common topics among the locals, born of the idiot folklore attending any treatment center for the mentally ill. But being in one of the famous cellars at last, and seeing it extend out into the gloom, with ancient brick archways, mysterious tunnels, and an inmate on the loose, it was hard not to give the tall tales some credit.
    Sammie went strictly according to procedure, everybody covering someone else, flashlights either directed forward or extinguished altogether, to avoid night blindness and giving the opposition a better target. No corner was rounded without first being checked with a hand-held mirror. Sammie herself operated a night vision monocular and scanned continually back and forth, watching for any surreptitious movements.
    The few tunnels Ben Coven had mentioned were trickier, being too tight for more than a single, small, crawling individual. The safest bet would have been to use gas canisters and flush out whoever might be down there, but given the kind of facility we were in, that wasn’t an option. What we did, therefore, harkened back to Vietnam, and the tunnel-rats of Chu-Chi. One by one, again starting with mirrors, the smallest members of the team dropped down into the holes without backup and made their way to a dead end in every case.
    By the time we reached the sealed bulkhead at the far end, we were drenched in sweat, our eyes were aching, and we’d built up enough nervous energy to run a generator. It was with obvious relief that Sammie announced the “all clear.”
    Only in the following relaxed silence did we all distinctly hear the distant, muffled sound of something in motion.
    “Cover,” Sammie yelled, causing us to flatten onto the ground in a circle, facing out. In the total darkness, Sammie made a slow, careful pan of our surroundings with the night scope.
    “What do you think it was?” she asked, finding nothing.
    “It sounded far away,” I answered, “like an echo.”
    Ward Washburn, one of the team, muttered, “There
is
no far away, for crying out loud.”
    Instinctively, we all returned to total silence, straining to hear it again. Working from memory, I crawled to a spot left of the bulkhead, and to a small, jagged hole in the crumbling concrete floor. My fingers wrapped around some rebar covering the top of a caved-in drainage pipe—a barrier we’d pulled on earlier to no effect.
    This time, I pushed it down instead, and the heavy mesh gave way like a swinging trapdoor. “Sammie, come here.”
    They all joined me to stare at the tiny opening. “You’re kidding,” Washburn said softly. Sammie dropped to her stomach and put her head into the pipe, the night scope in her eye. “It’s open as far as I can see toward Linden Street.”
    The sound came again, clearer this time—something metallic dropping into place. It floated out of the twenty-inch-wide drain as from an ancient loudspeaker.
    “Must be something else,” a voice spoke up behind me.
    Sammie looked up. “You going to make that assumption?”
    “No one can fit in there.”
    “I can,” she countered.
    I spoke into the radio. “This is Gunther. Somebody escort Ben Coven back here on the