the floor of another short passage connecting two container cars. When I got up into that hallway, I heard the electric motors on the other side of a door and almost got off the ladder.
But there was still dust and dirt floating down from above.
I kept climbing up and through another short hallway, past a door I felt sure led to the kitchen, and up again into a third shaft. Sweat dripped from my brow when I stuck my head up through the next level, the one that had been locked shut on the stairway side.
The door on my right was not locked, and my curiosity soared as I wondered what Rivers might have in there. But the door to my left was closer.
I lifted the latch, tugged the door open, and felt air rush at me. For several moments, I was confused because of the strength of the breeze and because I wasn’t looking into another container car but down a long, low-ceilinged tunnel.
In my flashlight beam, I could see fresh scuffing and hand-prints in the dust on the tunnel floor. They headed deeper into the passage, which jogged left after fifty feet or so, preventing me from seeing any farther.
My gut response was to crawl after Rivers, keep following him until I caught him.
But my mind seized on the wind hitting my face.
This tunnel leads out. It’s another exit. It has to be.
A voice inside me told me to stop for a second and try to orient myself above and belowground, try to imagine where the passage might go.
Northeast, I thought. Away from his Jeep, toward…the house?
Well, it made sense, didn’t it? Wouldn’t a doomsday prepper want private and secure access to his bunker?
A split second later, I made my decision. Crawling a quarter of a mile in a tunnel like that would take time, and I could go faster if I covered that distance outside.
I jumped back on the ladder, dropped down a level, and ran through the kitchen and out the door to the stairwell. Charging up the stairs, I figured that Sampson and I could get to the car and then up to that house fast—maybe not before Rivers, but very soon after.
When I reached the hallway that led to the main exit, Sampson was by the hatch door with a sour look on his face.
“Son of a bitch locked us in. Please tell me there’s another way out.”
CHAPTER 44
MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS that tunnel. But how had Rivers gotten out to come around and lock us in? Was there an exit before the house?
Then I remembered something. I scrambled up the staircase yelling, “Follow me!”
I bolted up the three flights and climbed the ladder into the upper container car, the one that jutted out of the roof of the anthill. I pushed open the door and shone my light on the winch bolted into the side of the bunker and the ropes coiled below it.
By the time Sampson reached me, I’d found the winch control in a toolbox inside the bunker. I tied a loop in one end of the rope and hooked it to the quarter-inch steel winch line.
I handed the control to John, took the coil of rope, and moved to that low gate in the defensive wall. I unlatched it, opened it, and threw the rope over. As I’d suspected, it didn’t reach the bottom.
“Play me out as I go,” I said, turning to face him.
I started a modified rappel down the steep side of Rivers’s bunker. The vegetation covering the bunker’s side actually helped my footing, and I moved much faster than I’d thought I would.
Sampson uncoiled a good twenty feet of the winch line until the rope below me reached the ground. By the time I got there, John was on his way down.
I sprinted to our car, jumped in, turned the key in the ignition, and got nothing.
Nothing!
Jumping out, furious, I ran back. Sampson was almost down.
“He disabled our car,” I shouted as I went past him.
When I reached Rivers’s Jeep, the keys were still there in the cup holder. I snatched them up, found the right one, stuck it in the ignition, and felt like cheering when the engine turned over.
Sampson jumped in beside me, drenched in sweat, his hands bleeding. “That cable tore the hell out of me!” he said.
“Hold on somehow,” I said as I threw the Jeep into gear.
I mashed the gas pedal down and kept cranking the wheel to get around the base