It always took a few moments to psych herself into leaving the relative safety of the tin-can-like stairwell for the enormous supply arch.
She was going to call out to see if anyone was there, but that was totally the kind of thing the first victim did in horror movies. Besides, it wasn’t really a creepy, dark snow tomb about to crumble under the weight of a bazillion tons of ice. That was just her imagination. She peered up at the corrugated warehouse ceiling. Well, the dark part was true. Only a few of the lights seemed to be working. Were the others out? She felt along the wall and flipped the switch. Nothing. Okay, great. Fine. A quick check confirmed her Maglite was still in her coat pocket.
From the outside, the arches were snow-covered, nothing visible but brightly shining metal doors, but inside, the place was more shadows than light. In the next arch over, the power plant’s bright-yellow machinery busily chugged out electricity and heat for the entire station. And in the farthest one, Jameson coddled hardworking vehicles into lasting another season, another year. But this arch was silent, dark, lifeless, the type of place where you’d expect to see bats hanging from the ceiling. Except, of course, nothing could survive down here.
Swallowing hard, she avoided the tall rolling ladders lined up on the concrete floor like stairs to nowhere and peered into the shadows behind the massive metal storage shelves lining the long building. The coast was clear. Nothing but a bright red POSITIVELY NO SMOKING sign.
Oh for Pete’s sake. Relax.
She walked farther inside and grabbed a sled, onto which she’d pile supplies before dragging the whole thing out through the big arch entrance, up the ice ramp, across the snow, and to her kitchen. It was a long haul, but she couldn’t carry the stuff back up the steps.
As fast as she could, she yanked big bags of pasta from wooden pallets, a few canned items, then on to paraffin-coated eggs and frozen veggies and fruit. Those were a necessity here, since aside from the freshies coming in on today’s flight, there’d be limited produce. And her people needed their vitamins.
It was at moments like this that she hated being short. The darned canned tomatoes were at the back of the second shelf, which meant the ladder wouldn’t help. And though she stretched as high as she could, she couldn’t quite get her hands on them.
Grumbling under her breath, she pulled the sled into the shadows between two big units and the wall, then slid behind one of the metal structures. Her boobs made it a tight squeeze, but she managed to shuffle down, strained up, and slid a can off. She just caught it before it brained her, and—
What was that?
Every nerve ending in her body vibrated as she went still and listened hard for that strange scuffling sound.
Buzzing, nerves on high alert, she held her breath and stared hard into the shadows, willing a familiar figure to walk by. But nobody appeared. And when it came again—a slow, stealthy dragging sound straight out of every one of her childhood nightmares—she screwed her eyes shut and crouched low, trying to make herself as small as she possibly could.
It was absurd to be afraid of the dark. She knew that. She did. But there was something out there. Or someone. And she couldn’t for the life of her fathom why they were working so hard to be quiet.
Chapter 6
A door slammed and Angel startled, just barely tightening her hold on the can of tomatoes before it clattered to the ground.
Okay. This was ridiculous. When would she stop being so spooked? Forcing herself to relax, she started to call out when someone spoke.
“Down.” Though it was spoken quietly, some strange acoustic trick made the word so loud she obediently ducked before realizing the order wasn’t meant for her. She should make a joke right now. Bark or yell Up! or something. But she couldn’t even catch her breath.
“S-swear I told you everything I know.”
Wait. Who was that? A second guy? Whoever it was sounded scared, his voice high and shaky.
“Look, Stickley.” Stickley. Alex Stickley. A climatologist maybe? Or maybe he was one of those guys who searched for meteorites. He liked hash browns. That she knew for sure. “If you can’t show me which tube it’s in, I’ll have to—”
A dull thud made Angel jerk so hard she rattled the metal shelf, then put out a hand to still it.
Was someone hurting Alex?
No way. This had to stop. Now.
She’d half stood, ready to march down there, when the next sound hit her. A pop like a nail gun, quick and loud.
Then screaming.
For a few long moments, her mind went completely blank. Those sounds knocked all understanding from her, the way a word lost its meaning after repeating it too many times. Nothing made sense—not the noise or the voices or even the sight of her own gloved hands grasping metal.
Dumbly, she focused on the industrial tomato can with its ’50s block lettering, then slid her eyes to the shelves and stared until the holes in the metal brackets lined up again.
This nightmare was actually happening.
She had to get out of here and find help. She started sliding toward the end of the storage area, an inch at time, her body so tightly wound it was a shock she could move at all.
The man’s next words made her stop and listen. Though she truly didn’t want to hear them.
“No, no, no, no, Alex.” That was Bradley Sampson speaking, in his soft, singsongy drawl. “See, bro, you’re not dead. You know? Just a kneecap,” he scolded affectionately. “It’ll heal.”
Alex’s response was too garbled to understand.
“Look, this isn’t about me. We answer to a higher power.” Apparently there was something funny about that, because someone laughed. Was there a third person there? “This is bigger than you or me, man.” Sampson lowered his voice, so she had to strain to hear. “I’ll put it to you straight: you help me figure out which of these core samples to pull, right here, right now, and this little cutie?”
“No, no. Noooooooooooo.” The word was long and low and full of so much pain that it stood the hairs up all over her body.
“This li’l lady and her mama back in Ann Arbor? Well, they might just survive this. But we need the ice samples. Today. Right now.”
A scream welled up inside her—a bubble that needed to burst, only instead of being hollow, it was filled with the horror of this new reality. They’d threatened to kill his wife. His baby, for God’s sake. Oh God, Alex.
Half ready to spring into action, half paralyzed by fear, she willed the scream down and listened.
It took a while for Alex to respond and she couldn’t make out the word. Maybe “okay,” though it might just have been an expelled breath.
“Cool.” Sampson’s voice turned those fine standing hairs to ice picks. “Here.” Footsteps crunched. “Let’s get you…”