Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(18)

A narrow opening led out of the kitchen into the living room. Lovely. One overstuffed chair in front of the fireplace. If it had faced the window, someone could sit there and watch the weeds grow.

Freddy moved across to the bedroom and its adjoining bathroom, the last of the rooms in the small house. Here he paused, letting the flashlight play across the walls and furniture. The darkness inside was nearly complete. Considering the tiny dimensions of the rest of the house, the bedroom appeared disproportionately large. A king-size bed, complete with log headboard, occupied the far wall, while a dresser and a small closet took up most of the wall to Freddy's right. A single nightstand occupied a spot next to the right side of the bed. Other than the ceiling light, currently useless, there were no other lamps. Evidently, neither Delbert nor the house's more recent occupant was a big reader.

Just as Freddy was about to move toward the bathroom, he spotted the rug. It was a six-by-eight-foot rectangle of Indian design and looked out of place in the otherwise undecorated house. Freddy moved closer, bending down to examine the stitching. It was handwoven, obviously authentic and expensive.

Freddy had always had a reporter's nose. That, along with his annoying habit of putting it into everyone else's business, was what had made him one of the best. Something about this rug just smelled wrong.

A soft creaking sound caused him to swing the flashlight back toward the doorway. Just as he was about to lay it off to his imagination, he heard it again. It sounded like a loose board moving under weight.

Freddy straightened and moved back to the door into the living room. There was no use sneaking. If someone was there and hadn’t seen his flashlight, they were blind. The living room was empty, as was the kitchen beyond that. Once again, Freddy paused to listen. There it was again, along with another sound: the wind.

Freddy shook his head. It was only the wind picking up as the temperature dropped that was causing the old structure to shift and complain. Jesus H. Christ. He was getting jumpy as an old woman. But then again, Benny Marucci had never before warned him to be careful.

Freddy moved back into the bedroom and resumed his examination of the Indian rug. Why was it here?

Un-slinging the Nikon and checking the flash, Freddy began snapping pictures in rapid sequence and from a variety of angles. Sometimes just looking at the film as it developed in his darkroom revealed some little detail he missed while on location. Although this room appeared benign enough, something about that rug gave him the creeps.

Satisfied that he had captured everything, Freddy knelt down and gently pulled the rug to one side. No attempt had been made to conceal the trapdoor beneath it, except for the rug covering, which stood out like a sign along an empty highway. A simple handle with a sliding dead bolt secured the thing. There was no lock.

The dead bolt opened easily, another unusually well-maintained piece of this run-down property. Well, the people he’d talked to at the courthouse had said that Delbert Graves was a survivalist. You’d expect some sort of underground bunker on his place. How else would he survive the nuclear war?

Somehow, Freddy doubted that fear of impending nuclear attack was behind the well-oiled latch. Well, he wasn’t going to find any answers just staring at the closed trapdoor. Inhaling deeply, Freddy lifted it open.

He played the beam around the opening, leaning forward to look down into the hole. Iron rungs had been set into the concrete wall about a foot apart. The narrow opening continued downward for a few feet before opening into a room further down. Beyond that, the flashlight’s yellow beam was too dim to provide detail.

“Anyone down there?” The echo of his voice startled him, making Freddy feel even stupider than when he yelled out the question.

Looping the camera strap back over his shoulder, he swung his legs into the dark opening, gently lowering himself until his foot found a rung. It seemed solid. With the flashlight angled downward, he began climbing down, almost immediately enveloped by a coolness common to poorly insulated underground spaces. The place probably felt great in the heat of a New Mexico summer day, even at this high altitude. But with the arrival of night and the rapidly dropping temperature, he had become chilled.

Hell. That was probably why his hands were shaking.

At the bottom of the ladder, Freddy paused, shining the flashlight around the room. It was about ten feet across and of a similar width and constructed of unpainted concrete blocks. The ceiling was a dozen feet above his head. As he shined the flashlight around the room, Freddy wondered if the beam was getting dimmer. It was probably just his imagination. He was pretty sure he’d changed out the D cell batteries not long ago.

A steel door in the far wall was closed with yet another dead bolt. To his left, a large metal closet jutted outward into the room. Beside it, a long workbench contained an odd-looking assortment of tools and equipment. It took Freddy a couple of moments to realize what he was looking at. It was an ammunition-reloading workbench, complete with gunpowder scale, reloading dies, and other unfamiliar tools.

He opened the metal closet doors.

Holy shit. The bastard had been preparing for World War III. At least a dozen rifles and handguns hung in mounts along the back wall of the gun closet, although several of the racks were now empty.

Freddy moved to the closed steel door in the far wall. As he got close, he saw that the dead bolt had not been engaged and that the door was open a crack. As he touched the handle, he paused, listening. Nothing. Down here in the concrete underground bunker, the silence was nearly perfect. Even the roar of the wind outside and the creaking of the old house had been completely damped out.