Seize the Night

one was already open approximately as far as Doogie had opened the first, the goggle-defeating UV light issued from the room beyond.
    Sasha and Roosevelt remained at the first valve. Armed with the .38, Sasha would make sure that no one came along behind us to block what might be our only exit. Roosevelt, whose left eye was swelling again, stayed with her because he wasn't armed and because he was our essential link to the cat.
    The mouser hung with Sasha and Roosevelt, keeping safely out of the forward action. We hadn't dropped a trail of bread crumbs on the way in, and we weren't a hundred percent certain that we could find the route back to Bobby and the elevator without feline guidance.
    I followed Doogie to the inner gate valve.
    After peering into the space beyond the gate, he raised two fingers to suggest that there were only two people in there about whom we needed to worry. He indicated that he would go first, moving immediately to the right after entering, and that I should follow, going to the left.
    As soon as he cleared the doorway, I slipped into the room, with the shotgun thrust in front of me.
    The Twilight-of-the-Gods rumble, rattle, bang, and skreek that shook down through the entire facility, from roof to bedrock, was muffled here, and the only light came from an eight-battery storm lamp sitting on a card table.
    This chamber was similar in shape to the egg room three floors overhead, though this was much smaller, about thirty feet long and fifteen feet in diameter at its widest point. The curving surfaces were sheathed not in that glassy, gold-flecked substance but in what appeared to be ordinary copper.
    My heart soared when I saw the four missing children sitting with their backs to the wall in the shadows at one end of the room. They were exhausted and frightened. Their small wrists and ankles were bound, and their mouths were covered with strips of cloth tape. They were not visibly injured, however, and their eyes widened with amazement at the sight of Doogie and me.
    Then I spotted Orson, lying on his side, near the kids, muzzled and restrained. His eyes were open, and he was breathing. Alive.
    Before my vision could blur, I looked away from him.
    In the center of the room, frozen by Doogie's gun, two men sat in padded folding chairs, facing each other across the card table that held the storm lamp. In this stark tableau, they reminded me of characters in a stripped-down stage set from one of those stultifying minimalist plays about boredom, isolation, emotional disconnection, the futility of modern relationships, and the sobering philosophical implications of the cheeseburger.
    The guy on the right was the abb who had tried to brain me with a two by-four under the warehouse. He was wearing the same clothes he'd been wearing then, and he still had those tiny white teeth, although his smile was considerably more strained than it had been previously, as though he had just discovered a corn worm among that mouthful of white kernels.
    I wanted to pump one shot into his mug, because I sensed not just smugness in the geek, but also vanity. After he took a magnum round at such close range, the only word adequate to describe his face would also spur on a dog sled team.
    The man on the left was tall, blond, with pale green eyes and a puckered scar, in his mid-fifties. He was the one who had snatched the Stuart twins, and his smile was as winning as it had been when he was a boy of twelve with the blood of his parents on his hands.
    John Joseph Randolph was unnervingly self-possessed, as if our arrival neither startled nor concerned him. “How're you doing, Chris?” I was surprised he knew my name. I'd never seen him before.
    Whispery echoes of his voice were conducted like a current along the copper walls, one word overlaying the next, “Your mother, Wisteria—she was a great woman.”
    I couldn't understand how he knew my mother. Instinct told me that I didn't want to know. A shotgun blast would silence him, and scour that smile off his face—the smile with which he charmed the innocent and the unwary—turning it into a lipless death's-head grin.
    “She was deadlier than Mother Nature,” he said.
    Renaissance men ponder, brood, and analyze the complex moral consequences of their actions, preferring persuasion and negotiation to violence. Evidently, I'd forgotten to renew my membership in the Renaissance Man Club, and they had repossessed my principles, because all I wanted to do was blow away