Seize the Night

breeze.
    “I'm talking the day after tomorrow. Strictly offshore by then. Gonna be waves so scooped out, you'll feel like the last pickle in the barrel.”
    The hollow channel in a breaking wave, scooped to the max by a perfect offshore wind, is called a barrel, and surfers live to ride these tubes all the way through and out the collapsing end before being clamshelled.
    You don't get them every day. They are a gift, sacred, and when they come, you ride them until you're surfed out, until your legs are rubber and you can't stop the muscles in your stomach from fluttering, and then you flop on the sand and wait to see if you'll expire like a beached fish or, instead, go scarf down two burritos and a bowl of corn chips.
    “Twelve-footers,” I said wistfully as I opened the man-size entrance in the forty-foot-high door. “ Double overhead corduroy.”
    “Churning out of a storm north of the Marquesas Islands.”
    “Something to live for,” I said as I crossed the threshold into the hangar.
    “That's why I mention it, bro. Board head motivation to get out of here alive.”
    Even two flashlights could not illuminate this cavernous space on the main floor of the hangar, but we could see the overhead tracks on which a mobile crane—long since dismantled and hauled away—had traveled from one end of the building to the other. The massiveness of the steel supports under these rails indicated that the crane had lifted objects of tremendous weight.
    We stepped over inch-thick steel angle plates, still anchored to the oil and chemical-stained concrete, upon which heavy machinery had once been mounted. Deep and curiously shaped wells in the floor, which must have housed hydraulic mechanisms, forced us to follow an indirect path to the far end of the hangar.
    Bobby cautiously checked out each hole as though he expected something to be crouching in it, waiting to spring up and bite off our heads.
    As our flashlight beams swept over the crane tracks and their supporting structures, complex shadows and flares of light were flung off steel rails and beams, thrown to the walls and to the high curved ceiling, where they formed faint, constantly changing hieroglyphics that flickered ahead of us but quickly vanished, unreadable, into the darkness that crept at our heels.
    “Sharky,” Bobby said softly.
    “Just wait.”
    Like him, I spoke only slightly above a whisper, not so much for fear of being overheard as because this place has the same subduing effect as do churches, hospitals, and funeral parlors.
    “You been here alone?”
    “No. Always with Orson.”
    “I'd expect him to have more sense.”
    I led him to an empty elevator shaft and a wide set of stairs in the southwest corner of the hangar.
    As in the warehouse where I'd encountered the veve rats and the thug with the two-by-four, access to the floors below had surely been concealed. The vast majority of the personnel who had worked in the hangar—good men and women who had served their country well and with pride—must have been oblivious of the infernal regions under their feet.
    The false walls or the devices that had concealed entrance to the lower floors had been stripped away during deconstruction. Although the stairhead door was removed, a steel jamb was left untouched at the upper landing.
    Past the threshold, our flashlights revealed dead pill bugs on the concrete steps, some crushed and some as whole and round as buckshot.
    There were also the impressions of shoes and paws in the dust.
    These overlaid tracks were both ascending and descending.
    “Me and Orson,” I said, identifying the prints. “From previous visits.”
    “What's below?”
    “Three subterranean levels, each bigger than the hangar itself.”
    “Massive.”
    “ Mucho .”
    “What did they do down there?”
    “Bad stuff.”
    “Don't get so technical on me.”
    The maze of corridors and rooms under the hangar has been stripped to the bare concrete. Even the air-filtration, plumbing, and electrical systems have been torn out, every length of duct, every pipe, every wire and switch. Many structures in Wyvern remain untouched by salvagers.
    Usually, wherever salvage was pursued, the operation was conducted with an eye for the most valuable items that could be removed with the least effort. The hallways and rooms under this hangar, however, were scraped out so thoroughly that you might suspect this was a crime scene from which the guilty made a Herculean effort to eradicate every