The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

black beyond the tunnel’s mouth.
    “Watch out for a drop-off,” Travis said, and then they were inside, blind for a second as their eyes tried to adjust.
    An instant later Paige sucked in a hard breath and stopped—she threw both arms out to block the others.
    There was a drop-off.
    Ten feet in, the concrete floor ended as neatly as a high-dive platform, empty space beyond the left half, black metal stairs descending beyond the right half. Paige led the way down. Ten steps, then a landing made of the same metal gridwork, and another flight. And another. At the bottom of the fourth they touched down on concrete again—another horizontal tunnel. It stretched twenty feet and terminated against a slab of solid metal, eight feet square, visible in the pale glow of an overhead mercury lamp.
    There were giant hinges on the slab’s left side, and there was a keypad on its right.
    Travis stared.
    He felt his thoughts begin to go blank.
    High above, sounds reverberated through the stair shaft. The sliding of feet and hands on loose soil outside. Then the scrape of boots skidding to a halt on concrete.
    Paige and Bethany ran forward, getting clear of the shaft. Travis followed, but at a walk; he’d barely noticed the sounds. All his attention was on the giant door.
    Which was green.

Chapter Twenty-Eight
    “What the hell do we do?” Bethany whispered.
    Paige could only shake her head.
    There was a handhold inset in the steel just below the keypad. Her sense of futility manifesting in her body language, Paige took hold of it and pulled. The door didn’t so much as rattle in its frame.
    Behind and above, in the shaft, more footsteps thudded into the concrete tunnel. Voices spoke in low, soft tones, some of which carried unusually well in the strange acoustics.
    “We called it in,” someone said. “They want them alive, whoever they are.”
    Someone else cursed softly, then said, “Okay.”
    Paige turned from the door and faced Travis, and seemed thrown by the look in his eyes. He imagined he appeared numb. He sure as hell felt that way.
    “What is it?” Paige said.
    Travis took a deep breath. He steeled himself for the likelihood—it should’ve been a certainty—that the dream had been only a dream. That this was the mother of all coincidences, and a cruel one at that.
    Up in the shaft, something like a backpack dropped to the concrete. Tough fabric with metal objects clattering inside. A zipper came open.
    “Travis?” Paige said.
    He stepped past her to the keypad. Above the buttons was a simple readout, like a VCR’s clock. There were glowing blue dashes where digits could be entered. Five of them.
    “There’s a dozen masks in one of the back storage holds,” someone up above said. “Go get them all.”
    Then came a faint but sharp sound from atop the stairwell. Some tiny metallic thing being pulled free of something else. Like a key drawn from a lock, but not quite.
    Travis blocked it all out and thought of the dream. The old man—the Wilford Brimley lookalike—staring at him from a few inches away. Asking over and over what was behind the green door. We already know the combo, the old man had said.
    And then what?
    What exactly had come after that?
    High up in the vertical shaft, something bounced hard against the wall—by its sound Travis pictured a can of shaving cream, though he was pretty damn certain it wasn’t. The thing ricocheted again and again, hitting the stairs, the walls, the landings, making its way down. Travis turned with Paige and Bethany and watched it hit the bottom, less than twenty feet from where they stood. They could barely see it in the vague light there, but there was no real mystery as to what it was. It came to rest and did nothing for two seconds. Then it jumped and skittered and started blasting thick gas into the air. Tear gas or pepper gas or some variant. Another canister came rattling down after it. Then another.
    “Shit …” Bethany whispered. Her voice gave away a tremor.
    The gas churned and curled toward them in delicate wisps.
    We already know the combo.
    Travis closed his eyes.
    A second passed.
    He opened them again and turned back to the keypad.
    At the corners of his vision he saw Paige and Bethany watching him, confused.
    He entered the numbers carefully but quickly: 4–8–8–5–4.
    The instant he punched the last one the keypad flared with green backlight. Something very heavy thudded inside the door, and with a hiss of air pressure the huge