Twilight Fall

Alex stepped in front of him. “Allow me.” She bent down and worked her fingers into the seam of the heavy iron door, and lifted it as if it were made of Styrofoam. “Was this left open like this?”

“It was padlocked, and completely covered with branches and dead leaves and weeds. I had to rent a metal detector to find it.” He directed his flashlight into the tunnel. “It goes down forty feet. There's a ladder on the side, but it's slippery. Be careful climbing down.”

His sister blew a short raspberry. “Please.” Without warning she jumped in.

“Alexandra.” John snatched at the empty air where she had been, and then knelt at the edge, trying to see her. His light showed her standing at the bottom, gazing back up at him.

“Come on, Michael,” she called up to them before stepping out of the way.

“We don't climb.” Cyprien said to him, almost apologetically, before he too jumped in.

John reconsidered walking away and leaving them to it. They were the ones with the superhuman abilities, not him. This wasn't his war. He didn't belong to either side. But he couldn't trust Cyprien and the Darkyn any more than the Brethren, and someone had to stand up for the humanity caught in the middle.

John pocketed his flashlight and climbed down into the tunnel.

Below the surface, the vertical accessway opened into an intersection of four ten-loot-high horizontal tunnels that ran off in opposite directions. Here the air was cold and stale, soured by the rotting smell of mildew. Water dripped somewhere, the impact of the drops echoing through the tunnels like the first moments of a rainstorm. Scurrying feet retreated as the mice and rats that had nested nearby fled the light.

“These passages are lined in cement,” Alex said, touching one wall.

“It's built like one of those old bomb shelters from the fifties,” John told her, and flipped a switch next to the ladder. Light illuminated the corridor intersection by the ladder. “Another reason I know they haven't totally abandoned this place. The electricity was never cut off.”

“How much have you seen down here?” Cyprien asked him.

“I didn't have time to do more than a quick walk-through of about half the facility. There are offices and records rooms down there.” He turned to the opposite passage, which was gated with iron bars. “The dormitories are through there.”

“Give us the grand tour,” Alex suggested.

He took them first to the eight dormitory rooms, each filled with twenty single beds. “They were keeping the kids in here.” He pointed to the doors, which locked with dead bolts from the outside.

“How do you know the occupants were children?” Cyprien asked. “They might have used these rooms for members of the order.”

John went to one of the beds. “Too small for adults.” He demonstrated by reclining, and had to bend his knees sharply to fit on the short, narrow frame.

Alex bent down to read some faded numbers and letters stenciled onto the end of the frame. “'AK-nine-one-nine-eight-one.' The last four might mean the year 1981.”

“Perhaps the year it was manufactured,” Cyprien suggested.

“No, there are different numbers and letters on each bed.” John told him. “They probably branded them on the kids' arms after they abducted them and shipped them off here. The way the Nazis did to the Jews in the concentration camps.”

“That's kind of a leap, John.” Alex said as she straightened and gazed at the other beds. “Twenty per room, that's a hundred and sixty kids. No one could take that many children and get away with it.”

“Thousands of children go missing every year.” John told her. “Most of them are never found. The Brethren are well organized and own extensive property all over the country.”

“If this is how they've been recruiting members for the order,” she said, “we need more evidence than some numbers on an old bed frame.”

“They weren't just recruiting kids for the order,” John told her. “They were experimenting on them.” Her shocked reaction made him glance at her lover. “Didn't you tell her what I found?”

“I thought it would be best if Alexandra saw these facilities first before we drew any conclusions.” Cyprien said. “Young children get sick quite often. What you saw could have simply been an infirmary.”

John didn't care for the way Cyprien looked or spoke to him, as if lie were indulging a fretting child. “You know exactly what monstrous things the Brethren can do, and you're defending them.”

“I know what they do to me and my kind.” Cyprien said. “We have never known them to hurt human children.”

“Well, they have.” John told him. “I found a laboratory set up to perform experiments on large subjects. Too large to be lab rats.”

Alex's gaze moved to Cyprien and then back again. “Are you sure they weren't experimenting on monkeys or other large primates, like gorillas? It's repulsive, but it happens.”

“Other than the Brethren, I haven't seen any evidence of animals down here.” John told her. The anger flared up inside him. “How can you make excuses for them? These were children.”

“I'm not making…” She blew out a breath. “Show me this lab. John.”

John took them back through the corridor and into an adjoining passage. Alex halted a few times to look through the dusty windows in some of the doors.

“These look like some sort of treatment rooms,” she said.

“They were cleaned out: there's nothing left in them but the exam tables and empty cabinets.” He stopped in front of a set of double doors. He hated going in, but it had to be done. “This is where they did the real dirty work.”

He walked around the room as Alexandra examined the equipment.

“Okay, we've got some extremely decrepit EEG and EKG machines, a sucky treadmill, lousy endoscopes, Jurassic-era blood pressure monitor, intravenous equipment with unsafe needles—is that really a defibrillator?—a crappy ventilator…” She stopped at one cart. “And what very well could be the world's oldest incubator.”

“Look at the tables,” he insisted. The first time he had, he'd vomited. “The straps on them.”

Alexandra went over to one of the flat sheet-metal tables and inspected the perforations in the surface before gingerly unbuckling one of the leather restraints. She examined the inside of the leather before putting it down. She went to the cabinets and opened each one, pulling out some of the dusty contents.

Cyprien came to stand beside John. “The Brethren despise us, but they believe they are protecting humanity. I am not defending their methods, but I cannot believe that they would kidnap or harm human children in their mission to destroy us.”

“You're right about one thing. John,” Alexandra said as she closed the last cabinet. “Everything in this room indicates that the subjects who were treated here were human beings.” Before John could say anything, she held up her hand. “I can't say for certain that they were kids, and if they experimented on them, they didn't do it here. This lab is set up to perform standard tests and monitor physical conditions. They have some emergency equipment. John, but nothing out of the ordinary.”

She still didn't believe him.

“Why would they need to do that?” he demanded. “Test and monitor the children for what?”

“I don't know,” she admitted. “I need more information. You said there were records.”

John look them to the offices at the end of the next tunnel, and gestured to the barricaded doors he had been unable to open.

“I only brought bolt cutters with me the last time, so I couldn't get in.” He pointed to the three steel bars at the top, middle, and bottom of the door. “These are welded in place.”

Alex peered through the webbed glass at the rows of old metal filing cabinets. “They cleaned this place out pretty thoroughly before they left. Those cabinets could be empty.”

“Then why seal the room?” he asked her.

“Good point.” She glanced at Cyprien, who took hold of the other end of the center bar welded across the door. Together they pulled it off, the steel tearing like tin foil, and then they did the same to the other two.

John brushed past them and went to the first cabinet, almost pulling the empty drawer out completely in his haste to open it. He bent and opened the one beneath it, and the next. The entire cabinet, as Alex predicted, was empty.

“No, there has to be something in here.” He moved to the next cabinet, jerking at drawer handles and finding it empty, and then the next, and the next, until a drawer flew out of his hand and hit the wall on the opposite side of the room. He stared at the small crater it made in the wall before landing on the linoleum floor. “Where are they?”

A cool, gentle hand touched his cheek. “Johnny, stop. Michael, would you give us a minute?” Alexandra waited until Cyprien left them before she guided John to a chair and sat on the edge of the desk beside it.

“I was so sure I'd find the proof in here.” His eyes felt hot and dry, his eyelids lined with sandpaper. Something like a laugh came out of his throat. “I should have known they wouldn't leave any evidence behind.”

“It's obvious from the dormitory that they were keeping some kids here,” she said in a placating tone. “There's just not enough left to indicate why. Maybe if we can find out where they're operating from now, we can go to the media with that. Anderson Cooper just got back from filming starving Afghan farmers growing opium poppies for the Taliban, you know. He'd jump all over a story like this.”

“I'll never find them.” John felt defeated. “They use the Church as a front, so it could be any Catholic program, parish, or building anywhere in the country. There are hundreds of thousands of places they could be.”

“Michael will help,” she told him. “The Kyn have some amazing resources we can use. We'll find out the truth, John, and we'll expose them. I promise.”