Randy Terri's Arc

Chapter 5 of 11

Randy drove east with Sinclair sitting quiet in the passenger seat, the journal and recordings locked in a metal case between them. The coordinates led them past the ridge where the dead man had been found, then another two miles through dry scrub until the ground changed from packed dirt to old concrete. The vault entrance sat in a shallow depression ringed by cracked foundation slabs. A canvas tent stood twenty feet from the door, its stakes driven deep and its flaps tied back like someone planned to return. Next to it was a plexiglass security booth that hadn't been there when Randy first found this site — scratched panels, metal desk inside, coffee cups stacked in a way that said weeks not days. The vault door itself hung open six inches, and a broken padlock lay in the dirt surrounded by metal shavings. Someone had cut through it with tools that left clean edges. Randy walked to the booth and looked through the plexiglass. The desk held a water bottle, a notebook with coordinates that matched the ones from his billboard, and a hand-drawn map of the underground chamber from the photograph. Whoever had been here knew exactly where sublevel three was and had been monitoring it long enough to set up a permanent station. He picked up the notebook and flipped through pages of measurements and timestamps — radiation readings taken every six hours for the past month, crop yield correlations, power consumption estimates that matched what Sinclair's grandfather had described. Sinclair stood at the vault door and pushed it wider. The metal groaned but swung open, revealing stairs that descended into darkness lit by emergency strips still glowing after all these years. Randy closed the notebook and put it in his jacket. The person who'd been living here had left in a hurry or hadn't planned to stay gone long, and either way that meant Randy had a choice — go down now while the entrance was open and unguarded, or wait and risk losing access when whoever owned this camp came back. He looked at Sinclair, who was already pulling a flashlight from his pack, and stepped past him toward the stairs.