Contain (27 page)

I keep expecting Jonah to push me
harder. I almost wish he would. Then I'd have a reason to turn
around and slug him. I need to vent some of this anger boiling
inside of me.

“
Finn,” Jonah says. It's so
low I almost don't hear it at first. I brace myself for the poke in
the back. “Listen, Finn. I just want to say I'm sorry about what
happened.”

I stop and turn, made somehow angrier
by this unwanted display of humility. “It's your father who needs
to apologize.”

He stares at me for a moment, the
darkness in his eyes like the emptiness in the faces of the
infected.

“
Fine,” I say, turning back
and resuming my steady march over the murky abyss. “Apology
accepted. Whatever.”

“
Yeah, whatever.
Jerk.”

I stop again, but don't turn. My
fingers curl around the rail and squeeze, and the bones in my hands
shift as the muscles and tendons tighten till they feel like they
may snap. I can almost feel the steel deforming beneath my
grip.

The walkway beneath us shakes
slightly, and the distance between us and Mister Abramson grows by
two more feet with each heavy step. He's now three-quarters of the
way across.

Jonah places a hand on my shoulder and
tries to get me to turn. I shrug it off, though I turn
anyway.

“
I never wanted it to be
like this, Finn.”

“
Funny. Because it sure
seems like I've been saying the same thing to you for the past
three years. Both me
and
Bix.”

The muscles in his cheek ripple as he
clenches his jaw.

Up ahead of us, Mister Abramson has
finally realized we're not right on his heels. “Boys!” he
calls.

The word ricochets off the walls, off
the surface of the black pool below us, off the ceiling close
overhead.

“
We're not boys!” Jonah
screams.

The metal rings with the force of his
voice.

He brushes angrily past me,
shoving me up against the railing. “
I
don't know why I bother
,” he hisses at me.
“
This is such a waste of
time.
”

I volunteer to climb down the ladder to check below, partially
because I already know what sort of evidence to look for in the
slime coating the platform, but also because I don't want anyone
seeing the marks I left a few days before and misinterpreting
them.

As expected, I find no evidence that
Eddie's been there, so unless he's suddenly developed the ability
to scale smooth cement walls and has grown gills he's not hiding
down here, either in the water or between the sump
pumps.

We rejoin the others and head up a
flight to Level Nine, where we meet Missus Abramson on her way
down. Mister Abramson looks surprised to see her, and he chastises
her for being alone.

I ask about Bren.

“
Sleeping,” she answers.
Her voice quavers, and her hands shake as she goes to her husband.
It's clear that she's still not fully recovered from the brutality
we witnessed on Levels Five and Six. After a moment, she pushes
herself out of Seth's embrace and says, “I left her and Hannah with
Fran and the boys.”

“
You shouldn't have come
down, honey.”

“
I couldn't just sit there
knowing a killer is hiding somewhere inside the bunker. I feel
better by your side.”

Bix rolls his eyes and whispers, “Gag
me.” But despite his making light of their intimacy, it troubles me
that they're okay leaving Bren alone.

As before, we leave Bix and his father
outside in the stairwell to Level Nine, Susan and Harry just inside
the door in the hallway. The rest of us, now four, search each of
the accessible rooms.

On that level, there are two rooms
full of spare parts for the boiler room at the end of the hall, as
well as an assortment of machined parts and tools carefully
arranged on metal shelves or hanging off of a pegboard. Each tool
has its designated spot, as indicated by a painted white outline.
There are several empty spaces, including one clearly meant for the
wrench in my hand. I no longer have to wonder where Jonah got the
items he turned into weapons.

The third room holds drums of machine
oil and a small hand truck. The smell triggers a memory of Eddie,
but he's not here. Just to be sure, Jonah checks the loose cover in
the corner of the wall near the ceiling, even though it's much too
small for a full-grown man to crawl into.

The oil containers appear to have been
recently opened, and there's a small spill near the door. Jonah
doesn't remark on it, and when I do, he sniffs and says, "Probably
your dad or one of the others needing to lube
something."

The fourth room is empty, whereas the
fifth and final room at this end of the hallway is another control
station. This one is for the adjacent boiler room, and it modulates
the function of the main ventilation and humidity control systems.
The station is rarely used, since once the ranges are set, they
essentially run on autopilot. Pretty much like everything else in
this place.

In a typical hydroelectric facility,
the safety overrides would have shut power production down within
weeks, if not days, of the outbreak, as electrical demand
fluctuated. Power consumption would have been erratic at first, but
then would drop through the floor, eliminating the load on the
turbines and causing them to shut down.

But every process in this facility was
designed with meticulous care to continue operating in an adaptive
fashion for extended periods of time without human intervention.
Each function is linked into a complex feedback monitoring
system — the main brain of the facility — which is
located upstairs on Level Two. That computer, which is not
networked with the outside world, so as to avoid terrorist hacking,
adjusts everything from water flow through the turbines and the
bypass systems via the sluice gates, clears blockages, monitors
electrical demand, and meters power into the facility and outward
to the grid.

Because it's not a typical plant, we
weren't forced to leave it when Mister Gronbach died and left us
with essentially no idea how to run it. Fortunately, that was not
the case, and it was probably the main reason it was chosen to be a
bunker. Nevertheless, Dad has taught himself as much as he possibly
can about the place, which hasn't been easy without the benefit of
manuals. For the past three years, he has been personally checking
every single system to make sure each is running within normal
limits.

Given their vulnerability, the control
rooms are only accessible by a very short list of people, including
my father, Mister Abramson, Mister Resnick, and Susan
Miller.

Mister Abramson keys in the number,
then he instructs me and Jonah not to touch any of the controls.
“Be quick about it. Kaleagh and I will head over to the boiler
room.”

He doesn’t look worried that we'll do
any harm. Knowing our mutual distrust, he probably figures Jonah
and I will keep an eye on each other.

Jonah steps inside first and
immediately begins to circle the room in a clockwise direction. He
pokes his length of pipe ahead of him into the kneehole under the
control bench, banging it against the thin metal. A large console,
painted olive green and populated with dozens of dials, switches,
and lights, sits on top. Dust covers everything, a testament to the
fact that nobody's been in here in a while, including my
father.

In no mood to talk, I turn in the
opposite direction.

We meet in the back behind the bench,
pass each other, then circle around to the door again. He bangs
once on the vent above our heads. Then, convinced we've cleared the
room, he gives me a single nod. “Not like Eddie was going to be in
here anyway,” he grumbles, then steps out into the hall.

We make sure the door latches shut
before turning toward the boiler room. The Abramsons have already
gone in.

Jonah raises his hand, but instead of
knocking to be let in, he keys in the access code. As if sensing my
surprise, he gives me a nonchalant shrug. “Dad and I helped Stephen
and Danny with the repair the other day,” he says.

The memory of the accident comes back
to me, the scene where Eddie runs in without first checking that
it's safe. I still feel like I could've stopped him. I'd had this
foreboding feeling that something was wrong, yet I hadn't acted on
it.

Could Eddie be inside right now,
waiting for us?

Jonah starts to turn the handle. And
suddenly I have this fear that he really is in there and that he's
already killed Bren's parents. I can almost feel his presence, and
I slap Jonah's hand off the knob.

“
What the hell,
Bolles?”

But the door still opens, and I step
back with a gasp, cringing. Mister Abramson sticks his head out.
“Took you two long enough,” he says.

The humidity slaps me across the face,
fills my chest and makes it hurt. Jonah rolls his eyes and shakes
his head at me.

The room is quite large, about thirty
feet wide and twice as long. The front is well lit, but the
lighting is poorer behind the main furnace, which sits right in the
middle of the floor just ten feet in from the door.

A series of pipes rises from the top
and extends both forward and aft, some disappearing into the walls,
others turning to other destinations. Several large ones run the
length of the room on either side.

Behind the boiler is a series of
man-sized breaker boxes, each with its own pressure and temperature
gauges. Dad once tried to explain it all to me once, but I never
bothered to commit any of it to memory.

“
Finn and I will check on
this side,” Kaleagh Abramson shouts above the low roar of the
furnace. I pull my eyes away from the pipe which burst, and find
her standing on the opposite side of the room, her back against the
wall.

Mister Abramson reluctantly agrees,
perhaps wary of the tension between me and Jonah. He volunteers to
take the other side alone, instructing Jonah to stand guard by the
door.

“
Sure, no prob, Mister A,”
he says. “I got this.” But I'm sure I see a flicker of apprehension
in his eyes. He's always bragging that nothing scares him. It’s
clearly just an act.

A blink later, however, and there's no
evidence of anything on his face except boredom.

Missus Abramson gives me a grim smile
as I join her. I respect her willingness to come down and help with
the search, but it's still bothering me that she left Bren upstairs
with the Rollinses.

“
You know, I can do this
alone,” I tell her as she joins me.

“
Let's just find the
bastard,” she whispers. “The sooner everything can get back to the
way it was, the better.”

I silently confess that I'm wishing
for the same thing.

We edge our way forward, carefully
checking beneath, behind, and above the thick pipes. She doesn't
argue when I do the chivalrous thing and take the lead.

The further back we go, the more
everything is covered in dust. The fact that it's also undisturbed
does little to soothe my frayed nerves. I keep expecting something
to happen, for Eddie to appear, for Mister Abramson or Jonah to
scream. With each step we take toward the back of the boiler room,
the more I'm sure it'll happen.

I can feel it in the way the air
smells, the way it feels, as if it holds the essence of an
unnatural presence, a staticky sort of feel that comes from the
existence of something that doesn't belong. I feel as if I can
actually see the path Eddie took through the air, a shimmering aura
without color, not a visual thing but rather a psychic
one.

There's a loud clang from the opposite
side of the room, followed by a clatter of metal on metal, and we
both straighten up and spin around.

“
Seth?” Kaleagh calls
out.

“
Just me,” he replies. His
voice sounds far away. “I dropped something.”

I lower my gaze to my feet, to the
metal grate below us. The walkways on either side run the length of
the room, maybe fifty feet long and four wide. There are channels
running underneath, meant to drain leakage or excess condensation
from the many pipes that crisscross the room. The space is dark,
maybe even large enough to hold a man, but the grates, each roughly
four feet on edge, probably weigh a hundred pounds and are bolted
down.