A Fragment Too Far by Dudley Lynch

Author:Dudley Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 38

There wasn’t a whisper of air movement, and my protective clothing had never felt so icky, so we gave the remaining rooms only a cursory look.

The control room was behind the fifth set of barred doors on the right side of the hallway.

Simple enough setup. And yet, elaborate.

Two rows of four surveillance monitors on each of two long walls, and two rows of three surveillance monitors on the far wall.

Behind another set of bars were crew quarters. Had a small kitchen, an eating area, a lounging area, a wall lined with bunk beds for four persons, and a door I assumed led to a toilet and showers.

Then came areas that were a total puzzle to me. Burrows didn’t seem to have any ideas either. Or if he did, he kept them to himself.

One had placards of all the letters of the alphabet strung along two of the walls at eye level. A collage of the numbers from one to ten was arranged inside a large black frame running along the third wall. The rug had square designs, each overprinted with a single simple English word — the or and or go or get. None of the words was more than three letters long. And none was repeated.

Another room looked like a research laboratory on one side and a hospital operating room on the other. The effect was so morbid, I had to suppress a shudder. If we’d been investigating a Nazi concentration camp, I’d have thought we stumbled across Josef Mengele’s personal torture and experimentation chamber.

The room was even weirder. The tables and chairs were ordinary enough. Had there been nothing else in the room, I’d have dismissed it as a classroom. But plopped all around the room — sometimes on chairs, sometimes lying flat on a table, sometimes stacked atop each other in a corner — were . . . what? Mannequins? Stuffed dummies? Maybe half the size of the average adult.

I couldn’t tell much more, since I couldn’t get close to any of them. From what I could see, they all had arms, legs, and a head shape where arms, legs, and head shapes should go. But no eyes, noses, mouths, fingers, or toes.

To his credit, Assistant Fire Marshal Burrows understood my growing impatience and discomfort. “Got time for one more bit of weirdness?”

“We’ve come this far —”

“It’s on the roof.”

“Wouldn’t you know it?”

“Follow me.”

Two short stair flights later, we were standing on the roof of the old Cromwell Company warehouse.

Burrows tugged a heavy canvas cover off something flat and circular and at least fifteen or twenty feet across.

It looked to me like a heliport. A landing pad for helicopters. That wasn’t what stunned me. The design painted on the pad did that.

I’d seen it before.

It was a carbon copy, on a smaller scale, of the layout in the clearing that Judson Mayes III had discovered.

Delbert Burrows hadn’t recognized it, but he’d assumed its meanings were sinister. “What do you think this is?”

He wasn’t referring only to the chopper pad, if that’s what it was.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.