THIRTEEN 15 page

Amy had brought her backpack into the restaurant. Wolgast walked her back to the ladies’ room to clean up. “You need me to come in with you?”

Amy shook her head.

“Wash your face and brush your teeth,” he said. “And comb your hair, too.”

“Are we still going to the doctor?”

“I don’t think so. We’ll see.”

Wolgast returned to the table. “Listen,” he said quietly to Doyle. “I don’t want to drive into a roadblock. Something could go wrong.”

Doyle nodded. The meaning was plain. All that firepower, anything could happen. Next thing you knew, the Tahoe was riddled with rounds and everyone was dead.

“What about the district office in Wichita?”

“Too far. I don’t see how we could get there. And at this point, I’m thinking no one’s going to say they ever heard of us. This is all off the books.”

Doyle gazed down into his coffee cup. His face was drawn, defeated, and Wolgast experienced a blast of sympathy for him. None of this was what he’d bargained for.

“She’s a good kid,” Doyle said. He sighed hard through his nose. “Fuck.”

“This will go better with the locals, I think. You decide what you want to do. I’ll give you the keys if you want. I’m going to tell them everything I know. It’s our best chance, I think.”

“Her best chance, you mean.” Doyle didn’t say this accusingly; he was merely stating a fact.

“Yes. Her best chance.”

Their food arrived as Amy returned from the restroom. The cook had done the pancakes up to look like a clown face, with whipped cream from a can and blueberries for the eyes and mouth. Amy poured syrup over all of it and dug in, alternating huge bites with gulps of milk. It was good to watch her eat.

Wolgast left the table when they were done and went back to the little hall off the restrooms. He didn’t want to use his handheld, and it was back in the Tahoe in any event; he’d seen a pay phone back there, a relic. He dialed Lila’s number in Denver, but the phone just rang and rang, and when it went to voice mail he couldn’t think of what to say and hung up. If David got the message, he’d just erase it anyway.

When he returned to the table, the waitress was clearing away their plates. He took the check and stepped to the register to pay. “Is there a police station anywhere around here?” he asked the woman as he handed her the money. “Sheriff’s office, something like that?”

“Three blocks down the way,” she said, sliding his money into the register. “But you don’t have to go that far.” She slammed the drawer with a ka-ching. “Kirk over there’s a sheriff’s deputy. Ain’t that right, Kirk?”

“Aw, leave off, Luanne. I’m eating.”

Wolgast looked down the length of the counter. The man, Kirk, was poised over a plate of French toast. He had a jowly face and thick, weather-beaten hands and was dressed as a civilian, in snug Wranglers wedged under his belly and a grease-stained Carhartt jacket the color of burnt toast. A little town like this, probably he worked about three different jobs.

Wolgast stepped over to him. “I need to report a kidnapping,” Wolgast said.

The man turned on his stool. He wiped his mouth on a napkin and looked at Wolgast incredulously. “What are you talking about?” His face was unshaven; his breath smelled of beer.

“See that girl over there? She’s the one everyone is looking for. I’m guessing you saw something about it on the wire.”

The man glanced over at Amy, then back at Wolgast. His eyes widened. “Shit. You’re kidding. The one from over in Homer?”

“He’s right,” Luanne said brightly. She was pointing at Amy. “I saw it on the news. That’s the girl. You’re the one, ain’t you, sweetheart?”

“I’ll be damned.” Kirk hoisted himself off his stool. The room had grown quiet; everyone was watching now. “Staties are looking for her all over. Where’d you find her?”

“We’re the ones who took her, actually,” Wolgast explained. “We’re the kidnappers. I’m Special Agent Wolgast, that’s Special Agent Doyle. Say hi, Phil.”

Doyle waved listlessly from the booth. “Howdy.”

“Special agents? You mean FBI?”

Wolgast withdrew his credentials and put them on the counter for Kirk to see. “It’s hard to explain.”

“And you took the girl.”

Wolgast said so again. “We’d like to surrender to you, Deputy. As long as you’re done with your breakfast.”

Somebody, one of the other men at the counter, snickered.

“Oh, I’m done all right,” Kirk said. He was still holding Wolgast’s credentials, studying them like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “I’ll be dipped. Holy goddamn.”

“Go on, Kirk,” the other man said, and laughed. “Arrest them if that’s what they want. You do remember how to do that, don’t you?”

“Just hold the phone, Frank. I’m thinking.” Kirk looked sheepishly at Wolgast. “Sorry, it’s been a while. I mostly dig wells. Not much goes on around here, except a little drunk and disorderly, and half the time that’s me. I don’t even have handcuffs or nothing.”

“That’s all right,” Wolgast said. “We can loan you some.”

Wolgast told him to impound the Tahoe, but Kirk said he’d have to come back for it later. They surrendered their weapons and all piled into the cab of Kirk’s pickup to drive the three blocks to town hall, a two-story brick building with a date, 1854, in large block letters set over the front door. The sun was up now, washing the town in a flat, muted light. As they stepped from the truck, Wolgast could hear birds singing from a stand of poplars that were just budding out. He felt a kind of airy happiness that he recognized as relief. On the drive over, pressed into the truck’s cab, he’d held Amy on his lap. He knelt by her now and put his hands on her shoulders.

“Whatever this man tells you to do, I want you to do it, all right? He’s going to put me in a cell, and probably I won’t see you for a while.”

“I want to stay with you,” she said.

He saw her eyes had filmed with tears, and Wolgast felt a lump lodge in his throat. But he knew he was doing the right thing. The Oklahoma state police would swarm down on the place pretty fast once Kirk called in the collar, and Amy would be safe.

“I know,” he said, and did his best to smile. “Everything’s going to be okay now. I promise.”

The sheriff’s office was located in the basement. Kirk hadn’t handcuffed them after all, seeing how cooperative they were being, and he walked them around the side of the building and led them down the steps into a low-ceilinged room with a couple of metal desks, a gun case full of shotguns, and banks of file cabinets pushed against the walls. The only illumination came from a couple of high windows, welled from the outside and clotted with old leaves. The office was empty; the woman who manned the phones didn’t come in until eight o’clock, Kirk explained, turning on the lights. As for the sheriff, who knew where he was. Probably out driving around someplace.

“To tell you the truth,” Kirk said, “I’m not even sure I’d book you right. I better try to get him on the radio.”

He asked Wolgast and Doyle if they’d mind waiting in a cell. They had only the one, and it was mostly full of cardboard boxes, but there was room enough for the two of them. Wolgast said that would be fine. Kirk took them back to the cell, unlocked the door, and Wolgast and Doyle stepped inside.

“I want to go into the cell too,” Amy said.

Kirk frowned in disbelief. “This is the strangest kidnapping I ever heard of.”

“It’s fine,” Wolgast said. “She can wait with me.”

Kirk considered this a moment. “Okay, I guess. At least until my brother-in-law gets here.”

“Who’s your brother-in-law?”

“John Price,” he said. “He’s the sheriff.”

Kirk got on the radio, and ten minutes later a man in a tight-fitting khaki uniform came striding through the door to the office and marched straight back to the cell. He was small, with a boy’s slenderly muscled frame, and he stood not more than five foot four, even on the heels of his cowboy boots, which looked to Wolgast like they were something fancy—lizard maybe, or ostrich. He probably wore the boots to give him a little extra height.

“Well, holy crap,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice. He was looking them over with his hands on his hips. There was a little bit of paper on his chin where he’d cut himself, shaving in a hurry. “You guys are feds?”

“That’s right.”

“Ain’t this a can of peas.” He turned to Kirk. “Whatcha got the girl in the cell for?”

“She said she wanted to.”

“Jesus, Kirk. You can’t put a little kid in there. Did you book the other two?”

“I wanted to wait for you to get here.”

Price sighed with exasperation. “You know,” he said, and rolled his eyes, “you really got to work on your confidence, Kirk. We’ve talked about this. You let Luanne and all them others bust on you too much.” When Kirk said nothing, he continued. “Well, might as well get on the horn. I know they’re looking all over hell and earth for this one.” He looked at Amy. “You okay, girl?”

Amy, who was sitting on the concrete bench next to Wolgast, gave a little nod.

“She said she wanted to,” Kirk repeated.

“I don’t care what she said.” Price took a key from a compartment on his belt and unlocked the cell. “Come on, girly,” he said, and extended a hand. “Jail cell’s no place for you. Let’s get you a pop or something. And Kirk, get Mavis on the phone, will you? Tell her we need her over here pronto.”

When they were alone again, Doyle, who was slouched on the concrete bench, tipped his head back, closing his eyes. “For Christsakes,” he moaned. “It’s like an episode of Green Acres.”

About half an hour passed; Wolgast could hear Kirk and Price talking in the other room, deciding what to do, whom to call first. The state police? The DA’s office? So far, they hadn’t even booked them yet. But it was all right; this would happen in due course. Wolgast heard the door open and then a woman’s voice, talking to Amy, telling her what a pretty girl she was and asking her what her rabbit’s name was, and would she maybe like an ice cream, the store around the corner was opening in just a few minutes, she’d be glad to go and get her one. All of it just as Wolgast had foreseen when, sitting in the Tahoe in the darkened car wash, he’d decided to turn himself in. He was glad he’d done it, so glad it surprised him, and the cell, which he guessed was the first of many in his life, didn’t seem so bad. He wondered if that was how Anthony Carter had felt, if he had said to himself, This is my life from now on.

Price stepped up to the cell, holding the key. “Staties on the way,” he said, rocking on his heels. “You all must have stirred up some real hornet’s nest from the sound of it.” He tossed a pair of cuffs through the bars. “I’m thinking you all know how to use these.”

Doyle and Wolgast cuffed themselves; Price opened the cell and led them back to the office. Amy was sitting in a folding metal chair by the reception desk, her backpack on her lap, eating an ice cream sandwich. A grandmotherly woman in a green pantsuit was sitting beside her, showing her a coloring book.

“He’s my daddy,” Amy told the woman.

“This one here?” the woman said, turning her head. She had dark, drawn-on eyebrows and a rigid helmet of raven-black hair—a wig. She looked at Wolgast quizzically, then back at Amy. “This man here’s your daddy?”

“It’s all right,” Wolgast said.

“That’s my daddy,” Amy repeated. Her voice was stern, correcting. “Daddy, we have to go right now.”

Price had taken out a fingerprinting kit; behind them, Kirk was setting up a screen and camera, to take their mug shots.

“What’s that about?” Price asked him.

“It’s a long story,” Wolgast managed.

“Daddy, now.”

Wolgast heard the door to the office open behind him. The woman lifted her face. “Help you?”

“Hey, good morning,” said a man’s voice. There was something familiar about it. Price was holding Wolgast’s right hand by the wrist, to roll his fingers in the ink. Then Wolgast saw the expression on Doyle’s face, and he knew.

“This the sheriff’s office?” Richards was saying. “Hey, everyone. Whoa, are those things real? That’s a lot of guns. Here, I’ve got something to show you.”

Wolgast swiveled in time to see Richards shoot the woman in the forehead. One shot, close range, muffled to a clap by the long bore of the suppressor. She rocked back in her chair, her eyes startled open, her wig askew on her head. A delicate frond of blood wet the floor behind her. Her arms lifted and then fell again, into stillness.

“Sorry,” Richards said, wincing a little. He stepped around the desk. The room was filled with the acrid odor of gunpowder smoke. Price and Kirk were frozen with fear where they stood, their jaws hanging open. Or perhaps it wasn’t fear they were feeling, but mute incomprehension. As if they’d stepped into a movie, a movie that made no sense.

“Hey,” Richards said, taking aim, “stand still. Just like that. Superduper.” And Richards shot them too.

No one moved. It had all happened with a curious, dreamlike slowness but was over in an instant. Wolgast looked at the woman, then at the two bodies on the floor, Kirk and Price. How surprising death was, how irrevocable and complete, how much itself. At the reception desk, Amy’s eyes were locked on the dead woman’s face. The girl had been sitting just a few feet away when Richards had shot her. Her mouth was open, as if she were about to speak; blood was running down her forehead, seeking out the deep creases of her face, fanning across it like a river delta. Clutched in Amy’s hand were the melting remains of her half-eaten ice cream sandwich; probably some of it was actually in her mouth at that moment, coating her tongue with its sweetness. A strange thing, but Wolgast thought it: for the rest of her life, the taste of ice cream would recall this image.

“What the fuck!” Doyle said. “You fucking shot them!”

Price had hit the floor face-down behind his desk. Richards knelt by his body and patted his pockets until he found the key to the handcuffs, which he tossed to Wolgast. He waved his gun listlessly at Doyle, who was eyeing the glass case of shotguns.

“I wouldn’t,” Richards cautioned, and Doyle sat down.

“You’re not going to shoot us,” Wolgast said, freeing his hands.

“Not just now,” Richards said.

Amy had begun to cry, her breath hiccuping in her chest. Wolgast gave the key to Doyle and picked her up and held her tightly to his chest. Her body went limp against his own. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” It was all he could think to say.

“This is very touching,” Richards said, handing Doyle the little backpack of Amy’s belongings, “but if we don’t leave now, I’m going to be shooting a lot more people, and I feel like I’ve had a very full morning already.”

Wolgast thought of the coffee shop. It was possible everybody there was dead too. Amy hiccuped against his chest; he could feel her tears soaking his shirt. “Goddamnit, she’s a kid.”

Richards frowned. “Why does everybody keep saying that?” He motioned with his weapon toward the door. “Let’s go.”

The Tahoe was waiting outside in the morning light, parked beside Price’s cruiser. Richards told Doyle to drive and sat in the backseat with Amy. Wolgast felt completely helpless; after all he’d done, the hundreds of decisions he’d made, there was nothing left to do but obey. Richards directed them out of town, to an open field where an unmarked helicopter with a lean black body was waiting. At their approach its wide blades began to turn. Wolgast heard the wail of sirens in the distance, coming closer.

“Let’s be quick now,” Richards said, motioning with his weapon.

They climbed into the helicopter and were airborne almost instantly. Wolgast held Amy tight. He felt as if he were in a trance, a dream—a terrible, unspeakable dream in which everything he’d ever wanted in his life was being taken away from him, while all he could do was watch. He’d had this dream before; it was a dream in which he wanted to die but couldn’t. The copter banked steeply, opening a view of the sodden field and beyond, at its edge, a line of police cars, moving fast. Wolgast counted nine. In the cockpit Richards pointed out the windshield and said something to the pilot that made him bank the other way, then guide the chopper into a hovering position. The cruisers were coming closer now, within just a few hundred yards of the Tahoe. Richards motioned for Wolgast to pick up a headset.

“Watch this,” he told him.

Before Wolgast could answer there was blinding flash of light, like a gigantic camera going off; a concussive thump rocked the chopper. Wolgast gripped Amy by the waist and held on. When he looked out the window again, all that remained of the Tahoe was a smoking hole in the earth, big enough to fit a house in. He heard Richards laughing through the headset. Then the helicopter banked once more, the force of its acceleration pressing them into their seats, and took them all away.

TWELVE

That he was dead was a fact. Wolgast accepted it, as he accepted any fact of nature. When everything was over—in whatever manner this occurred—Richards would take him to a room somewhere, give him the same cool, final look he’d given Price and Kirk—like a man performing some simple test of accuracy, lining up a cue ball or tossing a piece of wadded paper into the trash—and that would be the end of it.

It was possible Richards would take him outside to do it. Wolgast hoped he would, someplace he could see trees and feel the touch of sunlight on his skin, before Richards put a bullet in his head. Maybe he’d even ask. Would you mind? he’d say. If it’s not too much trouble. I’d like to be looking at the trees.

He’d been at the compound for twenty-seven days. By his count it was the third week of April. He didn’t know where Amy was, or Doyle. They’d been separated the minute they landed, Amy hustled away by Richards and a group of armed soldiers, Wolgast and Doyle with a coterie of their own—but then they’d been split up, too. Nobody had debriefed him, which at first struck him as strange, but when enough time had passed, Wolgast understood the reason. None of it had officially happened. Nobody was going to debrief him because his story was just that, a story. The only remaining question for him to puzzle over was why Richards hadn’t just shot him in the first place.

The room they’d locked him in was like something in a cheap motel, though plainer: no carpet on the floor, no drapes on the lone window, heavy institutional furniture, bolted down. A tiny closet of a bathroom with a floor as cold as ice. A tangle of wires on the wall where a TV had once been. The door to the hall was thick and opened with a buzz from the outside. His only visitors were the men who brought him his meals: silent, hulking figures wearing unmarked brown jumpsuits who left his trays of food on the small table where Wolgast passed most of each day, sitting and waiting. Probably Doyle was doing the same thing, assuming Richards hadn’t shot him already.

The view wasn’t anything, just empty pine forest, but sometimes Wolgast would stand and look out there for hours, too. Spring was coming. The woods were sodden with melting snow, and from everywhere came the sound of running water—dripping from the roofs and branches, running down the gutters. If he stood on his toes, Wolgast could just make out a fence line through the trees, and figures moving along it. One night at the beginning of the fourth week of his imprisonment, a heavy rainstorm blew through. The force of it was practically biblical; thunder rocked over the mountains all night long, and in the morning he looked out his window and saw that winter was over, rinsed away by the rain.

For a while he’d tried to talk to the men who brought him his meals and, every other day, a clean set of surgical scrubs and slippers for him to wear, even just to ask them their names. But none had offered so much as one word in reply. They moved heavily, their movements clumsy and imprecise, their expressions benumbed and incurious, like the living dead in some old movie. Corpses gathering outside a farmhouse, moaning and tripping over their feet, wearing the tattered uniforms of their forgotten lives: he’d loved such films when he was a boy, not understanding how true they really were. What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?

It was possible, he understood, for a person’s life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more instance in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas and, for whatever reason, made them your own. That was the truth he’d learned on the carousel with Amy, though the thought had been building in him for a while, most of a year, in fact. Wolgast had more than enough time now to think this over. You couldn’t look into the eyes of a man like Anthony Carter and fail to see how this worked. It was as if, that night in Oklahoma, he’d had his first real idea in years. His first since Lila, since Eva. But Eva had died, three weeks short of her first birthday, and since that day he’d walked the earth like the living dead, or a man holding a ghost, the empty space in his arms where Eva had been. That’s why he’d been so good with Carter and the others: he was just like them.

He wondered where Amy was, what was happening to her. He hoped she wasn’t lonely and afraid. More than hoped: he held the idea with the fierceness of a prayer, trying to make it so with his mind. He wondered if he’d ever see her again, and the thought made him rise from his chair and go to the window, as if he might find her out there, in the shifting shadows of the trees. And more hours would somehow go by, the passage of time marked only by the changing light from the window and the comings and goings of the men with his meals, most of which he barely touched. All night long he slept a dreamless sleep that left him dazed in the morning, his arms and legs heavy as iron. He wondered how much longer he had.

Then, on the morning of the thirty-fourth day, someone came to see him. It was Sykes, but he was different. The man he’d met a year ago was all spit and polish. This man, though he was wearing the same uniform, looked like he’d slept under a highway overpass. His uniform was wrinkled and stained; his cheeks and chin were glazed with gray stubble; his eyes were as bloodshot as a boxer’s after a few rounds of a badly mismatched fight. He sat heavily at the table where Wolgast was. He folded his hands, cleared his throat, and spoke.

“I’m here to ask a favor.”

Wolgast hadn’t uttered a word in days. When he tried to answer, his windpipe felt half-closed, thickened from disuse; his voice emerged as a croak.

“I’m done with favors.”

Sykes drew in a long breath. A stale smell was rising off him, dried sweat and old polyester. For a moment he let his eyes drift around the tiny room.

“Probably this all seems a little … ungrateful. I admit that.”

“Fuck yourself.” It pleased Wolgast enormously to say this.

“I’m here about the girl, Agent.”

“Her name,” Wolgast said, “is Amy.”

“I know her name. I know a great deal about her.”

“She’s six. She likes pancakes and carnival rides. She has a toy rabbit named Peter. You’re a heartless prick, you know that, Sykes?”

Sykes withdrew an envelope from the pocket of his coat and placed it on the table. Inside were two photographs. One was a picture of Amy, taken, Wolgast guessed, at the convent. Probably it was the same one that had gone out with the Amber Alert. The second was a high school yearbook photo. The woman in the picture was obviously Amy’s mother. The same dark hair, the same delicate arrangement of the facial bones, the same deep-set, melancholy eyes, though suffused, at the instant that the shutter opened, with a warm, expectant light. Who was this girl? Did she have friends, family, a boyfriend? A favorite subject in school? A sport she loved and was good at? Did she have secrets, a story of herself that no one knew? What did she hope her life would become? She was positioned at a three-quarter angle to the camera, looking over her right shoulder, wearing what looked like a prom dress, pale blue; her shoulders were bare. At the bottom of the photo was a caption: “Mason Consolidated High School, Mason, IA.”

“Her mother was a prostitute. The night before she left Amy at the convent, she shot a trick on the front lawn of a frat house. For the record.”

Wolgast wanted to say, So? How was any of that Amy’s fault? But the image of the woman in the photograph—not even really a woman, just a girl herself—belayed his anger. Maybe Sykes wasn’t even telling the truth. He put the photo down. “What happened to her?”

Sykes lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “No one knows. Gone.”

“And the nuns?”

A shadow skittered across Sykes’s face. Wolgast could tell that he’d hit the mark without even meaning to. Jesus, he thought. The nuns, too? Had it been Richards or somebody else?

“I don’t know,” Skyes answered.

“Look at you,” Wolgast said. “Yes, you do.”

Sykes said nothing more about it, his silence telling Wolgast, This line of conversation is over. He rubbed his eyes and returned the photos to their envelope and put it away.

“Where is she?”

“Agent, the thing is—”

“Where’s Amy?”

Sykes cleared his throat again. “That’s the reason I’m here, you see,” he said. “The favor. We think Amy may be dying.”

Wolgast wasn’t allowed to ask any questions. He wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone, or look around, or step from Sykes’s line of vision. A detail of two soldiers led him across the compound, through the damp morning light. The air felt and smelled like spring. After almost five weeks in his room, Wolgast found himself taking deep, hungry breaths. The sun was painful to his eyes.

Once they were in the Chalet, Sykes took him down an elevator, four floors. They exited onto an empty hallway, Spartan and white, like a hospital. Wolgast guessed they were fifty feet belowground, maybe more. Whatever Sykes’s people kept down here, they wanted at least that much dirt separating it from the world above. They came to a door marked MAIN LAB, but Sykes passed it without slowing his stride. More doors, and then they came to the one Sykes wanted. He slid a card through the reader and opened it.

Wolgast found himself in some kind of observation room. On the other side of the broad window, in dim, blue light, Amy’s small form lay on a hospital bed, alone. She was connected to an IV, but that was all. Beside her bed was a plastic chair, empty. From tracks on the ceiling hung a group of color-coded hoses, coiled like the pneumatic hoses at a garage. Otherwise the room was bare.

“This is him?”

Wolgast turned to see a man he hadn’t noticed before. He was wearing a lab coat and green scrubs, like Wolgast’s.

“Agent Wolgast, this is Dr. Fortes.”

They nodded without shaking hands. Fortes was young, not even thirty. Wolgast wondered if he was an MD or something else. Like Sykes, Fortes appeared exhausted, physically spent. His skin was oily, and he needed a haircut and a shave. His glasses looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in a month.

“She has an embedded chip. It transmits vitals to the panel here.” Fortes showed him: heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, temperature. Amy’s was 102.6.

“Where?”

“Where what?” The doctor’s eyes floated with incomprehension.

“Where’s the chip?”

“Oh.” Fortes looked at Sykes, who nodded. Fortes pointed at the back of his own neck. “Subcutaneous, between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. The power source is pretty nifty, actually, a tiny nuclear cell. Like the kind on satellites, only much smaller.”

Nifty. Wolgast shuddered. A nifty nuclear power source in Amy’s neck. He turned to Sykes, who was watching with a look of caution.

“Is this what happened to the others? Carter and the rest.”

“They were … preliminary,” Sykes said.

“Preliminary to what?”

He paused. “To Amy.”

Fortes explained the situation: Amy was in a coma. No one had expected this, and her fever was too high and had gone on too long. Her kidney and liver values were depressed.

“We were hoping you could talk to her,” Sykes said. “This sometimes helps with patients in a prolonged state of unconsciousness. Doyle tells us that she’s pretty … bonded with you.”

A two-stage air lock connected them to Amy’s room. Sykes and Fortes led him into the first chamber. An orange biosuit was hanging on the wall, the empty helmet tipped forward, like a man with a broken neck. Sykes explained how it worked.

“You’ll need to put this on, then wrap all seams with duct tape. The valves at the base of the helmet connect to the hoses in the ceiling. They’re color-coded, so that should be obvious. When you come back through, you need to shower in the suit, then shower again without it. There are instructions on the wall.”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 534