The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [62]
The pickup had bumped to a sudden stop. Stan Odum was showing his hairy hand to the electric eye that opened the security gate. After all those spying missions, I was finally entering the Onion.
18
Now that the truck had stopped, I heard Barbie’s teeth chattering. Mine decided to join hers. We’d gotten chilled in the cave, and riding in the open air had sucked any remaining warmth out. On the bright side, I noticed that my teeth didn’t ache anymore, even when they clanked together like ice.
Jed put an arm around each of us and rubbed our shoulders briskly as he said, “Don’t worry, guys. Stan will take good care of you. He’s really a good fella underneath all the bulldozers. The Gash to the Onion was graveled with good intentions.”
Boots Odum a good fella? This was not the same Jed who used to picket outside the entrance to ORC, protesting the ruin of the land in the gore.
The truck spiraled downward through a parking garage with several floors. The top floor held all the huge equipment under the height of the dome—bulldozers, dump trucks, backhoes. The middle floors held more cars than I’d expect during the wee hours of Sunday night. There must be more people working here than I ever realized.
On the bottom floor, we passed a bunch more vehicles—one, a very familiar rusty red pickup. Me and Barbie gaped at each other.
Ma seemed stunned. “What’s your father’s truck doing here?”
We all looked at Jed.
“I’ll explain later,” he whispered. “The walls in this place have ears. And eyes. Beware.”
We went all the way to the end of the spiral and stopped right next to the entrance on the bottom floor. We must have been pretty deep underground. The parking spot had the number one painted on the concrete and a RESERVED CEO sign posted on the wall.
“We’re here.” Jed scooched himself to the back of the truck and lowered the tailgate, then dropped to the floor, moving better than I expected him to in his leg braces. “Come on.” He held out his hand to help Ma down.
“Alrighty, then,” said Boots Odum, joining us. He hoisted up his jeans by the belt loops, reminding me so much of Pa that I stepped behind Ma. “I realize you folks will want to know why I brought you here instead of taking you home. Unfortunately, there’s a lot I can’t say. Some questions simply don’t have answers. Some things, I can’t say because of classified information. So please bear with me.”
“Classified by whom?” said Ma in a tight voice, her arms crossed over her chest. “Are you working for the government, Stan?”
Boots Odum ignored that and continued with his welcome speech. “One thing I do know is that we have to scan you all immediately, just to make sure you’re all right.”
“All right,” said Ma, her arms still crossed. “Why wouldn’t we be all right?”
He winced at her apologetically, then looked at his watch. “We’d better hurry.”
I wanted to ask why the rush, but I figured that was classified too.
Our host stepped to the entrance, showed his hand to another electric eye, and led the way past a series of wide elevators down a long hallway with white concrete block walls, like at school. I followed at his heels, taking it all in.
The legendary boots clickety-clacked on the hard tile floor and left a faint trail of leathery aroma along with clods of mud they were tracking in. Jed’s steps went THUMP unevenly behind us, like one leg took longer than the other, but he kept up.
The walls had lots of doors. Some had normal department names like Human Resources or Payroll, and some had mysterious names like Project Foobar or Little Genius Lab. Every door had a security scanner. You probably had to let an electric eye scan your hand to use the bathroom if you worked at ORC.
Occasionally an archway would curve off into another hallway, reminding me of the passages in the tunnel where we’d found the cavern. A strange sweet scent that I recognized right away drifted from one hallway.
“I know that smell from somewhere,” said Ma.
“What is that smell, Mr. Odum?” I had a pretty good idea it was adrium,