Page 29 of Hurry Up And Wait

“Wait, where’s the lab?”

The man slowly faced me with an almost gleeful look. “Underground.”

I walked through the tunnels,wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into. There was literally an underground bunker. Like the kind they used during the Cold War. I didn’t know that was even still a thing. Were people really worried about air raids and nuclear bombs? Should I have a bunker built somewhere?

I studied each screen on the wall as we passed. Updates on the day scrolled across the screens, maps of the tunnels filled the majority of the space, and there was some kind of beacon system flashing on the screen.

“What’s that?” I asked, stopping by one of them. I pointed at the dots flashing.

Dash stepped up beside me, his arms crossed over his chest. “Those are locators.”

“They’re moving.”

“Yep.”

Wow, talk about being informative. “But what are they tracking?”

He looked at me funny. “People.”

“Like…people in town?”

He barked out a laugh. “No, us.” He pulled up his sleeve and pointed to a thin scar on his arm. “We all have them.”

He had a tracker in his arm. That was…insane. Dogs had trackers. Maybe cats. Hamsters, even. But people? My eyes flicked from his arm to his face. “You…have a tracker.”

“For jobs. You know, if we get separated from the team or taken hostage or find ourselves in a foreign country or…the ocean.”

“The ocean,” I repeated.

He shrugged. “It happens more than you think.”

I didn’t think it happened at all, but what did I know?

“Can anyone get a tracker?” Riley asked. “Or do we have to work here?”

I nudged her in the side. “What would you need a tracker for?”

She grinned at Dash, batting her eyes. “So someone can always find me.”

He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Married,” he said, holding up his left hand.

She sighed. “All the good ones are.”

We followed him the rest of the way until the tunnel opened up into what looked like the inside of a grain elevator. Except, we were underground.

“Is this…”

“A missile silo?” Dash grinned. “Pretty cool, right?”

“You work in a missile silo,” I repeated.

I knew I was repeating everything like I was stupid. Well…more like he was stupid. This was insane. Did the town know that these men functioned like mole people? Or was this the best-kept secret in the Midwest? Just a bunch of men hanging around underground, plotting and devising plans to take over the world. Okay, maybe they weren’t going to take over the world, but what on earth could they possibly need a bunker like this for?

And how did Kavanaugh get wrapped up in an organization like this? From everything I was finding out about him, I would guess he wasn’t the same person I knew as a kid. It was like he had been cloned, but given an entirely new personality. Not that I was complaining. I liked this new version of him just as much as the last.

Especially his muscles.

I realized that I had been staring at the massive room, freaking out internally because…well, this was really weird. I heard a hard thwack and looked behind me to a room where a woman was cheering on other women. I made my way over to the doorway and peeked inside. There were five of them, all gathered around a styrofoam cutout of a man. And he had knives embedded in his junk.