The room was the biggest open space in the bunker. Marcus estimated that it was thirty feet wide by thirty feet long. The walls had been completely covered from floor to ceiling with mirrors. A massive black pentagram covered the floor. At each of the symbol’s five points rested a chair. Each chair contained the small burnt body of a child. Their hands had been bound behind their backs. Their heads were tilted at odd angles. Agony was etched onto their charred features.
Maggie covered her mouth and looked away. Beaman stumbled back into the previous room. Marcus could hear his whispered prayer clearly in the silence of the bunker.
He shone his flashlight around the rest of the room and found more bodies stacked in the corner like a pile of garbage. Adults. Five women, three men. The parents of the murdered children.
Stepping closer, he made a quick visual examination of the bodies. He wished that Andrew had been there to tell them an exact cause of death. With the level of decay, it was difficult for him to determine much about how they had died.
Maggie said, “I bet they tried to stop Conlan when they found out that he planned to …”
She didn’t finish her sentence, and she didn’t have to. Marcus guessed that Conlan had been a very charismatic and persuasive man. After all, he had convinced several families to move into a hidden underground bunker. But apparently his brainwashing techniques hadn’t been effective enough to convince these people to sacrifice their own children. But Conlan wouldn’t have cared about them, anyway. He had been prepared for their objections and had dealt with them. Poisoning would have been the easiest way. Marcus pictured all of them sitting down for a meal. Maybe laughing. Maybe even happy in their simple lives. And then they were gone.
He turned back to the pentagram. When he had first looked at it, his eyes had been immediately drawn to the burnt bodies on the symbol’s periphery. Now he saw there was also a small stool at its very center. And it was empty.
Stepping to the core of the dark annulus, Marcus sat down on the stool. His eyes swept around to the faces of the children. They were all looking in at him. Their eyes accusing him.
“This is where the Anarchist sat,” he whispered.
“Oh my God,” Maggie said. “He sat there and watched all the other kids burn to death. His friends.”
The room was silent.
As Marcus looked around the circle, he wondered what he would be like if he had been subjected to even a fraction of the pain and suffering that men like Ackerman and the Anarchist had endured.
He sat there for what felt like a very long time, but finally he said, “We should go. We’ll get some fresh air and then come back down. See if we can find any other clues.”
Maggie nodded, and they stepped back into the previous chamber, leaving the death and pain behind. Maggie placed a reassuring hand on Beaman’s shoulder and ushered the old man forward.
But then Marcus heard a strange sound, like the quiet rumble of a distant shower or faucet running. And he smelled something as well. He sniffed the air.
Then everything clicked, and he ran toward the ladder. He scrambled up it. He could hear Maggie and Beaman saying something, but he didn’t have time to listen.
His body was halfway through the trapdoor opening when he looked up toward the cellar doors and the other ladder that led outside. The figure standing there was lit from behind, but the man was also leaning down into the opening. What looked like a sixty-four-ounce bottle of Kingsford lighter fluid was turned upside down in his hands. The contents of the bottle flowed down the ladder and pooled on the floor.
Marcus looked up into the man’s face. Their eyes met.
Then the man lit the stream of liquid. Fire exploded down the ladder, and the cellar doors swung shut.