I dropped to my knees and pounded the floorboards until an echo answered my fists, then asked Noor to find me something to pry the hatch door with while I ran my palms across the boards. I found the disguised hinge just as she returned holding the bloody, bronze-handled letter opener, which only moments ago had been buried in the neck of a dead wight. I could almost hear Miss Peregrine’s voice say What an endlessly useful little doodah as I stuck it into the thin gap and pried up a three-foot section of floorboards. Underneath was the armored bunker door.
Noor expressed no surprise at any of it. V had her own secret time loop; compared to that, an underground bunker must have seemed like a foregone conclusion.
The bunker door was locked with an alphanumeric keypad. I started to punch in the code, but just like that, my mind went blank.
“You’re not typing,” Noor pointed out.
I stared at the pad. “It’s not a birthday. It’s a word . . .”
Noor raked a hand down the side of her face.
I shut my eyes, tapped my head. “It’s a word. A word I know.”
The compass needle wobbled, then steadied. I could feel the hollow tearing through the woods, nearly out of them now. I stared until the keypad began to blur. It was in Polish. Little something.
“Please, for God’s sake, hurry,” Noor said through her teeth. “I’ll be right back.”
She left and came back a moment later with the dark brown comforter from my grandfather’s bed. She settled it over V’s body.
Tiger! Little tiger. That’s what he used to call me. But what’s the word in Polish?
Noor rolled V over, wrapped her in the blanket. A mummy in a microfiber shroud. And then it came to me, and my finger stabbed the keys.
T-y-g-r-y-s-k-u
The lock tumbled open. I could breathe again. I swung back the heavy door and it banged like a gunshot against the floor.
“Thank God.” Noor sighed.
A ladder descended into darkness. We slid V’s shrouded body to the edge. I climbed down three rungs, one arm wrapped around her calves, but she was too heavy to carry down by myself, and there was no time to lower her gently into the bunker tunnel, with the two of us inching downward rung by rung.
A loud metallic groan came from the porch, which might have been the wind tearing the screens away—or a hollow.
“We’ve just got to drop her,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Noor didn’t reply, just nodded. She drew a deep breath. I silently apologized to V for what was about to happen, then let her slip from my arms into the dark. There was a loud crack of bones breaking as she landed. Noor winced and I suppressed a shudder, and then we climbed down after her.
Noor pulled the hatch door closed above us. It shut with a reverberating clang and locked automatically, and we were engulfed in dark. Crashes echoed from the other side, and we heard a howl that was definitely not the wind. I climbed the rest of the way down the ladder, stumbled over V’s body, and ran my hands along the rough concrete wall until I found a light switch.
Green fluorescents built into the walls flickered on. Thankfully, we still had power despite the storm. Knowing my grandfather, the bunker was connected to a backup generator somewhere.
A crash from inside the house echoed off the tunnel walls.
“So, this place is hollow-proof?” Noor asked, looking up at the hatch.
“Supposed to be.”
“Was that ever tested?”
The hollow started pounding on the hatch, the sound like a bell ringing dully.
“I’m sure it was.”
A lie. If the wights had ever found out where Grandpa Portman lived—before last year, that is—he’d have had to move his family, go into hiding, and never come back. Which meant the integrity of this forty-year-old bunker was being tested for the first time, right now.
“But let’s get away from that door,” I said. “Just in case.”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
The command center at the heart of the bunker was as I remembered it. Twenty feet from end to end. Bunk bed against one wall, military-issue supply locker against the other. A chemical toilet. A hulking old teleprinter machine atop a hulking wooden desk. The room’s most obvious feature was a periscope that hung down by a cylindrical tube from the ceiling, identical to the one in V’s house.
Even through the thick hatch door and down the long concrete tunnel to this underground room, sounds of destruction from above echoed vividly. The hollow was on a rampage. I tried not to think about what it was doing to the house—or what it would do to us, if given the chance. I didn’t have a lot of faith in my hollow-taming abilities at present. Our best chance at survival was to stay away from it. I felt strangely superstitious, too, about trying to fight a hollowgast here, in the very place my grandfather had been killed by one. Like it would be tempting fate.
“All I see is tall grass.” Noor had put her face to the periscope and was turning a slow circle. “Your grandfather’s surveillance system doesn’t work because nobody bothered to mow the lawn.” She pulled her face away and looked at me. “We can’t stay down here.”
“Well, we can’t go up there,” I replied. “That hollow will turn us inside out.”
“Not if we find something to kill it with.” She went to the supply locker and opened the door, revealing shelves of neatly stacked survival gear. Food and medical supplies. Nothing deadly.
“There aren’t any weapons down here. I’ve looked.”
She was excavating the locker anyway, raking a shelf of tinned food onto the floor with a clatter. “There was an NRA convention’s worth of guns in the garage. How can there be none in your grandpa’s survival bunker?”
“I don’t know, but there aren’t.”
I went to help her, though I knew it was pointless. I shoved aside a stack of mission logs, procedural manuals, and other books to look behind them.
“What the hell.” Having searched every corner of the locker, she turned her back on it and threw a can of beans across the floor. “Whatever. We still can’t stay down here.” She had remained remarkably composed ever since we’d come in from the yard, but now panic was creeping back into her voice.
“Just give me a minute,” I said. “I need to think.”
I plopped down in the swivel chair. There was another way out, of course: through the second tunnel, up into the dummy house on the other side of the cul-de-sac, where my grandfather’s white Chevrolet Caprice sat waiting in the garage. Then again, maybe the hollow would run outside the moment it heard the Caprice’s motor and murder us before we could even back out of the driveway. More to the point, maybe I was not yet ready for the blind rush and perfect execution such an escape would require.