That was all Keene needed to see. He turned and retraced his steps back to his office. It didn’t take a psychic to sense the group was a hair away from exploding. If Hanratty had been possessed of real guts and a defter touch, he might’ve talked them down. But he didn’t and he couldn’t and Taylor was precisely the wrong catalyst, a rock-head with too much authority and the problem-solving sensitivity of an ape. The man was so ill-suited to the task of calming a distressed group of people that Keene wondered idly if the Observer’s reach was so great that he’d somehow arranged for Taylor to be present at precisely the wrong place at the right time.
He picked up his pace as the shouts took on a different tone. Anger, of course. Outrage. And the most frightening of all, release.
He had tried to warn both Hanratty and Taylor that the crew—ostensibly selected for their self-sufficient, take-charge attitude—couldn’t be put off forever, that they wouldn’t be satisfied with half-truths and orders to obey some arbitrary chain of command. They were used to thinking and acting independently. It was obvious that, between the scripted accidents and whatever insanity the Observer had planned, everyone on base was being primed to reach a breaking point. How and when they handled it could spell the difference between a group that worked together to get out of a jam or an all-out riot spiraling down into anarchy and violence. Keene knew which way the group was tipping.
He reached his office nauseated and shivering, perhaps a delayed reaction to the scene in the kitchen or maybe anger at the inevitability of it all. He’d told Hanratty to do some major damage control sooner, long before midwinter and the communications debacle. Then Jennings had stormed in, dropped her fucking bombshell, and suddenly it looked like all of them were in a conspiracy. The moment had been lost and now this was the result.
Keene had started making plans of his own as soon as he saw Hanratty and Taylor marching down the garden path. With the fitness level one might expect from a fifty-one-year-old psychologist, there was no way he was going to risk an overland trek to the Russian base, but neither was he going to hole up in his office with the desk blocking the door. At some point, someone was going to decide that the base psychologist had to have been behind the experiment and he wasn’t going to wait to see what kind of mob showed up looking for answers.
A few days after the power had gone out, sensing a seismic shift in how Shackleton’s psychic environment had changed, he’d started making nightly treks down the Beer Can and into the ice tunnels, moving his most important files, batteries, food, and other supplies into a hidey-hole just off the main artery. He had no illusions about surviving the four months until help arrived in November; he just had to hunker down, stay safe, and wait until the fire had burnt itself out. Then, maybe, he could resurface, perhaps reestablish communications and leave this nightmare.
In his office, he moved quickly, staying long enough to scoop only the most critical pieces of his work into a backpack. He spared a last look, feeling nothing but revulsion for the little space—the books, the paintings, the stupid fucking fish—then flipped the lights off and hurried out, locking the door behind him.
He paused to glance down the hall: the knot of people was seething, wrestling, breaking each other’s bones and hearts and trust. Involuntarily, his lip curled. They got what they deserved.
He turned in the opposite direction and headed for the Beer Can. When the shots rang out, he stopped in his tracks, shocked. Then he broke into a run, realizing in a wash of insight that even he had underestimated just how bad things had gotten.
Hanratty didn’t know when the situation had gotten so out of hand.
Someone had punched him in the side of the head and it ached from the cheek up to the temple, while a dull throbbing emanated from his thigh where someone else had kicked him. One hand held the collar of someone’s shirt—the face was so twisted with anger, he couldn’t recognize him—then the face was whipped away, replaced by a woman’s clawed hand raking at his eyes.
Throughout the melee, he was aware of Taylor shouting hoarsely, threatening people with detention if they didn’t clear out. Hanratty fought the urge to laugh—the fool was telling the genie to get back into the bottle or else . It had explained a lot, he thought, when he’d found out that Taylor was not nearly the international mercenary soldier he’d initially claimed, but instead had been a sheriff’s deputy at a Louisiana jail before working security at a few TransAnt facilities. And now his inexperience was coming home to roost.
Hanratty pushed the woman—he finally recognized her as Beth Mu?ez—away and shouted to Taylor, “Back up, back up! We’ve got to get to the office and regroup.”
Taylor, his normally flat expression twisted into fury, didn’t seem to hear him. He was struggling with Dave Boychuck, who, even with his wrist broken, was still wrestling the security chief one-handed. From nowhere, someone took a swing at Taylor, landing a weak punch that the chief caught on a hunched shoulder. The second attack seemed to trigger something in Taylor; he lashed out a kick that buckled Dave’s knee, punched him in the throat for good measure, then backed up.