The smell of boiling cabbage and scorched electrical insulation drifted down the corridor from the staff mess hall.
Mara stepped over a tangled snake of rubber-jacketed cables, her flashlight beam sweeping across the secondary transfer vestibule that connected the utility cellar stairs to Ward C. Ahead, where the corridor widened into an arched intersection, a barricade had been thrown together with frantic, desperate haste: two overturned stainless-steel laundry hampers, three heavy oak supply tables turned on their sides, and a crisscross of slotted angle-iron wedged into the door frames.
Behind the barricade, five men and two women stood in grease-stained gray smocks. One of them, a broad-shouldered man with a soot-blackened welder’s cap pulled low over his forehead, held a heavy thirty-six-inch pipe wrench resting across his forearm like a carbine. Beside him, a younger woman with red-rimmed eyes and a bandage taped across her nose was gripping a marine flare gun, her finger white against the plastic trigger guard.
Beyond the barricade, through the open wire-glass doors of Ward C, Mara could see eleven people sitting on canvas cots—unprocessed intake captives who had arrived on the south convoy two nights ago, their civilian coats still dusted with road grit, watching the standoff in mute, frozen terror.
