Standing on the second-floor balcony of the ruined factory, Chris Korman could see his boss striding across the open field in front of the remains. A trick of the forces involved in the explosion had left this building and three houses virtually intact. The separate concussions must have spent their force on each other as they neared this spot.

Not that the people in this place had survived. The rest of the force crushed them. No, they were the only people left identifiable.

Chris understood that facet of the carnage. His lifelong passion was working with explosives. Fireworks, movie explosions, real weaponry. If it went boom, Chris loved it.

Until now.

This was what Berlin must have looked like at the end of the Second World War. This valley was so bad that they had never rebuilt it. Even the machinery in the ruins was never recovered for use elsewhere. Below him, on the factory floor, dozens of upright presses stood forlornly as if waiting for the day the workers would return to the valley. They were rusting monuments to a decade of violence.

It was enough to make Chris want to find another job.

Of course, the strange noises in the building added to his desire to leave. Metallic squeaks and thumps echoed in the remnant. You might think the years would have allowed all the noise to be leached from the machines, but Chris suspected the place was never silent.

A loud noise drew his attention back to Anthony as Chris’s boss entered the building.

“Bloody hell, what a mess,” Anthony looked for Chris. “What the hell are you doing up there?”

“Rigging the flash bang,” Chris pointed to the flash pot he was fusing. The simple pyrotechnic would make a bright flash and a minor concussion that Anthony hoped would scare the wits of one or more victims. Of course, it had to be done just right or it would seem like a cheap parlor trick. They would light it off when the family was nearing the building, far enough away to keep them from understanding what they saw. Once the charge fired, Chris would come out of hiding and gather the evidence to a spot they designated as a hide. The victims would have a hard time finding the old manager’s office and Chris if they made it to the second floor, and from his vantage, Chris could trigger several other surprises for the Ottingers.

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Anthony smiled with satisfaction as he examined the preparations in the building. This was going to knock the socks off the audience. They would talk about it for years.

Satisfied with the preparations, he waved to Chris and climbed out of a hole in the west wall. The houses were a danger to anyone walking in them. As a precaution, Anthony had placed signs telling the victims to stay out of the decaying wooden structures. As an added effort, they wrapped bright yellow caution taped over the doors and windows using tacks to hold the tape in place.

As he walked around the few houses and checked for entries they might have missed, and found none, something dropped within one house with a loud bang. Anthony looked at the small home with interest, but nothing more. Unlike the other people working in the valley, he felt no impact for the people who had died here so long ago. It was possible his immunity came from a youth spent in Coventry. His city had seen the worse of the German bombers during the war.

The feel and taste of death were not new to Anthony. The dead of this valley were just as dead as the thousands who died in Coventry.

He shrugged off the line of thinking and walked to the northern wall of the valley. Here was the only artifact that interested him beyond a mental catalogue of the destruction. In the sheer wall of the rock face, a steel door towered over Anthony.

The paint had peeled off over the years and rust taken hold with a vengeance, yet the steel straps welded to the door looked strong enough to resist unwanted entry. A few of the straps partially covered damage to the door. The straps looked welded on after the explosion, closing this bunker off from the investigation.

Still, he wanted to know what was in the bunker, why the Americans felt it needed such enormous steel doors. It was a mystery begging to be solved.

Anthony smiled to himself. If the mystery were to be uncovered, it would be by someone other than himself. Only a fool would break into a place that was this secure in a valley that manufactured explosives.

Anthony was not a fool. Or so he thought.

Turning his back on the doors, he continued his check of the preparations.