After finding Delgado in the stairwell, he’d gotten three of his men to accompany him down to the basement, and they weren’t going back upstairs until every test subject down there was dead. He’d brought McCoy, Baker, and Axelrod because they hadn’t hesitated to follow orders when they were outside getting the sheriff. When Baker had found the test subject lying in the road—Kaufman had later told Ollie he’d run over the man with his car—trying to crawl away, he’d shot it without pause. He needed men like that with him down in the basement, especially the subbasement, which he had expected to be everything it turned out to be. Axelrod had already shot one of the test subjects in the basement and their adrenaline was pumping. They were ready for more. Ollie tried to keep his adrenaline under control as they slowly made their way through the damp darkness, their feet crunching over the rocky dirt floor. He had put his ski mask back on and was glad of it because the light from his headlamp kept glinting off of cobwebs, and with the mask on, he could walk through them without feeling their tingling, sticky touch on his face.
