Three A.M.

by Steven John

  “My pants got some gasoline on ’em. Didn’t seem safe.”

  He nodded, his face again placid. He seemed perfectly satisfied after this cursory explanation. I had to learn all I could about this man—he had to know almost everything about this place.

  “Sorry if I interrupted your dinner,” I said, gesturing toward the sandwich. “Feel free to finish.” He sat back down, folding over the corner of a page in Huck Finn and putting the book aside, still open.

  “So are you here for a resupply?” he asked through a mouthful of food. “Seems I’m about due for it.”

  “Yeah. That was the plan, anyway. Probably tomorrow.”

  “Good. I’m all out of milk powder and eggs.”

  I crossed to the wall of lockers and leaned up against them, watching him in profile. “How long have you been here, Verlassen?”

  “Here? At the dam? About four years. Just shy, actually, I think. Who’s counting? When I hit five, they’ll ship me out and that’ll be that. Watching the calendar just gets depressing, y’know.”

  “Who’s they?”

  He snorted and then dragged a sleeve across his nose. “That’s a good one! You’re they, bud!” I smiled and shrugged as if to say, Just kidding. “Say, what was your name again?”

  “I didn’t give it. Sorry—it’s Thomas. Tom Heller.”

  “Nice to meet you, Tom. This your first time at the dam? I mean it probably is—I ain’t never seen you, but this thing’s been here years.”

  “Yeah … yeah, it’s my first time.”

  He nodded and took another giant bite of his sandwich, leaving just a crust behind, which he balled up in a napkin and pushed aside. The napkin fell open, and the remnants fell out onto the table. He made no move to clean up.

  “Well, I’m gonna go for a smoke. Care to join?” I nodded and straightened up. “Then you can check all the dials and gauges and whatnot you boys always do and leave old Hank all by his lonesome again.”

  I followed him through a heavy iron door. It led into a small square room with a spiral staircase in its center. The thunder of the falling water echoed more loudly in here, and the air was quite damp. Dim track lighting running up one corner of the narrow room cast shadows across the walls and stairs. I followed Verlassen up dozens of corkscrew turns.

  Eventually he looked back at me and spoke over the dull roar. “Imagine trying to sleep hearing this shit every night! Ha! Takes a while.”

  “You said at five years, we’ll ship you out.… What’d you mean?”

  “You are new! That’s my contract length.” We reached the top of the stairs, and he threw wide a door connected to a metal grate landing. Darkness penetrated at points by stars framed the doorway as deafening thunder washed over me. Verlassen waited for me to step past him and then pulled the door closed. He shouted to give me bearing as I blinked and rubbed my eyes to adjust them to the dark.

  “I would have taken a longer contract, but it ain’t safe, I guess. I never felt sick or nothing, but what are you gonna do, right?”

  I nodded, not really understanding. He pulled out two cigarettes and handed one to me. On the front of the pack in his hand, I could clearly see the word MARLBORO. I accepted his lighter and cupped my hands around his in the dancing winds. The smoke was rich and fine.

  We were standing on a thin ledge, maybe four feet wide, which curved outward along the dam’s wall before disappearing into the haze. A thin, rusting iron railing stood between us and a long drop.

  “What brought you here, Hank?” I called out, leaning near to his ear.

  “Money. Good money. Gets lonely without even a phone, but man, you deal. I worked most every day of my life, and I’ll make more in these five years’n all of it put together, bud!” He took a drag off his cigarette and nodded to himself. “I’ll head home and retire and never lift a finger again.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “California. Way up north by Oregon. Lots of rivers up there. I worked on every dam north of Frisco, I’ll bet.”

  “Oh yeah? I bet you know all about these things, huh?”

  “You think I could run this sumbitch alone if not? Oh yeah, I know rivers and dams, Heller. Shasta, Monticello, Lake Oroville … tension or cantilever or cement, no prob.” He leaned in conspiratorially, lowering his voice only slightly over the crashing water. “I’ll tell you, though, this baby just about runs itself. It’s got more fancy computers and machines and all—I just make sure they keep clicking and whizzing. Which they always do. Piece of pie here. Ain’t like the old days.”

  He leaned away again and continued more to himself than to me. “But I’ve read all my books. I don’t mind being alone, but it makes me sore not having nothing new to read.”

  I was silent for a moment, feigning attention and trying to figure out how to prolong the conversation and turn it my way. Verlassen was clearly not the smartest man, but I sensed a worldly awareness about him that would smell foul play if I didn’t tread softly.

  “Where are we right now, Hank? What part of this thing?”

  “Just above the powerhouse below the main retention wall.” He pointed down and to the left. I followed his gesture but could see nothing in the gloom. “The reservoir’s up behind us. Almost six miles long and half that wide most parts. Whole fuckin’ thing is man-made.” My stomach turned over. “You should see it, Heller—biggest earthworks I’ve ever seen or even heard of. I go up there and look out over it sometimes. Only for just a couple minutes at a time, of course,” he said, glancing over at me with a knowing nod. I returned the gesture, uncomprehending, and he went on.

  “The excess water sluices out of channels over there—” He hooked a thumb to the left, then pointed the other way, and as I leaned over the railing, I could make out falling water in the pale moonlight. “—and there. That’s why it’s so loud right here. We’re kind of near the middle of the bowl, and all the echoes come right here. I love it. Normally ain’t up here for a conversation, though.”

  He flicked his cigarette butt out into the darkness. I wondered how many of them littered the ground below us, how many times he stood there, smoking in the dark and utterly alone.

  Verlassen motioned for me to follow him back into the stairwell and shut the heavy iron door behind us. In the relative quiet, he coughed and then asked, “Well, I guess you want to take your readings now, huh?”

  “Sure. I should try, at least. The other guys know a bit more about it than me, though. They should be along tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? They’re gonna spend the night out there?”

  “I suppose so. Got to get the helicopter working.”

  “Ain’t safe,” he said, shaking his head and turning to lead the way back down the spiral staircase.

  “Why not, Hank?”

  “What?”

  “Why isn’t it safe?”

  Verlsassen stopped and turned to face me. “I get that you’re new to this stuff, but come on, Heller. The sickness all over. I’m sure you boys got your pills and all, but…” He trailed off. “Well, you couldn’t pay me to spend a night outside.” He continued down. I was struck by his words and forgot myself, standing perfectly still, one foot raised slightly to continue my descent. They fed the same line to everyone, inside and out. Dead to the world as the world had been dead to us.

  Verlassen looked back over his shoulder at the sound of my heavy footfalls echoing off the metal steps. He waited at the bottom of the stairs and held the door to the antechamber open for me. Stepping past him, I made a point of taking the rifle off my back and leaning it in a corner of the room. To show him trust.

  “Okay to leave that here?”

  “Ain’t gonna be any visitors unless they came with you.”

  I nodded and Hank walked over to a control panel set in the wall next to the large sliding door. He turned a key that was already sitting in its slot and then pressed the uppermost of three large black buttons. With a groan, the door began to rise, its metal slats clicking together. A dull h
um grew louder as the grate rose into the ceiling. Beyond it, I could see massive machinery.

  I followed Hank into the cavernous chamber as the door locked open with a loud clank. He started off across the floor, and I followed at a very slow pace, marveling at the enormous machines before me. They looked remarkably similar to those I had seen in the warehouse. Twenty of them painted bright blue and red and churning and grinding away rather than rotting beneath a veil of cobwebs. Each had a large base penetrated all over by cords and pipes; the upper half of the contraptions was shaped much like a giant top hat, slowly revolving beneath a thick cable that led up to the ceiling.

  I didn’t realize Verlassen was standing beside me until he spoke. “Lots of watts, as we always say.” He chuckled to himself. “Lots ’n’ lots of watts. Come on—I’ll show you to control.”

  We walked down the row of humming, groaning behemoths toward a thin wooden staircase that led to a small landing. Verlassen led the way up, and past him I could see a wall of windows overlooking the machine room floor. He nudged a door open and stepped into the room beyond it.

  I followed him and for a moment could see nothing but flickering lights and pulsing screens here and there. Then Hank flipped a switch and the room was bathed in a cool blue light. There were dozens of monitors, gauges, dials, and control panels. I walked the length of the small room while Verlassen stood back, arms crossed, looking almost paternally out over the instruments.

  “Everything’s ship shape, Heller. Always is on my watch. Poke around.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” I said, “You know more about this kind of fancy shit than I ever could anyway.”

  He nodded and grinned, walking to a small shelf in the corner. There he sorted through some bags and produced a nondescript bottle of pills. I watched askance as he cracked it open and poured one into his palm, pausing before he recapped the bottle.

  “You had yours today?”

  “What’d you say?” I asked over my shoulder, pretending I hadn’t seen.

  “Your dose. Antidote pills. Good for you and good for me to have you nice and healthy while we’re sharing the same air. I got plenty stockpiled.”

  “Not a bad idea … It has been about twenty-four hours, I guess.” He walked over and handed me a pill. It was a large clear capsule filled with white powder. Hank walked back to the shelf and replaced the pills in a little satchel, producing a bottle of water. He raised it to offer me some.

  “No, dry is fine, thanks.” I mimed taking the pill and slipped it into my jacket pocket. Walking slowly from gauge to gauge and glancing at all the monitors in the room, I made little grunts in the affirmative and pretended to study the intricate system that kept the city alive. I had no clue what I was looking at, but at least every dial’s needle was squarely in the center of its circumference and each screen was full of words like STABLE, READY, or NOMINAL. Well done, Kirk, I thought to myself. Well done.

  “Everything looks good to me, Hank.”

  He smiled and held up both hands to indicate, Well, what can I say. I followed him back down the narrow wooden steps and onto the floor of the machine room. “What are these doors along here?” I asked.

  Verlassen kept walking, answering over his shoulder. “That leads down to the penstock, this—”

  “The what?” I interrupted.

  “The penstock. It’s a big kinda underground tube of water. Gets forced through the main turbine.” He pointed to the next set of steel double doors as he continued on. “Which is down through there.”

  “Can I see it?”

  He stopped walking and laughed, turning to face me. “Ain’t nothing to see unless you want to swim through twenty thousand cubic feet of water and get chewed up by fan blades the size of a truck.” He continued laughing and pushed hard against the silver blue metal doors. They swung open, revealing darkness within. “There, take a look,” he said as he turned and started off again. “Big empty tunnel next to a big tunnel full of cold water.”

  I stepped in front of him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Wait, I want to understand. The water flows through the pen.…”

  “Penstock. It goes in a big ol’ intake and down into the penstock to the turbines.”

  “So what’s all the water spilling over up top?”

  “Out them four chutes? That’s just runoff. Some days there ain’t a drop; some days it comes out like lightning. Depends on the rain, the snow.”

  “But the power is always steady?”

  He looked at me as though I’d asked which hand was left. “Well, yeah—that’s why the intakes are deep down in the reservoir. Not always, actually, I should say. Hell, you should see the Shasta Dam way up near Oregon. Got its intake spillway in the center of a lake. It looks like God reached down and put a drain right in the middle of the water. Biggest spillway in the world—it’s forty feet across.”

  “That sounds like something, all right.”

  Verlassen nodded and began to turn again.

  “Let me ask you, Hank, just because I’m new to this stuff, I heard some of the other guys talking … Could this thing ever break down? I mean, just one guy monitoring it all … What if there was a fire or something up in that control room?”

  “Nah, there’s sprinklers and all. Don’t you worry, Heller—we’re safe.”

  “Is there any way you could shut it down? Turn the power off?”

  He looked hard at me, his dull eyes flashing for a fleeting moment. “No. Christ, hell no. I couldn’t shut it down if I wanted to—the controls are all redundant, see? Here and far off who the hell knows where else—they don’t tell me for security, I guess. And I don’t ask. This thing provides my power too, y’know? I want my air and water filters plugging away just as much as they want theirs.”

  “Theirs … You mean the city?”

  “City? There’s nothing but a couple research posts out there, man!” He seemed offended by my question. “Maybe I wouldn’t have come here if not for the money, but I sure as hell hope they find out what the fuck happened out there too. Stop it from happening again.”

  He was the lone sentinel of a forsaken world, and he didn’t even know it. I figured I could get nothing further out of him. I just had to come up with a way to get him out of here for a while. We walked back to the small room where he had first surprised me, and I slung my weapon as he shut the heavy grate, sealing off the generator room.

  “I’ll walk you out, Heller,” Hank said, flipping a switch next to the line of lockers. The long corridor through which I’d earlier stumbled lit up in a patchwork of shadows and flickering pools of light.

  We walked down the tunnel together in silence, the gritty floor crunching beneath our feet and the dull thunder of falling water all around. As we reached the end of the tunnel, I stepped out onto the road and into the cool night air. I figured the one chance I had to keep Hank safe and out of the way was to play upon his fears.

  “Listen, Hank, I have to level with you. I wasn’t here for a resupply, and as you may have noticed, I don’t know a goddamn thing about dams or the gauges or any of it.” He eyed me quizzically, and I went on. “Tomorrow we’re going to do some tests in the area. We think it may be safe again around here—safe to be out and about. To live. But to be sure, we have to take some air samples from a lot of places, and one of them is in there.” I pointed back down the tunnel. “So I need you to clear out for a while tomorrow. From sunup to sundown. They weren’t going to say anything, but you seem like good people, Hank, and I don’t want you in any danger. It’s safe out here for a few hours. Just take a double dose and clear out for the day, huh? Take a long walk. Maybe around the reservoir—I don’t know. Might be a nice change of scenery.”

  Verlassen’s eyes studied my face. His lips tightened behind his beard. He didn’t believe me—he was going to radio this in.…

  “Take a walk?” He slowly stroked the long whiskers on his chin. “Well, that sounds just fine, Tom. I ain’t spent more than fifteen minutes further than just rig
ht here in four goddamn years!” He smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. “Four years,” he repeated softly.

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I had been holding and reached out to shake his hand.

  “Hey, where are you from, by the way?” he asked.

  “I was from around here, actually. I had to go away for a while, of course, but I was from here.” He frowned knowingly and then bade me a safe trek back. I thanked him and set off down the road, searching the sky for my beacon of stars, wondering how far they’d slid across the firmament. Hank Verlassen stood in the mouth of the tunnel—the door to his world—for a long time, framed by pale gray light from within. As I crossed the bridge, I looked back once more and he was gone.

  I set out across the fields, coughing and wheezing in the cold air. I rubbed my hands together to warm them. Then I remembered something I had noted to myself earlier. I stopped walking and pulled out the pill Verlassen had given me. Rolling the capsule in my fingers, I gently separated the two halves and poured a bit of the white powder into one palm. The little mound shone starkly against my flesh in the moonlight. I took a pinch and put it on my tongue. Sugar.

  15

  I switched off the engine and stepped out into the cold night air, stretching my legs and back. I slung the rifle over my shoulder and leaned against the warm hood of the truck, looking across the low valley between me and the Ayers home. With the same sense of fatality that had led me to Science and Research before, I started off down the hill. There was no other choice to choose. Following a route directly across the grassy fields that would give wide berth to the wreck and the soldiers’ bodies below, I made my way toward the house. The windows were dark. All was silent; not the slightest breeze stirred the cold night air. I had no idea what to expect—the best I could hope for was nothing. Well … maybe not the best I could hope for, but hope had never helped me out that much.

  The house seemed quiet. I circled all the way around it once and was crouching in the tall grass below the manicured yard. There were no lights, no sounds, no vehicles, and no fresh tracks. Finally, slowly, I began to ascend the hill. I kept my rifle at the ready, cocked and with the safety off, my finger resting on the trigger guard, but I felt no fear. The night had gotten colder as it wore on. Icy air sneaked in between my clothing and skin. I shivered and picked up the pace; I had spent too long sitting still, observing the house, and was chilled to the bone.