Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  Mr. Bridge’s lips were pursed. They disappeared beneath his mustache. “I’m not a scientist.”

  “Yeah. Me neither.”

  I waited. Bridge could see what the deal was now. I wasn’t turning anything over without this conversation.

  “What it is…my understanding is…that what it is is cells.”

  “Human cells?”

  “Yes and no.”

  I aimed my gun at him. “Bridge.”

  His face contorted. He didn’t know how to answer. He didn’t know whether he could. Of course I already knew what it was. I had been to Saint Anselm’s. I had found Father Barton, as I expected to, in a wretched state, his man Cook having mysteriously disappeared along with his means of tracking me. I got the drop on Mr. Maris, whispered sweetly to him a little with my weapon in the small of his back, and then me and Father Barton had done some talking. I had done just what I was doing now—held the gun in one hand and this tiny vial in the other, held both before his pale staring eyes, and said to him, this isn’t the financial records of any fucking Malaysian shell company, is it?

  At gunpoint he had told me what it was, admitted what he had known all along—that he had sent me down there, run me through all that he had run me through, run Kevin through all that he had run Kevin through, all on the basis of a lie. The truth was too heavy, too serious to be trusted to the poor dumb Negroes he was working so hard to save. Another layer, another layer down.

  I had held the damn thing up in front of that monster and threatened to destroy it—burn it before he could show it to anyone. I had flicked my cigarette lighter open beneath the envelope until his soft young face melted with fear. Please, he had said. Please…

  And now here was Bridge, the same desperate expression, the same worried Please. He rubbed the corner of his mustache.

  “They are hybrid cells, Victor. From eggs that are…eggs that have been harvested from human subjects.”

  “Slaves.”

  He sighed. He looked up toward the statue, as if the Martyr would provide him some relief. I just wanted it. I needed it. I needed for him to say it.

  “What is it, Mr. Bridge?” Now I was walking, coming down the steps toward him, gun in one hand, envelope in the other. “You think I’ll back out? You think this is the one thing I can’t live with? After everything I’ve lived with, you think I can’t live with this?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. GGSI has a medical facility. Okay? The egg is harvested from a human subject, and—my understanding—the nucleus is removed. And then new material, not new, but taken from other subjects…look, what they’re working on, on making…” He wasn’t a scientist. It sounded insane, but it was true, so he said it. “On making people. It’s hard to understand.”

  But I did understand. I understood better than he did. In that black building on the map, auxiliary to the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, they were taking girls like Luna and stealing their eggs, separating out the DNA, forming hybrids, breeding cell lines.

  Barton had had his own language for it, had turned it all into biblical horror: They are casting themselves as God. They are bringing forth the stuff of life.

  I put it more plainly still, my gun still trained on Bridge’s wide midsection. “They’re growing slaves.”

  “Well,” he said, “they are trying.”

  It was coming up, my anger, my disgust, my wild red feeling. It was coming up fast and I knew it was going to and I struggled to keep my voice even. Keep it calm.

  “What’ve the marshals got to do with this?”

  “Elements within my service,” he began, and from the way he was looking at me, weighing me, I could tell he was trying to find my breaking point. See how much I could take. “Not me, mind. But others—have been involved. In helping to make arrangements to provide some of the necessary technology.”

  “Arrangements.”

  Bridge nodded. “Again, not me. We are a large organization, Victor, with many layers. But yes. If the population held in bondage, if they were—not technically…people any longer. Certain constitutional issues, certain political issues…would be resolved.”

  I tilted the vial one way and then another in my hand, felt the small movement of the liquid. This is what Barton wanted to publicize, this is what the marshals were desperate to have kept secret: not some banking irregularities, not fiscal collusion. This. The next step. They’d been improving the machinery of slavery for two centuries, inventing new tortures to make people work harder and longer. Stripping slaves of their names, their families, their spirits. This is where it went next: people with no bloodline, people with no past and no future, people with no claim to freedom. These strong hands belong to you…Hands and back and spirit, too…

  Bridge took a step up toward me. “You can appreciate, I think, why it is important, for a variety of reasons, that this experimentation, at this delicate stage, not become public. That’s all.” Now he was getting bold. Now some steel was coming into Bridge’s voice. He saw the end; he was ready. “So you’re going to hand me that package, Victor, and I’m going to take it. We are going to determine that it’s the right material, then we are going to destroy it. And then we are going to do as you have asked. We are going to set you free.”

  “When? And who’s we?”

  “Right now.” Just like that, his voice had taken up its old boss-man confidence. “I have traveled here from Gaithersburg with a technician named Lance Cormer. Dr. Cormer works in a special division in our service, and he has come prepared.”

  “Prepared for what?”

  “Prepared to take care of both ends of this. He can quickly do some initial testing on the materials you’ve provided to make sure it’s what we’re looking for. Make sure you’re not—that you’re not pulling some trick here.” He rubbed his forehead. “Mind, I don’t think you are. You’re a straight shooter, Victor. You’ve always been a straight shooter.”

  He puffed out his cheeks a little, and tilted his head, and I felt that he had somehow shifted, started singing in a new key.

  “And, Victor, further to that, I did want to say: thank you for your service to your country.”

  I had to laugh. I laughed. “Okay,” I said. “You’re welcome.”

  “And also, uh—good luck to you.”

  I didn’t laugh any more. What was next? Was he going to give me a gold watch?

  I tried to see behind Bridge’s eyes, see how deep he went. Was he saying merely what he was saying, or was he saying he was sorry for what he had done to me, what all the world of Bridges had done to all the world of me’s?

  Should I have felt in that moment a matching spirit of magnanimity and grace? Should I have extended my hand for him to clasp, placed my black hand in his white one and smiled, no harm done, life goes on? I could not feel that spirit of grace, not in that moment. Not after all I had been through in the preceding two weeks and in the six years before that. I would have had to be superhuman, I think, to feel that forgiveness. I was and am possessed of all human flaws and weaknesses. I did not want to forgive him, so I did not. On the other hand, I wanted to fire the gun and watch him fly backwards on the steps, but I did not do that, either. Call that even.

  “It is important we both realize, Victor, that it’s merely an accident of history that created this problem. An accident of timing. Do you see what I mean? We were precipitous, and agents of my service were too eager to be helpful. That was all. But in time, this”—he gestured to the vial, and I saw the energy in his fingertips, wishing he could just grab it from me; I held it together—“will all be perfectly legal.”

  “I don’t think so. I think in time…”

  I couldn’t finish the sentence. Because what I was thinking was, of course he’s right. Of course he’s right. Because this is what happens: shit gets worse. It doesn’t get better. It gets worse. Incidents ripple up, then they ripple away again. Batlisch appears, troubles the surface of the world, but then is destroyed. Disappears. Time makes things worse; bad
is faster than good; wickedness is a weed and does not wither on its own—it grows and spreads.

  “One more time,” said Bridge. “So we are clear. We walk together, four blocks, to a van, where Dr. Cormer is waiting. You continue to hold those materials. Dr. Cormer performs the minor surgery to remove the transmitter-responder from your spinal column. That will take about four and a half minutes.”

  Four and a half minutes, I thought. Four and a half fucking minutes.

  “And then before Dr. Cormer and I allow you to leave the van, you will give us the materials and Dr. Cormer will conduct the verification process. When that is done, we go our separate ways. You need never see me again.”

  I nodded.

  “Yes? Is that good?”

  “Almost. What about papers?”

  Bridge nodded, all eagerness now. “I have a set for you. Wilson Teller, born Albany, New York. No marks, no record. Passport and driver’s license.”

  “Clean?”

  “Clean and clear.”

  “How will I know?”

  “You will know because…” He shrugged. “You will have to know because I am telling you so. Is that acceptable to you, Victor?” He smiled, very, very small. “Mr. Teller?”

  I eased my head back and forth. I shifted from foot to foot.

  “Victor, can you live with that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I can. I can live with that. Fine and dandy.” I said those last three words with special distinctness, fine and dandy, to ensure they would be registered by the microphone I was wearing. Button-small, tucked inside my ear like a hearing aid. Barton had fitted me for it. He had all kinds of gadgets hidden in Saint Anselm’s Catholic Promise, behind his false walls and hidey-holes. I said it loud and clear. “Fine and dandy.”

  Mr. Bridge drove the van, and I rode in the back with Dr. Cormer, who did not wear a white coat or any other indication that he was a doctor; just a black suit and black shoes and no tie, and—for security purposes, or so he said—a featureless plastic face mask, drawn tight across his whole face like a second skin. Eyeholes, a hole for his nose, and one for his mouth. I rode in the back in silence staring at the blank face of Dr. Cormer, forty-five minutes across from one another in the bench seats of the van, as if descending deep into some sort of meaningful dream.

  We arrived, forty-five minutes outside of Indianapolis, at the only kind of place that is forty-five minutes outside of Indianapolis: a cornfield, empty and endless. I saw it out the tiny rear windows of the van. The van turned down a tiny gravel spit of a road, and we bounced along it deeper and deeper into the corn until we pulled up outside a white tent, erected in the middle of a dirt circle between two corn rows.

  Bridge killed the engine, came around, and opened the back of the van. Dr. Cormer in his mask got out, and I got out behind him, and the three of us walked from the van into the tent, through that big Indiana darkness. The rain had stopped and the moon was out, a flat, tarnished coin. Stars scattered like pinprick wounds. The white tent glowed dully in the moonlight.

  Inside was a table covered in white paper, surrounded by surgical lights. A generator chugged in the corner, powering the lights and a squat silver machine, no bigger than a dorm-room refrigerator.

  “If you would remove your shirt and your undershirt, please.”

  It was the first this doctor, this ghost, had said, and by old instinct I tried to get a read on his accent, tried to find the man inside his voice. Nothing came.

  “Lie down, please, on your stomach.” Neutral voice. Empty. Something beautiful in that nothingness, something pure. “Yes,” I said. “Okay.”

  I lay down and heard the machine humming to life, and I saw Bridge with my half-closed eyes, shifting from foot to foot. I heard the pin in my back, calling out, protesting.

  Four and a half minutes. I counted them down. A minute of preparation, some sort of gel being spread across my back, cool and clammy, like Vaseline. A flat disk placed halfway up my back, then moved, in small circles, up and up; I heard it beeping, one beep every two seconds. Listening. Up and up the ladder of my spine, by two-second intervals. Beep, beep, beep.

  Bridge watching from his corner, brow furrowed, frankly fascinated. My body trembled. Dr. Cormer moved his disk more slowly, then there was one long beep, and then a sudden sharp pinch as something was inserted into my flesh. I heard the doctor murmur, “Okay, there. There we are.” I thought of Martha, sweet Martha, pulling free the bullet from my shoulder—There! Got the little fucker—and I smiled. Bridge saw me smiling, and he looked troubled, wondering maybe how I could be smiling, as he stepped forward, got down on his haunches.

  “Dr. Cormer, are we clear?”

  “We are clear,” said the doctor in his voiceless voice. “We are engaged but not yet withdrawing.”

  “Now, Victor,” Bridge whispered, “I need you to give me the package.”

  “What?”

  “The envelope, Victor. We will need to see it right now and test its contents. You will need to wait.”

  “What—why?”

  “We need to make sure this is real before we let you go.”

  “You said—”

  “I know what I said, and I apologize that it was necessary to mislead you. But it’s important that everyone is pleased before we complete the surgery. This is the only way.”

  “Mr. Bridge,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It could have been…”

  “What?”

  “Now,” I said, “now,” and Bridge said, “What?” but I was talking to the microphone, and the explosion was loud and immediate, a huge noise and a rush of wind from the cornfield as the tent flew away and the dirt patch was flooded with lights.

  Bridge was armed, of course, a nice government handgun, and so, it turned out, was Dr. Cormer. Both of them were armed, but they weren’t armed like Mr. Maris was armed. A tank of a man, black boots and camouflage pants and shirt, holding a shotgun and backlit by truck headlights, throwing forward his tall shadow while he shouted, “Drop your weapons; drop them; drop them now!”

  Bridge tossed his gun so it landed in the dirt at Maris’s feet. Maris fast-walked with his shotgun, paramilitary style, and stepped on Bridge’s gun, pushing it into the soil. I was still down on the mat, still attached to the machine—the needle in my back, the long thin cord stretched across my back. Not yet free.

  Dr. Cormer, the man with no face, wasn’t ready to give up. Maris shouted “Drop it” again, but he stood defiant, surely in violation of his training, and Maris, with a burst from the shotgun, sent him spinning backwards into the dirt.

  “No!” I cried from the table. “No!”

  Maris said nothing. He moved swiftly around the perimeter, searching for more adversaries. Father Barton emerged from the front seat of the truck and walked calmly toward Mr. Bridge, holding in one hand the hilt of a long curved knife.

  I rolled myself off the table to the place where Dr. Cormer was slumped at my feet.

  I had to save him. That was all I could think of. I had to fix him so he could finish fixing me. I felt under his collar and found the edge of the mask and peeled it off. A kind-looking young black man with a pencil-thin mustache.

  But he was dead. The government technician was stone dead, laid out beside me, as dead in the dirt as Cook had been on the motel carpet. Father Barton, with his left hand, held the precious envelope clutched to his chest; he held the knife in his right. Bridge was on his knees with his hands behind his back, the barrels of Maris’s shotgun against the back of his head.

  Barton knelt beside him, exactly like a consoling priest, though his words were a low, cruel murmur. “I do not know the extent of your crimes, sir, but I know how they are to be purged. They are to be purged in blood. They are—no,” he said sharply and seized Bridge’s face. Seized his eyelids, pulled at them. “No, you may not close your eyes. You may not.”

  Barton’s arm, though, lacked the conviction of his voice. He raised the knife slowly, creeping toward
Bridge’s fat throat, uncertain of his angle. Maris held the shotgun, impatient.

  “No,” I said. “No; stop.”

  Maris looked down at me, confused. Barton, though, he was nodding. He understood—he thought he understood. “Do you want the gun?” he asked me. “Or the knife?” He didn’t wait. He lowered his wicked blade, handed it to me where I was crouching on the floor, the thin wire still trailing out behind me, tethering me to the machine. “Go on, then. Go ahead.”

  “No,” I said. I put the weapon down. “Let him go. You have what you wanted. What we wanted. Go on with it. Tell the world. But let this man go.”

  Maris looked at me coldly. “Your sympathy is misplaced.”

  “He was doing his job.”

  “No excuse,” said Maris. “Absolutely not.”

  But Barton was not so certain. He looked like the timid young priest he had pretended to be when first I met him, at the Fountain Diner, stammering, apologetic. He lowered his knife. “I’m not…I don’t know,” he said. “How can we let him live? A man like this.”

  “A man like this?” I said softly. “What’re you? What’re you?”

  When they were gone, when we were alone in the field of corn, Bridge stood up slowly. His pants were untucked, his hair a wild mess. Inside man, desk man. All this adventure was new to him.

  “Thank you,” he said. “My God, Victor. Thank you.”

  He held out his hand to help me up, but I crawled back up onto the table. I was still hooked up. I was ready to go.

  “Mr. Bridge. Do you know how to work this goddamn thing or not?”

  I could feel it as it happened. Feel it tearing free of me. Letting go the nerves, nerve by nerve, bursting stars of bright pain flying out along my spine. I screamed, but there was no turning back, there was no way to undo it now. He had grasped it, fished it out with that flat disk and conjured it up, yanked it from my flesh, and I screamed and screamed and everything went black, black as a gunshot, black as a disappearing sun.

  When I woke up I was alone.

  Bridge was gone. All remnants of that tent were gone, the poles and the canvas, the machines and the generator.