The Lost Castle

by Nick Cole

  Frank sits stiffly in his chef’s whites. He takes off his hat and holds it between his hands.

  There are very few diners at this late hour.

  Service for the night, this Tuesday night, is over.

  It’s clear by the silence that follows, the silence that actually emits from the Man with No Name, that Gino’s presence is no longer required. Gino, with much ceremony and ambassadorial goodwill backs away. And this is too weird again for Frank.

  Truly, in the year and a half Frank has worked at Scarpetti’s, Gino has never once gotten Frank’s name right. Or even remembered it.

  Now... holding out chairs. Remembering names. Something’s up.

  “So,” says the Man with No Name as he picks up his smoldering cigarette from the ashtray and draws on it as though he is slowly sucking the life out of a victim and enjoying every moment of it. “About that war...” smoke spills from his nostrils. Like a dragon. Like smoke from a dragon who fears no crusader nor shiny pig-sticker. “We’re still looking for a few good men.”

  Frank lowers his head, smiling, looking at his chef’s hat in his hands. Thinking, “Guy’s gotta be CIA or something.”

  “Not interested,” Frank begins when he looks back up and across the table at the man from the past. “In working for the government.”

  No Name smiles thinly and leans forward on his elbows, holding his cigarette out in front of him as though seeing something hidden in its undulating wisps rising into the upper reaches of the shadowy dining room.

  He’s thoughtful for a long moment. A long and very uncomfortable moment. He stares at Frank through washed-out, barely blue eyes that seem almost devoid of color. They’re only blue in that they are barely anything. One eye drifts toward closing, as though he is in deep thought, or almost sleep, or some-when else altogether.

  A trance.

  And for some strange reason, Frank is thinking about that night at the Eden Roc when everything, for just a moment, felt like it was coming together for him. He remembers the narrow dark backstage. The band. Every high note, every manufactured intimate moment. Remembers nailing Come Fly with Me. And in the end, at the end, knowing he’d done everything right and that someone who could make his career was out there beyond the footlights, listening, and then he’d gone back in with Somewhere over the Rainbow.

  Back when he believed in something good. Something worth living for.

  That had been the high water mark, Frank had thought in the many nights since. In the long walks back to his apartment through the hot late dark of neon Miami. Or on Mondays when he’d go to Joe’s Crab Shack and get stone crab on his day off. A slice of key lime pie and a cup of Cuban coffee to finish.

  That night at the Eden Roc had been the highest of high water marks indeed.

  He’d been alive.

  It’s not like he’d quit. He still sang, in his apartment when he was alone and doing the dishes. Or in the shower. Always, he realizes now, with the sound of rushing water to cover it. He’d never realized that until now, sitting in the main dining room in front of No Name, at ten thirty on a Tuesday night.

  So he hadn’t really sung since that night.

  No Name raised the closed eye and he was staring right through Frank.

  “I don’t work for the government, kid. Never said I did.” He took a final drag of the cigarette and crushed out the stub in the thick glass ashtray on the table above the starched white tablecloth. Instantly he was about the practiced business of lighting another. Tapping it out of a pack, thumb and forefinger to the lips. Silver lighter snapped open, and flicked. Flame and then snap shut.

  And then he’s leaning back, staring at Frank.

  “You were a singer?”

  Frank nods. As though he too is now in some kind of trance.

  “Didn’t work out did it?”

  Frank knows mind reading is impossible. That it’s just been some kind of coincidence that the man in front of him is talking about exactly what he was thinking about. If he’s CIA then of course they know what he’s been up to. It just some totally random coincidence in a world full of them that make it probable for the seemingly impossible to occasionally happen. The percentages say that it must. That occasionally, two people can seemingly be at the same mental point, randomly.

  It’s bound to happen in a world so wide and vast.

  “Had my chance. Bad luck,” replies Frank and then smiles. It feels pathetic. Or at least that’s how it feels to Frank. A loser’s smile. “Disco.”

  “Yeah,” says the Man with No Name. “I was always a Hank Williams man myself. But... I understand. Disco.”

  Silence. Someone near the back is talking to someone in the kitchen about closing down the line and Frank realizes he’s got to get back in there and do a few more hours’ worth of work.

  “How’d you like to sing again?”

  Frank was thinking about scrubbing the stove. Stocking the walk-in and polishing the pass out. And then the walk home through the darkness, watch out for alligators.

  Frank smiled and began to stand.

  “I think I’m done with all that. I had my chance.”

  “Hey,” said the smoking man who was once a captain and had never once given his name. “I’m offering you a chance to sing again. Maybe the last chance, kid.”

  Standing, Frank smirked and said, the low and whispered bitterness clear, “Sing. Really. For the CIA.”

  “Told you...” No Name whispered through a smoky drag. “This ain’t about the government. And yes. You’ll be singing. In Europe primarily.” He took another long drag on his cigarette and looked away, checking the room to see if anyone was listening. That much was clear. “But of course...” he smiled and let the smoke spill out across the white tablecloth in front them. “That ain’t all. Be clear about that. That ain’t all. War’s on, kid. We need soldiers. Soldiers that stick when the going gets rough. Rougher than it’s ever been. I’d be lying if I told you it was any different than it is. Okay?”

  Frank stared at the man for a long minute.

  “I had my chance. Bad luck. Disco is big. Thanks, but no thanks.”

  And Frank turns and walks back to the kitchen, and doesn’t care if this guy is made or connected or whether Gino of the one hundred suits bows and scrapes and washes the guy’s car while the Man with No Name eats free, on the house. Frank doesn’t care.

  “Then you’ve got to change your luck,” the man shouts across the dining room as Frank enters the kitchen.

  Later, when he’s polished the pass out so hard he’s worn a spot into the finish, Frank realizes he’s angry.

  Not caring was a lie.

  Why are you so angry then?

  Because... he rages inside his head in the quiet and empty kitchen. Because he got close to my dream. The one...

  ... the one you keep inside your head. Buried in the pit of that night.

  Yeah, that one.

  He throws the polishing rag into the hamper on the way out of the kitchen. Gino and Mama are in the back office. They don’t see him and for a moment he watches the two of them talking in low, hushed tones as Gino, wearing a thick, white, starched napkin to protect his hand-cut silk shirt, spoons up soup and Mama watches every bite with a kind of rapture.

  And he knows this is their dream.

  Just like he almost had his.

  And he’s out the back and off into the hot Miami night. He walks the long dark road back to his apartment along the estuary and begins to sing. Quietly. That’s Life. Never mind the alligators that crawl up into the grass alongside the road. It’s been a long time but he still knows every word. Every note. And in the silence of the night, all alone, somber, it’s even better than...

  A car’s headlights appear on the road ahead of him and Frank knows it won’t pass when he hears it slowing. Hears Volare over the radio. Hears the tires crushing the
grit alongside the road as the car slows.

  Smells the cigarette.

  Frank turns.

  The Man with No Name is staring at him with those same washed-out, barely blue eyes that are so old and tired that color, all color but the barest memory of blue, has fled their depths.

  Dean Martin dances through Volare and makes it look so easy it’s absolutely effortless. Not even Sinatra could do that. Only Dino. The easiest man in the world. Pro. Singing... because he loved it.

  And then Frank thinks, they’ll let you sing. There’ll be other stuff, probably... but yeah... they’ll let you sing again.

  ‘Cause you love it too. So who cares what you have to do to do it.

  And...

  “Then you’ve got to change your luck.”

  Frank crosses in front of the continentally wide hood of the rented mint green Impala and gets in.

  And then they are just taillights in the dark of the Miami night.

  Chapter Ten

  Braddock went to the armory at five, dawn just thirty minutes off. No one was there. No armorer. Just weapons cages left wide open. Weapons plundered. But there were more than enough. Rows and rows of racks upon racks of everything from state-of-the-art high-tech weaponry like Heckler and Koch’s latest to racks of old reliable forty-fives.

  For heavily armed mercenaries, the end of the world was like that. There was an abundance of firepower with which to make things happen for the right price. But for how long, wondered Braddock. How long until they were down to machetes and baseball bats?

  Every vehicle was to have one heavy gunner, one sniper and three riflemen. Braddock tried to remember who he’d placed in his vehicle as he selected his weapons and pulled ammo and grenades.

  Watt.

  Coombs.

  Harding.

  Harding with the heavy.

  Coombs rhymes with Tombs. Sniper.

  Watt at the wheel.

  And Brees. Brees on the mini.

  Brees who’s told Braddock that during night shifts on guard duty out there in the depths of Death Valley, he could see things, large things, moving out there in the dark beyond the perimeter.

  “Like dinosaurs, Cap. Real big.”

  A completely stone cold sober Marine Scout Sniper, told Braddock he was seeing dinosaurs out in the dark.

  “They movin’ around out there, Cap. Can’t but barely see ‘em. Real scary, huh?”

  Braddock found an MK12 that suited his purposes. A nice rifle system he could engage targets at distance, or go full auto up close and personal. He picked up a couple of M9 sidearms. One for his shoulder holster if things needed solving. And one he’d keep under the seat of the vehicle just in case. Then he found the Desert Eagle Twenty Four. Fifty-caliber action express for reduced recoil.

  Don’t think about what you’re going to do with this, his mind whispered. Don’t think about that, or he’ll know.

  That’s what his mind had been saying since he’d met the high value target known as Mr. Steele. And seen the gleaming alloy underneath the torn flap of ragged skin on the man’s cheek. The guy had taken a round straight to the face. And it didn’t bother him one bit.

  But that had been Marines firing two-two-three back on the rooftop of the U.S. Bank Tower above Downtown LA.

  The fifty-caliber bullet the Desert Eagle fired would put an elephant down. The action express was for low recoil, relatively speaking. Because Braddock knew he’d empty the whole magazine to put the elephant known as Mr. Steele, down. And that’s all he’d probably get. If he didn’t do it in the few seconds it took to empty the hand cannon, well... then it probably didn’t matter, did it?

  Whatever it takes, she’d said in their last transmission. Darling had said that. That’s what he called her. Darling. Because she called him the same when she gave the orders for him to kill.

  Whatever it takes, Darling.

  He took grenades and some smoke for signal, but there would be crates of ‘nades in the back of every Humvee along with other explosives to clear roadblocks. And such.

  At six a.m., the bloody red morning sun was soaring above the jagged mountains in the east as the convoy rolled out through the front gate of the abandoned base Braddock knew they were leaving forever. They were not coming back to this place.

  Whatever was next was out there somewhere.

  The base and all its guns and supplies would be for someone else who happened to wander down to the absolute bottom of Death Valley. Some end-of-the-world survivor sifting the salt flats of a long dead ocean for enough salvage to go on salvaging. Just like in some book he’d once read on a long MAC flight between places foreign where he’d kill people for freedom. The name of the book was The Old Man and the Wasteland. He’d finished it by the end of the flight.

  If things came to that, then that meant everything else out there had burned up. The world would be nothing more than survivors.

  If there were any survivors left.

  They took the winding road up through cuts in the red rock hills that ringed the valley and up onto the western edge of the Mojave Desert.

  Radio traffic was silent. Steele was riding with Mercer in Bravo to the rear.

  They hit the old road that led down to the fifteen and passed long stretches of crimson cliff and burning white sand. Beyond this lay wide spaces where jagged hills suddenly arched up out of the landscape like shadows in morning blue and iron gray. Occasionally they would see some NASA-white observatory set up high in the rocks.

  Watt put on some music as he drove. Some guy who was probably dead, or a zeke now, thought Braddock.

  Some cat called Jose Gonzales.

  And Braddock realized, as he listened to the melancholy guitarist work his way through lonely melodies, how long he’d been at this. How long he’d actually been “gone deep” to find a man who was attempting to destroy America. It had been a long time. Longer than he’d expected. But he’d finally found him. Except, by that time, the man had destroyed the world already.

  Maybe.

  A song called Teardrop came on as they saw the bats. Freakishly large bats hovering in the daylight around one of the distant observatories up on a high rocky outcrop.

  Braddock halted the convoy and put his ‘nocs on the observatory.

  The bats were like a swarm of large locusts. Very large locusts. They were diving at the observatory.

  Then one carried a flailing definitely human body into the air, beating its wings as it raced off into the rocks above.

  At least that’s what it had looked like.

  A flailing body. A someone.

  The radio popped and squealed. “Paladin Six. Why are we stopped?” asked Steele.

  “Bats, Warlord,” Braddock reported, and almost laughed at himself.

  “Disregard, Paladin Six. Move forward,” came the reply from Mr. Steele somewhere back in the convoy.

  Braddock gave the order to move forward with a dismissive wave of his hand, and the convoy started out once more down the long straight highway past the observatory and the giant bats. And the flailing body that was probably no longer flailing. The morning heat had risen and everything seemed to wither and shimmer in the distances of the desert and the burnt highway running like some compass toward a disappearing horizon that promised never to be reached. It was seven o’clock in the morning. It was going to be a long, hot day. A very hot day, thought Braddock. And a very long day.

  ***

  It was a place some okie, or miner forty-niner, had decided long ago to call Adelanto where they had their first engagement.

  They topped a rise and zekes were everywhere in the white clapboard shack town spreading out from both sides of the long two lane road reaching for the far horizon. They swarmed the road and clustered around cinderblock bars and some kind of gated refinery that was on fire. Piles of black oily smoke rose and
hung in the hot, still morning air. It could’ve been Iraq. But it was home.

  Braddock advised Steele of the situation.

  “Clear the road, Paladin Six,” came the terse reply over the radio.

  Braddock ordered his six Humvees armed with miniguns out into a crescent along the road and positioned the vehicles carrying the MK 19’s at the top of the rise.

  Then he began.

  “Brees... engage the nearest group.”

  “Cool Breeze,” crooned the guy who’d once been a member of Marine Force Recon. The mini spooled up into an urgent whine, and seconds later that deafening braappppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp erupted across the vast desert stillness, echoing out into silent and lonely mountains off in the distance.

  There was a hanging moment of pause between sound and impact. Once Brees depressed the trigger button, a moment of silence filled with horrible expectation passed. Then a large group of dead clustered around a white clapboard shack came apart in explosive sprays, along with dirt and dust and the splintered rotting wood of the shack they were trying to get into. Limbs and bodies went everywhere amid the dust and carnage.

  “Hold,” ordered Braddock.

  He knew they’d just burned through about a thousand rounds.

  Large chunks of the dead mob peeled away from the neighborhoods that lay among the desert scrub and burnt gray streets, heading toward the sound of the raging minigun in the turret of the Humvee.

  The main body of the dead surged up the road toward their formation atop the rise.

  “Flash your lights, Watt.”

  Watt reached down and toggled the headlights on and off.

  No one said anything. Everyone was a pro. They knew what this was. It was a kill zone. And Braddock was luring the dead into a “maximum effect” zone for concentrated fire to kill in large numbers.