by Noah Mann
“What did they do?”
“Nothing to me,” I said.
My tone expressed that he shouldn’t press for more details. Not now. And he didn’t. He knew me, as I knew him. Or as I thought I had.
“How did you do it, Neil?” I asked. “How did you keep everything from me?”
“Don’t you mean ‘why’?”
I supposed his correction was more accurate than what I’d asked.
“Okay...why?”
“Because that was my job,” he answered, providing the simplest, most obvious response. “And I was good at it. And I believed that what I was doing was important. So with all that in mind, just understand that me hiding what I did from you was to protect me, and to protect you. I wanted to keep doing what I was meant to do, being who I was meant to be, but I couldn’t manage that if either of us was compromised.”
“I wasn’t the spy, Neil.”
“You were the spy’s best friend,” he said. “That was enough. People who suspected the truth about me, or knew it outright, are always aware of who men like me are close to.”
As he explained his rationale, I could understand. The lack of further details did not diminish my acceptance. Mostly, though, I trusted my friend.
My friend...
“Elaine and I got married,” I said. “A while after you left with Grace and Krista.”
“She’s the right woman for you,” Neil told me. “It only took the end of the world to bring you two together.”
I allowed a soft chuckle. It was true what he said. Before Elaine I’d rarely even thought about ‘settling down’. I was all about my business, and my freedom. But with her, through her, I found more freedom than I’d ever expected to know. And more joy.
“We have a daughter,” I said. “We named her Hope.”
I continued, filling him in on all that had transpired in Bandon, and with its residents, since his disappearance and supposed death. He took it all in without reacting, showing no emotion until I was finished. Then he spoke, a sadness about him.
“I’m sorry about Elaine,” he said. “It shouldn’t have been her getting hurt. I should have been there with you. It should have been me.”
“She’s all right,” I assured my friend. “If there was still a Daytona Five Hundred I think she could place top ten in that chair of hers.”
He accepted my words, even smiling lightly after a moment.
“Hope, eh?”
I nodded.
“You named her,” I said.
“There’s always hope,” Neil said, repeating the mantra he’d shared first when warning me about the coming blight. “I want to believe that.”
He shifted his attention from me to the space beyond the vault. Jake had his small warming fire burning again, something sizzling in a pan over it.
“He’s making us lunch,” Neil told me, his voice kept low.
“You need to eat,” I said.
“I might eat later,” Neil said.
“I’m just...worried about you,” I shared.
Neil fixed his gaze hard on our guard in the ransacked front of the bank building. It was not an angry stare. It was more...focused. I’d seen it before in him, as far back as high school, when he was sizing up an opponent on the thirty-yard line before the snap.
“Things are going to get bad, Fletch,” he said.
“I know.”
He looked to me now, that same intensity in his eyes. I could feel it across the six feet that separated our cells.
“It’s going to be okay,” he told me. “Trust me.”
“There’s always hope?” I suggested.
He shook his head slowly and laced the fingers of both hands together, squeezing hard. Enough so that his knuckles cracked with sharp, almost painful snaps.
“We don’t need hope,” he said. “Because I have a plan.”
“Lunchtime,” Jake said as he came into the vault, two small cups in hand. “Some sort of chicken thing from an old MRE.”
He crouched and placed the cups just outside our cells and stepped back. I reached through the bars, only managing to get a flattened hand out before the meat of my wrist prevented any further reach. I pinched the edge of the container between two fingers and slid it into my cell.
“It’s good food, Neil,” Jake said, looking to my sickly friend. “I had some already. Tastes like real chicken. It’s got some peas in there, too. Gravy’s not bad, either.”
Neil slid back from the bars into the shadows of his cell, curling up in the back corner.
“Maybe I’ll have some dinner later,” my friend said.
Jake nodded. He seemed to actually be a bit concerned with one of his prisoner’s condition and looked to me as I smelled the contents of the cup.
“I’ll leave his cup,” Jake said. “See if you can get him to eat. He doesn’t hardly eat anything.”
The man left us. I tipped the cup and sampled some of the chicken mixture before chewing and swallowing more of it.
“Neil,” I said.
Looking across the space between us, I could just make out his position shifting as he looked toward me.
“What plan?” I asked.
“Later,” he said.
Then he turned away again and said no more, settling into a deep sleep, wet coughs bursting every so often. There was reason to worry about him, I knew. Anyone who’d laid eyes on him could see he was in trouble physically.
And yet, he spoke of some plan. But a plan to what? Escape seemed unlikely with the realities of our captivity. The cell bars were unbeatable I knew from some simple testing I’d done. The lock, similarly, that secured the chain around the door was not pickable. Not by me, at least.
‘Because I have a plan...’
I had to trust that what my friend had said was true, whatever it meant. And whatever it meant for us.
Six
Night came, and so did Perkins.
He was accompanied by no one. Neither Bryce nor Sheryl were with him, and Jake remained in the front of the bank as the colony’s leader came to our cells.
“Jake’s cooking you up a special dinner,” Perkins said.
I’d noticed the scent drifting back from the guard’s small cooking area near his fire. The terrible, familiar smell.
“A nice big helping of Frank Wallace,” the man said, reaching down to pat a spot on his pants below his front pocket. “Thigh, I believe. Should be fairly tender.”
“Not gonna happen, Perkins,” I said.
The man sniffed a laugh and looked into Neil’s cell. My friend still slept there, breathing fitfully.
“I don’t know,” Perkins said. “Your buddy here looks like he could use a good meal.”
He didn’t know. If he had, if Neil had revealed what he’d had to do on our journey back from Cheyenne to stay alive, Perkins would be hammering us both with that. Whatever they’d tried, or managed to beat out of him, that morsel of information from our collective past hadn’t been revealed.
“Is this it, Perkins?” I asked. “You make me watch someone die, then serve them up for dinner?”
“More than that,” the man said. “I hope you enjoyed that chicken slop for lunch, because that’s the last taste you’re going to have of something not of your species until I get what I want.”
He looked to Neil again, briefly, then focused back on me.
“When your friend wakes up, share the good news with him,” Perkins said.
He flashed a smile at me, then left, giving Jake a quick thump on the shoulder as he passed, the guard tossing a salute that his leader ignored as he left the bank building.
“When Jake comes back, get him to face you,” Neil said softly.
I looked to my friend. He’d rolled over and now faced the bars, still curled into an almost fetal position. I moved closer to the bars to hear his quiet words better.
“What are you talking about?”
“Fletch, just do it,” Neil urged me. “Because pretty soon it’s going to be one o
f us that Jake’s frying up out there. You know that Perkins will take this thing all the way there.”
I hadn’t considered that, but my friend was right. In the twisted dictator’s mind, he would see that as the ultimate card to play against us.
“Just do it, Fletch,” Neil said. “Trust me.”
I nodded, and he closed his eyes. If this was part of the plan he’d mentioned, I didn’t know. But it seemed likely. We were fast approaching a decision point where the worst option was no option at all. Except Neil seemed to have, at least in his own mind, discovered another way.
* * *
A few minutes after Perkins left the bank, as I watched Jake filling two small cups with strips of seared, nauseating human flesh, a sound began to rise.
Cheering.
It was distant, but not too far. Maybe down the street a bit. Many voices blended together, with howls of approval and raucous clapping. I had little time to try to comprehend what it might be as our guard approached with our intended dinner.
“Mr. Perkins wants you two to eat this,” he said, almost embarrassed, wincing slightly at the offering he had brought us.
He placed the two cups on the floor near our cells, just as he had done so when serving us lunch. As he began to back away toward the vault’s exit, I stood and approached the bars.
“Jake...”
“What is it?”
‘...get him to face you...’
What did Neil have up his sleeve? Some weapon hidden in his cell? That was impossible. There were no spaces to keep some makeshift knife or other implement out of view.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
Jake didn’t approach, keeping his distance from the cells.
“About what?”
‘...get him to face you...’
I had to trust my friend. I had to make it happen.
“I can’t eat this,” I said. “I can’t.”
“That’s not...I have no say in this,” Jake said.
“Listen, Jake, I just can’t,” I said. “I’ll cooperate.”
The man guarding us seemed genuinely surprised at what I’d said. He approached slowly, positioning himself in the space between the cells, standing midway between each. Even if I’d been able to squeeze my arms between the bars, he was still out of reach. But I was not doing this for that purpose—I was playing this charade because my friend wanted me to.
“You want me to get Perkins?” Jake asked, suddenly self-conscious. “Mr. Perkins.”
Before I could respond I saw something, though I forced myself not to react as I glimpsed Neil rise up in his cell directly behind Jake. His chiseled hands gripped the bars, but once he was upright they slipped through the space between, as did his wrists, forearms, and elbows, until the length of both withered arms were stretched out toward our guard.
You son of a...
I didn’t mentally complete the term of both surprise and admiration as I came instantly to understand the ingeniousness and fortitude that my friend possessed. He’d done this. Prepared for this, though not exactly this. He would have had no idea that we would be reunited in captivity. Instead, he’d subjected himself to starvation so that when the opportunity arose, a confluence of circumstance and timing, he could act.
He could strike.
For the briefest instant, past Jake, I caught Neil’s eye, and I knew what he needed me to do beyond luring Jake close—but not close enough.
“I could just tell you, Jake,” I said.
Then, as the mildly feeble man considered what I’d said, I made my move, lunging at the bars I could not get through. That did not matter. His reaction was instinctive. He recoiled, taking a quick step back, away from me.
And into Neil’s grasp.
My friend had denied himself food for some time now, it was obvious, so that he could thin his arms enough to fit them between the bars that confined him. But, while he’d neglected his body, he focused what strength he retained on one thing—his hands. As I’d noticed, they remained strong. Powerful, even. What exercises he’d managed in private to maintain them I did not know, but when Jake was close enough Neil seized him, hands grasping the surprised man’s head, fingers hooking into his eye sockets with terrible pressure as my friend jerked him backward against the bars.
Jake’s head smashed against the solid steel with a sickly crack, his body going limp, cups of our intended meal tumbling to the floor. As he slid downward, Neil maintained his hold, and smashed the back of the man’s skull against the bars again and again until, even in the dim light from the fire beyond the vault, I could see the wet red pool building beneath him on the concrete floor.
Neil, though, wasn’t satisfied. He reached around Jake’s neck and put one forearm in place, drawing it hard against the windpipe, choking whatever life remained from the motionless man.
“He’s dead, Neil,” I said.
My friend, though, didn’t let go. He kept the pressure up.
“Neil...”
Finally, when he was satisfied that he’d sent our guard to his maker, he released him. Jake’s upper body tipped to the right and Neil was left with his arms hanging outside the bars, spent.
“He has keys,” my friend said through nearly gasping breaths.
“Can you get them?”
Neil nodded and repositioned his arms through the lower section of the bars, slipping one hand into Jake’s left pocket. They emerged with a small ring, two keys on it.
“You’ve been planning for this,” I said.
“For something like this,” he partly corrected me.
He gripped the bars and hauled himself upward so that he could reach the upper section where the chain and lock secured the barred door. But the violent act he’d just completed had sapped whatever strength he’d held in reserve, and he collapsed back to the floor, sitting awkwardly, one arm propping his body up like a kickstand.
“Fletch,” he said, the hand that didn’t hold him up reaching toward the bars, the key ring in it.
“I’ve got it, buddy,” I said.
He managed to get his hand through and slide the ring across the space between the cells. I retrieved it and unlocked my cell, then moved quickly to his, opening the door and reaching my friend.
“I’ll get you up,’ I said, crouching to get an arm under him.
“We’ve got maybe ten minutes before the show finishes,” he said.
I lifted him and helped him from the cell. We made our way out of the vault and to where Jake’s cooking fire still burned.
“What show?” I asked.
“Perkins puts on this rousing rally thing once a week,” Neil told me. “It would make Goebbels proud.”
That explained the cheering and applause, I now knew.
“People will be in the streets as soon as it’s over,” Neil said as I lowered him to the chair Jake had occupied. “We need to—”
He paused, his gaze fixing on the small cooking grate above the fire, strips of meat charring upon it. Flesh that allowed terrible memories to come flooding back. With a fast kick my friend sent the grate and its contents tumbling.
“His shotgun,” Neil said, nodding toward an old desk once he calmed.
I looked and saw the weapon, a small pouch of shells next to it. Nearby, stabbed into a wooden tabletop, was a knife. I retrieved it and the more potent weapon.
“Any idea where we should go?” I asked.
“Anywhere but here,” Neil said.
“What about sentries?”
“I won’t be much help against those,” Neil said. “So let’s not run into any.”
“Simple as that, huh?”
“You know it,” he said, the joking moment a welcome interlude.
But it couldn’t last. I had to get the both of us out of there. It was clear that I’d be doing the heavy lifting for the moment, but I needed my friend to get some of his strength back as quickly as possible.
“Here,” I said, snagging an open MRE pouch from near Jake’s fire. “S
hove whatever’s in there in your pockets.”
Neil did just that, breaking open a packet of stale crackers and feeding the contents into his mouth as I helped him up.
“There has to be a back exit,” I said.
“There is,” Neil confirmed. “Perkins has a nice little spot across the alley where he tied me to a chair to make it a fair fight and did some work on my ribs and my jaw.”
A torture chamber of sorts. That was what my friend was telling me.
“I’d be all for sticking around to do some damage to our friend Earl,” I said. “Except I want to get...”
I couldn’t say what I wanted to. What was natural to say. Because, for Neil, I realized in that instant that the home he’d left was not the one he’d be returning to. If we made it out of there.
“Let’s go home, Fletch,” he said, speaking the word which I could not. “Let’s go.”
Part Two
Flight
Seven
I opened the back door as Neil leaned against the wall just inside the bank building’s rear exit and cautiously looked outside. Across the narrow passage between structures was another door, likely to the den of pain Neil had mentioned. To the left the alley continued into darkness, and to the right it spilled into the street less than twenty feet in the distance.
“The show’s still going,” Neil said.
I nodded. The sound of applause was more pronounced with my head poked outside, and was coming from the left.
“Wherever it is it backs up to this alley,” I said.
Neil nodded toward the door he’d been taken through before.
“It won’t be locked,” he said. “We can cross through to the next street.”
“All right,” I said.
I lent my friend a hand again, the double barrel shotgun slung over my right shoulder and knife tucked in my low boot. We crossed the narrow gap between the buildings and, as Neil had suggested, the door was not locked. He twisted the handle with his strong grip and we were inside.
If the bank had been dim, this was blind midnight, hardly a wisp of ambient moonlight trickling in. Ahead, though, past the vague outlines of a wooden chair bolted to the concrete floor, I could just make out the glint of broken glass. It had to be the shattered window of whatever this establishment had been in the old world.
