the Second Horseman (2006)

by Kyle Mills

  Brandon didn't respond immediately, trying to shrug off the matter-of-fact description of the brutal torture he and Catherine had doomed Edwin Hamdi to.

  "Then it's time for us to go, Colonel."

  Another drag on his cigarette. "Yes, it's time to go."

  When they stepped outside, the sun was directly overhead, eradicating shadows and giving everything the look of an overexposed photograph.

  The city appeared to be completely dead, but Brandon knew it wasn't. After sunset, it was speckled with intermittent lights. Mostly old people, a soldier had told him. People who preferred to die in their homes than to try to embark on a new life in their final years.

  At its height, there had been at least five hundred men assisting in the search -- smashing in doors with sledgehammers, tracking progress on laptops, eyeing him and Catherine with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. A few days ago, though, the city had been deluged with a procession of trucks, helicopters, and busses -- all of which were quickly crammed with soldiers and sent on their way. As far as Brandon could tell, there were only about a dozen of the original search crew remaining. Maybe less than that now.

  "The next address is just across the street," Catherine said, pulling a pen from her pocket and marking the paper in her hand. She started forward, but Silva gripped her shoulder. "Perhaps we should take a short break and enjoy this beautiful day?"

  Men began to appear in doorways, moving slowly toward the middle of the empty street, shaking hands and talking softly amongst themselves. Brandon watched as some wandered away and others huddled together. Silva just stared up into the empty sky.

  "You're not leaving," Brandon said. "Jesus . . . You're not leaving."

  "No," Silva said.

  "Why," Brandon said. "Why would you stay here?"

  Silva shrugged. "I suppose we all have our own reasons. Some because they cannot walk away from the land of their God. Others --"

  "Are you crazy?" Brandon shouted. Everyone on the street turned to look at him. "Are you all crazy? A nuclear bomb is going to go off here! You're going to die! Do you understand? Die!" He moved away from Silva and spoke directly to a knot of men standing near the sidewalk. "What's the point? To be heroes? People won't remember. To pray? It won't work. If God wants you dead, let him come down here and kill you. Don't do it to yourself!"

  Honestly, he wasn't even sure any of his audience spoke English. There wasn't any reaction at all to his words.

  "No!"

  At the sound of Catherine's shout, he spun around and saw her backing away. "You can't die here! You can't make Brandon stay. This is my fault. You don't have to die because of me."

  Colonel Silva, the man who a few weeks ago had been so willing to torture and kill them, walked up to her and put a hand on her back. "It's not your fault, Catherine. You're not to blame. And I'm sorry you and Brandon are here. I didn't agree with that decision. It --"

  The hum of an engine stopped him in midsentence and everyone turned toward the sound, watching a sand-colored panel van skid around the corner and bear down on them. Brandon took a few hopeful steps toward it. Had they found the nuke? Had they changed their minds and decided to evacuate him and Catherine?

  The van skidded to a stop about twenty yards away, enveloping them in a thick cloud of dust. Brandon grabbed Catherine by the arm and followed the men moving toward the vehicle. This might be their only chance.

  The driver jumped out and ran around to throw open the vehicle's rear doors. He ducked inside for a moment and when he reappeared, he was dragging what looked like a dead body behind him.

  The smell hit Brandon almost immediately -- but not the stench of death. It was the stink of old sweat and blood. He covered his nose and continued to edge forward as the driver released the collar of what had once been an expensive suit and let the limp man fall to the ground.

  Catherine mumbled something and he looked over at her. "What?"

  "Hamdi," she said quietly. "It's Hamdi."

  By the time a rough circle had formed around the prostrate man, he was showing signs of life. They all watched as he struggled to his knees despite the zip tie securing his hands behind his back.

  He seemed rather small, with a dark complexion and eyes that still seemed intelligent despite their swollen and cracked sockets. His feet were bare and Brandon could see that they were covered with black marks that looked like burns.

  Catherine squeezed his arm, probably wondering the same thing Brandon was:

  What had this man gone through over the past weeks?

  How did people live like this, Brandon wondered for the thousandth time since he'd been broken out of prison. Why did they live like this? Killing, torturing, oppressing. Playing hopelessly complicated games that could only be lost. He'd occasionally felt some guilt about how he made a living, but not anymore. He'd done more harm in a month working for the good guys than he could have in a thousand years of stealing and con games.

  The driver of the truck started shouting at Hamdi, motioning toward the men encircling him, trying to get him to look at them. Brandon didn't understand the language but could get the gist: "You've lost. These heroic men and others like them have stopped you."

  Hamdi raised his head slowly, ignoring the Israelis and focusing only on Brandon and Catherine. His stare was almost violent, and Brandon wanted more than anything to back away. But he couldn't.

  Hamdi didn't move or even blink until the driver pulled out a pistol and aimed at his head. It seemed to take all the strength he had left, but he managed to spit on the man.

  "Stop!" Catherine tried to jump forward, but Brandon held her. There was nothing she could do.

  Hamdi looked at them one last time and said something. It wasn't loud enough to hear but Brandon could read the movement of his lips. Congratulations.

  The sound of the gun and Catherine's scream vibrated the air and Hamdi's head jerked forward, briefly ringed by a halo of blood.

  For almost a minute, everyone just stood there, gazing down at the dead man in the street, absorbed in their own thoughts. Finally, one by one, they began to wander off.

  Brandon wrapped an arm around Catherine's waist and managed to get her to come with him. But to where? He picked a street that no one else had chosen, and they just walked along it in silence. Waiting.

  He was surprised when she spoke. He'd assumed he would never hear her voice again.

  "You know I never wanted you to get hurt."

  "Yeah. I know."

  It was strange. Normally, he would have been consumed with trying to figure a way out of this. But there was none. And for some reason he felt almost at peace with that. In a few minutes, it would be over. In the blink of an eye, everything would turn to nothing.

  Catherine slowed and finally stopped, pulling him toward her and kissing him. They were still locked together when he saw a dull flash through closed eyelids -- like a camera going off at a distance. They both ignored it, shutting out everything except each other.

  To Brandon, it was a moment that seemed to go on forever. Then he realized it really was going on forever. There was no sound of an explosion, no scalding wind, no screech of buildings as they were pulled from their foundations. Just the still warmth of the sun and of Catherine.

  When he pulled away, she opened her eyes and they looked at each other for a moment.

  "Are we dead?" she asked.

  "I don't think so."

  He took her by the hand and walked back down the road to an open square where they could see over the tightly packed buildings and into the surrounding desert.

  It was impossible to judge distance accurately, but based on the scale he imagined, it had to be well over a hundred miles away. The shape was just like on TV: A tiny line thrusting from the ground and spreading out into the inevitable mushroom cloud.

  He could hear the shouts of the men who had stayed behind but wasn't immediately able to process what had happened. Was there another bomb? No. Silva said they'd found all but one . . . />
  "Hamdi held out," he mumbled to himself. "That has to be it. Hamdi held out. He didn't give them the right location of the last bomb. It wasn't here! We --" He fell silent.

  Colonel Silva and his men were gathering at the other end of the square, staring out at the gracefully expanding cloud with almost the same intensity as Catherine.

  Brandon pulled on her hand but she didn't move. A second, harder pull was no more effective. He leaned in close to her ear, keeping Silva in his peripheral vision. "Time for us to go."

  Chapter FIFTY-TWO

  "This is it," Brandon said, sinking to his knees and rubbing what was left of a metal fork on a rough patch in the floor. He'd been carefully grinding it for what felt like years now, fashioning a makeshift lock pick that a more technically minded crook could have turned out in a day.

  He glanced back and saw Catherine staring blankly at the table she was sitting behind. It was a position that was becoming a little too familiar.

  "I'm serious. This is the one. Guaranteed."

  "We're on a ship," she said, not looking up. "Probably in the middle of the ocean."

  Their escape from the town where, to hear it told, God saved them, hadn't worked out so well. He'd managed to get Catherine to break into a run -- no mean feat these days -- but had quickly discovered that there weren't a lot of transportation options. The city's fleeing population hadn't left so much as a skateboard behind.

  Plan B had been to hide out and wait for everyone to start flooding back, then to lose themselves in the chaos until they could figure a way to slink out of the country. And that probably would have worked if it hadn't been for some screeching old lady jumping up and down pointing her finger at them. Who would have thought that the ultimate instrument of his destruction would be wearing a housecoat?

  "What are we going to do if the door does open?" Catherine pressed. "Where do you think we're going to go?"

  He stopped grinding. "Did you ever think that maybe I don't want to just sit here and wait for someone to put a bullet in the back of my head?"

  She didn't respond and he immediately regretted snapping at her.

  "I'm sorry, Cath. I didn't mean it like that. I just need something to occupy my mind, you know?"

  Over the time they'd been imprisoned there, Catherine had sunk into a fatalistic melancholy that all the yelling in the world wasn't going to break her out of. Every day she seemed to figure out a new way to heap more blame on herself -- a new way to make herself directly responsible for one third of the nuclear attacks that had ever occurred on earth.

  The truth was that they didn't really know anything: Not where the nuke was detonated, not what kind of damage it had done, not how many casualties there had been. It didn't matter, though. She'd convinced herself that whatever was going to happen, she deserved worse.

  He, on the other hand, was less resigned to their situation. And while she was probably right that there was nothing he could do about it, at least he could fan the flames of false hope enough to keep his sanity.

  He finished grinding and crawled over to the door, taking a deep breath and sliding the homemade pick into the lock. He jockeyed it back and forth for a few seconds, closed his eyes, and gave it a twist. The click seemed impossibly loud in the small space. Terrifying and satisfying in roughly equal amounts.

  "What was that?" Catherine said, jumping to her feet and starting to slowly back away.

  He pushed the door with the tip of his index finger and it swung partway open to the sound of Catherine hitting the wall behind her.

  It had been an interesting time. He wasn't certain how long they'd been there -- no windows or clocks had been provided -- but his best guess was a couple of weeks. They'd spent the endless hours telling their life stories with the honesty of the doomed, speculating about what the world's reaction to all this had been, and finally, making love. Though she seemed to do that with fatalistic resignation, too.

  "Lock it back, Brandon."

  "What? No way."

  "But we're . . ." She fell silent.

  The one thing they hadn't talked about was the future. It was just understood. The Israelis would keep them around for a while in case there were any more questions, but once the situation was under control, he and Catherine were going straight into the drink.

  "Come on, Cath. They're gonna kill us anyway, right? Why not go look around?"

  She just stood there, holding up the wall.

  "Don't worry," he said. "We won't get away. You'll be dead in a week. I promise."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  He pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped aside. "It means, ladies first."

  The metal corridor was uniformly white and narrow enough that they couldn't walk side by side. He decided to let Catherine lead, but it left their progress a bit halting.

  "The trick to hiding in plain sight is bored politeness," he said quietly. "What?"

  "I'm thinking we're on a navy ship and that most of the people on it probably don't know who we are or what we're doing here. There's nothing we can do about the fact that we look out of place, so it's all about attitude."

  She stopped suddenly. "Brandon, we can't ---.

  He put a finger to his lips and then pointed up the corridor. After another moment's hesitation she started out again.

  "Bored politeness," she said.

  "That's all there is to it. Trust me. People are suspicious of anyone who's overly friendly or overly standoffish. But no one thinks twice about someone who's vaguely good-mannered."

  "Okay. Let's say that works. Where are we going?"

  It was a good question. He'd actively ignored that particular subject, satisfied to immerse himself in the mechanics of getting through the door. The deck seemed like as good a goal as any. If they were docked and insanely lucky, maybe they could just stroll away. If not, maybe they could swim for it. Most likely not, but if they stayed below, there was no chance at all.

  This was one of those rare times he wished he were the violent type -- the kind of guy who would go down fighting, taking as many people with him as he could. He'd tell Catherine to run while he single-handedly took out a team of Israeli commandos. A death fit for a made-for-TV movie.

  "It'd be nice to see the sky one last time," he said.

  She stepped through a small doorway and turned right, slowing significantly when she saw a man in an Israeli navy uniform coming toward them.

  Brandon stuck a hand in her back and subtly pushed her forward until they both had to stop and turn sideways to let the man by.

  He looked a bit perplexed, but Catherine gave him a short nod with a disinterested smile, and he moved on.

  "How was that?" she said when they were alone again.

  "Beautiful," he whispered, putting a hand on her back again, but this time just to touch her. "I liked the hint of arrogance you brought to it. Works with the whole military thing."

  She pointed to a set of metal stairs. "So when we get to the top, what are we going to do? Jump over the side? We're probably a thousand miles from shore."

  "Not quite a thousand."

  They both stopped dead at the lightly accented voice behind them.

  "Too far to swim, though, I think."

  When they finally turned, Brandon was surprised to see a pudgy, unarmed man with gray hair that seemed to be controlled by unseen static.

  "Keep going, Cath."

  She didn't move.

  "Cath --"

  "He's the prime minister," she whispered to him.

  "The prime minister of what?"

  "Of Israel," the man said. "The prime minister of Israel."

  "Seriously?"

  He nodded and motioned toward the stairs. "Shall we?"

  Brandon had to shade his eyes when they stepped outside. The sky was dead clear, reflecting off the ship's white paint and the ocean around them. The shore was there, but distant enough to be at the very edge of his vision.

  "Come on," he said, slipping a han
d in Catherine's and pulling her along behind their huffing guide.

  The deck was full of sailors, all working at their tasks in complete silence. Other than a few respectful nods and enigmatic stares, the crew seemed satisfied to ignore the two Americans trudging along the deck.

  The prime minister -- whose name Brandon wracked his brain to recall -- walked up to the rail circling the deck and leaned against it, looking out over the water. Brandon's eyes had adjusted to the bright sunlight and now the shoreline was a little clearer, though it still wasn't much more than a uniform brown streak that went from horizon to horizon.

  They waited for the man to speak, but he just stood there, taking in the view long enough for Brandon to glance over at Catherine and raise his eyebrows. She just squeezed his sweaty hand.

  "Look, uh, sir. We --"

  "Ten of the eleven were deactivated," the prime minister said, cutting him off. "There is nothing left of Beersheba and the land around it will be uninhabitable for some time. We estimate over three thousand dead, though it's too soon to know for certain. The evacuation of millions of people in the span of a few weeks is a virtually impossible task, even if they're eager to leave. There was no time to consider those who were determined to stay behind."

  Out of the corner of his eye Brandon saw Catherine sag against the railing and for a moment thought she was going to collapse. Despite the fact that the number of casualties was much less than she'd fantasized, there was one critical difference: Those three thousand people weren't bloodless guesses and tortured calculations. They were real.

  He had no idea how to talk to a prime minister, but Catherine obviously wasn't in any condition to contribute, so he decided to lay his hand on the table. It might be the only chance he got.

  "So, it looks like we saved your country, huh? Seems like we should get something in return."

  "It does?"

  "Sure. I mean, getting a nearly empty city blown up is still pretty bad, but it could have been a lot worse."

  "Yes, but isn't it true that you also caused our problems? While I appreciate that you helped us find most of the warheads . . ." He motioned toward the shoreline. "My country has still been ripped apart."