The colonel makes a confused face.
He’s listening to me because he has no choice.
“That’s what Jenison said we all are. That’s why we’re doing this, all of us. That’s why they want to blow up the world, that’s why you want to save it. We’re the dogs who are ripped apart and don’t even know we’re dead. My wife is down in that bunker with those psychopaths. And I’m the only one who knows where it is. So I’m going down there with you . . .”
I flex my legs and . . .
. . . I stand up.
For the first time in forever.
For the first time in my life.
“. . . or you can sit right there and watch yourself die.”
My words hit him in his face like the hardest punch I’ve ever thrown.
Then he grabs me by the throat.
• • •
I face it standing up, but my legs are the first thing to go, vanishing into a bottomless nothing. His boys are all over me at once. I fight them, but my legs are weak, my arms like licorice. The half-healed wound in my side stings like razors between my ribs. They rip away what’s left of the blue hospital gown and pin me down on the gurney. The fight goes out of me fast.
I don’t flinch at all.
I don’t beg.
I don’t scream.
• • •
Heather—or Lieutenant Stone, or whatever her name is—she doesn’t look happy about any of this. She takes a few steps forward as Morales manhandles me from the back, cutting off the circulation to my upper arms, freezing me there.
I am naked and crucified.
The colonel looms over me, flicking open a nasty serrated jackknife. “A man with nothing to lose is a dangerous man, ain’t he?”
“You’re real brave,” I hack at him.
“You think you could kick my ass in a straight fight? That, I’d love to see.”
“I bet you would.”
He moves the blade down my chest, not quite touching the skin.
“You’re no better than Jenison,” I tell him. “You get off on it, don’t you?”
“This is war. We do what we have to do.”
“You said that already.”
“I don’t think you were listening very well.”
The blade, almost to my waist now.
His face, stone hard.
“You can save your speeches and your indignation for someone who hasn’t been on the front lines. I’ve seen my commanders blow away whole countries. Shitholes you’ve never even heard of. I didn’t like it, but those were my orders.”
He shifts his weight forward, gets right in my face.
The blade held right over my manhood.
“See, that’s where you’re wrong about people like me,” he says. “We’re different than politicians. We do believe in something. Discipline. Honor and duty. The survival of the human race.”
“Doesn’t make you any better than a maniac.”
“You may be right . . . but I act on orders because without a chain of command, it all falls to shit, son. We’re down there in the jungle with anarchy. Down there with Resurrection Express. And right now my orders are to go in there and kick their asses. By any means necessary.”
He takes a breath, then begins to lower the knife.
“Now . . . you’ve got balls. But you ain’t gonna have ’em for long. You feel that? That’s just the first taste. We’ll go all the way if we have to.”
I laugh softly.
As I feel the cold steel.
He sounds like Jenison did, back in the hospital. They all sound the same when they make excuses for their side. I feel his breath sour in my face.
“I can see that you’re laughing, and that’s fine. But I’m making you an offer and you damn well better take it.”
I hork up a ball of spit, and I blow it right in his eye.
“Knock yourself out, asshole.”
He doesn’t smile at all.
“So be it, son.”
• • •
The blade comes in cruel, and I hear a terrible wet crunch before the pain shocks up my stomach. In the same moment, Heather jumps forward and screams:
“Tell them, Elroy! Tell them!”
The pain rumbles in my lower regions like a meteor now, making bile sting up in the back of my throat, my guts on fire, the cold steel like a laser down there.
And then he stabs me again.
Heather shouting:
“Elroy, you have to tell them! They’re gonna kill you!”
“Fine,” I manage to croak out, rising just above the sheets of blinding agony. “Let them kill me . . . and then you’ll all die . . . you can all go to hell . . .”
She comes closer, stopping the colonel’s next thrust with her hands on his shoulder. He doesn’t look at her, but she looks right into me.
And I see tears in her eyes.
“You’re right, Elroy—about all of it! We’re bad people. But we can’t punish the world just because we blew it. We have a duty!”
I hear Toni’s voice when she says that.
We must live and our children must live after us.
“Save your breath, Lieutenant,” the colonel says. “I think the old boy’s mind is made up.”
She turns on him with fire. “And do you like that? Is this our job?”
He fumes at her one second, almost says something and stops.
And she spits in his face: “Your daughters would be ashamed of you now, Gerald. Every goddamned one of them.”
He pushes her away, lowers the knife on me again.
Heather looks back in my eyes, tears wet on her face now.
She’s crying because we’re monsters.
And we’ve failed our children.
Failed everyone.
The colonel rears back for the thrust that will sever my manhood from my body. His face is full of grim years. Secrets he brought back from the lands of the living dead. I see it all in this moment: life as a father, his wife who was once beautiful, then a mother, then a corpse, leaving him with only this—hard steel and iron resolve to protect the lives they made. The voices of his little girls, grown to become women, who taught him every secret about how the human mind works.
I look him in the eyes and I see it all.
As he backs away from me.
The knife clatters on the floor.
“Goddamn,” he says.
And that’s all.
• • •
The knife doesn’t have much blood on it.
As I look down to see the blade, I notice that he stabbed me shallow in the thigh. Not a big wound at all, mostly pantomime—a dirty-pool military trick. He was punching me in the balls at the same time to make the big-time agony blast happen. Painful, but still a bluff.
Goddamn, indeed.
“Guess you’re one of the good guys after all,” I tell him.
“Something like that, son.”
His voice is beaten as he hangs his head and shoulders. I see a tired old man standing in front of me now. A father scared to death. A human being who went down in the dark and became bad, just like Heather said.
We came here because we had no choice.
The men look at each other, astonished, the room locked in a timeless, horrifying freeze.
Nobody has any idea what happens next.
Heather reaches over and grabs a clipboard from the desk. On the clipboard is a sheet of clean white paper. She hands it to me, along with a ballpoint pen.
“There’s no time left. Please, Elroy.”
I write down the numbers.
Then hand it over.
• • •
She passes the sheet of paper to the tech sitting at the wall-sized monitor. He enters the coordinates and the screen fills with a satellite image—the same satellite image I saw before, only much cleaner. The best money can buy.
The numbers pin the exact location.
“Resurrection Express,” I tell him, as the eye in the sky zooms in for a closer v
iew of the mountains.
It’s in the middle of nowhere, miles from civilization. They must have bought the land and cleared it good—it’s nothing but desert and ghost towns in every direction.
And right in the middle . . .
Target Zero.
The colonel looks up at the screen and makes a fist.
“Congratulations. You just saved the world.”
He looks at Morales. “Lock this boy up. I don’t want him leaving the base.”
Then he looks at me.
“I’m sorry, Mister Coffin. Just try to remember . . . we are the good guys.”
I don’t say a word as they drag me out of there, but I glance back once, and see the tears still fresh on Heather’s face.
22
00000-22
THE DARK
Basement level, more corroded steel and concrete. The dogfaces drag me buck naked down a straight corridor off a clunky old elevator and toss me in a solitary cell, then throw some clothes on the floor, all lashed together in a bundle with a thick webbed belt. It’s freezing down here, which seems odd to me for some reason, and one of the grunts tells me to cover myself before I catch cold, with a crooked cartoon grin pasted on his smug face. His voice comes from the Deep South—maybe Louisiana. That’s where a lot of marines breed. He says he’ll be right outside with his buddy if I get lonely, and I’m reminded of prison again. That place was no different. A hell-hive crawling with big dumb bastards mumbling in countrified streetspeak, surrounded by mold and corrosion and the smell of piss. I slump in the center of the floor, my legs still tingling, arms still made of licorice.
A key tumbles in the lock.
I know exactly what the gears and metal rods look like as they move from place to place inside that big steel door.
I could open it using a wire coat hanger and some spit.
Or a ballpoint pen.
• • •
I get the fatigues on quickly and I’m shocked to find that they fit pretty well. They must have sized me up while I was under. Thirty-two regular always works. I click the belt into place, holding up desert brown pants, just below a black sleeveless shirt that feels like it’s never been worn. No shoes, though. Damn.
I’m reminded of my wife again.
She always shopped for my clothes, and they were always black and white and ordinary. You had to blend right in, she always said. Had to be a ghost in the machine and on the street. She once bought me a boring suit that cost over two grand—told me it was like a shield that made me invisible. Nobody ever tried to kick my ass while I was wearing it, but I’m not sure that means anything.
I’ll need boots when I make my run.
I’ll think of that later.
First things first.
I look at the pen in my hand, and I’m amazed again that they never took it from me when they hauled my ass out of the war room. I palmed it when I handed back the clipboard and everyone was a little distracted by the big screen after that. I knew they would throw me in a dungeon like this. I knew everything about that old fossil the second I saw him. These guys are soldiers, and soldiers all fall back into thick patterns of two-dimensional thinking. Guns and knives and sharp sticks—straight solutions to complicated equations. And they don’t look at the details. They never consider that a bobby pin could bring their whole kingdom crashing down around their ears. And it always does, eventually.
I sit for a few minutes in the center of the room.
Calm myself.
Channel the blood into my arms.
Find my center.
See the leads, running end to end.
Yes.
Time to move.
Fast.
• • •
I start working on the lock. This will take three minutes. I can see the two guards through a tiny peephole on the door, sealed off on the other side with metal grating. I can smell their cigarette smoke, hear them laughing.
They have no idea who I am.
I try not to think about what comes next, as I slide the long plastic stem of the pen through the tiny opening near the main lock box. I try not to think about how I plan to get past the two grunts and make my way to the airfield—get aboard one of the choppers somehow. I leave it all to Zen, living from one moment to the next, as I feel the metal rod inside the door give just a bit and work it again, slightly to the left, so that it clicks softly, dribbling saliva down the center of the plastic pen casing to grease the way. I think only about how easy this is, how it all comes back on reflex, without even trying. How I’ve broken hundreds of locks on cell doors, just like this one.
In two more minutes, the lock will go.
In two more minutes, I will think about my run to the surface.
In two more minutes, I will be closer to you, my love.
I will come for you.
I will make it happen.
Click.
• • •
The grunt doesn’t hear the lock going or sense it when the doorjamb loosens, just at his back. But he hears it when I say something intelligent through the small grated window:
“Hey, asshole.”
I see a sliver of him as he turns, and he makes some redneck noise I can’t quite make out—something about my mother. These guys are all the same—throw out a cheap shot and they come right at you, fangs first.
I see his fangs through the grate as they tell me to go fuck myself.
Then I shove the door open right in his face.
• • •
It happens really slow, stretched out across five seconds. Something screeches like a prehistoric bird—metal hinges scraping and grinding as I crack the good soldier’s nose back into his sinus cavity with a thick wet sound. He’s stumbling back on the other side of the door as I force it the rest of the way open, and I hear him bounce off the opposite corridor wall and go down in a heap, still blasting off in stanzas of redneck gibberish, all watered down by bloody backwash. As the door flies open, I sense the other grunt just over my shoulder—he spins with his rifle, gets the bad end right in my face, but when his finger hits the trigger nothing happens because the safety is still on. I see him squeeze again and he says the word “shit” out loud and I grab the barrel hard with both hands, using his own muscle burst when he tries to fight me, turning it back on himself—classic forced-fulcrum technique. It shifts the butt of the gun into reverse, stuns him right in his mouth. He gags on his exploding teeth and falls backwards as I land on him, jabbing again with my bare hands. This time I hit him in the throat—a two-handed straight chop that puts his next breath on hold and almost knocks him out. I pick up the gun and use it to score the final home run. His head knocks back with a weird empty coconut noise against the concrete floor and he goes to sleep fast. I wasn’t able to put much muscle behind the blow, but I’m doing okay for disco.
On the other side of the open steel door, the good soldier is wallowing in his own blood, trying to call me a motherfucker with his face oozing between his fingers.
I hear his gun clack loudly in the closed space.
He stumbles around the door as I bring his buddy’s rifle up, squeezing the trigger, and the shot hacks into the good soldier’s upper arm, the recoil almost knocking me down, the big boom almost making me deaf. I wasn’t paying attention before, but it turns out this is an AK-47, top of the line. Never fired one of these in my life. Watching my father all those years, I thought it might be easy, but it kicks bad against my weakened muscles. And the bullet bounces off the concrete walls when it’s done chewing through the good soldier’s arm, zinging like a microscopic meteorite, finally striking home somewhere down the hall . . .
. . . as I re-aim at the good soldier’s head.
I tell him to drop his weapon.
I don’t hear my own voice when I say that.
It’s all on slo-mo with the sound way down.
He can hardly see me through his rearranged face, spitting blood like an animal.
He uses what’s left of his destroye
d arm to raise the gun.
No choice now—I aim right between his eyes this time.
I will not miss.
I can do it.
My finger squeezes hard, and the shot blows through the hall.
• • •
“Stop!”
The voice breaks through the slurred moment, and my eyes squint in the dark of the corridor to find the source. A woman’s voice. It’s frozen my target where he slumps also, because he can see her face. I can’t because she’s behind me.
I realize that the good soldier ducked my second bullet.
I would have killed him, but he saved himself.
“Drop your weapon now!”
I put up my hands as I turn to face the voice. The whole corridor behind me is filled with guns, all aimed at my vital organs. Heather stands in front of her men, black and green in a military assault uniform.
“Put it down,” she says, and only then do I realize I’m still holding the machine gun in one hand.
I set it down slowly. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the good soldier lose it and come charging at me, but I sidestep him quickly and stick my foot out, sending him to the floor. He crash-lands on his buddy and stays there.
The ten guns in the corridor don’t flinch. She came down here with plenty of insurance.
“Back in your cell,” she says slowly.
• • •
She closes the door behind us and tells her men to watch the corridor.
No escape now.
It’s just the two of us, face to face in the dark room.
She has a black satchel in one hand, a big gun in the other. It’s too dark to tell what kind of weapon it is—but the rough shape is something that looks mighty goddamn state-of-the-art. Something Alex Bennett would have known about.
“That was stupid,” she says. “You could have gotten yourself killed.”
“We all gotta go sometime.”
“What were you going to do when you got out of here? They would have taken you down before you got to the first floor.”
“Your two guys outside didn’t agree with you.”
Resurrection Express Page 35
