The Detainee

by Peter Liney

  She heard me returning and motioned for me and Jimmy to join her a few steps along the tunnel.

  “We got a problem,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  Lena hesitated for a moment, as if she wasn’t sure if Jimmy could take this. “She’s deteriorating,” she eventually said.

  I hesitated for a moment, not wanting to admit it, though I knew it was true. I’d been looking on Delilah’s unconsciousness as a friend that occasionally came to relieve her of pain, but now I was beginning to fear it might take her away.

  I glanced at Jimmy but he didn’t say a word. He’s been like that ever since we came down here. This old man suddenly becoming a lost child, turning from one adult face to another, waiting for us to decide his fate.

  “She’s pretty tough,” I said, in that dumb way people always have when they think they gotta come up with something positive.

  Lena shook her head. “Clancy, this island is made of crap. The whole damn thing’s toxic. People die of infections they get from cuts or grazes. Can you imagine what she must have inside her?”

  I paused and looked back down the tunnel to the long stick of Delilah. I hadn’t really thought of that. She’d been opened up from head to toe. Any virus, any germ, any foul damn creeping evil parasite that we got around here could’ve crawled inside her. Jesus, if it hadn’t seemed hopeless before, it did then.

  “She needs antibiotics,” Lena said.

  “A doctor?”

  “Medicine.”

  “Same thing.”

  She paused for a moment. “Not necessarily.”

  I turned to her. The way she said it, I knew she had something in mind. “What?”

  Lena hesitated for a few moments, then sighed, like she was about to say something she knew she shouldn’t.

  “Where do you think I got all these creams and bandages?” I didn’t answer. Tell the truth, I hadn’t really thought about it. “I told you, I used to work in the warehouses. A lot of Mainlanders don’t finish a course of tablets when they’re ill. As soon as they start to feel better they throw what’s left away.” She paused for a moment. “There’s a warehouse down there stuffed full of medical stuff.”

  For a moment I just stared at her, barely able to believe where this was heading. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m just telling you what’s there, that’s all.”

  “Go down to the Camp? Steal from the Wastelords?” I asked.

  There was another silence that no one seemed inclined to break, then, almost like a stranger walked in, Jimmy finally piped up.

  “Is she going to die if she doesn’t get antibiotics?” he asked.

  Lena sighed. “I think so.”

  “Then I have to go,” he said simply.

  I turned on him. “Jimmy! For chrissake! You can’t go down there!”

  “I don’t have a choice,” he told me.

  “Are you crazy? What good’s it going to do for you to die?” I asked, the thought of what he said before momentarily occurring to me, that without Delilah he wouldn’t want to live anyway.

  There was another long silence. Both of them seemed to want something from me and I wasn’t exactly sure what.

  “We wouldn’t stand a chance,” I told them. “We don’t know a thing about the place. The layout, the security, nothing.”

  There was another pause, then finally Lena spoke. “I do,” she said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  If Mr. Meltoni knew what I was planning, if he was gazing out from his huge, ornate Gothic pink marble mausoleum over on the Mainland, I reckon he’d probably pull the lid shut on his coffin and go back to being dead. A blind woman, a little bent old guy with a stick, and a spent heavy intending to go down into what must surely be one of the most dangerous places on Earth. The heartland of thousands of drug-taking kids who’ve all been indoctrinated with the notion that the murder of old folk is a fine recreation. To maybe confront the Wastelords, those who’ve attained an almost legendary status for being the source of everything evil upon this island. I tell you, it’s insanity gone mad.

  And you wanna know something else? Maybe the craziest thing of all? The one time Lena thinks we might just get away with it is on a dark, foggy night. Okay, so I can see there’s a certain logic there. If it’s foggy we got a chance of not being seen, right? And if the kids are getting themselves up on the notion of paying the Village a visit, sure as hell the last thing they’re going to expect is for us to repay the compliment. But that don’t ease my mind none. No way. I mean, if I had to nominate the number-one place I would least like to visit on a dark, foggy night—or any other time come to that—it would be that Camp.

  Trouble is, we don’t look to have a choice. Delilah’s getting worse by the hour, her face draining of color as if it’s an indicator of life, the rasping of her one lung echoing away down the tunnel. Like it or not, if we want to save her we have to go down there—and as soon as we can.

  Which means that we actually find ourselves in the unique position of praying for fog, that this freak spell of weather, with its warm days and cold nights, might allow us a further dark pocket of anonymity in which to hide.

  Lena’s been over the whole complex with us. Not just the Camp, but the warehouses, De Grew and his Wastelords—everything. Tell the truth, it makes me feel a little uneasy—the amount of detail she knows. Maybe it’s cuz they’re among the last of her sighted memories? Like the final model off the line of a superseded car, kept by the company, forever shiny and new.

  Apparently there ain’t a lot of security (who’s going to rob them, for chrissake, and where would they go if they did?). The only place they bother to put a guard on is—yeah, you guessed it—the medical warehouse. At any one time there’s enough stuff down there to stock a couple of hospitals. Pills, creams, and potions, thrown away by the sick, the dying, or merely the hypochondriacs of the Mainland. The reason it’s guarded is cuz everything medical is there—including “recreational” drugs—and the enemy they really got to watch for is the one within, the child addicts who can’t wait for the next heyday.

  Tell the truth, twenty, thirty years ago, with some good boys and decent hardware, I might’ve fancied it. We could’ve blasted in there, kicked the ass of anyone who got in our way, and been home in time for the big game. Now though, and with what we got available, I don’t think we stand a chance. I tried to persuade them to let me go alone. At least that way there might be a scrap of hope, but Lena wouldn’t even hear me out. She told me she’s the only one who knows her way around down there, who can get us where we want to go, What on earth was I thinking?

  Which kind of irked me in the same way Jimmy used to when I played chess with him and was about to make a move and he’d start all this tutting and shaking his head. Which was probably why I turned on the little guy, telling him he should stay and look after Delilah, he’d do more good that way. He got all prickly with me, saying no one was going to stop him doing his “bit” and that at some stage we might well need his “specialized knowledge.”

  I guess he just can’t cope with the idea of sitting around waiting to see if Delilah’s going to make it or not. Or maybe the possibility of losing her means he’s got that rush of wayward courage that those who find they have no interest left in life sometimes get. Either way, it don’t matter. I’m stuck with both of them, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  A little before eight I went up to check yet again on the weather and found that, since I’d last looked, the night had returned and brought an old familiar enemy with it. I turned and walked back down to tell the others, cursing myself all the way for not being able to think of another way to do this.

  Jimmy and Lena never said a word, just started to get ready, and even though I’d promised myself I’d have one last try at changing their minds, they looked so determined, I didn’t bother.

  Fifteen minutes or so later, we made a final check on Delilah, then left. She never heard our reassurances that we’d be bac
k soon, that we’d be bringing something to make her better, and to tell you the truth, I think we were all a little grateful for it.

  Believe me, it was one helluva disturbing feeling pushing back that entrance door and being met by nothing but a dark, hanging gray wall of moist silence. I mean, Lena was right, for once it might be on our side, but that didn’t make me feel any more comfortable about going out there.

  She pushed past me as if she didn’t understand my hesitation and Jimmy and me followed her out into a world as alien now as any distant planet.

  I tell you, it’s amazing how she gets along. In the tunnels I’ve come to expect it. I figure that over the years she’s drawn a map of that place in her head and couldn’t lose herself if she wanted. But outside? That’s something else. For the first couple hundred yards I kept telling her to watch out for this, and watch out for that, till eventually she lost patience and told me to shut up. From then on all I could do was to watch helplessly as she walked straight at obstacle after obstacle. It was nerve-racking, but after a while I began to appreciate how she’s adapted to her disability. She’s like one of those all-terrain vehicles that immediately responds to whatever conditions it strikes. If it was you or me walking into a pile of rubble we’d fall flat onto our faces, but she instantly brings her foot up a little higher, or swivels one way or another, managing to somehow keep her balance and carry on. It took me a while to relax. She did stumble now and then, and occasionally, if she was faced with something really big, I couldn’t help but tell her, but it didn’t take me long to realize she was nowhere near as vulnerable as I thought.

  Soon the ground began to slope away and we realized we’d found our way to what was once “Chinatown,” and the hill that, were the weather clear, would overlook the Camp. As soon as we began our descent the sound we’d been dreading and anticipating in equal measures started up somewhere in front of us. The beating of their drums vibrating out of the fog, warning us how close we were getting, what penalty we’d have to pay if we got any nearer.

  Jimmy froze in midstride. Even in the dull light I could see how pale his face was.

  “Jesus, Big Guy,” he whispered, as if it was only now the full impact of what we were doing was getting through to him.

  I nodded. I mean, no matter how well intentioned this might be, it still didn’t stop it from being suicide. There were thousands of them down there, whipping themselves up into a killing frenzy, and we were going to walk smack dab into the middle of it all.

  “Clancy!” Lena hissed back at us impatiently. “Let’s go!”

  We hurried after her, concerned she might disappear into the gray murk locked about us, that we’d never find each other again.

  I kept trying to relate where we were to the diagram she’d scratched on the tunnel wall. The Camp had to be slightly over to our right, the sorting area for new garbage in front of us and the warehouses behind that, then De Grew and his Wastelords up on the hill. Not that it really helped. The fog was so thick we might as well all have been blind. Mind you, if we had been, we wouldn’t have coped as well as Lena. At times she was taking us along at such a pace Jimmy was starting to get a bit puffed.

  “You okay?” I whispered to him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, taking yet another nervous look around. “Worry about yourself.”

  We descended another couple hundred yards or so, the drums getting progressively louder, more threatening, joined by the occasional mad scream, when suddenly something so weird happened that for a few moments it made us forget everything.

  I don’t even know how to describe it. It was like being mugged from inside. Set upon. Beat up. As if a thousand sleeping memories suddenly reared up inside me and went screaming through my head, colliding with each other and shooting into the air. Out of nowhere I saw my kid brother, Don, the one who died drinking bleach when the babysitter was supposed to be looking after him. It was a hot summer’s day and him and me were searching through some long grass for a ball I’d just hit. Then I saw my mother on her hands and knees, washing the kitchen floor, that sweaty piece of hair that used to hang in front of her eyes rocking back and forth. Mr. Meltoni puffing out his chest the way he used to when he was having his photo taken, standing next to his freshly polished limo. My father painting the bedroom ceiling. The girl who used to work in the flower shop on the corner. I saw them all in a kind of rapid-fire attack, so quick it literally left me gasping. I mean, despite my situation, where I was, what I was doing, it was all I could do not to cry out. All of it was so vivid.

  I turned to Jimmy and found the same stunned, almost horrified look on his face.

  “What the—?” he gasped, his voice trailing away.

  Before I could answer, Lena walked back out of the fog. “What are you two doing?” she asked.

  She grabbed my arm and yanked me on and I finally realized what it was about. We were on the edge of the sorting area, near the fresh garbage, and suddenly it wasn’t one smell we were faced with, not the melded old rotten one we’ve known for the past God knows how many years, but a whole lot of different new ones.

  It was those smells that were dragging our memories up. I was getting wafts of all kinds of stuff. To my right there was a heap of dying flowers, hundreds and hundreds of them. I don’t know where they came from. Maybe a wedding or a funeral or something. Some of them were still fresh, still innocently giving off perfume long after they’d been discarded. A few paces on I started homing in on something else. The synthesized freshness of polish. Detergent. Cellulose paint, motor oil, cut grass. It was like a smorgasbord of scents and all you had to do to get a different one was to take a couple more strides and face in another direction.

  Suddenly my nose was invaded by a smell so strong it seemed to barge all the others out of the way. Jeez, I could smell food! Meat, vegetables, spices—goddammit, garlic!

  I tell you, I couldn’t stop myself, I struck out for it like some snuffling pig, letting my nose guide me to the spot, sifting through bags, squelching through discarded vegetables, digging through all sorts of crap till I found what I was looking for. A big fat steak cooked in garlic butter; medium-rare, almost untouched, just a little bit cut out of the middle and then thrown away.

  Jimmy came up behind me and grabbed some too. There was so much food it was obscene. People up in the Village could’ve lived for a whole year on what had been thrown away in one day. I practically jammed the whole damn steak into my mouth. Lena hung back, looking away, almost embarrassed, as if we were taking a pee or something. Or maybe cuz she knew what was about to happen.

  See, you’re probably thinking we were about to go through all sorts of mouth-watering convolutions, finding ourselves with “real” food in our mouths again, but we didn’t. Something really weird happened. No matter how long Jimmy and me chewed on those steaks, how much we got our jaws chomping, we just couldn’t swallow. It was as if it wasn’t our food anymore and even if we did manage to swallow some, we’d just throw it back up.

  In the end we both spat it out. As if we’d just learned we’d been reprogrammed. And when Lena urged us to move on we followed along without a word of complaint, a little ashamed of what we’d just done.

  Jimmy might’ve been worried sick about Delilah, he might’ve been scared stiff at where we were and what we were doing, but that didn’t stop him from realizing his long-treasured dream had finally come true: we were on the fresh garbage. A couple of times I noticed him hesitate for a moment, peering down at stuff on the ground, pushing and prodding with his foot, then squatting to take a better look.

  “Jimmy!” I hissed.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “No! And I don’t care, either. Now, come on! You’ll lose us.”

  “It’s an old TX motherboard!”

  I grabbed him by the arm, pulling him to his feet, resuming our journey, but within moments I’d turn around to see him crouched over something else. I went back and was about to go mad when suddenly I noticed Lena had st
opped a few paces in front of us, her head kind of cocked, listening intently. I clamped my hand over Jimmy’s mouth, just in case he was about to say something.

  The two of us remained there, crouching low, breathlessly watching as Lena slowly turned her head from side to side, like she had antennae. All the way down from the Old City I’d been aware she was working off a different map from us. Different coordinates. And I ain’t just talking about hearing either. I mean smell, too. Searching through places our eyes didn’t have a chance of piercing, cross-referencing her senses, plotting out the whole thing in her head.

  I released my grip on Jimmy and silently made my way over.

  “There’s someone over there,” she whispered, gesturing into nothingness.

  I turned and strained to see in the direction she’d indicated, to somehow pierce the gray, milky murk; the noise of the drums, the chorus of screams around us, suddenly seemed much louder.

  During the next few moments a dozen or so people came out of that fog—not one of them proved to be of any substance.

  “Can’t see anyone,” I whispered.

  For several moments neither of us spoke or moved, just waited for something to happen. Eventually she gave a sigh of relief. “It’s okay. They’ve gone.”

  She moved on, noticeably much slower and more watchful now, pausing every few seconds. A door slammed somewhere over to our right. No more than thirty yards away. Probably on one of the warehouses. Someone called out, “Where?”

  “I dunno!” someone else shouted back. “It was there this morning.”

  Kids. Both of them. And if that fog lifted, if that curtain went up, I tell you, it’d be on a scene of total massacre.

  Lena paused again, like she was checking her internal bearings. Every now and then I noticed her touching something, maybe a post, a stack of old drums, and she’d nod to herself like she’d reached a milestone. “It should be over there,” she whispered.