The Cause

by Roderick Vincent

  “Why there?”

  “No one knows we’re coming,” he said, “and where we’re going no one will find us.”

  We wound our way to the 257, heading for Las Vegas.

  Chapter 28

  “For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no monument to preserve it, except that of the heart. These take as your model, and judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of valor, never decline the dangers of war.”

  -Pericles

  The sun cracked the sky into a soft light dancing over a set of high arching clouds colored pink and maroon as we arrived in Las Vegas.

  We ditched the bikes by the side of the road on the outskirts of the city and scaled a chain-link fence at an overpass before climbing down into a storm drain. The ten-yard sloping slab of concrete we stood on led to a ten-foot-high tunnel going underground. We stopped at the entrance. Seee unzipped his backpack and tossed me a headlamp, a flashlight, a poncho with a hoodie, and a Glock 19. He told me to put on the poncho and keep my head covered. He put on rubber boots and told me mine were in the backpack. After I had changed, I asked him if there was another Anthill in here. He laughed and told me no, saying the people inside held onto higher moral codes. But then he told me to blind anyone looking at us.

  We crept into the tunnel with our headlamps underneath our hoodies. The air cooled as we stepped into the pitch black. A platoon of Tunnel People camped near the entrance hidden in makeshift shanties, each meager dwelling sectioned off by tarpaper, wallpaper, roof liner, or bedsheets. We heard the playful song of a child drifting from within the darkness. As we approached, the child went quiet, conditioned for this sort of disturbance, like a well-taught cheetah cub crouching low, slithering through tall grass while keeping its tail down. We moved past a shack where the little girl’s voice had come from. The entrance had a shower curtain jerry-rigged to the ceiling. The curtain was pulled back, and inside the dim room a bug-eyed man stared out from behind a book, a candle burning behind him, a shotgun on his lap. The man had a long, stubbled chin reaching out and grabbing the darkness. Pinned-up hair was braided into cornrows and flowing over his shoulders. As we passed, he was in the midst of rolling one of the serpent strands up in a finger. He gazed at us from behind a pair of spectacles as if we were a pair of loitering predators. A hand moved quickly toward the weapon, but Seee blinded him with his flashlight and the other hand went to his eyes. We moved past. A daddy longlegs scurried up a wall as our head beams moved back over the exterior. I had been surprised looking inside. The whole room sat on top of wooden pallets, runoff flowing beneath. An old-timey icebox sat in there, a sofa, double bed, coffee table, sink, rolled up sleeping bags. Lines of cultivated moss soaked up the wash running between the pallets, and at one end of the room the man had sawed-up whiskey barrels with tomatoes growing out of them.

  “Man’s got a penthouse in there,” Seee said once we were well past.

  “Viva Las Vegas, right?”

  “Exactly,” Seee said.

  “Better digs than my jungle mansion.”

  “You had free room and board,” he snorted. “Nothing to sneeze at.”

  I laughed as we slogged through the running water streaming down the corridor. The hexagonal tunnel lit up with burning candle lights as we dove deeper inside. I looked back at the strip of sunlight thinning from the tunnel’s entrance. We were exploring the hallway of a marooned spaceship which had lost power and drifted out in space, a Battlestar Galactica type of scene where the Cylons had invaded the decks and pulverized all of the humans, the survivors now stuck in the midst of the rubble.

  As we moved past another village of Tunnel People, the stench of urine, feces, and mildew grew. The farther in you went, the less motivated you were to travel out. Seee turned on his flashlight. The middle was a no man’s land. On its borders, the accommodations slipped to simple sleeping bags atop pallets. Duffle bags were stuffed and ready to move, most spots deserted. No man’s land was a stew of garbage, legions of ants, cobwebs, dead rat carcasses.

  We walked in deeper, past the garbage dump, took a left and kept going. The cockroaches kept us company on our march through the sludge, scurrying up walls and following. Perhaps we went another two hundred yards when we saw another glimmer of sunshine down the long corridor. We stopped at an air channel and sucked in the breeze.

  We kept going. Another hamlet of Tunnel People emerged, but none to put an eye on. We hopped a wall of sandbags mounted to direct the wash through a funnel and moved into another no man’s land.

  “What’s your real name?” I asked as we dipped back into the darkness.

  “Why do you want to know that?” Seee asked.

  “It’s part of you, isn’t it?”

  “A dead part—sure—I suppose so. But here I am. My name is Seee. I exist in the here and now. Why do you need to know more?”

  “I am not searching for your existence. I am searching for the truth.”

  “Truth cannot be found in a name or words alone. Some truths are self-evident.”

  We passed through a shallow lake in the middle of the corridor. The water was up to the top of our boots, stagnant and briny. Minnows darted in the water under the beam of my flashlight, and I thought about how the place had its own ecosystem. Separate rules of evolution reigned here in the catacombs different from the outside.

  “You still don’t trust me,” I said.

  “It is Cyril Tetsu,” he said abruptly, his tone carrying an air of seriousness.

  “Come on,” I said. “That name I’ve found tumbling inside the QX. It’s like a surfer caught in an undertow of Montgomery information waves.”

  “You profiled Montgomery?”

  “Why wouldn’t I? We need to know our enemy, don’t we?”

  Seee stopped, turned his flashlight on a wall of graffiti in competition with gray mold and green algae. The light beamed over the rainbow-colored words, Viva la Revolution. Directly below it was an airplane outlined in a circle—the peace sign, painted in black.

  “So how about it?” I asked.

  “You will never find a record of my existence.”

  “But yet, here you are,” I said.

  “Here I am.”

  We walked a while in silence. He seemed to know exactly where we were going, maneuvering throughout the labyrinth of underground tunnels expertly. My curiosity with his tie to this place was aroused. Was he just a rat that had come up through the sewer? A man from the true Underworld and not the virtual one? Perhaps he truly didn’t have a name and was never part of the State apparatus. Maybe everything about his past coiled into a simple fabrication. Instead of being a deadly assassin working for The Company all of those years, perhaps he elevated himself to god of the conmen, juking anyone gullible enough to bloody their names in his quest for liberation. Perhaps he was simply a cult, a numen to The Cause instead of a solid man.

  Finally, Seee said, “It is time we ditch your State name. I will now call you Cerberus. He has always been a part of you as Seee has been a part of me.” He moved the light off the wall and on to me, pointing it at my chest. “Do you see him? He’s a different man with a different name. He can see through six eyes instead of two, and you will need every one of them for the future that will sweep you up in its winds.”

  I walked silently behind him, the gun tucked behind my back in the crease of my jeans. He knew as well as I who had the strategic position. A lack of fear within him one could only equate to trust. I felt I had walked over a line, but the significance of the moment I wouldn’t yet fully comprehend.

  After another hundred yards of stepping through a stream of broken glass, we came upon another scattered collection of shanties. This time Seee went into one. When I entered through the slit in the tarpaulin, he was shaking hands with a man he introduced as Turner.

  Turner had a reedy voice, stood tall and up
right. A bald-headed man who spoke with an accent I couldn’t quite place.

  “You had any Noahs recently?” Seee asked.

  “Bad one last summer,” the man answered. “Worse yet since I been down here.” He pointed up at the wall. A black strip of paint over the words RIP Dorma May was drawn above a spraypainted array of flowers amongst the other graffiti randomly splattered up there. “The place flooded up to that mark. Killed a hundred people. But I handcuffed myself to the pipe there.”

  He showed us the scar on his wrist, a ring of pink and wrinkled flesh. “Cut me up pretty bad. Dislocated my shoulder the current was so strong.”

  Seee nodded, patted the man on the shoulder. They talked about the floods, the new Tunnel People tenants surrounding Turner’s dwelling. Then Seee said, “We’ve been on the road for quite some time. Mind if we take a rest?”

  “My home is your home,” the man said. “You can take that mattress there.”

  We crashed on a queen-size mattress on top of two wooden pallets. I fell asleep within a couple of minutes, the sound of the stream lulling me to sleep. I woke an indeterminable amount of hours later. Seee whispered to Turner over a low candlelight, a mason jar in his hands, drinking something that smelled like rye. I kept my eyes closed, interloping on their conversation. It might have been Yoncalla, perhaps a Tunnel People argot, but their voices were low and muddled.

  Finally, I stirred and sat up. Turner threw a miniature box of cereal at me.

  “Breakfast?” I asked.

  “That or lunch or dinner,” the man laughed, elbowing Seee.

  After a cup of coffee, Seee and I were on our feet again and moving through the dark tunnels, slogging through a sandy stream until we hit a patch of concrete. We walked through the middle of a long corridor absent of inlets or drains that might have provided a hint of sunlight. The roar of traffic came from overhead. Suddenly, Seee stopped and turned to me.

  “Give me your flashlight,” he ordered.

  I did as I was told. My headlamp beamed over his face and he squinted in the light. “Turn that off as well,” he said. Once I had done as he asked, he turned off the lights, and we were standing about two yards away from each other in the pitch black.

  “It wasn’t so long ago a pair of bars stood between us down in the darkness. Do you remember?” Seee asked.

  “Of course I do.”

  “You had a thirst for light.”

  “I wasn’t used to being blind.”

  “Eventually you realized you don’t need light to see, didn’t you? The darkness taught you something about instinct, Cerberus. Didn’t it?”

  “It did,” I said, wary of what leash he strung me on. In the midst of the blackness, I sensed a change, and I felt like a rabbit in an open field freezing under a circling shadow. Everything had lead up to this moment—why we were down here, why his mood had been so strange. I sensed a subtle movement and a chill raced up my spine.

  “I have a vision it will be you who will lead The Minutemen in the future,” he said.

  “Kumo is second in line,” I said warily, “and you’re not dead.”

  “Yes, and Kumo deserves the honor, but I don’t think he’ll last.” A shadow seemed to pass before me, but I knew my imagination played tricks as the darkness was pure.

  “Why don’t you think so?”

  “He’s street smart, no doubt about it. But he doesn’t see all of the angles.”

  “And I do?” I asked. “I don’t understand the angle right now.”

  “But you know there is one.”

  “I figured.”

  “You are a man who can find his way out of the dark, and live in it at the same time. You can coexist in two worlds. Kumo is present in only one.”

  “Are you saying I can liaise with The Anthill more effectively?”

  “Information is more important in the modern world than swords or guns. It is the NSA whom we must battle. You would be a great asset inside.”

  “This is all hypothetical talk,” I said. “We will hide you away, won’t we? You are Seee, alive in the here and now.”

  He ignored what I said. His voice turned inward, lethargic and tired, as if I were barely there. “They will follow my command, even if I am dead. Merrill has a recording of my wishes if things go badly. I buried something at The Abattoir. Remember the tree you scratched the date into?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s buried in the ground around it in a small vial. It has the names and contacts of each of the cells. Kumo is the only other who has it.”

  I felt veered away from the words he didn’t want to speak. He had a knack for steering conversations to the direction he wanted them to go. I tried to swerve it back and asked, “How am I going to get into the NSA? How am I going to explain that I’m here with you now? The Company will probably have my ass and…”

  Something occurred to me that stopped my thought process. I stood there silent a moment. I could hear him breathe in the blackness. Like a ripple in a lake, a tiny wave of it rolled over me.

  “You see the angle now,” Seee said. He flicked on one of the flashlights from his waist, and the light streamed across his face. His eyes danced in the shadows, his gun pointing directly at my head.

  “Pull your weapon out,” he ordered.

  I stood there frozen, looking him over. A crazy look buzzed in his eyes.

  “I won’t ask you again,” he said.

  I pulled out the gun tucked in my jeans from behind my back and held it down at my waist.

  “Point it at me,” he yelled.

  My thumb touched the steel on the front of my belt buckle, the gun clenched tightly in my fist. His eyes creased and turned yellow in the light.

  “The star that burns the brightest is the one closest to death. My spirit is on fire and you must be the one to snuff it out.”

  “I cannot,” I said, my voice gritty and furious. “I will not!”

  “You can and you will. Have I taught you nothing?”

  “You have taught me everything.”

  “Then you know what you must do.”

  He tilted the flashlight to the scabby concrete floor, and his face went dark. Then I felt a sharp pain shoot through my shoulder. I flicked on my headlight and saw him with a hunting knife in his hands, the tip bloody and red. The same knife with the twine handle and nickel guard I had used in the jungle to carve up the tree.

  I tilted my headlamp to my shoulder and saw blood seeping through my shirt. The wound wasn’t deep, but the blood kept flowing, dripping down on my boot.

  “It should leave a nice trail,” he said.

  The light passed underneath him once more. He looked like a glassy reflection in a river eddy—me at the river the morning after I had drowned Burns, a man not entirely of this world, a man about to leap for the Lushing Tree, a man ready to climb Jacob’s Ladder from the sandy Pit. I put my hand to the wound, and applied pressure, asking myself how I could pull the trigger on a man birthing an idea that might actually change the world.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” I yelled out to him, reaching out and pushing his gun out of my face. “This is not a game!”

  “The State needs a head. The media needs a hero. Let’s not let them jackoff to a huge search where I’ll end up dead anyway. Let’s do this on our own terms. I will not be a prisoner to anyone.” With his knife, he stroked each cheek, making streaks of red, a war-painted face. “I know this is no game, but this is game-over if it doesn’t get done.”

  I waved my flashlight over his eyes to blind him from my expression. “Why did you let me live knowing my motivations coming into The Abattoir?”

  “You came in with preconceived ideas. You knew nothing of The Cause. You were a traitor then, but you aren’t one now. Everyone knows it. Everyone has seen it.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that.”

  Tires swished by on a road from the world above. Way off in the distance, some drunk howled at the wind. Down in the darkness o
f the sewer, the steady sound of the stream flowed through the pitch-black corridor.

  His tone softened as he grabbed ahold of the barrel of my pistol and pointed it at his chest. “One of the hardest things in life is having to say goodbye to someone you love. In this score, we are brothers. I appreciate that it will be you if it makes any difference.”

  I thought of my father squirming on the ground after I shot him, after I had taken off his mask, after I had thrown my gun long and far across the parking lot. He asked the impossible. “This doesn’t have to be done.”

  “If you look at it clearly, you’ll see that not only does it have to be done, but it has to be you.”

  He pushed his chest against the barrel. “Pull the trigger. It’s what you’ve wanted? Now is your chance.”

  “I’ve given up that chance. It’s not what I want at all.”

  “It’s not what we’re going to make them believe.”

  With my gun against his chest, I felt his fingers over the trigger guard. Like his every move, reason and intent stood behind it—cold calculation, rational thought in the midst of stormy emotions. A memory of Drew Gareth being shot by the map man flashed in my mind, Seee standing there without even blinking an eye.

  “How are we going to make them buy such a story?” I asked.

  “We’ve left a trail for you. Messages to Pelletier. You are no longer at The Abattoir. You’ve been on my tail now for a while. You knew about Jackson Hole. You texted it to them a few minutes after it started happening.”

  He tilted his head back and laughed. “You, my friend, are a patriot.”

  Strained lines furrowed deep in his pallid face. He spoke with the voice of the earth, graveled and fading, light dimming in his eyes. A realization dawned in him that these were his last minutes, that they would be spent with me, that I was the man standing in front of him whom he was going to say goodbye to. His lips were void of color, a breathlessness rising to the surface. Flesh on his face thin, like snakeskin ready to peel away.