by Robert Clark
‘You asked me to join you,’ said Lee.
‘Make no mistake, I want you to join us,’ insisted Cage, ‘however, yours is a brand new role I have worked up. I built this place way back in the seventies. When the United States Government had its head up its ass with the Vietnam shit storm. Back then, they didn’t give a damn about me or my plans. Probably still don’t for that matter. But their eyes are working their way here, and that’s my concern.’
‘You want me to run interference?’ asked Lee.
‘Of a sorts, yes. I want you to be one of our number, while at the same time a lone wolf. I need you out there, scouting what you can, and deflecting any problems that come our way before they sink their blades into our business. Don’t get me wrong, you will be a part of our community, but you’ll seldom reap the benefits, if you know what I mean.’
There was a moment of silence while both parties contemplated the offer.
‘Now,’ continued Cage, as though he felt compelled to speak, ‘you can decline, and I neither blame you, nor resent you if you so choose, but I cannot offer you a place here otherwise. I’m afraid it’s all or nothing with this one, and I’m serious about the role. It may be that ten months down the line we discuss flexibility in the role, but-’
‘No flexibility required,’ interjected Lee, ‘and I accept your offer.’
‘Lone wolf, scouring the outskirts for fresh meat?’
‘Whatever you need of me, boss.’
‘Excellent!’ boomed Cage. ‘I knew you were the right man for the job. Now, let me take you on a little tour of-’
The recording ended. I imagined Cage thumbing the button to kill the recording before taking his newest recruit on a tour of the place he would protect. I wondered how long he had held his solitary post, watching through the trees for Cage’s enemies. I imagined him returning victorious. Another dragon slain, and gaining the growing approval of his new boss. How many days had passed before he returned to his new home, a trusted confidant?
Even though I had barely known him, Lee Corser’s voice sent a shiver through my spine, like I had seen the ghost of the man standing before my very eyes. He had risked his life to save me more than once, and had died as a result of my actions. He was a good man, and had served his leader to the very end of his life. Given those in Cage’s inner circle, he had picked wisely putting his faith in Lee.
I put Lee’s tape beside the growing collection of bygone conversations and picked up the final cassette I had taken. My own. James Stone. I held it in my hands and thought about smashing it to pieces with the axe. It was a slither of evidence I didn’t need lying around. If Cece was successful with her attack, the might of the government was going to come thundering down on this place, and I didn’t need any other crimes pinning to my chest. I had enough to be getting on with already.
But something in my mind couldn’t let it go. I slid the cassette into the device, closed the lid and pressed play. Just like with Agent Noble, the conversation did not start at the beginning.
‘I knew you came here for a reason,’ said Cage. I remembered him saying it. Not from our first encounter, but when he had called me to his office to ask me to uncover his mole.
‘Besides you planning my abduction?’ I said. The sound of my own voice made me cringe. I always hated hearing myself speak.
‘Water under the bridge,’ said Cage. ‘Now, we don’t have time to waste. You have a date with the Dawsons.’
I heard the sound of my chair scraping across the floorboards, followed by footsteps and a closing door. Then there was a couple of moments silence.
‘I knew you came here for a reason,’ said Cage again, ‘and I can’t help but shake the thought that you’ll end up listening to this cassette one day. If that’s the case, then I suppose there is something you need to hear, because I am almost certainly not around to tell you it in person.’
Thirty-One
Exhaustion
Maddox Cage took a long, wistful sigh before he continued.
‘Trust is a funny thing, don’t you think?’ he said, dictating his rhetorical question into his recording device. ‘We put it in people and ask for nothing in return. We hand over our innermost secrets, our terrifying truths, our lives, and bestow another living being with their welfare. When this whole thing started, I never expected a day like this to come. But here it is, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it now but watch the cards tumble down.’
I heard a noise that I could only suppose was Cage removing the recording device from its hiding place.
‘Truth is, I’m tired of this world,’ he said with another sigh. ‘I look at everything I’ve achieved, here at Second Solace, and during my time in the Marines. I think of all the lives I’ve helped and all the ones I’ve taken, and I feel one thing. Exhaustion. I don’t care. Not about the victories or the defeats. Nothing. I used to stay up at night thinking about the faces of those I’ve murdered. Sounds like a goddamn cliche, but I don’t know how else to say it. They used to haunt me. They spurred me on to becoming a better person and bringing those responsible to justice. Our Commander in Chief sent us off to an unwinnable war without a goddamn care in the world. He sentenced my brothers to death, and ignored the growing pile of bodies that appeared outside his window. I used to hate John F. Kennedy, before he took a bullet. Hell, I cheered when he died. Now I can’t even remember what that anger felt like. It’s not even a memory anymore. It's nothing to me. Completely gone from my world.’
He got up out of his chair. The leather squealed again. A few seconds of footsteps followed, then nothing. Silent contemplation.
‘I can feel it coming soon. The end of the world,’ he said, his voice forlorn. ‘It feels strange to say this, but I don’t dread it like I used to. I don’t relish the thought. I… nothing it.’
More silence, and I could feel his eyes meeting mine across the ether. A dying message from a wayworn warrior.
‘But even so, it’ll come and I need your help. I… I should have trusted you,’ Cage said, his voice sounding much more desperate than I was used to. ‘Yours was a guiding hand I should have held. When the time comes, I don’t want to go down without a fight. That’s where you come in. I want you to burn it all down. Kill them all. Every last one of them.’
I heard him move once more, and almost thirty seconds passed before he spoke again.
‘He will come for me, I know it,’ Cage continued. ‘I believe you were right. We cannot trust him.’
Something changed in my mind, and the sense of compassion that had begun to warm my chest was gone.
‘Cecilia,’ said Maddox Cage, ‘there is no one I trust more than you. When Stone comes for me, I want you to be the one to finish him off. I have sent him on a fools errand, and I will indulge him where I can while you complete your work. But he will come for me, and I need you to be ready. Good luck, my darling.’
I ejected the cassette and snapped it between my fingers. Anger consumed my heart, making every beat of it feel like fuel on a raging fire. He hadn’t trusted me. He hadn’t believed in me. Just like Cece, he had vilified me from the start, but his trust had been misplaced, and as I sat there with only the meagre light of the oil lantern for company, I relished in his downfall. He wanted me dead, just like the rest of the fucking world.
But I was still standing.
‘That was four days ago.’
The Wolf, come to argue once more.
‘All I’m saying is, he gave you the combination of his safe for a reason,’ the Wolf insisted. ‘Maybe he wanted you to know he had his doubts, but in the end he changed his mind.’
‘He sent me off on a wild goose chase for days,’ I snapped. I pushed off the camping chair and stormed around the miserable, dank space. ‘All because he wanted his dog to be the one to finish me.’
‘If that were true he’d have ordered you dead from the start. He was paranoid. If he wanted Cece to kill you, why did he record his request on a tape and hide it in a locked safe?’
‘Why record it at all if he thought I would kill him?’
‘James, you were ordered to kill him,’ snarled the Wolf. ‘Don’t throw a tantrum because he figured that out. And how do you know half of those tapes you left behind didn’t have equally accusatory messages recorded on them? He could have feared half his number at the end.’
‘No messages like that on Cece’s tape, were there,’ I shouted.
‘You heard that recording. It must be ten, fifteen years ago, at least. He probably thought he was invincible back then.’
‘Why are you sticking up for him?’ I asked. ‘Just to spite me, or is there some equally shitty reason for your constant belligerence?’
‘I’m not sticking up for him, I’m just explaining to you that things changed in four days. Just because you’re too shortsighted to see it, I’ll rub it in your face until you understand it.’
I swore and kicked over the chair Fenwick had sat in and looked for something to punch. Nothing but packed boxes and jagged stone walls. I swore again.
‘Look,’ said the Wolf, his tone far more considerate than I was used to. ‘You haven’t eaten in ages. Get some tinned crap down your throat and sleep it off. If you’re still angry in the morning, I won’t argue, alright?’
‘Since when were you the voice of reason?’
‘Since you stopped being. Now go eat and sleep.’
With great reluctance, I submitted. Unpacking the boxes of food told me all I was going to get for sustenance were vacuum-packed sachets the like of which I suspected were used by astronauts on the space station. To give them some credit, they didn’t taste bad. I wolfed down as many packs as I could fit into my starved stomach and chased them down with a bottle of water that tasted funny.
With my hunger satisfied, sleep came quickly. No sooner had I unraveled one of the moth-bitten sleeping bags stacked beside the food boxes and crawled inside like a hibernating animal, did I feel the crutch of consciousness fall out from under me, and I fell into a deep sleep.
A cascading mess of thoughts pelted my muddled mind, too dazed and exhausted to focus in on any singular aspect that troubled it the most. I saw the faces of countless foes and far fewer friends drift in and out with sporadic frequency. The words they spoke made little sense to me, and the more I tried to listen, the more their speech garbled.
More than once I woke with a start, eyes frantically searching the engulfing darkness for whatever had brought malice to my mind. Of course, there was no one there. Fenwick, it appeared, had been true to his word. And the desire for sleep was much stronger than my desperate search for ghosts.
When finally I woke for good, it was to a world of complete darkness. The oil lantern had burned out, leaving the canvas of my eyes no paint to map out my surroundings. Yet I could feel in my body that it was morning. For the first time in what felt like ages, I was well rested, and after a couple more sachets of astronaut food, I felt ready to take on the brand new day.
A quick rummage of the supplies earned me a valuable discovery. A walker’s rucksack. I poured in my collection of cassette tapes, along with the recording device, several sachets of food, a bottle of water, and the screwdriver.
What came next would have been a damn sight easier with a torch, or lantern, or even a lit match. Fumbling around across uneven terrain with no clue whatsoever how far my journey was likely to be did not fill me with a sense of joy, yet without any other options, it was my only choice.
I eased slowly forwards, hands outstretched and searching desperately in the stygian gloom for some solid contact just like they had all those days ago when I had first entered the bunker. My fingers brushed against damp, moss-coated rocks. I felt around to make sure it wasn’t a loose boulder, and as my fingers continued along their contour, I followed at a steady pace.
I headed left, traversing with slow, precarious steps into the darkness. Progress was as slow here as it had been in the bunker. With no sense of direction, I had no idea which way Fenwick had gone the night before, nor did I have any idea how many branching paths there may be down here. I cursed his decision to not leave me with a torch, but it would do me no good swearing into the blackness.
I continued for what felt like hours, fingers forging ahead before my feet followed with trepidation, before I started to see something. Daylight worked its way through cracks in the ceiling which, as I continued in their direction, seemed to grow ever more present. Finally, I saw light spooling in and painting itself across the walls up ahead, and abandoned my steady approached in favour of a run. I wanted out of the gloom. I needed to breathe.
I turned the corner and was greeted by the transcendent glow of the winter sun, low in the sky, but dead ahead of me like a trophy at the end of a marathon. I stepped out of the cave and let the warmth sooth my body. Basking in its glory. It was a comfort I had sorely desired.
‘Hello, James.’
The voice almost killed me. The shock sent me a foot into the air and spinning wildly to see where it had come from. As my eyes landed on the culprit, he burst into laughter.
‘Jesus Christ, boy. You got a firecracker up your ass?’
Agent Kayden White took a step closer. His pressed suit replaced by a thick white winter coat, grey waterproof trousers, and a grey sherpa hat with the ear flaps hanging down to his jawline. Slung around his shoulders was a machine gun.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I snapped.
‘We came to save your ass,’ said Agent Jonah Miles from behind me. He too was dressed in similar attire, though he sported no hat, and his weapon was up and trained in my direction. ‘Easy now, we weren’t sure who we’d find up here.’
Without hesitation, I launched at him, knocking the weapon from his grasp and pulling the axe out of my pocket to drive into those pristine teeth of his. Whyte made a noise, and was on my back before I could get the axe loose. He heaved me back, which gave his partner enough time to scramble to his feet and jam the nose of the gun in my neck.
‘That’s the one and only chance you’re going to get there, Stone,’ Miles snapped. ‘Try anything again and I’ll put you down like a rabid dog.’
‘You son of a bitch,’ I barked. ‘You lied about Sophie. You fucking tricked me.’
‘Alright, yes that was a dick move, but you wouldn’t have played ball otherwise, would you?’
Whyte let go of me and got to his feet. He too had his gun on me.
‘We needed your help, and this was the only way we could get it on short notice,’ said Miles. ‘We didn’t like doing it, but that’s the job sometimes. You’ve got to get your hands dirty.’
‘Except I hear it's not your job anymore,’ I spat. ‘I spoke to your boss, Alex Pierce. He told me you two just got the sack.’
The two ex-agents shared a quick look.
‘That might be a bit of an overstatement,’ said Whyte. ‘But yes, we aren’t in his good books. Which reminds me.’
He swung back his gun and stood over me. With Miles still pointing his gun at my head, Whyte knelt down and pressed my head to the side.
‘Get off me,’ I yelled.
‘Easy now, I’m checking the tracker. What the hell did you do to it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Miles. ‘Those things never fail, and yours has been sending out a signal weaker than your granddaddy’s boner for days.’
‘You think it was the cave?’ asked Whyte to his partner.
Miles shook his head.
‘Should work up to one hundred feet underground. A little cave ain’t doing shit to them.’
Whyte backed off, and I scrambled away, getting to my feet in the process.
‘Go figure it would be the elusive James Stone to get the faulty tracking device,’ laughed Miles. ‘We should take him to Vegas and see if that luck of his could win us the big bucks.’
‘If the tracker is broken, how did you find me here?’ I asked.
‘We started following you as soon as you got back here
yesterday,’ said Miles, holding up a small palm-pilot device. ‘This thing should find our little needle in this shit stack, but when we got close, your signal died. Normally, we should have got a reading to say if you’d tried to pull it out or gotten yourself killed, but there was nothing. We waited around to see if it came back on, and early this morning, it did. We’ve been tracking your location above ground.’
‘I figured you’d found a way to cut it out and stick it to a rat or something,’ sniggered Whyte.
‘I had more faith in our boy,’ smirked Miles.
‘I wished you two had died in a car crash,’ I said.
‘Don’t be like that, James,’ said Whyte with a look of genuine disappointment. ‘We’re on the same team here.’
‘Are we?’ I snapped. ‘Does that mean it’s my turn to hold your loved ones hostage and threaten you to do my bidding, or do you guys give more than you can take?’
‘Why don’t you quit your yapping and give us a debrief on your mission?’ said Whyte.
‘Here it is. The mission was bullshit all along.’
Miles launched forwards and grabbed a hold of my shirt.
‘Listen here, shit bag,’ he snarled. ‘This might not mean anything to you, but this shit is serious. We’ve got a terrorist up there concocting nuclear weapons with a bunch of crazed activists, and one of ours trapped in the fray.’
