The Tank

by Nicola Lombardi

  He had to force himself to avert his gaze from that impossible, malignant universe, and closing his eyes he wondered what he would do if the Suffering was to suddenly open. How many - just how many? - had stood where he was and couldn’t come back? But once there, the time for choosing was over. There, on the Shutter’s moving platform, all the possible ways out were closed, except one.

  Leaning on his arms, Giovanni distanced himself from the door, moving backwards with difficulty, knowing he had to immediately escape from that absurd emotional flood. He swore under his breath, feeling betrayed by his own feelings. Focused as he was on the need to tear away those thoughts hanging from his brain like cobwebs (what would you do before an open Suffering?), only at the last moment did he hear the noise behind his back.

  He turned around, shocked by fear, and his legs gave away. He fell backwards, in the Shutter, lying on the platform. His right arm went numb from hitting the floor with his elbow, while the back of his head hit the surface of the Suffering. His heart screamed, but from his mouth only a muffled sound came out, almost a wail.

  It wasn’t an illusion this time. he wasn’t imagining it. There was someone out there, in the Ring.

  Standing against the feeble light of the emergency lamps, half hidden beyond the doorstep, was a shadowy silhouette, a fragment of darkness in human form. It was standing still, the contours drawn by the weak luminescence behind its back, and it looked like he was watching the Keeper lying in the Shutter, waiting to take a decision.

  “Who...” Giovanni had to get more air in his lungs to make himself audible. “Who are you?”

  He didn’t really expect the shadow to answer him, so he wasn’t surprised by it remaining silence.

  “What...?” His tongue deserted him, reluctant to obeying his brain. A mental ravine filled his head with a chaos of frantic thoughts.

  What do I have to do?

  A sudden movement from the shadow caused him to feel pins and needles on the back of his head, already in pain for the blow. Did he raise an arms, the right one, partially hidden from his view? He had brought it to...

  Terror blocked his throat. He didn’t just brought it to the input push-button panel, did he?

  A light shone in a recess of Giovanni’s mind. He had to. Yes, he absolutely had to...

  He started searching with the still numb fingers of his right hand. He felt pain, but he couldn’t give up: it was his only hope.

  It was then that the black shape spoke. It did so with a clearly altered voice, a coarse whisper like a rusty needle. Maybe he had an handkerchief on his mouth. “I need but press a button.”

  Giovanni’s fingers found what they were looking for, while torpor slowing them down started turning to fire. His blood was scalding and flowed at an extreme speed.

  The metal safety. He needed to switch it off.

  “Just one button...” the shadow went on.

  But that distressing whisper was interrupted when Giovanni, lying inside the Shutter, extended an arm. In his hand, the gun he had thought about bringing with him at the last minute reflected the trembling emergency light. He was shaking, that much was obvious. But he couldn’t miss at that distance.

  “You are dead.”

  He didn’t waste any more time, nor breath.

  The intruder predicted, probably from the tone with which Giovanni had spoken, he would really pull the trigger. He jumped backwards, out of the firing line, but wasn’t quick enough, and to the detonation a muffled whimpering followed. The shot, amplified by the Shutter’s walls, was like a bomb. Giovanni tried to frantically stand up as fast as he could. Clenching his teeth, his head a cauldron of pulsating pain, he briefly thought about the senseless human amoeba; it had surely heard everything too, and the Keeper imagined the multitude of eyes staring upwards.

  He quickly rolled out of the Shutter with such force he almost crashed on the opposite wall of the Ring. He heard steps running beyond the turn. Did he get him? It looked like it. From how he had jumped back, before disappearing, he probably hit him in his left shoulder.

  Keeping the Beretta aimed forward, ready to shoot again, he cautiously started following him. Fear had been suffocated by adrenalin, replaced by a frenzy he had never felt before (nemomeimpunelacessit). His survival instinct was inciting him, shouting to be on guard, but not let his prey get away. Ahead he went, walking along the wall at a fast pace, from one area of darkness to the next. Sweat irritated his eyes; he wiped them away with an angry gesture of the arm. Where did that bastard think he was going? Did he really believe he could reach the elevator and escape before being caught? Well, good luck then! He could also stop and wait for him, crouching in the shadows, ready to attack him. But Giovanni was ready, too. He would shoot the first thing he saw moving and all his senses were more alert than ever before.

  Traces could be seen on the linoleum floor. Water stains. Wet prints.

  Another thunder. It was strangely loud, considering the storm should be farther away now. Then a cold current came, a sudden and refreshing wind. Giovanni stopped, trying to understand the nature of that unexpected fall in temperature. The sweat on his forehead froze in an instant.

  He needed but take one more step to understand everything.

  The Escape was open. From the black, shining rectangle of night inside the green metal frame a cold current slapped him inside the copious rain.

  “Damn him...”

  He ran to the doorstep, not caring about the water biting him with myriads of icy teeth. With a hand on the small railing he looked down. A set of rungs went down towards the base of the Tank, disappearing after just a few meters in the dark and howling throat of the night.

  “Coward!” He screamed towards the black void in which the ladder plummeted. “You’re nothing but a coward!”

  He felt the impulse to shoot again. He aimed his Beretta towards the bottom of the ladder, in a vertical line, and imagined the bullet hitting whoever was descending in the center of his head. But then? In what mess would he get himself? He knew he had to justify each bullet. Until then it was self-defense and he knew nobody could blame him; but now, had he shot a man on the run, whoever he was, he would be less defendable. Not worth it.

  He relaxed his arm, listening to the thunders rumbling and slowly drifting southwards.

  “Coward...” he said again, but with less conviction. He was drenched and cold. The primitive furor that had possessed him was gone. As were the lights of the lamps behind him. He raised his head, still on the edge of the abyss, looking at an inexistent horizon. The world outside the Tank was a dark ocean, an impenetrable curtain that the rain, however insistent it could be, could not dissipate.

  A weird thought came to his mind. Is there still something beyond this silo of steel and concrete planted in a corpse-drenched soil?

  It was an interesting thought, but an inappropriate one. He had to go back in. Both because his duty not to stay outside the Tank without a good reason and because he seriously risked getting sick.

  A last, childish look under his feet, then he went back inside and closed the green door with a pound thud.

  But how did he open it?

  With a key, of course. Whoever had gotten in had one. Someone with access to a copy and the terminal from which he had sent his pathetic threats in the past.

  He holstered his Beretta, then took the keys out of his left pocket, making sure the small metal tetragram wouldn’t get caught in the thread of his pants. Once closing the Escape - no name could be more appropriate in that particular moment - Giovanni leant on it with his back. He needed a break. Even just a minute to catch his breath and calm down the chaos boiling in his head before the emergency light, which were now struggling, left him in the dark.

  Had he really been about to die? To be unloaded? Or was it a bluff? It was impossible to say. He would report the following day. He would tell everything.The NMO would catch the person that tried to kill him. There was a wounded man in Camp 9. He no doubt left lots of traces.
>
  He moved away from the cold, green door - beyond which the night went on, indifferent to his frustration - and started walking. The cold trails he had followed running outside the Shutter weren’t as knitted as before. He proceeded close to the wall on his left in order not to step on the blood that probably fell on the floor while the intruder ran away. If the wound was deep enough. Blood could give precious information on his persecutor’s identity.

  But he would check the following day. It was impossible to investigate in that particular moment. Thinking about what happened, or what could have happened, nauseated him. An irresistible idea had carved a path in his brain: go to bed and disappear. Go off. Draw a red line on that day. That’s what he would do.

  He struggled a bit trying to insert the apartment key into the lock. Once he was inside and had closed the door, the strong smells coming from the kitchen and the almost utter darkness disoriented so much he crashed into the coat hanger. His reflexes and some clumsy footwork helped him to avoid falling together with the wooden piece of furniture. Had he really fallen, he would probably just have stayed there on the ground for the rest of the night. He used his last energy to take off his shoes, water-and-sweat-drenched trousers and shirt, then threw them into the darkness. He heard the wet noise of his clothes together with something more massive. He remembered that his pistol and holster were still attached to his belt, but he lacked the will to take care of it. Let them stay there. It was fine with him.

  He had to take the shower, but the emergency lamps were now nests of dying fireflies. Moving without damaging something or hurting himself was impossible. Night itself had seeped into the apartment through invisible pores in the walls.

  He reached his bed, helped by the dim light coming from the window, and fell on it face first, with a groan. He felt so exhausted he couldn’t resist his worst thoughts, the ones his brain focused on when it felt his self-control slip away.

  He imagined the intruder coming back to the Tank and into the apartment, pick up the Beretta, still abandoned among his wet clothes, aim it to his temple, pull the trigger, then put it in his hand to simulate suicide.

  Everyone would think he couldn’t make it, the poor thing.

  He couldn’t bear the Tank. He didn’t resist. He looked so strong, so...

  He imagined all this while already floating, weightless, between wake and dream, and wasn’t surprised to think that if that really happened with him aware of it, maybe he wouldn’t raise a finger to stop him.

  18 - Questions Without Answers

  He woke up with a start at 5:43 A.M.. The voices had pulled him out of his dream. One was male, deep, grave, and one was female, polite and light.

  Only a few seconds earlier Giovanni was still standing before the open Escape, facing a storm that, however violent, couldn’t move him. The landscape expanding under his eyes was terrifying, surreal. An infinite expanse of corpses, as far as the eye could see. The whole Camp 9 was filled with corpses, but not all were immobile, no. Some were trembling, here and there. Some were still breathing and tried escaping his unavoidable doom. Giovanni contemplated that apotheosis of pain and deaf, terrified, yet intimately sure he was the chosen one, the untouchable one, privileged. The Tank protected him from harm. It was his fortress, his whole life. Then perceived the vibration, a diffused tremor, accompanied by a sinister crackling.

  It’s the universe’s foundations, he thought.

  And in that moment the mass of corpses started moving, a waving, sinuous surface, arched by invisible underground protrusions. Giovanni tried to get away from the Escape’s doorstep, but the charm of that view had an immense, trampling power. He couldn’t step back, not even when the Tank started bending forward in a barely noticeable, yet unstoppable way. His hands were clenched around the green mental steps, he tried to shout, but the storm shove the shout right back into his throat. There was no hope for the Tank. The enormous circular structure was lost. And while Giovanni fell with it, all the bodies obscuring the land raised their arms to welcome him...

  He opened his left eye and saw his wrist and watch. The right eye was buried in the pillow. In his head, the echo of the falling Tank still hadn’t gone silent, and so the scare.

  He had no time to completely wake up, nor to get over the devastating effect of that morning nightmare, because a new sensory solicitation, way more real, needed his attention.

  Two people were talking. There, in his apartment. A man and a woman. He didn’t understand what they were saying, but it was his duty to immediately get up and go deal with whatever it could be. It didn’t look like they were plotting something and he didn’t hear any signs of tension or threat. For what he could hear, they were in the kitchen.

  A pink dim light got in from the window, the placid light of dawn rounding every corner and making it soft and relaxing. Giovanni sat on the edge of his bed, but the change in blood pressure made his head spin and the room rotated some degrees. He decided it would be helpful to close his eyes for a few seconds, keep his breathing under control and wait for the heart to get back to working correctly. But when he felt ready and about to get up to go find out who had gotten in his flat, he realized he was only wearing his underwear and socks. However anomalous the situation, it wasn’t appropriate to go check dressed like that with a woman in the room. Apart from the embarrassment, there was the possibility that they had been sent by the NMO: they weren’t hiding their presence and were maybe waiting for him to get up. But...at that time?

  He quickly took a night-gown our of his wardrobe without worrying about the door creaking. He noticed a second of silence in the kitchen, then the voices started talking again. They probably heard him. Maybe the man said something funny, as the woman laughed before commenting herself.

  Giovanni got his gun from the pile of clothes on the floor, put on his slippers and, hiding the Beretta under his back, appeared on the kitchen’s doorstep. He was ready for anything, but not for what he saw. And a painful migraine punished him instantly for his stupidity.

  He still hadn’t noticed that all the light were now on. And so was the TV.

  In the screen, a young journalist and very elegant old man were talking in a studio. The camera focused on one, then the other, and it sufficed to follow just a couple of sentences to understand it was an interview. He was a nazi hierarch, or something like that.

  Dragging his feet and pressing a finger on his temple Giovanni grabbed the remote and made both disappear, annoyed. It was all clear now. What an imbecile!

  He sat at the table, which was still set from the night before, but the mere sight of the dish, oily and smelling of hot sauce, made him sick. He stood up, growling some vulgarity, and went to the bathroom. He swallowed a couple of painkillers, took a warm shower, dressed up, then dragged himself to the Control.

  Everything appeared to be in order inside the Well. The greenish image of the agonizing convicts went back to its professional routine that made him keep his usual balanced emotive detachment. Good.

  The Postman was silent. Everything good on that front, too. It was too soon to receive messages or faxes. But that day he would be the one to take the first time, and very early, too.

  He sat in front of the screen, rubbed his hands and, without beating around the bush, he started writing his report to the officers in the Center. His headache was disappearing.

  Thanks to the chemical first-aid, he thought with mock satisfaction. Moreover, the strict mental training he went under in these last few months let his cut with efficiency the umbilical cord binding to the nightmare he had made, so he couldn’t remember it. It was useless, very useless, to think about it. There was a time when he would think about it for half a day. But not now. No more dead weights. A clean mind!

  “I am the NMO.”

  Yeah, right. A piercing titter slipped away from a corner of his mouth. You are the NMO, and you are also an idiot who cant tell two talking people in the TV from intruders...

  That was really a good one. It would be
a funny chapter in the memoir he would write. One day.

  He shook his head to forget those inanities and focused on what he was writing. Once finished, he double-checked.

  “Esteemed Sirs, I have to signal a serious incident happened in the evening of yesterday, the 6th of July. Alerted by a power outage I proceeded with all the necessary inspections, opening the door of the isolation cabin to check. During the inspection I was blindsided by an intruder, impossible to identify due to the reduced visibility caused by the emergency lights being almost out of battery. Since he manifested homicidal intents, I was forced to shoot (a single bullet). Wounded, probably in his left shoulder, the intruder escaped using the escape door form which I think he got in, considering the impossibility to do so with the elevator. My attempt to catch him had a negative outcome. I still haven’t cleaned the floor should there be the need to analyze the blood trails. I await directions. Respectfully.”

  Bureaucratic slang had always irritated him. But now, so spontaneously coming from his head, he found it ridiculous. It was a very good report: dry, short, exemplary. It was a pity he couldn’t communicate the enormous emotional impact of what happened. But what could he write? Passions and emotions had very little influence when information was communicated to those levels. The only important thing was to be dutiful. And be sincere, when possible. Ok, he didn’t get inside the Shutter for an inspection, not technically anyway; but he also had to protect himself, didn’t he? Ok, that was good.