Mikail turned and began to tap the wall with his hand, then looked back at Clay with a worried look on his face.
“It’s not possible for you to understand the politics of this place, Clay. You don’t even know where you are. But,” he indicated ‘out’ by making a circular motion with his hand, “the rest of these guys are real criminals. Some of them are the worst kind of criminals. Whereas we,” he indicated the three there in the room with Clay, “are political criminals. They think we’re spies. Listen.” He stopped and walked toward the cell door, looking out for a moment before poking his head back in. “Forget all of that. None of that is going to make sense to you. I just say all of that to tell you that we are not your enemies, and those guys out there are not your friends. They’re rifling through the place as we speak, looking for food. That’s all they can deal with right now. Todd is dead, and if they find any other guards around here, those guys will be dead, too. I’m thinking that the back to back storms basically doomed the place. I’m not sure that any of the other guards even made it out here after the Hurricane. I’m thinking Todd’s been manning this place by himself. So, when no food showed up and things ran low in the cafeteria, he just decided that no one would care if we starved to death.”
Clay stared for a moment, trying to take it all in. Mikail looked at Sergei and Vladimir, “Well, I think that’s about it, Clay. An unnecessary chain of unfortunate events and now, shall we say, things have gone a little haywire.”
Clay just looked at Mikail, not sure what to think about anything he was hearing. He slipped off the bunk onto the mattress on the ground and sat there, pulling his legs up to his chest. Mikail crouched down, looking at Clay face to face. He whispered conspiratorially, “The new bosses, those thugs out there, they sent us in here because we speak good English, which is exactly why they hate us. That is why they suspect us of being spies. They don’t trust us. But they use us, you see, because our English is good. We’re here to find out if you can help them. To find out what you know.”
Clay shrugged, wordlessly. What could he tell them? He knew nothing. He showed as much in his face, as a way to answer.
“These young men and boys will kill you, Clay. That’s a fact. They almost did it before, but we were able to stop them. So, we’re supposed to find out just who you are and if you have any value to them.”
Clay shook his head, slowly. Strangely, the effects of the hypothermia had worn off, but the world he’d stepped into seemed to have shifted. It was as if the beating—perhaps it was the adrenaline—had served to heighten his awareness and his thought processes were back to normal, but the world had gone sideways in the bargain. He felt like he’d walked off the edge of the earth. He believed that Mikail wanted him to tell him something but he had absolutely nothing to tell him. He was a guy who had hiked out of the city and into the mountains and seemed to have wandered into a world not of his making. The only thing he knew for sure was that his only way out of this was going to be to convince someone, somewhere, to let him leave.
“Well,” he said, after some thought, “I’m Clay… I told you that. I am a hiker and a traveler that got lost in the storm. The second storm, not the first one. I was fine after the first one. I’m from upstate but I’ve been living in Brooklyn for the last six years. I got out of New York because of the storm, and because I just want to get home. I’m trying to get home to Ithaca. Then the nor’easter hit. I got completely turned around. I was unprepared. I made stupid decisions. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I stumbled into this place. One whole section of the external fence is down, by the way. That’s how I got in. Anyway, I stumbled into this place about half dead and frozen and I was able to plead with that security guard named Todd to let me in to warm up and dry out. That’s all that I know, but it’s the truth.”
“Yes,” Mikail said, “well, the truth shall set you free, I suppose.” He stood up and looked at the others.
Vladimir, the tall one, speaking for the first time, said, “Stumbling into this place was probably a bad deal for you. Might have been better if you died out there in the cold.”
“Maybe,” Clay said.
“No maybe,” Vladimir said. “This place eats people. It doesn’t spit them back out.”
Sergei interrupted. “What Vladimir Nikitich is saying, Clay, is that you need to work with us. Think of something to give them. If they don’t need you, you’re dead. Right now they’re probably at the cafeteria ripping it apart for packets of ketchup or rotten fruit. But they won’t be down there forever.”
Mikail picked up where Sergei left off, almost without missing a beat. “Just so you know, those guys aren’t geniuses. They’re not all idiots, but most of them are. They’re in here for being sociopaths, psychopaths, and rejects, your social castaways. Warwick has those things just like any other place in the world. Maybe even more so. You ever been in jail, Clay?”
“Yeah. Nothing too serious, though. You call this place Warwick?” Clay asked.
“That’s where you are. Not the prison here. The prison is part of Warwick. Warwick is the whole damned town.”
“What do you mean the whole town?”
“Clay,” Mikail continued, “Focus. What you’ve stumbled into is too big to get in your head, so you’re just going to have to get your head into what’s going on right here and right now. Everything else… you don’t need to know. What you need to know is that here in a bit—maybe in an hour, maybe in five minutes—those guys that wrecked this place and killed Todd are going to come back here, and you will need to give them something. We don’t have time to mess around.”
“Give them something? What can I give them? I don’t even know what’s going on,” Clay said in something approaching despair.
“If you’re working for someone, Clay—CIA, some faceless government agency, a joint task force, anything like that—you’ll need to tell them. That’ll keep you alive. You’ll have value to them then.”
“But none of those things are true!”
“Do you want to live, Clay?” Mikail asked, with an intense look on his face that seemed to mask a motive that Clay was not able to discern.
“Of course.”
“Then what are you really doing here?”
“I told you.”
“You told me nothing!” Mikail shouted angrily, before thinking better of his outburst and lowering his voice, “I’m trying to help you, Clay. That’s all. No one else needs to die. Who are you?”
That was it. Right there. That was the moment when Clay knew. Looking Mikail right in the face, he knew… and Mikail knew too.
“I’m just a guy who’s had a very bad day. I obviously ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m just trying to get home.”
Mikail nodded at the other two and they slowly moved toward the door, but before Mikail turned to leave, he knelt down and touched Clay on the shoulder, “I don’t think you’re going to make it home, Clay, not if I can’t tell those guys something other than that you’re just a tourist who stumbled into prison. That story doesn’t fly, so just think about it.”
With that, the three young men shuffled out of the Tank and the door closed softy behind them and Clay heard the lock turn and engage and the light clicked off bathing him once again in inky blackness.
****
Outside, somewhere, the blizzard still raged, if Mikail was to be believed.
Inside, the questions swirled through Clay like a tempest in their fury. How would a prisoner have even known all of this, Clay wondered, especially one who was an outcast among outcasts? If Mikail was under suspicion as a spy, how would he have known their motives, and his own role in carrying them out?
Clay sat on the floor in the dark and went over the conversation in his mind, trying to grasp at any straw that would help him solve the puzzle in a way that would allow him to give the three visitors the benefit of the doubt. He could find none.
He didn’t know what kind of place this was, this place called Warwick, but he knew that wha
tever storm was raging outside was nothing compared to the storm raging in here. Further, he knew that if he was so foolish as to allow himself to think for a moment that the three young men were being straight with him, he would certainly end up dead. Perhaps it was the weirdness of the encounter with others who, like him, were aliens in their own homeland, or maybe not that, exactly, since he’d experienced several such encounters over the course of the last few days. But it was something along those lines. He’d grown sensitive to the nuances of such meetings. Out of all of his uncertainties and confusions, Clay was absolutely sure of one thing…
Mikail had the keys.
These three young men were not innocent victims of circumstance, like he was. They were not “political prisoners” either. In fact, he was certain that these three were the ones really running this place.
****
Saturday
He didn’t know when he fell asleep, but he figured it must have been way after midnight. He was so exhausted, though, that he eventually slipped into a very deep and fitless sleep. It was the kind of sleep that only attends to a man whose waking life is falling apart. When he awoke he could not remember tossing and turning at all.
Clay’s eyes (or was it “eye”, singular?) opened slowly when he heard a commotion in the hallway outside his cell. He sat up in his bunk and it took him some time to get his bearings on where he was. The dull aches in his body reminded him that things had not gone well the night before and his right hand found the lump near his eye and probed it, noting that he still didn’t have any feeling there at all. It was dark in the room, so he didn’t know if he’d regained any sight in that eye. A thought crept into his mind and slowly formed until it joined with memory and he realized that somewhere out there, according to Mikail, the prisoners were supposed to be deciding his fate. Apparently they were in no hurry.
Along with his pains and a dull ache coming from his lower back, he felt a gnawing hunger that reminded him that he had not eaten much at all since the turkey sandwiches at the restaurant just off the highway back in another life. The little bit of fish he’d swallowed right before the riot hadn’t amounted to much, and he felt the growl in his gut and the faintly pleasant tightness that reminded him of day three of a fast. Does the condemned man get a last meal around here? He suddenly remembered that food may not be the best topic of conversation with prisoners who have been starved for a week.
After an hour or so sitting quietly in the dark the light flipped on and he saw a face look in at him through the tiny window. With his one good eye and the crisscross of chicken wire he didn’t recognize the face at all. Clay sat up on the bunk and pushed his way along it to the far wall, not knowing if this was to be another interrogation or if they were actually coming to kill him.
The lock turned and the door swung open and a face looked in at him and smiled. It was the face of a boy who looked to be about sixteen or seventeen, and then the rest of the boy came through the portal carrying a faded green plastic meal tray. The young man approached slowly, with some hint of fear on his face, and he tried to smile bravely as he handed the tray to Clay.
Clay looked down and he was startled at what he saw. For a starving people they surely ate well around here. His tray was loaded with four or five thick slices of some kind of rye bread slathered with butter. There were two hard-boiled eggs, peeled; a bowl of some kind of hot cereal grains (also slathered with butter); some sliced apples; a hunk of whitish cheese; and a mug of hot, black coffee.
“Wow,” Clay said, looking over the veritable feast. “Good thing I still have my teeth.”
The young boy nodded, smiled politely again, and then turned to leave.
“Wait… you,” Clay sputtered, not knowing what to call the youth, “what’s your name?”
“I don’t speak the English,” the boy said, shyly and with a very heavy Russian accent.
“Someone forgot to tell your mouth,” Clay responded.
“Vasily,” the boy replied, again with a very thick accent, looking over his shoulder as if he were doing something very wrong. He stepped back out into the hall, and then quickly returned back to the cell with a case of water in plastic bottles, still in the plastic wrap. The writing on the water bottles was, he assumed, in Russian.
Clay grabbed one of the bottles of water and twisted off the cap and took a long swig of water. “Where’d you get the food, Vasily? I thought you guys were all starving to death.” Indeed, Vasily did look slightly thin, though not in any way approximating starvation or even some kind of malnutrition. His eyes were clear and bright, and his hair had been cut recently and he looked strong in a sinewy kind of way.
Vasily did not reply, but something in his eyes tried to communicate with Clay and he wrapped his hands nervously in his faded orange prison shirt not knowing if he wanted to flee or stay and talk.
“Are they going to kill me today, Vasily?” Clay asked, taking a bite from the toast, his good eye rolling back in pleasure at the taste of the salty, melted butter and beautifully toasted rye bread. When he looked back to Vasily, he smiled at the boy again, just waiting for a reply.
Vasily did not reply, he just nodded his head and walked back out of the cell. The lock ticked closed but this time the light was left on.
****
The next two meals that day were the only other interruptions to Clay’s somewhat welcomed solitude. Lunch was as bountiful as breakfast had been, though Clay could not be sure exactly what each of the dishes were or what they contained. There was a cold, sour soup that Vasily called “Okroshka” which had some green leafy vegetable, large pieces of potato, and chunks of fish. It was delicious. There was actually a small dab of some white caviar with small crackers which he did not enjoy, but then there was a heavy pancake topped liberally with butter and sour cream which was perfect. There was more coffee to drink, along with a shot of vodka. The only things he left on his tray after lunch was the caviar and the vodka. He laughed to himself as he looked at the un-tasted vodka. Last time I had vodka, I got thrown in jail!
Supper was a bowl of what looked like beet soup with ample pieces of meat (he could not tell if it was beef or venison or some other meat) and heavy dollops of sour cream on top. This was served with thick chunks of black barley bread with butter and a couple of sliced cucumbers.
“Maybe they’re getting me ready for my execution,” he told Vasily, “fattening me up so they can eat me.” The boy, who either did not understand or did not appreciate gallows humor, simply paused at the door as if to say something, but decided better of it and then disappeared again.
He was left alone without visitors for a few hours after his supper, and then, about the time that he figured it might be starting to get dark outside, he heard a knock at the door and recognized the tall figure of Vladimir peering in. Why knock?
Mikail led the procession into the cell and Vladimir and Sergei came in behind him. Both leaned up against the walls with arms crossed affecting a youthful position of arrogance and unearned power, like thugs who had just taken over the playground. It had become evident to Clay that Mikail was the man in charge and it didn’t seem that he minded letting Clay know that either.
“Good evening, Clay,” Mikail said with a cold smile of mock friendliness.
“Hello,” Clay responded unemotionally. It was apparent to him that the façade of good cop had been dropped. Mikail had apparently decided to now deal with him as who he really was, whatever that could be. With the better lighting and some minimal use of his right eye, Clay now noticed that Mikail was probably in his early 20’s, older than Clay had originally thought, though youthful enough to pass for an older teenager. Sergei and Vladimir did not look to have reached their 20th year yet and were maybe in their late teens.
“I hope you have enjoyed the food. Things improved for us radically once we’d taken the town,” Mikail said, with just a hint of pride.
“So there is a Russian town around here?” Clay asked.
The three young men s
tarted to laugh, Mikail laughing the hardest, and it took a moment for him to return to his more serious demeanor.
“Yes, Clay, there is a Russian town around here. Right here in America. Warwick, as we informed you earlier. And like a wick draws up oil, so Warwick has drawn you into itself. It is our town, and now we run it.”
“Congratulations. Ok, so what does that have to do with me? Why am I still here? Why are you still acting like I should know something I don’t? Why was I beaten? What comes next?”
“Easy, Clay” Mikail said, “You are still here because we have not yet decided what to do with you. You are a hostage. The rest can wait for now.”
“Do I get a phone call?” Clay asked sarcastically.
“Maybe you could if the phones were working, or if anyone else in the tri-state area had electricity. But…” Mikail paused, taking a deep breath. As he did so, Clay could sense the bravado drain out of him, replaced by a level of stress and weight that the young man was not entirely used to. The crown weighs heavy on the head of a king.
“But,” Mikail continued, “it seems that the fortuitous duet of storms that has plunged this part of America into utter darkness, has had—is having—some serious effects. We were able to take this prison—and all of Warwick—because the guards and many of the employees either couldn’t make it here to work, or chose not to come in for some selfish reason of their own. As we mentioned last night, the prison didn’t even have a ghost staff on duty when we took over. The town fell just as easily.”
“I don’t know Warwick, and I don’t know Russian, and I don’t know you, and I don’t have any idea what any of this is all about, Mikail,” Clay stated, frustrated and starting to get angry.
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