No Man's Land

by G. M. Ford

  “This isn’t funny.”

  Driver slowed. “I didn’t plan on this, Corso. I didn’t think they could put an assault together this quickly. I figured there’d be hours of dialogue. Threats and demands . . . that sort of thing, before anybody got serious. I figured we could have a couple of hours for an update. Things have changed.” He waved a hand.

  “Maybe even a sequel.” He paused and swallowed a thought. “I figured I could get you back out before the shooting started.” He looked rueful. “Must be losing my edge.”

  Corso could feel the bile rising in his throat. The cold mantle of fear began to envelop him. “I haven’t got a lot of options here.”

  Driver nodded his rueful agreement. “Your best bet is probably to find an empty cell, jam the door shut, pull the mattress over yourself and hope to God one of those Marines doesn’t shoot your ass for fun.” He nodded at the open door and the shaft of yellow light at the far end of the alley.

  As if to aid Corso in his decision, another volley of smallarms fire erupted from the cellblocks above. When he looked back, Driver had a small black flashlight in his hand. He was bent at the waist, shining the powerful beam at the lock on what appeared to be the central back door of the Louis Carver Administration Building. Corso watched as Driver fished a ring of keys from his pants pocket. Took him three tries to find the right key. He pulled open the door and inclined his head toward Corso. “What’s it gonna be, big fella? You part of the problem or part of the solution?”

  Driver stepped partially inside. Corso caught the door in his hand, looked around for a moment and followed the rapidly retreating shadow. The electricity had been turned off in the building, leaving the hallways on auxiliary power, delineated by strings of small white lights at foot level like on an airplane. Green EXIT signs floated above occasional doorways as they made their way to the corner stairwell and started down.

  12

  Colonel David Williams stopped halfway to the office door as his mind tried to make sense of what he’d just heard. He pulled off his helmet and put it under his arm.

  “What did you say?” As he hadn’t seen who had issued the statement, he asked the question to the room. The guy with the hair. The one sitting at the extra desk closed his cell phone and opened his mouth.

  “You’ll need to do as little damage to the facility as possible,”

  he said.

  That’s what he thought the voice had said. As the anger rose in his throat, the colonel started to speak but swallowed it. Instead, he turned to the warden.

  “Who the hell is this guy?”

  Romero looked embarrassed. He sucked air through his bottom teeth and ran a finger around his collar before answering.

  “This is Mr. Asuega. He’s Deputy Director of Security Operations for the Randall Corporation.”

  “Ah,” Williams said. “The folks who run this place. That figures.”

  The heels of his boots beat a slow cadence on the floor as he No Man’s Land crossed to stand in front of Dallin Asuega. “Worried about your building are you?”

  Asuega showed him an acre of teeth. “Meza Azul is a state-ofthe-art facility,” he said evenly. “The cost of replacement would be—”

  The colonel cut him off. “Before you start in on the facts and figures, Mr. . . .”

  “Asuega.”

  “Mr. Asuega. Let me make a few things clear to you.” He hesitated long enough to ensure he had everybody’s attention. “First off, you need to understand I don’t give a hill of beans for your ‘state-of-the-art’ facility. The only thing on my agenda is the safety of the men under my command. If it takes razing the building to the ground to keep my men safe, I’ll do it.” Asuega raised a finger. Williams raised his voice. “Second, you seem to have failed to notice your ‘state-of-the-art’ facility is presently being run by the inmates. Leads me to believe that your ‘state-of-theart’ systems must have left a great deal to be desired, so maybe you all ought to rethink your definition of state of the art.”

  Williams checked his watch. “It’s twenty-two-forty,” he announced. “We’re going in at twenty-three hundred sharp. I’m going to have the first two Strykers put a salvo of fifty-millimeter cannon fire through that third-floor walkway where all the fire is coming from. Once those assholes figure out we can kill them right through the bricks, I’m guessing most of them will be feeling a whole lot less feisty.”

  He nodded at the assemblage. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, before turning on his heel and marching from the room.

  “You figure the boys will put up much of a fight?” Corso asked as they descended the stairs.

  A harsh laugh escaped Driver’s throat, the kind of studied humor that gave sane men pause to wonder. “Hell no,” he said.

  “Couple dozen of them may prefer ‘death by soldier’ to serving out their sentences, but . . . the rest of them . . . they’re not soldiers. They’re rabble. The scum of the earth. First heavy arms fire they see will send them scurrying back to their cells like lemmings.”

  They were at the bottom by then. Driver pushed his way through an unlocked door and suddenly they were in the modern version of a boiler room. Sans the boiler. All electronic gauges and digital readouts. Took Corso less than half a minute to see that Driver had been down there before. That whatever he was doing to the furnace was something he’d worked out on a prior visit. He watched as Driver manipulated the dials and gauges. Watched as he pulled the great wad of gum from his mouth, reached inside the service panel at the bottom of a heating and air-conditioning unit and slipped the gum into place. What the gum’s function might be was lost on Corso.

  Driver didn’t bother to close the door. Instead he crossed the room to the far wall, to the cluttered desk, where he picked up the telephone receiver and set it gently on its side. Corso stepped in closer. Watched as Driver unscrewed the mouthpiece and began to pull wires loose. It was too dark for Corso to make out exactly what Driver was doing. Only that he was attaching the colorcoded wires to one another in a fashion unintended by the phone’s designers.

  Satisfied, Driver screwed the cap back into place and set the receiver in the cradle. Corso followed along as Driver returned to the same set of dials and gauges he’d messed with before. He’d pushed only a couple of buttons when the hissing began. Deep and insistent like wind through a crack in the door. And then that rotten egg smell and the beginnings of a painful heat in the lungs. Gas. No doubt about it. Natural gas was pouring out of the furnace at a prodigious rate, filling the room, causing Corso’s eyes to tear and his lungs to stall.

  Corso covered his mouth with his jacket, stood there with his eyes screwed shut, breathing the smell of himself as the gas folded itself around him. Driver took him by the elbow and led him back to the stairs. Closing the basement door behind them, Driver pulled Corso along as he climbed the stairs to the main floor and found their way outside, where they stood wheezing and wiping their eyes, until the sound of a diesel engine snatched them from their lethargy.

  Kehoe was easing a tandem tanker truck around the side of the cellblock. Driver raised a hand and began to motion him forward. Come on, come on, until finally he stiffened his fingers and had him bring the big rig to a stop. He used his index finger in a throat-cutting sign. Kehoe shut off the truck, which now sat in the darkness hissing, and climbed down. “I don’t know what you got in mind, Captainman, but it damn well better be quick. Those old boys out there look like they’re about ready to go.”

  As if to reply, Driver pulled one of the tanker’s delivery hoses from its bracket on the side of the truck, used the metal end to break the window in the upper half of the administration building’s back door and pushed the hose most of the way through.

  “Don’t just stand there, Cutter,” he said. “Hook this damn thing up. We need to pump the front unit about two-thirds of the way out.”

  Kehoe’s eyes narrowed. “Right into the building there?”

  “Big as life,” Driver said.

  Keh
oe didn’t move. His face was hard as stone. “You know, Doc . . . one of these days we’re gonna have to address this you givin’ me orders thing.” His face cracked into a smile. “But in the meantime, I sure like the way you think.”

  13

  In the hours since Paul Lovantano had been dragged from the cab of his truck and locked in a cell with half a dozen other truck drivers, he’d come to believe his life might have turned out differently had he been subjected to this kind of treatment during his formative years. With the specter of death looming and with a little time to think, he’d come to a number of revelations concerning such matters as who he was and how he’d come to be driving a diesel delivery truck in bumfuck Arizona on the day a prison riot was destined to take place. Not coincidentally, he’d also come to realize that he’d managed to get through forty-four years on the planet without ever taking the time to sit and wonder about the choices made and the roads not taken. Like he’d just been along for the ride on the delivery of his life. Wasn’t like he was some sixth-generation redneck like some of the folks around here. Eking out livings cutting wood and working as handymen. Wearing the same winter coats until the fabric fell off their backs. Married to one of these hatchet-faced desert queens, so bony and brown they looked like overcooked chicken wings.

  No . . . he’d had every advantage. Every chance to make some-No Man’s Land thing of himself. Like everybody else born and raised in Larchmont, New York, Paul had faced a fairly codified set of expectations. It was quite simple really. All that was expected was that he graduate at the top of his high school class, ship off to Princeton or Columbia, become a doctor or a lawyer or something spiffy like that, then make it big in the Big Apple before bringing his burgeoning family back to Larchmont just in time to take over the family manse and shuttle the old folks upstate to Shady Rest. He could see now that the difference between the success scenario and the situation in which he currently found himself was predicated on a small number of ill-considered moments that had sent his future spiraling out of control and left him adrift in the dire straits of the present predicament.

  It all started with knocking up Mary Ellen Standish in the eleventh grade and then, as his parents had insisted, denying responsibility. He could see it clearly now . . . how something about that particular subterfuge had gnawed at his gut every day for the past twenty-seven years and how the experience had created within him a sense of unworthiness, a sense he was doomed to failure, a sense that he didn’t deserve any better than he was getting.

  That feeling made it easy to get kicked out of Brown University after his father had pulled every string he could muster just to get him admitted. Made it easy to take that trip out West the summer before he was scheduled to pick up the pieces at the local community college. Made it easy never to go back. Made it easy to marry Edith and then Sherry and Wanda June. To have half a dozen kids floating around the Southwest somewhere. Kids whose faces he couldn’t conjure without the aid of a photograph and whose names he’d never quite had straight. It went on and on. One bad decision after the next until he found himself in his present position, sitting in a prison waiting his turn to die. That’s how he had it figured. Only way it made sense. They were taking them out one at a time and shooting them. That’s why none of them came back. Why he wasn’t going to come back either. So when the cell door opened for the fifth time, it was no surprise that Paul Lovantano’s heart began to race. His mouth wanted to beg, but something inside of him would not permit it. Maybe that Mary Ellen Standish thing. Who knew? The cell door opened with a rattle. The huge con had acquired what looked like an Uzi since his last visit.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Your turn now, buddy.”

  The smell of diesel hung heavy in the air. The rush of fuel flowing into the building nearly drowned the sound of the pump. Driver was up on top of the front tanker, pointing his flashlight down through the hatch into the tank. Most of the small-arms fire had stopped as the calm before the storm set in.

  “Shit’s gonna be knee deep in there,” Kehoe said with a laugh.

  “We best hope nobody lights a match before we get outta here.”

  Driver looked up from what he was doing. “Turn the pump off,” he said to Kehoe.

  With the hum of the pump suddenly ended, a final spurt of fuel was followed by a short series of drips, then a short period of silence before a volley of gunfire and a series of screams echoed from inside the cellblocks. Sounded like somebody was begging for his life. Two more shots suggested the pleas had been in vain. Kehoe heaved with both hands, sending the delivery hose through the hole in the door. “What’s it gonna be, Captainman? Whatever the hell you got in mind for getting us the hell outta here . . . now’s the time.”

  Driver walked to the passenger side of the cab, reached up, opened the door and dragged a tight bundle out onto the ground. He scraped up the tape end with his fingernail. The tape came away with a hiss; the bundle unfurled to reveal several pairs of bright blue coveralls, red rubber boots and helmets, black breathing masks. Driver sorted himself out a pair of coveralls and sat down on the ground, where he inserted one foot, then the other, before rising to his feet again and pulling the zipper all the way up to his Adam’s apple. He looked over at Kehoe and Corso. “I found these haz-mat suits in with the rest of the guard equipment. We’re gonna get inside that front tank there and ride it right the hell out of here.”

  A moment of stunned silence ensued. “Inside the tanker?”

  Kehoe asked.

  Driver nodded, then smiled.

  “Sittin’ in diesel fuel?”

  “Just about waist deep now,” Driver said.

  “That shit’ll kill us.”

  Driver pointed to the bundle on the ground. “Not in these haz-mat suits it won’t. At least not right away.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Kehoe demanded.

  “It means that sooner or later the diesel is going to eat its way through the plastic. Either that or the filters on our breathing apparatus are going get saturated and we’re going to find ourselves breathing diesel fumes in a closed environment. Either way, we end up dead.” He shrugged. “Look on the bright side: they probably won’t find us until whatever’s left of us clogs up the pump system.”

  “How long you figure we got in there?”

  “Couple of hours . . . three max.”

  “Jesus,” Kehoe muttered. “This is your big deal fuckin’ plan?”

  “We been letting drivers leave with their trucks all day,” Driver said. “Everybody should be used to the drill by now.” He patted the side of the tanker truck. “It’s a local company. If the driver’s got a family, I’m betting he gets to them as soon as he can. If not, he’ll want to get to his favorite bar and tell the story. Either way, I’m figuring he gets rid of the truck as soon as possible.

  Minute he leaves, we get out and get up the road. It’ll be a couple of days at least, before they get things squared away enough to know for sure we’re missing.”

  “And if they decide to search the truck?” Kehoe asked.

  “Only way to do that will be to get in there with us. I’m betting they’re no more anxious to climb inside than you are.” Before anyone could respond, Driver produced a black wireless phone. “Beside which,” he said. “I’ve got a little surprise for them. Something to keep them occupied while we get some sea room.”

  He looked from Kehoe to Corso and back. “It’s now or never, fellas. You’re either coming along or you’re staying behind. What’ll it be?”

  “Seems like all I get to choose is how I want to die.”

  “Must be your day for life-and-death dilemmas, Frank.”

  “You’re out of your fuckin’ mind,” Corso said. The glint in Driver’s eye told Corso his assessment just might be correct. Kehoe was already in the suit, using the attached gloves to get the hood up, then fiddling with the mask and breathing apparatus Driver shrugged and began to help Kehoe with his breathing mask. “You’re a grown man, Corso. Make
up your mind.”

  As an answer, Corso sat on the cold ground and stuffed his feet into the coveralls.

  “For a guy who had no intention of getting me into this mess, it’s amazing how you came up with one of these suits to fit me.”

  Driver ignored him. Instead, he pushed a button and spoke into the wireless phone.

  He said, “Roscoe.”

  “Yeah,” came the reply.

  “Bring that last driver down to his truck.”

  14

  Paul Lovantano had never seen a sight so beautiful as that great big Texaco star on the side of his DESERT DISTRIBUTING rig, sitting there between the buildings, like a big silver liner just waiting to fly.

  “Keys are in it,” the big con said before kicking out the hook and slamming the door behind himself.

  Unable to believe his good fortune, Paul looked around. The yard was empty. The sky above was the color of rolled steel and devoid of stars. The area along the side of the cellblock was ankle deep in broken glass. He moved slowly, as if expecting to be struck down by some unseen hand at any moment. He’d covered half the distance to the rig when several faraway pops ricocheted along the night air and suddenly the sky was alive with flares, arching their way high into the blackness, bathing the ground below in a quivering red light. As far as he was concerned, whatever was going on with the flares didn’t bode well. Some instinct told him to get out immediately, while the getting was good. He broke into a run, covering the remaining twenty yards with the speed of a halfback, grabbing the door handle, launching himself up onto the step and into the familiar confines of the cab.

  Took him a full minute to get it running, then he was on his way. Sliding off the clutch harder and faster than he ever had before, feeling the wheels chatter on the concrete in the seconds before the rig got rolling. Spinning the wheel hand over hand as he brushed the front bumper along the far wall, making sure the tandem tanker had room to clear the turn, holding his breath as she swung around to face the front gate, hitting second gear, winding it up on his way across the yard toward the way out. Two-thirds of the way across the yard the gate began to slide open. The smile on Paul Lovantano’s face didn’t begin to fade until he saw the armored vehicle motor across the entrance. Half a dozen soldiers rode in back like fleas on a dog, rifles raised, pointed at the windshield of the truck. Paul used one hand to downshift the truck and another to wave surrender out the window as he eased the big rig to a halt in the mouth of the gate. Just be his luck to get this far only to take one in the head from some nervous kid with an itchy trigger finger.