Standing, trembling a little, he began removing the coat. He was a man on the gallows now. The trapdoor was beneath his feet. All that remained was for the executioner to pull that lever and send him to his inevitable end.
A sudden force struck the center of his body, surprising him as he was pulling his arm free of the coat. The air left his lungs in a rush. His eyes rose, dazed and unclear, just in time to see a fist hammer his guts for the second time. His stomach heaved for a moment—and then Khan staggered to the side and vomited.
Alcohol and pills, a sour soup, hit the pavement and went streaming toward the gutter. Khan wretched a second time, then a third, stupified by the rediscovery of all the pills he had swallowed.
“Can’t let you take the easy road, chum,” a voice said behind him.
Khan drew his arm across his mouth and faced his attacker. He was too overwrought to string even a simple question together.
His erstwhile attacker stepped toward him and tapped the symbol on his coat. “You’re going to help me get there.”
“What? Why?” Khan managed to ask.
The man, whom Khan now recognized as the bouncer who had stood outside the tent, stared straight into Khan’s eyes. It was almost as if he could see into Khan’s soul.
“Because we have something in common, you and I,” he answered. “We both need to find Victor Gervasio.”
Chapter 37
A darkness overtook Victor on that doomed walk through the tunnel. He felt a sense of finality, of having made his last wager and lost. There were no more chips on his side of the table, no more chances, no more strategies. The game was over. He had fought as long as he could, but now his king was surrounded and he had no pieces close enough to break the stranglehold.
The last time he had been imprisoned, he had bought his freedom by granting a budding sociopath’s desire for revenge. Would any such offer come to him a second time? He thought not. No, as he followed the lanterns up onto the platform and passed the first set of cages, he knew better than to think he would get any such chance.
He tried not to meet the hollow eyes that stared at him from between the bars. He didn’t want to think that they might once have been like him, a victim of circumstance, an innocent who could clear everything up if only given the opportunity to explain himself. But such a hope presupposed a system of law and reason, didn’t it? And though Yates had initially struck him as a reasonable fellow, it now seemed the Communist had taken a page from Stalin’s book.
Paranoia. Complete paranoia. There was no other explanation for his accusation.
And Scarlett…
Had she known? He remembered how she had looked at him and said, “Never seen him in my life.” Why? Self-preservation? Was she afraid of associating herself with the condemned? And the way that soldier had draped his arm around her waist…
Either way, she had not been honest with him, and her lies might just have sent him and Dante to their deaths.
Dante’s face was silhouetted by the lanterns as they crossed the platform. He looked young and tragic, like a nobleman on his way to the guillotine during the French Revolution.
“Keep your chin up,” Victor murmured. “We’ll get out of this.”
The only answer he received was a fist to the cheek.
“Quiet,” his captor growled.
They passed rows of pillars, grimy and tattooed with unreadable words, along a black fence that stretched from floor to ceiling. This was to be their prison. It was too soon, too sudden, he needed one more chance, he had too much fight left in him to be thrown away like this, left to rot in darkness with the stench of his own decaying body.
But before he even saw the door clearly, he was shoved from behind and went stumbling into the cell, his hip bumping hard into Dante’s. The door closed, the light of the lanterns narrowed and began to fade, and Victor searched for his brother while the cell still possessed a dim glow of light.
“This is my fault,” he whispered to Dante. “It’s all my fault. But we’ll get out of here, brother. There’s always a way.” He could have been buried alive fifty feet beneath the earth, a thousand miles from civilization, and still he would have convinced himself there was a way to escape. What was the alternative? Once hope died, what was there left to live for?
In the words of Andy Dufresne, “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
“We just need some time,” Victor went on. “We need to know what this prison is for. Yates is too practical a man to just send us down here to die. There must be a reason.” He sensed he was grasping at straws, speaking only to fill the silence, like a nervous kid at his first job interview. He was supposed to be calm, always in control. Was it possible he had finally met his match? Was it possible there was no going back from this?
“I’m afraid you’re correct,” a voice answered. Victor had glimpsed the cell in the light of the lanterns, a dozen or more dirty and bearded faces blinking back at him. Now he moved closer to Dante. He knew what kind of people a prison could breed.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“There is a reason for this place. Have you ever heard of the Sunset Limited?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Never mind. It don’t matter. This place is only a holdover, a waiting place. A purgatory, if you will.”
“So where do we go next?”
“That, my friend, depends on the state of your immortal soul.”
Victor heard his brother press his back to the bars and slide to the floor. Victor joined him.
“Dante? What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? You mean, besides everything?”
“We’ll get out of here. You need to trust me.”
“I’m tired of trusting and hoping things will get better. Tired of living off wishes and dreams.” He sighed heavily. “I put off living my life for years, unsure of what I wanted or who I was supposed to be. Now that I know those things, I’m stuck here. Maybe it’s just too late—maybe I had my chance.”
“No,” Victor answered quickly. “That’s not true. You need to keep fighting.”
Dante’s voice was small, almost distant. “I’ve been fighting all my life, Vic. I just never knew what I was fighting for.”
___
At some point - it may have been day or it may have been night - Victor dozed. He did not dream. He only knew he had been sleeping because he woke, sitting up abruptly and sensing something had disturbed him. His arm was touching the bars, and he could feel them vibrating now, thrumming like guitar strings.
He pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the cramps in his legs, and stared into the darkness of the platform.
Yes, something was coming. He could hear a deep, almost gravelly rumble echoing up one of the tunnels. Red light blossomed across the platform as the rumble clarified into the steady drone of a large engine. The red light disappeared…and then the beams of flashlights swept across the platform.
“What do you believe in?” the stranger murmured. “I believe in the Sunset Limited.”
The flashlights trawled along the cages that lined the room. Some faces shrank from the lights, while the hands of others reached through the bars, snatching at the uniforms of the soldiers. The soldiers stopped at one of the cages, exchanged words Victor could not hear, and opened the door.
Several prisoners rushed forward. They were beaten with batons, kicked into submission, and left curled and bleeding on the platform floor. The rest of the prisoners were herded from the cell in a single line, following the glow of the flashlights toward the tunnel.
Minutes later, after the prisoners had disappeared inside the tunnel, the red light reappeared briefly and the engine began to rumble away, burrowing back into the darkness from which it had come. A resigned silence overtook the station, hollow and empty, broken only by the whimpers of those left bruised and bleeding on the platform.
“They’ll come for us next,” another voice said. He sounded more sane than the first one, so Victor decided to
learn what he knew.
“How do you know?” Victor asked.
“Because our cage is nearly full. The more eggs in the nest, the happier the snake will be.”
“Been here long?”
“Four days. Seen them come…let’s see…three times now.”
“Any idea where the prisoners are taken?”
It sounded like the man was scratching a dry scalp. “A work detail, I thought at first. Maybe to clean some of the tunnels? Some are blocked with debris from explosions—not sure if that’s deliberate or accidental. Others are flooded, or so I hear, so I thought they might be trying to get the pumps running again.”
“But you don’t think so any more?” Dante asked.
The stranger took a long breath. “The way I figure, if they wanted labor they’d feed us—a few scraps, at least. But nothing. Can’t do much on an empty stomach, so that theory is debunked. And why don’t they come back?” He clucked his tongue sadly. “No, there ain’t no coming back from that tunnel. That there is a one-way ticket on a train going straight to hell.”
Chapter 38
Time passed, counted only by the dripping of water and the murmuring of voices, lengthened by the dread that at any moment the rumble might fill the tunnel again, and then the light would blossom and the soldiers would cross the platform with their steel-shod boots.
If America’s prisons had operated on this model, Dante thought, few criminals would ever risk returning for a second round. The expectation of an uncertain fate, the knowledge that all bets were off and any harm, physical or otherwise, could be perpetrated without legal consequence—the fear of these things was in itself a deterrent. It might even be a stronger deterrent than whatever would happen to them in that tunnel.
Dante rested his head against the bars, shoulder to shoulder with his brother. It might have been morning. A stretch of darkness had passed, continually disturbed by the cavernous voices of the other prisoners, and there was only more darkness ahead. He tried to remember the last time he had eaten.
“If you could have anything,” he asked Victor in a low voice, “what would you want to eat right now?”
Moments passed. Dante began to suspect Victor had fallen asleep, bless his soul. Then Victor murmured, “I’d take a glass of water, for starters.”
“Obviously. And for the main course?”
Victor grunted. “A sirloin steak with fried potatoes.”
“Medium-rare?”
“Always. Wait, can I change my order?”
“I think it can be arranged.”
“I’d like to add some sliced peppers to the side of my dish.”
“Grilled?” Dante asked.
“No, fresh.”
“And to drink?”
“I wouldn’t mind having that bottle of bourbon.” He gave a dry chuckle. “But that’s only after I’ve had three glasses of water.”
Dante nodded. “Could do a lot worse. Personally, though, I’d take a bacon cheeseburger with pickles. Might even slather it in horseradish sauce the way dad liked.”
“Gross.”
He was feeling better, not so much better that the fear of the engine (“I believe in the Sunset Limited”) did not haunt him every second, but enough to let his imagination wander beyond the confines of their prison. He relived his harrowing experience of solo-climbing a cliff in Spain. Then, scrolling further back through his history, he was in Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls, dashing into an alley as the stampede rushed by, laughing hysterically and fighting an urge to cry at the same time.
So many experiences filled with their own color, texture, and light. It occurred to him, resting there in the darkness, that he may have been wrong to think life was short. Certainly it was short in comparison to things left undone, goals unreached, but that was because there was no finish line for the human heart, no moment at which the soul would say, “I have done everything I ever intended to do, and now I will rest at ease.”
The human experience was a candle that burned brightly for a short time and then disappeared, gone forever. Were he to die after a thousand years, he would still leave plenty of tasks left unfinished. It was not the goals that mattered so much as the process, the journey. As soon as one goal was accomplished, another would take its place.
So in that sense, life was long—long enough, at least, to leave a mark upon the world, build a legacy, enjoy the bloom of true love. After all, how many years had he wasted in indecision and uncertainty? Why should he believe that, if only he had one more chance, he would do things differently a second time? Was it a choice? Or had his path been set the moment he was born, guarded by walls he could never climb?
“You know,” he said, “if you weren’t in here with me right now, I’d throw in the towel.”
“Come on, Dante, don’t talk like that.”
“I’m serious. I’d give up. You don’t get scared the way I do. It’s like…” He paused, pressing his lips tightly together. “Like every mistake is just a confirmation of something I already know. Like I knew all along there was no happy ending for me.”
“Quit talking shit,” Victor replied with a touch of anger. “You’re just letting this get to you. Before long we’ll be on our own again, and we’ll forget all about this. You’ll see. Every nightmare is forgotten eventually.”
Dante listened to the staccato drip of water deeper in the station. He tried not to smell the damp odor of the cage or to imagine the faces of the other prisoners in the darkness. A few of them spoke in hushed voices, but for the most part the station was quiet. They were all just waiting for the trapdoor to open beneath their feet.
Dante said, “I left the other night while you were sleeping.”
“What?”
“On the roof of the hospital. I took Scarlett’s key and went downstairs. I thought I just wanted to clear my head, but then I found myself at the pharmacy.”
Victor did not speak for a few heartbeats. Then he asked, “Did you find anything?”
“No. But Vic, I went looking. I thought this was behind me. I was starting over, turning a new leaf. Then I tried to get away from the horsemen, and Walker stuck me with a needle. It was heroin, Vic. Heroin. I just keep thinking about it now—how it felt, the excitement, the way all my worries just melted away. I don’t want to be that person again, Vic. I really don’t.”
“I know,” Victor answered. “And you won’t.”
“How? How can you promise that?”
“Because I won’t let you. We’re brothers, Dante, and I’ll always have your back—no matter what.”
Dante felt Victor’s hand squeeze his shoulder. He nodded, though Victor would not be able to see the gesture, and tried to believe what Victor had just said, willed himself to know their friendship was stronger than the bonds of any addiction.
___
Sometime later, long after Dante had concluded he could never sleep in such a dungeon, he woke to the clatter of boots on the station platform. He slurped involuntarily as he woke, retracting a strand of saliva that had been crawling from the corner of his mouth.
“Victor?” He shook his brother’s shoulder. “Victor, it’s happening again.” He tried to hide the anxiety in his voice, but it was a losing battle.
Victor stirred beside him. Dante strained his eyes in the direction of the tunnel where he had seen that red light hours before. The only lights he saw now came from the flashlights of the figures on the platform. He counted five or six.
He rose to get a better view. “They’re coming this way, Vic.”
“Stay calm. I don’t hear anything from the tunnel, do you?”
Dante shook his head. “Nope. Is that good or bad?”
“I guess time will tell.”
The beam of a flashlight panned across the brothers’ cage, dazzling Dante’s eyes. Half-blinded, he heard one of the figures strike the bars of the cage with a baton.
“Gervasio, step to the front of the cell,” the soldier demanded.
Neither of the
brothers moved. Dante read his brother’s face in the cold glow of light: eyes narrow and hard, jaw clenched, nostrils flared. It was an expression Dante knew well. He also knew what would come next.
The idea that came to Dante in that brief window of time was formless, as much feeling as thought. But if he had been able to put it into words, it would have gone something like this: I can’t change the man I’ve been, but I can still change the man I am.
Time fragmented, breaking into isolated chunks: Victor’s chest rising with a long breath, the side of his face pale as chalk; the baton rattling a steady beat against the bars; the soft scraping of feet shuffling toward the back of the cell, pooling there like rabbits trapped in a burrow; Dante grabbing Victor’s coat and pulling hard, cloth tearing as he shoved Victor back toward the middle of the cell; stepping forward as Victor landed in the dust, robbed of his opportunity for heroism.
The Shadow Walker Page 25