by McBain, Tim
“Yeah, I guess that’s a fair enough point. So we do what leaders have always done, I suppose. We use a layer of bureaucracy to insulate ourselves from our deeds. It’s a brave new world, eh?”
“It just makes sense, Ray. You’ve got enough on your plate as it is. You can’t do it all yourself.”
He grunted a sound that conveyed halfhearted agreement.
The wind picked up for a second, and the ferns rustled against each other. He liked it out here. If it weren’t so hot out by noon every day, he’d spend more time on this trail, away from all the people.
“I know you’re not going to like this,” he said. “And I know you have your reasons for that particular point of view, but understand that I have mine, too.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“I’d like Jones to become part of the council.”
“Jones, as in the creep?”
“The men in camp look up to him. They show him respect. I think he has innate leadership qualities that could be valuable to us, and I think he earned a seat at the table when we got attacked down there. Most of the people in camp weren’t around to witness it, but they’ve all heard the story.”
Lorraine kicked at a rock, and they watched it tumble off the trail and disappear into the grass.
“Well, you were right about one thing,” she said. “I don’t like it.”
“Don’t you think there should be a man or two on the council? Just for appearances, I mean. I’d like Jones to be that man.”
“I see what you mean, and if it were anyone else I’d be with you. But it’s not any other guy. It’s Jones. The one who makes my skin crawl. The one who makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up whenever his eyes meet mine. He’s not right.”
“He’s a damned hero. You weren’t there, alright? He risked his life to save us. If we can’t trust the guy who does something like that, how can we trust anyone?”
“I trust Louis. He may not be as violent as Jones, but the men look up to him some, too, don’t they?”
“It’s not the same. I like Louis, too. I wouldn’t mind him being the second man on the council, but Jones must be the first.”
They stopped walking to clear a few dead branches off the trail and toss them into the brush, one large maple limb and a smattering of smaller bits that splintered off upon impact. Ray did most of the work, but pregnant or not, Lorraine insisted on throwing a few as well.
It felt good to work, to let all those cords in his arms pull taut. It got his heart beating, and sweat glistened on the back of his neck.
Soon, the path was clear again, and they pressed forward.
“If you absolutely insist on Jones, then I will agree to it,” she said. “I don’t like it. Not a bit. But I guess part of the deal is negotiating with personalities that you don’t mesh with, finding a way to make it work. Give me some time, though — maybe a few weeks — to work on Phyllis and the others before we make it official. Everything will go a bit more smoothly if we introduce the idea slowly rather than all at once.”
“That’s fine. I’d still need to talk to Jones about it anyway.”
“You still planning on keeping the next faith healing on the grounds?”
“Yeah. We’ll take a break for a while yet. With the guns all locked up, we can go light on the security and feel pretty safe. We’ll go out on the road before long, but I want to let the assassination talk die down first.”
“And you’re sure that the guards within the perimeter shouldn’t carry?”
“Nah. We’ll just keep it simple. No guns inside the fences. The guys manning the gates and towers will be armed, and that’s it. Less chance for anything crazy to happen, I think.”
Erin
Moundsville, West Virginia
266 days after
She had to pee. She swung her head around the little room, looking for a bucket. There wasn’t one. It occurred to her that she probably wouldn’t have been able to pull off a bucket maneuver with her hands chained like this anyway. What was she supposed to do? Piss herself?
Maybe this was a nightmare. It had to be, right? It couldn’t be real. That’s the kind of thing that would happen in a dream, too. When she had to go to the bathroom, she often dreamed she couldn’t find one.
The floor was uncomfortable, too. She tried to push with both legs to adjust her position, and nauseating pain clawed its way up from the wound on her leg. Nope. Not a dream.
She thought about calling out to the man. Telling him she had to go. Plus, if he unchained her, it could be a chance for escape. Or maybe he wouldn’t take the risk. Maybe he’d insist on helping her. She imagined him fumbling with the button on her jeans, sliding her pants down.
No. No way. She’d piss herself before she asked him for help. Before she let him touch her.
For now, she’d hold it. Even though her bladder was already starting to ache, she’d hold it.
What did he want? She could think of a few things, none of which she was willing to give.
She started to get pissed off. The world was empty now, plenty of resources for the few left if you were willing to make an effort, and this fucker chose to spend his time preying on people? What kind of sick fuck? And he wasn’t the only one. She knew he wasn’t. They were all over the place. Thieving, killing, raping.
And she was here because she was too stubborn to tell Marcus to stay. If she hadn’t brought up their stupid deal, none of this would have happened. She felt the sting of tears and stomped her good foot into the ground in rage.
What the hell was she going to do? If she didn’t figure something out — now — she was going to die here.
People on TV picked handcuffs all the time. She’d never picked a lock before, and suddenly wished she’d taken Izzy more seriously all those times she talked about it, instead of always thinking of her as a brick dragging her down. A lump formed in her throat again.
No. No more fucking crying. Crying wasn’t going to help anything.
Everything else seemed so long ago now. All those days spent biking from house to house, scavenging for food and supplies. She’d thought that was hard. Almost too hard. She’d complained about it. Stayed up at night worrying about it. But the truth was that had been easy.
Avoiding people like the men on the overpass and now this Texas Chainsaw Massacre motherfucker… that was proving to be the hard part about surviving.
She squirmed into a seated position and angled herself toward the pipe in a way that allowed blood to flow into her arms and hands again. She expected pins and needles, maybe even the kind that tickled a little as the feeling came back and made you laugh and cringe at the same time. But no. It was pain. Stabbing aches that ran all the way to her spine. She could barely stand it, but she couldn’t stop it either. She squeezed her eyes shut and kept her arms and hands moving, trying to speed the process along.
When the pain subsided, and the feeling was back in her fingers, she slumped against the pipe, head bowed. She was exhausted. Whatever plan she eventually came up with, she hoped it wouldn’t involve fighting her way out. Because she didn’t think she had the strength.
She took a few more steadying breaths and sat up again. She craned her neck, eyes squinting in the darkness, trying to see. It was a fruitless effort. There wasn’t enough light to see anything other than the crudest shapes in the dark. The pipe. Her feet. What looked like a water heater to her left.
Maneuvering so she could straddle the pipe, she let her bound hands touch the floor. It was dirty and cold. Her fingers crawled along, feeling for anything she might be able to use to pick the handcuffs. Her hands came upon something small and round in the corner of the room. She rolled it between her finger and thumb. A pellet from a BB gun. Or maybe a bead. No use for it that she could think of, but she tucked it back where she found it just in case.
Her hands went back to their search, brushing the filthy ground. While she scoured the area for a tool, she considered her options once she got free from the cuffs. He
r eyes scanned the room once again. No window, only the door, which she studied now like there might be a pop quiz after lunch. It didn’t look like a real door, now that she thought about it. More like a gate on a privacy fence. Unfinished wood boards laid side by side. There were even gaps between some of the planks. And a bigger gap of several inches between the bottom of the door and the floor. Not enough to crawl under.
She rewound the events in her head, trying to remember what had happened when he left the room. There’d been a few metallic sounds. Scraping and clicking and rattling. Sounds that reminded her of something familiar. Something from school. Gym class, freshman year. Why? What could her ninth grade gym class possibly have in common with this basement torture chamber?
And then it came to her: padlocks. The regular lockers at her high school came equipped with built-in locks, but the gym lockers had separate removable locks. She felt a little burst of adrenaline from solving that puzzle, but it quickly subsided when she considered what she might do with the information, which was jack shit. Her mood sank lower.
No, she had to stay positive. No giving up. What did a padlock mean? It probably meant there wasn’t a real latch on the door. No knob. No deadbolt. Her eyes went to the door again. Maybe that didn’t matter anyway. A door like that should be easy to bust through. She tipped her head to one side.
OK, maybe “easy” was an overstatement. But compared to a normal door? Or a reinforced steel door? This was not an impenetrable fortress. This was a shitty little basement room with a shitty door with a shitty padlock. A hack job.
Temporary.
The word startled her a little. It meant he wasn’t planning on keeping her here long. That sent a little shudder through her. But it also made the decision for her. No time to waste screwing around. It was now or never.
Baghead
Little Rock, Arkansas
9 years, 128 days after
His jaw clenched in his sleep, the muscles knotting up, flexing and releasing over and over again. His teeth ground together, sounding like miniature rocks bashing and grating against each other in time with the jaw clenching, shaking bouts of violence in his mouth. His tongue slithered among all of this, the tip pressing into the roof of his mouth periodically like some mollusk poking around for a way out.
His eyes bucked and lurched in his head like they were trying to get away as well, the whites smearing against those thin flaps of skin that shrouded him from reality and held him in a dream.
Images flickered in his head, another silent film that never quite coalesced into a discernible narrative:
A ladder leaned against cracked vinyl siding. A dog’s tongue lolled out of the side of its mouth. A thumb tack penetrated a woman’s palm, jabbed all the way in. She pulled it out slowly and pried at the edge of the wound with her fingernails, thin sheets of skin peeling away like wet paper.
A crease deepened between his eyebrows as the dream imagery turned violent. A fold over the bridge of his nose that looked angry, aggressive, animalistic.
Need to wake up.
The pain came upon him in stages, more like a series of symptoms presenting themselves one after another than a simple physical feeling. This hurt was more elaborate. It was a process. The sweat came next.
The perspiration leeched out of his skin, droplets taking shape on his forehead, rising from the surface of his skin like the first shoots of plants poking up out of the ground. The beads grew in slow motion and drained down past his temples. Some flowed into each ear, winding their way through the curved folds of flesh, but most of the fluid got soaked up by the hair where his beard met the hair on his head.
I need to wake up.
Feeling came alive in his limbs then with a throb, an electric current of sensation that flowed up and down his nerves like they were power lines. All the switches had been flipped back to the “on” position. And it felt like his arm had gone through a meat slicer, that cleaved off place suddenly feeling ragged and raw, the flesh along the wound screaming out in agony. No more shock persisted to mute things, to numb away the aches and pains. Now the hurt was pure and raw and totally uncut. Even in his sleep he felt it.
His forearm felt taut, every muscle tightened and frozen in a permanent flex. The fist that wasn’t there was clenched tight somehow and stuck that way. He couldn’t help but twitch a bit, to squirm the incomplete arm in fits and starts like a newborn next to him. Even in his unconscious state, he couldn’t keep it still, couldn’t resist the urge to wriggle it, to adjust it, to try his damnedest to unclench that invisible fist at the end of it.
Eventually the towel wrapped over the wound caught on his belt buckle, and the fabric shifted over the wound, and the raw places reopened themselves where the towel pulled away, the pain screaming all the louder. It felt like rug burn on the inside, he thought, and that’s all he could picture: his bloody stump smearing over a rough piece of carpet, leaving a red streak behind.
Panicky feelings washed over him in waves as the hurt bloomed in the wounded stump. It had been painful before, but this was something else altogether. His teeth bit down as hard they could, and his chest convulsed a few times. His perspiration intensified, the sweat tingling with electricity on his top lip like it was pure adrenaline soaking his skin now as well as coursing through his veins.
He shuddered again, his torso quivering, his shoulders rattling his arms about. Breath scraped in and out of him now, dry and harsh in his throat, his chest rising and falling with growing speed.
Need to wake up.
Need to wake up.
Need to wake up.
He felt the sharpness again, the cold metal edge parting his flesh and muscle like deli meat, the cheap stuff that’s wet and heavy and pulls apart with ease like boiled ham. It seemed to him that feeling would always be with him, the way it felt when the blade passed through his wrist, a memory with a hair trigger, only needing the slightest touch to reappear, always ready and waiting to be replayed.
The dream reached for images to match the blade’s feeling and created one. A finger tip being flayed by a scalpel, the skin peeling back slowly, red meat visible in the tiny gap, a single droplet of blood swelling there. There was no context. Only that close up image of the metal slicing through the cylinder of flesh, that fingerprinted skin peeling back from the muscle and bone.
Little noises chirruped in his throat now. Sounds like those of a dog having a bad dream. Some were deep, closed-mouth grunts, others more like whimpers. All of them had that raspy, muffled sound to them. The sound of sleep itself, he thought.
Once more the Delta 88’s upholstery seemed to be breathing on him, blowing that stale cigarette scent into his nostrils with considerable force. The smell was everywhere, a cloud hanging in the gloom all around him, like he could feel it stinging along the rims of his eyelids, leaving a film on his lips and teeth where he grimaced in his slumber. A grime.
I can’t.
The dream image morphed to the burning window sill, the pink glow of the coals broken up by black lines, cracked areas that made the rest look like burning scales. His stumped appendage pressed to that place, that open wound kissing one of the cracks between two flakes of pink.
And he felt it again, the scream of the chopped place searing like a piece of pork on the grill. The flesh blistered, little opaque bubbles forming in it like snot. Rapidly blackened snot. It wasn’t just a bolt of pain. It wasn’t singular. There were layers, like a harmony occupying four notes at once rather than just one. This was a symphony of torment. Every kind of ache assailing him all at once.
He understood it now, though. They’d cauterized the wound to stop his bleeding. They’d burned that open place closed, melted that cave shut, cooked his wrist medium well.
He remembered the smell of it. Like burning human hair mixed with a sweet pork dish from a Chinese restaurant, one in particular that he couldn’t place. Not sweet and sour pork. He knew that. Maybe sesame pork? Something like that, anyway.
I can’t wake
up.
His heart beat faster and faster, and his breathing went ragged, air catching on his epiglottis to create a throaty sound with each exhale.
His dream morphed to a cartoon monkey face, frightened, mouth hanging wide open, breathing in fast speed, little chest pulsating.
And then something touched him in real life, a hand on his shoulder. At first it merely gripped him, but after a second, it gave him a shake, fingers digging into that meat surrounding the ball and socket.
His confused dreams parted at last, the fevered images dissolving to black. His consciousness floated out of the blackness and into the light, and he was struck by the way his sense of sound changed, the high frequencies suddenly returning with such force it seemed as though there was a high-pitched ringing all around that he’d blocked out until just this moment.
“You all right?” a voice said.
It was Delfino, though he had to think about it a second to be sure.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice thick, still far from awake.
“Just finishing up as far as the tires,” the driver said. “We’re fixin’ to take off in a minute here.”
“Is she OK?”
Baghead didn’t truly consider the question until after it had passed through his lips, and then goose bumps sprouted along his forearms.
“Aw, she’s fine. She saved us, you know? Saved both of us. She’ll be ridin’ shotgun for a while here, if you don’t mind it too much.”
Baghead nodded, and he heard the friction of the driver’s jeans against the upholstery, that agitated noise of opposing textures rubbing at each other, and a click followed as the door closed behind him.
Everything was OK, then. They were all OK, save for his left hand. He knew he wasn’t quite awake. Not really. And real sleep still seemed an option for the moment. He could let the real world drift away again for a while, he thought, so long as he didn’t open his eyes, which he had yet to do. That might complicate things.