Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  He woke on his hard bunk to the sound of boots marching through the mud outside. A hand snaked out of the darkness and touched his shoulder. He jumped as a face loomed out of the murk; it was Buddy. A pilot in the military a few years before, Buddy had been caught, along with another man named Roy Whitman, smuggling alleged dissidents south into Mexico and beyond.

  “You hear that?” Buddy whispered. Kendrick nodded mutely as loud voices approached from somewhere outside. They listened, hoping that whoever it was they were heading to some other hut.

  Just then the door slammed open, warm air rushing into the moist atmosphere of the wooden building. Outside, crickets chirped loudly, the night filled with the sounds of tropical life. Several figures, reduced to silhouettes by the bright arc lights of the camp outside, stepped in among them, bulky in their camouflage gear, rifles slung over their shoulders. The soldiers seemed like phantoms from some other age – an age of hot water, clean blankets and edible food.

  “McCowan, Juarez, Gallmon,” one of the soldiers bellowed. “Stand.”

  A hushed silence fell across the hut, where perhaps thirty men were crammed into a tiny space, sleeping on their rough bunks in the unbearable heat. Kendrick thought enviously of all the others in the camp who must have heard the soldiers stamping their way across the scrubby soil, and their relief as it became clear that they weren’t coming for them.

  Kendrick lifted himself from his bunk and stood up uneasily, hunger and lack of sleep nearly making him stumble. McCowan and Buddy stood up simultaneously. Although thoughts of resistance and escape were always present, Kendrick had witnessed what happened to those refusing to cooperate. Their blood still stained the rough soil outside.

  They were led out into the warm night air, the stars sparkling far above them, the jungle visible merely as a vague black mass beyond the arc lights. A thin beard clung to McCowan’s hollow cheeks under eyes that were rheumy and sunken. Kendrick hadn’t had much of a chance to get to know him yet, since he was only a recent arrival, although he’d brought with him some precious news of happenings in the outside world. He was apparently a Scotsman with “business connections” in the Middle East – in the eyes of the Wilber administration, a good enough reason for immediate arrest.

  Like Kendrick himself, he’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Every time a new prisoner arrived, more snippets of information were disseminated through the camp. Since Kendrick’s own arrival, just after the LA Nuke, thousands more had been processed through the impromptu detention centres set up across the United States. Then they’d been incarcerated in this hell-hole.

  The three prisoners were taken outside and made to stand in a ragged line. As Kendrick glanced down at Buddy Juarez’s feet, he realized that the other man must have been lying in his bunk with his boots on.

  Buddy caught his eye. “Always prepared,” he whispered.

  Sweat prickled on Kendrick’s brow; for all the fragmented news about mass arrests still continuing back home, none of them had any idea where they were actually being held. The jungle and its temperatures suggested that they were somewhere in South America. Since there were no signs of civilization beyond the arc lights and the surrounding vegetation the nearest town might be miles away, maybe hundreds.

  Something hard and metallic was poked harshly into the small of Kendrick’s back so that he stumbled forward at the same time as the other two. They were then led away from the huts and through the wire fence that separated them from the rest of what seemed to be a military base hacked straight out of the raw jungle.

  “Welcome to the Maze,” said Stenzer.

  There was food on a tray, fresh coffee in a pot brewing on a hotplate. Kendrick eyed a plate of doughnuts with sugar glazing. Small plastic pots of cream stood near the brewing coffee. The familiar smell of it all brought Kendrick to the edge of delirium. He was starving, had been starved for months.

  “Where did you say?”

  A smile flickered at the corner of Stenzer’s mouth. A thin residue of hair clung to his scalp just above the ears.

  “Our nickname for this facility,” he explained. Stenzer’s military cap lay by his elbow on the plastic-surfaced desk that separated them.

  All three had been taken to a long, low building resembling a concrete bunker. Beyond it Kendrick had noticed an airstrip extending all the way to the edge of the jungle, and scattered around were other buildings, many surrounded by trucks. Kendrick guessed that this was the main barracks for their guards and the pilots who transported the prisoners.

  Inside the building was a long row of elevators, each big enough to accommodate a truck. Their ride down had been long, the cage rattling and jerking continually as it descended. Several minutes later, its grille-gate slid open to reveal a long, grey corridor lined by metal doors. Kendrick had then been separated from the others and pushed into an empty cell lit with flickering strip lighting. There he had crouched on the bare concrete floor, waiting until the soldiers returned uncountable hours later to deliver him to this man Stenzer.

  A calendar hung on the wall behind Stenzer’s shoulder. Kendrick focused on it, noticing how days were ticked off in a loose, childlike scrawl. He saw that it was now the end of July.

  His stare locking on Kendrick, Stenzer nodded in the direction of the doughnuts and coffee. “Would you like something to eat?”

  “Yes,” Kendrick choked, his stomach squirming painfully at the thought.

  Stenzer’s smile broadened just a touch. Not a smirk but a genuine smile, as if things were going just fine.

  “Okay, then.” Stenzer folded his hands together on his desk. “But I’d like you to answer some questions first.”

  At first, the routine was unvarying.

  They kept Kendrick in the same empty, windowless subterranean cell he’d first been placed in. He had no pillow, no blankets. Daylight became a distant memory.

  Any tenuous sources of information he had about the outside world were now cut off. One thing Kendrick realized for certain: nobody was coming to save him.

  The last news he’d heard was that there had been some kind of rebellion among America’s East Coast states, though he found this almost impossible to imagine. Supposedly, large sections of the United States armed forces had started fighting among themselves, with casualties in the thousands. Verifying the truth of this was impossible, of course. If such a rift really had occurred, it must have happened only a few weeks after his arrest.

  Kendrick could imagine the causes, however. It would have started with the rot that had turned fertile wheat fields into millions of acres of sterile ruin, withering and dying under what was perceived as a biological and genetic attack by some invisible enemy. How easy it had been then to reduce America to a paranoid police state.

  For a while he was tortured randomly. Guards would beat him with hoses if he fell asleep. Sometimes he let himself drop off anyway, enjoying a few blissful seconds of unconscious peace before the men in uniforms slammed the cell door open again.

  At other times he would be asked repeated questions about people he did not know and had never heard of, about places he might have heard of but knew only from the pages of magazines.

  Occasionally, as Kendrick was led down the long corridor for a session with Stenzer, he would see men in lab coats who looked like doctors or scientists walking past him. They spared him no glances: he was beneath them, he realized. Their faces told him that they considered him merely a traitor, and a criminal.

  Kendrick faced Stenzer across the plastic desk for what seemed like the thousandth time, yet he couldn’t even remember being taken out of his cell.

  There was always hot food and coffee on these occasions. Kendrick’s interrogator followed a routine where he’d get himself a coffee and a doughnut while reading through his eepsheet messages. Every time this happened Kendrick felt like he was trapped in some unique version of Hell, looking in from behind a one-way mirror while some office worker ingested his morning dose o
f carbohydrate and caffeine before pursuing a mundane life that Kendrick could now only dream of. The strange thing was that, despite his hatred for Stenzer – an emotion so intense that the old Kendrick could scarcely have imagined feeling it towards another human being – he found himself irrationally trying to please the lieutenant.

  For a while he’d thought that the morning routine with the coffee and doughnuts formed a part of the general torture. But then he wondered if it was instead more on a par with the lack of response he got from the soldiers and scientists moving purposefully along the subterranean corridors of the Maze, an unintentional cruelty that served to weaken him further nonetheless.

  Stenzer finished reading his eepsheet, then folded his hands into each other again and scrutinized Kendrick.

  “August thirteen, time fourteen hundred hours. Interview with subject Gallmon, charges relating to” – Stenzer’s eyes flicked down to the eepsheet – “subverting the government of the American people by aiding and abetting its enemy.” Stenzer stared closely at him. “Mr Gallmon, are you prepared to answer some questions today?”

  “I don’t know any of these people you tell me about,” Kendrick mumbled. “I never met any of them. I’m not a terrorist.”

  “But your wife did meet with some of them?”

  Kendrick couldn’t remember how many times they had spoken exactly these words to each other. “I don’t know,” Kendrick replied automatically. “She interviewed people. She was a journalist, like me. Meeting someone doesn’t imply collusion with them. I know I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Mr Gallmon,” Stenzer said, almost gently, “if you’re innocent, why would we have brought you all the way down here, to this place?”

  Kendrick’s stare met Stenzer’s. “Where are we?”

  And then . . . something amazing happened.

  Stenzer stood and poured a second cup of coffee, then held it out in front of Kendrick’s face. Kendrick eyed the cream-coloured cup as though it was going to bite him.

  “It’s all right,” said Stenzer. “Take it.”

  At first Kendrick hesitated, but then he reached out and took the coffee cup in both hands. By contrast with the jungle far above his head, the Maze was cold and the warmth of the mug flowed into him like a liquid sun melting into the core of his soul. The scent and the steam of it made his head swim, as if he had just been handed back a tiny sliver of his previous life. At that point he felt at his very weakest.

  “You can have a doughnut too if you want. Just help yourself.”

  Stenzer’s voice had an almost conspiratorial tone that Kendrick had never heard before. He sipped at the coffee and grunted at the flavour of it. He then reached over and picked up a cream doughnut, watching Stenzer with frightened animal eyes. Stenzer only nodded encouragingly.

  The interrogator did something to his eepsheet and it greyed out; Kendrick could see that he’d turned it off. “Listen, right now what goes on in here is between us. Nobody knows what I’m really saying to you. Do you understand?”

  Kendrick touched the creamy edge of the doughnut to his mouth and felt a surge of bile rise halfway up the back of his throat. Then the confectionery was in him, his hands cramming the sugary dough into his mouth, filling him with a rush of warmth and pleasure.

  Kendrick swallowed and coughed. “I don’t believe you,” he continued wearily. Of course the room was bugged. Of course they would record everything.

  “Mr Gallmon – Kendrick – we both know this is a waste of time.” Stenzer stared at him. “We both know this is going nowhere. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Stenzer shook his head. The sugar had now entered Kendrick’s bloodstream, making him as blissful as a newborn baby. Stenzer came around the desk, putting one hand almost paternally on his shoulder.

  “Listen to me,” Stenzer said in a low voice. “I can’t do this any more. Do you understand me?” Kendrick turned slightly and stared at him.

  “I’m serious,” Stenzer insisted. “I can’t go on treating you this way any more. So when you come here, you eat what you like and I won’t tell the guards.”

  Stenzer picked up another doughnut and handed it to Kendrick. Kendrick took it and forced himself to take more time eating it. The idea that Stenzer actually meant what he said formed a tiny brief blossom of hope deep within his chest, but he pushed the idea away.

  He was, after all, in Hell. Hope was an impossible commodity in Hell.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Stenzer continued. Kendrick finished the doughnut and drained the last of the steaming black coffee.

  “I’ve told you everything I know.” The same thing he had become used to saying, over and over, week after week.

  “Yes, I know,” said Stenzer. “But I want to know who you are – who you really are. There are files that tell me things about you, about your family and your life, your job. But they don’t tell me everything I want.”

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” Kendrick replied. “And I have no idea how many times I’ve told you that. I just don’t know what else I can tell you.” The words spilled out in a dull monotone.

  “It doesn’t have to be anything important,” said Stenzer, stuffing his hands into his pockets and resting against the edge of the desk. “All I really need is some piece of information I can give to my superiors, no matter how trivial it may seem to you. And then, I swear, maybe we can do something to get you out of here.”

  “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

  Stenzer studied him. “You’re charged as an accessory to sedition, to aiding and abetting the enemies of the United States. America is at war, Mr Gallmon, and the rules inevitably change during wartime. Under the new emergency legislation, you can be held without charge for the rest of your natural life, if necessary – if it is believed that you in any measure could harm our nation.

  “Not only that: while you are under military jurisdiction, you are required to serve our nation by any means necessary that might contribute towards maintaining the United States as the pre-eminent free democracy.”

  Kendrick was utterly appalled. “Jesus Christ, what did you lot think I did – blow up LA personally?”

  “Perhaps you weren’t directly responsible, no, but your wife interviewed individuals known to associate with enemies of our country. Terrorists, dissidents and the like. Your own work at times led to your having contact with the same kind of people, and your written articles made it clear you understood the implications of a terrorist threat.”

  “But I didn’t make anyone do anything. I just—”

  “Talked to them? And if you hadn’t been there to disseminate their vicious, anti-American views, do you think they would have even given you the time of day? Perhaps you even shared those views.” Stenzer shrugged. “But some of the things you said about our country – about our President – they were designed to undermine us.”

  Kendrick tried to speak, but only a kind of feeble croak emerged, as the horror of what he was hearing slowly filtered into his mind. “I thought you said you wanted to help me. This . . . this bullshit can’t . . .” He shook his head, his words tailing off.

  Stenzer mustered something like a smile. To Kendrick, it seemed like a grinning skull clad in paper-thin flesh.

  “People make mistakes,” Stenzer continued. “They associate with the wrong people, and there can be . . . consequences that they might not have expected. Like the LA Nuke, or even the rot that devastated our great farmlands. I meant what I said: I could walk you out of here right now, if I wanted, and you could be home in a couple of hours. But I can’t do that just yet.

  “The fact is I need to give them something, or they wouldn’t keep me here in this job. And then I’d never be able to help you. If you can give me something – anything, no matter how trivial it might seem to you – I swear I’ll do my damnedest to get you out of here. Today, if I can.”

  Kendrick smoothed his suddenly sweat-slicked h
ands against his legs. “I don’t know. What is it you want me to say?”

  “Anything you can give me,” Stenzer replied, his words imploring. “I can help you, but only if you can help me.”

  But what can I say? Kendrick wondered. He was a journalist. Stenzer already knew everything about his life. It still seemed incomprehensible that there could be any correlation between those articles he’d written and his imprisonment here without any official charges ever being laid. There was nothing he could tell Stenzer he had not already described in excruciatingly repetitive detail.

  Tears came to Kendrick’s eyes: Stenzer was clearly employing a new tactic to get from him that which he did not have to give.

  “I don’t have anything. I don’t. I’ve told you everything I can, everything about my wife and myself, God knows how many hundreds of times over. I wish I could tell you something more, but there’s nothing, I swear.”

  Stenzer’s expression became grim. “The smallest detail, Mr Gallmon. You might think it isn’t important, but it might be. Your wife was in contact with dissidents and enemies of the nation. Are you telling me she had America’s best interests at heart when she consorted with the kind of people who would incinerate a city full of innocent people? I have copies of everything either of you ever wrote and, let me tell you, I have never been so sickened by so much unpatriotic filth.” His voice was rising now.

  Kendrick shook his head violently. “Christ, you don’t even know that terrorists caused the field rot! Anyway, the environment’s been fucked for decades, and—”

  “Don’t tell me what to think!” Stenzer screamed into Kendrick’s face, spittle spraying from his mouth. Until now, it had just been questions, endless questions, while Kendrick’s mind grew dull from boredom and hunger.

  Now, something had changed.

  Stenzer struck him hard. It took several seconds before Kendrick understood he had been assaulted. He found himself lying on his back, the chair tipped over to one side, his mouth full of the taste of blood and iron.