“Huh,” I said.
Because that was a good question. Maybe Scotty Barnes, the compound fracture kid, maybe he was still at large. And maybe Penzler really had created a heap of plastic soldiers—Hunter in Ohio’s idiot dad. And of course Natalia.
“Why do you still give a shit about the product,” I asked, “if you blew up all those kids just to get rid of it?”
“You misunderstand.” He scratched his top lip with a thin pinkie. “By torching our subjects’ houses, among other dubious tactics, Penzler made itself a liability. They felt they had to cover their bases, security-wise, I appreciate that, but even so. They’re out. The US military does not consider itself or the product a liability, so in our hands solely the project will move forward.”
“What happened to the woman and kids I was with?”
“We have seven more subjects from diverse sources but you aren’t going near any of them until your parts all get thrown on the pile.”
I swallowed hard.
“What are the names of these subjects?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You feeding them this fertilizer crap?”
“Don’t worry about it. No one exposed to the product has lasted long. After that we send the remains to Albany.”
“Oh,” I said. “Huh.”
I lunged at him, but of course the cuffs kept me pinned. He sat watching me, the pencil between his fingers. I lunged again, flashing canines like a pit bull tied to a tree, then something felt wrong so I stayed pitched forward, waiting to pass out or puke. He’d doctored me with something. And how long had it been since my last strip of bacon? Carver gripped his gun in its holster and squinted like he was inspecting my undercarriage. I hiccuped, hard. My ears produced a hiss like a beer bottle opening, then my lower jaw detached and fell on the floor with a thud like a T-bone falling into a tub.
It lay beside my left boot, my goddamn jaw: two half-hinges of grisly bone at either end, a fringe of beard, scabbed bottom lip, then yellow teeth, tongue like a raw cutlet. The tongue’s pink tip quivered like I’d had something to say.
Carver’s face went gray like it was a hunk of him down there. Syrupy blood migrated down the front of my shirt—now I was half a head over a drooling spigot. Carver squinted up at the part of my face that could still blink, his lips a little blue, so I took a deep breath and looked at him meaningfully.
“Aaah-ghaa-ghaa!” said my mucousy throat.
He bent and puked into his hands. Yellow bubbles seeped between his fingers, then I was on my feet in the middle of a 180-degree turn. Painful on the arms, but the flying chair legs must’ve flattened him because there was a crash like a shopping cart falling down stairs, and when I finished turning, his own chair lay on its side, casters still spinning, and he was halfway under the table with a gash across his temple.
I stepped gingerly over my jaw and around his smear of puke, the chair prodding the backs of my knees, and studied Carver for a loop of keys. None visible. I got my toe under him and rolled him onto his front, but there weren’t any on the back of his belt.
I sat back down to think it over. No klaxons were ringing, no sleep-gas fizzing in yet. Five minutes to get the jaw back on. Carver’s foot twitched in its loafer, which either meant he was waking up or just died right then. Thanks to unfettered salivary glands my top half was sopping wet. I noticed his gun in its holster and cursed myself for a full-blown idiot.
“Yaah huh-huh yah-yea,” I muttered.
I stood up and shuffled forward. As long as he was under the table, I couldn’t get near his holster, so I put my shoulder against the table leg and pushed so it mooed across the floor. Then I knelt beside Carver, the edge of my chair really cutting into the backs of my knees, wrists straining at the cuffs, and managed to wrap the fingers of my right hand around the butt of his pistol. Ropes of my mucous drizzled his cotton-blend shirt. I tried to straighten up with the gun in my hand but the chair tipped left instead and I toppled onto my back.
With four minutes to get my jaw back on I stared at the particleboard ceiling. Seven prisoners? Colleen, Harv, Franny, Megan, Clint, that made five, but if Carver had two more from someplace else maybe the last two were Amber and Grace. Or maybe none of the seven were from my gang.
c-a-m-p, I reminded myself.
I bent my wrist far enough for the barrel of the gun to point at my left hand eighteen inches away. I pulled the pistol’s hammer back with my thumb. The cuff dug so hard into my right wrist that I had to concentrate to get my trigger finger to tighten while drool ran down in my ears—could I even aim? I lifted my left hand so a single steel link appeared, vulnerable, between my wrist and the arm of the chair.
Before I was entirely ready I pulled the trigger.
The recoil rolled me onto my right side, my feet across Carver’s chest, but my left arm flapped free! It didn’t look right, though, because the wrist was raw hamburger and because my hand was gone. People should only point guns if they’re prepared for the thousand different things that might happen when they pull the trigger.
I rolled most of the way out of the chair onto the purple-spattered linoleum. My left hand lay exposed on its back five feet away, fingers outstretched like it was waiting to catch a baseball. I lay down with the runaway hand against my left hip, and tried to push the thing onto my belly but my stupid stump was too slick to steer the hand up off the floor.
“Ga hoo,” Carver sighed.
My faithful right hand laid the gun on my chest then reached across, dragging the hard corners of the chair over me, patiently set the left hand on my belly then spun it and turned it over like it was a specimen we’d found at the beach. That put the severed hand in position to hold the gun. One by one my right hand uncurled the left’s fingers and let them snap closed around the handle. I set the index finger around the trigger. What was I down to, two minutes? Less than that before Carver sat up shrieking.
I tried to breathe easy through my flaps of throat. With my right thumb I cocked the gun, then banged the chair down to get the right handcuff into position. The fluorescent tubes glared down at me. I set the wet stump of my left wrist against the toothpick bones at the back of my left hand. Maybe with the barrel pressed against the handcuff I could apply a modicum of pressure to the hand before the wrist went sliding in another direction.
I glared at my left hand—it had done everything I’d wanted for thirty-four years, right? Its thumb twitched.
Then my left hand, gun and all, flew across the room, and my right hand lifted away from the arm of the chair like they’d never been more than passing acquaintances. The gun had fired. My body was missing two crucial pieces, but I was chairless!
“Zah,” said Carver.
I clambered to my feet, dropped my dripping jaw down the front of my shirt then scampered across the room and did the same with my heroic left hand. Carver’s gun slid into the back of my belt. The steel door only had an opening for a key card. I ran back to Carver and noticed a pivoting security camera, green light blinking, in the corner of the ceiling. So why hadn’t those 1,855 troops stormed in? I knelt over Carver, feeling his shirt pockets.
He smacked his lips then opened one eye, just halfway, calibrating.
He said, “Yuh!”
As his wiry arms flailed up at me I gripped his whole forehead in my one hand, lifted his head six inches then drove it into the floor. Both of his eyes flew open, then stayed that way, like he couldn’t comprehend something written on my forehead. A pool of blood spread around his head like a sombrero, then a rope of my drool draped his eyebrow. My jaw had one minute left and the other subjects might’ve been dead already.
I rolled him over and checked every pocket. No key card. Even as dead guys go he was useless. I stood, breathed deep up my nose, then ran at the door and kicked it as hard as I could with the heel of my boot.
It flew open, banging the
wall. Not even locked. The light from the interrogation room was enough to show a hallway, a wire wastebasket, a space heater plugged into an outlet, a heavy yellow door six feet in front of me, another red door ten feet to my right, and a rolling garment rack with six wire coat-hangers dangling from it, one displaying a satin turquoise Florida Marlins baseball jacket. No pimply sentry cradling an M-16, that was good, but no useful power drills or wood screws either. I threw the yellow door’s deadbolt in case that stopped anybody coming in from outside. Frightening them with my dripping head might buy some time too.
I laid one of the coat hangers on the floor, and stepped on it while my good hand unwound the top hook then straightened the whole thing out. The hanger squirmed like it was dipped in Vaseline and my right hand kept expecting the left to pitch in, but eventually I had a shape like a C. Five minutes had been and gone. But old Arthur had heard on npr that the brain believes moments of stress last longer than they really do and normal humans think a twenty-five-second roller coaster ride lasts three minutes.
I dropped on my back again, twisted the top of my head against the beige lino and balanced the jaw on my neck. That left enough of a gap to fit half my hand between the bottom teeth and the top, so at age thirty-four I’d inherit Great-grandma Giller’s astonishing underbite. With my stump I pressed one end of the wire against the side of my head then used the good hand to wind the rest of the hanger under the point of my chin then tight across the top of my head. Then I was out of wire. I had no idea if the jaw would stay on my face when I sat up, but at least I had contact. I twisted the ends of the wire together, then held the jaw and sat up.
My chin must’ve been a good focal point for the upward pressure, because nothing seemed to shift. But could I cram my left hand back on before the 8th Airborne Division rammed the door?
A much-beloved to-do list:
Pull Carver’s baseball jacket off its hanger and into your lap.
Tie a knot in end of left sleeve. You only have one hand so pinch armpit of jacket between your heels.
Form left hand into fist and drop knuckles-first down the closed sleeve.
Put left stump into left sleeve, aligning wrist to back of hand.
Put right arm through right sleeve so that you’re wearing the jacket. Shortened left sleeve causes jacket to bind painfully under right armpit but also creates beautiful pressure at left wrist.
Palpate left sleeve with right hand—does the hand sit against the arm the way it used to? Wish that you’d palpated your left wrist more often in the old days so you’d know for sure whether it felt all right? Yes, if it heals the arm will be shorter, you’ve lost body mass, but that doesn’t matter a good goddamn.
Then I was light-headed from loss of viscous blood or cough syrup or whatever. I swayed to my feet and took down another coat hanger and yanked it into a sort of diamond. I tucked that under my chin too, dragged the top up over my forehead, and the thing fit perfectly after all of ten seconds’ work.
And it was a good thing I’d doubled the pressure on the jaw because then I knelt and vomited into that useless wire wastebasket, though my mouth couldn’t open more than a quarter-inch. My jaw stayed in place.
So I stepped back to that big yellow door and put my hand on the cold latch.
Cold air bathed my poor face and shook those structural coat hangers. I looked down at a set of three wooden steps, then a tall chain-link fence, white windblown prairie and gray sky beyond it. Just looked like Nebraska as far as I could tell, but I’d never been to Virginia to be able to say if it looked any different. No sign of friend or foe. Left alone to mop up as usual.
I shut the yellow door, tiptoed down the foyer and clicked open that other red door. By the light of a spastically flickering fluorescent I saw twenty feet of bare hallway, with a blue door at the far end this time, and chunks of cement spilled across the floor from a hole in the wall. With the red door open an inch I could smell sawdust, so this seemed right—still no clatter of grenade belts. I shut the door silently, and behind it found a green-and-white fifty-pound bag of fertilizer, showing grapes and watermelons, just like farmers buy in Velouria.
“He-oh?” I called to the knee-level hole in the wall. “Ih Heeda.” It’s Peter, who’s in here? “Who ih he-a?”
Five seconds of silence. A noise from the hole like a cat coughing up hairballs. None of my crew had ever made that sound. Gingerly I dropped to one knee and peered in. Just blackness, and a bare patch of cement floor lit by that sporadic fluorescent tube.
I went back to the bag—it was open but mostly full, with a Pyrex measuring cup on top of the white pellets. I dragged the bag over to the hole.
“Aw? Jock?’’ Rob, Jock—funny the words you can still say even when your tongue’s on hiatus. “You guys ungry? Ih Heeda.”
I threw a handful in ahead of me as I crawled through the hole. It was dark and smelled like smouldering sawdust. Crawling across the pellets didn’t feel too pleasant on my kneecaps, so with my good right hand I dragged the bag in after me.
“Who in heah?” I asked.
Straight in front of me I heard the coughing-cat noise again, and to my right what sounded like a guy muttering in his sleep. Where the hell was I?
Suddenly enough light came through a window in a door on the left to throw a weak square onto the floor, and from that I could make out two guys sprawled to my right and one in front of me. Then the square of light went off again.
I crouched and waited to see if the bodies would get violent. I was in the mood for that, to be honest, until something else occurred to me.
“Hey,” I whispered. “You guy know ’Onny ’Own? Ih ’Elouria?”
No response.
“I was at ‘Ockside doo, at day. I was da deecha.”
The coughing-cat sound turned into indisputably human gagging, loud and wet, and somebody else started to slowly hum. I recognized it. Well, East Coast girls are hip, I really—“California Girls.”
“Wha you know about Dockside?” asked a guy to my right. Sounded like his mouth was full of paste.
“I know na-hin. Any kids in heah? Ha do ged dem outta heah!”
“What’s in that bag?” someone else whispered. “Smells good.”
“Why’s id so dah in heah?” I asked.
“Tim smashed the bulb,” said Pastemouth. “Tired of looking at each other.”
“Give me some of that to eat,” said the whisperer.
I scooped a cupful of pellets out of the bag and held it out to the dark. I couldn’t see exactly who’d been talking.
“What’s he s’posed to do with that?” asked Pastemouth.
“Ih calciuh nidrade.”
“He cand reach it,” said Pastemouth. “You a retard.”
“You got to put it in my mouth,” the whisperer agreed. “Please.”
On my knees I shuffled toward his voice, handful of fertilizer extended.
“Tell him where you are, Lars,” said Pastemouth.
“Nah, I’m down here,” said Lars, the whisperer.
The light flickered on again. I was kneeling over Lars’s bare leg but the leg wasn’t attached to the rest of him, which was propped in the corner dressed in a T-shirt and underpants. Just below his right elbow his head lay on its side. Only the head. His eyes looked up at me, blinking as the pupils dilated to pinpricks in the light.
“Oh,” I said. “This stuh is dry.”
“Just cram it in,” he whispered. “I’d like to choke on it.”
He opened his mouth wide like a child in a high chair. I set my hand on his forehead to roll his head back so the stuff wouldn’t fall out of his mouth.
“Pour it in,” Pastemouth said—I saw now, he was a fat bearded guy with his left hand lying by itself in his lap.
I dropped the pellets into Lars’s mouth. He shut his eyes and said, “Mm-nn,” as he tried to swal
low, trying to get his throat to work even though it was a couple of feet away. He made a wet, determined sound, “Mm-nn!” Then he tried to get a breath in through the stuff and his eyes opened wide.
His eyes shut again and didn’t move. I figured he was really dead then. I brushed his hair out of his eyes. Must’ve looked like I was petting a football.
“He had a girlfriend in Velouria,” said the hummer, his voice warbling like a flute. “She had sex with him in the interview room in jail.”
“Whad were dey gi’ing you to eat heah?” I asked.
“Chicken breast,” Pastemouth mumbled. “Fuckin’ salad.”
“We just have to wait,” said Colleen.
I quit breathing, waited for her to say something else.
“Whed da hoice cah rum?”
“Vent up dere,” said Pastemouth. “We dought they were on that side, hey, made a hole, but we guessed wrong. I don’t figure I’m intact down below anyway. Crawled back in here for a rest.”
He tugged at his handless forearm. It was tattooed with a bare-breasted mermaid, the fucked-up product of science gone wrong.
“Delicious salad,” the hummer said.
“I tole hib we need bacon. Dockor saib, ‘Human body dond need bacon,’ I saib, ‘This in’t a human body, fuggin’ asshole.’ ”
Pastemouth’s shorter arm dropped away at the elbow. We both sat looking at it. A single drop of blood trickled sluggishly across the mermaid.
The hummer started into “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean.”
“We said we’d wait,” Colleen whispered out of the vent, “so we’ll wait.”
“I never said I’d wait!” Megan yelled.
“Toby?” said Pastemouth. He prodded the hummer with his toe.
“He’s aslee,” I said. “Ow do I ged negt doah?”
“Toby ain’d adleep,” said Pastemouth.
I felt hungry as hell, I realized, a real emergency, so with nothing else in front of me I scooped a half-cup of calcium nitrate past the coat hangers and crammed it into my own mouth. Tasted like chalk and tonic water.
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