Second Solace

by Robert Clark

  ‘It’s not the size that counts, it's how you use it. I’m sure that’s a mantra you’re used to.’ I said, returning a false smile.

  ‘We’re going to have a lot of fun together, you and I. Agent Whyte is so excited, he’s already on his way up to the site. It’s a dark zone, you know. Outside of the control of the government. We have our orders, you see. We’re on an unlimited schedule. Our diaries are clean for the next couple of weeks. We’re to stay with you until we’re satisfied there’s nothing left inside that tiny little mind of yours that we don’t already know. How long that takes is entirely up to you, but you know, I figure we’ll be spending Christmas together. Would you like that? I’m sure we can get you a gift or two.’

  ‘A carrot cake with a nail file is always popular amongst us detainees.’

  ‘Presents are for good kids. Naughty children get coal, right?’

  ‘You’re shit out of luck then aren’t you?’

  The officer uncuffed my arms from the chair one by one and clipped me to the chains. Once the arms were connected, he did the same with my ankles. They massively restricted movement. If I tried to flee, I was going to make an absolute fool of myself. Not that I intended to escape.

  Yet.

  The officer stuck his hands under my armpits and heaved me to my feet. The length of chain connecting the restraints around my hands and wrists was a touch too short. Even with my hands at my hips, I had to bend slightly to stop the cuffs from digging into my skin. The officer hauled me around the table, seemingly unaware to the fact I had to shuffle at double-time to match his stride. Agent Miles opened the door and gestured for me to go through.

  ‘Ladies first,’ he said.

  ‘No, I insist. Age before beauty.’

  He smiled again and pushed me through the door. The corridor was a bland affair. Harsh, fluorescent tubular bulbs coated the space in an unflattering yellow light. Agent Miles slipped his hand under my arm and nodded to the officer who strode ahead without another word.

  ‘So,’ I said as we walked like an elderly couple. ‘How did you find me?’

  Agent Miles laughed.

  ‘Are you serious? James, you are as subtle as a freight train. How on earth you managed to evade the authorities in Europe is beyond me. You’ve left a trail of destruction so big, you could land a jumbo jet in the aftermath.’

  ‘That says a lot about you guys then that it’s taken you this long to catch me.’

  ‘Do you know how you arrived in America?’ he asked. ‘I’m serious here, do you actually know?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Kind of hard to get the specifics from inside a tiny box.’

  ‘James, you arrived in a crate. One of about eight thousand or so on a freight ship from Spain. Of those eight thousand, two hundred were not accounted for on the manifest. They just went missing. We believe those two hundred were used to smuggle people into the country. Children mostly. They’re resilient. Most adults would die in those conditions. I suspect a fair number of those kids were part of the number you found in Domingo Reyes’s little cave. And yes, we know about your involvement in that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because you blew Reyes’s brains out right in front of two hundred witnesses. It didn’t take long to piece that particular puzzle together. But hey, I ain’t judging. That’s got to be the most generous act you’ve ever accomplished. Not that it will make a difference in your fate, of course. Your copy is already blotted. But to answer your question, the only reason we didn’t snatch you up right away on that harbour was because we didn’t know exactly which box you were tucked up in. We tracked down about thirty of them. All kids, all European, all traumatised by the situation.’

  ‘I didn’t actually kill Reyes. That was someone else.’

  ‘Then you achieved exactly jack shit, didn’t you? I’m sure Nicole Green would love to take the credit instead.’

  Nicole. Had she been caught?

  ‘Relax,’ Miles said as though he had read my mind. ‘Lucky for her, she’s still in the wind. But we’ll find her, don’t you worry.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Nicole is as tenacious as they come.’

  ‘Still, she’s no match for the United States government. No one is.’

  We reached the end of the corridor and took a door on the right. It was another small room. Same metal table. Same eagle-eyed surveillance camera watching intently. The only differences were a lack of mirrors, and a neatly folded orange jumpsuit positioned on the tabletop.

  ‘I want you out of those clothes and into your new suit in thirty seconds,’ Miles ordered. He uncuffed my hands and ankles and stepped back to give me a little space. I slipped off my clothes, and left them in a pile on the floor—no reason to do the FBI the kindness of picking them up—and reached over for the jumpsuit, but Miles put his hand in my way.

  ‘Briefs too, James,’ said Agent Miles with a grin. ‘Gotta go the whole nine yards.’

  I didn’t object. Didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. I pulled down my boxers and kicked them aside. Curious eyes flashed down, but nothing was said. I pulled on my new clothes. They were slack and starchy. Not exactly designer brand. If I wasn’t careful, they could be the last clothes I would ever wear.

  ‘And what a sobering thought that is,’ said the Wolf. He too wore the awful prison clothes and admired them with the same disdain.

  ‘Hey, I’m all ears if you’ve got a suggestion to get us out of here,’ I said. ‘Best we can hope for is a quick death at this point.’

  ‘Patience,’ the Wolf whispered. ‘A sharp eye will spot a flaw. This needn’t be our last call.’

  ‘Talk like a normal person, will you?’

  ‘Keep your eyes open and watch for their mistakes. Old toothy here has got two pistols. One in the holster on the inside of his jacket over his left lung. That means he’s right-handed too. The other is an ankle holster. A smaller weapon, but no less deadly if you let him get to it. Best bet would be to go for the former and kill him before he gets to the latter.’

  ‘You think he’s going to let me get that close to him without putting up a fight?’ I asked.

  ‘He will if you make him.’

  ‘All ready?’ Miles said. ‘The truck’s ready and waiting.’

  Without his counterpart, Miles was at least slightly more bearable. Like when two friends got together and suddenly reverted to acting like they did when they were kids. At least now he had some shred of professionalism to him. Miles reattached the chains and pulled me back out into the corridor. The chains were a little looser than before. I didn’t have to bend to walk. A bonus, all things considered. Any improvement in movement was welcomed.

  We walked out into the foyer, savouring every air-conditioned second, and out of a side door into the blustering Florida heat. In the fallout of the storm, the weather had gone into overdrive, the swing of the pendulum had taken the weather from some kind of apocalypse to an inferno. It had to be at least thirty degrees, probably more. It was nothing to the residents, but to a Brit grown up on a diet of single digit temperatures and brisk sea breezes, it was killer.

  The truck was less audacious than I had expected. It was a large, grey van. More like a movers truck than a prison transfer vehicle. No flashing lights, no bustling entourage, no menacing government logo painted on the front. The officer who had taken out my catheter stood by the rear doors, watching and waiting. As we approached, he swung open the door and pulled me inside. The interior was sweltering. With no windows, and a shell made entirely of metal that had sat super-heating in the sun for hours, the temperature inside was easily another ten or twenty degrees higher. Enough to kill.

  As soon as I stepped inside, I felt like I’d walked into a wall of cooked fudge. The air was heavy and suffocating and made me want to vomit. As some cooler air leaked in, I began to realise just how horrendous the journey was going to be.

  The officer unclipped the chains around my ankles and secured my wrists into a bolt
on the floor. Sweat dripped from his head as he secured me to my seat, and he climbed out without a word.

  ‘I’ll see you up there,’ Agent Miles said. ‘Try not to burn up before you arrive. The temperature should cool when you get out of Florida and into Alabama, but not by much.’ His laughs echoed around the truck interior as he swung the door shut, trapping me in a tomb of sweltering heat and regret.

  There was no interior light. No glimmer from a window. No crack in the door to give me any indication or respite from the devastating heat. I might as well have been thrown into a casket and buried for all the difference it made. But no, there would be no grave for me. No casket. I would be burned up and turned to ash and thrown in the trash. A legacy ended as nothing more than dust and bone.

  The throbbing headache came in minutes. The dry throat, dizziness and nausea all arrived within the first hour. But the hell didn’t alleviate for almost four hours. I focused my mind to stave off the madness by tapping out the passing seconds with my knuckles on the metal seat. It helped to give me a purpose. I started by counting to sixty seconds without missing a beat. After sixty, I tried for one hundred, then two hundred, then five hundred, then a thousand. I made it all the way up to three thousand four hundred and thirty two before my mind wavered. Then I started again. Ten, fifty, one hundred, one thousand. Again and again until the torment ended.

  Four hours in was when I had to admit defeat. I’d got all the way up to six thousand seven hundred and nine when a bump in the road made me bash my head against the wall and lose count. That was too much. It was time for change.

  With my unshackled foot, I kicked against the partition that separated the oven from the cabin and shouted. I kept up my attack until finally the driver yielded and I felt the truck pull off the road and stop. The door swung open wide and a blissful breeze of refreshing, chilled air swept inside. The light was too much. After four hours of darkness I had the vision of a bat. I squinted and tried to shield my eyes, but my hands were shackled down. Through the gap in my vision, I could see the driver.

  ‘What?’ he snapped.

  ‘I need to use the bathroom,’ I said.

  The officer shook his head.

  ‘No can do, you’ll have to hold it.’

  ‘Fine by me. I’ll go in the truck. I hear dirty protests are all the range these days.’

  The officer huffed, climbed up inside and unshackled me from my seat. He dragged me by the cuffs out into the world. The air could be no cooler than it had outside the station, but it felt like I’d climbed out in Antarctica. I stopped and stretched and savoured the cool, but a quick tug on the wrists heaved me from my reverie.

  The driver had parked up behind a small service station beside a busy highway. A steady stream of traffic filed in and out around the front, but no one slithered around the back. The officer pointed to a door up ahead. A faded sign drilled onto the door read Restroom. The officer went in first and looked around. It was small. Only a one cubicle affair, with a small shower and sink for long-distance truckers to grab a little respite. Once satisfied there was no other escape route, the officer pulled me inside.

  ‘You keep the door open,’ he said, looking between me and the foul smelling cubicle.

  ‘What am I going to do, swim down the pipe? Give me a little privacy at least.’

  The officer grunted.

  ‘One minute, otherwise I’ll drag you out of there with your pants round your ankles.’

  ‘Noted.’

  I shuffled inside and gave the officer a warm, auspicious smile as I shut the cubicle door. The toilet was vile. The porcelain had cracked and splintered and numerous spots, making the whole structural integrity about on a par with one of the damp discarded tissues littering the tiled floor. All kinds of suspicious stains covered the basin, the floor and the surrounding walls around it. Using a makeshift glove of as many dry tissues I could collect from the dispenser, I wiggled one of the weakest pieces of the toilet. Nothing doing. I contemplated trying to kick it free, but that would be as big of an alert as it was possible to make. So, no weapon, unless I wanted to count a nigh unlimited supply of tissue as a weapon, which I didn’t. But I had done more with less in the past. I could do it again.

  Gently, I slid the stall door lock to into the unlocked position and squeezed myself into the gap behind the door. The stall was cramped for one man, and it was about to get smaller. I took a deep breath, and yelled as loud and visceral as I could manage.

  The officer reacted in an instant. With his pistol already in hand, he darted forwards and barged into the cubicle door with all his might. Expecting the resistance of a lock, he was thrown slightly off balance as the door yielded immediately, and staggered into the cubicle, gun arm first.

  Just as I had expected.

  The door ricocheted off my chest and bounced back into the tumbling body of the officer. The moment the door bounced off me, I threw all of my weight into it. The tired wood cracked as thirteen stone of Stone collided with the police officer. He groaned as his entire body compacted into a slither of his former self, but I was not done.

  With the chains hanging between my wrists, I swung my hands around his exposed hand and the pistol, and tugged as hard as I could back into the cubicle. As the pistol clattered down into the toilet, and splashed into the rancid water, the officer slid his shackled hand free and out of sight.

  But he was not about to give up lightly. As I recoiled to give another shove, the officer took the audacious liberty of retaliation. Hoisting me with my own petard, he slammed the door back in my direction. With my hands still outstretched before me, the door crumpled into them like they were nothing but paper, and crushed them into my ribs. Fingers and muscles and bones twisted in each and every way, sending a tidal wave of pain up into my brain.

  I shrieked and forced my knee up to relieve some of the pain. As my kneecap collided with the seriously compromised stall door, I twisted my body sideways, freeing my hands, and putting me back on the offensive. I barged all of my weight back into the door, repeating my first attack all over again. It worked, albeit not as effectively as before, but that didn’t matter. It was the next step that counted.

  The officer retaliated the only way he could. It was like a game of pong or tennis. I had slammed the metaphorical ball into his court, which left him with two choices. Retreat, or attack. Of course, he chose the latter, which I had counted on. As my attack reached its equilibrium, I pounced forwards, lodging my foot in beside the toilet, and pirouetting awkwardly on the spot.

  At the same time, the officer threw all his weight into the door, hoping to strike gold twice. But of course, gold was mid pirouette about two foot ahead of the place he was attacking. Just as he had when he first attempted entry to the stall, he flopped into the empty space I had just vacated, and bounced off the adjacent wall.

  Had the tiled floor been clean and dry, that might have been it. But it wasn’t. At once, both of the officer’s feet lost their grip on the filthy, waterlogged tiles, and he slipped down onto his arse, sideways in the cubicle. As he hit the ground, I had finished my brief career as a ballerina, and brought my free, plimsoll-laden foot crashing down into the officer’s nose. The feeble material did little to muffle the sensation of his nose breaking under my heel, and as he slumped to the ground, I couldn’t help but shiver.

  Time was short. I needed to escape, fast. The cuffs on my wrists could wait. At least my leg restraints had been removed. I was dehydrated, exhausted, and almost definitely delirious, but I had something the police didn’t.

  I had nothing to lose.

  I leapt over the defeated officer and sprinted for the bathroom door. The truck would be a no go. The officer would have the keys, and even if he had miraculously left them inside the vehicle, taking it would be like holding a large neon sign over my head. For now, I just needed to run.

  I burst through the bathroom door and was immediately dazzled by the light of the sun. I held my hands up to shield my face, but as I did, somethin
g massive slammed into my right cheek.

  I dropped to the ground, dazed and confused. My head spun, my eyes saw double. Through the blinding brightness, a figure appeared.

  ‘Christ alive, James. What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’

  It was Agent Miles. As my vision returned, I saw the recognisable sight of a pistol pointed directly at my head.

  ‘You are one stupid son of a bitch, aren’t you?’ he mocked. ‘Did you really think we wouldn’t expect you to try to scuttle away?’

  He kicked me in the ribs. I gasped for air.

  ‘That’s for attacking an officer of the law. Don’t you know that’s a crime?’

  My lungs recoiled.

  ‘Now, get back in the sweatbox before I let Officer Gomez have some fun. Wouldn’t you like that, Officer Gomez?’

  Another figure appeared over me.

  Officer Gomez spat on my face. The combination of blood and saliva trickled down my cheek.

  ‘Fucking asshole,’ he swore, as the pair picked me up and dragged me back to the truck.

  Four

  Second Solace

  It was dark by the time we finally stopped. The car scratched and screeched and whined and complained with every passing mile as the road got progressively more uncooperative. The final stretch consisted of a long incline, wherein the heavy sniper rifle sunk the weight of an obese child into my spine, which finally relented seconds before the engine was killed and I was pulled out for the last time.

  The world was almost entirely black, lit only by the mesmerising beauty of the clear, star-scattered sky. There wasn’t so much as a single ounce of light pollution for miles. Just as it should be. I could hear the soothing sway of a thousand trees rustling in the light wind. It was a blissful calm.