The Four Stages of Cruelty (29 page)

“All right, Roy. With what little authority I have left, I’ll make your case.” He looked to Josh. “Let him come with me now. We’ll walk out, and you walk back. I’ll get your damn comic book. And I’ll see you in a cell by this time tomorrow.”

“Sorry, Keeper, I’ll need our friend here to keep an eye on my back. But I promise I’ll do what I can to keep him out of the worst of harm’s way. You know I’m fond of him. Think about the ones like Josh when you’re telling your snipers where to line up. You’ll be killing people who don’t deserve killing, and you know it.”

The Keeper pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to Roy.

“You can reach me on this when it’s necessary to talk. There’s only one number programmed into it. Just hit send.”

Roy slipped the cell phone into his pocket. “You mean I can’t order a pizza?”

He put his arm across Josh’s shoulder and nudged him around. Josh could sense the Keeper watching him leave. If Josh wanted to, he probably could have broken away, raced down the tunnel, crying and running like hell. But it was easier to return to the madness than make a spectacle of his own fear.

I longed for fresh air and sleep. I wanted to drink. I needed to urinate badly.

Cutler was all death, and I didn’t go near. He lay in a half slump against the wall, his face slacker than it had been when muscular impulses toned the flesh, his hair clumpy with red, his chin tilted downward, his eyes gone opaque and dull.

Stone was not dead. He’d rolled over and lay, like a twisted sandbag, on his side. His face was swollen as though it had been boiled in the sun, and it was caked everywhere with a hard crust of mucus. It was a wonder to me that he could breathe. A blubbering sound came from him occasionally, as though he were trying to cough up phlegm.

Outside, the battering lost its intensity. The inmates did not walk the hub freely, but seemed to be hanging out in the entrances to the tunnels, sometimes running from one tunnel to the other, low to the ground, zigzagging, as if to avoid a sniper shot. The hub was in darkness, and I’d turned off the lights in the bubble, too. Searchlights swept by, altering the world around me in a passing instance, illuminating furniture, the wall. Now and then I peered up and out the windows to survey the hub. I hoped each time to find it empty, and imagined running wildly across the open space and flinging myself through one of the doors to the perimeter of safety. The radio stayed silent. Had the inmates somehow cut the signal? That didn’t make sense. I wanted someone to talk to me. I wanted to hear a voice explaining the details of what was going on, and the strategy for how and when they were going to retake the hub and the blocks. I wondered if they’d switched channels. Was there a protocol for that? I couldn’t get my brain to focus.

Instead, crouched below the console deck, I remembered a nighttime rocket attack in Iraq. I was living on the base. Those of us who thought of it had grabbed our rifles. The rest waited for the lull before making the embarrassing retrieval. Outside, the air was exhilarating, the stray whiff of burning powder. Some of us shot off rounds, little sparks and snaps sent spinning off into the darkness. When we moved, we did so in coordinated jumps and stops. Training that seemed so fake and macho had worked its way into our brains somehow. The best part was the elation once we knew the attack had been choked off and that it was random rather than
the big assault everyone secretly feared. We shared the intensity of the experience. We grinned easily for a change. That feeling faded hard in the grime of daily life afterward, but I never forgot the glory of that night.

This time it was different. This time I felt only loneliness and fear. It didn’t help that I was beaten up. Every breath was like a scaling knife grating my lungs. There were sore spots all over my face. Whenever I touched a cut or accidentally wiped my face with my forearm, I blinked more pain into my eyes with the rub of chemical agent. More than anything, I longed to stand beneath a shower and let cold water run over me for hours.

Stone spoke to me, his eyes cracking open into red slits, his swollen lips moving. “It’s going to be fun,” he mumbled, “when they get in. You’re going to love it.” Then he stopped talking and closed his eyes again.

When they get in. Stone was right. It was only a matter of time before they got determined about that. I had no idea whether they could force their way into the bubble or not, but if they did, they would have access to the armaments room and the Remingtons and flash grenades. Whatever else happened, I didn’t want to see them get those weapons. The escalation of the riot would be unthinkable. A siege. An occupied city. But what could I do?

I was sluggish in my thinking, a reaction perhaps to the stress or trauma, or an injury from Stone’s beating I did not want to acknowledge. It took me an hour to work through it, the idea forming slowly, and then I understood what I wanted to do. Stone was unconscious. I crept away from the console
deck and over him, fearful that he could reach up even though his swollen arms were zipped behind his back. I opened up the hatch and went down into the darkness.

I did not dare turn a light on down below, worried that it would burst brightness into the room above. I let my eyes adjust to the blackness. Could I hide out down here, armed to the fucking teeth? It would not, I decided, prevent the inmates from getting the weapons. I could kill three or five as they came down the hatch stairs before the others got me, and the end result would be the same.

The weapons were stored in the armory lockers. I typed the code into the electronic keypad and opened the doors, then listened for more noise up top. Reassured, I took a moment to squat with my pants down and let the urine drizzle down onto the floor. Then I got busy.

There were six Remington pump-actions in the rack and twelve boxes of cartridges, plus a box of six flashbangs or stun grenades, along with four flashlights, two full sets of riot clothes, and one shield. I clipped a heavy flashlight and two flashbangs to my belt, and then I unhooked one of the Remingtons from the rack, bottom loaded it with two cartridges, and shoved four more cartridges into my pocket. I put the remaining boxes of cartridges into a tool bag and slung the heavy load over my shoulder.

The entrance to the City was taped over with yellow, but at the bottom of the stairs the door was still unlocked. I stepped down, guided by the beam from the flashlight at my waist, and pushed the door open with my foot. The cold, damp air came up at me. I breathed hard in spite of myself, remembering
Crowley. There are no ghosts, I told myself, but even so, I did not like the taste of that air in my mouth. Inside, I leaned the Remington against the wall and hauled the bag of shell cartridges into one of the cryptlike cells. In the corner of the floor was a small but open drain. With shaking fingers I poured a box of shells into the hole. Then I opened another box and did the same until I’d gotten rid of each spare shell, except for the two in the Remington and the two in my pocket. Guns don’t kill people. Bullets do.

I breathed better as I climbed the stairs out of the City and emerged in the armaments room. I started for the flashbangs, but heard a noise in the bubble above and realized the hatch door had been closed. I’d left it open when I came down, and now I felt the sickness a small animal must feel hiding in a dark cave when a larger animal has returned.

Were they above me? I tried to get my breathing back and listened intensely for mumbled conversation, a footstep, any kind of tell. I heard a thump and a bang, but nothing coherent to give me a picture of the situation. With the loaded Remington I crept skyward, step by step, until I reached the hatch door; then I propped it open a sliver with my hand and tried to see out, but could glimpse nothing. I flung it back, ran the next two steps, and saw Stone, seated in a chair, raking the side of his face against the console deck.

His hands were still zipped. He was trying to operate the switches, randomly I supposed, with insect-like determination. I took two strides to him and yanked him back hard, then kicked the chair away and sent it spinning toward the hatch.

Standing in the bubble, I looked around to get my bearings,
see what had changed in my absence. That’s when I saw Brother Mike walking through the hub. He wore a flak jacket and a helmet, and in his hands he had a manila envelope. He moved unsurely, like a tourist in a town square. I could imagine him wondering, had human beings done this damage unaided by machine? I waited for him to look my way, to wave or glance—my rescuer. But then two men appeared, picking their way fast through the rubble, dressed literally in loincloths. He did not move until they arrived, and for his patience, they grabbed him roughly, tore the envelope from his hand, put a sack over his head, tied his hands behind his back with strips of cloth, and pushed him forward. He immediately stumbled. One of the men tugged him up, and Brother Mike limped painfully as they hustled him away. Together they disappeared within the tunnel to B block.

I watched him dragged into hell, yet what hurt most was the lack of comfort for me.

Roy was unflappable, Josh thought. But whenever Fenton showed up, the two strong-willed men fought like an old married couple, and it didn’t matter who could hear. Fenton confronted Roy with issues he’d neglected, called him out publicly on the matter of getting a prompt response to their demands,
berated him for the fucked-up situation they found themselves in. Roy made up the most audacious lies on the spot, told Fenton and everyone within earshot that he had already achieved several key concessions, that the warden had been relieved of his duties and the president himself had been told of their demands. He claimed that the media, in trucks and helicopters, had converged on the parking lot and that CNN, Fox,
Entertainment Tonight
, and Geraldo Rivera himself were fighting for the best vantage point.

“You’re full of shit, Wobbles, and you know it,” Fenton seethed. “You’re going to get us all killed and accomplish nothing. We can’t get the guns. We don’t have the comic book. Nothing you planned is working.”

“Is it my fault your handpicked fuckup locked himself in there?” Roy sneered, then built up wind and mocked Fenton as a fear-mongering, nay-saying, cock-sucking do-nothing who could only criticize and never offer a single effective command.

Roy went too far, Josh figured. But Fenton didn’t act on his anger, just left. The night getting late, Roy built a little fire outside an abandoned and disassembled drum, as though they were camping, and told him a story about a fishing trip he’d taken with his grandfather as a boy. Josh fell asleep on a mattress thrown over a pile of rubble. He woke up knowing something was wrong. The fire had turned to ashes, barely glowing. He was lying half inside, half outside of one of the ground tier cells. He sensed rather than heard the commotion and started walking, then running to the end of the tier, where Fenton had set up his headquarters, an expanded area
of three cells. When he was halfway there, Screen Door met him coming the other way. Her Tammy Faye Baker eyes stared deeply into his own, all dazzled with tears. How many hours had gone by? He swallowed hard and asked Screen Door what was wrong.

“You need to come,” she said. “Brother Mike brought the comic book. But Roy’s in trouble now. Fenton’s too angry to think straight. Maybe you can talk him out of it.”

She led him along, holding his hand. Jim Lucky Bones and two other inmates huddled in the hall around their own larger fire and stood to block their way Screen Door wilted at their menace, but Josh said he’d been called to join Fenton and Roy. Roy’s voice bellowed from behind and ordered Josh through.

Jacko met him at the door to Fenton’s cell. Over his shoulder Josh saw Brother Mike sitting against the wall, his pant leg rolled up and a long, watery smear of blood on his shin. The cell was full. Fenton, Jacko, and Cooper Lewis. Roy stood next to Brother Mike, and there was something wrong in that. Too close to him, a position of shared accusation.

“Joshy,” Roy said, his good humor out of sorts with the situation. “Just in time for the unveiling. It’s only right that you should be here.”

Cooper Lewis pulled Josh in. There was something wrong with Lewis. His face was streaked with ash, his hair dust-covered, and there was a sluggish thickness in his eyes that made him look pill-heavy and cruel. A shard of metal with a taped-up handle was caught in the waist of his pants, a homemade machete that looked like a scimitar on his belt.

“Is everything okay?” Josh asked. He looked to Fenton for
some kind of reassurance, but Fenton ignored him completely.

Roy kept talking. “Brother Mike’s been kind enough to bring us Crowley’s comic book, Josh, just like we asked. But Billy here hasn’t got a drop of gratitude in him. And he doesn’t appreciate yours truly much either. He probably thinks he could have gotten the comic book on his own, just by asking. Maybe we didn’t need a riot. Maybe we just needed to be more polite.”

“Every word that pisses me off, Roy,” Fenton said, “I’ll remember later. Tell us where it is.”

Where what is?

Roy opened the envelope and slid Crowley’s comic book out. Not again, Josh thought. The thing he’d tried to get rid that kept coming back. And still, it was with a held breath that he saw it opened. Crowley’s work and his lines sharing the same pages. What seemed like many years ago.

“What we have here,” Roy began, holding it up, “is a record of the work of Earl Hammond.”

“What are you talking about, Roy?” Brother Mike said, an irritable old man, intolerant of fools.

Roy flipped pages for them all to view. Josh thought he knew every image by heart, but he saw it differently now, all of it more detailed and ornate. The convoluted walls of the city folded inward like a rose and became street walls, building walls, chamber walls. Roy stopped in the middle, where a battle raged, the city overrun. An army of men in masks, some with long beaks, some with large frog’s eyes, swarmed the cobbled streets riding black horses with dogs’ heads and lizards’ tails, the men and women below them begging for
mercy, everything on fire, as though the world were being consumed by hatred—a conflagration of murder, lust, violence, and disease.

“Hammond wanted records of everything, Brother Mike,” Roy said. “Every transaction, every deal. You see, he thought we should run things like a real business. Record revenues. Tally costs and expenses. Reconcile it all annually, pay dividends out to shareholders, and keep lots and lots for himself. But in his genius, he put all the details in code. He got someone, probably someone like Crowley or Josh here, to draw pictures that would symbolize the activities of his organization and the amounts that were earned. That way, no one but the parties involved understood the details.”

“Read it, Wobbles,” Fenton said. “Get to the point.”

“You don’t read it so much as decipher it. A horse isn’t just a horse, Billy, it’s a delivery of heroin. A dismembered woman is a punk sold off for sex. Each page in this book is a quarter of a year. Every step, brick, window, sword, spear, and decapitated head stands for services that got bought and traded, and how much was dealt and how much got earned by it. This is a spreadsheet of every operation Hammond was ever involved in.”

“You’re insane,” Brother Mike hissed. “How could Crowley know those details? He wasn’t here then.”

“We found the files, Brother Mike. I figured out your stupid code, and Crowley got everything you had in there from Hammond, all the old drawings and numbers. Then he recorded it all here, in a single book.”

The anger surged in Brother Mike, and Josh barely recognized him.

“I told Jon about Hammond’s life, not his criminal dealings. This book is the story of a brave man who tried to change other men’s hearts. And you’ve turned that hope into violence. You evil man. You’re making it all up. You lie and you lie.”

Roy looked offended. “Why is it just because I hate to tell the truth, everyone thinks I lie? You’re so naive it’s a laugh. You think Crowley wanted your spiritual guidance? You think Hammond did?”

“Where’s the money, Roy?” Fenton asked. “I’m not even kidding. You tell me where it is, and at this point I may even let you live to see the morning.”

“Patience, Billy. Crowley figured it out, that rascal, and he wrote it down here, on the last page, the one page he wouldn’t let me see, just out of spite. So let’s take a look.”

Roy turned the comic book over to the back and flipped it open. They all crowded in, fighting for a glimpse.

On the last page Josh saw the drawing of the Beggar in a room at the top of a tower, sitting naked like a Buddha, his misshapen bald head finally revealed, the skull tattooed with some bizarre spiderweb that spread with little order, like cracks in a window. What Josh liked about the drawing was the sense that the confined space had opened up. The roof of the tower was broken, and above were sky and birds and the sun and a snowcapped mountain—and a hint that confinement was an impossibility. It was a peaceful image to Josh, in a story that was otherwise wrinkled and torn with violence, a cliché of escape, like something you’d see painted on the side of an old van, but the image had been raw and poignant to
him as Crowley described what he wanted. Trapped in Ditmarsh, the drawing was Josh’s own wish, too, that he could travel to other worlds via his very brain.

“You remember this, Josh?” Roy asked.

“I remember it.”

He remembered every line on the page, and how Crowley had, for once, given him the freedom to expand on it how he liked, without limits. It had come from his imagination.

“What are we looking for?” Jacko asked.

“A bank account number,” Roy said. “The money is in a bank account, Crowley told me. All we need is the account number and pass code, and it’s ours. Crowley put it here on the last page. But I can’t read these images. It’s not the code we used to use.”

“I don’t think he was trying to say anything about numbers, Roy,” Josh said quietly, and then wished he hadn’t.

Faster than Josh would have thought possible, Cooper Lewis pushed past him and stretched out with his machete, tucking it into Roy’s neck, tilting back his head.

“Stop him!” Brother Mike said.

“Easy, Cooper,” Roy said, as if his mouth were full. “Don’t be rash.”

“Not yet,” Fenton said, and Cooper kept his hand steady, white spots showing up on his knuckles. “Where’s the fucking account number, Roy?”

“Well, it’s not in my neck,” Roy said. “And if you give me a few more minutes to think, we’ll puzzle this out.”

A few more minutes. Roy had kept up his patronizing tone when he spoke to Fenton, but he looked pale to Josh, the
desperation tainting the color of his skin, as though poison were working its way through his system. At Fenton’s nod, Cooper Lewis pulled the machete back, and Josh wondered if he could turn and run for the tunnel, chase after Keeper Wallace. He didn’t belong here with these men. But could he leave Brother Mike behind?

“These words, Josh,” Roy said. “Did Crowley tell you anything about them?”

Josh was startled because he remembered no words. He leaned in awkwardly, the thought of running so strong that half his molecules were leaning in the other direction already. Then he forgot himself and tried to understand. The words were written in small print along the bottom of the page, two lines, like the beginning or the end of a poem.

“What does it say?” Fenton asked.

Jacko read, “‘Humpty Dumpty stuffed in a cave. Humpty Dumpty dug his own grave.’ That’s it. What the hell does Humpty Dumpty have to do with anything?”

“Shut up and let me think,” Roy said.

Twenty seconds went by, and Roy said nothing. The quiet tightened and strained in Josh’s throat.

“Crowley used to sing a Humpty Dumpty song all the time,” Josh said, unable to let another second go by. “The first day I met him, he was singing,
‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a fuck of a fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again
.’”

“Why was he singing that?” Jacko asked.

“I thought he was talking about himself because his arm
was broken and it was like he’d fallen and couldn’t be put back together.”

“Fell a few times,” Cooper Lewis said. “Sure as fuck.”

“Humpty Dumpty is Hammond,” Roy said. “You just count the letters in Humpty and add the D. Take away the umpty, which is empty. We coded him that way.”

Josh couldn’t tell if Roy was telling the truth or making up lies on the spot.

“So this message means what?” Jacko said. “Hammond’s dead?”

“How does that help us?” Fenton asked.

“He’s telling us to look somewhere,” Roy said. “The account number must be written on another page.”

And he began turning.

“Maybe there’s a picture of a grave inside,” Jacko suggested, and he took the book from Roy’s hands and flipped faster, but found nothing.

Cooper Lewis laughed. “Look all you want. Wobbles has been playing us.” And he turned the homemade machete again with an easy twist of his wrist.

Josh breathed out and knew he needed to begin talking. He wanted to tell them about the caverns and tunnels underneath Ditmarsh and all the demons that lived there. He wanted to tell them the stories Crowley had told him about the Beggar. He felt that if he could tell a story that was long enough and convincing enough, the sun might come up and turn these trolls to stone. But he had no such story in him.

“Crowley wrote ‘dig’ on the door when he was locked down in the old hole. I think that’s Hammond’s grave,” Josh said.

They all stared at him, even Brother Mike.

“Bullshit,” Cooper Lewis said.

“How do you know that?” Fenton asked.

“A guard told me. It’s the truth. He wrote ‘dig’ before he died. That must be what he’s telling us. We need to look down there.”

It caught them. The idea of Crowley writing ‘dig’ was just strange enough and distracting enough to be worthy of pursuit. He could sense that they were on the edge between believing him and dismissing him, and that they needed a push. But he had nothing left in his mouth.

“Hammond was down there a long time,” Roy said. “That’s where he dug his grave. I bet he scratched the account number into the rocks. That’s what Crowley’s telling us to do, right here on this page. Go down there and dig and find it for ourselves. I bet that’s why the jacks put him down there. Crowley told them it’s where Hammond put the account number, only Crowley never gave it up, and that’s why they let him rot.”

It still seemed possible for the story to go one way or the other. Then Jacko moved it to the place where they all believed in it and needed to do something.

“How are we going to get in there?” Jacko said. “We can’t break in. We’ve been trying to get those weapons.”

“Breaking in is not a problem,” Fenton said. “I just need to turn my attention to that obstacle.”

He pulled Brother Mike up from the floor.