“Uh, freedom? And I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, but word on the street is the military has declared this whole hunk of land a loss and is about to drop a big goddamned bomb on it.”
“We had a conversation about this, when I first arrived. A conversation that I suppose you now no longer remember. About my book? Titled
“No. Sounds like it stars Jason Bourne.”
“I know time is short, but… I think you missed an important point earlier, about these patients. The symptom that brought them up here was diarrhea, not nightmarish spontaneous deformity or propensity for violence. They showed no other symptoms. None. And I’m starting to believe that there are others that show no symptoms at all. And that we may
My answer wasn’t something I wanted to hear myself say out loud. Finally, I said, “So what you’re saying is, if the military is going to wipe this quarantine off the map, do I really want to stop them?”
“Think about it. Think about whose purpose is served if the bombs fall. Think about whose purpose is served if they don’t.”
“How about you just tell me?”
“That would require me to actually know myself.”
On the way down, I stopped at the lobby and peeked out of the main doors, to make sure we hadn’t aroused suspicion. What few people were still out in the brisk night were gathered by the south fence, watching the sky like they were expecting a tornado.
I wandered out until I found a green—an older, bearded guy—and asked what was happening.
He shrugged. “Somebody shootin’ flares over at the asylum.”
“Flares? What does that mean?”
“Probably don’t mean shit. Could be a kid with leftover fireworks for all we know. But it took a whole three minutes for the rumor to spread around the yard that it meant a posse was gonna break through the fence and set us all free. Give us all Cadillacs for our trouble. Why not?”
Somebody said, “Look! Look! Another one. Red this time.”
I turned in time to see the ball of magnesium die and fade to earth. Murmuring from the crowd.
I said, “Well I’m going to bed. If it’s a rescue party, throw a rock up at the window or something. And save me a Caddie.”
By the time I made it back down to the basement, twenty-seven goddamned people were packed in the boiler room, spilling out into the hallway. A buzzing, murmuring crowd of people who, even though they had been stripped of all possessions when they entered quarantine, somehow all had luggage. Backpacks and garbage bags and various random shit they thought they would need. The people were knocking around and slamming doors and giggling and asking questions and basically conducting the least stealthy prison escape in history. The reds were asleep, most of them anyway, but it would take exactly one of them to discover the massive conga line of people piling into the boiler room to blow the whole operation.
TJ was so pissed he looked like steam was about to start whistling from his asshole. Hope was trying to calm him down, trying to work through the logistics.
“What about knee pads, huh?” he said, wrapping electrician’s tape around the caps of the two jugs of the binary chemical “mouthwash.” “I suppose we came up with knee pads for two or three dozen people in the last half hour?”
“No, but we have duct tape,” said Hope, reassuringly. “All people got to do is take off their shoes and tape them to their knees. You know, like Dorf.”
“Like who?”
“It works, all right? Katie and I did it and crawled around the floor, from one end of the hall and back again. It’s going to be
“Well, then that’s one of our nine hundred problems solved.” To me he said, “If we was smart, we would send one guy through by himself to make sure the path is even fuckin’ open. Or that Carlos isn’t waitin’ at the other end. They’d crawl through with the flashlight and signal back that the coast was clear, so if there’s a problem we don’t got to turn this whole ridiculous human centipede around. But we can’t fuckin’ do that because we’d have this huge noisy crowd of people standin’ out here for an hour, waitin’ to get caught.”
“It’s only gonna last until somebody else stumbles across the tunnel anyway.”
He shook his head. “Racist Ed is stayin’ behind, once the last person is through he’s gonna stack up some of them cardboard boxes in front of the hole. I already cleaned up the bricks on the floor, so hopefully that’ll throw off Owen’s dumb ass.”
TJ pulled the flashlight from his pocket and said to me, “I’m gonna let you pick. One of us will take point. The other stays behind and goes in last. The point man is the first to get to freedom, but he’s also gonna be the first to meet any bad news that might be waitin’ up there. Last guy has the easiest escape should things go wrong, but also has to spend the most time back here waitin’ for the stragglers to work through their bullshit. Guess it’s a matter of how optimistic you are.”
“No, it’s not. You’re in better shape than me, we don’t need the whole train to be waiting for me to catch my breath. You go first.”
“And you seen enough horror movies to know the black dude don’t ever make it to the end.”
“We all appreciate your sacrifice, TJ.”
“
He laughed. So did I.
TJ tied a bandana around his head, Tupac-style, and wedged the flashlight in it above his ear, so it’d work like a coal miner’s headlamp. He clicked it, shook my hand, and climbed into the tunnel.
I said, “See you on the other side, TJ.”
Hope followed him in. Then Corey. It was on.
What followed was thirty excruciating minutes as one by one, the escapees slowly, clumsily and noisily clambered into the ragged hole in the brick wall. I went around the boiler room, telling people to quiet down, explaining the knee shoe process, and waiting for a red jumpsuit to throw open the boiler room door and ask us what the hell we were doing.
One by one, they went through. The crowd in the boiler room got more and more sparse. As we drew closer and closer to the “holy shit this is actually going to work” mark, the knot in my stomach pulled itself tighter and tighter.
Then there were only five people left. That worked its way down to two, an older woman who in my opinion had no business attempting the crawl (what would I do if we got halfway through and she told me she needed to go back?) and a suave-looking dude who looked like Marc Anthony, the Latin pop singer. Racist Ed was standing guard in the hall and I was supposed to knock twice on the door once I saw the last person go through. He’d wait a few minutes, then come in and cover up the tunnel.
The last pair of shoes disappeared into the bricks and the boiler room had finally disgorged its contents into the tunnel. Was TJ out the other end by now? Surely the fact that we hadn’t heard anything was a good sign.
Hurrying, I knocked lightly on the hallway door and quickly jogged back across the room to the tunnel. I put my hands on the edge of the hole—
Dark in here. I couldn’t see the last guy who went in, and there was no sign of TJ’s bobbing flashlight up ahead. All I could see was maybe the first ten feet of muddy red brick before it was swallowed by the darkness. In the sputtering candlelight of the boiler room, it looked like a throat. I could faintly hear the hard breathing and scraping of the crawling refugees ahead, the sound fading in the distance.
I had a flashback to the dark hallway in the dungeon when I was heading for the elevator. The wet dragging sound.
