Teddy didn’t speak. Chuck didn’t speak.
“I know you guys,” the guard repeated.
Teddy managed a “Yeah?”
“Yeah. You’re the guys who got stuck with roof detail. In the fucking rain.” He laughed and extended the finger and slapped the card table with his other hand.
“That’s us,” Chuck said. “Ha ha.”
“Ha fucking ha,” the guard said.
Teddy pointed back at him and said, “You got us, pal,” and turned up the stairs. “You really got our number.”
The idiot’s laughter trailed them up the stairs.
At the first landing, they paused. They faced a great hall with an arched ceiling of hammered copper, a dark floor polished to mirror gloss. Teddy knew he could throw a baseball or one of Chuck’s apples from the landing and not reach the other side of the room. It was empty and the gate facing them was ajar, and Teddy felt mice scurry along his ribs as he stepped into the room because it reminded him of the room in his dream, the one where Laeddis had offered him a drink and Rachel had slaughtered her children. It was hardly the same room—the one in his dream had had high windows with thick curtains and streams of light and a parquet floor and heavy chandeliers—but it was close enough.
Chuck clapped a hand on his shoulder, and Teddy felt beads of sweat pop out along the side of his neck.
“I repeat,” Chuck whispered with a weak smile, “this is too easy. Where’s the guard on that gate? Why isn’t it locked?”
Teddy could see Rachel, wild-haired and shrieking, as she ran through the room with a cleaver.
“I don’t know.”
Chuck leaned in and hissed in his ear. “This is a setup, boss.”
Teddy began to cross the room. His head hurt from the lack of sleep. From the rain. From the muffled shouting and running feet above him. The two boys and the little girl had held hands, looking over their shoulders. Trembled.
Teddy could hear the singing patient again: “…you take one down, pass it around, fifty-four bottles of beer on the wall.”
They flashed before his eyes, the two boys and that girl, swimming through the swimming air, and Teddy saw those yellow pills Cawley had placed in his hand last night, felt a slick of nausea eddy in his stomach.
“Fifty-four bottles of beer on the wall, fifty-four bottles of beer…”
“We need to go right back out, Teddy. We need to leave. This is bad. You can feel it, I can feel it.”
At the other end of the hall, a man jumped into the doorway.
He was barefoot and bare-chested, wearing only a pair of white pajama bottoms. His head was shaved, but the rest of his features were impossible to see in the dim light.
He said, “Hi!”
Teddy walked faster.
The man said, “Tag! You’re it!” and bolted from the doorway.
Chuck caught up with Teddy. “Boss, for Christ’s sake.”
He was in here. Laeddis. Somewhere. Teddy could feel him.
They reached the end of the hall and were met with a wide stone landing and a stairwell that curved down steeply into darkness, another that rose toward the shouting and the chattering, all of it louder now, and Teddy could hear snaps of metal and chains. Heard someone shout, “Billings! All right now, boy! Just calm down! Nowhere to run. Hear?”
Teddy heard someone breathing beside him. He turned his head to the left, and the shaven head was an inch from his own.
“You’re it,” the guy said and tapped Teddy’s arm with his index finger.
Teddy looked into the guy’s gleaming face.
“I’m it,” Teddy said.
“’Course, I’m so close,” the guy said, “you could just flick your wrist and I’d be it again and then I could flick mine and you’d be it and we could go on like that for hours, all day even, we could just stand here turning each other into it, over and over, not even break for lunch, not even break for dinner, we could just go on and on.”
“What fun would that be?” Teddy said.
“You know what’s out there?” The guy gestured with his head in the direction of the stairs. “In the sea?”
“Fish,” Teddy said.
“Fish.” The guy nodded. “Very good. Fish, yes. Lots of fish. But, yes, fish, very good, fish, yes, but also, also? Subs. Yeah. That’s right. Soviet submarines. Two hundred, three hundred miles off our coast. We hear that, right? We’re told. Sure. And we get used to the idea. We forget, really. I mean, ’Okay, there are subs. Thanks for the info.’ They become part of our daily existence. We know they’re there, but we stop thinking about it. Okay? But there they are and they’re armed with rockets. They’re pointing them at New York and Washington. At Boston. And they’re out there. Just sitting. Does that ever bother you?”
Teddy could hear Chuck beside him taking slow breaths, waiting for his cue.
Teddy said, “Like you said, I choose not to think about it too much.”
“Mmm.” The guy nodded. He stroked the stubble on his chin. “We hear things in here. You wouldn’t think so, right? But we do. A new guy comes in, he tells us things. The guards talk. You orderlies, you talk. We know, we know. About the outside world. About the H-bomb tests, the atolls. You know how a hydrogen bomb works?”
“With hydrogen?” Teddy said.
“Very good. Very clever. Yes, yes.” The guy nodded several times. “With hydrogen, yes. But, also, also, not like any other bombs. You drop a bomb, even an atom bomb, it explodes. Right? Right you are. But a hydrogen bomb, it implodes. It falls in on itself and goes through a series of internal breakdowns, collapsing and collapsing. But all that collapsing? It creates mass and density. See, the fury of its own self-destruction creates an entirely new monster. You get it? Do you? The bigger the breakdown, then the bigger the destruction of self, then the more potent it becomes. And then, okay, okay? Fucking blammo! Just…bang, boom, whoosh. In its absence of self, it spreads. Creates an explosion off of its implosion that is a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times more devastating than any bomb in history. That’s our legacy. And don’t you forget it.” He tapped Teddy’s arm several times, light taps, as if playing a drumbeat with his fingers. “You’re it! To the tenth degree. Hee!”
He leapt down the dark stairwell and they heard him shouting “Blammo” all the way down.
“…forty-nine bottles of beer! You take one down…”
Teddy looked over at Chuck. His face was damp, and he exhaled carefully through his mouth.
“You’re right,” Teddy said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Now you’re talking.”
It came from the top of the stairwell:
“Somebody give me a fucking hand here! Jesus!”
Teddy and Chuck looked up and saw two men coming down the stairs in a ball. One wore guard blues, the other patient whites, and they slammed to a stop at the curve in the staircase on the widest stair. The patient got a hand free and dug it into the guard’s face just below his left eye and pulled a flap of skin free, and the guard screamed and wrenched his head back.
Teddy and Chuck ran up the steps. The patient’s hand plunged down again, but Chuck grabbed it at the wrist.
The guard wiped at his eye and smeared blood down to his chin. Teddy could hear all four of them take breaths, hear the distant beer-bottle song, that patient on forty-two now, rounding the corner for forty-one, and then he saw the guy below him rear up with his mouth wide open, and he said, “Chuck, watch it,” and slammed the heel of his hand into the patient’s forehead before he could take a bite out of Chuck’s wrist.
“You got to get off him,” he said to the guard. “Come on. Get off.”
The guard freed himself of the patient’s legs and scrambled back up two steps. Teddy came over the patient’s body and clamped down hard on his shoulder, pinning it to the stone, and he looked back over his shoulder at Chuck, and the baton sliced between them, cut the air with a hiss and a whistle, and broke the patient’s nose.
Teddy felt the
body underneath him go slack and Chuck said, “Jesus Christ!”
The guard swung again and Teddy turned on the patient’s body and blocked the arm with his elbow.
He looked into his bloody face. “Hey! Hey! He’s out cold. Hey!”
The guard could smell his own blood, though. He cocked the baton.
Chuck said, “Look at me! Look at me!”
The guard’s eyes jerked to Chuck’s face.
“You stand the fuck down. You hear me? You stand down. This patient is subdued.” Chuck let go of the patient’s wrist and his arm flopped to his chest. Chuck sat back against the wall, kept his stare locked on the guard. “Do you hear me?” he said softly.
The guard dropped his eyes and lowered the baton. He touched the wound on his cheekbone with his shirt, looked at the blood on the fabric. “He tore my face open.”
Teddy leaned in, took a look at the wound. He’d seen a lot worse; the kid wouldn’t die from it or anything. But it was ugly. No doctor would ever be able to sew it back clean.
He said, “You’ll be fine. Couple of stitches.”
Above them they could hear the crash of several bodies and some furniture.
“You got a riot on your hands?” Chuck said.
The guard chugged air in and out of his mouth until the color returned to his face. “Close to.”
“Inmates taken over the asylum?” Chuck said lightly.
The kid looked at Teddy carefully, then over at Chuck. “Not yet.”
Chuck pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, handed it to the kid.
The kid nodded his thanks and pressed it to his face.
Chuck lifted the patient’s wrist again, and Teddy watched him feel for a pulse. He dropped the wrist and pushed back one of the man’s eyelids. He looked at Teddy. “He’ll live.”
“Let’s get him up,” Teddy said.
They slung the patient’s arms around their shoulders and followed the guard up the steps. He didn’t weigh much, but it was a long staircase, and the tops of his feet kept hugging the edges of the risers. When they reached the top, the guard turned, and he looked older, maybe a bit more intelligent.
“You’re the marshals,” he said.
“What’s that?”
He nodded. “You are. I saw you when you arrived.” He gave Chuck a small smile. “That scar on your face, you know?”
Chuck sighed.
“What are you doing in here?” the kid said.
“Saving your face,” Teddy said.
The kid took the handkerchief from his wound, looked at it, and pressed it back there again.
“Guy you’re holding there?” he said. “Paul Vingis. West Virginia. Killed his brother’s wife and two daughters while the brother was serving in Korea. Kept them in a basement, you know, pleasuring himself, while they were rotting.”
Teddy resisted the urge to step out from under Vingis’s arm, let him drop back down the stairs.
“Truth is,” the kid said and cleared his throat. “Truth is, he had me.” He met their eyes and his own were red.
“What’s your name?”
“Baker. Fred Baker.”
Teddy shook his hand. “Look, Fred? Hey, we’re glad we could help.”
The kid looked down at his shoes, the spots of blood there. “Again: what are you doing here?”
“Taking a look around,” Teddy said. “A couple of minutes, and we’ll be gone.”
The kid took some time considering that, and Teddy could feel the previous two years of his life—losing Dolores, honing in on Laeddis, finding out about this place, stumbling across George Noyce and his stories of drug and lobotomy experiments, making contact with Senator Hurly, waiting for the right moment to cross the harbor like they’d waited to cross the English Channel to Normandy—all of it hanging in the balance of this kid’s pause.
“You know,” the kid said, “I’ve worked a few rough places. Jails, a max prison, another place was also a hospital for the criminally insane…” He looked at the door and his eyes widened as if with a yawn except that his mouth didn’t open. “Yeah. Worked some places. But this place?” He gave each of them a long, level gaze. “They wrote their own playbook here.”
He stared at Teddy and Teddy tried to read the answer in the kid’s eyes, but the stare was of the thousand-yards variety, flat, ancient.
“A couple of minutes?” The kid nodded to himself. “All right. No one’ll notice in all this fucking mayhem. You take your couple minutes and then get out, okay?”
“Sure,” Chuck said.
“And, hey.” The kid gave them a small smile as he reached for the door. “Try not to die in those few minutes, okay? I’d appreciate that.”
15
THEY WENT THROUGH the door and entered a cell block of granite walls and granite floors that ran the length of the fort under archways ten feet wide and fourteen feet tall. Tall windows at either end of the floor provided the only light, and the ceiling dripped water and the floors were filled with puddles. The cells stood off to their right and left, buried in the dark.
Baker said, “Our main generator blew at around four this morning. The locks on the cells are controlled electronically. That’s one of our more recent innovations. Great fucking idea, huh? So all the cells opened at four. Luckily we can still work those locks manually, so we got most of the patients back inside and locked them in, but some prick has a key. He keeps sneaking in and getting to at least one cell before he takes off again.”
Teddy said, “Bald guy, maybe?”
Baker looked over at him. “Bald guy? Yeah. He’s one we can’t account for. Figured it might be him. His name’s Litchfield.”
“He’s playing tag in that stairwell we just came up. The lower half.”
Baker led them to the third cell on the right and opened it. “Toss him in there.”
It took them a few seconds to find the bed in the dark and then Baker clicked on a flashlight and shone the beam inside and they lay Vingis on the bed and he moaned and the blood bubbled in his nostrils.
“I need to get some backup and go after Litchfield,” Baker said. “The basement’s where we keep the guys we don’t even feed unless there’s six guards in the room. If they get out, it’ll be the fucking Alamo in here.”
“You get medical assistance first,” Chuck said.
Baker found an unstained section of handkerchief and pressed it back over his wound. “Don’t got time.”
“For him,” Chuck said.
Baker looked in through the bars at them. “Yeah. All right. I’ll find a doctor. And you two? In and out in record time, right?”
“Right. Get the guy a doctor,” Chuck said as they left the cell.
Baker locked the cell door. “I’m on it.”
He jogged down the cell block, sidestepping three guards dragging a bearded giant toward his cell, kept running.
“What do you think?” Teddy said. Through the archways he could see a man by the far window, hanging up on the bars, some guards dragging in a hose. His eyes were beginning to adjust to what there was of the pewter light in the main corridor, but the cells remained black.
“There has to be a set of files in here somewhere,” Chuck said. “If only for basic medical and reference purposes. You look for Laeddis, I look for files?”
“Where do you figure those files are?”
Chuck looked back at the door. “By the sounds of it, it gets less dangerous the higher you go in here. I figure their admin’ has gotta be up.”
“Okay. Where and when do we meet?”
“Fifteen minutes?”
The guards had gotten the hose working and fired a blast, blew the guy off the bars, pushed him across the floor.
Some men clapped in their cells, others moaned, moans so deep and abandoned they could have come from a battlefield.
“Fifteen sounds right. Meet back in that big hall?”
“Sure.”
They shook hands and Chuck’s was damp, his upper lip slick.
?
??You watch your ass, Teddy.”
A patient banged through the door behind them and ran past them into the ward. His feet were bare and grimy and he ran like he was training for a prize-fight—fluid strides working in tandem with shadow-boxing arms.
“See what I can do.” Teddy gave Chuck a smile.
“All right, then.”
“All right.”
Chuck walked to the door. He paused to look back. Teddy nodded.
Chuck opened the door as two orderlies came through from the stairs. Chuck turned the corner and disappeared, and one of the orderlies said to Teddy, “You see the Great White Hope come through here?”
Teddy looked back through the archway, saw the patient dancing in place on his heels, punching the air with combinations.
Teddy pointed and the three of them fell into step.
“He was a boxer?” Teddy said.
The guy on his left, a tall, older black guy, said, “Oh, you come up from the beach, huh? The vacation wards. Uh-huh. Yeah, well, Willy there, he think he training for a bout at Madison Square with Joe Louis. Thing is, he ain’t half bad.”
They were nearing the guy, and Teddy watched his fists shred the air.
“It’s going to take more than three of us.”
The older orderly chuckled. “Won’t take but one. I’m his manager. You didn’t know?” He called out, “Yo, Willy. Gotta get you a massage, my man. Ain’t but an hour till the fight.”
“Don’t want no massage.” Willy started tapping the air with quick jabs.
“Can’t have my meal ticket cramping up on me,” the orderly said. “Hear?”
“Only cramped-up that time I fought Jersey Joe.”
“And look how that turned out.”
Willy’s arms snapped to his sides. “You got a point.”
“Training room, right over here.” The orderly swept his arm out to the left with a flourish.
“Just don’t touch me. I don’t like to be touched before a fight. You know that.”
“Oh, I know, killer.” He opened up the cell. “Come on now.”
Willy walked toward the cell. “You can really hear ’em, you know? The crowd.”
“SRO, my man. SRO.”