Inside Out

79

As a rail-thin six-year-old, Winter Massey had clutched his mother's hand as a guide in khaki shorts led a long line of tourists deep into the earth. Bare bulbs lit the cavern walls. Their guide had explained that the cave was once solid rock and that dripping water had entered the cracks in it and had, over millions of years, cut out the tunnels they were walking through. Winter had been frightened by the stalactites, which looked like pointy teeth with saliva dripping from the tips. At some point during that tour, the guide had extinguished the lights.

Winter came around and found himself in a place that was as dark as the cave in his memory, but the air was thick with dust from a recent explosion. There was a slight ringing in his ears not unlike what happened when he stood too close to a gun being fired without wearing proper ear protection. Beyond that ringing and somewhere close by, water dripped. And by tuning his ears past the water falling, he made out a persistent rumbling sound punctuated by a sharp scraping.

Why is it so dark?

Stay calm.

Am I hurt?

Broken bones?

Torn ligaments?

Broken neck?

Winter fought to push back the worst imaginable thought, but it persisted and filled his entire mind like a noxious gas. He couldn't see! He fought to see something-anything. He was looking out at a totally blank slate-nothing but thoughts. I can't be blind. Please God, don't let me be trapped in darkness. A picture of Rush formed in his mind-a before-and-after image. This is what it was like to be blind. Suddenly, he knew that it was just dark. A sudden giddiness swept over him and pushed away the panic. He assumed that the bomb had dumped rubble over him. It was still night. He might be crushed to death if the floor above him didn't hold up, or smother or drown, but if there was light he would be able to see it.

As he lay there, he gathered his thoughts and breathed slowly to calm himself and concentrate on surviving. Although he had obviously lived through it, he didn't remember the explosion, so he must have been unconscious. When he had seen the explosives in the refrigerator, he had bolted, running out into the service hall and jumping into the garbage chute. As he fell, he had slowed his decent by pressing the edges of his running shoe soles against the smooth metal sides like brakes.

Winter had never carried a lighter or matches, because he had never been a smoker. He had grown up resenting the odor his father's cigarettes had left in the Massey home, his nicotine-stained fingers. The sight of that sullen stranger in his underwear at the kitchen table, bleary-eyed, drink in hand, and enveloped in a cloud of smoke was one that continued to haunt him.

“Winter, you son of a bitch, you're alive,” he said, pleased by the sound of his own voice.

He was flat on his back on an uneven surface. He felt pain but couldn't tell what part of his head hurt. He moved his fingers first, raising then lowering them. His wrists were sore but not broken, and his elbows and shoulders seemed fine. He moved his toes, ankles, and knees. He was in the building's basement lying on rolls of carpet padding or soundproofing material, which probably cushioned his landing and saved his life.

Sitting up made his head swim. There was a bump on the back of his head, but it was dry, so he wasn't bleeding. The air was thick with dust, so he pulled the folded bandana from his back pocket, opened it, and held it to his nose as a filter. It'll make you less sad, he remembered Rush saying.

Unable to see his watch, he had no idea how long he had been unconscious. This is what it is like to be blind. Since he was stuck in absolute darkness, he would have to make do with his remaining four senses.

Since the garbage chute was in the right rear of the building, at the far end from the elevator, he assumed that he was a good eighty feet from a street in some unknown city.

The slight ringing in his ears diminished as he concentrated on the low rumbling and scraping sounds. Standing was impossible in the dark, so he turned over slowly to his hands and knees and prepared to crawl to find the closest wall and follow it toward the sounds. He folded the bandana into a triangle and tied it behind his head to make a dust mask.

The dozens of rolls rested tightly against each other. “Okay, Massey,” he said, “don't run headlong into anything. All you need is a rusty nail in your head.” He crept forward, stretching out his left hand and waving the air like a man painting horizontal and vertical strokes on a wall. He slipped off the rolls and onto the concrete floor beneath them. He moved chunks of brick and wood aside as he went. His fingers found a brick wall and, using both hands, he discovered the mouth of the garbage chute, now choked shut with rubble. With the wall as a guide, he could concentrate on making his way toward where he hoped the rescuers were working.

As he moved carefully, the noise indeed grew louder. He made slow progress, keeping his left shoulder next to the wall to maintain his equilibrium while feeling with his right hand for obstacles. He stopped when he found what felt like a four-inch cast-iron waste pipe before going on.

He had moved a few feet from the pipe, when the rumbling diminished in stages-telling him that more than one piece of heavy machinery was involved in clearing rubble. The machines stopped altogether, leaving only the sound of dripping water. The emergency workers have stopped! Are they giving up? They might hear him if he could make enough noise. He had no idea how long the lull would last. He had to make noise. With a sense of urgency growing inside him, he groped his way back to the vertical waste pipe. Now, before the machines started up again, he needed something to beat against the cast iron. Without an alternative, he pulled the antique Walther out of his coat pocket and began hammering the gun against the pipe. “S”

DOT-DOT-DOT / “O” DASH-DASH-DASH / “S” DOT-DOT-DOT… DOT-DOT-DOT / DASH-DASH-DASH / DOT-DOT-DOT. He yelled out when he heard answering metallic bangs.

The rumbling began anew and the scraping grew louder. Winter slipped the compact gun back into his jacket pocket. Without being able to see and no way to know what was above him, he sat with his back against the brick wall to wait in the darkness.

The noise of dozer blades clearing the street grew steadily louder until the door to the sidewalk-level service elevator was peeled back. When Winter saw a vertical sliver of light, vague as a neon tube through a thick fog, he wanted to cry out in relief but was afraid that even the slightest sound from his lips would cause the entire structure to cave in. He followed the light bar to its origin-a crack between a pair of steel doors. After locating the lever, he pulled the heavy doors open. Light blasted him and more dust billowed into his basement tomb. Winter stepped into the lift's rubble-coated floor to the shouts of men that were just silhouettes above him. He reached up, hands grabbed his, and he was jerked up out of the lift pit straight into a tortured landscape.

The sun's first rays were illuminating the fronts of the buildings across the street, which stood open and exposed like the backs of dollhouses. Herman's building looked like a candle that had burned down to the third floor. In the way of charges and sudden pressure change, the adjoining buildings had shaped the force upward or outward through the thinner walls at the front and rear.

Soot-faced firemen strapped Winter on a stretcher and, while he protested that he was perfectly all right, they muscled him over the piles of rubble. They handed the litter to a crowd of EMS technicians and cops. He knew by the insignia tags on the uniforms that he was in New York City.

After the cot was lifted into an ambulance, a man in a suit climbed in and cuffed Winter's right wrist to the stretcher's rail. “FBI. Just until we straighten out who you are and what you were doing in there.” The agent pulled the Walther out of Winter's jacket pocket, examined it, then dropped it into his own coat pocket.

“You have to call the United States Marshals office and get Chief Marshal Richard Shapiro. I have to talk to him now.”

“Before I call anybody, you've got some questions to answer.”

“It's a matter of life and death. I'm United States Deputy Marshal Winter Massey.”

“Where's your badge?”

“I don't know.” He assumed that it was inside the building, a bauble left by Fifteen to be found by the people clearing the wreckage of a building that had headquartered Russian mercenaries who had been careless with their explosives.

“I didn't realize the Marshals Service was issuing World War Two weapons to deputy marshals,” the FBI agent said.

“If you don't believe I'm who I say, call Supervising Agent, Fred Archer.”

Winter knew the agent would contact Fred Archer long before he did Richard Shapiro.