Hard Rain

Thirty

The light was soft and grey. I heard Masters’ voice, but couldn’t hold on to the words. They slipped away like a failing handhold on a cliff face.

I was thirsty. My tongue had swollen in my mouth. My teeth crunched. Masters hovered over me. ‘Vin…’

‘Wa’er…’ I garbled. The back of my throat felt raw, skinned. I’d swallowed some earth. Maybe that explained the thirst and the rawness, and maybe not. The sand crunched between my teeth like glass.

The water I asked for arrived in my own boot. That’s when I knew we were in trouble. I drank from Masters’ shoe next. And then from a soaked shirt wrung in such a way that the water dribbled down Masters’ thumb and into my mouth. The sound of dripping water echoed, disorienting. There was a small crack of sparkling white light in the ceiling and a cold gloom everywhere else. I felt Masters lay my head down and I looked up into her face haloed with that light. Yafa was right — Masters was beautiful. I asked myself who Yafa was and found I couldn’t put a face to the name. Maybe Yafa wasn’t a who, but a what. The question drifted into the awareness that the floor beneath my back was rough and hard, rock-strewn. I drifted off again without realising it, unable to keep my eyes open.

The count I’d been down for was so long the arena had emptied, everyone had gone home, and I was still on the canvas. I either had a hatchet buried in my forehead, or a bad headache. The jury was out on which. I was familiar enough with the symptoms of concussion to know I had it.

Masters was standing with her back to me, hands on her hips, looking up at the patch of light twelve-to-fifteen feet above her head, contemplating it the way a caged animal contemplates the bars.

‘Hey,’ I said in a voice that sounded like it was someone else’s.

Masters turned. ‘Hey, yourself. How you feeling?’

‘Not sure yet,’ I replied as I grunted, struggling up onto an elbow to get a better angle on things. ‘I’ll let you know after you tell me where we are.’ The suspicion I had was that we were in a place known as The Deep Shit. My throat still felt flayed and the taste of copper — blood — was in my mouth. My head hurt, my ribs and chest hurt, and the arm in the cast had gone to sleep and hung heavy and useless by my side.

‘I think we’re in a cistern,’ she said. Frogs started up, a steady chorus of croaking.

‘Isn’t that another word for a toilet?’ Maybe I was more on the ball than I thought.

‘A cistern is what the Romans called a water storage tank.’

‘The Romans…?’ My eyes were adjusting to the twilight. We were in a rectangular room around ten yards long and six wide. Columns of various heights and thicknesses kept the vaulted roof in place. One had collapsed near the centre and a small chunk of the roof had come down with it, accounting for the light source. There’d been another collapse in the corner to my right, a pile-up of rock and earth. There was something scattered across it. I peered into the murk. ‘Those things over there,’ I said. ‘They what I think they are?’

‘Depends on whether you think they’re human bones.’

Masters came over and helped me to my feet. Once I’d steadied myself, she checked my pupils for dilation. ‘You’ll live. And sorry for kneeing you in the head,’ she said.

‘Did I do anything to deserve it?’

‘No. For once. They threw us down that hole,’ she explained, giving the light source a nod. ‘When I came to, I was lying on top of you.’

‘See, even unconscious I’m irresistible.’

‘Okay, now you deserve it.’

I ran my hand over my skull. There were more lumps than a sugar bowl. There was also a large, crusty patch of dried blood. My feet were cold. I looked down at them. They were white, naked and soaking in a pool of icy water. I wriggled my numb toes.

‘Oh yeah, and I’ve put our footwear to better use,’ Masters said, gesturing at a far corner of our tomb where a tree root had broken through a crack in the rock facing. Water dripped steadily from the roof’s spidery fingers into Masters’ Nikes. My boots were off to one side, full to the brim. I remembered drinking from them in a half-forgotten dream.

‘If your dentist tells you you’ve got athlete’s foot,’ I remarked, ‘don’t blame me.’

‘Deal.’ She gave me a smile, but it didn’t last long. ‘Vin, we’re not going to survive very long down here. We need to find a way out.’ Worry had etched itself into the lines on Masters’ face, and this partner of mine was not easily spooked.

I took an unsteady walk around the cistern’s perimeter. ‘The stuff that bitch used on us was chloroform.’ I said. ‘Kinda closes the loop on our murders in a circumstantial way, doesn’t it?’

‘Kinda.’

‘And we’re the only people who know about it.’

One column had come down and the hole in the roof was the result. So what about taking out another column or two? I checked the condition of the ones still standing. A quick inspection told me all seven were in pretty good shape, and all were marble. Three were identical, having probably been pilfered from the same building. These were constructed from five sections apiece and still had that just-quarried look. The four remaining columns were single-piece jobs, each a work of art. And they weren’t going anywhere either. Damn Romans. Subsidence had brought down the one, single-piece column, same as the minor wall collapse.

I moved on to the walls and chipped at the joins between the stones with a chunk from the broken column. I got nowhere. The granite blocks had been keyed together with molten lead poured between the cracks. This cistern had stood for a couple of thousand years at least — unlikely it was going to come down in the next day or so. Made me wonder what’d be left from our own civilisation a couple of millennia from now, aside from plastic bags, car tyres and divorce statistics.

Okay, so the one way out was up and through that hole; only, the roof was well out of reach. I looked up at it. I thought maybe, if it rained enough, the place might fill with water and we could swim out. But the stonework was stained with mineral deposits up to a height level with my hip — a high-water mark that wasn’t near high enough even if there was a convenient flood that arrived before we died of starvation.

There were no doors. We had no tools. No food. No fire. No means of contact with the outside world.

Masters read my thoughts. ‘Yeah, I know. I’ve had most of the day to think about it and I keep coming up with dead ends, too.’

‘Interesting choice of words,’ I said. ‘What about Cain?’

‘We told him where we were going, but not when to expect us back. Might take a few days before he raises the alarm and when he does, it’s not like he’s going to send a rescue here to this place. Hell, I don’t even know where here is.’

‘So then it’s up to us,’ I said, lost in my own thoughts. I found myself staring at the bones neatly laid out on the mound of earth and collapsed stonework. A couple of frogs hopped between some ribs. Masters, despondent, went to oversee our water-storage facilities.

I went over and picked through the scraps of rotting clothing that remained. From the style and age, I figured that the skeleton inside them belonged to a guy who had fallen into this place around three years ago. The bones themselves were dry and clean, without being brittle. A farmer, or maybe a shepherd. The poor sap had landed hard and snapped his tibia and fibula. At least Masters and I had both been spared that kind of injury. I wondered how long he’d managed to hold on. Perhaps he’d died quick.

I moved what was left of his jacket. There were other skeletons mingled with his — four, to be exact. I picked up one of the skulls for a closer look. It was small, the size of a large walnut, pointed at one end, with four yellow interlocking, chisel-like teeth. ‘Rats,’ I said, thinking aloud.

‘You say something?’ Masters asked.

I looked up, dropped the skull into the drink. ‘What? Nope. The frogs, most like…’ Given Masters’ fear of rodents, my thinking was not what she needed to hear right at the moment. When this guy was dying — or if he was lucky, after he’d gone and collected his harp — rats had paid him a visit. Maybe like him they’d accidentally fallen in. I gave the hole above another glance. Maybe the guy’s distress as he lay slowly dying had brought them running. Whatever, the animals had feasted on him.

I continued the walk around, doing it a step at time like I was pacing out a crime scene. I found quite a few more bones belonging to critters that had probably just fallen in rather than been summoned by the prospect of fresh meat: the remains of a couple of snakes, half-a-dozen squirrels, a couple of rabbits, plus seven more rat skeletons. There was also a large mound of bat guano in one corner. It crawled with bugs. There were no bats here now. Maybe they made their home in the cistern during the warmer months. The whole pet-cemetery thing didn’t bother me so much. What did worry me was that all these animals had died here, which meant they’d been unable to find a way out. And if snakes and, especially, rats hadn’t been able to escape this place, what chance did Masters and I have?

We were cold and hungry. And both of us knew this would be just the beginning of the ordeal. Night had come down five hours ago. The stars were bright enough to throw a thin shaft of ghost light through the hole. We sat huddled together in the shaft for the meagre comfort that being able to see our own noses provided. The rest of the cistern was immersed in a darkness thick enough to ladle into a bowl. Masters’ teeth were chattering. ‘You mind turning the heater up?’ she stuttered.

Gladly. I wrapped my arms around her and squeezed.

‘I haven’t th-thanked you,’ she said as we clung together.

‘Thanked me for what?’

‘Yafa. When that bitch was all over me. You tried to stop her.’

‘Sounds out of character,’ I replied. ‘I’m usually all for a little girl-on-girl action.’

Masters punched me in the arm. After a while she said, ‘At the time, when it was happening, I felt angry and degraded. I just stood there, frozen.’

‘Try not to let it worry you. From what you’ve just told me, you played smart, played dead.’

‘I guess… Now, in this place, the assault — the helplessness I felt — doesn’t seem so important. But if I ever get my hands on that goddamn freak show…’

‘Can I watch?’

I earned another couple of punches. Masters’ teeth stopped chattering. She was warming up, which was good. She was also expending excess energy, which was bad.

I remembered the gun in my mouth and the shock of the click, click, click. ‘Did you get a good look at the odd-looking handgun I was chewing on?’ I asked. ‘Ever seen one of them before?’ It was all angles and bumps — a distinctive weapon.

‘No. You’re right, though. It was an odd-looking thing.’

‘It was Israeli. Called a Barak. They designed it for their armed forces, but the weapon didn’t catch on.’

‘Israeli,’ she said. ‘Now, there’s a word that keeps popping up. And, while I think about it, so does the word “Mossad”.’

Masters was right about that, but I still found it hard to believe those jerks were on its payroll. The Mossad I knew, Israel’s secret external security agency, was arguably the toughest and most determined organisation of its type in the world, their agents steeled by a fight to the death with neighbours committed to their homeland’s destruction. They were hard-asses, not psychopaths.

‘Hey, I’ve got one Jewish joke. Want to hear it?’

‘Like I can escape,’ she said, teeth chattering.

‘Okay — so it’s the close of the tax year and the IRS sends an inspector to audit the books of a synagogue. While he’s going through them, he turns to the rabbi and says, “I notice you buy lots of candles. What do you do with the wax drippings?”

‘“Good question,” says the rabbi. “We save them up and send them back to the candle-makers, and every now and then they send us a free box of candles.”

‘“Really,” replies the auditor, disappointed his tricky question had a practical answer. “What about all these bread wafers? You’re going to have crumbs, what do you do with them?”

‘“Ah, yes,” replies the rabbi, realising the inspector’s trying to trap him with an unanswerable question. “We collect them and send them back to the manufacturer, and every now and then they send us a free box of bread wafers.”

‘“I see,” says the auditor, now determined to fluster this smart-ass rabbi. “Well, Rabbi, what do you do with all the leftover foreskins from the circumcisions you perform?”

‘The rabbi responds, “Here, too, we do not waste. What we do is save the foreskins and send them to the IRS. And then they thoughtfully send us back a complete prick.”’

Masters got her teeth under control. ‘Please don’t make this any harder than it already is. Hunger and exposure I can deal with…’

‘Y’know, seriously, and not that I’m going to send in a complaint about it, but I don’t understand why those assholes didn’t just put a bullet in our brains before dropping us down here.’

‘Vin, if we’re still down here in a week’s time, we might wish they had.’