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Chapter 56

First there was sensation. His head pulsing, filled with so much blood it seemed it might explode. Dust on his tongue. A slab of cushioned plastic shoved to his face, mashing his features to one side. A scent of decay, drawn into his mouth with each rasping inhale.

Then sound, strained as if through a filter. Water sloshing. Shuffling boots. William’s voice – ‘I got the technique down. I been rewatching that C-SPAN Senate inquiry. Why? What do you prefer?’

And then Dodge. ‘Fingers.’

‘Knuckle by knuckle, like Sharky’s Machine? No, we should give this a try. I mean, military-perfected, right?’

None of this seemed to be related to Mike; it was as though he were listening to an old-time radio show, fictitious characters discussing fictitious outcomes. He forced his eyelids to part. The movement, however minuscule, sent daggers of pain back through his head. But finally: sight. It was like being reborn, acquiring one sense at a time.

The room rotated on its axis for a while, and slowly it dawned on Mike that he was lying supine on a downward slant, his face turned to one side. It took a few minutes longer for his eyes to adjust to the dimness and sharpen the focus on the whitish blob five feet away, staring at him. It was Hank’s face, paled to an ashen white. His lips were bruised and mottled, puckered out as if for a last kiss.

His daughter’s name roared into his head: Kat. I have to scrub the memory of her location from my brain so no matter what they do to me, I’ve got nothing to tell them.

When he shifted, fire roared through his chest and arms. His bound hands were a knot in the small of his back and his head screamed. He twisted his wrists and noted through his mind-numbed stupor that the restraints rubbing against his raw skin felt like cloth. He appeared to be at a forty-five-degree angle, his knees visible above. His thighs burned, and his calves and feet were installed into a contraption of some sort. Gradually, he recognized that he was hooked into an incline sit-up bench.

The voices continued, a calm rumble. Dodge and William were behind him?

With great effort he rolled his head, the dark ceiling scanning by, and faced the other direction. He was in a big concrete box of a cellar, the only light thrown through the open door at the top of a splintering wooden staircase. Standing between Mike and the stairs, visible only as a slice of shoulder, cheek, forehead, was Dodge. Mike blinked a few more times, the cellar coming clearer, William resolving from the darkness at the big man’s side. They were huddled, conferring. Mike’s gaze pulled to a square of burlap spread on the concrete floor, various tools laid out like devices on a medical tray. Beyond the burlap was a large, old-fashioned dunking-for-apples wooden tub. The water filling it to the brim looked black and forbidding.

Dust trembled in the column of light thrown from the open door above.

‘Oh, you’re up.’ William came toward him, making lurching progress, an empty plastic milk jug floating in each hand.

Mike turned his head away, the only movement he could muster, bringing him again face-to-face with Hank. His sprawled body lay at an odd angle to his neck, a plastic drop cloth already cocooning his lower half. One foot protruded, the worn black dress sock incongruous here, in this context. The line of flaking white skin showing at Hank’s ankle underscored the awful tableau, the frailty of this life, of any life, which, despite all the sweat and work and best-laid plans, could end in a windowless cellar, half rolled in a strip of plastic sheeting.

Beside the body was another drop cloth, which Mike realized had been reserved for him.

When he turned back, Dodge loomed above him, winding a piece of terry cloth the size of a gym towel around his hand. His shirt was unbuttoned, curled back from a wife-beater worn to near transparency. William crouched, letting out a little pained moan, and began to fill the gallon jugs with water from the tub. The bubbles gave off a faint, comic-book repeat: glug glug glug.

‘Okay,’ Mike said, still trying to grasp what was happening. ‘All right.’

William stood, a bottle dripping in either hand. Staring up at the faces overhead – Dodge’s drawn back, glinting eyes set in the wide skull, and William, stooped to favor his left side, all wisps of facial hair and bunched lips – Mike felt something break open inside him and spill heat.

‘I heard about you years ago,’ William said, ‘from my Uncle Len. You were the one who got away. The Job. But Boss Man, he woulda let it lie. Finding you. He stopped looking. Stopped caring. Figured whatever life you’d made, you’d never put it all together. But then your buddy Two-Hawks kicked the hornet’s nest, found out about your name on that genealogy report. Boss Man caught wind, and guess what? You were back on the table.’

He neared. ‘These are glossies of Ted Rogers, the guy who did the stealing for Two-Hawks.’ He produced some photographs from a back pocket and held them for Mike to see. The soft pink skin of a middle-aged man in various forced contortions. William fanned through several taken within these same cellar walls before Mike turned his head and gagged. William leaned over him, breathing down. ‘My uncle worked on your dad some. What yer daddy went through? Made this’ – a shake of the photos – ‘look like a tickle. You know what? Why’m I talking so much when I can just show you.’

Horror came on like a toothed blade, sawing its way through the shock.

‘Okay now,’ William said gently, and Dodge let the small towel flutter down over Mike’s face.

Mike jerked in an instinctive breath, the towel adhering to his mouth. He sensed William lean in close, and the cloth grew wet and heavy. Water moved up his nose, a slow trickle at first, and then soaked through the terry, sealing out oxygen. The effect was instant, comprehensive. Mike jerked and screeched, shaking his head, but the towel clung to his face like a film. His lungs and throat spasmed uselessly. Just when he thought he might go out, the towel peeled back and he found himself gasping and gagging, Dodge staring down at him, the towel dripping onto the floor.

Mike’s shoulders cracked in their sockets, and he realized he’d pulled himself up to a sitting position. Also that he was screaming. He twisted off the backboard, one leg tangling in the pads, the bench rocking up on two legs and settling with the clop of horse hooves on cobblestone. He hit the floor with his shoulder and lay there, exhausted, pain blurring his vision.

Dodge leaned down and lifted Mike as easily as a grocery bag. He laid him back on the bench, manipulating his legs and torso with stern efficiency, totally absorbed in his task. He might have been threading a needle or tying his shoes. When Dodge moved Mike’s feet through the leg pads, Mike bucked, trying to get upright again, but Dodge placed a thumb on his chest and flattened him down onto the decline backboard. Blood rushed to Mike’s head. His chest heaved against the pressure.

Dodge finished with Mike’s feet and eased his thumb off. Mike gasped for air, his ribs aching.

‘You got information you don’t want to tell us, right?’ William said. ‘So we need to extract it from you. It’s not gonna be easy – on you or us. It’s just something we gotta get through together.’

Mike made some garbled noise.

William’s eyes trembled back and forth, as if his gaze were wavering, though it was not. ‘Where’s Katherine?’

Mike said, ‘I don’t know where she-’

William went to a knee over the tub, grimacing. Glug glug glug – the sound of round two.

It was over now, Mike knew. He was going to die. He just had to figure out how to get them to kill him before his stamina gave out. He pictured Kat where he’d left her, sitting on that little bench in the foster home, her untied shoelaces scraping the ground. Please, Daddy?

William said, ‘We know you wanted to put her somewhere safe. Somewhere hidden. But Boss Man needs her, see, you and her out of the picture.’

‘Shep got your address from Graham,’ Mike said. ‘If I don’t check in with him, he’ll call the cops and head up here.’

William shook his head with disappointment. He nodded slightly, and the terry cloth slapped back over Mike’s head. Mike’s panicked inhalation dimpled the cloth into his mouth, up his nostrils, and then the slow bleed of water invaded his face, drowning him into contorted silence. His thighs burned against the pads, but when he tried to shove himself upright, the steady pressure of Dodge’s thumb smoothed him back down. There was fire and agony, the cloth suctioned to him like a sea creature, leaking a calm stream of water into him, shoving his own breath back down his throat.

At last he tasted oxygen and felt light on his face. His eyelids were fluttering as William leaned close, that sour breath moving across his cheeks.

‘Ouch, ouch, I know, pal. I’m sorry. I know.’ William watched closely, his face soft with empathy. ‘But you see, I’m an expert in this. I’ve taken a lot of folks to the edge. I been here before. And you haven’t. So I know the stories they tell, the lies they spin. There’s a pattern to it, see? The fake answers, the money they promise, the friend who’s gonna call the cops.’

‘Okay…’ Mike panted. ‘I lied about Shep.’

‘Where’s Katherine?’

‘I don’t… I don’t know.’

William hoisted a filled jug. ‘Ready for the next round?’

‘No,’ Mike said. ‘No no no.’

But it came anyway. The even influx of water up his nose, the airless choking and heaving, the head-shaking blindness – a fireand-brimstone hell imported from some past, barbaric age. Somewhere between screaming soundlessly and passing out, his instinct to detach, cultivated since the whitesouts of his early childhood, kicked in.

He slid out of himself and observed the proceedings. He made himself impervious. He was a collection of parts, of bone and flesh. He was a rock. Unthinking. Unfeeling.

As Dodge tried to pull the towel free, Mike clamped his teeth down on it, and it tore a little. William laughed, ‘He’s bitin’ it?’ And then Dodge’s fist hit Mike’s forehead like a battering ram and the cloth was ripped from his jaws.

William said, ‘Feisty, huh?’

Mike sputtered and drooled water. Because of the slant, it ran up his cheeks, over his eyes, through his hair, and tap-tap-tapped on the concrete.

William said, ‘Where’s your daughter?’

Mike said, ‘I have no daughter,’ and something in his voice made William draw back, shocked or perhaps a touch awed.

Dodge scowled impatiently and William bobbed his head, winded. A foul odor pressed in on Mike, and he thought for a moment that he’d messed himself. But then he realized it was the decay of Hank’s body, picking up strength in the dank cellar air.

They did another round. And another. He would have preferred to die, but that was the point, to take him to a place where he would’ve pled for a bullet and to make him stay there awhile. And then to bring him back to life, again and again.

When he came into himself the next time, he was breathing and William and Dodge were standing side by side, arms crossed, William wearing an expression of frustration that would have been gratifying under different circumstances. The little towel hung like a dishrag in Dodge’s hand, and Mike was pleased to see that it was ripped in several places; he must’ve bitten down on it a few more times. The smell of Hank’s body was stronger now, mixed in the airless room with the stink of sweat and fear. Reclined half upside down on the exercise bench, Mike hacked water through his mouth and nose, his throat raw, his chest an unremitting ache. His arms were as numb as posts beneath his back.

Dodge produced two cigarettes and set them beside each other between his lips. He dug a cheap plastic lighter from his shirt pocket and lit up, tilting his head to a cupped hand out of habit. He passed one to William, who sucked a long, eyes-closed draw.

‘Fucking stinks in here.’ William armed sweat off his brow. ‘Before we take it to the next level, we should check with Boss Man.’ His left leg was trembling. ‘I’ll get the phone.’

He labored up the stairs and returned a few minutes later. His gait had worsened from the effort of climbing and descending, one foot dragging, pigeon-toed. He reached Mike, squatted, and held the phone to Mike’s ear.

Brian McAvoy’s smooth voice. ‘She’s in a foster home, isn’t she?’

Mike said, ‘Who?’ The syllable like a claw raking his throat.

McAvoy laughed. ‘With the money at stake? We’ll check every last one in the state. And then we’ll move to the next state. And the next.’

‘So all this,’ Mike said, ‘is about money?’

‘You think I’m just a casino?’ McAvoy said. ‘I am a nation. I made something where there was nothing before. My daughter etched her initials into the front step when we poured the foundation. I know you think your life, your daughter’s life are a big deal. But as far as collateral damage goes when it comes to nation building? There’s no choice. This isn’t my fault any more than it is yours. Or Katherine’s. So let’s handle this like men. Men with a decision to make. Here’s my proposal to you: You tell us where she is, and we’ll make it humane. For you, now. And more importantly for her.’

Mike’s breaths were shallow across the receiver. He said, ‘No.’

‘We’re finding her either way. All you’ll be doing is sparing her a scared, miserable existence between now and then.’

‘No.’

‘So what’s your plan?’ McAvoy said. ‘You’re going to outlast my two guys there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Bring ’em down through force of will?’

‘Sure,’ Mike said.

A guffaw. McAvoy had intended it to be dismissive, but there was surprise in it as well. ‘And then?’

Mike said, ‘You’re next.’

A very long silence ensued. Then McAvoy said, ‘Tell William I’d like to talk to him.’

Mike rolled his head. ‘Wants… to talk… you.’

William stood up with the phone, cigarette dangling between his lips. ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.’

He snapped the phone shut and tossed it to Dodge, who slid it into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants. Something passed between their eyes, and then Dodge crouched, picked up the ball-peen hammer from the neat square of burlap, and tapped it into his vast palm.

William said, ‘Why don’t you get rid of our pal there first. He’s makin’ my eyes water.’

Dodge shuffled over, rolled Hank’s body a few more times in the plastic sheeting, and hoisted him onto a shoulder. Mike’s stare lingered on the remaining drop cloth that he’d soon be occupying.

William said, ‘Leave me the rag.’

Dodge tossed it over, and William held it up in front of his face, his small eyes and patchy beard visible through the holes. He shot a stream of cigarette smoke through the towel and said, ‘This ain’t gonna work no more.’

Dodge swung Hank’s body down, which struck the floor, sending a vibration through the sit-up bench. He tugged off his shirt and dipped it into the tub of water, his shoulders and biceps bulging beneath his wife-beater. On his way back to the body, he dropped the sopping shirt onto Mike’s face.

Darkness. Mike had managed to suck in a breath before the shirt hit, and he fought the wet fabric with his mouth and tongue, moving it around. Breathing was difficult, but without fresh water pouring through he was able to draw some air.

William’s voice floated down at him. ‘When we’re done with you, I wonder if you’ll see my brother. If you do, tell him I’m sorry. I should’ve looked out for him better, like he looked out for me. Tell him we sent you.’

Mike heard Dodge’s heavy boots creak the stairs as he carried the body up. He heard William’s knees crack as he crouched and then the glug glug glug of the milk jugs filling. From upstairs came the muffled ring of a phone, then the screech of a fax. A moment later Dodge’s voice called down – ‘Look’ – and something soft hit the cellar floor. The sound of paper uncrumpling, then a shrill laugh escaped William.

‘Wow,’ William said. ‘Wouldja look at that. Okay, go on and take care of the body. I’ll fill in our friend here on the recent developments, and then we’ll go handle business.’

Heavy footsteps moved overhead, and a screen door banged. Mike kept manipulating the shirt into position. His teeth locking into the fabric, he blew out hard and managed to suck a few drops of air around his lips. Then he kept working the shirt across his face – almost there.

A singsong voice. ‘I got something to show you.’ Another laugh. ‘Looks like a cop who owed me a favor came through. Little girl found. In a foster home. He was good enough to fax over a picture so we could confirm. Before we… you know, saddle up and ride all the way out to… Arizona.’

Heat spread through Mike’s chest, out through his limbs. A prickling panic, suffused with rage. Images flickered through the darkness – Dodge and William rolling up in their truck. Snatching Kat off the playground. Her little body, fighting and twisted in panic.

He forced his focus back to the wet shirt. A few drops tapped the fabric, increasing the pressure above his nose, quickening to a thin stream; William was playing with him, drizzling water. ‘Wanna see?’

William reached for the shirt, and then the weight was lifted from Mike’s face. A grin twitched around the cigarette. ‘Ta-da!’

Mike caught a flash of the uncrumpled fax in William’s hand – a photo of Kat in the backyard of the foster home. The picture had been taken at night, the flash severe, and Kat was recoiling, terrified, her skin bleached a sickly white.

Mike breathed through his nose, his nostrils flaring, his mouth clamped around the acid liquid burning into his tongue.

Cigarette smoke unspooling up the side of his face, William looked down at the object clattering on the concrete floor, freed from the wet shirt.

A cheap plastic cigarette lighter.

Chewed open.

The cherry on his cigarette flared with a shocked intake of breath, and William lifted his eyes just as Mike wrenched himself forward in an excruciating sit-up and blew a spattering of lighter fluid into his face.

The cherry erupted into a sparkler, embers flying into William’s eyes and beard. One side of his face caught, the wisps crackling, giving off an acrid odor. William screamed, a high-pitched feminine wail, and stumbled blindly to the tub, with the fax, aflame, fluttering after him.

Mike fought to keep himself bent up into the incline, and as William dunked his head into the tub, Mike flopped off the situp bench, landing across William’s shoulders. The bench flipped with him, the pads clinging to one calf.

William bucked and fought, Mike struggling to keep his weight on him so his face would stay submerged. But without the benefit of his arms, Mike could only pin William so long. William slid out from under him and collapsed on his back, sputtering and moaning. Mike rolled off as well, the wooden lip digging into his side, and spun over to the square of burlap. With the cloth restraints biting into his wrists, he felt for the tools behind his back, his fingers fussing over metal rods and rubber handles. William writhed on the floor, holding his eyes and thrashing. Something stuck one of Mike’s fingers, and he reached for it again, holding the blade even as it opened the pad of his thumb. Trying to will the tingling from his fingers, he got the knife turned and sawing against the restraints. His panicked stare moved between William and the door at the top of the stairs.

Silently, William shoved himself to a sitting position. One eye was open. His teeth showed as a slash carved out of red flesh and black, curled hair. He struggled to his feet and lurched toward Mike.

Mike rocked to aid the movement of the blade, his shoulders aching, his hands cramped and barely holding on. William was almost on top of him. There wouldn’t be time to saw through, so Mike rolled to his side, bent his legs, and tried to swing his wrists down under his feet and in front of him. The cloth restraints snagged on the bottoms of his shoes, and he tugged harder until his hands popped through. He barely managed to get to his feet before William swung at him. Mike ducked the blow, grabbed the back of William’s shirt with both bound hands, and tugged it over his head to tie up his arms, an old schoolyard trick. Pressing his fists together, he hammered them down across William’s face. A ribbon of blood slapped the concrete, and William fell to all fours over the canvas. Mike wrenched his arms apart, straining as hard as he could. The restraints finally gave way with a wet rip just as William hoisted himself up and slipped a knife into Mike’s side.

The motion was silent and smooth, all pressure and no pain, just the slice of a shark cutting through water.

And then William wrenched.

The sensation was electric, Mike arcing like a hooked fish, a current of pain running so hot and intense up his left side that he thought for a moment he’d somehow caught fire.

He staggered back a step and then another, William keeping on, the blade low in his hand, his breath fluttering the charred tufts of beard around his lips. William jabbed and Mike skipped back, the current coming to life again, making him cry out. Mike unhooked his belt and wrapped the soft end around a fist. William lunged with another thrust. Mike dodged and whipped the buckle, catching William at the side of the jaw, knocking him forward too hard and quick for his left leg. He stumbled, landing on a knee. Mike threaded the belt back through the buckle to form a snare and lowered the loop of leather over William’s head. Yanking the makeshift leash tight, he dragged William choking and screaming across the floor to the patch of canvas. William’s resistance, coupled with the tearing pain in Mike’s side, brought Mike to his knees short of the mark. William’s hands scrabbled at his throat, loosening the belt. As he turned to claw at Mike, Mike snatched up the first tool in reach, a flathead screwdriver, and drove it through the side of William’s left knee, crushing the fragile bone. William howled, veins popping on both sides of his neck, and curled on the floor, coughing and weeping.

It took a few minutes, but Mike forced himself up. Stepping over William, he started for the stairs, his elbow brushing the wound, blood streaming down the outside of his leg. He left a scarlet footprint on the bottom stair. A few steps up, he almost lost consciousness. He pressed his bloodstained knuckles against the wall for balance and then sat.

He whited out for a minute, drifting back to Shady Lane. Charles Dubronski waited in the darkness, thick bully head protruding on his stout neck, except this time he was leering not at Shep but at Mike. Stay the fuck down, runt. Stay down.

Somehow Mike was at the top of the stairs, stumbling into the wreckage of a kitchen, shocked to see daylight streaming through the dusty windows. The smell of grease clogged his throat. Every surface was littered with rotting fruit, pots, and pill bottles – so many pill bottles. But no Dodge. The house felt empty, and the walls threw off an old-lady vibe. Peeling floral wallpaper. Old pictures in rose-colored porcelain frames. A posy of fake flowers, dust caking the gingham bow. Mike tilted into the table, sending sheets of paper airborne and knocking over a stack of old newspapers. His Batphone was on the table, dissected; clearly, given how they’d questioned him, they hadn’t been able to retrieve whatever data they were looking for. He swung his leaden head around, searching for another phone. The charger at the outlet was empty, and Mike remembered Dodge slipping the phone into his pocket. Panting, Mike leaned on the counter, coming face-to-face with a fax machine perched atop a cracked microwave.

It had no telephone function, but the piece of paper in the feeder had Mike’s Social Security number and another of those crazy codes – FST14U. He clutched the page, his fingers leaving bloody smears. There was another page behind, also waiting to fax, with another Social Security number – probably Hank’s – and another code, 6D8BUG. In sofar as he could think anymore, Mike thought, So that’s it.

William’s moans climbed up the stairs, but there was no way he’d make it up and out. As Mike turned to go, he spotted among the mess of papers on the table the big gray envelope Two-Hawks had given him. Its contents had been pulled halfway out, bringing the stack of photocopied ledger pages into view. He told himself to pick it up, and a minute later he listened. He staggered across the corroding tile of the foyer and out into the vivid white day. A vast field of weeds, hilltop wind roaring across his ears, and on the other side of the hilltop, a wrecking yard from which issued a blacksmithlike clanging over the low drone of machinery.

He lost his footing on the porch stairs and had to hug the banister, worried that his intestines were going to spill onto the rust-colored dirt. But then he was balancing cautiously, tightrope-walking across to the laid-open gate of the wrecking yard. His throat and nose still burned, salt-tinged wetness stinging the abraded flesh. He spit a mixture of blood and lighter fluid. The weight of the envelope tugging at his left hand reminded him, every instant, of the knife gash in his side.

The walk was interminable, the wind rising to a maritime whistle. Purple spots appeared across the sky. The glare of the sun turned into a five-pointed star. The banging continued – metal on metal – and as the mechanical drone grew louder, Mike pegged it as a big diesel engine of some sort.

He passed into the yard, tasting the rust in the air, and followed the clang clang clang through two rows of crushed cars stacked higher than the fence. He came into a clearing, one arm numb at his side, his legs wobbling.

A giant electromagnetic crane loomed ahead, the enormous circular magnet up on the boom still swinging from recent activity. But the cab was empty, the door ajar. A battered, rusting station wagon waited below the hoist, an ant beneath a raised boot. Its old-fashioned black-and-yellow license plate was barely holding on: FST14U – the code paired with Mike’s Social Security number on the fax back in the kitchen. Staring at the plate, Mike blanked out, the heat rising from the earth through the soles of his shoes. But a fresh clanging broke him from his trance.

He oriented toward the sound, which came from an ancient, top-loading automobile crusher – a cross between a giant Dumpster and a bear trap. A fat cable ran across the dirt, connecting the two machines so that one man could work the yard by himself, operating the crusher from the cab of the crane. In the crusher Dodge’s massive bowed shoulders reared up into view. He was hammering away with his ball peen, trying to dislodge a piece of shrapnel from the metal jaws.

Mike stood frozen, no more than twenty yards away. But given the rattle of the crane’s engine and the pounding of the hammer, Dodge was oblivious. He stopped swinging, evidently satisfied with his progress, and stooped, disappearing from view beneath the high wall of the crusher. A moment later he heaved back into sight, Hank’s wrapped body tilted across a shoulder. He readjusted the corpse, letting it slide down and away. Then he stood with his hands on his hips, catching his breath and regarding his handiwork.

Mike threw the gray envelope through the open rear window of the station wagon for safekeeping, the pages coming free and scattering across the backseat. He stumbled around the tailgate, crossing the faded set of tire tracks pressed into the loose dirt, and staggered right past Dodge, heading for the crane. His side was warm, so warm, and his left shoe squished with each step. He fought not to scream as he hoisted himself up into the high cab, his wound tearing open a bit more. His shirt, matted to his side, felt dense and heavy. The rumbling of the cab was agony.

From the higher vantage, he could see down into the crusher and piece together what had happened. With the crane Dodge had hoisted the car – a ’68 Bug as the license plate proclaimed – into the crusher, but the machine had jammed, popping the vehicle onto a tilt and jogging the body half out a smashed window. Dodge had climbed in to fix the snag and slide the body back into the car.

Mike reached for the control, popping the clear plastic lid over the wide red button. Down below, Dodge finally turned, hip-deep in the huge bucket of the crusher, his legs lost in the snarl of the partially crumpled front wheel well. Their eyes met across twenty yards of dust-filled sunshine.

Mike pushed the button.

The hydraulic crushing cylinders hummed to life, the contraption beginning to clench. Like a dumb animal, Dodge moved deliberately and without panic toward the edge, trying to climb out. But then he stiffened, and it was clear that the jagged metal had folded in on him. With his flat gaze fixed on Mike, he started his descent without whimper or complaint, descending until only one hand remained in sight, lifted as if for a life preserver. It quivered once and vanished slowly into the metal crush.

Pressing a hand to the wound in his side, Mike slumped forward over the controls, his vision spotting. It occurred to him how very nice it would be to go to sleep. His blinks grew longer.

A faint movement registered through the black-and-white speckling before his eyes, and he blinked several times, squinting through the cab window.

William.

His left leg trailed lifelessly behind him, the screwdriver still jammed through the side of his wilted knee, but he was tugging himself forward with his forearms, making herky-jerky progress, like some awful stop-action film. His face scraped along the ground, his mouth and nose powdered with dirt.

Mike stared for maybe a full minute in disbelief. William belly-crawled, arm over arm, past the rows of smashed cars and into the clearing. He paused now and again to catch his breath, his head wriggling on the yoke of his shoulders.

Mike’s hands twitched forward onto the console, moving across the steering levers, the joystick, the pushbuttons. Having worked a lot of big construction machines, he found the controls familiar. The magnetic hoist hung high in his field of vision, maybe forty feet above the ground. Mike clicked the joystick, and the boom whirred over toward the car crusher, the hoist rocking at the end of the giant cable.

He tried three buttons before he found the servomotor. The entire crane vibrated from the massive charge, the generator shooting a jolt of current to the magnetic hoist at the cable’s end. Mike rode the joystick left a few beats more and dropped the boom, undershooting the release to compensate for the skewed perspective from the cab, a trick he’d learned from years on wheel loaders and hydraulic shovels. The giant magnet clanged onto the roof of the crushed VW Bug. Mike lifted the neat bale of metal and flesh from the vise of the crusher and began to swing it across the clearing.

William paused to take note, his raw face tilted to the early-morning sun.

The rectangular shadow fell across him, and he began tearing at the dirt, trying to make quicker progress, but it seemed his arms had nothing left.

Mike pulled back on the control and raised the compacted car to the clouds. Seventy feet, eighty – he kept on until all he saw was the underside of the vehicle, the wheels smashed up into the box of the frame.

William lay still, panting, glaring across at Mike through a tangle of fallen hair.

A moment of perfect tranquillity stretched out and out.

Then Mike tapped the button, cutting the power to the magnet above. The car detached from the hoist without a whisper of noise and plummeted in absolute silence. William let out a bark of a cry and had just enough time to cover his head.

An explosion of dust, pluming like the aftermath of a bomb. The cloud rose halfway to the hoist and then began to dissipate. The warmth of the sun slanted through the glass, and again Mike was tempted to set his head down on the console and doze off.

Mustering strength, he shoved open the door of the cab and tumbled to the dirt. He lay there panting, holding his side, the flesh tacky and warm. Parked before him was the station wagon that William and Dodge had planned to crush him in, but his slanted view also took in the swirling brown mist in the air, thinning by degrees. Emerging from the dust, stacked against the chain-link across the lot, was a distinct stack of smashed cars, clearly set apart from the other rows. Some were newer, some so rusted that no color was discernible. The dust thinned further, and he saw, wired to the front of every neatly baled car, a license plate – FRVRYNG, MSTHNG, LALADY. Metal coffins, a body interred in each one. Just John. Danielle Trainor. Ted Rogers.

Mike’s breath kicked up little puffs of dust, Indian red and oddly beautiful. His hand, lying a few inches in front of his face, was caked with layers of blood, slick and bright over dry and black.

A snowy patch blotted out all sight, and then somehow he was standing, leaning heavily against one of the crane’s high, hot tires. He staggered forward, falling onto the back of the station wagon and then shoving himself along its side, leaving mime handprints in blood along the dusty windows. The driver’s door groaned open, and his legs went to water. He fell into the soft cloth seat, the springs sighing beneath him. He would not be able to pull himself from the car, so he prayed the broke-down piece of shit ran. His arms felt heavy, filled with gravy. He swatted a hand forward once, twice, his fingers somehow hooking onto a key, but he didn’t believe it was real until he twisted and the engine sputtered irritably to life.

He’d been driven into this mess in a station wagon; now he’d go out in one.

Yanking the stick into drive was a herculean task. Tailpipe dragging, the car shuddered around the dropped bale of VW, out of the yard, down the harsh slope of the desolate dirt road. The turns were punishing, the switchbacks agonizing.

He realized halfway down the hill that he was probably going to die.