The Day Before Midnight (45 page)

The blade touched his throat; he felt it begin to cut then halt.

He felt the sinewy muscles so tight against him ease just a notch; then, swift and silent as his stalker had pounced on him, he was gone. The weight left Walls’s back; rolling over, his fingers flying involuntarily to the break in his skin where the blade had begun to slice open his throat, he found himself staring into the mad eyes of his own death, which this time had by luck decided not to occur.

“Jesus, lady, you scared the shit out of me.”

The Vietnamese woman looked at him sullenly. God, how could such a scrawny creature be so strong? Baby, you had my ass cold. Fifteen years ago you get me like that and my ticket be punched forever and ever.

He rubbed his neck, which was wet with a trickle of blood.

“I figure you come up the tunnels same as me. Then you run into one of them pipes for the rocket blast, right? You follow it, and you end up in here with me, is that right, girl? Sure it is. No other way it could be. Then, when you hear me coming, you crawl up inside there—” He pointed to the big cupola of the rocket exhaust port. He shivered, thinking of her curled up in there, like a cat actually inside the thing. “Shit, you look like you been through worse hell than me.”

She was smeared with mud and blood; her face was filthy. She had a crazed look in her dark eyes and her hand kept tightening and loosening on the haft of the big knife. One of her trouser legs was ripped out. A terrible gash had left a cascade of dried blood down one arm; the cut itself had turned black and glistening. Whoever said their faces were blank? He was wrong, whoever he was, because Walls now looked hard at the thing he had all those years ago taught
himself was flat and dull and yellow and saw the same play of emotions he’d seen on any face: fear, anger, pride, a big charge of guts, maybe more than a little grief.

“They jump you? Where your partner be at? You know, Stretch. That tall white dude. Where he be at?”

She shook her head.

He laughed. “He didn’t make it? My boy Witherspoon didn’t make it neither. Well, sugar, just you and me, we’s all there is, us old-time rats. Nobody else coming.” He stood, picking up his shotgun.

“Okay, lady,” he said. “Now, I figure on climbing up this ladder to that little door. You see it? Way up there? Then, maybe somehow we get through the door. ’Cause the one thing I know, we don’t want to be sitting next to this big cocksucker”—he looked at the missile—“in case it gets lit off. Burn us to shit. You coming or you staying? Best if you come.”

She looked at him, her dark eyes crazily boring into his.

Shit, she don’t even understand what this is. This is just another tunnel to her, except that now it’s some shit with a rocketship.

“Come on,” he crooned. “Take it from me, you don’t want to be down here if this sucker go. Fire come out of the hole, burn you all up like napalm.”

He began to climb up the rungs. He climbed, looking up, watching the manhole cover of the silo hatch. He wouldn’t look down because it was too far, and Walls, the tunnel champion, was afraid of heights. He climbed and climbed until he was woozy. Seven fucking stories. It was high!

He finally reached the door. It was blank and solid. Hanging groggily on the rungs, he touched it, and it had no spring or give. It was another door, the door of his life.

FUCK NIGGERS
wasn’t scratched into it, but it could have been, for that was its message. Like any door he’d ever faced, it only said, You ain’t going nowhere. You ain’t invited.

His hand made a fist and he smashed it, stupidly. His hand crunched in pain.

So this was it, huh? This was the cocksucker. Another door.

Walls thought he might laugh. All this way, and he just run up against
FUC
—

He heard a noise, looked down to see the little Vietnamese woman beneath him a few rungs.

“That’s good, mama-san,” he said. “Good you came along, but there’s no place to go.”

She reached up and tapped his foot, then pointed.

Well, well, hello yourself. Yes, it was another small door or hatch or something, maybe two feet by two feet, covered with metal gridwork. The thing was about five feet farther around the curve of the silo wall. It looked like the entrance to a duct or a vent or the air-conditioning. But it didn’t matter.

“It’s too far,” he yelled. “I can’t reach that far.”

But with her gestures she made him see that she wanted to come up.

The bitch going to try. Don’t she know? Can’t get in. Nothing to it now. All she wrote, end of story, the man he had them beat.

But up she came, like a cat, Jesus, she was so strong. He slid over on the rungs, and up she scrambled, until they shared the same precarious upper rung. She pointed and made interesting facial explanations and ultimately it occurred to him that
she
was proposing to go over to the little door.

He saw now what she meant. He was strong, she was light. If he could just hold her, somehow, maybe she ought to be able to bridge the gap.

Dumb bitch, don’t know when the man got you beat.

“Sure, hon. You just go on. Nathan hold you.”

He tried to turn sideways on the rung beneath, planting one foot real solid; with his arm he embraced the top rung.

Backward, she mounted him, feeling back with one strong supple foot, planting it on his thigh, then with her arm hoisting herself, and planting her other foot while he embraced her around the waist with his arm.

She was light, just bones and strings and skin and short black hair, but she wasn’t that light either, and there was a terrible instant when he couldn’t get set just right as her weight threw him off, and he thought he was losing her. He
could feel her tighten, shriek a little, and scream or curse in her language, but in just a second he had her back under control.

“Okay, okay, we be okay, just cool on down, just chill it on down, sugar baby, now,” he moaned through his own pounding breath. He knew whatever he did he couldn’t look down: it was delicate, their position, the two of them supported on the slippery purchase of his one boot on the rung, his other out to balance them, her whole body leaning on his thighbone and the slipperiness of his muscle there.

It wasn’t going to work, goddammit!

But out she strained, out, so far, Jesus, she had guts, and he clung desperately to her waist, feeling it slide against his grip as she leaned ever out for the grid on the little door.

He could hardly see what was going on, just her back ahead of him, inching away from him, and he could feel the great pressure against his forearm, holding her in, and also the great pressure in his other arm, keeping them moored to the top rung. He could feel the sweat pop out of his hairline and begin to trace little patterns down his face. He thought his muscles would cramp; his heart was thudding; he couldn’t get breath and his limbs began to shiver and tremble against the strength that threatened to desert them totally. He heard what sounded like pinging or chipping and realized that she’d gotten her knife out and into the frame of the little door and was trying somehow to jimmy the goddamned thing open and—

Uh—

Suddenly, she took flight and squirmed out of Walls’s grip and he lurched for her. His foot slipped off the rung and he himself fell, in his panic forgetting her as the gravity claimed his body and he knew he was going to die—but then his left arm wrenched him with a whack into the wall and was so panicked it would not let him fly loose and he planted his boot back onto a rung and with his now tragically free hand, grabbed back to the top rung again, and then and only then did he see that the woman had not fallen at all, but like some kind of simian creature now actually rode the grate on the
little door which on its delicate hinges swung ever so gently back and forth.

“Jesus, watch yourself,” he shouted.

The little door swung the full 180 degrees, banged into the wall with its desperate cargo; then with a toe she pushed off, clinging like a cat on a screen to the gridwork. Her foot came out, searched for the duct and found it, and she pulled herself closer, shifting
in
her ride, until,
swinging
just a bit, she was able somehow to heave herself at the duct—a sickening thud as she hit too low against the base of her spine, but pivoted in spite of the pain, and with one arm reached out and caught something inside, then with the other pulled herself in.

Jesus, he thought. She made it.

She rested for what seemed to him to be an inhumanly short time and then peeped out, pointing at his loins urgently.

Lady, what the fuck you want?

Then, of course, he caught on: his rope tied in a tight figure-eight on his web belt. He took it off the D-ring, kneaded it free, and tossed it in an unraveling lob toward her; she caught it neatly—she did
every
motherfucking thing neatly—and in seconds it was secure on something inside.

Walls tied his end into about a trillion or so knots on the rung. She gestured him on.

Oh, shit, he thought. Hope this sucker holds.

It was only six or so feet, but it seemed a lot farther. The only way he could manage it was upside down like a sloth, his boots locked over the rope, eyes closed as he pulled himself along. Jesus, he felt the give and stretch of the rope bouncing as it fought against his weight, and the dead steel of the twelve-gauge pumpgun hanging off his shoulder and all the little pouches on his belt swinging and the pockets full of loose twelve-gauge shells jingling.

As he edged along the rope, Walls prayed feverishly. His desperate entreaties must have surely paid off, for suddenly he felt her hands pulling at him, and in a squirming frenzy of panic—this was the worst yet, of it all this was the absolute worst—he managed somehow to get himself into the duct opening.

He sat there, breathing hard. In time the various aches of his body started to fire up; he saw that his palms were bleeding from the tightness with which he had clung to the rope, and that he had whacked himself in the shoulder, the arm, the hip, and the shin getting over the threshold of the duct. He didn’t want to think about it though. He just wanted to suck in some air. He wished he had a cigarette.

She was saying something, and after he’d caught up on oxygen he got enough concentration back to say, “Hey, no speakee, sugar. Sorry, can’t understand you, honey.”

But he could read her gestures: she was pointing.

At last it occurred to him to see what they had achieved and the disappointment was crushing: they had achieved nothing; about six feet back the duct ended abruptly in cinderblock.

So what’s the point of the duct, he thought bitterly, knowing it to be another government fuck-up.

But then he saw the point of the duct: a metal box up near the corner of the wall, with metal tubes running out and into it from various points in the wall.

He crawled closer.

A padlock kept the box from human touch, but the box itself looked flimsy enough to beat open.

He squinted at the words on the box:

DOOR ACCESS FUSE PANEL, USAF LCA
-8566033 it said.

He recognized only one. It was familiar from his years in prison:
DOOR. DOOR. DOOR.

That’s how we get into the sucker, he thought, and began to beat at the metal box.

Dill could hear the firing up ahead, rising, rising still more, rising till it sounded incredible.

“Jesus,” he said to his sergeant.

Then the second gunship went up like a supernova a few hundred feet ahead, its glare spilling across the sky and filling the woods with light.

Dill winced, fell back, his night vision stunned. He blinked, chasing flashbulbs from his brain. You never look into a detonation, he told himself.

He looked back. Most of them—maybe a half of them—were still strung out in the creek bed, coming up over the ice, pulling themselves up rough stairways of stone, up gulches, scrambling up little gulches and whatever. It would take an hour for all of Bravo to make it up.

But now he had twenty-five guns, M-16s, full auto, and he could hear the firing beckoning him onward, and it was time to go.

“Almost there,” he said.

“Bob, a lot of us are going to get killed,” said one of the men.

“Yeah, Bob, it doesn’t look like we’ll have much of a chance against all that.”

“Yeah, well,” said Dill, “I get the impression the Russians don’t know we’re here. And, like, those other guys are counting on us. I think there’s a pretty good fight going on, and we ought to be there helping.”

Dill knew he wasn’t an eloquent man and even by his standards his little speech had been pretty lame, but at least he hadn’t whined and sounded utterly preposterous, and so he simply walked ahead through the snow, slipping between the trees, trying to figure out if he was going in the right direction or not. He thought they were with him, but he didn’t want to turn around to look, because it might scare them away.

He came to a meadow shortly. Up ahead there appeared to be a kind of fireworks display going on; he couldn’t make it out.

It was all wrong somehow, nothing at all like what he expected. He had no idea if he was in the right place. The feeling was all wrong too; there was a crazy sense of festival to it, none of the noise was distinct, but simply a blur of imprecise sound. He couldn’t see anything well, just sensing confusion, as if too much were going on, really, to decipher.

“Bob, is this where we’re supposed to be?”

“I don’t know,” said Dill. “I’m not sure. I hope we’re on the right hill.”

“We have to be on the right hill. There’s only one hill.”

“Uh—”

Dill now saw someone emerge before him. He smiled, as if to make contact, and realized in a second he was staring at a Soviet Special Forces soldier with camouflage tunic, black beret, and an AK-47 at the high port. The man was the most terrifying thing Dill had ever seen. Dill shot him in the face.

“Jesus, Bob, you killed that guy.”

“Bet your ass I did,” said Dill. “Now,
come on
, goddammit!”

All up and down the line, without orders or thought or guidance behind them, the troopers began to fire.