John Gone (33 page)

“What did you do exactly?” John asked
cautiously. “To end up in here, I mean.”

“You don’t already know?”

“Tell me in your words,” John replied.

The man began to take short steps toward John
as he spoke. “I was jealous of my neighbor, a Turk,” he said. “He
had taken a beautiful bride, while I could find no one for my own
bed. When he was away, I snuck into his home and had my way with
her between his own red silken sheets. Later, she told him, though
I had threatened her life not to.”

The man was now standing over John, his face
only a foot away. John was getting nervous. “He came to my house,”
the man continued plainly, “and overpowered me. He is a bigger man.
He took a poker, my own poker, and slashed it across my face,
blackening my sight because I had seen his woman naked.”

The man gestured to his eyes, and at his
close distance, John could see the thick, two-pronged scar running
through one of the man’s eyes, over the bridge of his nose, and
across the other.

“The
militsiya
arrested me soon after.
They brought me here without trial, and here I have sat. Now, all
that my eyes can see are light and dark. No shapes.” The man turned
and backed away.

“Are you sorry?” Ronika said quietly.

The man laughed heartily. “Sorry?” he yelled
loudly. “Sorry they found me before I could tear the genitalia from
that Turk with my teeth! Sorry they have kept me here where I can’t
take another ten wives of another ten men! That is why I am sorry!”
Mouse shrunk back into John’s messenger bag.

John felt something bug-like crawl across his
left ankle. He jerked his foot back at the touch. Knocked from its
perch on his leg, a large cockroach scurried away across the floor
to some secret exit from the jail cell.

“Why are you telling me this?” John asked, “I
thought you were being judged.”

“Because I know the truth,” the man said. “It
doesn’t matter what a man does when he is greeted by decisions to
be made. You can live your life as a good man or as a monster, but
in the end, fate will deliver you into the arms of its choosing.
That’s hell usually, in this world or the next.”

“That’s a bit defeatist, don’t you think?”
Kala replied.

“It is not ‘defeatist’ to go where you are
taken, when you can go in no other direction,” he growled. “And if
none of it matters, then why not cave to the flesh and listen to
the darkness, when the darkness is all that will speak to you.”

Suddenly, there was a banging at the door, a
controlled three knocks, the sound of a hammer on iron. Then, the
door across the room from John opened, allowing a strong wedge of
light to enter the space and illuminate the half-blind man in the
corner. As the light fell across him, he lifted his arms against it
and shrieked. With his body now bathed in light, John could finally
see what this frightening man truly was, old, frail, and
tattered.

John looked back to the door and saw six men
with berets and assault rifles orderly crowding behind a short,
bald man in a fifty-dollar suit. “Hello, John Popielarski,” he
said.

“You, with us,” the bald man commanded,
pointing at John with a fat and dirty finger. His thick Russian
accent heavily muddled the English that he spoke. The six imposing
guards behind him filled the cell’s sole doorway with their
diagonally-held guns and trunk-like bodies.

“How do you know my name?” John asked loudly,
backing himself against the wall farthest from the bald man.

“It was told to me,” the man responded
bluntly. “I know what you are doing here, and you are caught doing
it.”

“Spirits, they can hear you!” the blinded
prisoner exclaimed. The Slavic-sounding man turned and nodded at
one of the six guards standing vigilantly behind him. One stepped
forward and approached the raving man in the corner. Without so
much as a blink, he broke the man’s nose with the butt plate of his
assault rifle. The prisoner silently collapsed to the floor,
bleeding from his face where the gun had struck him. The guard
returned coldly to the door alongside the other five, his
expression unchanged.

The bald man smiled widely, his teeth showing
yellow and rot. “Are you coming or am I retrieving you?” he asked,
spitting in spray as he spoke.

John looked down at the half-blind man,
face-down and bleeding on the filthy prison floor. The warden held
out his hand. John looked at him, confused, until the man moved his
eyes sharply to John’s messenger bag. John sighed and handed his
messenger bag to him.

Like a serpent, the six armed guards moved in
a line around John, circling to enclose him from behind, blockading
against any misplaced thought of retreat. One of them lightly
nudged the small of John’s back with the butt of his rifle, urging
him forward. John complied and left the cell, following the lead of
the short, bald man now waddling in front of him with John’s bag
held firmly under his heavy arm.

“Who are you people?” John asked. None
replied. As they walked down the corridor, he spied entrances to
other cells. Each was made from thick rusted steel and supported by
hinges the size of bread loaves. He wondered if the men held behind
them were monsters or innocents. Both seemed equally possible.

“You need to tell me how you know my name,”
John said. The guards stopped in tandem with the bald man at their
lead. The man turned and walked at John, the edge of his large gut
pressing against him, bouncing him into the cold, stone wall of the
hallway. John’s back slammed against it.

“I am the warden here, the god,” the man
said. “I
need
to do nothing.”

John watched fearfully as the warden drew a
worn revolver from a military holster strapped to his side. He
raised the gun to John’s throat, laying the cold iron barrel flat
against his windpipe. He pushed it hard into John, allowing its
hammer to jut into the soft skin of his neck. The pressure was
beginning to choke him.

“I don’t like people sneaking into my prison
for information from my prisoners,” the warden growled.

“I, what? No,” John sputtered.

The warden jerked his sidearm from John’s
neck and holstered it. “I am delivering you back to your
government. They have come for you. They’ve paid me just enough to
forgive this intrusion.
Just enough!
” he yelled, the thick
phlegm in the back of his throat rattling against his windpipe.

“My government?” John asked. “They’re here?”
They must have picked up the signal from the watch,
he
thought.

The warden turned from the wall and continued
his walk down the prison hall. His six guards continued in a
semi-circle behind, their march bumping John’s body forward before
them.

The party stopped a few minutes later at a
shiny door, much newer-looking than the rest they’d passed along
the wall. A small rectangular keypad was mounted where a handle
might be. John was surprised to see such technology present in the
damp, degrading facility to which he’d just been introduced.
Somehow, he’d expected a rounded keyhole and long-stemmed brass key
dangling from a large ring on the warden’s belt to match it.

The warden stepped forward to the door and
punched a six-digit combination into its face. The red light at the
top of the keypad turned green, and a mechanism buried inside of
the door clicked. The warden shoved it open with his belly and
walked inside the room.

John followed him closely through the door
and was walked by the six guards at his back to a metal
folding-chair at the room’s center. He sat, and the men retreated
to an area behind him, unseen. The door closed. A hard-shining
light draped in a circle around the chair while the rest of the
room remained shrouded in a deep, concerning blackness. John heard
the sound of a cocking gun behind him.

“Move and he shoots,” came the sound of the
warden’s familiar gruff voice. “It’s that or cuffs.”

“I think I’d prefer the cuffs,” John said. He
could see nothing in the room but himself and the chair he sat
upon. The light encasing him was so harsh and direct that John
opted to close his eyes rather than continue his ineffective
squinting a moment longer. Another gun cocked behind him. “Got it,
no moving,” he said.

“He’s yours, gentlemen,” John heard the
warden say from the other side of the room.

“We’ll be fine, Warden. Thank you for your
help,” a voice replied.

“Do you need the guards?”

“No. We’ll be fine.”

“He had this on him.”

“Thank you.”

The warden’s voice said something in a
language John didn’t understand. Footsteps filled the darkened room
again. John opened his eyes briefly and was barely able to make out
the figures of the warden and his guards just before they left the
room.

“Hello, John,” the voice said from somewhere
ahead of him.

“Who are you?” John asked.

“I’d like to talk to you about that watch on
your arm.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Only a little. I’d like you to tell me how
you got it.”

“I found it.”

“How did you learn to use it?”

“I didn’t.”

A loud cough broke the silence behind John.
The voice ahead of him continued to speak. “What were you planning?
Canada, France, Africa? Where are you going, John? What are you
hoping to accomplish?”

“Who did you say you were?”

John heard the sound of more footsteps
followed by a light plastic click. The light above him dimmed into
darkness. John opened his eyes. Another click, and a different,
more mellow and even light illuminated the room. A man with dark
hair in a light grey suit stood before him. John turned his head
frantically toward the exit. A blond-haired man stood blocking it,
holding a large brown leather circle the size of a bike tire with a
round black bead pinching its center.

“Advocates,” John whispered reactively. The
dark-haired man furrowed his brow quizzically at the word. He shook
the thought and nodded to the man past John.

The blond-haired man approached and wrestled
the leather circle over John’s head and around his throat. He slid
the black bead past its center and up to the back of John’s neck,
tightening the leather into a collar.

“The ring slides one way,” the dark-haired
man explained. “You pull too much and it chokes you.” The
blond-haired man took the other end of the circle and dragged John
by the neck from his chair to the room’s exit.

“Wait,” the dark-haired man commanded. His
partner halted. The dark-haired man walked to John and looked him
over. He opened one of the sides of his worn, grey jacket and
revealed a small switchblade knife hanging from the breast pocket.
“Let’s be thorough.”

The blade triggered with the flick of a
button on its handle. John closed his eyes and winced, struggling
against the band tightening around his neck. Not feeling the cut he
expected, John opened his eyes. The dark-haired man was using the
newly exposed blade to slice open the back of John’s messenger
bag.

“What are you doing?” John exclaimed.

The man shook out John’s bag, spilling its
contents to the ground: sunglasses, a book, the small blanket and
extra shirt that John had packed the last time he’d seen his
mother, a flashlight, some notebooks, a pen, and two halves of a
broken branch. The Advocate patted down the limp bag and found
nothing else of interest. He discarded it to the ground. “Alright,
let’s go.”

The blond-haired man kicked at the back of
John’s knee, breaking his stance and forcing him forward. The
leather band around his neck was tight, and despite his efforts,
John was neither able to remove it nor fight where it moved him.
Collared, shoved, and pulled, John accompanied the Advocates out of
the room and into the dark, stone hallway outside of it.

“Guys, stop, wait,” John said. “I didn’t
steal it, okay? It’s stuck. I want to give it back, I do.” There
was no response.

They continued to move down the corridor,
unimpeded by any of the guards stationed throughout the facility. A
few times, John called out to them, insulting their morality and
humanity when they ignored him. His mind continued to race for an
idea, anything that could get him out of his current predicament.
He looked around at his surroundings: walls, doors, stone, uncaring
guards who probably didn’t speak English. There was nothing to help
him, nothing and no one.

This is it,
John thought.
After
everything I survived, this is where I die. I should have gone to
the lab days ago when I first heard about it. Kala would have seen
the sun. Mom would still be alive and, after today, I might have
been, too.

The blond-haired man pulled sharply on the
leather circle around John’s neck. John stumbled for a moment, but
deftly regained his footing as they turned past a door into another
room of the prison.

John thought about Ronika and those silly fox
ears she wore on her head. He thought about how much he’d enjoyed
his time with her in person and chided himself for not doing it
sooner.

At least she got out of this okay
, he
thought
. She’s the only one who did. That’s fair. She had the
least to do with this anyway. I wish I could see her again, though,
just one last time before the end.

John and the Advocates soon arrived at what
appeared to be the prison’s galley, a large and filthy room stuffed
wall to wall with shoddily made metal shelving, now rusted red and
brown. Most were filled with various pots and tureens while the
others were stacked with unlabeled metal food cans. The sinks below
them were crammed with dirty dishes and silverware and, judging by
the amount of mold and flies surrounding them, it seemed to John as
if they’d likely been there for months.