Nightwise (18 page)

“Node,” I muttered as I put my head down on the table.

“You a freelancer, a Sellspell? A Hexhitter? Maybe you're an Athame, a ritual assassin with another lodge, and Berman got in your way? Tell me I'm wrong.”

“Who's Berdman?” I said, looking up and rubbing my swelling face.

“You led us a merry chase, I'll give you that,” Skinny said. “We had been looking for you for days. It was fortunate we picked you and Berman's boyfriend up on the city cameras we have hardwired into the Sphinxes.”

“Finxes?” I asked. Skinny handed me a paper towel to stanch some of the blood dripping from the train wreck that was my face.

“We take political prisoners, like you. Some homeless, if they haven't wrecked their nervous systems with too much Sterno, orphans of the state that have fallen through the cracks, and we do a series of surgeries on them. Remove all their external sensory organs: eyes, ears, nose, tongue. We destroy parts of their brains and enhance other parts, and then we wire them up to the over 2,397 traffic and surveillance cameras in the city. They become eternal watchmen, scanning, seeing, unblinking, unsleeping. They live in coffins—devices that feed their shriveled bodies. They sift data for us, churn it, and, lucky you, they spotted you and your dead friend, Trace.

“Were you fuckin' him too?” Fat rumbled, and smacked the back of my head. “That why you snuffed Berman, lovers' spat, homo?”

It was hard to think, but a few wheels were turning in me. A hypothesis was formulating, but I didn't have the brain power to reason it out right now. They were either playing games with me, mind-fucking me, or I was missing some things. I decided to keep doing what I was doing, clam up and keep fishing.

“Whyd you killh him?” I asked Skinny, looking him dead in the eyes. “Trace. He wad a civilian, a nobody.”

“You liked him,” Skinny said.

I nodded. “Yeah, he was okay. Why killh him and keep me? Why?”

Skinny looked genuinely pained for a second and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It was not supposed to go down that way,” he said. “Someone on the extraction team screwed the pooch, got a little overenthusiastic and dropped Trace. We'd already interrogated him about Berman and had pretty much written him off. It was sloppy and bad form. You're right.”

Fat seemed not to be too happy with Skinny's line of discussion with me. He resumed brooding and pacing in the corner. But I saw what angle Skinny was working here, and it was brilliant. Establish trust, demonstrate honesty, and share information, just enough to keep me going but not enough to give me the full picture.

These two cops were not just pulled out of a hat; they were both experts in their arenas. Fat in breaking my body and Skinny in hacking my mind.

“Why did you have him with you at the ritual site?” Skinny asked. “What did he know?”

“I thin' the real question is whyd yourth man killed him,” I said. “I'd look to yourth own house, firs', pal. That wasn't an accident, id was an off-the-books hit.”

The muscle in the left side of Skinny's jaw twitched.

“Your ass is about to be disappeared,” Skinny said. “Now, why did you kill Berman?”

“I'm ready to disappear now,” I said.

“Ballsy little prick,” Fat muttered to Skinny. “Want me to bounce him around a little bit more? See if he gets more helpful?”

I looked up at Fat. He was panting, but he actually looked healthier after our session. There were all kinds of things I could say. They would all get me killed or in a wheelchair, turned into a vegetable, breathing through a machine. Sometimes you have to listen to your survival instincts and not be a fool.

I smiled through bloody teeth and shredded lips. “Thad wha' youh and yourh boyfrien' call fordplay, Salad Barh?” I said to Fat. I heard Skinny laugh.

I don't remember anything after that, until the Tombs.

*   *   *

The second worst thing about being beaten to within an inch of your life by professionals is that after it's all over, you have the time to stiffen up. Time for your back to become a fused steel rod, for your head to feel like it's full of gravel, for your skin to feel tight and numb over the brutal topography of bruises and split skin. The worst thing, of course, is getting the shit kicked out of you in the first place.

They call the Manhattan Detention Center “the Tombs” for good reason. In the caves of crumbling concrete, between curtains of steel, it's easy to feel lost to time, to life, to daylight—a thing of dust, frozen pain, aborted from the memory of the world. Prison is Hell's waiting room.

On the way to my new home, they paraded me through the general population. Imagine walls six stories high, made of screaming, hungry faces and steel. It rained down on me; I was baptized in shit, blood, puke, moonshine, and cum from my new neighbors. The guards just smiled. They knew I was headed for the special cells.

I sat in my dark cell in the deepest bowels of the prison and felt the beating I got at the precinct house stiffen me up real good. Welcome to the rest of your life.

I was unsure how long I had been out. I had been drugged, I felt that much and, like any effective drug designed to incapacitate you, it played hell with my sense of time. My head buzzed, and I was dizzy, and my mouth was dry. The puncture wounds and burn marks from the Taser's barbs in my chest were scabbed over and healing. The looked like they had been treated. That gave me a rough idea: I had been in here for at least a few days.

My new world consisted of a six-by-nine cell. Facing the corridor were steel bars with an electronic sliding door of bars built in. On the back wall was a cot bolted to the floor, a thin, slightly moldy old mattress, an army blanket, and a plastic hospital-style pillow. A sink with a square of polished steel for a mirror bolted to the wall, a stainless steel toilet with no seat. When I used it, I pissed bright red blood.

I tried to focus my energies and see if I could perceive any enchantments on the bars or locks, or any kind of scrying, but I was too broken, too weak, and still too drugged to make anything happen. I tried to cry, but my eyes were too swollen and raw from bruises to summon tears. I groaned and rolled over on the cot, falling into a deep narcotic darkness—a land of no dreams. If there was mercy in this universe, I would die in my sleep, but my last waking thought was that I knew there was no mercy, and even if there were, I was the last soul on earth deserving of it.

 

TWELVE

Sleep was a knotted, broken thing. Nightmares of the beatings Fat had given me, Trace's head exploding and showering his brain meat on me. Restraints, the smell of rubbing alcohol, and questions droned in my ear under surgical lights. ECT sessions at Weston, Boj's sunken skull of a face. Slorzack staring at me from the video, killing the video with a stare. Static. Tangled, wet sheets, awake.

I woke in my cell to guards over me, guns pointed at my face. Men in white coats were holding me down and injecting me with hypodermics. I tried to fight, but I was made of pain and stone.

They departed, and I fell back to sleep. It was hard to keep my eyes focused; my brain was slippery. Whatever they were planning to do to me, it could wait till after a good nap.

I awoke later; time had no meaning anymore. My face itched, and I scratched it. I had a beard now. I sat up in bed, and there was no pain, but there was a powerful, gnawing hunger in my gut. I was starving, and my mouth tasted like a diseased raccoon had taken up residence in it.

I stood and walked to the mirror over the sink, again amazed that there was no pain, no stiffness. I twisted on the faucet and water sputtered out. I knelt and drank great greedy gulps of the cold, silver liquid. It was the best water I had ever tasted, and I drank until I couldn't drink any more. I straightened and regarded myself in the mirror. I had a full beard now and my hair had grown at least a few inches. For a second, I thought they had kept me drugged and under for weeks, maybe a month, but then I touched the bloodstains on my pillow and mattress. Some of them were still damp.

I went back to the bunk and sat down, waiting, craving food.

“Hey, hey man,” a voice called to me from the darkness of the other side of the corridor of cells. “You okay, brother?”

“Surprisingly, yes.”

“Dude, you grew that beard crazy fast,” the voice said again. “They brought you in yesterday, and you were clean shaven, and beat to hell.”

“Yesterday?” I said. “Thanks. My time sense is kinda fucked-up with no windows or clock and the drugs and all. So I've only been down here a day?”

“Yeah,” he said. A horrible voice inside me whispered that this could all be an Illuminati psyop designed to feed me false information and screw even more with my brain. I wasn't quite that paranoid yet; for example, I had drunk the water and shoved down the thought that it was most likely dosed with chemicals. If I lost myself to that level of crazy already, then I was as good as dead. “Yeah, man,” the voice continued. “We get three meals a day—that's part of how I have been keeping track.”

“Good, I'm starving,” I said. “When's food?”

The guy laughed. “You slept through breakfast, so lunch should be coming soon.”

“Great,” I said. I felt so much better, I felt like pacing the cage, running laps. I didn't understand what was happening inside me. To pass out in so much pain and so tired and sore and wake up feeling brand-new, it was exciting and frightening all at the same time. I knew they were doing something to me, inside me, but at the same time I felt like I was in my twenties again.

“I'd tell you my name, but they are listening in,” I said to my friend in the shadows. “You can call me Crowley, if you like.”

“Cool,” he said. “Like the Ozzie song. They already know who I am, so I don't give a shit. My name is Darren, Darren Mack. Nice to meet you, man.”

“Likewise,” I said. “Don't take this the wrong way, Darren, but … are you real?”

He laughed. “Yeah, they do kinda play with your head, man. But no, I'm real, bro.”

“Good,” I said. “How long you been in here?”

“Well,” Darren said, “the protests were in October, and if we go by the clock of the belly and count each three meals as roughly a day, then … I'd say … about five years.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Five years? Alone?”

“Mmmmhhhmm,” Darren said. “I kind of thought I'd lost it when you showed up, maybe I was finally hallucinating, so I started some shit with a guard to see if this was real or if it was just me going batshit. He fucked me up pretty good, so I got my answer. Totally worth it, by the way.”

I laughed, and so did Darren. I got off the bunk and knelt by the iron bars and the door, examining the lock. I closed my eyes and felt the power flow through my bone and nerve staircase. The defensive enchantments glowed and danced like live current. The place was warded against my kind of trouble. Given a lot of time and tools, I might be able to unravel the defenses, but then where exactly would I go? I was out of the world, in the bowels of one of the greatest prisons on earth. In a cell block that could be designated “the George Orwell Wing.”

“Hey,” Darren called out, “what you doing, Crowley?”

“Sussing out the locks,” I said. “They are pretty thorough.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I gave up on breaking out of here a long time ago.”

“You said something about protests,” I said. “What happened?”

“Times Square,” he said. “It was a huge protest in October—that would have been … 2011,” he said. There was a long pause, and I knew he was doing the calculus of imprisonment, reviewing all the birthdays he had missed, wondering if loved ones were alive or dead, searching for him, or if they had forgotten him. Missed chances, missed loves, life eaten up by the sharp maw of time, eaten and gone. I remained silent.

“Yeah, so I was part of a group, we went after Citi's mainframe.”

“You a gray hat?” I asked.

“Hells yeah,” he said. “Damn good one too. Just not good enough. They busted me after I put some stuff up on their Web site.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “They did not drop you in the sphincter of the universe over some spray paint manifesto on a corporation's home page.”

I heard Darren chuckle. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess it was a tiny-weeny bit more than that. I coordinated the cyber attacks against the IMF during those months. Sent all those documents to Wikileaks. They busted me. Had a whole G.I. Joe black helicopter assault team come get me in the dead of night. Been here ever since waiting for my due process.”

He laughed again. I was amazed by how human a sound it was, laughter in the heart of the labyrinth. Pissing in the eye of the Minotaur.

“You,” I said, “you are Fawkes? The Fawkes?”

Laughter again. “Yeah,” he said. “Guilty. Did Wikileaks ever get that stuff out?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said, “about Wikileaks…”

I spent the time till our jailers brought us lunch catching Darren up on the news of the last few years. I have to admit, by the time the guards rolled up with the carts with the Styrofoam boxes containing our food, I was dizzy and groggy from low blood sugar. I could usually go days without eating and be cool. They had done something to me, were still doing it, but I didn't care. I wanted food more than answers.

A detail of SWAT myrmidons showed up at the same time, in full combat gear. One of the riot cops pointed at me.

“No time for lunch, asshole, you got a date at the precinct house.”

And away did I go. As they marched me out, I saw Darren. The kid in the cell across the hall from me, the scourge of the Secret Masters, was maybe twenty-five, tops; he had a full brown beard, long hair, and a hell of a shiner. He was dressed in filthy street clothes. His shirt had a complex circuit board design on it. He gave me the peace sign as he grabbed a second Styrofoam lunch box.