He sighs. “You’re just all flint and leather, aren’t you? I bet you gave Perry a hell of a headache.”
“I thought you didn’t want to talk about Perry.”
“Is that how he died? Did you bitch him to death?”
“Shut up,” she snaps, the whites of her eyes expanding, and her gun arm rises.
Abram puts his hands up, startled by her response. “All right, all right.”
She jabs the flashlight at the door. “Let’s go.”
“Going.”
He takes Sprout’s hand and disappears into the shadows. Julie follows him, Nora and I follow her, and behind us, M grunts and curses his way through the doorway. The flashlight’s beam diffuses against the concrete, dimly illuminating a staircase so steep it’s almost a ladder.
“Daddy,” Sprout says, “are we going home?”
“This place wasn’t our home, little weed,” Abram says. “We don’t have a home.”
“When do we get to have one?”
Silence.
“Can we build one?”
Silence.
MY PRISON.
The floor of my cell is an impressionist painting of stains, and since food is only served in the mess hall, these can only be bodily fluids. I feel them under my palms when I push myself up, greasy and sticky, and when I lower myself down, I can smell them: salty and meaty and sickly sweet, a putrid cologne of human depravity.
“How many are you up to?” Paul says from the cell across the hall.
“Not counting.”
“Then how do you know when you’re done?”
My arms burn and tremble. My stomach feels taut enough to snap. Sweat pours from my face, adding fresh brine to the soup on the floor, which I force myself to inhale, savoring the raw disgust. This is what we are, I repeat to myself with each breath. Blood and piss and come.
“I just know.”
Scrub us away. Bleach us white.
“I’m glad you’re with us, R—,” Paul says, smiling. “It takes hard men to believe the truth. It takes strong warriors to fight God’s war.”
But I’m not thinking about God’s war. I’m thinking about mine. I want to punish my weak flesh. I want to become strong so I can hurt whoever deserves hurting. These simple exercises won’t make me a warrior, but the men in the yard might. War criminals, militia chiefs, rogue assassins, so amused by the boldness of this skinny country kid that they’re only too happy to teach me a few tricks. My body bears the marks of their generosity. My face is purple, my knuckles are red, and my muscles were burning before I even began this set, but I’m not done yet.
“They preached hard doctrine at the Fellowship,” Paul is saying from somewhere far away, “but even there, no one had the balls to really live it. To take it all the way to its conclusion like they do in the Middle East. We have to be willing to burn for the truth.”
How I know I’m done is when I find myself facedown on the filthy floor, my mutinous muscles refusing all orders, my mind empty of everything and surrounded by clouds of glittering blackness. I use my last remaining calorie to roll onto my back so I can watch the colors spin in my vision.
“These bars can’t hold a fire,” Paul says, his voice filling with inspired fervor as he watches my suffering. “When we get out of here, we’re going to round up the others and finish our work.”
The lock clicks; the door slides open. A scarred, leathery face appears above me, then the door slams shut. My eyes remain fixed on a rare ceiling stain. Blood. Must have been quite a spray. Pencil to the jugular, perhaps.
“Welcome, brother,” Paul calls to the new prisoner.
The man glares down at me for a few seconds, his bald, craggy visage floating in the stars like a cruel god. “The fuck are you doing?” he says, and kicks me in the ribs. “Get off the damn floor. This is my cell now.”
I stand up. I sit on my cot and look at the man. Big. Muscular. Covered in tattoos. The usual snakes and skulls and eight balls, the clichés of a man who thinks darkness is crime and violence, not the void that lurks behind them.
“Shit,” he says, glancing from me to Paul. “You’re fuckin’ kids. What are you, eighteen?”
“Seventeen,” I reply.
“National Guard ain’t worrying about petty shit anymore. What’d punks like you do to get in here?”
“We burned down Helena.”
He looks at me, nonplussed.
“And Boise and Denver. They caught us halfway through Salt Lake City.”
The man looks at Paul. Paul smiles.
“We’ll finish that one later,” Paul says.
I lie back on my cot, folding my lifeless arms over my chest, returning my attention to the blood on the ceiling. Dark red like a fading sunset.
? ? ?
The basement door is unlocked and sits half open, and cold subterranean breezes whistle through the gap. My past no longer waits for dreams. It plays out in front of my open eyes, projected onto my waking life with such hideous clarity that I can hardly believe my friends don’t see it. But if they did, surely I would know it. Surely everything would change if they learned what’s inside this quiet, shrugging man.