We walk through a labyrinth of passageways, our footsteps echoing on the floor. Marines in fatigues nod at us as we pass. There’s an elevator ride down, then we exit into a small room overlooking the cargo hold of the vessel.
It’s a vast space. Three stories of steel-enforced walls the length of a football field. Metal shipping containers fill the main part of the floor, painted on the top and sides with a letter and a number in white.
“She’s in C-9,” says Grayson, pointing to a windowless red metal container.
“I’ll kill you for this.”
“Man, you know I don’t call the shots. You start talking about making someone an asset, wheels start to turn.”
“Why did you wait almost four bloody days to tell me where you were keeping her?”
“Standard operating procedure. Most people cave during the intake interview. The ones who pass that have to be isolated without food or water for seventy-two hours to see if that’ll break them. Which it almost always does.”
“Without food or water?”
He turns to me with a half smile. “You’re focusing on the wrong shit, here, Dec. She’s legit. Fucking hard core. She didn’t even wobble.”
“I could’ve told you that, you bloody wanker.”
He chuckles. “She broke Cliff’s nose on her way in. Took Aquinas down with a kick to the kneecap during her interview, too. The deputy director is impressed.”
He picks up the receiver of a phone hanging on the wall and presses a number. “Discharge on C-9. Paperwork’s been processed.” He listens a moment, then says, “Copy that,” and hangs up.
He turns to me. “It’s gonna be a while. They’ll clean her up, debrief her, and give her something to eat. After that, she’s all yours.”
I look out over the graveyard of shipping containers with a feeling like a hundred pounds of sandbags are on my chest. “She’ll never forgive me for this.”
“Yeah, she will.”
He sounds confident. I shoot him a querying look. He smiles.
“No woman backs a man like she did you unless it’s true love, brother. Just give her some space when you get her home. She’ll get over it.”
I mutter, “Enough with the ‘brother’ shite,” but what I’m really thinking about are the two words he said right before that one.
One thing’s for sure. If she doesn’t love me, I’ll find out fast.
The minute she buries a knife in my chest.
37
Sloane
I’m asleep when the door to my cage opens.
“Miss Keller. Follow me, please.”
A woman stands in the doorway. I can’t see her face. She’s just a dark figure backlit by light so bright, it makes me wince.
Sitting up on the thin mattress on the cold steel floor that passes for my bed, I raise a hand to shade my eyes against the glare. “Follow you where?”
My voice is a rasp. Dry and cracked, like my lips and throat. These bastards haven’t given me any water.
“You’re being discharged.” She steps away, leaving the door open.
Discharged? Maybe that’s a government term for executed.
I debate with myself for a minute about whether or not to just go back to sleep. If they’re going to kill me, they should have to come in here to do it. Why should I make it easier for them?
But nobody rushes in with a gun. No evil doctor with a syringe full of poison creeps in, leering. So curiosity eventually wins. I stand, holding my hands out for balance when the room starts to spin.
I haven’t been without food this long since fat camp. I’m weak and dizzy. My stomach is gnawing on itself. I have a new empathy for supermodels, who probably feel like this all the time.
I shuffle out of the shipping container, past the big plastic bucket I’ve been using as a toilet because otherwise I’d have to pee on the floor. Aside from the mattress, bucket, and the black eye of a camera on the ceiling, the space is empty. There are no mirrors, no lights, no television, no furniture, no shower, no sink. They didn’t even give me a pillow.
I knew guys in college dorms who lived like this, but I like things a little more luxurious.
The soldier who told me I’m being discharged waits patiently for me a few yards away, standing in the narrow opening between two tall rows of identical shipping containers. She’s dressed in fatigues and combat boots. Her brown hair is wound into a tidy bun at her nape. She’s holding a clipboard.
“Are you the welcome committee? Because, boy, do I have some complaints to lodge with you. This place is a dump.”
“Compared to my last assignment, it’s a palace.”
I scoff. “Really? Where were you, Guantanamo?”
“Yes. Follow me, please.” She turns and walks away.
Some people have no sense of humor.
I follow her past dozens of containers identical to the one I was thrown in. Most are eerily silent, but from within maybe five or six comes the sound of music. Though the walls of the containers are made of thick steel, the music isn’t muffled. It’s so loud, it thumps.
It’s the Meow Mix commercial theme song, a mind-numbing chorus of meow-meow-MEOW-meow performed by a singing cat set to a ragtime piano score.
I’m glad they didn’t subject me to that. I definitely would’ve cracked.
The woman stops in front of a metal door. She enters an impossibly long code into a keypad on the wall, and the door unlocks. She pushes it open, stands back, and gestures for me to go inside.
“Is this where you keep the gas showers and the ovens?”
Without a trace of emotion, she says, “This is the United States. There are no gas showers. We kill people in civilized ways.”
When I arch my brows, she says, “By raising them on high fructose corn syrup and fast food.”
I think I’m starting to like this lady.
“Amen, sister.” I walk past her into a long, narrow passageway lined on both sides with closed doors.
“We’ll be going into number six. It’s just down here, on the right.”
She passes me, walking briskly to the door numbered six. Without waiting for me, she opens the door and disappears inside.
Okay. I’m game. I walk into the room and am hit with the mouthwatering scent of bacon.
I knew it. Now the real torture starts.
But I could be wrong. This room is very different from the one I left. It has comfy-looking chairs and a sofa on one side, and a long table draped in linens on the other. It’s a mini buffet, with platters of food, both cold and hot.
There’s also a first aid station with a blood pressure machine, a glass cabinet full of medical supplies, and—ominously—a defibrillator, one of those electrical devices that give jolts of electricity to restart a stopped heart.
The soldier indicates a chair in front of the first aid station that she wants me to sit in. I oblige her, fighting my instinct to lunge for the bacon. She takes my blood pressure, then my temperature, then opens a small fridge and hands me a bottle of cold water.
I’m too weak to twist off the plastic cap, so she does it for me.
“Small sips, or you’ll throw it right back up because you’re dehydrated. Your electrolytes are imbalanced enough as it is. I don’t want you passing out on me.”