Underground Airlines(99)

We arrived, forty-five minutes outside of Indianapolis, at the only kind of place that is forty-five minutes outside of Indianapolis: a cornfield, empty and endless. I saw it out the tiny rear windows of the van. The van turned down a tiny gravel spit of a road, and we bounced along it deeper and deeper into the corn until we pulled up outside a white tent, erected in the middle of a dirt circle between two corn rows.

Bridge killed the engine, came around, and opened the back of the van. Dr. Cormer in his mask got out, and I got out behind him, and the three of us walked from the van into the tent, through that big Indiana darkness. The rain had stopped and the moon was out, a flat, tarnished coin. Stars scattered like pinprick wounds. The white tent glowed dully in the moonlight.

Inside was a table covered in white paper, surrounded by surgical lights. A generator chugged in the corner, powering the lights and a squat silver machine, no bigger than a dorm-room refrigerator.

“If you would remove your shirt and your undershirt, please.”

It was the first this doctor, this ghost, had said, and by old instinct I tried to get a read on his accent, tried to find the man inside his voice. Nothing came.

“Lie down, please, on your stomach.” Neutral voice. Empty. Something beautiful in that nothingness, something pure. “Yes,” I said. “Okay.”

I lay down and heard the machine humming to life, and I saw Bridge with my half-closed eyes, shifting from foot to foot. I heard the pin in my back, calling out, protesting.

Four and a half minutes. I counted them down. A minute of preparation, some sort of gel being spread across my back, cool and clammy, like Vaseline. A flat disk placed halfway up my back, then moved, in small circles, up and up; I heard it beeping, one beep every two seconds. Listening. Up and up the ladder of my spine, by two-second intervals. Beep, beep, beep.

Bridge watching from his corner, brow furrowed, frankly fascinated. My body trembled. Dr. Cormer moved his disk more slowly, then there was one long beep, and then a sudden sharp pinch as something was inserted into my flesh. I heard the doctor murmur, “Okay, there. There we are.” I thought of Martha, sweet Martha, pulling free the bullet from my shoulder—There! Got the little f*cker—and I smiled. Bridge saw me smiling, and he looked troubled, wondering maybe how I could be smiling, as he stepped forward, got down on his haunches.

“Dr. Cormer, are we clear?”

“We are clear,” said the doctor in his voiceless voice. “We are engaged but not yet withdrawing.”

“Now, Victor,” Bridge whispered, “I need you to give me the package.”

“What?”

“The envelope, Victor. We will need to see it right now and test its contents. You will need to wait.”

“What—why?”

“We need to make sure this is real before we let you go.”

“You said—”

“I know what I said, and I apologize that it was necessary to mislead you. But it’s important that everyone is pleased before we complete the surgery. This is the only way.”

“Mr. Bridge,” I said.

“What?”

“It could have been…”

“What?”

“Now,” I said, “now,” and Bridge said, “What?” but I was talking to the microphone, and the explosion was loud and immediate, a huge noise and a rush of wind from the cornfield as the tent flew away and the dirt patch was flooded with lights.

Bridge was armed, of course, a nice government handgun, and so, it turned out, was Dr. Cormer. Both of them were armed, but they weren’t armed like Mr. Maris was armed. A tank of a man, black boots and camouflage pants and shirt, holding a shotgun and backlit by truck headlights, throwing forward his tall shadow while he shouted, “Drop your weapons; drop them; drop them now!”

Bridge tossed his gun so it landed in the dirt at Maris’s feet. Maris fast-walked with his shotgun, paramilitary style, and stepped on Bridge’s gun, pushing it into the soil. I was still down on the mat, still attached to the machine—the needle in my back, the long thin cord stretched across my back. Not yet free.

Dr. Cormer, the man with no face, wasn’t ready to give up. Maris shouted “Drop it” again, but he stood defiant, surely in violation of his training, and Maris, with a burst from the shotgun, sent him spinning backwards into the dirt.

“No!” I cried from the table. “No!”

Maris said nothing. He moved swiftly around the perimeter, searching for more adversaries. Father Barton emerged from the front seat of the truck and walked calmly toward Mr. Bridge, holding in one hand the hilt of a long curved knife.

I rolled myself off the table to the place where Dr. Cormer was slumped at my feet.

I had to save him. That was all I could think of. I had to fix him so he could finish fixing me. I felt under his collar and found the edge of the mask and peeled it off. A kind-looking young black man with a pencil-thin mustache.

But he was dead. The government technician was stone dead, laid out beside me, as dead in the dirt as Cook had been on the motel carpet. Father Barton, with his left hand, held the precious envelope clutched to his chest; he held the knife in his right. Bridge was on his knees with his hands behind his back, the barrels of Maris’s shotgun against the back of his head.

Barton knelt beside him, exactly like a consoling priest, though his words were a low, cruel murmur. “I do not know the extent of your crimes, sir, but I know how they are to be purged. They are to be purged in blood. They are—no,” he said sharply and seized Bridge’s face. Seized his eyelids, pulled at them. “No, you may not close your eyes. You may not.”