‘For behold the days are coming in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the paps which never gave suck!’
This prospect seemed to please Pinkley for he started shaking with laughter. Klein could think of other inmates he would rather have seen at that particular moment. Pinkley caught sight of Klein blundering towards the watchtower and trotted along beside him. He bent over and screamed in Klein’s face.
‘The fetters of the law have been removed. On the wings of the righteous shall the spirit of Jesus soar amongst us. The foul and iniquitous shall be plunged into the pit of everlasting fire.’
Whether Pinkley saw Klein soaring on the wings of the righteous or embarked on the long plunge to Hell, Klein never found out. A look of stark terror wiped the fervour from Pinkley’s face as he looked over his shoulder in time to see his very own favourite-right-hand-in-all-the-world clamp around his throat and lift him off the floor. With a squeal of panic Pinkley vanished abruptly from Klein’s vision and Klein staggered on. His right arm was about to part company with his shoulder. His thighs were wobbling beneath him. He reeled across the central atrium and sagged, heaving, against the ruined watchtower.
After the claustrophobia of the corridor the forty-foot dome curving high overhead was a marvel, a thing of beauty. He caught his breath. Abbott emerged from the darker darkness of General Purposes.
‘Where’s Pinkley?’ asked Klein.
‘I put him back in the chapel,’ said Abbott.
‘Thanks, Henry,’ said Klein.
Abbott pointed at the body on Klein’s shoulder. ‘You should have let me carry him,’ he said. ‘He’s heavy.’
Klein smiled stiffly. A ludicrous macho pride prevented him from handing Crawford over. He could no longer feel his arm anyway.
‘You’re a good man to know, Henry.’ He nodded across the atrium. ‘We’re going into B. Stick by me, in case you run into any more trouble.’
Abbott nodded solemnly. Klein hefted Crawford and lurched the last fifty metres across the the floor of the atrium. As he went he told Henry to grab two pieces of wood from the wreckage on the ground. As Klein hobbled through the main sallyport of B block the stink of burnt gasoline filled his lungs and made his ragged breathing more painful than it already was. His feet slid in a greasy residue clinging to the walkway. Here and there flashlights wove about amongst the empty tiers and men called out to each other as they ransacked the cells for drugs, booze, cigarettes and cash. Klein leaned against the glass window of the guards’ office. His machismo was reaching its limit, as sooner or later it always did. In another sixty seconds he would have to let Crawford fall to the floor.
‘Go in the office, Henry,’ said Klein, ‘see if you can’t find us a flashlight.’
‘I already have one,’ said Abbott.
‘What?’ said Klein.
Abbott reached into his pants and pulled out a four-battery heavy duty flash encased in black rubber.
‘I always carry one,’ he said.
Of course, Abbott worked the sewers. He was used to wandering in the dark. ‘Find me an empty cell,’ said Klein.
Abbott walked ahead shining the flash into the cells of ground tier. The first two contained dead bodies, men incinerated by the initial, fiercest, blast of the fire. As they reached the third there was a movement within. The light beam fell on khaki clothing. Then a bruised face, blinking, a hand raised to shield the eyes. Two faces. A third. Three guards. The guards were huddled at the back of the cell.
Klein said, ‘Open the door, Henry.’
Abbott slid back the steel door. Klein shuffled sideways into the cell. Almost weeping with relief he bent forward and dumped Crawford onto the bunk. Crawford opened his eyes and screamed. As the blood returned to Klein’s shoulder, and with it a mass of agonising sensation, he felt like joining him.
‘Fucks goin’ on, man?’
The voice came from the walkway outside and Klein turned. One of Agry’s crew, a white trash musclehead with tattoos named Colt Greely, stood peering through the bars. In his hand was a sharpened screwdriver. As far as Klein knew Greely had never killed anyone. Klein massaged his aching shoulder. His right hand scintillated with pins and needles. He couldn’t move the fingers. Greely glanced nervously at Abbott, towering silently beside him. Klein reasoned that anyone calling himself ‘Colt’ had to be an asshole, and a gullible one at that.
‘Henry!’ snapped Klein. ‘Keep cool now!’
While Abbott didn’t move a muscle, and indeed had shown no signs of doing so, Colt Greely leapt a yard to one side, his eyes glued to Abbott. He called to Klein.
‘What the fuck, man? Don’t do that!’
‘Sorry, Colt,’ said Klein. ‘Abbott just killed four guys in the chapel with his bare hands. Once he flips I can’t stop him.’
‘Jesus.’
Greely gaped in horror at the flat, impassive face staring down at him. The shiv in his hand trembled unconvincingly. Greely looked at the shiv as if the hand holding it didn’t belong to him. He hastily shoved the weapon into his belt.
‘Abbott’s taken a shine to Crawford here. He made me carry the fat bastard halfway across the fucking joint.’ Klein nodded towards the khaki shirts cowering in the toilet. They too were staring at Abbott with naked terror. ‘He wants these jokers to take care of him.’
‘Shit,’ said Greely. ‘Why not?’ He smiled nervously at Abbott. Abbott just kept staring at him. ‘Hell, Crawford’s one of us ain’t he?’
‘Go get him some smack,’ said Klein.
‘Smack?’ said Greely stupidly.
‘Heroin,’ said Klein. ‘You know? Not coke. The best you can get, brown if possible. Right, Henry?’
Abbott stared at Greely without responding.
Greely bobbed his head gratefully. ‘You got it, Doc.’ He disappeared.
Klein turned to the guards. Burroughs, Sandoval, Grierson.
‘Grierson,’ said Klein.
While Klein made Crawford comfortable on the bunk and reapplied the pressure dressing to the wound Grierson stepped forward and watched. Klein took the two broken planks from Abbott and placed them front and back of Crawford’s leg. The movement caused Crawford to shudder with pain.
‘What I want you to do,’ said Klein, ‘is tear a sheet up and bind this splint in place, like this. Let him drink what water he wants. When Greely brings the smack let him snort a little at a time, for the pain.’
‘I got it,’ said Grierson.
‘It won’t harm your chances any with the crew.’
‘I guess.’ Grierson stole a glance over Klein’s shoulder at Abbott. ‘He really kill those guys?’
Klein didn’t see any harm in stoking Abbott’s reputation. Henry didn’t seem to mind.
‘Gruesome,’ said Klein. ‘Be glad you didn’t see it. What’s Grauerholz up to?’
‘He came through about thirty minutes since with sixteen or twenty other guys, coked and ripped to Jesus from what I could see. We thought our number was up but they went on past.’ Grierson paused. ‘Greely said Agry sent ’em to kill all the faggots in the infirmary.’ He glanced nervously at Abbott. ‘I mean the Aids guys.’
‘What’s happened to the blacks?’
‘They took a beating. If Vic Galindez hadn’t opened the cages most of ’em’d be dead. Agry’s men are still huntin’ in armed gangs, full of piss and vinegar. I guess the niggers are hiding out down below, what’s left of ’em, every man for himself. Lot of ’em still locked down in C with the Mexicans.’
Like the white cons the guards used ‘Mexican’ as a deliberately inaccurate and therefore insulting term for the Latinos, the vast majority of whom had been born here in Texas.
‘What’s Hobbes gonna do?’ asked Klein.
‘Unless they start killin’ hostages he’ll wait until the booze and the drugs run out and they start cryin’ for their mamas. I reckon maybe three days.’
‘Or maybe ten,’ growled Burroughs sourly.
‘
Will he stop Grauerholz assaulting the infirmary?’
Grierson frowned. ‘I wouldn’t count on it, but Hobbes is kind of an unpredictable guy.’
‘What about Cletus?’
‘I can predict him. He wouldn’t let one of our guys twist a fucken ankle to save that bunch of losers.’ He glanced at Abbott again. ‘I mean . . .’
‘Yeah,’ said Klein. He began to wonder why he hadn’t hired Abbott to walk around behind him for the whole three years he’d been here. ‘Mind this leg till we get back.’
He stood up and walked to the door. He flexed his right-hand fingers. Abbott handed him the flashlight.
‘I live in the dark,’ said Abbott. ‘You can’t see as good as I can.’
For a second Klein thought he heard something in Abbott’s voice he hadn’t heard before but he wasn’t sure what. Emotion, maybe. He looked up at him. The eyes were as pure and empty as ever. He took the flash. I live in the dark. The voice still echoed in the back of Klein’s mind. He shook it off.
‘Let’s go.’
‘Klein?’
Klein turned back to Grierson.
‘’Bout five minutes before you showed up the Tolsons and some other guys came through here. They was carrying that damned iron girder thing they used to smash into the watchtower.’ Grierson saw the look on Klein’s face. ‘I thought you oughta know.’
Klein pushed past Henry Abbott and started jogging down the walkway. The light of the flash wobbled across the floor in front of him. He caught a glimpse of a face, a moustache, pressed between the bars of a door.
‘Klein!’
Klein ignored the voice. The face was too vague to register. He heard it call again, behind him. Too many fuckers wanted his attention. And Grauerholz had the battering ram, upon which Klein wished more sorely than ever he had honourably broken a leg. When Earl Coley and all his patients were dead, Klein wondered, how would he feel? Coley would’ve told him to walk away and forget it. Would Coley do the same for himself? The hospital building was old and Coley had spent nearly twenty years inside its walls. If there was any place in there a man could hide Coley would know it. Yeah. Coley would know it and he would survive. He would let Grauerholz and his bunch kill whoever they wanted because he knew he couldn’t stop them, and he would remember all the advice he’d given Klein and save himself because it wasn’t his fucking business. Then he and Klein could mourn the dead together, and tell each other they’d done the only thing they could do by turning their backs. As Klein jogged towards the rear sallyport of B block its looming arch revealed more and more of the yard beyond. A thick, fast-congealing dread arose in his throat and coated his tongue with the taste of shame. He stopped running and walked the last few yards to the sallyport. He heard a distant noise: raucous voices raised in unison punctuated by a regular percussive thud. Between the upper edge of the gateway arch and the granite horizon of the great encircling perimeter wall he could see a band of clear night sky flecked with stars. He stuck the flashlight in his pants and walked down the ramp to stand in the doorway.
Across the yard a group of men were clustered about the foot of the infirmary steps. On the steps themselves were six men. Between them they held the red iron girder and swung it in short heavy arcs against the double doors of the infirmary. The thirty-foot length of the girder and the angle of the steps made the work awkward but Klein didn’t doubt they would get there. The crowd were chanting something guttural and short in time with the regular thuds of the battering ram. Some of the men on the edge of the crowd staggered drunkenly in small aimless circles. One of them fell to his hands and knees and threw up. When he’d finished he crawled forward through the vomit. Someone pointed at him and yelled. The crawler, oblivious, moved into the path of the battering ram. The bevelled rear end of the girder hit the crawler in the side of the head with a crunch that Klein imagined but couldn’t hear. The crawler fell face down and didn’t move. The ramming squad did not break their rhythm. None of the mob bothered to check the crawler out. Some doubled over with laughter.
The lights were on in the hospital and at the barred second-floor windows Klein could see the silhouettes of people within watching down on the girder and its grim work. The shame inside him dissipated into an appalling sadness that was somehow even worse. There really was, after all, nothing he could do. If there was no reasoning with Agry, Grauerholz and his mob were beyond any communication at all short of napalm. Grauerholz made Nev Agry look like Oscar Wilde. And Klein had humiliated him in the mess hall by taking his gun. Listening to their primitive chanting Klein realised that you could have offered them the world, and all that was in it, and they would still have preferred to carry on with what they were doing right now, battering down a door in pursuit of blood.
A sudden and terminal exhaustion wiped his legs from under him and Klein sank to his knees and sat back on his heels. A knowledge he had never felt before, icy and silent of all emotion, filled him: if he could have killed these people right now, he would’ve done it. He would have killed them all. He would’ve gassed them and burned them and shelled them. He would’ve buried them alive in a single unmarked grave. He would’ve slaughtered them en masse, denying any one of them the dignity of an individual death, and he would’ve expunged from the face of the earth all records of their existence. He would’ve accorded them no rights, no due process, no court of appeal. He would’ve prescribed their extinction as readily as he would an antibiotic to extinguish bacteria. Many of these men he had spoken to, some he had laughed with, others he had treated. He had recognised them as fellow men. Fellow men. Some of those they were now bent on murdering had been their cell mates a few weeks before, had shat in the same latrine, masturbated over the same porn mags, swopped and read each other’s letters from home. Now they planned to kill them in their beds.
Klein’s mind reeled with incomprehension. It was a phenomenon, something to be observed without true understanding, a virus, a cancer, an exploding star, for there was no understanding, and there was no forgiveness. There could be no forgiveness nor even punishment, for punishment implied understanding and justice and reparation and none of these things could be for these creatures who once were fellow men. There could only be eradication, cold and without vengeance, for a phenomenon such as this could not meaningfully require vengeance any more than an earthquake required an act of vengeance upon the earth. They were no longer men. He would not recognise them as such. They were not evil men or mad men or misunderstood men. They were not greedy men or angry men or violent men. They had forsaken that which made them men of any stripe to become instead biological particles in a bizarre natural phenomenon. And Klein wanted to eradicate them and knew that he could not. He felt huge hands grip his shoulder and lift him to his feet. He heard the breath of the giant in his ear.
‘They must be stopped,’ said Henry Abbott.
Again some subtle change in Abbott’s voice called out from the fringes of the delirium fogging Klein’s mind. He ignored it.
‘They must be eradicated,’ said Klein.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Abbott. ‘Stopping them would be enough. There’s a difference.’
Klein turned, shrugging off the hands. For once Abbott’s pedantic, plodding thought processes irritated him. ‘What difference is that, Henry?’
‘It’s the stopping them that counts. Not the killing. It’s a question of logical and moral priority.’
‘Jesus Christ, it must be time for your next injection.’
As soon as the words left his mouth a high-voltage current of raw shame blew the circuits in Klein’s gut. He was reduced to the cruelty of taunting a friend for a terrible affliction. He had turned himself into scum. He grabbed the front of Abbott’s shirt and looked up into the long gaunt face.
‘Henry, forgive me for that. I’m sorry. I’m a piece of shit. I . . . ’
Anything else was bullshit. His throat dried up. He rested his forehead against Abbott’s broad chest. He wished Abbott would wrap his massive arms ar
ound him and crush him to death.
‘Fellow men,’ said Abbott.
For a moment Klein thought he’d mis-heard him. He felt eerie. He swallowed. Without raising his head he said, ‘What was that?’
‘Fellow men,’ repeated Abbott.
Klein looked up at him. In the flat eyes there was a glimmer of light. A tiny glimmer, as of the most distant stars that you can only see if you don’t look directly at them. Klein had never seen it before. Then he realised that he had: on that very first night when he had entered Abbott’s filthy cell.
Abbott said, ‘I think we should go in there.’
Klein glanced over his shoulder and realised that Abbott meant the infirmary.
‘I’ll take you,’ said Abbott. ‘Through The Green River.’
A chill ran down Klein’s spine and he didn’t know why. Through The Green River. That voice change. As if, for once, Abbott knew. Klein stepped back and looked at him. The glimmer had gone. He couldn’t see it. Klein’s heart swelled and he felt tears in his eyes. Fuck, man, he told himself, you’d better get your shit together, because if you ask him to this big guy will go the very last bloodstained fucking yard. He’ll wade through Grauerholz’s mob and he’ll take them out in handfuls. But they will kill him. And you have a duty.
A duty. If he couldn’t help the guys in the hospital he could at least stop Henry getting himself killed, for Henry was a crazy man talking crazy talk. And Klein wasn’t. Klein was just an asshole losing his cool. That was the difference. Klein wiped his face on his sleeve. He smiled.
‘No, Henry. If I thought we had even a thousand to one shot I’d take it, but we don’t. There’s too many of them.’
‘They are many and we are few,’ said Abbott.
‘That’s right.’
‘But only one amongst us knows the River.’
More crazy talk. He had to get Abbott away from there before the big man lost control and got himself slaughtered for nothing.
‘We all know the River, Henry, and if we don’t get out of here it’s gonna drown us. Come on.’