Somebody said, “Look! Look! Another one. Red this time.”
I turned in time to see the ball of magnesium die and fade to earth. Murmuring from the crowd.
I said, “Well I’m going to bed. If it’s a rescue party, throw a rock up at the window or something. And save me a Caddie.”
By the time I made it back down to the basement, twenty-seven goddamned people were packed in the boiler room, spilling out into the hallway. A buzzing, murmuring crowd of people who, even though they had been stripped of all possessions when they entered quarantine, somehow all had luggage. Backpacks and garbage bags and various random shit they thought they would need. The people were knocking around and slamming doors and giggling and asking questions and basically conducting the least stealthy prison escape in history. The reds were asleep, most of them anyway, but it would take exactly one of them to discover the massive conga line of people piling into the boiler room to blow the whole operation.
TJ was so pissed he looked like steam was about to start whistling from his asshole. Hope was trying to calm him down, trying to work through the logistics.
“What about knee pads, huh?” he said, wrapping electrician’s tape around the caps of the two jugs of the binary chemical “mouthwash.” “I suppose we came up with knee pads for two or three dozen people in the last half hour?”
“No, but we have duct tape,” said Hope, reassuringly. “All people got to do is take off their shoes and tape them to their knees. You know, like Dorf.”
“Like who?”
“It works, all right? Katie and I did it and crawled around the floor, from one end of the hall and back again. It’s going to be fine.”
“Well, then that’s one of our nine hundred problems solved.” To me he said, “If we was smart, we would send one guy through by himself to make sure the path is even fuckin’ open. Or that Carlos isn’t waitin’ at the other end. They’d crawl through with the flashlight and signal back that the coast was clear, so if there’s a problem we don’t got to turn this whole ridiculous human centipede around. But we can’t fuckin’ do that because we’d have this huge noisy crowd of people standin’ out here for an hour, waitin’ to get caught.”
“It’s only gonna last until somebody else stumbles across the tunnel anyway.”
He shook his head. “Racist Ed is stayin’ behind, once the last person is through he’s gonna stack up some of them cardboard boxes in front of the hole. I already cleaned up the bricks on the floor, so hopefully that’ll throw off Owen’s dumb ass.”
TJ pulled the flashlight from his pocket and said to me, “I’m gonna let you pick. One of us will take point. The other stays behind and goes in last. The point man is the first to get to freedom, but he’s also gonna be the first to meet any bad news that might be waitin’ up there. Last guy has the easiest escape should things go wrong, but also has to spend the most time back here waitin’ for the stragglers to work through their bullshit. Guess it’s a matter of how optimistic you are.”
“No, it’s not. You’re in better shape than me, we don’t need the whole train to be waiting for me to catch my breath. You go first.”
“And you seen enough horror movies to know the black dude don’t ever make it to the end.”
“We all appreciate your sacrifice, TJ.”
“Fuck you.”
He laughed. So did I.
TJ tied a bandana around his head, Tupac-style, and wedged the flashlight in it above his ear, so it’d work like a coal miner’s headlamp. He clicked it, shook my hand, and climbed into the tunnel.
I said, “See you on the other side, TJ.”
Hope followed him in. Then Corey. It was on.
What followed was thirty excruciating minutes as one by one, the escapees slowly, clumsily and noisily clambered into the ragged hole in the brick wall. I went around the boiler room, telling people to quiet down, explaining the knee shoe process, and waiting for a red jumpsuit to throw open the boiler room door and ask us what the hell we were doing.
One by one, they went through. The crowd in the boiler room got more and more sparse. As we drew closer and closer to the “holy shit this is actually going to work” mark, the knot in my stomach pulled itself tighter and tighter.
So, so close.
Then there were only five people left. That worked its way down to two, an older woman who in my opinion had no business attempting the crawl (what would I do if we got halfway through and she told me she needed to go back?) and a suave-looking dude who looked like Marc Anthony, the Latin pop singer. Racist Ed was standing guard in the hall and I was supposed to knock twice on the door once I saw the last person go through. He’d wait a few minutes, then come in and cover up the tunnel.
The last pair of shoes disappeared into the bricks and the boiler room had finally disgorged its contents into the tunnel. Was TJ out the other end by now? Surely the fact that we hadn’t heard anything was a good sign.
Surely.
Hurrying, I knocked lightly on the hallway door and quickly jogged back across the room to the tunnel. I put my hands on the edge of the hole—
Whoa.
Dark in here. I couldn’t see the last guy who went in, and there was no sign of TJ’s bobbing flashlight up ahead. All I could see was maybe the first ten feet of muddy red brick before it was swallowed by the darkness. In the sputtering candlelight of the boiler room, it looked like a throat. I could faintly hear the hard breathing and scraping of the crawling refugees ahead, the sound fading in the distance.
I had a flashback to the dark hallway in the dungeon when I was heading for the elevator. The wet dragging sound.
Walt.
Stop that. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. Thirty people had climbed right into that tunnel ahead of me, men and women from age eighteen to early sixties. I’d be damned if I couldn’t do it.
My legs would not move.
Brick and mud. Cockroaches skittering along every surface. Spiderwebs spanned the gaps between rusty pipes. It stank of mold and mildew and rot. It stank of the grave. Water dripped from the cracks in the bricks overhead.
The shuffling of knee shoes was completely gone now, not even the echoes reached me. I had stayed behind too long. It was just me and the utter silence and the utter darkness. I remembered a video I had once watched of a wasp outside of a beehive, patiently beheading each bee that emerged from the hole. It accumulated a pile of hundreds of heads before it was done. I imagined a huge wasplike creature on the other end of this tunnel, silently and efficiently ripping the heads off of each muddy, exhausted person who emerged from the other side, tossing them into a pile.
Stop it.
I put my hands on either side of the tunnel. I said, out loud, “Here we go.”
But my legs did not move.
I started to whisper words of encouragement to myself, when a massive hand landed on my shoulder and spun me around.
Owen said, “And where do you think you’re going, bro?”
Owen pinned me against the wall. Racist Ed strolled past me and started dutifully stacking boxes in front of the tunnel entrance, which made me think maybe he didn’t fully understand the plan from the beginning.
Owen said, “Dude, you are a piece of work, you know that? What is that, a tunnel?”
“Let go of me.”
“Where does it go?”
“We don’t know. Out. Out there somewhere. We got no idea what’s at the end of it but we decided whatever it was, was better than being stuck in here with you.”
“How many people went in?”
“Fuck you.”
He slammed me against the wall. “How many?”
“About … thirty.”
“Thirty. And you had no idea what’s at the other end. Nobody scouted it first? Nobody crawled through to make sure it was even open at the other end?”
“We—we didn’t have time. I—”
“Right, you didn’t have time because you were afraid of being discovered. Because you had to keep this your little secret.”
Racist Ed said casually, “Well, I know where it goes. It runs right out to the old asylum.”
We both turned toward him.
I said, “You mean the—”
I was interrupted by echoes of gunshots, cracking through the tunnel.
Gunshots, and screams. Faintly, from the other end, I heard an unfamiliar voice scream, “THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE WALLS! THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE FUCKING WALLS!”
The Massacre at Ffirth Asylum
Amy was bouncing in her seat, muttering, “Come on, come on, come on.”
The gun cam was in the old cafeteria, trained on the door to the hallway. The other two guys—Flashlight Guy and Donnie—ran past. The camera swung around to find Donnie helping Flashlight climb up through the basement window.
To Fredo, Amy said, “They’re almost out! Get ready!”
It was taking forever. Flashlight guy was stuck in the window for some reason, his legs kicking but not making any forward progress. Josh kept swinging his gun/camera back to the door to see if they were being pursued.
Shrieking.
Not screaming—this was the kind of noise babies make, when they don’t know how to put their pain into words. It was Flashlight Guy. His legs were thrashing in the window. Something had him from the other end. Josh and Donnie grabbed his legs, trying to pull him back into the classroom. They pulled and pulled, and whatever had Flashlight from the other end finally let go. Of his legs, anyway.
Josh and Donnie found themselves on the floor of the classroom, with the lower half of Flashlight Guy twitching in their lap. Everything from the waist up was still laying in the basement window. If Josh and Donnie hadn’t had earmuffs on, they could have heard Amy scream from the RV.
Josh scrambled to his feet. He trained the gun cam on the window, and the twitching and now-silent pile of meat that was Flashlight’s torso. It appeared that something was ripping away at his guts from below, something coming out of the grass, like it had emerged from the earth itself and torn him in half. Josh shot at it, the Roman candle shells blowing Flashlight’s guts apart and sending fire streaking into the night beyond the window.