“Bogdan,” we both said at the same time. A moment later, the lights went out. Paul in his white suit, the white couches, the unconscious guard, the train — everything was swallowed by pitch black. I felt the train slowing, rolling to a gentle stop.
In those moments of complete and utter darkness thoughts of Iris suddenly swarmed me. Only then did I realize that I’d been forcing myself not to think of her. Somehow it was easier to do when I could divert my attention to something else. But in the dark, it was just me and my fears, and no one there to help.
It was hopeless. I had deluded myself into optimism with our progress, when in reality we hadn’t even started yet. Bogdan did his thing, but how could I possibly rescue anybody? Iris was dead, or taken away somewhere else, and I and Paul and probably even Brome would be dead soon enough. Dead, alone in complete darkness forever, because if there was no real God, then there was nothing afterwards. Just blindness. Maybe Dr. Wright had the truth of it. Maybe I was crazy and pitiful. Maybe someone was playing with my head. I’m too young, too successful to die, I suddenly thought.
It was Paul’s voice again that came to my rescue. “Damn, this thing is sturdy.” His delighted words jumped at me out of the dark.
“What?”
“The helmet. I can see like it’s daylight. Freaky stuff. You got a scared mug, by the way. Afraid of the dark? I know this guy, he’s like forty, a decorated ex-marine and sleeps with a light on at night. Terrified of darkness. He’s on some pill, too. He says the pills help a lot, but he still keeps the light on out of habit. So I told him he needed a different pill for that now.”
“You are one crazy son of a bitch,” I told him gratefully.
“You better watch it. I got the magic helmet.”
“All right, I’ll keep the payback for the dent in my head for later.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “So. Someone blew up the electricity. What do we do now?”
“Walk. The station can’t be more than a couple of hundred yards away by now.”
“What if the lights come back on when we’re still on tracks? Aside from the current, we’ll have an unmanned can of whoop-ass chasing us at fifty miles an hour. Did you notice how tight the pipe was? There are no sidewalks.”
“What I noticed was there aren’t any tracks,” I told the darkness, which my eyes could not adjust to. “The rail is on top of the train. We’re hanging from the ceiling. But you’re right about the other part. You have to go alone.”
“Why me?”
“You got the magic helmet. I got the doc’s face.”
“Then how are you going to see the controls you need to operate before I get squished?”
“The lights will be on.”
“Damn it,” he grumbled. I heard him move around. “You know, I coulda played the doctor just as well.”
“Don’t think I could do the part with the hostage, though,” I replied. I could hear his grin.
“That was good, wasn’t it?”
“Just like on TV.”
He chuckled. “So I bring a couple of guards back with me…”
“Right.”
“I hope they don’t have some secret handshake or something.”
The rest was a mumble, and then I heard a hissing sound of a door being opened. “At least this still works.”
“It’s a good omen,” I offered. He ignored it.
“It’s really narrow here, man. And there are reinforced beams I’ll have to really squeeze by. What do you suppose they do with the passengers when there’s an outage?”
I thought about it. He was right. With no sidewalks, they must have twenty-seven back-up systems for powering the trains. There was no way for him to make it walking even if it was only a hundred yards.
Just as I thought it, without a hint of a warning, the train was blindingly back. Talk about a bulb going off in one’s head. That particular one brought my hand up to my eyes so hard I felt my skin burning. But then I had to force my eyes to open, because during the split second in between, my blurry vision revealed Paul hanging halfway out the door.
“Paul!” I shouted and launched blindly towards him, groping for the nearest steel bar for support. “Get back.”
There was a gentle hum and the train jerked forward. I felt my hand close over the collar of Paul’s excruciatingly white suit, and I pulled him back into the car, my one open and watery eye noting a white reinforcing beam darting past an inch or two from his helmet’s visor.
Back on the floor I pushed him off and once again hid my eyes in the blissful reddish darkness of my palm.
“Magic helmet, man.” Paul was panting. “I swear, makes no difference inside the thing if it’s light or not. Did you see that? That beam almost took my head off.”
Little by little, I was able to remove the cover from my eyes.
“I saw some of it,” I said, sitting up.
“Maybe we should just start from plans B from now on? Or is it plan Bs?”
Yet again, there was no time for an answer. As I rose to my feet, I saw the darkened, tile-covered station, which looked like — although it had admittedly been a while since I’d seen one — a subway station in the city, only smaller. Two guards in white suits floated from left to right slower and slower outside the window. We were arriving.
Chapter Thirty-Three
As soon as they confirmed the radio was dead, Sono took half the squad up into the building, leaving him with Lietbarsky. Which was all right by him, even if Lietbarsky was an ex-cop. It was better to stay down there at the quiet train station with an ex-cop, than go chasing bombers in the company of bored, trigger-happy, pure-bred mercs. It seemed Lietbarsky shared the sentiment, although he probably wouldn’t be inviting his ex-mil co-worker to a donut-eating contest any time soon. Face hidden by helmet, Lietbarsky shrugged and walked away towards the guard lounge.
Fuck him, Pare thought. We don’t have to talk.
Four seconds later lights appeared in the tunnel, and then a train pulled in and rolled to a stop with a hiss. Inside were one of the guards and some guy in civvies. Lietbarsky returned and, having met Pare’s visored look, shrugged again.
“What the hell’s going on here?” the guard in the train called out when the doors slid open. Pare couldn’t tell by voice who it was, but that didn’t really surprise him. Most of them knew each other from the barracks, but mercs came in and out often, and assignments were shuffled constantly. Friendship was not encouraged. As if. Probably one of the ex-cops, Pare thought.
“Something popped. We don’t know,” Pare replied. He pointed with the barrel of his gun. “What’s this?”
“A cargo I’m dropping off. Didn’t the orders come in from WC?”
“The radio is dead,” Lietbarsky said. “No one’s allowed into the building until further notice.”
“Keep him here, then. I don’t care,” the guard motioned for the passenger to get off. “Go on, Doc. This is your new home.”
“Doc” didn’t seem happy. He was probably around fifty and looked like one of those guys who’d charge you five hundred bucks for looking into your mouth. Or worse, a shrink. Must have been a good one at that. He’d started getting on Pare’s nerves even before he stepped out on the platform.
“No. You keep him until Sono shows up,” Pare said. “Stay inside the train.”
“Sono in charge here? Listen, buddy,” the guard started. Buddy, Pare thought. A goddamn ex-cop, for sure. “My orders are to drop these fruits off and head back to Waukegan. I’m sure as peanuts not getting in trouble with WC because of you. All right? Now get your ass in here and unload this heavy bastard. That’s an order.”