“Coward…” he said again, but with less conviction. He was drenched and cold. The primitive furor that had possessed him was gone. As were the lights of the lamps behind him. He raised his head, still on the edge of the abyss, looking at an inexistent horizon. The world outside the Tank was a dark ocean, an impenetrable curtain that the rain, however insistent it could be, could not dissipate.
A weird thought came to his mind. Is there still something beyond this silo of steel and concrete planted in a corpse-drenched soil?
It was an interesting thought, but an inappropriate one. He had to go back in. Both because his duty not to stay outside the Tank without a good reason and because he seriously risked getting sick.
A last, childish look under his feet, then he went back inside and closed the green door with a pound thud.
But how did he open it?
With a key, of course. Whoever had gotten in had one. Someone with access to a copy and the terminal from which he had sent his pathetic threats in the past.
He holstered his Beretta, then took the keys out of his left pocket, making sure the small metal tetragram wouldn’t get caught in the thread of his pants. Once closing the Escape – no name could be more appropriate in that particular moment – Giovanni leant on it with his back. He needed a break. Even just a minute to catch his breath and calm down the chaos boiling in his head before the emergency light, which were now struggling, left him in the dark.
Had he really been about to die? To be unloaded? Or was it a bluff? It was impossible to say. He would report the following day. He would tell everything.The NMO would catch the person that tried to kill him. There was a wounded man in Camp 9. He no doubt left lots of traces.
He moved away from the cold, green door – beyond which the night went on, indifferent to his frustration – and started walking. The cold trails he had followed running outside the Shutter weren’t as knitted as before. He proceeded close to the wall on his left in order not to step on the blood that probably fell on the floor while the intruder ran away. If the wound was deep enough. Blood could give precious information on his persecutor’s identity.
But he would check the following day. It was impossible to investigate in that particular moment. Thinking about what happened, or what could have happened, nauseated him. An irresistible idea had carved a path in his brain: go to bed and disappear. Go off. Draw a red line on that day. That’s what he would do.
He struggled a bit trying to insert the apartment key into the lock. Once he was inside and had closed the door, the strong smells coming from the kitchen and the almost utter darkness disoriented so much he crashed into the coat hanger. His reflexes and some clumsy footwork helped him to avoid falling together with the wooden piece of furniture. Had he really fallen, he would probably just have stayed there on the ground for the rest of the night. He used his last energy to take off his shoes, water-and-sweat-drenched trousers and shirt, then threw them into the darkness. He heard the wet noise of his clothes together with something more massive. He remembered that his pistol and holster were still attached to his belt, but he lacked the will to take care of it. Let them stay there. It was fine with him.
He had to take the shower, but the emergency lamps were now nests of dying fireflies. Moving without damaging something or hurting himself was impossible. Night itself had seeped into the apartment through invisible pores in the walls.
He reached his bed, helped by the dim light coming from the window, and fell on it face first, with a groan. He felt so exhausted he couldn’t resist his worst thoughts, the ones his brain focused on when it felt his self-control slip away.
He imagined the intruder coming back to the Tank and into the apartment, pick up the Beretta, still abandoned among his wet clothes, aim it to his temple, pull the trigger, then put it in his hand to simulate suicide.
Everyone would think he couldn’t make it, the poor thing.
He couldn’t bear the Tank. He didn’t resist. He looked so strong, so…
He imagined all this while already floating, weightless, between wake and dream, and wasn’t surprised to think that if that really happened with him aware of it, maybe he wouldn’t raise a finger to stop him.
18 – Questions Without Answers
He woke up with a start at 5:43 A.M.. The voices had pulled him out of his dream. One was male, deep, grave, and one was female, polite and light.
Only a few seconds earlier Giovanni was still standing before the open Escape, facing a storm that, however violent, couldn’t move him. The landscape expanding under his eyes was terrifying, surreal. An infinite expanse of corpses, as far as the eye could see. The whole Camp 9 was filled with corpses, but not all were immobile, no. Some were trembling, here and there. Some were still breathing and tried escaping his unavoidable doom. Giovanni contemplated that apotheosis of pain and deaf, terrified, yet intimately sure he was the chosen one, the untouchable one, privileged. The Tank protected him from harm. It was his fortress, his whole life. Then perceived the vibration, a diffused tremor, accompanied by a sinister crackling.
It’s the universe’s foundations, he thought.
And in that moment the mass of corpses started moving, a waving, sinuous surface, arched by invisible underground protrusions. Giovanni tried to get away from the Escape’s doorstep, but the charm of that view had an immense, trampling power. He couldn’t step back, not even when the Tank started bending forward in a barely noticeable, yet unstoppable way. His hands were clenched around the green mental steps, he tried to shout, but the storm shove the shout right back into his throat. There was no hope for the Tank. The enormous circular structure was lost. And while Giovanni fell with it, all the bodies obscuring the land raised their arms to welcome him…
He opened his left eye and saw his wrist and watch. The right eye was buried in the pillow. In his head, the echo of the falling Tank still hadn’t gone silent, and so the scare.
He had no time to completely wake up, nor to get over the devastating effect of that morning nightmare, because a new sensory solicitation, way more real, needed his attention.
Two people were talking. There, in his apartment. A man and a woman. He didn’t understand what they were saying, but it was his duty to immediately get up and go deal with whatever it could be. It didn’t look like they were plotting something and he didn’t hear any signs of tension or threat. For what he could hear, they were in the kitchen.
A pink dim light got in from the window, the placid light of dawn rounding every corner and making it soft and relaxing. Giovanni sat on the edge of his bed, but the change in blood pressure made his head spin and the room rotated some degrees. He decided it would be helpful to close his eyes for a few seconds, keep his breathing under control and wait for the heart to get back to working correctly. But when he felt ready and about to get up to go find out who had gotten in his flat, he realized he was only wearing his underwear and socks. However anomalous the situation, it wasn’t appropriate to go check dressed like that with a woman in the room. Apart from the embarrassment, there was the possibility that they had been sent by the NMO: they weren’t hiding their presence and were maybe waiting for him to get up. But… at that time?
He quickly took a night-gown our of his wardrobe without worrying about the door creaking. He noticed a second of silence in the kitchen, then the voices started talking again. They probably heard him. Maybe the man said something funny, as the woman laughed before commenting herself.