Clay shrugged, wordlessly. What could he tell them? He knew nothing. He showed as much in his face, as a way to answer.
“These young men and boys will kill you, Clay. That’s a fact. They almost did it before, but we were able to stop them. So, we’re supposed to find out just who you are and if you have any value to them.”
Clay shook his head, slowly. Strangely, the effects of the hypothermia had worn off, but the world he’d stepped into seemed to have shifted. It was as if the beating—perhaps it was the adrenaline—had served to heighten his awareness and his thought processes were back to normal, but the world had gone sideways in the bargain. He felt like he’d walked off the edge of the earth. He believed that Mikail wanted him to tell him something but he had absolutely nothing to tell him. He was a guy who had hiked out of the city and into the mountains and seemed to have wandered into a world not of his making. The only thing he knew for sure was that his only way out of this was going to be to convince someone, somewhere, to let him leave.
“Well,” he said, after some thought, “I’m Clay… I told you that. I am a hiker and a traveler that got lost in the storm. The second storm, not the first one. I was fine after the first one. I’m from upstate but I’ve been living in Brooklyn for the last six years. I got out of New York because of the storm, and because I just want to get home. I’m trying to get home to Ithaca. Then the nor’easter hit. I got completely turned around. I was unprepared. I made stupid decisions. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I stumbled into this place. One whole section of the external fence is down, by the way. That’s how I got in. Anyway, I stumbled into this place about half dead and frozen and I was able to plead with that security guard named Todd to let me in to warm up and dry out. That’s all that I know, but it’s the truth.”
“Yes,” Mikail said, “well, the truth shall set you free, I suppose.” He stood up and looked at the others.
Vladimir, the tall one, speaking for the first time, said, “Stumbling into this place was probably a bad deal for you. Might have been better if you died out there in the cold.”
“Maybe,” Clay said.
“No maybe,” Vladimir said. “This place eats people. It doesn’t spit them back out.”
Sergei interrupted. “What Vladimir Nikitich is saying, Clay, is that you need to work with us. Think of something to give them. If they don’t need you, you’re dead. Right now they’re probably at the cafeteria ripping it apart for packets of ketchup or rotten fruit. But they won’t be down there forever.”
Mikail picked up where Sergei left off, almost without missing a beat. “Just so you know, those guys aren’t geniuses. They’re not all idiots, but most of them are. They’re in here for being sociopaths, psychopaths, and rejects, your social castaways. Warwick has those things just like any other place in the world. Maybe even more so. You ever been in jail, Clay?”
“Yeah. Nothing too serious, though. You call this place Warwick?” Clay asked.
“That’s where you are. Not the prison here. The prison is part of Warwick. Warwick is the whole damned town.”
“What do you mean the whole town?”
“Clay,” Mikail continued, “Focus. What you’ve stumbled into is too big to get in your head, so you’re just going to have to get your head into what’s going on right here and right now. Everything else… you don’t need to know. What you need to know is that here in a bit—maybe in an hour, maybe in five minutes—those guys that wrecked this place and killed Todd are going to come back here, and you will need to give them something. We don’t have time to mess around.”
“Give them something? What can I give them? I don’t even know what’s going on,” Clay said in something approaching despair.
“If you’re working for someone, Clay—CIA, some faceless government agency, a joint task force, anything like that—you’ll need to tell them. That’ll keep you alive. You’ll have value to them then.”
“But none of those things are true!”
“Do you want to live, Clay?” Mikail asked, with an intense look on his face that seemed to mask a motive that Clay was not able to discern.
“Of course.”
“Then what are you really doing here?”
“I told you.”
“You told me nothing!” Mikail shouted angrily, before thinking better of his outburst and lowering his voice, “I’m trying to help you, Clay. That’s all. No one else needs to die. Who are you?”
That was it. Right there. That was the moment when Clay knew. Looking Mikail right in the face, he knew… and Mikail knew too.
“I’m just a guy who’s had a very bad day. I obviously ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m just trying to get home.”
Mikail nodded at the other two and they slowly moved toward the door, but before Mikail turned to leave, he knelt down and touched Clay on the shoulder, “I don’t think you’re going to make it home, Clay, not if I can’t tell those guys something other than that you’re just a tourist who stumbled into prison. That story doesn’t fly, so just think about it.”
With that, the three young men shuffled out of the Tank and the door closed softy behind them and Clay heard the lock turn and engage and the light clicked off bathing him once again in inky blackness.
Outside, somewhere, the blizzard still raged, if Mikail was to be believed.
Inside, the questions swirled through Clay like a tempest in their fury. How would a prisoner have even known all of this, Clay wondered, especially one who was an outcast among outcasts? If Mikail was under suspicion as a spy, how would he have known their motives, and his own role in carrying them out?
Clay sat on the floor in the dark and went over the conversation in his mind, trying to grasp at any straw that would help him solve the puzzle in a way that would allow him to give the three visitors the benefit of the doubt. He could find none.
He didn’t know what kind of place this was, this place called Warwick, but he knew that whatever storm was raging outside was nothing compared to the storm raging in here. Further, he knew that if he was so foolish as to allow himself to think for a moment that the three young men were being straight with him, he would certainly end up dead. Perhaps it was the weirdness of the encounter with others who, like him, were aliens in their own homeland, or maybe not that, exactly, since he’d experienced several such encounters over the course of the last few days. But it was something along those lines. He’d grown sensitive to the nuances of such meetings. Out of all of his uncertainties and confusions, Clay was absolutely sure of one thing…
Mikail had the keys.
These three young men were not innocent victims of circumstance, like he was. They were not “political prisoners” either. In fact, he was certain that these three were the ones really running this place.
Saturday
He didn’t know when he fell asleep, but he figured it must have been way after midnight. He was so exhausted, though, that he eventually slipped into a very deep and fitless sleep. It was the kind of sleep that only attends to a man whose waking life is falling apart. When he awoke he could not remember tossing and turning at all.
Clay’s eyes (or was it “eye”, singular?) opened slowly when he heard a commotion in the hallway outside his cell. He sat up in his bunk and it took him some time to get his bearings on where he was. The dull aches in his body reminded him that things had not gone well the night before and his right hand found the lump near his eye and probed it, noting that he still didn’t have any feeling there at all. It was dark in the room, so he didn’t know if he’d regained any sight in that eye. A thought crept into his mind and slowly formed until it joined with memory and he realized that somewhere out there, according to Mikail, the prisoners were supposed to be deciding his fate. Apparently they were in no hurry.