The Condemned Read online




  The Condemned

  David Jack Bell

  FIRST DIGITAL EDITION

  The Condemned © 2010, 2008 by David Jack Bell

  Cover Artwork © 2010, 2008 by Dave Kendall

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DARKSIDE DIGITAL

  P.O. Box 338

  North Webster, IN 46555

  www.darkside-digital.com

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Special thanks go to Greg F. Gifune, a remarkable editor whose faith in my work has made all the difference. I'd also like to thank Shane Ryan Staley, Dave Kendall and everyone at Delirium for making this happen. Thanks to Molly for taking the manuscript to the beach and answering all of my questions. Some great teachers have helped me along the way: Tom and Elizabeth Monteleone, F. Paul Wilson, David Morrell, Brian Keene, Brock Clarke, Eric Goodman, “Crazy” Jim Reiss, and everyone at the Borderlands Boot Camps. Finally, thanks to my friends and family, especially Mike and Penny McCaffrey and my parents, Herbert and Catherine Bell.

  For Molly, who always believed

  And in memory of Andy Radcliffe (1975-2002)

  The lights are much brighter there.

  You can forget all your troubles,

  forget all your cares.

  So go downtown,

  things’ll be great when you’re

  Downtown

  no finer place for sure

  Downtown

  everything’s waiting for you.

  ~ Petula Clark

  ONE

  The sound of shattering glass, a window breaking nearby in the house, brought me out of a deep, troubled sleep.

  The baby’s room, I thought. Someone’s in the baby’s room.

  I threw the covers back and moved cautiously down the hallway. The house was cold, causing the skin on my bare arms and legs to break out in gooseflesh. I stopped outside my daughter’s room and listened.

  The night was quiet, the only sound the rush of blood in my ears.

  I looked through the door, into the baby’s room. In the indistinct light, I saw a figure standing at my daughter’s crib, its back to me. I didn’t speak, didn’t scream. Something about the figure’s posture—his gray work clothes, his hair—looked familiar, almost comforting. I hesitated. The shattered window gaped, the night wind fluttering the white curtains in the dark like a hovering ghost.

  Finally, I stepped into the room.

  The man at the crib slowly turned, revealing his face.

  “Vince,” I said. “How…How did you get back?”

  Vince didn’t respond, and I saw this was not the Vince I once knew, my work partner and best friend. This Vince had sallow, sunken cheeks, and his eyes looked back at me with a complete absence of recognition. They were lifeless and empty, like the blank eyes of a dead fish.

  The wind picked up, fluttering the curtains higher, and bringing to my nostrils an odor of decay, like rotting meat. It came from Vince, leaked out of his pores. I breathed through my mouth to keep from gagging.

  “That’s my baby girl you’ve got there,” I said, indicating the tiny bundle in Vince’s arms. He had taken her from the crib, and she lay in his grasp in the quiet room, seemingly at ease with the night’s disruptions. “She hasn’t done anything to you.”

  Vince shifted the baby in his arms, lifting her a little higher.

  “Why don’t you just let me take her?” I said. “You can do whatever you want to me, but don’t hurt Sophie. She’s not involved in any of this…”

  Vince shook his head, but the movement was more than simple refusal. It was defiance. He opened his mouth and showed his teeth the way a feral animal might warn off a threat to his food supply.

  “Vince, please…” I tried to move forward, to lunge for my daughter and save her life. But I couldn’t move. Rooted in place, my body refused to cooperate, and like a man stuck in concrete, I helplessly watched the nightmare unfold before my eyes. “Don’t!”

  Vince’s grimace turned to a triumphant smile.

  Teeth still bared, he bent to my child’s throat, and began to feed…

  * * *

  I sat bolt upright in bed.

  After days of lousy sleep, my nerves were frayed and jangling like a live wire. The clock on the bedside table read 6:27, three minutes before the alarm would ring. My legs were tangled in the sheets, binding my feet together in something like a burial shroud. I kicked and pulled at them, mostly freeing myself.

  “Jesus.”

  I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands, creating red and green starburst patterns on my retinas, but they didn’t replace the images I’d seen through the night. On those rare occasions when I managed to sleep, the nightmares came. For thirteen days straight, the same thing: I’d find myself back in the city, back among the dilapidated, empty buildings, the broken glass, the smell of urine…and Vince, always Vince, reaching out for me, calling my name. And me, frozen in place, unable to move, unable to speak, unable to help, even though I knew I had to. But now I’d dreamed of something new: our home being breeched, Vince in our daughter’s room, Sophie in danger. And still, I did nothing, could do nothing but stand there and watch helplessly.

  I reached over to the other side of the bed. “Nicole?” I whispered. Her side of the bed was empty and cold, her half of the covers thrown aside. “Nicole?” I said, louder.

  She never woke up before me unless the baby cried. And I’d have heard the baby crying. I dug out from under the sheets and staggered into the hallway. The door to Sophie’s room was open, the light on. Nauseous and scared, a hollow pit grew in the center of my gut like someone had scooped my core out.

  I went into the baby’s room and over to the crib. Empty. Just the yellow blanket and the silly stuffed ducky that Sophie slept with.

  I darted back to the hall and stopped, the carpet soft beneath my bare feet and the back of my T-shirt damp from night sweats.

  From the kitchen, noises. Dishes clattering, and then, faintly, the sound of Sophie’s chattering. Nonsense syllables repeated over and over again. I moved to the end of the hall and looked in the kitchen. Nicole stood at the sink, her back to me. Sophie, lost in her own world, sat in her high chair, playing with her spoon. The bright overhead light illuminated their simple morning routines.

  Behind me, the alarm clock kicked in, an insistent, annoying bleat, a call to begin the day. It sounded more like a warning. I went and turned it off.

  The first ordinary day of what I would come to call the rest of my life had begun.

  * * *

  “You’re really going to do this, aren’t you?”

  Nicole stood at our kitchen counter, the sleeves of her bathrobe pushed up past her elbows. Her eyes were puffy from sleep, and her hair went in about twenty different directions. But her eyes bore in on me, nearly pinning me to the wall.

  “It looks that way, doesn’t it?” I said.

  She turned away, back to the dishes that had piled up in our sink. Her silence was like a slap in the face, and when Sophie started banging her spoon against the tray of her high chair, I welcomed the distraction.

  “Hi, Sophie girl,” I said. “Hi, baby.”

  “Da-da. Da-da. Da-da.”

  She started scattering Cheerios everywhere, her arm movements jerky and haphazard.

  I sat down at the table. Nicole banged a few dishes around in the sink. It sounded like she was overhauling a transmission.

  “I gave the last of the milk to the baby,” she said. She offered no apology, made no mention of anything else to eat or drink.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I probably couldn’t eat anyway.”

  “How did you sleep last night?” Nicole said.

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  “For someone who sleeps okay, you thrash around a lot.” She dried her hands on a dish towel decorated with giant strawberries, a wedding present from some forgotten relative. “You woke me up twice, either mumbling in your sleep or moving around.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  The TV played in the corner of our kitchen. The morning news anchor said something about troop movements in Asia then read the latest body count. I didn’t hear the number. There were a lot of things I’d learned to ignore. That was one of them.

  Nicole tossed the towel away and looked at me. Her eyes showed concern. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she said.

  “I’ll be fine when I’m back at work today.”

  I started feeding Sophie Cheerios. She gummed them like an old man, her eyes as wide as dinner plates.

  Nicole came over and scooped her out of the high chair. Sophie made a little noise that indicated surprise.

  “She needs her bath now,” she said. “I didn’t do it last night.” Nicole stopped across the room. Sophie grabbed a fistful of Nicole’s tangled hair and twisted it in her little hand. Nicole shifted, moved the baby higher on her hip. “You don’t have to do this, Jett,” she said. “I’ve done everything but beg, but I’ll beg if it’ll make a difference.”

  I considered this woman I had loved for five years. She had given me everything and asked for so little. If I could only just bend in her direction for a change, give something back…but I couldn’t. Not about work. “It won’t make a difference,” I said.

  Nicole bit her lip. Time hadn’t touched her, and motherhood had only
made her more beautiful. She was strong, stronger than me. She wasn’t going to cry. She shifted the baby’s weight again. “Say bye-bye to Daddy,” she said.

  Sophie looked at me. She opened and closed her fist, the eleven-month-old version of a wave. Then Nicole turned and they went down the hall and out of sight, leaving me at the table with my thoughts and my stubbornness. “Nicole,” I called after them. I didn’t know if she could hear me, so I raised my voice in the quiet morning. “Make sure you lock the doors today. Lock all the doors. Please?”

  I’d like to say I was doing it all for them—returning to work, trying to protect them—but there was so much more to it than that.

  So much more.

  * * *

  I worked for the city. Never mind which one. By that point, they were all pretty much starting to look the same—like the remains of a once great civilization. And I often wondered what future archeologists would find when they dug us up. No pyramids, no pharaohs. No aqueducts or abacuses, just steel and glass and garbage. Lots and lots of garbage.

  I used to say I worked for a dying city, but that was too generous. My city was already dead. It belched out its last productive breath back during the Industrial Revolution, back when we made things besides bombs and planes and tanks. We made those too—don’t get me wrong—but only when we needed them, only in times of crisis. Eventually it became a way of life, the only way we knew how to survive.

  And who was I to judge anyone? I was a creature of habit like everybody else.

  I punched the clock like a rat in a maze, then waited for my piece of cheese.

  * * *

  We worked out of a wrecking yard on the west side of town, about ten minutes from where I grew up and went to grade school. The wrecking yard hadn’t always been there. When I was a kid, there was a hospital. St George’s, named after a guy who killed dragons. We could sure have used his help.

  I parked in the employee lot, turned the car off and waited. It was a beautiful day. The skies were clear, the sun bright. Up above was the promise of warmer weather, the hope for new life springing from the old.

  But down below, on the ground where we all walked, the sun reflected off twisted chrome and broken glass. The compacter ran both day and night, sending thick black smoke to the sky, covering the sun in a black scrim and filling our lungs with choking diesel.

  I didn’t mind going back and doing the work. I could do the work better than anybody alive. I feared the pity, the pathetic looks. The head-shaking and whispers behind my back. I didn’t want to be anybody’s charity case, the guy whose partner and best friend died in the line of duty.

  But like I said, I’m a creature of habit. What else was I going to do with my life? What else could I do? And didn’t I owe it to Vince to soldier on, to go back to work and keep doing what we were so good at?

  So I willed myself out of the car, and I walked toward the shed with my head down, hoping no one saw me or talked to me. And that became my strategy for that first day: head down, keep moving and don’t look back.

  * * *

  We called it the shed, but that word wasn’t really right.

  We operated out of a cinder-block warehouse large enough to house twenty wreckers, a dispatch center and an office for our supervisor, Ned. It was all city property now, but when I was a kid, there were houses there and trees and wide streets kids used to ride their bikes and play ball on.

  I went inside and smelled the familiar odors of oil and rubber. On the far side of the shed, mechanics tinkered with the rigs, and they didn’t notice me. I clung to the false and silly hope that I could slink through the entire day without seeing another soul.

  I moved to my left, toward our small break room and the time clock where I had to punch in. My false hope died there. When I walked in I saw about ten of my co-workers, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. The room turned silent as a grave when they saw my face. It felt almost as bad as one of my nightmares.

  I waited for someone to say something, and when they didn’t, I went to the clock, found my card and punched it. When I turned back around, the faces still stared at me.

  We weren’t soldiers or cops or firemen. We didn’t have a long tradition or honor codes to draw upon. But no one had ever died in our line of work, and while everyone said the right things at Vince’s funeral, I didn’t know how they’d respond to me today, when I came back to work and tried to be one of them again.

  Bobby Crawford stepped toward me. A big guy with a walrus mustache and knuckles the size of walnuts, he never said much to me. He never said much to anybody. But he was respected. Well respected. And if he told me to walk, I’d walk. “Jett,” he said. He nodded at me.

  “Bobby.”

  He studied me for a moment like he didn’t know what to do. At first I thought he was pissed, but it took me that moment to realize that the guy just didn’t know what to say to me. He stuck out his meaty right hand and nodded at me again. I reached out and shook it, his big hand swallowing mine and grinding my knuckles together. “Welcome back,” he said. Then he pulled me toward him a little and gave me a clap on the shoulder with his other hand. It nearly knocked the wind out of me, but I didn’t mind. Then the other guys were all around me, and I shook so many hands I felt like I was running for office.

  And for a moment, I forgot everything that had gone before, the nightmares and the fear. For a long moment, the burden lifted.

  I was back.

  * * *

  After all that, I went to see Ned.

  He had a small cluttered office with windows that allowed him to sit at his desk and watch what went on in the garage. When he saw me at the door, he stood up. “Jett. Hey. Well, look who’s here.”

  Ned was at least a hundred pounds overweight, and his skin was bleached out and pale. He looked like he was made of dough. His hair was almost gone on the top of his head, but he combed it over the bald spot in a vain and failed attempt to fool people. When I shook his hand, his grip was limp and cold, like holding a wet washcloth.

  “I just wanted to check in,” I said.

  “Yeah. Sure. Have a seat.” He pointed to a chair and we both sat down. I could tell Ned didn’t know what to say to me. He had caution etched onto his face, a look that said he thought I was going to jump up and bite him. Ned was a bureaucrat through and through, a pencil-pusher and a by-the-book city employee. He didn’t know how to deal with a real live human being. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said.

  “I’m glad to be back.”

  He nodded. “Nicole okay? The baby?”

  “Good. Good.”

  He picked up a paperclip and started bending it out of shape. He kept his eyes on the clip when he spoke next. “You know, you can take more time if you want it. City regs allow you more time.”

  “I figured you’d need me.”

  He dropped the paperclip. “I do, I do. Absolutely.” He ran his hand across his forehead. “We’re way behind here. Demand for scrap is up, and we haven’t been able to get enough. Guys are scared to go out there since…since you and Vince ran into that trouble.”

  Calling Vince’s death “trouble” struck me as the understatement of the century. But I let it go.

  “I’m here to do my job again,” I said.

  Now Ned smiled. I imagined that the little chart in his mind, the one that tracked our actual production versus our goals, started ticking in the direction he wanted it to go. “You’re the best, you know that. You were always the best.” When Ned smiled, a dimple appeared in his fat cheek. “I think it will be good for morale to see you back. I think the guys are really going to get a lift from this. Most of them.”

  “Most of them?”

  “You know…”

  “McGruder,” I said.

  Ned nodded. “You know how he is. He’s difficult.”

  “He’s a prick.”

  “But you don’t have to worry about him. Just ignore him. You won’t have to go anywhere near him.”

  “About that,” I said. “I wanted to ask you a favor.”

  The good cheer drained from Ned’s face. There was no word a bureaucrat hated to hear more than favor. “What do you want?” He looked stricken, like I had a gun pressed against his temple.

  “I want to work alone,” I said.

  Ned started shaking his head before I had even finished my sentence. “No, no way.” His head kept shaking, and the little flap of skin beneath his chin shook along with it. “No can do. Nobody goes out alone anymore. Nobody. Not after what happened out there to you guys.”