Chapter 56 Bastian
BASTIAN
cold storage /kōld ?st?rij/: noun
The cruiser takes a left where it should go straight.
I notice it immediately. Fuck knows I picked up Aleksei enough times in our teen years to remember the way. I know the route to every precinct in Chicago. Central booking is east. County lockup is south. Federal detention requires a highway merge that we passed three miles ago.
We, on the other hand, are heading west. Toward the industrial district, the home of abandoned warehouses and empty lots where screams don’t carry.
“Wrong turn,” I say to the partition. “County’s the other direction.”
Neither cop responds.
I lean forward and scan what I can see of them through the cage divider. No name tags and no badge numbers visible. The one in the passenger seat has a tattoo peeking above his collar.
It looks a lot like Aleksei’s.
“Hey.” I knock my forehead against the partition to draw their attention. “I said you’re going the wrong way.”
The driver’s eyes find mine in the rearview mirror.
He smiles.
It’s the coldest expression I’ve ever seen on a human face—reptilian, empty, like something alien wearing a person suit. Then he reaches up and clicks off the dashboard camera.
Fuck.
The cruiser pulls into what used to be a meatpacking plant, judging by the smell. Even with a car window between me and it, the taint of old blood and rendered fat curdles my stomach.
The factory’s walls look like they’re as sick of the stench as I am. They’re sagging toward the ground, weary, worn, disgusted.
We stop and the cops come around to haul me out by my cuffed wrists. “Gentle” is not a term they’re familiar with. My knees scrape concrete and start to weep blood as they drag me through a loading bay.
The smell gets worse and worse as we go. Years of disuse haven’t erased it.
We descend a concrete stairwell into a basement that has no business existing in a place like this. It’s too new, too clean. The walls are freshly painted, the floor recently poured, the fixtures humming with electricity that shouldn’t be running to this dilapidated shithole.
Aleksei renovated this space for a specific purpose. No prizes for guessing what that purpose might be.
The cell they throw me into is barely ten feet square. A big, square drain sits in the center of the floor. Huge meathooks dangling from the ceiling gleam in the low light.
I’ve seen rooms like this before, back when I ran jobs for my brother.
I know exactly what those hooks are for.
The cops string me up to one of them, looping the chain of the cuffs over the hook. My shoulders scream as my weight settles, high enough that my feet barely graze the concrete. Then they leave without a word. The door clangs shut.
I hang there in the gloom, counting seconds and cataloging pains. The gunshot wound Aleksei gave me throbs its displeasure at this new arrangement. The rest of me isn’t much happier with it.
After a while, the door opens again.
Three men enter wearing black ski masks and surgical gloves, all skin covered so I can’t see tattoos or anything identifiable. They could be anyone. They set a canvas bag on a steel table in the corner and begin unpacking their tools.
“Where’s my brother?” I ask.
No response.
“What does Aleksei want?”
Nothing.
“At least tell me what this is about, you cowardly pieces of fucking shit. Have the balls to answer a goddamn question.”
The first man approaches with a pair of pliers. He still doesn’t speak. He simply grips my left hand, isolates my pinky finger, and gets to work.
I hold out for about four seconds before the screaming starts.
One pain fuses into the next. Scalpers, pliers, cattle prods—they’ve brought it all and they’re very, very good at what they do. I’m in writhing agony from head to toe. It doesn’t have a beginning or an end, a center or a limit. It’s just a great, unbroken wall of red, screaming horror.
But it can’t touch the heart of me.
Because the heart of me is somewhere else.
I’m in a kitchen. Our kitchen. Sunlight cascades through windows that don’t yet exist, warming hardwood floors that have not yet been dreamed up. The smell of coffee mingles with pancakes and syrup and cut grass wafting in through the screen door that leads to the backyard.
A child’s laughter rings out from somewhere I can’t see.
The sound is so happy, so bright, that it takes me a moment to realize the wetness on my face isn’t sweat or blood.
It’s tears I didn’t know I was crying.
CRKCKK.
I gasp back into the basement. One of the masked men is wiping something sticky and red off his gloves.
“Still with us, Mr. Hale?” he asks. First words any of them have spoken.
I don’t dignify it with a response. I close my eyes and go back.
The kitchen again. Eliana stands at the stove, her back to me, apron tied around her waist, humming something I recognize after a beat—that Russian lullaby my mother used to sing. Her hair is longer now, a chestnut waterfall down her back, laced with the faintest threads of silver.
We’ve grown old in this dream. We’ve had time.
“Daddy!”
A blur of motion barrels into my legs. I look down and see—
I see our child.
She has reddened hair like Eliana’s and blue eyes like mine. Her grin is pure mischief, pure joy, pure everything I never thought I deserved.
“Hey there, trouble,” I hear myself say. “What’s the damage report?”
“I found a frog!”
“Oh, did you now?”
“His name is Gerald,” she informs me, “and he lives in my pocket.”
Eliana turns from the stove, one eyebrow raised in that way she has. “We are not keeping a frog, sweetness.”
“But Mom—!”
“No, ma’am. frogs. No salamanders. No ‘beautiful beetles’ that turn out to be cockroaches. I will not be fooled twice, young lady.”
Our child’s lower lip trembles, melodramatic and brimming over with emotion like only bright-eyed little girls can be. I crouch down to her level. My knees ache in the pleasant way of a body that’s been used properly—for yard work and piggyback rides and dancing in the kitchen.
Not for violence. Never violence, not anymore.
“How about we let Gerald go back to his family?” I suggest. “He probably misses them.”
My daughter’s lip wobble intensifies. “But I’m his family now.”
“Tell you what: We’ll build him a pond in the backyard. You can visit him whenever you want.”
The inherited stubbornness of both her parents works overtime behind my child’s blue eyes. “With a bridge?” she asks carefully after a moment’s thought.
“The fanciest, most beautiful bridge you’ve ever seen.”
“Deal!”
Tiny arms wrap around my neck. I breathe in the smell of grass and childhood and impossible, improbable hope.
Then another crack echoes through the basement, and the kitchen dissolves like smoke in the rain.
And I can’t help but wonder…
And wonder…
And wonder…
… if I’ll ever see a place so beautiful again.