Warlord: Dervish (10 page)

The Dirty Dozen

Was he awake or asleep when the little girl in the bee costume came and stood where he lay, saying his name?

Jason
.

He didn’t know. When Jason opened his eyes the girl was gone and he was alone.

Sitting up on the bunk, swinging his legs around, he placed his socked feet on the cool linoleum floor. He felt groggy and held the side of his head as he looked around. The room was enormous, filled with double steel bunks. Of all the beds he could see, each was neatly made except for his.

He seemed to be the only person in the vast room.

Standing, he looked down on his dark blue shorts, a t-shirt of the same color. He didn’t remember putting them on. There was a storage locker at the foot of his bed. When he opened it, Jason found a pair of white socks and running sneakers. He reached down, retrieved the foot gear, and settled back on the mattress.

He was starting to remember things: His cold cell…what they’d done to him…the needles…Dr. Kaku. Jason shuddered.

Though he was by himself, he didn’t appear to be a prisoner. Despite the Spartan, uniform surroundings, he didn’t
feel
like a prisoner. Apparently there was no Dr. Kaku here. After he pulled on his socks, Jason tied his sneakers. They fit perfectly.

He made his bed like he’d been taught, pulling the sheet and thin blanket tight, tucking both under the mattress. He patted the bed when he was finished, satisfied he could bounce a quarter off it. His head feeling better, clearer, Jason decided to poke around his environs, see what was what.

The barracks could hold hundreds of people in two-tiered bunks. The beds were laid out in neat rows, a fixed space between each, groups of four bunks set off by aisles. Painted lines marked the aisles.
Almost like boot camp
, thought Jason, or maybe some combination of boot and what he imagined a disaster relocation center might look like.

He stepped out into an aisle. There was a set of double doors at the far end of it. Looking in the opposite direction, he didn’t see a door in the far wall. The expanse of the dorm made it hard to tell if there was one. Jason walked towards the doors he could see, crossing the room, checking the other bunks as he went, satisfied that he was the only person here.

As he walked, other details stood out in his mind. There were no signs of life in the room, no rumpled sheets or blankets, no personal belongings or pictures taped to bed posts. Each bed was neatly made. Each had a foot locker. No windows in the room. Harsh, fluorescent light emanated from recesses in the ceiling. As he neared the doors, Jason noticed a blinking green light above them, and he immediately thought of the camera outside his cell wherever he had been. When he got close enough he saw his intuition was correct, that the light accompanied a lens tracking his movements.

He wanted to wave at the camera but suppressed the impulse. Not wave merrily, but wave to show he was here, to show that he was awake. Like,
hello motherfuckers
. But whoever’d put him here knew where he was. And Jason didn’t know who had placed him here. Just because he wasn’t in a cell, he reminded himself, didn’t mean Dr. Kaku
wasn’t
nearby.

The wide double doors under the camera gave to a long windowless hall. Jason stepped through the doors and into the corridor, looking back once as they closed behind him, spying a second camera on this side of the doors. He flipped it the bird, hoping someone was watching, hoping that someone was Kaku.

Passing several double doors on either side of the hall, he paused briefly to try each. None would give. He walked for what seemed several minutes, but Jason wasn’t certain. He looked down at his wrist. His watch was gone. That’s right. Kaku had smashed it in front of him. Cocksucker. That, Jason grudgingly gave the man, had been a nice touch, psychologically. Kaku knew what he was doing. However, Jason admitted to himself, he felt at a loss, because he had no idea
what
Kaku had been up to.

He followed the corridor to another uniform set of double doors where another green light blinked on another camera.

Jason pushed through the doors, entering a mess hall several times larger than the barracks he’d come from. Looking around, He took in his surroundings. The room was immense, capable of seating and feeding thousands. Row upon row of steel picnic-style tables with benches attached blurred together. Fifty-five gallon plastic garbage containers were placed between every four tables.

Though the room could conceivably house thousands, there were only a handful of other men and women in it. These were seated in the same general area, but within this space they were spread out, each seated alone except for a group of four. Some looked up as Jason walked in, and most who did so quickly glanced away. One of the men in the group of four made a comment that only his friends could hear, and a couple of them laughed. Jason hadn’t caught the remark, but judging by the look of the men, he figured it hadn’t been kind.

Whatever
. He chose to ignore them, walking over to a buffet-style serving station. White plates were stacked and steam rose from trays of food. Jason hadn’t realized how hungry he was. He took a plate and worked his way down the buffet, loading up on bacon, scrambled eggs, sausage and pancakes. When he couldn’t fit any more food on his plate, he filled a coffee cup from a stainless steel urn and started to look for a suitable place to consume his meal.

The woman closest to him didn’t look friendly. Nor did she look like she wanted someone sitting next to her. But Jason remembered the female voice from the cell next to his, and he wondered if this could possibly be that woman. She was big and rough looking, with tightly curled hair that looked in need of a shower and comb through. As Jason approached, the woman looked down at her plate. It wasn’t like she was intimidated. More, he considered, like maybe she hoped by ignoring him he wouldn’t say a word to her, that he would just walk past.

“Hi.” Jason stopped when he was still a couple yards away. “Are you…?”

A muscle in the forearm of her hand gripping the fork contracted.

“Were you in the cell next to me?”

The woman looked up long enough to cast Jason a withering glance, gripping the fork in her balled fist. “Get
the fuck
away from me.” As soon as she opened her mouth to hiss at him and Jason heard her voice, he knew she wasn’t who he’d thought she might be.

He raised a hand, palm out, apologetically, as he backed away, circling the table, turning and walking away from her.

The wise ass at the table of four who’d made his crack earlier leveled another comment, causing two of his companions to laugh. The fourth guy at the table was smoking a cigarette and watching Jason lazily.

Sitting at a table where he could face the four men, Jason kept his eye on them. At the opposite end of a table across from him, a lean woman gave him a barely perceptible nod before returning her attention to her food.

Jason tore into his meal. Damn, it was good. As he ate, he wondered where he was. Why were there no windows? Was this a military base? If so, where? And who were these people? He was a little surprised to see women. He knew he shouldn’t be. Women served among the front line troops in today’s military. There’d been a woman in the cell next to his…unless, that is, Jason had to concede, his mind had played tricks on him. He didn’t know. He remembered the injections. The hell was that? He banished the train of thought, swallowing a mouthful of eggs.

He was assuming everyone in this cafeteria was some kind of military. He thought about it and knew he had nothing to show for it. Everyone appeared to be dressed similarly to himself: dark blue t-shirts and shorts, white socks and sneakers. There was a dark-skinned guy a few tables over. Dark skinned, not black. Looked foreign to Jason. The woman across from him—the one who’d nodded—she was dark skinned too. Not as dark as the foreign-looking man, more olive-like. And she looked athletic: young and tall, lean and wiry. Straight black hair to her shoulders. Not unattractive.

The four at the table…their hair grown out on their heads and to varying degrees on their faces. Their ages, Jason guessed, were all over the place. He pegged the smoker as somewhere in his fifties, while the youngest of the four—one of the guys who laughed at the wise-ass’ comments—was maybe in his late twenties. Something told Jason the smoker was the closest the group had to a leader. Something else told Jason he didn’t want to hang with those guys. He was just glad to be out of that cell…away from Dr. Kaku…away from the things they’d done to him.

He was almost done with his food when a black guy came and stood directly across from him at his table. Jason looked up at the man and stopped chewing, a chunk of pancake on the tines of his fork.

“You sittin’ in my seat,” the man challenged. Jason looked at him, ready to throw down. The guy was young but had one of those faces you’d think he was thirty, like Mook. He was about Jason’s height, but he carried more muscle in his chest and shoulders.

“That right?” asked Jason. The table was between them. He figured the guy had an advantage standing like that with him seated, but Jason had a fork in his hand. Motherfucker come over the table at him, Jason would stick him in the neck. Like the woman he’d spoken to had looked ready to do to him.

A smile broke out over the black man’s face. “Relax. I’m jus’ fuckin’ with ya.” Uninvited, he sat down at Jason’s table. “Welcome to the party, main.”

Jason shook his head and then, in spite of himself, he grinned and stuffed the pancakes into his mouth.

“See,” the black guy said, “I got cha.” Without further introduction he started wolfing down the food on his own dish. “This my second plate,” he managed between swallows. “Shit’s good.”

“Yeah. It’s good.”

“Finish up and go git yo’self more. Shit’s all-you-can-eat.”

“You have any idea where we are?”

The man didn’t look up from his plate. “Nah,” he replied, dismissively.

“You know any of these people?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither. Name’s Jason.”

“Jason?” The black guy put his fork down and looked disapprovingly at him. “
Jason
?” He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “I’m ‘a act like I didn’t hear that, okay?”

“Why?”

“Listen main—don’t go tellin’ people yo’ real name roun’ here. Aight?” “All right.” It didn’t make sense to him, but Jason didn’t want to challenge the man. It wasn’t that he feared the guy. He hoped to find out what he could from the man. And he was just glad he wasn’t sitting by himself any more.

“I’m a call you—you know what I’m a call you?” The guy rubbed his chin as he considered Jason. “I’m a call you Buford. How’s that sound?”

“Buford?”

“Yeah. That tight, right?”

“Not really.” Jason smirked and the other man did as well. “Why Buford?”

“Come on main,” the guy said in a tone of mock-chastisement. “Don’t act like you don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“Buford Pusser.”

“Buford who?”

“Buford Pusser motherfucka.” The way the guy could call you
motherfucker
and not insult you. Yeah, this guy reminded Jason of someone. “You know,
Walking Tall
?”

Jason thought he had heard of that somewhere—was it a movie?—but he wasn’t sure. “Nah, I don’t know.”

“Day-em. Look main, I don’t mean it no diss, aight? It’s just you come on in here like whoever that white boy was played Buford Pusser in that movie, thas’ all.”

“That a fact?”

The man bobbed his head as he chewed, his cheeks chip-munked out from all the food he had shoveled in.

“I guess that’s good,” concluded Jason. “I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t feel like I was ‘walking tall’ walking in here. So what do I call you?”

“You—” the man chewed “—can call me—” he swallowed and tossed back whatever was left in his coffee cup “—Bronson.”

“Bronson, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Jason thought it bizarre but he agreed.

“You don’t recognize me, B, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

Bronson put down his fork again, apparently full, shaking his head once more. “Day-em, B. You was next to me…” Bronson looked like he was trying to find the right words “…in there.”

“In there?” Even as he said it, it hit Jason. In
there
. Bronson had been one of the people next to him, in the cells. “Holy shit. You’re real?”