Andrew Vachss - A Bomb Built in Hell

“Remember me?” Wesley asked.

The clerk didn’t know Wesley’s face, but he knew what those words meant. He whirled for the phone again as Wesley slipped the gas mask into place and pressed the release valve on the miniature blowtorch. The greenish gas shot across the counter and into the clerk’s face. He coughed just once as his face turned a sickly orange. The clerk slumped to the floor, his fingers still clawing for the phone. As he hit the ground, the kid came down the stairs with a gas mask on his face, carrying a Luger with a long tube silencer. He walked deliberately past Wesley, who had already stuffed the now-exhausted gas cylinder into his side pocket and pulled out a pistol of his own.

The kid slipped the gas mask from his face as he climbed into the front seat of the cab—the chauffeur’s cap was on his head, and the flag dropped as Wesley hit the back seat.

The cab shot crosstown, toward the East River. The kid spoke quietly. “I had to waste one of the freaks upstairs—he came into my room with a knife before I could even close the door.”

“You leave the room clean?”

“Perfect—I never got a chance to even sit down. Anyway, the charge in the duffel bag will go off in another few minutes.”

“That clerk was gone before he hit the ground,” Wesley said. “The stuff is perfect.”

“Was he the same one?”

“I don’t know. But he was guilty, alright.”

The cab whispered its way toward the Slip. It was garaged by midnight.

83/

Thursday night, 9:30 p.m. Wesley and the kid were completing the final work on the truck.

“Tomorrow there’ll be a full house. The Friday assembly period’s at 11:30, and there’ll be almost four hundred kids in the joint.”

“Wesley...”

“Yeah?”

“How come you’re taking the gas mask?”

“I’m not going out that way, kid. The gas’s for them , right? I won’t leave them a fucking square inch of flesh to put under their microscopes—no way they’re coming back here to look for you. You going to keep this place?”

“I don’t know,” the kid said. “I guess so. But I’m going to find a couple other places, too ... and fix them.”

“Yeah. And be out there, right? Everything you learn, teach— there’s a lot of men out there who’d listen, and you know how to talk to them.”

“Women, too.”

“They already know, kid. You see how the pillow snapped back into place in Haiti? It was a woman who held it. She must of been the one behind the old man, and the kid, too.”

“Maybe.... It don’t matter anyway—I’ll know who to talk to.”

“You got to be different from us, kid. We never had no partners, except in blood. I never could figure out how all those freaks run around calling each other ‘brother’—all that means is that the same womb spilled you, anyhow.

“You’re not going to be alone, kid. You know why? ‘Cause if you are, you end up like me. Carmine thought he built a bomb, but he didn’t. I’m a laser, I think. I can focus so good I can slice anything that gets in the way. But I can’t see nothing but the target. When I was in Korea, I thought I’d be the gun and they’d point me. But it didn’t make no sense, even then. It don’t make sense to have any of the other assholes point me either....”

“What other assholes?”

“Like them Weathermen or whatever they call themselves—writing letters to the fucking papers about which building they going to blow up ... and blowing themselves up instead. Bullshit. But I know how they feel—they got nothing of their own to fight for, right? The blacks don’t want them; the Latinos don’t want them; the fucking ‘working class,’ whatever that is, don’t want them.... They don’t want themselves.”

“Why didn’t the blacks want them?”

“Want them for what? All those nice-talking creeps want is to be generals—the niggers is supposed to be their fucking ‘troops.’ The blacks can see that much, anyway.”

“I talked to a few of them—the revolutionaries. I can’t understand what the fuck they’re talking about.”

“Nobody can but themselves—that’s what they should stick to. It’s like a fucking whore everyone in the neighborhood gangbangs, right? You might get you some of it, but you damn sure not going to bring her home to meet your people.”

“I would, if—”

“—if you had people. But you not like them. Now listen; that’s what their asshole politics is like—good enough to fuck around with, but not good enough to bring home, you understand?”

“Yeah. I guess I did even while they was talking.”

“They’re out there, kid. Driving cabs, working in the mills, mugging, robbing, fighting, tricking ... in the Army ... all over ... there’s a lot more of us than there are of them , but we don’t know how to find each other. You got to do that ... that’s for you.”

“Why me?”

“Carmine had two names, right? And Pet had one and a half ... Mister Petraglia? How many names I got?”

“One, Wesley.”

“And how many you got, kid?”

“I see....”

“But they won’t. I got another name someplace—I had one in the Army and I got one in the records up in the joint and I had one that the State gave me until I really didn’t have one no more. You ever see a giant roach?”

“No. Wesley, what’re you—?”

“One time Carmine and me decided to kill all the fucking roaches in the joint. We made this poison, right? It was deadly, whacked them out like flies. But after a few weeks we saw all kinds of strange roaches around. Some were almost white-colored. And then we saw this giant sonofabitch—he musta been six inches long. And fat.”

“That was a waterbug, Wesley.”

“The fuck it was. I seen too many roaches to go for that—it was a goddamn mutant roach. They breed much faster than humans and they finally evolved a special roach that ate the fucking poison, you see?”

“No.”

“That giant roach would’ve died if Carmine and me hadn’t fed him, kid. All he could live on was the poison, and we didn’t have too much left. When we ran out of the stuff, he just died.”

“How is that like your name?”

“I’m like that giant roach. I can only live on the poison they usually use to kill us off ... or make us kill each other off. That’s why I’m going home tomorrow. But the poison can’t kill you—you don’t need it to live on, so you’ll be the ghost who haunts them all.”

“How’m I going to find the answers?”

“I don’t know. They’re not all in books. And don’t be listening to all kinds of silly motherfuckers ... test them all. You got enough money to hole up fifty years if you have to, right?”

“Yeah. How’m I going to bury you, Wesley? I don’t want the—”

“The State birthed me—the fucking State can bury me. Just watch the TV real close tomorrow. You’ll see me wave good-bye.”

84/

They both went back into Wesley’s apartment and, after Wesley told the dog to stay put, he showed the kid all the systems, where everything was. It took several hours. Then Wesley stood up. “I’m going up on the roof, kid. Get everything ready—I’ll be pulling out around ten tomorrow.”

Wesley smoked two packs of cigarettes on the roof, thinking. The News only reported the “heart attack” death of the desk clerk because it was in the same hotel where a half-nude man was found shot to death—a bullet in his chest, one in his eye, and another in the back of his neck. A low-yield explosion had blown out most of the room.

He thought of calling Carmine’s widow to tell her about the fifty thousand in the basement, but decided to tell the kid about it instead.