Spoils by Brian Van Reet

Author:Brian Van Reet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Literary
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

Then there’s Crump. Much of their talk in the days to come centers on him, sharing their concern and speculating over his condition. He has so far refused all communication, verbal or code. McGinnis thinks he’s being held next door, maybe two doors down. But neither he nor Cassandra can say whether Crump’s refusal to communicate stems from an inability to hear, maybe some side effect of his head wound, or more disturbingly, whether he’s well aware but chooses not to respond. Would he somehow save himself by sacrificing them? Is this why he won’t answer? Or is there something he knows and they don’t, which makes any interchange too dangerous or pointless to attempt?

In any case, the problem is not that he’s silent. His latest outburst was the worst so far. Cassandra woke to him screaming and throwing himself against what sounded like his cell door, making enough of a racket that she could hear him plainly through her own door, the echo rising through the drain a redundancy.

“Come on and do it!” he shrieked, the kind of unmodulated shrillness that can only come from a human being pushed to a place where the lines between fight and flight approach a vanishing point. “Just get it the fuck over with! Do it, you pussies! Do it! I know you’re gonna do it so just fucking do it!”

The guards wouldn’t oblige him. Neither would he let up, and she thought he must’ve been hurting himself with the way he was going at the door, the crashing bangs sounding intermittently; must’ve been running at it, putting his shoulder into it like a battering ram. For his own good she hoped he would knock himself out. No such luck. The guards were in the hall, chattering unintelligibly among themselves and also yelling at him through the door, hollering at him to shut up, which only inspired a greater apex of fury.

There was the unmistakable clacking sound of an automatic rifle being cocked. Spring loaded, slick, a slim-tolerance sound. Done in the hallway, and louder than it had to be, more dramatic, as if the person cocking the rifle thought the sound itself would serve as sufficient intimidation to silence him, which it wasn’t. He kept on. And even though Cassandra was pretty sure he was about to die, she felt little pity for him in that moment. Anger, mostly. Anger at him and fear for herself, because of how his actions would implicate her, because the guards would kill him first and then move on to her and McGinnis. Not necessarily because they wanted to, but because they would have no choice, these Americans turning out to be more trouble than they were worth. Once you murder one prisoner of war, you’d better dispose of the others.

She braced herself for the rifle shot foretelling her doom. But as inexplicably as he’d started, Crump stopped. He went at the door to the point of muscle failure. Or maybe he did knock himself out. The guards talked for a while longer in the hallway and then went silent, too.

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