A Fountain Filled With Blood

He jogged over to the ladder, reached up, and tugged on it with both hands. It creaked, but there was no shifting or shower of brick dust. He wrapped his hands around the lowest rung, chinned himself up, and pulled his legs to his chest, curling forward until his head was pointing toward the ground and he could get his knees over the iron bar. He balanced there for a moment, waiting to see if his two hundred pounds would shake the ladder, but the old bolts held true—for the moment anyway.

He climbed without looking down. The faded brick wall was punctuated by small granite-edged windows at the first-and second-story levels, oddly placed rectangles just big enough to let in some light and air. None of them were close enough to grab hold of if the rungs beneath his feet gave way or if the bricks holding the ladder’s bolts crumbled. He breathed evenly and looked up. The window above the iron ladder was wide open.

He had to go headfirst through the window, a horribly vulnerable position, which made him feel like a hunting trophy mounted on a wall. He wiggled forward and flipped himself gracelessly onto his feet, thudding loudly enough to cause him to freeze in a crouch below the window. He breathed through his mouth, noiselessly, as if that would make a difference.

He was on a sturdy wooden platform encircling a vast area below. Railed and banistered, it had two steep staircases descending to the work space. What light there was came from windows hidden from his view beneath the walkway. There was machinery down there, behemoths of black iron, and a forest of chains and block and tackle hanging from runners in the ceiling.

A noise from below froze him in place. A scrabbling sound. And a clank. Too loud for an animal. He closed his eyes for a moment, straining to hear. The air stirred with the scent of iron and dry rot and mouse droppings. He listened harder and dropped to his knees and then to his belly on the walkway floor. He crawled forward to the opening between the railings that signaled the nearest stairway.

It was steep, like the gangway on a ship, built to occupy the least amount of productive space. The workroom floor was cleared for several feet around the final step. Descending would make him a sitting duck vulnerable to potential gunfire. He scanned the rest of the platform. The only other way down he could see was another staircase, equally open, at the end opposite him. He thought he could make out doorways there, too, but he had no doubt that McKinley had headed down to get out. Which meant he would have to go down, as well.

He suddenly thought, for the first time in years, of an argument he had had with a lunatic second lieutenant while squatting in the brush below a heavily fortified hill. He couldn’t recall the hill’s number. All the hills in ’Nam had had numbers, never names. They were supposed to take the damn thing, and he had been telling the FNG that it was idiocy to charge upward through the open into enemy fire. “It’s not idiocy,” the lieutenant had said. “It’s our job.”

He reminded himself that he had picked this job over running a security firm in Phoenix. He wiggled himself around, slid his legs over the edge, found the first step with his foot, and took it, hands loose on the railings, barking his shins as he scrambled down the ladderlike steps—one, two, three, four—and then there was a loud crack and his foot gave way, the step splintering beneath him as he plunged, then caught himself on the railings with a dislocating jerk to his shoulders. He was spread open like a wishbone, one leg dangling in space and the other stretched painfully behind him. A swirling cloud of dry rot made him cough. He hauled against the railings and tried to gain a footing on the step below, feeling a gun sighting on him as if it were a pointer pressed against his spine, trailing up to the back of his head. He flopped between the steps, hair prickling and the cold sweat of fear under his uniform shirt, and heard another noise from somewhere among the silent machines below. He remembered now that the second lieutenant hadn’t lived very long. He let go of the railings, sagging still deeper through the broken stair tread, braced his hands atop the step in front of him, and pushed forward, just as he had done at the window outside, levering himself up, freeing the leg that had been trapped against the lower step. He didn’t stop to think. He let both legs hang through the stair, gripped the step he had been braced on, dropped his torso and shoulders through the last of the splintery remains, and let go.