Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [45]
On the opposite shore was a railroad yard. Two locomotives and a coal car were turned on their sides. Boxcars had been burned down to the wheels. Cray dug into the water again and again, slipping toward the armory.
A barbed-wire fence ran along the edge of the armory property and into the water. Cray kicked around the fence posts and drifted toward the shore. When his feet found the soft bottom, he started up the bank, mud sucking at his boots. Then he heard a laugh to his left. Two cigarettes glowed near an armory door. Two more guardsjoined the group, and a match flared as they lit cigarettes. One of the guards shouted, and was answered by laughs from yet two more soldiers further along the brick wall. The water side of the armory was well guarded.
Cray slipped back into the river. An icy hand seemed to be squeezing his chest. The water had begun its work killing him. He closed his eyes. His face hardened, resolution rekindling, and when he opened his eyes again, he was ready for more of the river. He was no longer shivering.
He drifted along the bank. The south end of the armory had been destroyed by a bomb, and only the north portion was in operation. But all of it was guarded. Cray glided through the water. A new scent caught him. Sewage. In the dim light he saw an effluent pipe that jutted from the bank, most of it underwater. He paddled up to the pipe, which was about five feet in diameter. Cray gripped the edges and held himself against the outflow. The human waste was warm, surging around him. He began to feel his chest and shoulders and arms again. He soaked in the warm fluid, his head above the pipe as he surveyed the armory's yard. The foul odor smelled like life to him.
The troops strolled back and forth, rifles on their backs. One lit a piece of paper and dropped it into a barrel, then fanned it with his hands. Licks of flame appeared. Several guards held out their hands to the heat. When an officer barked at them, the guards resumed their rounds.
The sewage pipe seemed to head underground in the direction of the armory, and alongside the toppled south end of the building. Bombs had mangled that end, and a wall had fallen into the lot to the south. The underground pipe appeared to lie below this cratered rubble.
Cray studied the effluent. The stream carried the brown and unspeakable. Cray was comfortable hanging in front of the sewage pipe, and was tempted to stay awhile, leisurely coming up with another plan. But a splinter of wood drifted into him from the pipe, then more small pieces of wood, and then bits of floating plaster not yet fully soaked.
Detritus was falling into the sewage not far up the line. The pipe was open to the air nearby. As if doing a pull-up, Cray lifted himself on the pipe to peer into the armory's yard. Two men in overalls hadjust entered the yard from a vehicle lot to the south. The lot had camouflage nets strung over it on poles. The men were negotiating a path through the bomb rubble, their heads visible to Cray one moment, then not the next as they climbed and descended hills of debris. They reached the armory's river-side yard. One of them carried a toolbox. They might have been mechanics, and perhaps their regular route between the vehicle lot and the armory had been obstructed when the south part of the armory was destroyed, so now they had to pick their way through the piles of bricks and beams and around craters. The mechanics had kicked debris into the open sewage pipe.
Cray smiled thinly. He had found the breach.