The hall from the client building to the yard is fourteen paces if you're walking, twenty-two if you're being dragged, and your feet are catching.
The door at the end has a bar across it and no lock, because it's a fire door, because there was an inspection once, years ago, because somewhere in a filing cabinet this place is a working ranch with a bunkhouse.
I've never seen this hall.
Eight years. Nine? I've lost the exact number, and it doesn't matter, and it makes me want to howl, and I have never seen this hall, because women don't come up.
Women go down.
They bring the men to us like we're an exhibit, and the only time I've been above the dirt since I was twenty-two is when they wanted the others to hear me scream.
So they brought me up here to make a point.
And now I'm looking at a fire door.
Cold hits my face when they push through it and it’s May in the high desert.
It’s nothing like the cold in the bunkers, which is wet, close, and smells like a drain. This is dry and enormous. It's got sky in it.
I'd forgotten there was a sky.
Twenty-two paces of gravel. The mercury light over the equipment shed with the bulb that flickers, the one I can see a sliver of through the vent in the corridor.
The one I've been watching for six years and know goes out at nine and comes back at nine-fifteen.
There's the water tank. There's the pole barn. There's a stock trailer with a flat tire that hasn't moved in a decade.
It's all real. Every piece of it is exactly where I built it in my head.
Years of listening to engine notes, counting boot steps, and remembering every single sound that came down through eleven feet of dirt.
I built this place from the inside, and I built itright, and I’ve never been so certain of anything in my life as I am in this moment, upside down, bleeding into gravel, being carried by two men who are trying not to touch me.
The stairs down to the bunker are ahead.
The stairs down are the end of everything.
"Log her," Chuy says.
"You log her."
"She's your fuckin'—I'm not going down there, my shift's over."
"So, she's logged."
"Just say she's logged."
Wes counts.
That's the whole problem, that's been the whole problem since I got here.
Wes is downstairs, and he takes his job seriously.
He counts twice a night, every night, doors and faces. He doesn't drink, doesn't sleep, and he doesn't take anyone's word for anything.
But Wes counts who cameback.
I didn't come in tonight. I went up.
