Part Eighteen
Michael might not know weaponry, but he knew his brother. He knew the way that Lincoln's shoulders would tremble, as if he was trying to keep his entire body from shaking with rage and the tension had to leak out somewhere, the way that his hands would clench into fists, the way that his breathing would change. Michael had been paying to Lincoln's moods ever since they were very small, and he could do it without thinking. If they left the house before Lincoln struck Steadman at least once, then Michael would call it a job well done.
Alex was different in the way that Sara had been different and thus intoxicating. His moods were plastic and smooth, his true motives impossible to read, until he was so shaking apart with grief that he was more weapon than man. Just waiting for the trigger. It occurred to Michael that he himself might be that trigger, but it was low on his list of priorities at the moment.
He watched Alex and Lincoln both for signs of violence, and he wanted to watch Aldo as well. Michael was still unable to convince himself that his father's motives were pure after three decades of absence; he cursed the fact that he could not grow a separate set of eyes to keep track of all of the extra variables that needed his attention. Steadman did not seem like a threat at the moment, but neither had T-Bag when Michael had first met him. Manipulation from a point of supposed weakness. Michael had received quite an education since then.
He heard sirens coming towards the house, far away for now. They had a few more minutes in which to linger. Even though only two of them had actually been inside a prison, the five of them still tensed up as one.
"You sure about this?" Lincoln asked Michael in a low voice. The corner of his mouth twitched, in spite of everything, as if he was saying that he already knew that the next words out of Michael's mouth were going to be reassuring horseshit and was inviting his brother to lay it on him.
"It's the only choice that we have," Michael replied. Crude, brute force, but generally effective all the same. He would worry about finesse once his brother was safe.
"It won't work," Steadman said. He was trying to sound defiant, but with his obvious fear at how near Lincoln was, he was coming across more like a sullen teenager than eh was anything else. "They'll kill me before they let you take me out of here. She will." For a second, Steadman nearly sounded hurt. It was all that Michael could do not to drop his head into his hands.
"Then you're safer with us, aren't you?" Aldo said before he offered up a glittering shark's smile that made Michael glad that he had always been told that he took after his mother. "Makes fighting us seem foolish." Steadman had gone after Aldo with a fragment of the shattered blender shortly after Michael had hung up the phone. Aldo did not have a mark on him; Steadman was nursing a swollen wrist.
Michael was all out of empathy at the moment, in particular for Steadman. He shrugged, still listening to the sirens, and glanced towards Alex. Alex was leaning against the wall on the far side of the foyer, deliberately placing himself as far from the rest of the group as he could and still be available to play his part, his body so still that if it were not for the movements of his eyes Michael would doubt that he was real. Had he been like this when he killed? This chill, this remote, this completely divorced from the humanity that Michael had refused to stop appealing to until he had finally broken through? He had not been present when Alex had done murder; he could not be sure. Michael was not even sure which version he would have preferred, that Alex still have that relaxed mouth that he had applied to Michael's own, or to believe that Alex could become this cold and still habitually. He watched Alex and the negligent way that Alex was allowing the gun to rest against his thigh instead, one more crude plan that they had had no time to replace with better.
The sirens arrived at the door. Michael had heard enough sirens over the previous few months to hear the subtle difference in these and knew that all of his companions had enough experience to hear it themselves.
Steadman, of course, knew everything that was coming their way.
Aldo grabbed Steadman by the back of his neck and bodily threw him to the side, out of the immediate path of danger, as the front door was kicked open so hard that fragments of the doorframe flew at them all like shrapnel. Michael ducked back in order to protect his face and heard Steadman yelp as he struck the wall. That put the bastard well out of the way of the guns that were being thrust through the door. Would that the rest of them could say the same.
"Freeze!" the lead man through the door boomed at Michael. He had the voice of authority down to perfection. However, Michael would have been far more impressed if even the slightest effort towards dressing the part had been made. The neat, well-tailored suit was recognizable at a glance as Company.
He put his hands into the air slowly, as the man's moral fortitude had very little to do with his ability to operate the gun that he was thrusting towards Michael's face. As accustomed as Michael was becoming to having weapons pointed at him, the barrels didn't look any smaller each time.
"You stupid idiot," the man said as he walked cautiously through the door, scanning either side of it for threats. Aldo and Alex were nowhere to be seen. They had slid backwards and into the shadows before the first pieces of shrapnel from the doorframe had fallen to the expensive tiled floor. Lincoln was there, doing his very best scowl, the one that without fail made strangers dismiss him as a brute. There was also Steadman shrinking back against the wall. If he could have made himself a physical part of the house itself, Michael thought that he would have. "You should have run while you could."
Alex was back in the shadows, but close at hand. He had melted into them as if he had been born of them. Michael did not think that Alex belonged there every bit as fiercely as Alex seemed to think that this was the only place where he belonged. Michael measured his words carefully before he said, "There are certain things that are more important than personal safety." Almost as important was making that statement out loud, even as Michael could take one look at the man's eyes and know that he might as well be speaking Chinese.
The man with the glanced at Lincoln without saying a word. He didn't need to. The man could think that Michael was insane all that he wanted. Personal safety was one thing, but family was another. It was the same question that Alex had put to him scarcely two days before. Michael was still not sure what he had arrived at a satisfactory answer. He took a breath, aware that Lincoln was watching him with the steady belief that Michael would find yet another miraculous way out of yet another prison. Meanwhile, the Company man lifted the gun higher and drew his finger back against the trigger.
Aldo and Alex slid from their hiding places without even making the scuffing sound of their shoes against the floor. Michael was in a position to see the both of them from the corners of his eyes, and what he saw were sleek machines. Alex raised his gun and took aim in one smooth movement, his face remaining the same throughout. Michael did not even register the boom of the gunshot in his ear until he saw a red rose blooming across the lead man's chest and saw him begin to fall. The second boom was not heard at all. Michael felt suddenly as if his right bicep had taken a hard blow with a baseball bat, a shockwave that ran all the way up from his wrist and into his shoulder. It came close to knocking all of the air from his lungs and dropping him to the floor. Not until a full second later was he able to detect the individual point of impact, a tiny blip of time that still felt like an eternity as Michael was experiencing it, and then his arm felt as if it had been dipped in gasoline and lit on fire. He ground his teeth against one another until he tasted enamel, ignored the way that Lincoln yelled his name, and ducked back against the wall to put himself out of the way of the firefight that was looking for a way to get off of the ground.
Steadman broke and tried to bolt deeper into the house. Lincoln grabbed him by the shoulder and hurled him back against the wall without even taking the time to look around at the man. Steadman bounced, hard, and finally fulfilled his goal of making a dent into the matter of the house itself. He did not look as if he was inclined to run off into the unknown again.
A second man tried to leap over the corpse of the first, and Aldo plugged him in the throat and then the chest without changing expression. The tile entryway was now slick with blood. Michael was beginning to think that he could even smell it. He was not sure if the scent originated from the wound in his arm or from the dead men. Michael was carrying no weapon and, while Lincoln had one, he had yet to fire a shot.
Two bodies were enough to convince whoever else might be out in the yard that the bottleneck was not working in their favor, and that it would be wiser to wait until the tables had turned when the people in the house tried to come out themselves. No further bullets came whistling in through the doorway, even though no one was willing to go close enough to tempt fate and invite them. Michael leaned his hip against an end table and ground his teeth against one another as he clutched at his bloodied arm, trying to clear the buzzing from his head so that he could think.
"I'm fine, Linc," he said in an exhausted voice as his brother called his name again.
"Yeah, the bullet in his arm is making you dance a jig," Lincoln said brusquely. He tried to pull Michael's hand away from the wound and growled when Michael would not let it be easily moved. Over his brother's shoulder he could see Alex, staring out the empty and open door at the yard and looking more like a predator than ever. He blinked and seemed to come back to himself a few seconds later, before he noticed that Michael's fingers and the sleeve of his shirt were stained with blood.
"What happened?" he demanded as he strode over. Aldo was the only one remaining to watch the door, though there were worry lines around his eyes and mouth when he glanced Michael's way. Michael did not believe that he would ever be able to wrap his mind around the idea that his man who had done murder on such a large scale really could care about his sons at the same time.
Had Michael not been in such pain, he might have smiled as he realized his own hypocrisy by the time that Alex reached him. He resisted Alex's hand for a moment as Alex tried to pull his fingers away from the wound. There was already so much blood running down his arm and into the crook of his elbow that Michael could not imagine how much more would flood out once he removed the pressure.
"Let me see, Michael," Alex ordered him in a low and gentle voice, but did not pull at Michael's fingers any further. He waited until Michael peeled his hand away of his own volition before he moved the sleeve aside so that he could see the wound. Michael had witnessed two of his own toes being cut off less than three days after he had entered Fox River. He guessed that he could cope with the bloody and blackened hole that had been opened up in his own bicep, but it still made him queasy. He heard Lincoln's sharp inhalation from a few feet away.
"You still feel like runnin'?" Lincoln growled over at the president's brother.
"More than a little," Steadman confessed. He was looking at the small sea of blood spreading out from underneath the dead men as if he would not mind being sick over it.
Lincoln growled and was silenced when Michael said in an exhausted voice, "Linc. It's fine." The pain and the blood running down his arm were making him nauseous, but he was of little mind to start feeling any camaraderie with Terrence Steadman over it. And there were still the final shreds of the plan to think of.
It was much easier to keep the plan in mind when his arm was not giving him such pain. Probably easier when Alex was not touching him, too.
Alex turned Michael's arm over, gently and with no visible knowledge of the effect that he was having, so that could push the sleeve up and feel of Michael's tricep. There were calluses on the tips of his fingers that made Michael's breath catch. It was most likely that Alex attributed that small sound to pain, for his touch if anything grew lighter. That made it worse.
"There's no exit wound," Alex said at long last. It was such an easy conclusion to come to that Michael could not help but wonder if Alex had not been lingering simply so that he could continue to touch Michael. "The bullet will have to be removed."
"Fun for everyone involved," Michael said, and tried to offer up a tight smile. He was certain that it looked more akin to a grimace than it did anything else. Alex's hand around his arm tightened, only for a second, and released before it could cause any pain. They had all lost enough people.
"Later," Aldo said. He had shifted and was covering the doorway before anyone realized that he had even moved. His inability to stop watching Michael, assuring himself that Michael really was still on his feet, was troubling as ever. "Our opportunity is closing."
Aldo led them all outside cautiously, sweeping his gun in wide circles so that he could cover all of the shadows at once. Alex followed a step behind with his own gun drawn, while Michael followed him and Lincoln dragged Steadman along in the rear. Lincoln kept Steadman under control with a heavy hand on the back of his neck, the way that one would dangle a recalcitrant kitten, though Steadman was not at the moment presenting any kind of resistance. Michael did not like him, and for reasons which numbered far beyond the obvious. There was a low cunning to Steadman's face that reminded Michael of T-Bag, and said that Steadman was well-accustomed from manipulating and slinking along on his belly for so long that he no longer even wanted to stand.
There was a single car parked in front of the house, headlights still on; the two dead men had clearly not anticipated that their mission would take that long. Michael was almost insulted. Alex ducked past him long enough to retrieve the keys from one of the corpses and flashed an unpleasant smile at Steadman.
"Coming to the end of the road for you," Alex said.
Steadman replied with a small spasm of his lips. It was not a smile. It reminded Michael most of the kind of gesture that might be made by a panicky fish. "For you as well," he answered Alex.
"Already there." Alex strode over to the car without waiting for Aldo to cover him. He ducked inside, started it up, and emerged with a speculative expression that did not clear until, far away and coming closer. "They respect you at least a little," he said to Michael.
"There's that," Michael said. The urge to clutch at his arm, even knowing that it would only make the pain worse, was tremendous.
"It'll be tight, but everyone will fit," Alex went on, gesturing towards the car. "We'll make it."
"Can't leave the other one," Aldo said. He jerked his head back towards the woods. "It's too big of a risk if the VIN is traced." Before Michael could protest, Aldo pulled a cellular phone from his pocket and tossed it to him. "This phone is untraceable. The three of you get to where you think that you're safe, then hit the first speed dial."
"Yes," Michael said after examining the phone for a moment, and, "Thank you." He nodded towards Lincoln to follow him into the car with the prize that Michael could barely bring himself to look at, and grinned. "End of the road." It had a different connotation when he said it than when Alex had moments before.
Lincoln nodded back without smiling. He shoved Steadman towards Michael, hard. Steadman stumbled and, with Michael's bad arm unable to catch him, nearly ate the fender before he regained his footing. The look that he threw Lincoln over his shoulder was more like T-Bag's than any other that Michael had seen yet, pathetic and hostile at the same time. Michael grabbed Steadman's arm without thinking.
"You guys start running," Lincoln told Alex and Michael both. He was taking the same tack that Michael was in pretending that Steadman was not a person at all, that he was only an inconvenience and highly important parcel that they had to carry around with them for the time being. "I'll go with Dad."
Michael tightened his grip on Steadman's arm without thinking, hard enough to make Steadman gasp. It was only a small comfort to realize that his father was wearing an expression very similar to Michael's own. "What?" he asked.
"Linc the Sink," Lincoln replied without a trace of a smile. "He could use the muscle, maybe." It must have been showing in Michael's face that he wanted to argue, for Lincoln glanced up as the approaching sirens let out a particularly sharp wail and said sharply, "Don't forget why we came here, Michael."
'We came here to save your life.' Everything else had been secondary. It was the same challenge that Alex had thrown at him when Michael had been coaxing him over; Alex knew it, and now Lincoln knew it, too. Michael kicked hard at one of the car's tires before he shoved Steadman towards the door. "Get in." Aldo and Lincoln did not say anything else before they were disappearing into the trees as if they were already ghosts. Michael waited for gunshots and, when they did not come, spun urgently back towards Alex and said, "Drive hard."
Alex nodded without speaking. Michael was glad of it, for he did not know if he could handle the words that would inevitably go together with the bleak and barely held-together mood that had been following Alex over the past day. He did not know if he could cope with the same sacrifice that Alex had already made in order to bring this to a close.
The interior of the doors in the backseat had no locks, and would not open from the inside when Michael tugged at them. He was not shocked. Michael shoved Steadman in ahead of him and then hunched up against the driver's seat in his usual fashion. He continued to stare at Steadman, who seemed happiest when he was as far away from Michael as possible now that Lincoln was gone. Alex pressed on the gas pedal hard enough to send the car screaming away from the house and thrown Michael against the seat. They could not afford to go any slower. Meanwhile, even as the car jounced hard on the ill-kept road, Steadman never lost his eye contact with Michael.
"How do you do it?" Michael asked him. He had no illusions about getting an honest answer, was not even sure that the motive mattered to him in the end. What he wanted was to knock that smug certainty out of Steadman's face, even if it would only be a few seconds before he was able to replace it. "How do you throw so many lives away to save your own skin?" Alex's reaction was nothing more than a slight shifting of his weight. Had Michael not been pressed so tightly against the driver's seat, he doubted that he would have noticed.
Something flickered across Steadman's face. It was possible, Michael told himself, that he only had something in his eye. "What would you do for your brother?" he asked.
Michael glanced down at his arm, where blood was still running in a sluggish stream and fro which sick waves of pain rolled out every time that Alex hit a bump in the road too hard. The bullet was nothing, the mutilated foot was nothing, the destruction of his entire previous life was nothing. He would do all of it again, that and ten times more, if it meant that at the end of it Lincoln would be safe.
But that did not mean that there were not lines.
"I would not murder," Michael gritted. From the corner of his eye he could see Alex's hands tightening around the steering wheel. Steadman scoffed, but Michael already knew that his own expression had not changed. "I wouldn't." Universal versus particular. The majority versus the precious minority. Everything that he had thrown into Alex's face and that Alex had thrown right back at him, here, a concrete reality rather than an abstract, and it was making Michael sick to his stomach.
He looked out the front windshield rather than at Steadman again and his smug, self-satisfied face, just as the road ahead of them was lit up with headlights and the familiar flashing red and blue of police vehicles. Legitimate, not Company. Weren't they going to get a surprise when they reached the house.
"Hang on," Alex said curtly before he turned off his headlights and stood on the gas. The engine screamed as it was forced to an even higher speed. Michael bit at his lower lip until he tasted blood every time that he was hurled back against the seat; the car was bouncing too hard for him to keep his balance and avoid it. They could now only see the road dimly, in what little light came from the swiftly approaching headlights of the opposite cars. In rural areas like this, without streetlights, the darkness was total. The car bounced wildly from one side of the road to the other as Alex nearly ran them all into the ditch again and again.
Michael leaned forward and gripped at the seat ahead of him. He was only a moment or two away from grabbing at Alex's shoulder. "Alex," he said as the headlights loomed huge ahead of them. Another few seconds and the cars would be meeting each other hard enough to guarantee that no one was going to be walking away.
"I have it under control," Alex replied in a tight voice which said that it would be in Michael's best interests to shut up and let him concentrate. The car roared even louder, moving so swiftly that it was nearly airborne. From the other side of the car, Steadman yelped and ducked his head behind the passenger seat as the headlights became the biggest thing in the entire world. Michael watched Steadman for a second before glancing up and through the windshield again, at the exact moment when the police had to see them, even without the headlights, as it did not seem that the point of impact could be avoided any longer and as Alex finally hit the brakes and made the entire vehicle scream. The police cars split ahead of them like the Red Sea before Moses, amidst a blaring of horns and, Michael was sure, a flurry of cursing. Several of the vehicles ended up with their tail lights standing higher than a man's head as they wound up in the ditch and with their wheels spinning fruitlessly.
The sudden rush of relief was heady and sweet. Michael collapsed forward against Alex's seat, his face against the headrest, and reached for Alex's shoulder without thinking. Alex put his hand over Michael's for a moment before he pulled it away.
Michael lifted his head at long last and examined the empty road behind them, the equally empty road ahead. Alex had turned the headlights back on, but they were still alone. Far too alone, when Michael considered it. Adrenaline might have wreaked havoc on his ability to keep accurate time, but he still knew that it did not take this long for two men to cover one mile of distance.
"We need to go back," Michael said abruptly.
Alex lifted his eyes to meet Michael's in the rearview mirror. He did not seem surprised. "No." Alex shook his head. "We were lucky to get through once, we won't get that lucky again."
"Lincoln is back there," Michael growled. "If he needs my help-"
"If he needs your help, then it doesn't matter," Alex said. There was a tension in his body which said that he was speaking to himself as well as to Michael, and that he was not happy to be doing it. It might be the clearest apology that he was going to get, for Michael also know that the only way that he was going to get that car turned around was if he leapt over Alex and seized the wheel himself. He dug his fingers into the seat until his knuckles popped and ached.
"He's more important," Alex continued, jerking his thumb back in the direction of Steadman. His tone was still disgusted. "He has to be."
"No, no, no." Michael knew that Alex was now asking no more of him than what he had asked of Alex and that what was right had to come ahead of what was personal, but there was still a big part of him that really did not care. He opened his mouth to argue and was only halted by a distraction to his right. Steadman, hurling his own head towards the back window as hard as he could. Michael grabbed him by the collar and threw him back against the seat as hard as he could, ignoring the pain that immediately turned his arm on fire.
"What the hell do you think that you're doing?" Michael yelled at Steadman. It didn't matter that he knew the answer less than a second after he said it. Steadman was trying to sacrifice himself for his sister. It was an impulse that Michael could understand even as it made his stomach churn to realize that he and Steadman had anything in common whatsoever. He released Steadman's collar and watched him closely to make sure that he would not do it again before he sank back into his seat. Michael felt so suddenly boneless that he did not believe that he would have been able to stand if he had wanted to.
"Keep driving," he told Alex in a listless voice. Michael barely registered Alex's nod before he pulled out the phone that Aldo had given him and flipped it open. He punched in the speed dial and raised the phone to his ear as Alex stepped down on the gas even harder.
The trees were still thick on either side of the road, so that they did not see the headlights bouncing along on the side road until the SUV exploded out onto the pavement ahead of them and nearly hit them. Alex slammed on the brakes and cursed as he struggled to bring the fishtailing vehicle back under his control. Michael whooped with joy; he did not realize that the phone at his ear had been picked up and that a woman's voice on the other end was saying Aldo's name over and over again for several seconds.
"Yes, sorry," Michael said into the phone. He grinned at Alex through the rearview mirror and was grinned back at in return. Alex was nearly as happy to see Lincoln and Aldo again as Michael himself was. Michael laughed as Alex struck the steering wheel with his hand, and then turned his attention back to the cellular phone. "This isn't Aldo Burrows. I'm his son, Michael Scofield."
The woman on the other end of the line paused before she replied, "I've heard a great deal about you, Mr. Scofield." After another pause, she went on, "What happened to Aldo?"
"He's fine," Michael assured her. He heard her sigh on the other end of the line. "We were just separated for a little while. We have Terrence Steadman in our custody."
The woman made a curious sound, as if she was trying to hold back a joyous laugh, before she said, "That's excellent. Bring him to Topeka, Kansas. We'll take it from there."
"Whom am I speaking to?" Michael asked.
"My name is Melinda Graves," the woman told him. "And I've been waiting more than ten years for the kind of victory that you've just pulled off." She made that sound of delight again, that inexpertly smothered laugh. Michael could feel a smile spreading across his own face in response.
"Miss Graves," Michael replied, "we'll see you in Topeka."
End Part Eighteen