Chapter 5 #2
Darryl backed away as the water got near his feet. The men on the floor whimpered and moaned. I was ready to snap necks indiscriminately, but that motherfucker Darryl had to die first. I leaped for him, grabbed his throat, and slammed him up to the wall, squeezing his meaty throat.
Darryl clawed at my hands, but I couldn’t feel it. I just squeezed harder, until his eyes were bulging, tongue protruding, face going purple—
An alarm started squealing. I heard faraway yells. Crashing.
Aw, fuck. The riot. Mickey.
I flung Darryl away, and splashed through the flooded room, toward the tongue.
Mickey lay in the last shower stall, inches deep in water, naked. Ah, fuck, no.
My brain refused to process all the things they had done to him. He was covered in blood. They’d cut many pieces off. I fell to my knees next to him.
He still had eyes, and he stared up at me, weeping blood from his broken capillaries. His chin and chest were slick with blood from his mouth. His jaw was shattered. His teeth were everywhere.
He reached with a trembling hand as I dropped to my knees in the water beneath him. “Mickey,” I forced out. “Buddy. I’m sorry. I should have been protecting you.”
Mickey grasped my wrist with a sticky, claw-like hand, coughing helplessly. He was choking on blood, spraying it on me with every desperate, mewling sound he made.
“Don’t try to talk,” I urged, sliding my hands beneath his shuddering body. “I’ll take you to the infirmary. You need a doctor. A trauma surgeon, a transfusion.”
Again, the wordless howl, the burst of blood from his mouth, and he twisted away from my grasp, touched his hand to his bloodied chin and hit the filthy tile wall, leaving a smeared handprint.
Then he began to scrawl, in a loose sprawling script, in blood.
Joe Grifo OR. At least I thought that the last symbols were O and R.
He looked at me, and then made a swirling gesture in front of his face with his stiff, shaking fingers.
He made the swirling gesture again, and again, staring with wild intensity, like I should understand what he meant. Like I’d be an idiot not to.
But I didn’t. Not a fucking clue. And as I watched, the desperate entreaty in his eyes faded, replaced by emptiness.
His skinny, blood-soaked chest stopped moving. Blood stopped foaming and spattering out of the corners of his mouth. The bloody letters he had scribbled had dripped down the wall in the condensation like the title font of a horror movie, no longer decipherable. I felt for his pulse. Nothing.
Mickey was gone. The mission was gone.
What the fuck did I do now? The squealing alarm penetrated my consciousness again as if from miles away.
The riot. My window. I staggered to my feet. Stumbled out, waterlogged. Numb.
Keep to the plan. Go-go-go. If I didn’t leave tonight, they would regroup and kill me as they’d killed Mickey. Even if they didn’t get me tonight, chances were I would take the blame for this clusterfuck. I looked guilty. Like I’d taken a bath in blood.
That would be a whole new bag of dicks to suck, and who had the fucking time.
I staggered through the fallen men in the bathroom, and headed toward the north wing, trying to make my fingers work somehow. Groping for the cell phone. I was shaking. Adrenaline, shock. My eyes were wet.
Mickey. Jesus, Mickey. That funny, wiseass little shithead.
A whole life of being bullied and used and shoved around, and he’d still had dreams of being free.
Of lying on a sugar sand beach someplace on a towel, reading a book in blessed peace, with no one to bug him or interrupt him.
After a few months, I’d started wanting that for Mickey, too.
Completely apart from the intel I needed from him.
Damn, the guy had deserved to just live his life and not be fucked with, for once. It wasn’t that much to ask.
But no, it was not allowed. Those filthy, greedy scum-sucking motherfuckers had gotten to him first. They had chewed him up and spat out his bones.
All because of me. I’d brought my curse along with me, just like with Shane and the others. I am shit luck to anyone who gets near me, and yet here I am, still trying to be the fucking hero of the hour, so I can prove them all wrong.
Meanwhile, people around me drop like flies.
As I turned the corner, I saw Red Watson, the CO I most despised.
He was the most corrupt of the bunch. A pasty, brainless butthead.
I realized, from the horrified look on his face, that he’d been doing sentry duty for Darryl.
He had not expected to see me alive. His eyes went wide as I sprinted toward him. He lifted his baton, too late.
I barreled into him. We hit the floor, skidding. He howled as his head thudded the cinderblock wall. I wrenched the baton out of his hand and jammed it up under his throat. “Who hired you to take out Mickey, Red?”
He kept struggling, trying to loosen my fingers. His pale blue eyes bulged, rolling. I gave him just throat space for a single, desperate gulp of air.
“Mr. Jones!” he gasped out. “That’s the name! The only name he gave me!”
“What did he look like?” I leaned my knee into his groin.
He convulsed with a shriek of pain. “I don’t know!” he wailed. “He wore a mask! Ms. Smith was the other one. A hot Asian bitch. They said they’d kill my family! I had to! I had to do it!”
Oh, fuck this. There was no time to extract anything useful out of this sniveling sack of shit. I coshed him in the head with the baton, hard enough to keep him down, then staggered to my feet, and ran like hell.
Who knew if the riot was keeping them all busy. I had lost all sense of how much time had passed, but who cared. It was go time for me. I punched in the number of the cell phone wired to the explosives in the control room, and held my breath as it rang—
Boom. The blast outside was muffled, but audible. The light in the electronic lock went out. It was open. I pushed the door wide, then the outside door.
Fuck, it was cold out there. The wind sliced into me. The floodlights were dead. Just emergency lights glowed a sickly green.
I couldn’t see the crooked tree through the fence in the dark and the snow. That was my reference point, so I’d know where to dig. I slipped, slid, fell into the snow, squinting through the wind, the snowflakes, for the tree, the tree, the fucking tree...
There it was. It looked smaller, with eighteen inches of snow covering the roots.
Damn, so fucking cold. I oriented myself, fell to the ground and dug frantically under the snow. Under dirt and leaves. The snow turned red as I scrabbled through it.
There. Heavy plastic. My hands were so stiff, I almost couldn’t tear it open to get out the bolt cutters. I struggled, frantic. The backup generator was out, but the second backup generator would kick in any time now.
I got the bolt cutters in position. My hands shook and my teeth were chattering. If I got this wrong, I would fry like a pork chop, right here and now.
Snap, went the cutters through the electric fence.
Snap. Snap. I kept at it, cutting and bending until I had made a hole big enough to crawl out.
The juice would come back on any second.
Maybe while I was wiggling through the hole.
I was a perfect conductor of electricity right now.
Soaked to the skin. Slowed down by the cold.
If it happened, I just hoped it would be quick.
I felt the prison coverall tear. My skin, too, as I dragged my ass through that jagged hole, but I was too cold to notice or care. I launched myself in a stumbling run for the tree line for cover…and voilá, the lights came back on. Five seconds to spare.
I plunged into the forest, and soon found that I had to slow down.
The phone had a flashlight, but the beam was a weak, chilly glow that barely reached the ground.
The Jeep was a mile away as the crow flew, in a gully well off the road, buried under a tarp and what looked like brush left by the floods from last year’s thaw.
I’d walked the route months ago, before I went inside Kalaharee, and rehearsed it in my mind every night since, but everything looked different in the dark and snow, with Mickey’s mutilated body burned into my mind.
I lurched and stumbled on through the dark. I couldn’t feel my feet, my hands, my face. Wind screamed. Snow stung my eyes. At least the snow would cover my tracks. Though maybe not the trail of blood.
I was almost considering the merits of just falling on my face in the soft snow and drifting off into the next life when I found the gully, by way of falling off a cliff.
Eight feet of free falling, and then bang, thud, bounce, and I was tumbling down a steep rockfall, rolling and slipping and sliding, thankfully cushioned by snow.
Once I stopped rolling, I took a moment to orient myself and figure out at what level I had intercepted the gully.
From the grade of the slope, I was almost certain I was uphill from the vehicle, so I pointed myself downhill.
It wasn’t long until I saw the huge mounds of snow that covered the fall of dead trees where we’d hidden the Jeep.
Thank God.
I threw off the piles of brush, made heavier by heaped snow, gasping for air. My lungs were burning. I felt around for the key I had duct taped up inside the undercarriage with numb fingers. Maybe frostbitten. I could lose some of them.
Two more days, and the Drakes would have been there for backup. I could have run out the hole in the fence with Mickey, leaped into a warm car, and sped away with three tough-as-nails Unredeemables watching my back. But no. That was not to be.
Stop whining like a bitch, Clearwater. I dropped the key into snow at least twice, had to look for it in the dark with fingers that had no sensation.
Finally, I got the key and managed to open the door. I got the engine started and ratcheted up the heat. When I stowed the vehicle here, I had not counted on two feet of snow. I put it in gear, and lurched out onto the rough terrain.
I have a good visual memory, and I’d memorized every twist and turn of the terrain, but most of my many landmarks were hidden by snow.
There. Yes. The root system of a fallen fir, reaching up high into the sky like a skeletal fan, clutching boulders in its strangling coils. That was the spot where I needed to hew hard to the left… rev up, up, up…right over the big snowdrift…and yes.
I was thudding over a rough but more or less level track through the trees, lurching and wallowing. Clutching the wheel with bloody claws of hands that made me think of Mickey.
Body parts, clogging the shower drain. Don’t go there. Shut it down. Just drive.
The road ran parallel to the highway, all the way to where it intersected the powerlines. I could follow the lines down to the river road and connect with the main highway not far from the Dew Drop Inn. Where Sandee stayed, all unsuspecting.
Hoo, boy. I could feel it coming over me, like a bad rash. The urge to do something ill-considered. Self-destructive. Stupid heroics that no one had asked for.
But goddamn, that woman had done nothing to deserve what was coming for her.
She’d been stupid as dirt, definitely, but not evil or greedy or cruel.
She was just a weird, sweet, oversexed girl with no clue, and no discernible sense of self-preservation.
Granted, she may have been cruising for a little trouble, just for the entertainment value.
But not this kind of trouble. Not the kind that landed you in the morgue.
I couldn’t leave Sandee to Boer’s tender mercies, and Boer knew it. They’d threatened her with harm just to make me jump. Now look at me, three feet in the air.
I just never learned. It’s that sign taped to my back. “Go ahead, kick my ass.”
Fuck it. What was one more rousing ass-kick. Just to make my day complete.