The Eternal Prison (12 page)

 

Grisha spun around again and didn’t slow down. All at once every fresh cut on my body stung me, my own sweat sizzling on my skin like alcohol. My two new fans had woken me up right before sunrise, trying to stab me with the most pathetic shivs I’d ever seen. As a professional, I’d been offended, especially since it would have taken them a couple of really irritating, painful hours to actually kill me. As I walked, I jiggled my three shivs in my pocket and scanned the yard. For some reason I hadn’t killed them. It would have been easy, but I just… walked away.

 

Grisha led me out into the sun, making for the walls in the distance. “This place,” he said, spinning around again, “is very strange. A prison, yes?” He smirked. “Worst fucking prison I ever see. And I see a few, unfortunately. The Pigs, yes, they send you to prison, it is usually for one of two reasons: One, you irritate them, piss them off, so they want to kick you in the balls for a few months. Two”—he pulled one hand from his pocket in order to thrust two fingers up into the air—“they need something from you. Otherwise, just a shell in the ear, yes?”

 

He twisted his head around to squint back at me, and I gave him a curt nod. It was one thing we all had in common here, that memory of a cop’s gun barrel against your head.

 

“This place,” he continued, facing forward and pushing his hand back into his pocket. “This place is strange. Oh, yes, basic security. Walls, yes. Razor wire on top, of course. Guards with amazing skill in towers, able to put a hollow point into your eye from this distance—superhuman. Electric fencing that will turn you nice and crisp if you try to cross. Anti-tunneling measures—the usual. But, nothing
special.
Nothing
good.
Nothing I could not get around easily, with a few weeks to study and plan.” He shrugged. We were halfway to the walls. I raised my hand to shield my eyes and squinted up at the tower, the sniper on station there a black dot. I imagined I could feel his red eye on me.

 

“Ah.” Grisha stopped and turned. “But then there is the sun.” He looked up into the sky. “Based on stars at night, Cates, we are in fucking Death Valley, desert. North of Mexico. Hot. Nothing nearby for a hundred miles. This is the true prison. The rest is for show, the rest is just crowd control, to keep us in manageable spaces, yes? I could get out of here—my goodness, Cates, I could slip out for groceries and be back before dole and no one the wiser, yes? Except, then what. Then I die in the desert. I starve; I dry up.”

 

I nodded, turning to look back at the main complex. “What’s your point, Grisha?”

 

“Michaleen asks me to give you the rundown, since you are latest recruit to our little team.” I turned back to the Techie, who grinned again. “He is a very smart man, in his way. He is going to get us out of here.”

 

I nodded, hearing the little man saying,
Not long and not deep, but I knew ol’ Aubrey.
“Mickey’s a genius, okay. What about getting everyone else out?”

 

“Everyone else? Fuck everyone else.”

 

I nodded again. “Okay, so run it down.” I turned back to him, a man who looked so thin and dry he couldn’t possibly exist out here in the sun. “Where do the Crushers come from?” I’d seen two disturbances so far, fights that had pulled dozens into their gravity, threatening to become bedlam. Each time, the guards had been there instantly, dozens of the fuckers, as if they’d been hiding under our fucking bunks, ready to spring. I’d seen the fat, bearded man from the train, the non-Crusher, each time, looking fresh and clear, like he’d been napping and eating right in preparation for just such a contingency.

 

Grisha shrugged and started walking back toward the main complex. “That I cannot explain. Where do they live? There are no guard quarters. Under our feet? Possibly. There may be a huge complex underground, yes? That is the most likely explanation. But I cannot say for
sure.
”

 

I nodded. We barely saw guards when things were quiet. There was the one at the dole, there were the five or six we could see on the towers, and that was it. No one walked the yard to keep order; no one made sure we weren’t conspiring or plotting.

 

“This is mysterious,” Grisha muttered. Four people had emerged from the main prison building. I recognized the broad-shouldered form of my admirer, the longhair, and the skinny brown shape of my first-day attacker. There were two other men with them. I played with my three pot stickers and tried to make my leg bend a little as we walked. The thought of beating those two idiots off one more time almost made me want to lie down in the sun and bake until I passed out.

 

“This whole place, mysterious,” Grisha continued. “Why bring us all here? For what purpose? This is why we must escape. Before we discover the purpose the hard way, yes?”

 

I nodded absently. A crowd was forming behind my two idiots and their new friends, a casual, spotty crowd moving slowly and easily. An audience. I closed my eyes and imagined myself in the desert, empty and vast, the wind the only sound. I imagined a distant roar, so loud the sand vibrated beneath my feet. It felt good.

 

Opening my eyes, I blinked the glare out of them and took another look at my fans. The skinny kid had gotten improbably skinnier, shrinking under the murderous diet and smothering heat. The longhair was still limping from our last encounter, his jumpsuit spotted red. Their new friends were big, tall Augment freaks—bigger than the longhair had been but looking a little saggy after their time in Chengara. I wasn’t sure why all Augment addicts looked exactly the same, but they did: stiff and bulging, almost hairless, with thick, ropy veins traced under their thick, leathery skin. These two were burned pretty dark, so I figured they’d been here for a while. I ran the numbers in my head as we closed the distance: malnourished, bird boned, and willing to kill someone in return for a fucking nutrition tab and some cigarettes.

 

“Ah, you have some business, yes?” Grisha said, sounding almost happy. “Michaleen says you are a Gunner. That you have killed many people. That you are skilled.”

 

I took a deep breath of hot, dry air. It hurt my throat. My leg hitched painfully. “What I am,” I said with a slight smile I couldn’t suppress, “is old.”

 

“Yes,” Grisha said. “As are we all.”

 

My new friends had stopped about twenty feet away. Behind them was most of the prison, I thought, spreading around us to form a loose circle. There were no Vids; this was entertainment. It was difficult to be sure, but I thought some of the faces I’d gotten used to seeing were gone, disappeared. It seemed like each morning there were more missing faces, but new trains arrived every other day, so it was impossible to say for sure.

 

I kept walking as Grisha veered off and joined the crowd. With the sun like a fist pressing down on the back of my head, I continued until I was a few feet away and stopped.

 

“Well —”

 

They came at me all at once, all four just charging at me. Our audience let out a cheer, and I leaned down over the hot ground, putting my head down and my stiff leg in front of me, letting the longhair crash into me and rolling him over my back. Taking a fistful of sandy dirt almost unconsciously, I pushed myself up and tottered backward, off balance as the four skidded to a halt, spinning.

 

The crowd let out a cheer. I heard my name.

 

They came at me again, without even a hint of finesse or plan, just superior numbers. Assholes always thought superior numbers meant everything. I forced myself to stand still until they were right on top of me, then spun to my left, tossing my fistful of dirt into one of the big guys’ faces and bringing one of my shivs from my pocket. He cursed and went down onto his knees in a stumble, and I fell against him, my leg screaming out in sharp, sudden pain, and dragged the blade across his throat.

 

“Asshole,” I muttered, pushing myself back onto my feet.

 

The crowd cheered.

 

The other three spun and then stood there, staring from their dying fellow as he choked up blood into the thirsty ground to me. For a second, none of us moved, and then the other big guy let out an anguished screech and leaped at me. The crowd roared—but the roar transformed into something else. A puff of dust erupted silently at my feet, a sniper’s bullet.

 

The big guy suddenly jerked backward, a spray of blood hitting me in the face as his head turned into a sculpture of blood and bone. The crowd erupted into noisy chaos as the Crushers appeared, Taser sticks in hand, shouting and smacking everyone in sight. Again, they’d come out of fucking
nowhere.
If someone told me they’d blinked in from thin air, I’d fucking believe it.

 

I hesitated, picturing the puff of dust. I could feel the sniper on my back, but I didn’t know if he wanted me to stay put or get moving. Just the day before I’d been Tasered until my stomach had tried to crawl up my throat, and I didn’t want to repeat the experience, so I chose to move. I dodged clumsily to my right and then threw myself into a stagger to the left, my leg sending a sharp stabbing pain up my side. I scrambled for the edge of the crowd, hoping to skirt around the main body of ass-kicking and limp into the shadows. Fuck it. I was an old man, and there was no glory in pissing your jumpsuit twice in two days.

 

Panting and wincing, I swung through the thick cloud of hot dust and then skidded to a halt as my favorite Crusher, beard as neatly trimmed as always, loomed up in front of me. As I tried to shift direction, my leg twitched painfully and went dead under me, spilling me onto the ground.

 

The non-Crusher grinned. “I knew we’d manage to train you soon enough,” he shouted, raising his stick up dramatically. As I lay there trying to decide if I should just piss my jumpsuit now and get it over with instead of waiting for my nervous system to be lit up like a fucking power grid, someone appeared behind him and grabbed him around his thick neck. With a jerk, the non-Crusher’s head was twisted around much further than I thought possible as his legs left the ground. He kicked and jiggled for a moment and then there was a sudden violent stiffening of his limbs, and he dropped like a rag doll and lay still.

 

I stared at Bartlett for just a second, and then struggled back to my feet. The big black ex-cop surged forward, and before I knew it his bruised, sweaty body was right on top of me, his big hands wrapping themselves in my jumpsuit and lifting me up off the ground. He fucking
carried
me about twenty feet through the dust and noise and then slammed me down into a shady spot where the ground sloped downward, forming a shallow trench against the cinder blocks of the bunkhouse. A moment later he slammed against the wall next to me, panting.

 

“Gotta make sure you twist ’em
all the way,
” he huffed. “Gotta keep it up until they disconnect.”

 

“So we’re even?” I breathed.

 

“Even?” It was the first time I’d heard him speak at a normal volume. He had a deep, rich voice that sounded like a minor earthquake going off next to me. “Fucking rat. Fucking copkiller. You think you lift one shiv off an asshole for me, and now we’re fucking
buddies?
Motherfucker, I’d slit your throat right now—I’d probably be avenging what, a dozen—
two dozen
—dead cops just like that.”

 

I blinked. “Then —”

 

“She gave the order.”

 

I followed his jerking thumb. Sitting calm and composed in the narrow shadow of the dorm wall, her ridiculous, heavy coat still hanging off her thin shoulders, was the old woman I’d seen getting off the train. She stared back at me with those clear, dry eyes and then looked away. I felt the dismissal like a physical force buffeting me.

 

Before I could ask a question, the tide of the scrum intervened. I turned and Bartlett was gone.

 

 

 

 

IX

IF YOU WANTED TO KILL ME… THERE ARE FASTER WAYS

 

 

 

 

I stepped into the bar and stopped, the hair on my arms standing up. Krajian kept walking, the smoky gloom swallowing her, and I forced myself back into motion, stepping down and letting the door swing shut behind me. The sounds of the street disappeared, instantly replaced by the buzz of conversation and the clink of glasses.

 

I forced myself to keep moving and stay calm. It was a small, old place, sunk into the ground and almost windowless, the gloom feeling permanent, smeared onto everything like a stain. The walls were rough stone and the bar and tables were substantial, huge hunks of wood, polished with use and expensive looking. Everything felt close together, as if the furniture shouldn’t have been able to fit through the door. No one looked at me, but they didn’t have to—every cop in the place had noticed me the second I appeared in the doorway.

 

I followed Krajian to a table in the back with my head down. It was one thing to have half the System Pigs in the place know you were a criminal with just a casual glance; it was something else to have your face scanned by a fucking OFR handheld and have a dozen open cases pop up like hot coals, along with your name.