Xavier looked at Nathan and appeared to suddenly remember the sacrifice that Nathan had made to his cause.
‘Thanks, man. You didn’t have to do this.’
Nathan shrugged off his own misgivings. ‘I guess it was the right thing to do.’
Xavier scrutinized him. ‘You didn’t think the warden would put you in here, did you.’
‘No,’ Nathan admitted. ‘I called his bluff.’
‘Are you happy with the outcome?’
‘Not so much.’
Xavier stared at Nathan for a long moment and then he began to smile. Nathan chuckled, shook his head, and from their cell a ripple of laughter echoed out across the block. Allen apparently did not share their mirth.
‘Seriously, you guys think this is
funny
? We’re locked up in here with a bunch of crazies who’ll tear us apart given half a chance.’
Nathan’s mirth faded slowly away, Xavier’s laughter losing its gusto also.
‘He’s right, you should’ve stayed back,’ Xavier said finally. ‘The cons in here, they mean business. We’ll be lucky to get out alive.’
‘Best we settle in then,’ Nathan suggested, ‘if this is our home for a while.’
Detective Allen turned away from them and stood in front of the cell door, looking out over the prison block as Xavier leaned back against one wall.
‘Where’s your home?’ he asked Nathan.
‘Aurora, Colorado.’
‘Nothin’ much out there,’ Xavier frowned. ‘What made you leave?’
Nathan let a small, sad little smile curl from his lips. ‘Too much had changed, y’know, over the years.’
Xavier nodded, not really knowing what Nathan was getting at but merely in sympathy.
‘You got family?’ he asked.
Nathan sucked in a deep breath as he prepared to answer, and then realized that he didn’t know what to say. He did have a family and it felt as though they had been with him only months before, and yet they were gone and had been for hundreds of years. Nathan closed his eyes as a fresh wave of black grief threatened to overwhelm him, trembled on the edge of a precipice from which it seemed there was no return. He barely heard Allen’s reply.
‘Nathan’s on his own,’ the detective said softly, ‘family tragedy.’
Xavier’s expression creased as he realized his
faux pas
and he closed his eyes briefly. ‘Sorry, man.’
Nathan shook his head. ‘Not your fault, you couldn’t have known.’
The giant black wave receded into the distance, leaving Nathan feeling weak and disorientated. He sucked in deep breaths of air, caught Allen’s concerned expression but pretended that he hadn’t noticed.
Christ Nathan, get it together.
Detective Allen turned from the cell gates, and stood over Nathan where he sat on the low bunk and folded his arms across his chest.
‘Ironside, you might not be worried about living another day but I am.’
Nathan looked up at the detective questioningly, although he knew damned well what Jay was getting at.
Allen kept his voice down, but it was impossible for Xavier not to overhear their conversation. ‘You’ve been throwing yourself in harm’s way ever since you started wearing the uniform,’ he snapped. ‘What is it? You wanna die?’
‘Of course I don’t want to die,’ Nathan protested, ‘I’m just doing my job.’
‘No, that’s the whole point,’ Allen replied, ‘you’re not doing the job of an officer of the law, you’re playing the devil–may–care asshole and now you’re taking other people on the ride and sooner or later it’s going to cost somebody their life!’
Nathan saw Xavier watching them both with an expression of deep concern that matched Allen’s. Before Nathan could answer he heard a rippling sound echo across the block, as though a tin insect were scurrying on multiple legs across the roof. The sound swept across the block and Xavier stood abruptly from his bunk.
‘This is it.’
‘This is what?’
‘The end,’ Xavier replied. ‘The prison’s supposed to be on lockdown, right? That’s what the warden said. So why are the cells opening?’
Allen shot Nathan an angry look as he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘See what I mean?’
Nathan got up and saw the prisoners moving out of their cells. ‘Damn it, the warden knows that we’re in here!’
As Nathan moved to the cell gate so he heard the automatic locking system disengage, and then the door swung open with a metallic squeal as though it were announcing to every other con on the block that the cell was accessible to them. Nathan stepped back from the gate as he heard the sound of hundreds of feet shuffling from cells all across the block, dark eyes looking in their direction as one by one they began filtering toward Xavier’s cell.
‘Zak’s got somebody on the inside,’ Reed said, seemingly resigned to his fate. ‘He warned me that he’s got plans for me, and the word on the block is that he’s planning an escape.’
‘To where?’ Allen asked. ‘There’s nowhere to go.’
A sudden, squealing alarm shattered the silence as the sticks started sprinting from the gantries as they realized that the cells were all opening. Nathan dashed to the cell gate and saw them dash through the chow hall and rush toward the Watch Tower’s main sally port in a bulky black flood of riot gear and black uniforms.
‘They’re leaving us!’ Allen yelped in surprise.
‘This is nothing to do with the warden,’ Nathan said. ‘It’s too spontaneous.’
‘This is what Zak had planned all along,’ Xavier said, bizarrely calm in the face of imminent danger. ‘This is the riot he’s been waiting for.’
Nathan saw the sticks make it to the watch tower with dozens of screaming cons in pursuit. From nowhere, up on the gantries, the sound of flushing latrines being blocked sent streams of water flooding out of cells to drain like dirty waterfalls over the gantries, the sheets of water flickering in the light as from another cell a billowing cloud of smoke spilled out like poison as an inmate set his mattress alight.
‘Come one, come all,’ Xavier said with morbid resignation. ‘They’ll take us somewhere else in the prison and finish us off down there.’
As if Nathan needed confirmation that this was not some cruel final act by the warden, he saw two or three of the sticks caught up in the wave of running inmates, their bodies stomped upon by the hordes, their terrified cries swamped by the raging cons assaulting them. Nathan knew that no matter what the warden was up to his neck in, he wouldn’t have risked abandoning any of his men to the merciless horde of rioting inmates.
From across the block soared a banshee wail of brutal joy, of hundreds of men suddenly freed from incarceration to plunder and destroy as they saw fit. He heard the primal roar of human beings suddenly and as one unleashing years’ of resentment, hate, shattered dreams and lost lives in one uncaring and unstoppable wave of brutality.
Nathan sucked in a deep breath of stale air and hoped against hope that somebody would come to their rescue before they were dragged into the bowels of the prison. Even as he thought it, so the light from the prison beyond the cell gates was blocked by the bodies of muscular cons, all of them glaring at Nathan as they blocked their escape from the cell.
***
XXV
Nathan saw the hulking cons loom large on the gantry outside the cell, behind them the screaming hordes of prisoners running this way and that as they cheered their freedom and celebrated the only way they knew how: burning, breaking, punching and punishing anybody who stood in their way.
‘You got y’self a nice new cell.’
Zak Volt loomed in the doorway of the cell and directed a cold gaze at Xavier Reed, who stood next to Nathan but neither retreated nor advanced as he waited for whatever was going to happen next.
‘And you got yo’self some new boyfriends too, ain’t that cute?’ Volt went on as he looked at Nathan and Allen. ‘And you were detectives we hear? Well ain’t y’all gonna fit in on the block jus’ right?’
Nathan heard the other inmates crowding the gantry chuckle grimly as their gazes fell on Nathan. Nathan forced himself to take a pace forward to confront Volt, the con’s imposing muscular form and aura of psychosis making Nathan feel as though he was shrinking.
‘I still am a detective,’ Nathan replied.
Volt peered at him. ‘Then whatchya doin’ on ma block,
stick
?’
The last word was twisted and shoved into Nathan’s face like the insult it was meant to be. Nathan knew instinctively that he could not afford to show any weakness in front of men like these, often known as “sharks” in prison slang in his own time, with the rest of the population referred to as either “bait” or “fish”. Despite the weak position he held, he was still a detective and the power of authority could hold sway even here, even now.
‘Inmate Reed is my responsibility,’ Nathan snapped back. ‘I chose to come down here with him, because he’s innocent of any crime.’
Volt raised an eyebrow. ‘Well now, innocent y’say, huh? I guess that makes us all just th’same, ‘cause we’s all innocent down here in Tethys, right boys?’
A rumble of agreement rippled through the angry crowd, but Nathan kept his eyes fixed on Volt. The con, whatever he had done to be in Tethys, was clearly king of the block and the only way Nathan could change the balance of power was to knock Volt off his pedestal as quickly as possible and get the hell out of Xavier’s cell.
‘Yeah,’ Nathan replied, ‘I figured you for a choir boy too.’
The laughter was shut off like a tap and Volt’s humor vanished to be replaced with a tight jaw and a cold glare, like a gigantic cobra poised to strike.
‘You say what now,
stick
?’
‘You heard.’
Volt peered at Nathan for a moment before he spoke. ‘Y’see, stick, you gone and got us all wrong. We was here to welcome you with open arms, but now you made us your enemy.’
‘I didn’t change a thing.’
‘Wrong, stick,’ Volt sneered. ‘When we thought yo’ friend here was a cop killer, we could at least take him seriously. But now you say he din’ do it, so that makes him the same as you – a stick, stuck in here with us. What yo’ think we gonna do ‘bout that,
stick
?’
Nathan took a pace even closer to Volt, enough so that he could smell the con’s stale sweat and prison food breath.
‘I’m gonna count to three, and if you haven’t turned around and left this cell you’ll regret it.’
‘That so?’ Volt sneered with a broad smile. ‘Oh me, oh my, whatever will I do?’
‘One.’
Volt didn’t move, the smile broadening on his face. Nathan opened his mouth as if to say two, but instead he jerked his right knee up and slammed it into Volt’s groin. The big man’s smile crumpled inward and his eyes widened with shock as he reached for his crotch, his mouth opening as he began to bend forward and fold up over the blow. Nathan slammed his head forward and smashed it across the bridge of Volt’s nose like a sledgehammer.
Volt’s eyes rolled up into their sockets and he collapsed in a pile of muscle at Nathan’s feet, Nathan stepping neatly to one side to avoid the hefty obstacle as it slumped on the cell floor. He lifted one boot and with a heave of effort stomped it down on Volt’s face, crushing whatever consciousness remained.
‘Charge them, now!’
Nathan’s yell prompted Allen and Reed to move, and with a scream Nathan plunged through the cell gates and smashed into the wall of muscle outside as Reed and Allen slammed into him from behind. The combined weight of their bodies plowed through Volt’s thugs and propelled three of them over the gantry, their screaming bodies flailing as they plunged down into the chow hall and crashed onto the deck or across tables.
Nathan swung for the nearest con still standing and caught him a right hook across his broad and bearded jaw that sent the man reeling down the gantry. Allen dashed past on Nathan’s left and stomped his boot onto the man’s face, crushing his nose as the man’s eyes rolled up in their sockets. Nathan whirled as he heard Reed scream, and saw the former officer launch himself into the other two cons with a frenzy of blows, driven by the same repressed fury he shared with all of the other cons on the block.
Nathan hurried to Reed’s side and drove a boot into one of the henchmen’s thighs, the tattooed, shaven headed thug growling in pain as he collapsed onto one knee and Reed’s boot swung around to collide with his temple with a dull thump. The thug’s head clanged against the rail and he slumped unconscious as Nathan looked up and saw the last of Volt’s men fleeing down the gantry away from them.
Detective Allen moved up alongside Nathan and peered down the gantry.
‘Gutsy move man,’ he said, ‘but when Volt comes around he’s going to come down on us like a ton of bricks and there’s no way the warden’s men are comin’ back in here to find us.’
‘They will,’ Nathan insisted. ‘But right now we need to get out of the block and hide out somewhere while we still can.’
From the block rose a keening scream of outrage that soared to the very vaults of the ceiling as though probing for Nathan, Allen and Xavier. The scream turned to a roar of rage, twisting into something that Nathan could just about make out.
‘Kiiiillll them all!!’
Nathan looked at Allen. ‘You think that Ryan’s come round?’
‘We need to run, now!’
They bolted down the gantry to see Volt stagger out of Reed’s cell, his face a mask of blood, his eyes wild with terrible vengeance. Within moments, he was surrounded by a gaggle of thugs who rushed to join him as his bloody face looked across the gantry, his body trembling with fury as he pointed at Nathan with one quivering arm.
‘Kill them, now!’
Xavier grabbed Nathan’s arm as they ran across the gantry. ‘This way!’
Nathan followed with Allen as Xavier dashed past other cells, some of them filled with inmates all cowering from the threat of violence staining the foul air. The lights above began to flicker again and the sound of dull booms echoed through the prison’s grim interior like a labored heartbeat.
Xavier turned left, running along the upper tier as Nathan looked down and saw Ryan’s gang splitting up to cut them off, dashing across the chow hall below.
‘Where the hell are we going?’ Nathan asked.