The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(20)

The one before me reached up to her throat and plucked a single, squirming maggot-thing from her rotten skin. It twisted and writhed, pinned between thumb and forefinger, as she held it above my face. Panic welled up and I fought to keep my fear in check, holding very, very still as her hand came down.

I smelled mildew, and decay, and sweet rose water. Just before she dropped the maggot into my left nostril.

I lurched forward, eyes wide open, the vision torn away and the stench and sounds of the prison hammering my senses. Suddenly free and suddenly entombed. I clutched the thin blanket, pressing my face to the foot of my bunk, clenching my jaw until it ached. I could feel it, the alien thing inside my body, crawling up my sinuses and spreading a rash of pain like I’d just snorted chili powder. I felt the maggot squirm across the back of my eyeball, my vision blurring as it left a burning trail on its way to my brain. I wanted to claw at my skin, rip out my eye, anything to get the damned thing out. All I could do was count my breaths and hold very still, clutching the blanket, waiting for the feeling to end.

But it didn’t. The insect curled up on the skin of my brain—against all logic, against everything I knew about the human body, I could feel it there—and went to sleep. An unscratchable itch beneath my skull. A parasite made of cosmic filth.

It would only sleep for so long. I had two days, three at most, before it would start to burrow. It needed a warm, safe place, after all.

A warm, safe place to feed.

That was the number-one reason I’d only done this once before and hoped to never do it again. I had two days to pass the king’s “gift” to another victim, or it would devour me alive from the inside out.

Nothing in this universe is ever really free.





11.




I slept, if you could call it sleep. A few fitful hours of tossing and turning on the quarter-inch mattress, waking up with my back aching and my eyelids sagging, more tired than when I’d laid down in the first place. And I could still feel the maggot, nesting inside my skull. Paul chuckled as he pushed himself up from his bunk.

“Don’t worry, it gets easier,” he said. “My first week, I couldn’t sleep a wink. Eventually you just tune everything out. It’s amazing what you can get used to when you don’t have any other choice.”

I didn’t plan on being here long enough to get used to it.

The tiers showered in shifts, and we waited for the guards to pop our cell door, calling us out to stand along the railing in single file. We shuffled downstairs and through an access corridor, like the world’s slowest conga line at the world’s saddest party.

The movies had told me to expect a big, open room lined with shower nozzles, the space filled with milling naked bodies and the threat of violence. What I got instead was more like the showers in a college dorm. Individual stalls lined in white ceramic tile—with dingy plastic curtains, no less, though they didn’t quite cover the entire opening. Stepping into that stall and pulling the curtain shut behind me was the closest thing I’d had to privacy since I arrived at the Iceberg. I let out a faint sigh of pleasure and luxuriated under the sputtering lukewarm spray, running my fingers over my scalp. I only had five minutes, but it was enough.

Outside, toweling off with my uniform folded on a long wooden bench at my side, I got Paul’s attention and nodded left. Two men stood with crossed arms outside a curtained stall, staring daggers at anyone who came within ten feet.

“What’s up with that?” I asked.

“Like I said, usually don’t have to worry about being raped in the showers,” he told me, “but it’s a great place to get stabbed. Sometimes guys trade off like that, two standing guard while one showers, to make sure nobody pulls anything funny. Heck, put up some commissary goods and you can hire your very own bodyguards. Bet you never thought a chocolate bar could save your life.”

I had chocolate on the brain as we fell in line again down in the cafeteria. It was better than the watery scrambled eggs they were serving up, falling from the server’s ladle to my paper plate in a messy plop.

“So when does Hive B eat?” I asked the server. “I only see A and C on the schedule.”

“They don’t. Lockdown means all the meals get delivered to their cells. We cook ’em up and send them all over on rolling carts for the guards to pass out.”

“There a lot of guys in Hive B?”

He stared at me like I’d found his last nerve and planted my heel on it. Behind me, the line kept getting longer. I moved on.

The prisoners in Hive B were still eating, which meant they weren’t dead. One possible explanation down, countless more to go.

The back of my neck prickled as I walked the aisle, looking for a place to sit. I caught glances out of the corner of my eye, mostly from the Latino wedge of the cafeteria. Hard, narrowed eyes and soft murmurs. I slipped into an open spot not far from Brisco.

“Might have a problem,” he said, shooting a quick look over his shoulder.

Ray-Ray, sitting next to him, snorted over his eggs. “Yeah, and his f*ckin’ name is Jablonski.”

“You may have felt,” Brisco told me, “a little shade from our brown brothers over there being thrown your way.”

“I noticed,” I said.

“That’s not by accident. Someone slipped a copy of your jacket to the browns’ shot-caller, and he passed it on to the Cinco Calles. They know who you are.”