The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(27)

“If we do this, you’ll be a fugitive for the rest of your life. You okay with that?”

He stretched his arms over his head and stifled a yawn.

“My wife divorced me. She’s made it clear I’ll never see my little girl again, and I’m pretty sure my tenure at the university’s been revoked by now. It’s not as if I have a whole lot from my old life to cling to. So. You have a plan?”

“I’m working on that,” I told him.

Later, I lay awake in my bunk, staring at the eggshell paint on the wall and listening to the restless sounds of the prison after dark. They were less jarring than the night before, and it was that much easier to close my eyes and slip, if not into sleep, into an uneasy waking dream.

The alien maggot inside my skull, the gift from the King of Worms, squirmed across the meat of my brain. I could see it when I closed my eyes, its black, rubbery skin still reflecting the light from distant stars. Its hunger growing.





14.




I dreamed of Caitlin.

It wasn’t a message, no mystic vision. Just a snatch of memory on repeat. Sitting at a plastic two-seater in the secret little pizza parlor at the Metropolitan, side by side, sharing Cokes and fat, greasy slices of pepperoni pizza. She flashed her smile my way and I felt…whole. Human. Warm inside.

Then I woke up to the clattering and shouts and stench of the cellblock. My new home. My new home for the rest of my life if I didn’t start making moves.

I joined the line for the showers, letting myself be herded like a cow, hating how fast it became routine. Brisco’s boys, Ray-Ray and Slanger, fell in on my left and right. I gave Ray-Ray a nod.

“Brisco wants us to cover you while you shower,” he told me. “In case the Calles get stupid. Just do the same for us, okay?”

“Good deal,” I said.

I stripped down, setting my folded clothes on a long wooden bench, and stepped into the narrow shower stall. The curtain hung short, and even with it pulled closed I could see my new bodyguards’ feet outside, standing watch for me. For five minutes, at least, I could exhale and let my guard down.

I didn’t, though.

Something was off. As the lukewarm water splashed across the stubble on my scalp and rolled down my naked back, I stretched out my psychic tendrils. A mind here, a mind there. Snatches of confusion, of sudden anxiety, adrenaline spiking.

Fewer minds than there should have been. And the ones I could touch were leaving.

I turned around in the stall and looked down to the curtain gap. Ray-Ray and Slanger were gone.

Here it comes, then, I thought.

In the moments before a confrontation—when you know it’s going to be genuine kill-or-be-killed violence, no discussion, no debate—the world slows to a crawl. Time turns into an hourglass filled with molasses, the seconds dripping down one leaden echoing heartbeat at a time. Your vision narrows, the walls closing in around you.

I took a deep breath, living in that silent, eternal moment.

Then the curtain ripped open, and everything happened very, very fast.

He was shorter than me, Asian, cropped black hair, but my eyes were on his knife. Not prison junk. Carbon black steel, spec-ops style, and forged to carve skin like butter.

Pro, said the back of my brain while the rest of me went into overdrive, dodging to one side as he lunged at me. The blade stabbed empty air, one inch from my left shoulder. I grabbed his wrist, twisted, shoved him a step backward, and slammed his arm against the shower stall opening as hard as I could. His forearm met the white tile with a shotgun crack as a bone fractured. He grunted through gritted teeth, but he clung to the knife with a death grip.

He had a buddy with a blade of his own, dancing around outside the stall like a prizefighter waiting for his title shot. The stall was too small, and they could only come at me one at a time. My only edge. That, and the weapon they didn’t know I had.

The first hitter grabbed his knife with both hands, using his good arm to push as he forced me back a step, my shoulder blades pressed to the cold tile. The tip of the knife inched toward my belly as the shower rained down, drenching us both and turning the world into a wet blur as the downpour washed over my eyes.

As I pushed his hands back, straining against him, the alien maggot in my skull writhed with excitement. I felt it crawling across the back of my eyeball. Then it squirmed its way through the gelatinous tissue and nestled inside.

The hitter got a bright idea. Suddenly he wasn’t pushing, he was pulling, hauling me off-balance and sending me stumbling out of the shower stall. Out into the empty room, where they could both have a go at me. The second killer was eager, too eager. He took a wild swing, his knife slicing the air as I ducked, and he didn’t have time to recover before I threw myself on top of him. We landed on the wooden bench, rolled, landed hard on the floor, almost nose to nose.

I saw a heartbeat of terror register on his face. Then it was too late.

The black maggot spat from my iris like a bullet. It left no wound in its wake, and it didn’t leave a visible wound on him either. Not when it chewed its way into his eyeball, and not when it dug into his brain like a diamond-tipped drill.

He dropped his knife and clutched his face, shrieking, feet pounding the floor. The confusion bought me a precious second, just enough time to snatch up his fallen blade and jump back. I came up in a crouch as the first hitter, the one with the fractured arm, lunged at me. I grabbed my shirt from the bench and swung it like a whip, snapping it at his face. Then I darted in and slashed, shredding his shirt and drawing a thin red line from his nipple to his gut with the tip of the blade.