The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(55)

The headlights clicked on, halogens blazing against the night. I took one deep breath, steeling my nerves, and started to roll. The bus rumbled out of the bay and onto the tarmac outside, and I hauled the wheel around to make a sharp left turn. I saw the Wildcats in the rear-view mirror, swinging into position behind me.

There they were, about a thousand feet ahead: the prison gates, one just after the other, standing silent and tall and strong.

I punched the gas.

The bus rolled, picking up speed, my arm aching as I wrenched my way up through the gears as fast as the clutch would let me. Halfway there, a spotlight hit my windshield and blinded me in a wash of white light. A few seconds later, alarms began to howl.

I couldn’t see, but I didn’t need to. I held the wheel steady and braced for impact.





29.




The bus rammed the first gate at fifty miles an hour, and the world turned into a blur of shrieking metal and hot light. I jolted against the nylon seat belt, my head lurching forward and a searing pain lancing down the back of my neck. I fought to keep the wheel steady, my foot clamped down on the gas like it was the only thing standing between life and death.

Have to keep my speed up, I thought, frantic. If I can’t bust through the second gate, we’re all dead.

The spotlight’s beam slipped off the cracked windshield just in time for me to see the gate coming. Gray smoke spit from the bus’s crumpled hood in heavy plumes—and beyond it, looming in my blurry vision, the oncoming wall of steel.

Sparks exploded as the bus thundered through, tearing down the second gate, the windshield exploding in my face. I threw up an arm to cover my eyes, shoulder wrenching as the second impact jolted me hard enough for the seat belt to bruise my chest, and the wheel slipped from my grasp. It spun hard, the bus careening left, rising up on two wheels before slamming back down again. A tire blew with a crack like a gunshot, rubber shredding and the rim screeching against the asphalt.

The bus shot off-road, rumbling across the desert flats. A thorny cactus went down under the hood. Smoke gushed from the engine and billowed in through the broken windshield. The smoke clogged in my throat, and I coughed myself hoarse with one hand on the wheel and one clamped over my mouth and nose.

Just get it back on the road, I thought. I can do this. I can—

Then I was weightless, just for a heartbeat, as the right wheels jolted up on an uneven ridge and the bus keeled onto its side.

The world turned black and white, and all I could hear was a distant clamoring bell. I moved like a man sinking in quicksand.

The seat belt clicked. It boomed like a cannon in the warbling silence. I pushed myself up, or sideways, trying to orient myself in the capsized bus. My entire world was shattered glass and smoke and pain. I could move, though. Nothing broken. Everything bruised. Shallow cuts decorated my body like tribal tattoos, seeping.

The exit yawned above my head, accordion door hanging open and limp from a twisted swing arm. Using the side of the driver’s seat as a step stool, I climbed. Reaching up, taking hold of the door’s edge, groaning as I pulled myself out one agonizing inch at a time. Finally out, I flopped down on the ruined bus’s side, rolled over and stared up at the stars. Letting the frigid air of a desert night wash over me.

It was strangely peaceful.

Blinding light flooded my vision, and the shrill rotors of a helicopter ripped away the silence. Strobing lights painted the desert in blue and red, and I heard voices now, shouting at me from behind their car doors as the chopper above whipped up a dusty whirlwind. I ignored them. I just lay there.

Eventually, they came and got me.

*

New voices were arguing about me under angry fluorescent lights. I heard words like “Ad Seg” and “concussion.” Then calloused hands shoved me into a small, dark room and left me there.

I slept, I think.

My senses returned and brought pain with them. I flexed my muscles one at a time, moving slowly, taking an inventory of the damage. Fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders, counting pulled muscles and bruises. They’d stripped my clothes off, and the faint bar of light that shone under my cell door let me see the aftermath of the bus crash. Angry purple splotches spread across my skin like birthmarks painted by Salvador Dali.

I slept some more. Woke up sharper, but with a faint ringing in my ears. Waves of nausea washed over me, coming and going without warning.

The cell was smaller than a walk-in closet. In the shadows, when I managed to stand up at all, I could make out a concrete slab with a paper-thin mattress, no pillow, and a stainless-steel toilet against the back wall. A sluice drain sat in the middle of the concrete floor. With no clothes, there was nowhere I could sit that didn’t press at least some of my naked skin against cold, damp stone. If I stood, the soles of my feet froze. I stood anyway, walking in place, forcing my body to move over my muscles’ protests. I had to stay in motion, and keep as limber as I could.

A narrow slot in the middle of the door rattled open. I recognized the piggish eyes leering through at me. Jablonski.

“Hey, Faust,” he said, “shower time.”

Finally, I thought with a wave of relief. A chance to see light, to clean the dried blood and feel human again—

His face moved away, and I had just a second to recognize what took its place—the brass nozzle of a fire hose—before the water blasted in. The eruption hit me square in the chest with the force of a prizefighter’s fist, knocking me to the floor. The ice-cold water rained over me, Jablonski’s laughter drowning out the hiss of the hose, and I scrambled on hands and knees to take cover behind the bunk. I crouched there, curled into a fetal ball with my eyes squeezed shut, and waited for it to end.