From the Chrysalis (19 page)

Calm down, he told himself. They’d use tear gas first, wouldn’t they? Even the guards weren’t total fools. Christ. Was that smoke? Instinctively, he held his breath and crouched down. No use hollering. Even if he got somebody’s attention, so what? They’d have a hell of time prying the lid off his can without the key.
 

His thighs ached. He raised his head from his knees, took a cautious breath and coughed.
Jesus fucking Christ!
He exploded, wasting more precious breath. Smoke. The sneaky little bitch was funnelling from the tier below his cell, probably from the same place where he’d heard all that screaming last night. Smoke was wending her way into his cell and invading his air space, hitchhiking on oxygen-carrying red cells, like the alcohol in his daddy’s bloodstream.

He lurched to his feet and yanked on the bars.
Where the hell was everybody?
He wasn’t Superman. In fact, he was seconds away from screaming like a snitch stuck with a shiv. And he fucking well didn’t want to start screaming.
He didn’t want to die without anybody knowing.
He wanted to see his family again. To make amends. To show everybody who said he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, with all the stupid, fucking choices he’d made.
 

The smoke was getting thicker. He yanked his shirt up over his head and scrunched back down, coughing and sputtering until there was a little pool of spittle on the floor. Christ. He’d had enough. “Open the goddamn door! Get me out of this fucking drum!” he shouted.
 

Sandy McAllister and his masked banditos appeared so fast he wondered if they’d been right behind the fire door. Dace staggered to his feet. “Who started the fire?” he demanded, suspecting it was one of them.

“Easy guy. My boys knew what they were doing. It’s all under control. My control,” Sandy said, poking an assortment of keys into the cell door lock.
 

Charlie the Crowbar got fed up. “Good old Charlie to the rescue,” Sandy said, watching the man pull a crowbar from his sleeve.

Dace could see all sorts of uses for this contraband tool. “Where d’you get that?” he asked, though it hurt to speak.

“Smuggled it out of upholstery workshop a long time ago,” Charlie said, wedging the crowbar between a couple of bars and prying with all his might. “It was bound to come in useful someday.” He grunted until a small crack in the old plaster above the bars appeared.
 

Somebody else took over then. They all had a go.

For once, Dace wasn’t much use. In an effort to conserve his energy, he had sunk back down to the floor. “Hurry,” he slurred, slumping forward.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait long. Chunks of plaster thudded down as two bars pulled loose. “The bennies help, man,” Sandy said with a grin. He slid in behind Dace and lifted him into his arms. Somebody else grabbed his feet.
 

Dace couldn’t remember the last time he felt so wasted. As far as he was concerned, Sandy’s boys could do whatever they wanted. Darkness came then, though he could still hear somebody screaming
Fire!

Live, Dace, he whispered to himself.
I want to go home.
 

When he woke on the damp floor of the Dome he was wet, either from dirty water or from his own sweat. He couldn’t tell. At first he thought he must have fallen, then some part of him recalled being lugged from his cell, an almost comatose man on a phantom stretcher.
 

He flexed his limbs, relieved to feel nothing was broken, and looked at the ceiling. It looked dark, but the Joint was always dark, night and day. Hooded faces loomed above him.
Judgement Day,
he thought. Sandy McAllister and the beefy guy they called Charlie were still there. Who were the other clods?
 

“Look,” somebody said. “I see eyes. He’s coming ‘round. I thought for sure he was a goner.”

“Yeah, I see ‘em,” said another voice, chuckling. “Except they keep rolling back up into his head.”

“Too fuckin’ tough, man.”

“He should have come with us last night,” somebody else said.
 

“Yeah, well, who the hell’s gonna mess with
him
?”

“Maybe he’ll stick with us now.”

“What’s happening, man?” Dace managed to ask.
Why had he been saved? For what purpose?
His eyes burned and his throat was parched. Rubbing his eyes with his numb hands, he tried to make sense of the sheeted figures around him, but it was like waking up in a recovery room with masked doctors all around. Or a clutch of jackrabbits from the Klan. Jesus Christ. Just what he needed!

“Ah, we’re just having a little fun, Dace. One little, two little, three little piggies … We’ve got six little piggies holed up in that big old heating duct on the first floor.”

And the wolf is at their door
. Pain shot through his chest as he fought for a single, uncomplicated breath.
Breathe, breathe, breathe
, he recited. Christ. What if his lungs imploded? He’d read how people rescued from fires died later, their skin unblemished, their lungs a blackened mess.
 

Goddammit. I’ve been reading too much
, he thought, momentarily forgetting that for the past six months, he hadn’t had anything else to do besides read. He liked books all right, but the library was no place for somebody like him. A man could go crazy knowing too much. His unschooled father had done quite well for himself.
 

“Are you nuts?” he sputtered.

“The creeps are okay,” somebody said with a laugh. “And ain’t they just the cutest little mother fuckers, all dolled up in our monkey suits?”

“You’ve dressed the guards in prison uniforms?” Dace’s smile stretched over his chattering teeth.
Back off,
he felt like snarling.
“Real smart, guys,” he said instead. “They’re safer that way. You want some leverage, right?”

“Nah, we just wanna play with them. That Saksun guy’s a lot of fun.”

“What about your costumes? Did you raid the laundry or what?”

“Ah, we’re just playing dress-up, Dace. C’mon, wake up, you crazy mother fucker! You’ve already missed one hell of a party. Oh, shit, look at that. Some jackass spilled the hooch. Probably the last. We busted into Doc’s place too, but the bennies are gone now, man, they’re all gone.”

Dace folded his hands across his chest and crossed his feet at the ankles. He still wore his St. Christopher medal around his neck. His mother had given it to him. He recalled when—

Shit. His mind was wandering. He probably looked like a corpse lying there, but he didn’t care. Storm clouds scuttled across the skylight, far above him. He used to like being outside on a stormy day. That was when he’d had some sort of control over what happened to him. Or at least he’d had that illusion.
 

Christ, he couldn’t keep coughing. His audience was scattering. The minute he caught his breath, he choked to the diehards at his side, needing more information. “So talk to me. Why should I get up? What’s in it for me?”

Sandy McAllister was happy to oblige. Watching his rescuer, Dace briefly considered joining him. Sandy could be very convincing. With piercing blue eyes lighting his sincerity, he spoke for several moments about revolution and change. Then his rhetoric slipped.

“It comes down to this. We need a tough guy, man,” he said, reaching down and almost jabbing his long finger up Dace’s nose. “And that’s you, my fine, stalwart friend! We got crazies on the loose now. Look at Charlie. There’s no telling what he’d do with that crowbar if we let him. And the borderline nuts are cracking, too. They won’t leave the mother fucking hostages alone. Big Joe and his friends are threatening to take the screws upstairs and toss them over the rail to the sharkies below. You’ve gotta watch crazies. You know that. Last night they had one of the screws hanging over a railing, screaming like a banshee. Sorta funny, but …”

Funny, right. Everybody’s crazy except me,
Dace thought, allowing Sandy to yank him into a sitting position.

“Nah, I don’t have to do nothing,” he said. “What’s happening, anyway? Where’s the man? Are none of them inside?”

Nobody answered. Two of the younger men, teenagers really, stepped out of the circle and brandished their makeshift weapons at each other instead.
 

Swell
, Dace thought. A couple of kids. And the rest of Sandy’s followers? No doubt the rescuers were the cons with the biggest balls, the
solids
or the more aggressive prisoners: various assailants and bank robbers, the heartbeat of his prison world. The ones on paper who were the most like him. He sensed only a solid could have instigated a riot, egged on by the larger circle of thieves and robbers. A chill passed over him as he recalled how he’d almost bragged to Liza about being a solid. He had never expected to end up like this: a reluctant rebel of sorts. What the hell would she think?

At least the solids were predictable. Their sneakier associates were not. The sneaks were probably busting walls or tunnelling through heating ducts right now, trying to sniff out contraband: alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, girly magazines, prescription drugs and maybe even some cash. Whatever was going.
 

His chest tightened. He was in a corner, all right. A place where a man was apt to chew his leg off if he got caught. For as often as he told himself to be careful, he had always loved excitement. He hated what being careful got him.

He thought about the larger, less integrated circle on the periphery of the prison population, those soft, pasty-fleshed boys and stringy, nervous-looking men still in Segregation.
Night creatures.
Although the diddlers didn’t really count, Dace didn’t want to think how these men could spark the murderous fantasies of his more volatile friends. If he thought about it, he might have felt the same. The night creatures were made up of offenders least respected by other prisoners: the arsonists, the child molesters and the incestuous offenders.
 

“Well, let me guess then. It’s you, Sandy, isn’t it? Got yourself a key.”
More hindsight,
he thought a
nd a fucking lot of use it is.
Sandy had been talking about a bingo for weeks, but so what? Most blowhards just talked.

In reply, Sandy fluttered his eyelashes and flashed a smile as demure as any girl’s.
 

“Look, man,” one of his friends yelped. “He got some help. Except we didn’t mean to. Saksun oughtna had his key dangling out of his pocket so obvious-like. It was just hanging there, beggin’
take me! take
me!
so Sandy grabs the mother fucking key and bingo! It’s a bingo, get it? And we’s all on the front page and we’re free. Everybody on our shift got loose. We’re not sure about the guys in the other blocks, but we think they did too.”

“Free? Is that what you call this? So how come I hear bullhorns outside? And what’s that whirring? Maybe the good citizenry of Maitland are organizing our getaway cars? Or getting us some airplanes?”

Everybody stopped and looked up. Nobody had noticed the helicopters until then. One of them volunteered, “Well, sure man. Look out a window. There’s lots of little blue jean babies outside, too. They’re carrying placards. Co-eds—”

“Co-eds?”
Liza is a co-ed,
Dace thought. And scared. Well, no wonder. Look at him. He was
fucking terrified, and he’d been brought up to speed.
 

Jesus, he could still hear the German Shepherds patrolling the grounds, a sinister contrast to the carnival atmosphere inside the Joint. The goddamn dogs were still barking. He liked dogs, but not German Shepherds. In his mind’s eye, he dropped them one by one with his gun, the same kind of gun that had helped him out before. A gun from nowhere.
 

He closed his eyes, not knowing what else to do. Then he slept and his mind raced clean away.
Liza
, he thought he said, but nobody heard him.

“Christ,” Sandy shrieked. “We’re fucking losing him again. Give him some air.”

“Forget about him. I’ll …”