Jason Frost - Warlord 04 - Prisonland (11 page)

“I haven’t seen too many women around.”

“There ain’t any women around. Just a few pigs like them you seen back there. Might as well fuck a dog.” He laughed. “And there’s plenty that do around here. Most these guys been in prison for a lot of years. They know how to get along without women. Only we ain’t gonna have to much longer. Thor’s seeing to that.”

“How?”

Grub sneered. “You ain’t gonna be around long enough to worry about it.”

“That a threat?”

“Hell no. Just means most people don’t stay here more than a couple days. The rest is Thor’s men. It ain’t the safest place in the world, especially if you got something of value.” He looked at D.B. “My advice is you sell her soon as possible then haul ass outta here. You go walkin’ around Asgard with her much more and by tonight they’ll be lining up outside your room to slit your throat. She’s a choice cut, sport.”

D.B.’s skin was red with anger. She opened her mouth to say something to Grub and Eric yanked her choke collar, strangling her words.

“Thanks for the tip,” Eric told Grub.

“No sweat, man. That’s why I told ya I’d take her off your hands.”

“I’ll think it over.”

Grub led them deeper into the warehouse, down corridors of patients. Some were on cots, others just on blankets spread out on the floor. Eric noticed a lot of wounds; gunshot, knife, razor. Bruises and broken bones were also popular. Fighting was a way of life here, like an old wild west town. Arguments were settled by combat, the winner taking everything from the loser; the loser coming here to be repaired until he could find someone to defeat and take away their belongings. It had an odd sort of purity to it, Eric admitted.

“Hey, Doc,” Grub hollered across one room lined with patients.

A young man in a stained lab coat was bending over a man without an arm, checking the bandage on the stump. He lifted his head at Grub’s yelling and shook his head. “Quiet, asshole.”

Grub chuckled. “Sorry.”

Eric was surprised. Grub was not the kind of man to let anyone talk to him like that without turning it into a brawl. Certainly he wasn’t afraid of the doctor, a man about Eric’s age, though shorter and slighter of build. He had a shock of unruly red hair swirling from his head. He stared at Grub with a contemptuous frown but Grub, rather than crushing the doctor into sand, smiled as if pleased by the attention. This doctor obviously carried a lot of respect in Asgard.

“Thor wants you to take care of these two right away.”

“I don’t give a shit what Thor wants,” Dr. Fishbine said. He nodded at Eric. “I won’t even spit on this moron until he takes that choke collar off her.”

D.B. gave a little smirk to Eric as he slipped the collar up over her head. Eric draped the leash over his shoulder.

“Don’t mind the doc,” Grub explained to Eric. “He’s kinda gruff, but he’s a helluva doc.”

“And he’s full of shit,” Dr. Fishbine said, leading them on a brisk march through the wards past rows of patients. “This girl needs iron in her diet, for Chrissake. Isn’t there anybody left in California with a scrap of brain?”

Eric heard him talking but suddenly he wasn’t listening. The skin in his face tightened and his heart felt like a flaming log in a block of frozen ice. The man in the third cot. Sleeping.

Dodd.

“What’s wrong with him?” Eric asked.

“What’s it to you?” Dr. Fishbine snapped.

“Curious,” was all Eric said, but there was an edge in his voice, a tone of menace that stopped all three of them.

The doctor stared at Eric a moment before resuming his march. “Observation. He came in a few days ago. Fever, chills. Preliminary symptoms of plague. Gave him some tetracycline and he seems fine. I want to take one more blood culture and sputum sample.”

“What about aspirates of enlarged nodes?”

The young doctor looked pleased. “You a doctor?”

“Had some medical training.”

Dr. Fishbine studied Eric closely. “Soldier?”

“For a while.”

” ’Nam?”

“For a while.”

“Me too. Orderly.”

“Like on TV,” Grub said. “
M.A.S.H
.”

“Only without the laughs,” the doctor said, brushing back a hunk of red hair. “What’s your name?”

Eric hesitated, saw no point in lying. “Ravensmith.”

The doctor thought about it a moment, shrugged, and started to walk on. Then stopped abruptly, snapped his fingers. “Ravensmith from Night Shift? The one who put Colonel Dirk Fallows away for that massacre?”

Eric didn’t answer.

“Yeah,” the doctor nodded. “We’re about the same age. I remember you from TV.”

Grub looked confused. It had been a national scandal for months, all through Fallows’s trial, but Grub didn’t know what they were talking about. “This guy a stoolie?” he asked angrily.

“Never mind, Grub,” Dr. Fishbine said. “You wouldn’t understand.” He pointed at the leash and collar dangling from Eric’s shoulder. “Hard to believe the same man that did such a heroic thing is capable of using that.”

“Times have changed, doctor, or haven’t you noticed?”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

“One might be just as curious about you. What you’re doing here.”

Dr. Fishbine grinned. “Got out of the army, had an attack of social consciousness. A lot of that going around then, remember? Anyway, after med school and residency I started a GP practice and volunteered a few spare hours work at San Quentin. Just my luck the damned quake hits when I’m lancing some con’s hemorrhoid. Poor guy.”

D.B. laughed and the doctor laughed too.

“When the walls came tumbling down at San Quentin, Frank Stovell, or Thor as he now calls himself, grabbed me and took me along.” He held up his hands. “So here I am, fighting the plague and bandaging the wounds they inflict on each other. Had a bunch of AIDS victims last month, Thor sent a bunch of his men over to kill them all. Right, Grub?”

“Yeah, we got rid of ’em nice and clean. Burned the whole lot of them too, just like Thor said.”

“Now you know what I’m up against. One doctor for five hundred people, and another few hundred drop-in patients from the outside.”

“Don’t you have any help, nurses or anything?” Eric asked.

Dr. Fishbine laughed. “Yeah, sure. When Thor wants to punish somebody, but not enough to kill him, he sends him over here to work for me. Kind of like not having enough money to pay for your meal at a restaurant and having to wash dishes.”

“I say a bullet through their fucking heads,” Grub said. “That just leaves more for the rest of us.”

“More what?” the doctor asked, baiting him.

“More ...” Grub searched for a word, finally just throwing up his hands. “... stuff. More stuff for the survivors.”

They entered the makeshift lab area. Modern equipment lined tables. Overhead, electric lights beamed.

“Electricity,” D.B. gasped.

“Generators,” the doctor explained. “If there’s one thing these men are good at, it’s scavenging. They got the drugs I asked for, plus a bunch I didn’t. Also, they brought me all this equipment. Some of it I still don’t know how to use. But it’s sufficient for the tests I need to run for this plague business.” His voice became very methodical as he rambled on, more to himself than to the others. It seemed to help his concentration as he moved around the room, adjusting equipment. “
Yersinia pestis
is nonmotile at 37 and 22 degrees Celsius. The organism is usually negative for urea hydrolysis, but may be positive in freshly isolated strains. The oxidase, indole, and Volges-Proskauer reactions are negative ...”

Eric stopped listening. He was thinking of Dodd now. Just down the hall, asleep. This was a perfect opportunity. The only obstacle: Grub. And maybe the doctor.

“It’s pretty simple really,” the doctor continued. “The fleas bite you, suck the blood, then they vomit the blood back into your system. Only by now it’s picked up the plague. The incubation period is usually three or four days, but it could be as short as a few hours, as long as ten days. Starts with chills, fever, headaches. A palpable bubo may appear, preceded by pain and tenderness. Then it’s up for grabs. Nodal swelling in the armpits and groin. Insomnia, delirium, stupor, vertigo. That’s when the toxins hit the brain. Antibodies might form and clear the mess up by itself, or with some help from antibiotics. But if it gets into pneumonic stage within twenty to twenty-four hours after onset of illness, then you’ve got tachypnea, dyspnea, and coughing productive of bloody mucopurulent sputum supervene. If you aren’t treated effectively,” he sighed. “Meat wagon.”

His talk had frightened D.B. “Why give us anything, you don’t even know if we’ve got it?”

“I’ll run a test to make sure, but this is a kind of preventive medicine. Back in the 1940s they used sulfoamides and streptomycin but resistant strains started popping up. Now we use streptomycin and second, broad-spectrum antibiotic like tetracycline or chloramphenicol. Maybe kanamycin and co-trimoxazole.”

“Let’s just get it over with, huh?” D.B. said.

“Sure.” He prepared the injections. “Funny thing, swine are quite resistant to plague, did you know?”

“Interesting,” D.B. deadpanned, screwing up her face in anticipation of the shot.

Eric received his shot next.

“That all, doc?” Grub asked.

“Yeah. You’re due for a blood test again soon.”

“Aw, shit, man. Next time, really. Only I gotta take this guy over to Thor now. Next time for sure, doc.”

Grub turned and started for the door, gesturing for Eric and D.B. to follow. But just as he reached for the door, Eric looped the leash around his neck and drew the chain tight. Grub flailed out wildly, his hand smashing into a line of lab beakers, sending glass exploding through the room. Tiny slivers of glass stuck in his knuckles as he groped backward for Eric. Then he remembered his gun and grabbed for that. D.B. ran around him, twisted the gun from his bloody fingers as his eyes bulged and popped, his tongue flopping out of his mouth.

The doctor merely watched. Eric released the chain, wrapping his left arm around Grub’s neck. Without pause, Eric flung his own body down to the ground, allowing his weight to pull Grub backward, but feeling the neck snap, the bones rattling as the skull and spine separated and Grub was launched into sudden death.

Out of habit, Eric checked the pulse at the neck.

“Oh, he’s quite dead,” Dr. Fishbine said matter-of-factly.

Eric scrambled to his feet and looked at the doctor. “How do you want to play this?”

“Safely, if that’s possible.”

Eric thought it over. “It’s possible.”

“You could tie me up, I suppose, but that’s not really necessary. I do have rounds, and I see no reason to tell anyone what’s happened here.”

Eric kept staring into the man’s eyes. He wanted to trust him. But it would be safer to just kill him.

“Eric,” D.B. said. It was the first time she’d called him by his name. There was a pleading in her voice.

“Give me your jacket,” Eric told the doctor.

He stripped it off immediately and handed it to Eric. Eric shrugged off his backpack and gave it to D.B. He slipped on the lab jacket, buttoning it up. “I’m going back in there,” he said, pointing at the room where he’d seen Dodd. “Don’t come in there or send anyone else there for thirty minutes.” He’d either know what he needed by then or Dodd would be dead.

“You got it.”

Eric started for the door.

“Hey, what about me?” D.B. called.

He didn’t want her to see what he might have to do to get Dodd to talk. “You’d better stay here.”

“Bad idea,” Dr. Fishbine said. “They find her here alone, by tonight she’ll have been the property of a dozen men.”

“Stick her in a bed, pretend she’s a patient.”

He laughed harshly. “You think that would stop them? Christ, man, these aren’t your normal human beings we’re talking about.”

“Then why do you stay?”

“No choice. They may not be normal,” he said quietly, “but they’re still human beings.” He shrugged. “When that stops being a good enough reason, I’ll probably be one of them.”

Eric nodded, grabbed D.B.’s hand, and pulled her along.

“Thirty minutes,” Dr. Fishbine called after them.

“You think he’ll stick to it?” D.B. asked. “Not tell anyone?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“What was all that stuff about Vietnam and the trial he was talking about?”

“Nothing,” Eric said. “History.”

Eric found Dodd right away. He peeled back an eyelid. Dodd had been given something to help him sleep. Eric checked his pulse: strong. He was fine. Probably would have been released as soon as he woke up.

Eric slapped him sharply on the cheek.

Dodd’s eyelids fluttered. He shook his head groggily.

Eric slapped the other cheek. Harder.

Dodd’s eyes were open. He felt the broken knife blade at his throat.

“One time,” Eric said quietly. “That’s all I ask. Then you start breathing through your neck. Understand?”

Dodd nodded, the tip of the blade buried in his beard.

“Where?”

“I left him near San Diego.”

Eric grabbed a hunk of beard and sawed through it with the dull blade. Wads of beard just pulled out from the pressure, pinpoints of blood welling where the hair had been.

Dodd moaned, looking to D.B. for help. She stared dully into his eyes.

“Christ, Eric,” he said, “I’m telling the truth.”

“What happened with you and Fallows.”

“Difference of opinion.”

Eric crushed another handful of beard in his fist and sawed through it. About half of the other dozen patients in the room were awake and watching. Some looked too weak to care, others just didn’t care. A couple turned away, uninterested.

Two bald bloody spots appeared along Dodd’s jaw.

“Kind of scalping in reverse,” Eric smiled.

“You always hurt the one you love,” D.B. nodded.

“Okay!” Dodd said. “I wanted a bigger cut of the take. He said no. I took it anyway and left. Figured to get my own gang together. I’m as smart as that bastard.”

Eric laughed. “You aren’t even as smart as his shoes, Dodd. Now where did you leave him and where was he going? If I hear San Diego again, I’m going to slice the tip of your nose off.”