before you lay a hand on him.”
“Yeah? What’s that, smoke?” Burgon said.
“A con name of Weems fucked with this boy. You know Weems, don’t you? Big ass-ugly nigger looked like his mama passed him out her ass? Yeah, he played the game and you know what happened to him. Same went for a white trash meat-eater name of Tony Gordo…or you dumb spades forget that already? They say he was opened like a can of fucking beans. And in solitary. You wanna run that risk?”
They both looked at him like he was crazy and maybe he was, but they both backed off, looked a little tense and gray around the mouth. They didn’t have much to say after that.
Palmquist didn’t say anything either. But something just behind his eyes was watching them real close.
16
Maybe Heslip and Burgon didn’t have much sense vy'›
Men were afraid, but they could not admit it.
And worse, they didn’t know what they were afraid of. But in their minds, in the dark spaces and lonely tracts and locked rooms of childhood terrors, they were seeing things. Lurid shapes and white-faced haunters reaching out for them with hooked fingers. Things birthed from closets and beneath beds, things with moldering grins and shoe- button eyes that whispered your name in the dead of night and sucked the breath from your lungs with black, hungering mouths.
And as the night grew dark as tar and the cons huddled in their cells waiting for lights out, they began to see things reaching out for them from the shadows…
17
Romero hadn’t said much to the kid all day.
Every time he looked at the little bastard, something flipped over in his stomach and grease bubbled up the back of his throat. His heart started to pound and he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. There was something about that kid, just as there had been from the moment Jorgensen had brought him in, something repulsive about him. Something that got inside you, twisted blackly in your guts. He offended Romero and Romero found himself badly wanting to squeeze the stuffing out of the little shit, except…he was afraid of what might come leaking out.
The kid kept thanking him about intervening with Gordo, but Romero didn’t want to hear about that shit. Last thing he wanted to be thinking about was Tony Gordo and what happened to him. Especially now. It was lockdown and lights out was coming soon. And he was trapped in the cell with the kid.
So he lay on his rack and read his book and tried not to look at him. Which wasn’t easy, because the kid kept looking at him. Palmquist was pacing back and forth, rubbing his palms against his prison-issues, hugging himself, shaking his head. Half a dozen times now he’d stop, pitch a glance at Romero, open his mouth like he was going to say something, then just shake his head and go right on pacing.
“Why don’t you fucking relax?” Romero finally said. “You’re getting under my skin.”
Palmquis ~ith Gking relaxt sat down, then stood up, sat down again. “It’s gonna be dark soon,” he said.
“No shit?”
But the kid wasn’t having it. He studied his hands, thinking things and maybe wanting to say them, but not daring. He was pale as unleavened flour, his eyes like bruises punched into his face. He was jittery and nervous, couldn’t seem to sit still for more than a few moments at a stretch.
“That night,” he said. “The night Weems got it…did you hear anything?”
Romero dropped his book an inch or two. “Yeah, I heard you snoring.”
“Anything else?”
“What else would I hear?”
Palmquist nodded, rubbed his eyes. “I’m tired.”
“So go to sleep, do us both a fucking favor.”
But he just shook his head. “I don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t think I ever want to go to sleep.”
“Why is that?”
The kid looked at him and his eyes were practically bleeding. “Oh shit…if you only knew…”
And the bad part was, Romero figured he already did.
18
C Block this time.
About 2:10 A.M. it started.
There was screaming, but not the screaming of one man but the screaming of two and within seconds after it had begun, like an infectious disease, it spread from con to con on C until they were all going out of their minds.
Bobby Parks pulled the duty.
He had at least ten years on the rest of the guards and when it started, he told them to stay at their stations, told them to get Sergeant Warres right goddamn now.
And then he was racstarted, hs running, walkie-talkie in hand, calling for them to unlock doors as he made his way down to the end of C. The cons were out of their minds, hollering and yelling and clattering their bars and demanding to be let out. But Parks ignored them, went numb to all they said and did, concentrated on what was happening down at the end, must have been in cell #75 or #76, that general vicinity. He was hearing those screams that at first sounded like the inmates were being roasted over coals…gradually becoming something that human lungs were not capable of.
#75, all right.
Parks, big and pumped-up and more than a match for any of the trash that prison could throw at him, suddenly felt very small, very vulnerable, very afraid. He was thinking about Houle. About Jorgensen cracking up.
Man up, he told himself. Man up for chrissake. Do your job.
But those sounds…Jesus, he didn’t know what he was hearing.
A high-pitched screeching that was shrill and strident, piercing his eardrums, making his guts become cold, coiling snakes that twisted and mated, slithering up the back of his throat and filling his mouth. He wanted to turn back the other way, get away from that godawful racket that went right through him, made his molars ache and his marrow go to ice. The cons were all reaching out of their cells, demanding protection or sobbing and screaming, more than a few praying in broken voices.
The screeching was weird and sharp and echoing, had the tonal quality of buzzsaws tearing into planks. And there was a stink rising up, too, something flyblown and fermented and dirty.
Parks, his throat full of cinders and dry flaking things, got on his walkie-talkie as he neared #75. “It’s me,” he said dryly, breathlessly. “Open Seventy-Five…”
“Open it?” The guy on the other end couldn’t believe this.
“Do what I fucking said…”
Inside the cell, that screeching sound nearly drowned out the noise of things being slammed around, thrown against the bars. Wet sounds, ripping sounds, sounds like axes hacking into raw meat. Sounds Parks could not believe…the sound of something moving with moist undulations like snakes sliding out of swamps across wet leaves.
Parks edged in closer, clicked on his flashlight and saw He wasn’t sure what he saw, only that it made him take two fumbling steps back and that he nearly dropped his flashlight. He saw Heslip…he thought it might be
