Romero sighed. The kid was still alive then. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? He tossed his cigarette. “This could be real bad, JoJo. That thing in him…his brother…it’s already pissed off about the beating the kid got and now this.”
“And it’s dark out,” Aquintez said. “Pitch fucking black.”
A chill went up Romero’s spine. “I’m going up there.”
But Aquintez said that wasn’t a good idea. As he passed through the yard on the way to the administration building where the infirmary was, he could hear the cops out there. It sounded like maybe they were scaling the walls, positioning themselves.
“I’m going anyway.”
Aquintez clapped him on the shoulder. “Ah, Romero, the original Latino James Cagney. Heart too big and balls twice that size. Okay, I go with you, my friend.”
But what they were going into, they had no idea.
26
It started right away.
With sirens moaning and hostage negotiators working the loudspeakers, nobody realized it until maybe it was too late. The SWAT teams were beginning the engagement, the spearhead of a larger force that would crush anything that stood in their way. By the time Romero and Aquintez got around the chapel, got a look at the administration building, they saw black forms running along the tops of the, thiod in twall like scurrying spiders and the tear gas started dropping. Canisters were fired into the air, exploding on impact. There were bright flashes and popping, hollow explosions like the compound was under mortar attack and the gas detonated with rolling, noxious clouds. Not just outside the administration building, but out in the yard, on rooftops and walkways, just about everywhere.
And more canisters were dropping by the moment.
You could hear cons screaming and firing weapons, the reports of sniper rifles taking out prisoners at strategic points and the answering volleys of small arms fire from the convicts themselves. But in the darkness with only bonfires to see by and most of the cons drunk and stoned and confused, it was a turkey shoot. The SWAT teams had night-vision goggles and the cons had stick matches, some flashlights, and a variety of crude torches. Water cannons were hoisted atop the walls at the same time the snipers fired their first shots, many from silenced weapons. Before the enraged cons could even think of setting the hacks on fire, gouts of water hosed them down, wetting the hacks and knocking their abductors flat with high-pressure streams of water. Then tear gas. Stun grenades.
The troops moved in for the deathblow.
By that time, Romero and Aquintez had made the administration building, coughing and gagging and rubbing their eyes, steering themselves through the maze of corridors and climbing sets of steps with nothing more to see by than a penlight and the strobing flashes from outside.
“They’re tearing ’em up out there,” Aquintez said, panting.
And they were. You could hear screaming and shouting and cons begging for mercy. And the police were answering this with salvos of plastic bullets fired from automatic weapons and light machine guns.
But the screaming wasn’t only outside.
It was above them, too: on the fourth floor where the infirmary was.
They looked at each other in that churning darkness, the smell of death and teargas blowing in from outside and combining into a vile aroma with what was coming down from the fourth floor stairwell: a rancid, hot stench of blood and misery.
They started up.
More screams ringing out like church bells and just as high and low, as brassy and inhuman. They vaulted up the steps, hearing sounds and smelling things and feeling something like sheaths of needles unfolding in their bellies. In the corridor at the top, they could hear a wild, spiraling voice shattering like glass: “Help me! Help me! Get it off me! GET THAT MOTHERFUCKER OFFA ME OH CHRIST OH JESUS YAAAHHHH-”
But it wasn’t just that voice or the sound of something being squeezed out like a dishrag full of soapy water that stopped Romero and Aquintez, it was that screeching, strident noise that echoed out, seemed to make the windows shake and rattle in their frames. It wasn’t an animal sound or a human sound really, but maybe a little bit of both and neither. A raging, deranged shriek that faded into something like scratching black laughter, laughter filled with contempt and appetite and-Romero was thinking-a certain evil pleasure, a childish sound of glee.
Sure, that’s it, he thought, that’s it exactly. Damon’s on the loose and he’s having a good time just like some wicked little boy lighting cats’ tails on fire or pulling the wings off of flies.
Except it wasn’t cats or flies…but people.
Damon’s playthings.
With Aquintez behind him, they made for the infirmary door at the end of the passage. It was ripped from its hinges. And tossed like broken toy soldiers and gutted ragdolls were inmates and guards, some alive, but most dead. Some of them out of their minds, their eyes like shining ball bearings in the flashlight beam. They had seen something. Romero was sure of it and whatever it had been, it had sucked their minds dry, wrung out thought and memory and sanity in an oily slag that ran from their ears. They were mumbling and making empty sobbing sounds, staring blankly.
“Jesus,” Aquintez said. “It wasn’t like this before…it wasn’t this bad. Something…I guess something must have happened…”
Outside the entrance to the infirmary, they found the body of a con.
His head had been nearly twisted from his shoulders, both arms snapped off at the elbows, and as a humorous gesture from a bored child, his tongue and everything that held it in place had been yanked out of a chasm below his chin where it hung like a pink and bleeding necktie. They stepped over him and, oh Christ, it was even worse inside. The infirmary was a long, narrow room like a hospital ward in an old movie and this one predated even the silents by nearly a century. You could see the looted drug cabinets and supply closets.
But that had happened before Damon went on his tear.
Now the walls, the beds, the ceiling were red with splotches and streaks of blood. There were bodies and parts of them everywhere. It was a study in ghoulish creativity and the mind of a jaded, degenerate child knew no earthly bounds. Men had been dismembered. Men had been beheaded. Men had been skinned and plucked and disemboweled. Men had their bones pulled right through their skins and stacked in red, tidy heaps next to their boneless shells. Men were strung from light fixtures by ropes of their own viscera and their skins were tacked up over the windows with shards ofwit… bone driven into the plaster. A slaughterhouse and butcher shop and dissection room laid bare and ugly and stinking.
But there was one bed untouched.
One form sleeping beneath a crisp white sheet that was wet with slime, but not so much as a drop of blood had stained it or the man who slept there.
Palmquist.
Romero got close to him, close enough to touch. He found a flashlight on the floor and put it on him. The kid did not stir. His head was bandaged and the bandages were dyed red. Using Aquintez’s penlight, Romero examined the kid’s eyes. One of them was dilated like a black marble and there was no response from the light. The other pupil was the size of a pinhole.
“He’s got a concussion and probably brain damage,” Romero said in a weak voice, the stink of blood and meat and voided bowels choking him. “He could be in a coma for a day or two weeks and every night-”
That’s when Aquintez screamed.
Romero felt something swing by him like a bell rope and then Aquintez was screaming. A pink tentacle covered with tumorous suckers pulled him right off his feet and into the air.
Romero put the light up there.
He’d brushed aside spiderwebs when he first got to the bed, but now he saw they weren’t spiderwebs but wire-thin gossamer filaments of something connecting the kid and what was above him, spread over the
