then he saw the guy below him rear up with his mouth wide open, and he said, “Chuck, watch it,” and slammed the heel of his hand into the patient’s forehead before he could take a bite out of Chuck’s wrist.
“You got to get off him,” he said to the guard. “Come on. Get off.”
The guard freed himself of the patient’s legs and scrambled back up two steps. Teddy came over the patient’s body and clamped down hard on his shoulder, pinning it to the stone, and he looked back over his shoulder at Chuck, and the baton sliced between them, cut the air with a hiss and a whistle, and broke the patient’s nose.
Teddy felt the body underneath him go slack and Chuck said, “Jesus Christ!”
The guard swung again and Teddy turned on the patient’s body and blocked the arm with his elbow.
He looked into his bloody face. “Hey! Hey! He’s out cold. Hey!”
The guard could smell his own blood, though. He cocked the baton.
Chuck said, “Look at me! Look at me!”
The guard’s eyes jerked to Chuck’s face.
“You stand the fuck down. You hear me? You stand
The guard dropped his eyes and lowered the baton. He touched the wound on his cheekbone with his shirt, looked at the blood on the fabric. “He tore my face open.”
Teddy leaned in, took a look at the wound. He’d seen a lot worse; the kid wouldn’t die from it or anything. But it was ugly. No doctor would ever be able to sew it back clean.
He said, “You’ll be fine. Couple of stitches.”
Above them they could hear the crash of several bodies and some furniture.
“You got a riot on your hands?” Chuck said.
The guard chugged air in and out of his mouth until the color returned to his face. “Close to.”
“Inmates taken over the asylum?” Chuck said lightly.
The kid looked at Teddy carefully, then over at Chuck. “Not yet.”
Chuck pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, handed it to the kid.
The kid nodded his thanks and pressed it to his face.
Chuck lifted the patient’s wrist again, and Teddy watched him feel for a pulse. He dropped the wrist and pushed back one of the man’s eyelids. He looked at Teddy. “He’ll live.”
“Let’s get him up,” Teddy said.
They slung the patient’s arms around their shoulders and followed the guard up the steps. He didn’t weigh much, but it was a long staircase, and the tops of his feet kept hugging the edges of the risers. When they reached the top, the guard turned, and he looked older, maybe a bit more intelligent.
“You’re the marshals,” he said.
“What’s that?”
He nodded. “You are. I saw you when you arrived.” He gave Chuck a small smile. “That scar on your face, you know?”
Chuck sighed.
“What are you doing in here?” the kid said.
“Saving your face,” Teddy said.
The kid took the handkerchief from his wound, looked at it, and pressed it back there again.
“Guy you’re holding there?” he said. “Paul Vingis. West Virginia. Killed his brother’s wife and two daughters while the brother was serving in Korea. Kept them in a basement, you know, pleasuring himself, while they were rotting.”
Teddy resisted the urge to step out from under Vingis’s arm, let him drop back down the stairs.
“Truth is,” the kid said and cleared his throat. “Truth is, he had me.” He met their eyes and his own were red.
“What’s your name?”
“Baker. Fred Baker.”
Teddy shook his hand. “Look, Fred? Hey, we’re glad we could help.”
The kid looked down at his shoes, the spots of blood there. “Again: what are you doing here?”
“Taking a look around,” Teddy said. “A couple of minutes, and we’ll be gone.”
The kid took some time considering that, and Teddy could feel the previous two years of his life—losing Dolores, honing in on Laeddis, finding out about this place, stumbling across George Noyce and his stories of drug and lobotomy experiments, making contact with Senator Hurly, waiting for the right moment to cross the harbor like they’d waited to cross the English Channel to Normandy—all of it hanging in the balance of this kid’s pause.
“You know,” the kid said, “I’ve worked a few rough places. Jails, a max prison, another place was also a hospital for the criminally insane…” He looked at the door and his eyes widened as if with a yawn except that his mouth didn’t open. “Yeah. Worked some places. But this place?” He gave each of them a long, level gaze. “They wrote their own playbook here.”
He stared at Teddy and Teddy tried to read the answer in the kid’s eyes, but the stare was of the thousand- yards variety, flat, ancient.
“A couple of minutes?” The kid nodded to himself. “All right. No one’ll notice in all this fucking mayhem. You take your couple minutes and then get out, okay?”
“Sure,” Chuck said.
“And, hey.” The kid gave them a small smile as he reached for the door. “Try not to die in those few minutes, okay? I’d appreciate that.”
15
THEY WENT THROUGH the door and entered a cell block of granite walls and granite floors that ran the length of the fort under archways ten feet wide and fourteen feet tall. Tall windows at either end of the floor provided the only light, and the ceiling dripped water and the floors were filled with puddles. The cells stood off to their right and left, buried in the dark.
Baker said, “Our main generator blew at around four this morning. The locks on the cells are controlled electronically. That’s one of our more recent innovations. Great fucking idea, huh? So all the cells opened at four. Luckily we can still work those locks manually, so we got most of the patients back inside and locked them in, but some prick has a key. He keeps sneaking in and getting to at least one cell before he takes off again.”
Teddy said, “Bald guy, maybe?”
Baker looked over at him. “Bald guy? Yeah. He’s one we can’t account for. Figured it might be him. His name’s Litchfield.”
“He’s playing tag in that stairwell we just came up. The lower half.”
Baker led them to the third cell on the right and opened it. “Toss him in there.”
It took them a few seconds to find the bed in the dark and then Baker clicked on a flashlight and shone the beam inside and they lay Vingis on the bed and he moaned and the blood bubbled in his nostrils.
“I need to get some backup and go after Litchfield,” Baker said. “The basement’s where we keep the guys we don’t even feed unless there’s six guards in the room. If they get out, it’ll be the fucking Alamo in here.”
“You get medical assistance first,” Chuck said.
Baker found an unstained section of handkerchief and pressed it back over his wound. “Don’t got time.”
“For
Baker looked in through the bars at them. “Yeah. All right. I’ll find a doctor. And you two? In and out in record time, right?”
“Right. Get the guy a doctor,” Chuck said as they left the cell.
Baker locked the cell door. “I’m on it.”
He jogged down the cell block, sidestepping three guards dragging a bearded giant toward his cell, kept running.
