300 Miles to Galveston (10 page)

When she came to, she was in a clearing lighted only by the moon. About 50 of the creatures had formed a wide circle around her and her dad, who stood beside her with one eye swollen shut and blood dripping from his ear. Six of the creatures stood behind them, facing one that stood about ten feet in front. He was bald, and human in shape, but not in his being. Even in the moonlight, the scars across his head and face were prominent. Tattooed across his throat, per the 2022 Felony Identification Act, was “GENTRY RR” in luminescent ink.

These were the Polunsky Devils, creatures of myth across Texas. Everyone knew they were real, the same way great white sharks were real. You just never wanted to meet one in its native environment. Just as the open ocean had shaped the great whites into eating machines that could smell a splash of blood from half a mile away, the walls of the Polunsky Unit of Huntsville Prison had crushed the souls of bad men into small, hot things that cracked through their civil veneers at the slightest insult.

When the world still functioned, Polunksy was over a half million square feet of gloom defined by concrete walls and three-inch window slits set so high on the wall that they didn’t let light into the cell; they transformed the wall into an angry monolith with one wide glowing eye.

Back in the days when people still occupied these cells, their long stare into death had much the same effect on them as the time after the Leonids had on all free people, though in reverse proportions. A few were placid and accepting, but most were unhinged when they arrived – and the Polunksy Unit pushed their souls through their skins.

It was a sunny May day in the year 2000, in the upper 70s – cool for East Texas in May – and Juan Soria was two months from execution. When Rev. Bill Westbrook, also in his upper 70s, stopped by to chat, Juan held out his hands to him, as if to join him in prayer. As Bill offered his hand through the bars, Juan dropped his hips and yanked hard, slamming Bill’s head into the steel. As he came to, the Rev realized Juan had tied one end of a bed sheet around his wrist and the other end around the base of the toilet, and had pulled it tight.

Bill struggled to see, but his face was pressed against the bars and he could only see Juan with his right eye.

Juan showed him the razor, made from the blades of two disposable Bic shavers set end-to-end on the side of a half-melted white plastic toothbrush handle. He grabbed Bill’s forearm and started sawing at the thumb side of his wrist. Bill screamed as he went through the first tendon, but Juan kept sawing, the blood lubricating the motion and spattering their clothes, the bed, and the floor. Guards thundered to the cell, but Juan kept working the blade back and forth, back and forth, blood spurting along the toothbrush handle. Bill’s hand hung by his pinky tendon when they unlocked the cell door and tackled Juan.

The floor was slick with blood. The first guard fell face-first into Juan’s knees. Juan screamed,
“Esa mano es mía! Esa mano es mía!”
as they pressed him to the concrete.
That hand is mine!

Juan had grown up in Fort Worth, and had never been outside the state. He spoke little Spanish. When the state psychiatrist asked, Juan said he didn’t know why he’d said that. “It just came out of me.”

When asked why he’d sawed the hand off of a sweet old man who had never harmed him, Juan said nothing.

He was executed in July, on schedule.

Just as in Juan’s time, the worst of the Devils – those with a level of cunning to their violence – were housed in Polunsky’s Building 12. Before the Leonids, each death row inmate had his own 60 square foot cell, where he was left to fight his inner evils alone. As the risen had no legal rights, these cells housed up to four Devils each, where they constantly fought and crippled each other, scarring and healing again and again, until their entire bodies were crisscrossed like the backs of unrepentant slaves.

When the power grid finally shut down in February 2036, and the correctional officers quit showing up for work because they weren’t getting paid – all checks and banking were electronic – the Devils sensed that something had changed. They howled, all to the cry of one leader, the worst of the worst, a creature so vicious that even in his three-body cell, the other two Devils never fought unless he allowed it. His name in life had been Ronald Ray Gentry. He’d entered death row alive, sentenced to die by lethal injection for the bludgeoning deaths of his girlfriend, her two children, and four other kids unlucky enough to ring his doorbell on Halloween, 2029.

At some time in 2036 – no one knew exactly when, though it must have been October or November – Gentry had died. Perhaps it was a heart attack or an aneurism. His behavior hadn’t changed – he never spoke to guards, and unlike most Devils, never hurt himself.

He was getting his annual physical, nodding when asked questions, and when the nurse moved the stethoscope to his upper chest, he bent over and chewed off the flesh between her thumb and index finger while she slapped him and clawed at his eyes.

The guards tackled him. His head was wrapped in a spit guard, wrists bound, ankles bound, strapped into a wheelchair and wheeled to an observation cell like a strangely muscular invalid, where standard procedure was to leave the inmate alone until he wore himself out.

Gentry wasn’t screaming, wasn’t struggling. Nonetheless, they left him there for three hours. When they took off the spit guard, the scratch marks across his eyes had healed, and he was calm as a crocodile.

Gentry had that same expression now, as Sophie was dragged before him and dropped next to her bleeding father.

With two heavy steps, he knelt down to look at them. One of Kurt’s eyes was swollen shut, and Sophie’s lip was split, but otherwise they looked OK.

Kurt had gotten off two good hits when he was jumped – he was sure he’d broken the arm of one of them with a pivoting strike that snapped the elbow in its unnatural direction – but it just didn’t seem to matter. Kurt had the sense, after years of practice, that the thing he’d hurt had already felt that particular pain a dozen times before. There was no sense of shock, which was a big part of how karate worked. There was even – did he get that right? – a sense of
pleasure
. The creature had sighed, like someone getting a massage.

Kurt’s open eye met the eyes of the thing that had been Ronald Ray Gentry. Then, Gentry shook his head.

The circle of creatures gasped and grunted.

Gentry pointed to Sophie, and the creatures got excited. Howling, gurgling, they came closer, eager to participate.

A fireball arced from the ring of creatures to Gentry, bouncing squarely off his chest and splashing flames onto his face.

“Run!” yelled Bane.

The creatures near him turned their eyes to him, drew back their cracked lips, and leapt for Bane. He shot one squarely in the face with his pistol crossbow, then fell as he was tackled. The swarm of creatures writhed over him, punching, kicking, biting, slamming his face into the ground, hammering fists into him as if he were a drum, over and over, snapping his bones and pummeling his flesh into the soft green earth.

Kurt and Sophie bolted for a gap in the circle that had opened during the confusion. Behind them, Gentry raised his hands and howled, but did not swat at his face or roll on the ground as a man would. He simply sank to his knees, howling, hands as high as the flames on his head, until he collapsed, and the only sound he made was from his crackling flesh.

They didn’t know where they were running, except away. Kurt and Sophie crashed through the piney woods, tripping on vines and shrubs, swatted by branches, and cut by nettle. Back in the clearing, they heard the creatures howl, first separately, then in unison. They were running into the woods, too, but not all in the same direction. They had scattered like a bomb, and from the sound of the footsteps behind them, Kurt guessed that only four had gotten onto their trail.

They splashed through a creek. When he heard them splash through, he knew they were about 80 yards behind.

He glanced left, then right. Sophie was gone.

The pine trees were slender, tall, and straight, ten feet apart with no reachable branches. He picked one, and stopped beside it.

Two of the Devils charged him, both slender six-footers. As one drew close, he sidestepped, forcing the Devil to turn around the tree in pursuit. The other Devil drove straight towards him, growling and stomping through the mud. When they were both two feet away from him, he dropped to the ground and they collided, smacking heads with the dull sound of bone and meat. Kurt sprung up and stomped on the closest one’s neck, turning his hips like he was putting out a giant cigarette. This rotated the Devil’s jaw, torqueing his neck into an unnatural angle and crushing his windpipe. He gasped and flailed against the ground.

The other Devil scrambled up and grinned, revealing a new gap in his teeth where blood flowed. He took in a breath, as if to howl, and that’s exactly when Kurt punched him through his solar plexus. The Devil was slender. Kurt felt his ribs compress and snap from the thrust before knocking against his spine. The Devil staggered, trying to inhale, arms held out as if carrying a large bowl that could not be filled, and then collapsed. Kurt pulled his knife and began sawing. A few minutes later, two heads splashed into the creek.

“Sophie,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” she whispered.

He cursed, looking around. “Sophie?”

“Yes?”

“Where are you?”

“You can’t see me?” He turned her direction, but in the moonlight and tree shadows, saw nothing girl-like. He shook his head.

“Man, as bright as it is out here? You must be getting old,” she said, and stepped out of the shadows of a tree 20 feet away.

Kurt started getting the shakes and squatted. “Sorry, Sweetie. I’m glad you’re OK. Are you OK?”

“Are you?” she said. She sat down beside him, looking at his bloody arms.

“Not my blood. What happened with you? I heard four of them, and two stayed on me.”

“Oh, those guys were idiots. Great in a straight line, not so great with turns, and I don’t think they see well in the moonlight.”

“Can I check something?” said Kurt.

He pumped his flashlight and turned it on, pointing at her feet. He raised the beam until it was on her chest, and she squinted.

“Try to hold your eyes open, Sweetie.”

She forced them open, and she could see that the two spots at 10 and 2 o’clock had overtaken her entire corneas, which had stretched to encompass most of her eye, leaving only a ring of white visible at the left and right edges.

“You fought them, or lost them?”

“I... I don’t really remember.” She turned away from the light. Water dripped from her face and hands.

“You washed up?”

“I got a drink. I was thirsty. There’s a little limestone pond over there, the water’s pretty good.

“Do you feel OK?”

“I’m fine. Geez, you don’t need to talk so loud.”

“I’m not,” he said, then switched to a whisper. “Is this OK?”

“Yes. Thanks. We should keep moving.”

“I have no idea which way to go.”

“I do,” she said.

He followed. 

Chapter 11: Skid Steer

Kurt replayed the scene in his mind. It had been the half-empty mason jar of moonshine, the lid removed, the screw-ring holding a flaming rag in place. The thick soda-lime glass, made for canning, would not break easily, so Bane had thrown it spinning, top up, squarely onto Gentry. The Devils had swarmed on Bane, kicking and smashing him, and Kurt and Sophie had fled.

“You know what they’ll do to him,” said Sophie. “He’ll come back as an Angel, and they’ll hurt him.”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe. They’ll hurt him. They’ll never stop hurting him.”

“Sophie, we escaped. He bought that with his life. I’m not throwing it away because you’ve got a Rambo fetish.”

“What’s a Rambo?”

“Some guy from a movie.”

“What’s a fetish?”

“Never mind.”

“I don’t want to leave him there.”

Kurt reached to Sophie’s side and pulled out her knife, and handed it to her, handle first. “Then go get him. Go face – what? Forty of those things? – get him here safely without being followed, and restore him to life. Oh, and don’t get killed.”

Sophie stabbed the knife into the ground and cursed.

“This is why they only let young people into the Army,” said Kurt. “They’ll do crazy stuff like that, and they give them the equipment to back up the crazy. We are not the Army. I am a middle-aged man, you are a kid, and we need to survive.”

“I know.”

“If we don’t figure out a way to get to Galveston soon, we might not even do that.”

“I know.”

“I hate it when you say that.”

“I know.”

Kurt looked at the stars. “I have no clue where we are. And that water smells bad.”

Sophie looked up, sniffed. “The highway is about half a mile that way, and we’re half a mile that way from of our bikes,” she said, pointing north.

“OK, Tonto.”

“Who’s Tonto?”

Kurt sighed.

As they came to a clearing, Kurt remembered the mob pounding Bane into the ground.
Of course he’ll come back as an Angel,
he thought.
If Bane comes back as a Devil, life makes no sense.

Sophie turned her head, then Kurt heard it: Three Devils, howling.

Sophie wiped her blade on her pants and took the lead.

“How do you know where we’re going?” Kurt whispered.

“I don’t know where we’re going,” she whispered. “I know where they are, and I’m going the other way.”

They stumbled across a field of gravel where no grass grew. It smelled of fertilizer, sulfur, ammonia. Sophie winced.

I think this is a fertilizer plant,
thought Kurt, looking towards a nearby metal building.
Ag chemicals.

In the moonlight, Kurt could see the mounds of phosphates, other salts, and sulfur. In the right proportions, these chemicals could help any plant grow, but in their raw forms, they were dangerous.