The Eternal Prison (9 page)

 

“Gall is in constant motion; we don’t know exactly where he’ll be,” Neely snapped, sounding impatient. “You’ll need to make contact, get some fucking intelligence, not just go tearing ass into the wilderness.”

 

Ruberto looked down at his small feet for a moment, then directly at me. “Well, what do you say? I realize this is a bit more complex than our usual arrangements, and once you’re behind their lines in New York, we can offer you no more direct resources, unfortunately. Here and there we may be able to pass information or other aid to you, but it will be unpredictable.”

 

“The fucking cops kill our people when they find them,” Neely said. “But there’s one name we can give you: Krajian. Cop, but she’s clued in on what Marin’s doing —”

 

“First the cops, then
everyone,
” Ruberto said. “All of us, taking the King Worm’s invisible orders.”

 

“— And she ain’t happy about it. We don’t manage her as an asset, so you take your chances, you contact her. But it’s all we can give you for now, as long as the city’s basically under siege.”

 

“So!” Ruberto snapped, suddenly jolly. “Name your fee. This is an unusual assignment. Name your fee for your assistance.”

 

I looked from Ruberto to Neely and back again as the hover began to slow. I figured my odds of death had just shot up tremendously, but felt nothing. “My fee? Shit, Cal, if this puts Marin in a grave, I’ll do it for free.”

 

Neither of them seemed surprised.

 

 

 

 

VI

A HEAVY BOLT OF FABRIC STRETCHED ALL AROUND US, SUFFOCATING

 

 

 

 

I was dying of thirst, and I was about to be stabbed.

 

I hadn’t been in prison since I’d been a kid, three months in a juvie center in New York a lifetime ago, before the rules had changed removing the juvenile distinction. I’d been lucky, then, caught out by some loafing Crushers instead of some hardcase System Pig—it was the difference between juvie and just being beaten to death, or worse. It had been easy time, and I’d made my first big-deal contacts back then, older kids on the cusp who introduced me around, put the first knife in my hand, pointed me at someone’s jugular and the big money. Easy as it had been, there’d been chores, and bored Crushers with electric prods to get your ass in motion, and I’d gone to bed every night sore and exhausted from cleaning the fucking bathrooms until they glowed and a million other backbreaking chores.

 

Chengara Penitentiary was something completely unexpected. I’d been in-house for a week and so far hadn’t been given a single chore, command, or beating. There were Crushers around, sure, but we only saw them when something went seriously off the rails, when a riot seemed to be brewing. Then they were everywhere, all at once, but only as long as it took to get things back in order, and then
poof!
They were gone again.

 

Mainly, they used water to keep us quiet.

 

The heat was like a heavy bolt of fabric stretched all around us, suffocating. Twice a day we got our nutrition tab and water ration. We lined up, meek and quiet, took our share, and did our best to make it last, to make it seem like it was enough. It wasn’t. It was just below
enough,
making us all shrink. And when we acted up, the next ration got canceled, and you spent a sleepless night feeling your own body chewing on itself. In my week it had happened twice, and already I’d been trained to just get on line and keep my mouth shut.

 

Meanwhile, there was no work detail, no required activity, no schedule at all aside from the dole. We lounged around, we got into fights, we worked a primitive economy, and we talked a lot about the jobs we’d pull when we got out, and the Crushers let us. As long as we didn’t cause too much trouble, they let us do whatever we wanted and didn’t seem to care.

 

I eyed my two admirers while the dole line moved forward a step. In front of me were five or six soft-looking middle-agers, two men and a woman in their thirties who’d aged considerably since arriving, their faces haggard, their posture slumped. They wore their jumpsuits like they hurt them. When they’d arrived a week before they’d been plump and sleek, if a bit ruffled. Politicos, support staff for some Undersecretary—now just People of Interest, like the rest of us. It was the strangest prison I’d ever heard of, but some things were universal, like having people who wanted to kill me.

 

The skinny Asian kid who’d jumped me off the train and the longhaired asshole I’d disarmed out in the yard a few days ago had made friends and were out of line a dozen feet ahead of me. They leaned against the wall in their bright orange suits, staring at me. When I’d first noticed them, I’d been incredulous—was their plan
really
to just stand there waiting for me to come within reach and then jump me? It seemed impossible. The line moved a foot at a time toward the little booth where the single Crusher stood, taking his damned time about issuing each prisoner’s ration. I kept my hands in my jumpsuit’s pockets, one wrapped around the shiv I’d taken from the longhair, the other curled into a fist.

 

The line lurched forward, and suddenly someone was at my side. Since he only came up to my elbow, I knew it was Michaleen, and didn’t even look down at him.

 

“Fucking morons,” I muttered. “You see this?”

 

It was amazing how quickly I’d taken to the little man. His wrinkled, loose face was folded around an unlit cigarette, as usual, and his hairy, short arms disappeared into the deep pockets of his own jumpsuit. “The youth of today,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s a fuckin’ tragedy.”

 

I nodded. “Give me some room, Mickey.”

 

He pulled one short arm from his suit and laid a calloused, gentle hand on my arm. “Not here, Avery, not here. You can get away with a lot, but you don’t fuck with the dole. Copy? They get all bent out of shape if you mess with the dole. You fellows start a scrum down here and you’ll end up in solitary.”

 

I turned my head until my neck cracked. I couldn’t just let it go. I was an old man, and I’d been pinched. If I started to walk away from fights, I was as good as dead. “I can handle solitary.”

 

“Avery,” Michaleen said in a low, intense voice. “Listen to me. I’ve been here in this fucking hell a
long
time. No one ever comes
back
from solitary.”

 

I took my eyes from the geniuses and put them on Michaleen’s upturned face. I wondered how exactly he’d managed to remain here a
long
time. Everyone else seemed to be here on a strictly temporary basis. He gestured and a stooped, round-shouldered man with peppery hair and nervous, quick eyes that tried to be everywhere at once stepped forward.

 

“Avery, this is Guy,” the little man said, pronouncing it, unfortunately, as
Gee
with a hard
g.
“He was in the banking line until a few weeks ago, when the Pigs plucked him outta his plush little apartment in Washington. He’s graciously agreed to take your place in line and collect your ration in exchange for some… considerations.”

 

Guy didn’t look at me, though he flinched away from me as if I’d made a move at him. “And you said I’d be
protected
on line,” he whispered.

 

“Yes, yes,” Michaleen said soothingly. “No one’ll touch you because I say not to. Now, you’ve heard of the right honorable Avery Cates, yes? So you know what happens if you screw him out of his ration, yes?” He leaned in to mock-whisper in Guy’s ear and winked at me. “Here’s a hint, boyo: he kills people. Yes?” The little man slapped him on the shoulder and waggled his eyebrows at me. “Okay?”

 

I glanced at the geniuses again, still glaring at me with undiminished hatred. Where’d they get the energy? How in the world did they just keep it up like that? I wasn’t where I’d been back in the ruined shell of Pickering’s when the cops had picked me up—I’d come back up for air. But I still wanted to nap half the fucking time, just let everything wash over me.

 

“Why do I want to leave the line, Mickey?” I said, letting the knife slip from my hand inside my pocket. “I like it here.” I realized that I was still holding on to one thing from the Plague, from shuffling through the burned remains of New York: I didn’t care about dying. Everything else had come back to me, but I thought of dying and felt nothing.

 

Michaleen nodded as if he agreed with everything I’d said, wholeheartedly and without reservation. “We’re havin’ a meeting, concerning the escape project.”

 

He started walking away at as brisk a pace as his short legs would take him, and I cursed a little under my breath, stepping out of the line to follow him. “All right,” I muttered, falling into step beside him. “All fucking right, you little runt, is this question-and-answer time? We’re gonna talk?” A lump of corrosive anger formed in my belly, suddenly there fully formed. I reached out and grabbed the little guy by the shoulder. He paused and… almost moved, his body twitching familiarly beneath my grip. Then he went still and closed his eyes.

 

“All right,” he said after a moment, opening them again and looking at me. “All right, Avery. You are irritated, I can see. Let’s have a quick chat then, on our way to the others.”

 

I stared down at him. I’d had the craziest feeling—an instinct, feral and speechless—that he’d been about to turn on me, to come
after
me. A man two feet shorter than me, a hundred pounds lighter. Thirty years older, if not more. For a second, every alarm in my head had lit up bright and worried, and it didn’t make sense—I wasn’t worried about
Michaleen.
I could fit Michaleen in my fucking
pocket.

 

We looked at each other for a long moment. It was a familiar flat stare, one I’d shared a million times: Michaleen was a pro. He was an old hand, and suddenly, we understood each other perfectly. I let my eyes slip past him, and there was the old woman I’d seen arriving the other day, sitting fiercely erect at one of the bare metal tables provided. Her hair was mussed, standing up crazily in several directions, but she didn’t look too bad for an old bag in prison. She was smoking a cigarette and looking right back at me. I still couldn’t place her face.

 

“All right,” I said, nodding and looking back at Michaleen. “Let’s go.” He turned to start walking, and I put my hand out again, once more feeling him stiffen in that oddly familiar, primal way, like he was forcing himself to stay calm, let it pass. I grinned suddenly. I
wanted
to see this little man go apeshit. I wanted very badly to see what the old bastard could do.

 

“No more fucking cigarettes,” I said. “I’m not your fucking performing monkey, and I’m not being trained to drool every time you whip one out, okay? If I’m in, I’m in for myself.”

 

He stood there for another moment and then nodded, turning his familiar, fake-as-hell grin on me. I saw through it now. His eyes were hard and dead, even if his face was twisted up comically. “All righty, then, Mr. Cates. You fucking owe me three packs of good cigarettes. You can work it off, eh?”

 

“Fine. Why are you my best friend, Mickey?”

 

There was some movement behind my shoulder, and I cursed myself for turning my back on my two fans. As I started to hunch down and move my shoulder to take whatever impact was coming, Mickey dived under my arm.

 

The tall, skinny prick from the train was right behind us. A grin spread across his face as Mickey stepped up to him, but the little man didn’t hesitate or say anything, lashing out a solid punch right at the kid’s balls with one calloused hand. The kid’s breath shot out of him, and he bent over double with a grunt, cupping his crotch. Michaleen slapped an arm around his neck and jerked him up, hooking one little leg around one of the kid’s and bending him backward harshly. The kid seemed to swallow his own tongue, his face instantly turning a shade of purple I found worrying.

 

“Lad,” Mickey said in a calm voice, not sounding out of breath at all. “I see your shadow again today, and you won’t be waking up tomorrow, eh? If you understand me, roll your pretty eyes for me.”

 

The kid’s eyes began rotating spastically. Mickey nodded and released him in a graceful motion, spinning away as the kid, hacking and coughing, fell to the floor like a sack of shit. The whole thing had lasted ten seconds and produced almost no noise or fuss. I stared at the kid, replaying the scene—it had been a professional little takedown, the sort of ballet moves that took skill and lots of practice. Michaleen, I realized without too much surprise, was a fucking dangerous man, and I felt like clown shoes next to him.

 

And then the little bastard was on the move, and I had to hurry a bit to catch up.

 

He led me out into the yard. The Crushers on the towers were distant, but I could feel their tiny eyes on me. My second day some asshole who referred to herself as a Master Thief, whatever the fuck that was, started scaling one of the walls like a fucking insect, somehow finding cracks in the mortar and clinging to it, rising up incredibly fast. One of the Crushers had taken his time, making a show of setting the rifle against his shoulder and taking aim, and then the Master Thief’s skull had exploded silently, a neat little plume of red. She’d left a nice red stain on the wall. It was brown and flaky now, slowly eroded by the endless sandy wind.