"If I don't get back by the time the food runs out, send someone hunting. But I'd start by trying to spear fish in the creek. For that-" Frank waved his hand. "Yeah, I know. Thin blades, two or three, tied onto the shaft. And cut little barbs in the end or the fish will squirm loose." Smiling a little, he hefted the makeshift spear in his left hand. They'd made over a dozen of those, by now. They were just sharpened poles with fire-hardened tips. "These won't hardly do."
Marie nodded. "If a dangerous looking animal comes around, pile everyone into the cave. Stay there even through the night, even if some of you have to sleep standing up." She looked at the spear in his hand. "Except for maybe a giant dinosaur, no predator's going to try forcing its way into a cave past a dozen of those sticking out. Even if it does, you can probably kill it." She hadn't been looking at him while she talked. Now, her shoes tied, she stood up and did. She looked him right in the eyes. "The last thing. Frank, you and I both know that Joe's probably not going to make it." Frank sighed and looked away. But he didn't argue the point. "Okay, then. If and when Joe dies, take care of the body right away. Don't leave it in the camp, whatever you do. You couldn't bury it deep enough to do any good. And you sure as hell don't want to burn it. The smell would attract everything for miles. Get him at least a mile away from here."
Nickerson nodded, his jaws tight. She tightened her own jaws. "And now comes the worst part. Don't take the time to bury it. It's not worth the risk. You'll be running enough risk just carrying the body. Not too much, I don't think, if you do it right away. But if you leave it lying while you take the time to dig a grave deep enough that scavengers wouldn't just pull it up, it'll start to go ripe in this heat and moisture. Don't forget that most predators are also scavengers." Frank was holding his breath. Suddenly, he let it out in a little burst. "Shit," he said. But it wasn't an argument, it was just a pained acknowledgement of the truth. "Just pick your spot, dump the corpse, and then hightail it back here. We can make up some kind of memorial for Joe later." She knew Frank would have already thought of everything she was saying. But telling him what to do made it easier for her to leave, somehow. She handed Nickerson the knife. "You may as well take this too, I guess." But Frank shook his head. "Not a chance, Marie. It's the only real tool and weapon you have. Not much of the first and even less of the second, but it's something. It might save your life, and I can't see where it's critical for us one way or the other. If we need cutting edges, there are stones around we can use to sharpen belt buckles." She decided he was probably right, and tucked the knife away. She was on the verge of giving Frank some more advice, but stopped herself. At this point, she was just jabbering at the man. He and Barbara Ray went with her to the creek. Once they got there, she knelt and soaked her T-shirt in the water, then rolled it loosely and wrapped it in some big leaves they'd found from a plant that looked tropical but wasn't any plant she knew. That was the closest thing to a water bottle they could manage. She should be able to find enough water along the way to keep it water-logged. She started to get up but Frank pointed at the creek. "Not so fast. You need to hydrate as much as you can before taking off." He was right.
She was just feeling nervous and wanting to get on with it. "Thanks."
She dropped to the ground and drank as much as she could hold. The water would bring her body temperature down, and that would mean she would have to burn extra calories to warm back up. But for now, the calories were something she could spare more than she could the risk of searching for water along the way. Water drew animals and animals drew predators. "Marie," Barbara said, tears in her eyes. "I would go if I thought I could do it." "I know, Barbara. I'll be fine." "Do you think you can find Andy and Jenny?" The nurse looked toward the cave entrance. "I wouldn't even know where to start." "Rod told me where they were going. It's about a two-day journey from here, I figure."
"Will the Indian camp still be there?" Nickerson asked. "It doesn't matter. If they've moved on, I'll be able to follow them. They couldn't have gone too far. According to Stephen McQuade, there were about three hundred people in his Cherokee group, many of them elderly or children. They'll be moving slowly enough for me to catch up with them." Barbara gave her a hug, "God bless you, girl." When she was out of sight of the cave, Marie stopped to look around. She wanted to make sure she could find it again. Even though she had a knife, she couldn't mark a trail on the trees as she went. Blazing trees was as obvious to pursuers as to the pursued. She needed something the prisoners or Spaniards would miss if they decided to track her. She'd use twigs, stones and patches of downed grass. She found a branch that was small enough to go unnoticed but large enough it would take a significant wind to move it, and laid it against the base of one of the trees. She placed it on the side facing the setting sun. Her next marker would face sunrise. Rotating her marks was one of the little tricks she had learned as a kid, but it was something that would be missed by anyone but the most experienced tracker. She started walking. About an hour later she came across an old set of prints. She shivered a little. They were big enough that she could almost lie down in one of them if she curled up. Well, not really. But they sure looked that big. She tried to imagine the size of the creature that had left the prints and then broke off the exercise before she scared herself into running back to the cave. Besides, she didn't think the tracks had been made by a predator anyway. As big as they were, they had to be a dinosaur tracks, and she'd gotten a lesson in basic dinosaurology from Jeff Edelman. She'd paid very close attention. In the Cretaceous, big land predators belonged to the theropod group of dinosaurs. From giant multiton tyrannosaurs down to velociraptors the size of a big turkey, they were all theropods. At least, so far as Jeff knew. That meant they were all two-legged, walked something like birds-and, more to the point, all had birdlike feet. She looked down at the tracks. No bird in the world had left those tracks. They looked more like something a gigantic elephant might have left. So, feeling a little better, she continued on her way. The better feeling faded soon enough, though, as other alternatives came to her. First, they onlythought they were somewhere-somewhen-in the late Cretaceous. But even Jeff, whose theory that was, had admitted that some of the creatures they'd seen belonged to much earlier periods. She tried to remember the names of the earlier periods in the Earth's evolutionary history. Permian was one of them, she remembered. What did giantPermian predators look like? For all she knew, they looked like gigantic elephants with fangs instead of tusks. The second alternative was even worse, though, in a way. At least if she got caught and eaten by a predator, there'd besome sort of purpose to her death. Even if it was just the primitive purpose in the tiny brain of a prehistoric monster. But she could also imagine herself being squashed flat by a giant herbivore, simply because it didn't notice her at all. That was a really creepy thought. It wouldn't happen in the daytime, sure.
Unless she'd been hurt in an accident and couldn't move, she was certain she could get out of the way of a dinosaur just lumbering along. But what about at night, when she was asleep? She'd have to sleep sometime. She and Frank had already considered the possibility of her sleeping in the trees. But neither one of them thought that was really such a good idea. First of all, because they had no idea what lurked in the trees. Even in the world they knew, some big predators could climb trees. And once you were in a tree, you were pretty well stuck there if something came after you. You might not have much of a chance of running away on land, but at least you had some. The biggest problem, though, was the simplest. Sleeping in the trees sounded great in adventure stories, but in the real world people tossed and turned in their sleep. Marie knew for sure she did. She'd never been married, but she'd had several boyfriends. Two of them had lived with her for a while. Both of them had made wisecracks about waking up to find Marie sprawled every whichaway on the bed. That was fine on a queen size bed whose mattress wasn't more than hip-high off the floor. Not fine, perched in the fork of some tree branches thirty feet off the ground.
And they had no rope she could use to tie herself down. Tying together strips of cloth was another one of those things that sounded great in stories but Marie had her doubts about. And they didn't have enough suitable cloth anyway, unless they stripped somebody of the one and only suit of clothing they had. Which was skimpy enough as it was, since most of them had been caught by the prisoners while asleep. No, she'd have to sleep somewhere on the ground. She was hoping she could find a cave, or at least a decent-sized rock overhang. On the bright side-so she told herself, anyway-the tracks were leading in the same general direction she needed to go. She decided to follow them, on the supposition that an animal that big probably scared away other animals added to the hypothesis-very dicey, this one was-that an animal that big would also find it hard to turn around. And both of which were irrelevant anyway, since she could tell that the tracks were at least three days old. But… at least it gave her an orientation. She'd be less likely to just get lost. After she'd traveled perhaps another two miles, however, her heart skipped a beat. The tracks she had been following were now covered by the tracks of another creature.
Creatures, rather. These tracks were smaller, but they were obviously made by a pack and were just as obviously tracking the larger beast.
Abstractly, Marie knew that what she was seeing was old news, at least three to four days old. She also knew the pack animals weren't following footprints. They would be following a scent trail. That was the one trail every creature left and any creature but man could follow. Her father's words from the past came back to her. If you're ever in the woods unarmed and on the run, pray like hell you're running from a human. They're easy. A bear or wolf pack is a lot harder to beat, but if you use your head and haven't pissed off lady luck, you can even beat them. "Yeah, maybe," she whispered to his memory. "But does Lady Luck help with monsters?" Days old or not, she wanted nothing to do with whatever creatures had left those tracks.
Thosedid look like something giant birds might have left. She angled off to the north. The big tracks had been starting to veer a little too much to the south anyway. She didn't find a cave, or a good overhang. But she did find something she hoped would be just as good if not better. A huge old tree, dead now, struck by lightning. But the lightning or maybe a series of lightning strikes had hollowed out the interior. It was a bit like a tall and narrow teepee with walls made out of thick wood instead of hide. It was a squeeze getting through the opening, and the interior was just barely big enough for her to stretch out. She was very tired, by now. Not exhausted, exactly, but pretty close. She'd been pushing hard since she left. She had enough energy to eat, and drink. Then she lay down and tried to sleep.
Normally, Marie slept easily. But she couldn't keep her mind from pondering a question. How strong was the trunk left by even a huge tree, once it was dead and hollowed out? And how much did a really huge dinosaur weigh? If it was big enough, it might just topple over the whole tree, blundering around in the dark. It was a stupid thing to worry about, and she knew it. First, because really big animals were diurnal, not nocturnal. She couldn't think of a single really big animal that moved around at night. Living by night posed problems that could only be solved at a price, evolutionarily speaking. And if you were big enough, who cared what saw you in daylight? Second, it was stupid because the real danger she faced was that of a nocturnal predator who was not much if any bigger than she was, and could fit through the opening. Still, she couldn't help brooding over the horrible ignominy of ending her life as an accidental byproduct of a damn animal's clumsiness. Here lies Marie Keehn. Look close and you might spot a little crushed bone or two mixed in with the bark and wood splinters. But, eventually, she fell asleep. She even slept through the night, and slept well. When she woke up in the morning, she found herself sprawled almost ninety degrees from the orientation she'd had when she lay down. How had she managed that, in this tight a space? She almost giggled, then. She was pretty sure Rod Hulbert would prove to be a light sleeper. If she did survive all this-and he did-she was probably looking at a lot of mornings filled with wisecracks.
Chapter 30 Through the mob, James Cook could see the front gate.
But it was too far away, even if Luff hadn't positioned men at the gate itself. In the two seconds it took him to make that calculation, he could see that four more prisoners had been shot down trying to rush the gate. James spun around, looking for an alternative. His foot struck something. Glancing down, he saw that he'd accidentally kicked a man in the head. Well, no. He'd kicked a head. The body it had once been attached to was nowhere in sight. The head must have belonged to one of the men Luff had had decapitated a short while ago. The heads had fallen into a barrel positioned below the execution platform. In the chaos that erupted after the Boom blew his stack, somebody must have upended the basket. The heads had spilled out, and they'd been kicked all over the yard ever since by hundreds of frantically milling men. "What do we do?" asked John Boyne. He and the rest of the men in Boomer's gang who were still alive, clustered around James. Boomer wasn't one of them. His body lay in front of the executioner's platform. Shot to pieces by Luff's goons. James felt a moment's sharp pang. But there was no time to grieve now. The only reason he and his group were still alive was because Boomer's charge at the execution stand and the firing squad response had triggered a mass rebellion by over fifteen hundred prisoners gathered in the yard. The fact that Luff's men were the only ones with guns gave them the edge, but it still wasn't easy. Some of the cons were crazy and plenty more who weren't had been driven crazy over the last few days. They might not have guns, but they were old hands at makeshift weapons and some of them weren't afraid to die. So, for the time being, Luff and his goons were preoccupied with staying alive. But it wouldn't be long before the tide turned. Then it would just be a slaughter-and James didn't have any doubt that Boomer's people would be at the top of the list.
Hearing shouts, he glanced over. Luff's men must have finally driven off the first frenzied assault. Now, they were concentrating their fire on the center of the crowd. There were already at least a hundred dead or dying between X-row and the front gate. He couldn't really estimate how many men had been killed trying to rush the gate itself.
Their bodies were piled up too high. At least two dozen. When the riot started he'd been surprised, but he hadn't been unprepared. Some things you could predict, even if you couldn't predict when they'd happen. Having the freedom to work together over the past few days, even if the work itself had been grisly, Boomer's boys had been able to do a lot. All of them had shanks now-good ones, usually made of sharpened pieces of steel. Better still, they'd been able to bribe a few key-holders and James now had copies of a number of the prison's keys. James checked to see if the men were still with him. Those still alive, were, and that was almost all of them. As far as he knew, besides the Boom himself, only three of their guys had been killed so far. He was their anchor now. Somehow, in the days during which he'd organized the death detail, he'd emerged as the gang's second-in-command. Boyne probably would have contested that, eventually, but he wouldn't any longer. His instincts and attitudes were those of a subordinate. Now that Boomer was dead, he had no inclination to be the leader-as long as he could stay the lieutenant.
In four short words he'd just made that clear. "What do we do?" No reason he couldn't stay the lieutenant, so far as James was concerned.
Boyne was a solid man. The question itself remained. What do we do?
And he only had seconds to decide. This was rapidly turning from a rebellion into a massacre. Most of the prisoners now were just trying to get away from the killing ground at the center of the yard. That provided at least part of the answer. If they were moving with the crowd, Luff and his men wouldn't be able to spot them. If they were even trying to, which James doubted. Boomer's eruption and the riot that followed had obviously caught Luff by surprise too. Which way, though? A slight thinning of the crowd gave him the answer. He thought they could make it into the admin building. Luff and his usual bodyguards wouldn't be in there. They'd been on the execution platform. It doubled as a speaker's podium. Luff always gave a little speech after each morning's killings. He led the way, ready to knock aside any con who impeded them. But he didn't have to. Before he'd taken more than a few steps, he heard Boyne say: "Get in front of him and clear a path, Dino! You're the biggest." A moment later, Dino Morelli strode past James and did as he'd been told. Morelli was built like a basketball player, not a football player. But even a slender man who stands six feet, seven inches tall packs a lot of weight.
Especially if he pumped iron, which Morelli did religiously. And just his height was intimidating by itself. So they got there more quickly than James would have believed possible, and easily enough that he had time for a wry thought along the way. Leave it to Boomer. Morelli's insistence that he was really a Puerto Rican with an Argentine great-grandfather, not a goddam Eye-talian which wasn't much different from a white man, was as transparent as you could ask for. Privately, the Boom made jokes about himself. But James knew that when Morelli had approached him, a few days back, asking for a place in the gang, Boomer hadn't blinked an eye. James would miss Boomer, he surely would. He'd been a giant in more ways than one. Once they were through the door and into the admin building, the cool calm of the dark empty rooms seemed to hit the men like a hammer blow. Most of them sank to their knees gasping for air. James leaned against the wall, his heart pounding in his chest. They needed to rest, but he knew they couldn't.
It wouldn't be long before Luff's killers started searching this building along with all the others. He moved a few feet to peek out of one of the windows that opened to the outside and overlooked the front gate. But there was still no solution there. The area between the prison and the woods was a kill zone. The small group of men Luff had positioned at the gate must have finally been overwhelmed, because there were prisoners pouring through. But other goons on the walls were firing at them. Some of them would make it to the woods, sure, but most of them wouldn't. Bodies lay everywhere. "Where to, boss?"
James turned away from the window and studied his new lieutenant for a moment. John Boyne was a middle-aged man who was very thick-bodied and strong-looking but was so short the top of his head barely reached Cook's chin. Despite the man's name, he looked Hispanic rather than Anglo. James had never asked about his ancestry and the Boom had never told him anything. Not that he cared. James didn't share the Boomer's animosity toward white people, as such. As far as he was concerned, Boyne could be every bit as Irish as his name sounded. He was dependable and solid as a rock. Where to, boss? James thought fast.
After his transfer to the clinic he had spent a lot of hours in this building. This is where he'd come for cleaning supplies. He knew it very well-and he could only hope that one of the keys he'd paid bribes for would open the critical door. He pointed down the hall. "Move everyone that way. We'll see if we can get into the basement. Almost nobody ever goes there. I think we can hide until things settle down.
Then we'll try our break after the sun goes down." No one needed coaxing. They were on their feet and moving as soon as James finished speaking. The guns were still going off in the exercise yard and men were still shouting and screaming as they got butchered. The one critical piece of luck they needed came through. The fifth key James tried unlocked the maintenance door leading down to the basement. He almost thought it wouldn't, since the lock was stiff from lack of use.
But a little jiggling had done the trick. The basement was cool, dark and damp, and smelled of mold and rats. James hated rats. He'd grown up in a roach- and rat-infested housing project. It had been hell, but it was better than a reservation. At least that's what he'd been told.
He didn't know for sure. He had never set foot on a reservation. A con-he didn't see which one-opened the drain valve on a water tank and another one was passing out water in a curved piece of scrap metal someone found. James gulped the liquid and then handed back the makeshift cup so someone else could get a drink. The water tasted of iron and rust, but it was water. It was the first drink they'd taken since early this morning. The tank looked plenty big, too. They'd need to take water with them when they make their break into the woods.
"Look around and see if you can find anything that'll hold water," he told Boyne. "Anything one man can carry by himself will do." While Boyne set about that task, James pondered the problem of food. They had nothing with them, and there was no chance at all of finding food in the basement. Whatever scraps a maintenance man might have left down here would be long gone by now, eaten by rats. There'd be food upstairs in one of the rooms in the admin building. There was a refrigerator in a small lunch room on the second floor, and even if the refrigerator didn't work something would be up there. Luff and his top goons had used the building as their own headquarters, after they took over. Luff was not a man to go without his lunch handy. But he didn't dare send anyone to look. The search could start any minute. It was better to go hungry than run the risk of being spotted. James was fairly certain none of the goons would do more than rattle the door leading down to the basement to make sure it was locked-and he'd been careful to lock it behind them. The goons wouldn't have a key to open it anyway. Luff would, of course. But James was even more certain that none of his underlings would risk triggering off his temper right now by pestering him for a key, just to open a locked door that no fleeing con could have gotten through anyway. Not an underling low enough on the totem pole to be sent searching a building, anyway. Luff wasn't hot-tempered in the usual sense of the term, but the man could go quietly crazy when one of his plans didn't work. And this one hadn't worked, big time. James leaned against the wall, finally allowing a bit of his grief to wash through him. He knew perfectly well what Luff had been doing. So did the Boomer, because they'd talked about it. The killings had started the day after the uprising. Just ten men, that first day. All of them complete crazies that nobody would miss. That was the same day the execution stand had gone up. Luff had given a little speech, as he would do every day thereafter. The only difference was that in the days that followed he'd give the speeches after the killings. The charges Luff had leveled against the ten condemned men were completely ludicrous. None of them were competent enough to do what they were accused of, even if they'd wanted to.
Three of them had been in the psych ward, practically catatonic. One of them had been hauled to the noose in a straight-jacket. The next day he'd hung fifteen, also crazies. The charges had been every bit ludicrous, but they'd gotten vaguer. "Plotting with the guards" had become "treason against the people." The third day there'd been twenty-five men hung. And, for the first time, some of them hadn't been waterheads. Just… old. The fourth day there'd been thirty.
Half of them… just old. And by then the standard charge had become "uncooperative with the new order." Which was about as good as it got, in the could-mean-anything department. By then, too, the timber-cutting details were well underway. And it hadn't taken more than two days for every con in the prison to figure out that being chosen for the details was tantamount to a death sentence. The men hung weren't the only dead bodies that James and his people had had to dispose of. He grinned a little, thinking about that. There was even a trace of humor in the grin. The ovens had been Boomer's idea. "Tell 'em you need ovens to burn the bodies, boy." "Why ovens? Be easier to just burn them on piles of wood." "You not thinkin' straight. Wood be wood. Ovens gotten be built. To work right, they need doors. Doors need latches and you can't make no latches wid'out steel." The big grin had appeared. "You follow me now, boy?" How could a man that smart have just blown up? James wondered. Heknew the Boom understood what Luff was doing, because he and James and John Boyne had spent hours talking about it-and just as many hours talking about how to handle the situation. The executions, the life-draining work details, the sporadic food and grotesque water rituals, the lack of exercise, it was all part of an age-old practice of divide and conquer. Start with the outcasts and the weak, whom nobody would stand up for, just to get everyone accustomed to the killing. Then, broaden the scope, but always give people the hope that they might be spared. Give them shit jobs to do, and make believe if they did what they were told they would live. Let them know if they didn't they woulddie. Rub their noses in it. Set up a kangaroo court and let those on the jury know the only acceptable verdict was guilty. Hold court daily. Have only one penalty. Make the executions public. In fact, require everyone to attend. Make it plain that the people were being killed for a reason.
They had done something wrong. Whatever it was. Something the rest of the population could avoid doing and thus be spared. If you didn't understand what could get you killed, at least you knew what wouldn't.
Being "cooperative" with the new regime. Suck ass. Destroy the will of the ones you wanted to control. Grind them into the ground. Break their spirit. But Luff screwed up. He was too much of a bookkeeper, not enough of a psychologist. He went too far, too fast. The killings were too methodical, too transparent. The guards hadn't been gone much more than a week and already the prison population had been cut by almost two hundred. The promise ofdo as you're told and you'll be okay wasn't believed any longer by too many people. It wasn't just the public executions. In some ways, the timber details had been worse.
Even men being deliberately worked to death shouldn't die in a few days. The goons didn't feed them badly; they didn't feed most of them at all-and then shot dead anyone who slacked off from the heavy labor of cutting trees and turning them into firewood. Given that most of the men picked for the timber details had serious medical problems to begin with, it wasn't surprising that they started dropping like flies almost immediately. Two men had died on the first day from heart attacks. They'd both been in their late fifties. By the time the rebellion erupted, James didn't think many of the prisoners outside of the two or three hundred who were tight with Luff thought they would survive another week, the way things were going. And through it all, as cold-blooded and calculated as Luff, Boomer had held them steady.
"Just be good boys. Do your job wit' the bodies. Stupid fucks are leaving you alone, mostly, so you can do the things we done talked about. Time ain't right yet, but it will be soon enough." The night before, the Boom had even told James and Boyne that he thought it was about to blow. "Just take a little spark now, that's all. Just one spark." He'd been right, too. But he'd never said anything about being the spark himself. James sighed. That hadn't been planned, he knew that much for sure. Somewhere inside Boomer, somewhere inside that giant with no education beyond the sixth grade but a mind as sharp as any, something was broken. Probably broken long ago, when he was a kid. The same thing that had landed him in prison over thirty years earlier. When something did set off the Boom, he just went nuts. Plain berserk. James didn't know exactly what had set off that crazy streak this morning, and he'd never know. But he thought it was probably the guillotine. Today was the first time that had showed up. Luff must have decided hanging was too slow, too inefficient, so he'd had some of his men design and build a crude version of the device. That would be just like the bastard. He had a crazy streak buried inside a lot wider than the Boom's, even if it didn't manifest itself as spectacularly. The moment Boomer had seen the thing, his eyes had never left it. He'd stood there, stiff as a rock, while one man after another was dragged up and had his head chopped off. He'd lost it at the eighth man. "Fuck you, Luff!" he'd bellowed-and a Boomer bellow could be heard all over the yard. "We men, you motherfucker! We ain't sardines!" And he'd charged the stand. Armed with absolutely nothing but his fury and three hundred pounds of meat and muscle. He'd gotten almost all the way there, too, before the bullets finally brought him down. And the rebellion erupted. Boyne appeared at his side. "Boss, I found something. But you better take a look just yourself." He was speaking in a whisper. Why? Puzzled, James pushed away from the wall and followed the short, stocky man into a far corner of the basement, mostly hidden by some sort of old retaining wall. The wall created something in the way of a big cubbyhole in that area. The lighting was very dim. "There," Boyne said, pointing. Cook peered into the darkness, not seeing anything at first except two odd reflections.
Then, suddenly, he realized he was looking at a pair of eyes staring back at him. "What the…" He stepped closer until he could see clearly. On the floor was a small, dirty makeshift mattress. Not a mattress, really. Just some kind of folded-over… Something.
Probably an old blanket a maintenance man had had down here when he took a nap. On it, covered with nothing more than old newspapers and spread open old magazines, was the young black C.O. he had seen in the infirmary just a few days before Luff had taken over. He knew she had been knifed and was in bad shape. She was staring at him, saying nothing. James was sure she was petrified. She must have been hiding here for more than a week, ever since Luff took over the prison. She'd managed to get water from the tank, the same way they had. He could see a big tin can next to her, with the shine of water coming from it.
But she probably hadn't much if anything to eat. Worst of all, he could only imagine what she must have been thinking all these days.
One woman-young and pretty, too-trapped inside a prison with more than two thousand convicts on the loose. The only surprising thing was that she wasn't just gibbering. What was her name? He had to think hard; those days seemed so long ago. Then he had it. "Ms. Brown," he whispered. "Elaine Brown, if I remember right. We're not here to hurt you. We didn't come here looking for you in the first place. We're just trying to do what you're doing. Stay alive. Nothing more." He waited. She just stared at him. "Do you understand what I'm saying, Ms. Brown? Please. I'm an experienced emergency medical technician. I need a response." Abruptly, she nodded. Once. Okay, she hadn't gone nuts. That was something. "Now I need to ask you some questions.
First, where are the other guards?" She stared at him. Belatedly, James realized the question might seem like an interrogator's, hunting the guards. He waved his hand. "Never mind. You don't have to answer that. I just asked because-" "Gone. I'm the last one." Her voice was low, barely above a whisper. Cook didn't know if he should believe her. If there were others, she probably wouldn't say so. She would want to protect them, and maybe save herself by giving them a chance at surprising the escaped prisoners. The woman shook her head. "I'm not telling you where they went, so don't bother asking." Unlike the first two sentences she'd spoken, her voice almost quavering, that came flat and hard and final. Boyne chuckled. "Girl's got guts, for sure." James smiled. That, she did. He squatted next to her, reached out and laid gentle fingers on her forehead. Wanting to touch her more than check her temperature. Just to make sure she was real, maybe. He didn't know what to do, but whatever he did, he wanted to make sure it wasn't something he'd regret for the rest of his life. Touching her seemed to steady him, somehow. That was instinct, probably. She flinched from his fingers, but relaxed when she realized he wasn't doing more than touching her brow. Her temperature seemed fine. He tried to figure out what to do. Not even that, yet. Just figure out the right way to talk to her. This wasn't a gangbanger, or a tough street whore playing the percentages. She was just a young woman, badly hurt and scared, wanting to do the right thing and not knowing what that was. "Lady, the shit jumped off less than an hour back. Luff and his thugs are killing men left and right. You must have heard all the gunfire even way down here." She nodded. He took his fingers away from her brow. "We're just trying to escape. That's why I asked about the other guards. After we get out of this prison, if we want to stay alive, we have to find Captain Blacklock and his people. We have a common enemy, in the here and now, and I figure what's past is past.
That makes us allies." Elaine Brown chewed her bottom lip. Her eyes moistened a little but her voice remained steady. "Prove it, then.
Take me with you. There are enough of you. You can carry me out. Take me with you and I'll show you the way to the captain." James hesitated. All of his instincts told him to agree, but he wasn't sure it was even possible. "Please," she said. "If you found me, how long until someone else does? And I don't think I can make it much longer even if they don't. I'll starve. Worse yet, I'll get so weak I can't keep scaring off the rats when they sniff around me. The last time I went upstairs at night to steal a little food was two days ago. I can't make that climb up the stairs again. I could handle the pain but I'm not strong enough any more." James reached out again; and, again, Brown stiffened and pulled back a little. "I'm just checking," he whispered. Gently, he removed the newspapers covering her abdomen, then lifted her blouse. The I.V. he remembered was now gone, but the bandages were still in place. Her breathing was rapid and a little irregular. The basement was too dark for him to see if that reaction was due to fear or infection. He touched the bandage itself. It was dry. That made her proposal… Well, possible anyway, without just killing her. She wasn't a big woman. Never had been, even before a bad injury and a week without much food shrank her weight down even further. If James and his men could escape at all, they could carry her easily enough. And, being completely cold-blooded about it, having Elaine Brown with them when and if they finally found Blacklock would work in their favor. James could make bold statements about "being allies," but the fact remained that Blacklock had well over a hundred well-armed guards and James had a little over twenty convicts armed with nothing more than shanks. He could easily see where Blacklock might decide that locking up his new "allies"-or just shooting them-was the appropriate measure. Harder to do that, though, if those same cons were the ones who brought out alive a female guard whom the other guards had left behind to die. Alive, and unhurt. In any way.
James pondered that for a moment. The problem was that he didn't really know all of the men in the gang that well. Once again, Boyne showed how good a lieutenant he was. It was a little uncanny, the way such a dull-looking man could seem to read his mind. He squatted next to them and said: "Won't nobody hurt her, boss. Don't think any of them would anyway, but I'll see to it." His grin split the gloom.
"Just to make sure, I'll have Kidd watch over her. Be her personal bodyguard. Goofy bastard'll get a kick out of that." James chuckled.
Elaine's brow wrinkled. "What's so funny?" "Geoffrey Kidd's as queer as they come, lady. He's also six feet tall, weighs well over two hundred pounds, and hospitalized the last man who tried to make him his bitch. That was… what, John? Before my time." "Four years ago." Boyne stood up and looked down at Brown. "Just relax, girl.
Won't nothing bad happen to you. Not from us, anyway." The moist gleam in her eyes turned into a sudden flood. Her body was wracked with sobs. Quiet ones, though, very quiet. Even now, she was trying to maintain her control and self-discipline. Hoping it wouldn't be misconstrued, James slid right next to her. Half-sitting and half-lying down, he put his arm around her shoulders. This time, instead of drawing back, she leaned into him. Started to clutch him, in fact, before the pain brought by the motion made her pull the arm back. "I've been so scared," she whispered. "Never thought a person could get so scared. Or stay so scared for so long." He felt a lump in his throat. Ancient instincts were getting stirred up, no doubt about it. For the first time, her good looks registered on him. Big time. He needed to bring that under control, for damn good and sure. The effort to do so made his mind veer off to something that made him laugh. Not chuckle, laugh outright. "What's so funny?" she asked again. His initial reaction was that an honest answer wouldcertainly be misconstrued. But something in the way she looked up at him, her head resting on his shoulder, made him think otherwise. There was something very steady about this woman, as young as she was. He didn't think she rattled easy. "It's just that, when I was a kid, I used to have this daydream. Like in the comic books or the movies. Someday I'd rescue a beautiful princess from dire peril." He laughed again, more softly.
"You're good-looking enough, that's for sure. But I'd been figuring I'd find the princess in a fancy castle somewhere. Not…" He waved his hand at their surroundings. Brown laughed softly herself. And then, to his complete surprise, nestled into him. "I was born in a bungalow, not a castle. And the closest I ever came to being a princess was being runner-up-second runner-up, mind you-in a stupid beauty contest my mother made me enter when I was sixteen. Junior Miss Alexander County, I would've been, if I'd won. Oh, whoop-de-do." She looked up at him again. Her dark eyes seemed bigger than any eyes he'd ever seen. That was a trick of the dim lighting, of course. "What's your name? I remember seeing you now, once or twice, in the infirmary.
But I never knew your name." "Cook. James Cook." He smiled. "Not the sort of fancy name any knight in shining armor would have, is it?"
"No," she said calmly. "But it's the same name as that famous captain.
The great explorer. The one who sailed all around the world and discovered almost everything, way back when. More'n two hundred years ago, I think." James knew who she was talking about, of course. His crazy damn father had named him after that captain. He chuckled, harshly. "Yeah, I know. And wound up, in the end, being killed by cannibals." "I like the name." Oh, Lord. The lump was back in his throat and James had a feeling it wasn't going to get dislodged any too easily. A little noise made him look up. He was a little embarrassed to discover that the whole gang had quietly gathered around, peering into the cubbyhole. He cleared his throat. "Uh, boys, this is Elaine Brown. Ms. Brown, these are… ah…" What to call them? They'd always just been "Boomer's boys." Boyne cleared his throat. "Boss, I been thinking we should probably have a name. I mean, now that Boomer's gone." He was right, and the name came to James immediately. "We do have a name. We're the Boomers." The men murmured among themselves for a little while. It didn't take more than a few seconds before Morelli said: "Hey, I like it," and everybody else nodded their agreement. Geoffrey Kidd pushed forward and knelt on one knee in front of Brown. As big as he was, he seemed to dwarf the little woman. That wasn't just his height and his weight. Kidd had figured out right from the start that the best way for a gay man serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison to survive on his own terms was to outdo the cons at their own dominance games. Being almost as black as the proverbial ace of spades helped, but he'd gone the whole nine yards. He lifted weights until he looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger, shaved his head bald, and had tattoos all over. The four knuckles on his left hand spelled out F-U-C-K. The ones on his right spelled out Y-O-U-2. "Pleased to meet you, Ms. Brown," he said.
"I've been assigned the task of watching over you, it seems." Kidd had a good sense of humor, and was obviously amused by the situation.