The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust Book 5)

by Craig Schaefer

  That was when the reality of the situation hit me, a full-bore shotgun blast straight to my reptile brain. I was a prisoner here. I was a convict. And all the things I loved, all the things I dreamed about, were just that: dreams. Everything I couldn’t have. For the rest of my life.

  I swallowed down my sudden animal panic, pursing my lips into a taut line, and looked for a place to sit.

  The cafeteria tables were more Neapolitan ice cream. Vanilla on the left. Paul caught my eye and waved me over, scooting to make a spot beside him.

  “Welcome to Chez Eisenberg,” he said, nodding across the table as I swung a leg over the bench and sat down. “You know Jake and Westie?”

  “Yeah, we met in the yard. Hey, guys. Speaking of, remember our talk out there, Paul? You had started to say something about breakouts.”

  He dipped his plastic spoon in the chicken and rice, giving it a dubious sniff. “Huh? Oh, right. Okay, so it’s not totally true. People have broken out of the Iceberg—”

  “Lucky bastards,” Westie grumbled.

  “Wait for it. They have, maybe three or four times, but they either get caught or gunned down right after.”

  Paul pressed his spoon against his mashed potatoes, separating them into a pair of lumps and drawing a thin potato road between them. I sampled a mouthful of the chicken and rice and struggled to hold it down. The meat was half gelatin and half gristle, in a sauce that tasted like warm mayonnaise.

  “This food is…not food,” I said, chasing it with a swig of lukewarm water. “They seriously feed you this slop?”

  “All meals meet a minimum caloric and nutritional standard,” Paul said, engrossed in his potato sculpture building, “emphasis on minimum. Food budget’s something like four bucks a day per prisoner.”

  “Now you know why people shank each other over commissary goods,” Jake cast a cautious glance across the room. “And why aren’t we on lockdown after that shit that popped off in the yard today? The blacks and browns are givin’ each other snake eyes, and I’ve seen two guards so far with their fingers on their triggers.”

  “Probably hoping it gets worse,” Westie said, following his gaze. “Hell, a full-on cafeteria riot? They could put the whole hive in lockdown for a month. Gotta get all that overtime in before Christmas shopping, right?”

  I took a deep breath, steadying myself as much as I could manage, and stretched out my senses. Psychic tendrils, glistening in my second sight like purple sea anemones, drifted across the room. Touching brains, scooping up surface thoughts, sifting through emotions like panning for gold in a vat of sludge. Fear. So much fear. The kind of anxiety that turned a man feral. Anger, but that was mostly surface bluster. A crude dam to keep the terror from breaking loose.

  The way I saw it, the cafeteria was a hair’s breadth from going nuclear. One wrong move, one jostle or a second of eye contact with the wrong person, and blood would spill.

  I wasn’t sure what worried me more: standing at ground zero in the heart of a riot, or the idea of being locked in a cell for a month afterward.

  “Okay,” Paul told me, wagging his spoon at his mashed-potato map. “It’s like this: we’re in the middle of a desert.”

  “You don’t say,” Jake muttered.

  “Nearest town is Aberdeen, thirty miles south. This two-lane road was built at the same time the prison was. Most of the guards, support staff, even the warden lives in Aberdeen. Interstate 80 brushes the edge of town, heading east and west. Those are pretty much your only travel options.”

  “So you need wheels to get out of here,” I said, thinking it through. “You’ll die on foot in the heat. And by the time you reach Aberdeen—”

  Paul tapped the mashed-potato road with his spoon. “You got it. Total lockdown. All they have to do is put two roadblocks on I-80 and you aren’t going anywhere. Most escapees either get caught at the roadblock or on the way there. Nobody’s ever gotten farther than that.”

  “Why take the road at all?” Jake asked. “It’s a desert. Just pick a direction and ride.”

  Paul shook his head. “It’s not a flat desert. Sand dunes, drifts, rocks…yeah, you could do it in an ATV, easy—but only if you can see where you’re going. Do it during the day, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb. Helicopters’ll spot you in seconds. Do it at night, without headlights, you’ll end up in a wreck before you make it five miles.”

  “Why do you wanna know anyway?” Westie asked me.

  I shrugged.

  “I’ve got restaurant reservations. Don’t want to be late.”

  * * *

  After lights out, I rested on my back on the slab of concrete that passed for a bunk and tried to ignore the cold. The Iceberg earned its name after sunset. I imagined arctic wind whistling over a frozen tombstone. And there, under the snow and the permafrost, entombed I lay.

  Thinking.

  I’d already spent all the time I wanted behind bars. And the amount of time I wanted was zero. I was leaving, and I didn’t care if I had to climb a mountain of corpses to do it.

  Couldn’t be reckless, though. While my reptile brain thrashed its tail against the back of my skull, kicking me into fight or flight, I clamped down hard and forced myself to think it through. Going off half-cocked would just get me shot or worse. I needed a plan.

  So nobody had ever successfully escaped from Eisenberg Correctional. I was willing to bet they’d never had a prisoner like me, but then again, that was probably what every other would-be escapee thought before he ate a bullet. The prison, the town, the highway…I played around with my mental map for a while, floating possibility after possibility like helium balloons and shooting each one down.

  That was fine, for now. A solo escape act was my last resort. If I could crack the curse around my imaginary “trial” and get somebody in authority to see I’d gone from arrest to prison in the blink of an eye, that would solve everything. The confusion would at least be enough to gum up the legal works. All I needed was a hearing, and then I’d be on my way to a country with no extradition treaty faster than you could say “bail money.” If nothing else, worst-case scenario, they’d have to move me to a county jail until everything was sorted out.

  It’d be a hell of a lot easier to break out of county.

  Speaking of hell, Caitlin would be back to Vegas in a few days, and she wouldn’t waste any time trying to track me down. Did I have that long, though? If Nadine was telling the truth—and I couldn’t find a good reason to doubt her, much as I tried—I could expect a hired killer or two to come hunting for me. Soon. It was in my best interest to be long gone before that happened.

  No, waiting for Caitlin to find me was too risky. I needed to take this bull by the horns and find a way to get word to the outside. I had a few thoughts in that direction, but my head kept coming around to Fleiss. I couldn’t figure out why she wanted me dead—she and I were going to have a chat about that as soon as I got loose. For now, though, I was a sitting duck in here. I needed a weapon. Not a sharpened broom handle or a razor blade either. My kind of weapon.

  No grimoires, no ritual tools, no herbs or oils, no privacy. Trying to do magic behind bars was like trying to build a nuke with a nine-volt battery and some chewing gum. Still, I knew one spell that would get me exactly what I needed.

  A spell I’d only cast once in my entire life, for a damn good reason.

  10.

  Her name was Jenna Rearden, and she kept her hands clasped tight before her, like a penitent nun, to keep them from shaking. It wasn’t me she was afraid of.

  Not entirely me, anyway. This wasn’t long after I’d broken company with Nicky Agnelli. A heist went bad, shook my confidence, threw me off my game. Instead of getting back on Nicky’s payroll, I shifted gears and tried something new. I hung out my metaphorical shingle, offering vengeance for hire. Dirty deeds done at premium prices.

  It was mostly curse work, though I passed myself off to my clients as a mundane “fixer” who could arrange convenient accidents for anyone who
had done them wrong. Cheating spouse? Sexually harassing boss? Cross my palm with silver, and I could make your problems go away.

  Then came Jenna. Young, mousy, freshly divorced with a six-year-old daughter. A daughter who had gone from vibrant and outgoing to sullen and stormy, a pattern that grew worse with every weekend visit to her father’s house. Jenna got smart; she slipped a voice-activated recorder into her daughter’s Hello Kitty knapsack. The audio told her everything she needed to know.

  “My lawyer says there’s no guarantee how much prison time he’ll get,” Jenna told me, “or if he’ll get any at all. There are cases where men have…done this to their children and even kept visitation rights. I can’t do it, Mr. Faust. I can’t. I’ll take her and run if I have to. I’ll spend the rest of my life as a fugitive before I’ll—”

  I held up a hand. “You won’t. Go home, and go about your business like it was any other day. I’ll handle everything.”

  “How will I know when—”

  “You’ll know.”

  I didn’t need to hear the audio, but I still listened. I listened to every cry and muffled whimper. All two hours of it. I needed the hatred, coursing through my veins like high-octane gasoline, to do what I did next.

  Two days later, a noise complaint led the cops straight to Jenna’s ex. He was sitting up in bed and screaming. Just staring into space and shrieking, endlessly, until his vocal cords tore and nothing but agonized wheezes gusted over his blood-flecked tongue. Last I’d checked, he was still in a padded cell at Napa State Hospital, under heavy sedation.

  He’d be there for the rest of his life. Even if I wanted to, what I did to him couldn’t be undone.

  I wouldn’t bring that kind of doom down on somebody’s head under normal circumstances, unless they truly deserved it. These weren’t normal circumstances, though, and a weapon was a weapon.

  It was time to call upon the King of Worms.

  * * *

  I’d found the king’s name in Bentley and Corman’s back-room collection, a trail that slid in and out of history like a wisp of sulfur smoke. Here, a mention in a sixteenth-century French black magician’s manual. There, a casual aside in a colonial witch hunter’s diary. Puzzle pieces scattered across time, waiting for someone foolish enough to put them back together.

  It was never quiet in prison. Even at midnight, even in the darkness, the hive was a cacophony of snoring, wheezing, coughing, whispering. Faint metal clanks and the sudden strangled sound of a sob muffled by a pillow. I pulled the paper-thin blanket aside and sat up in my bunk, crossing my legs and resting my upturned palms on my knees.

  If I leaned forward and craned my neck, looking toward the tower in the heart of the hive, I could make out shapes through the darkened windows at the top. A couple of guards stood watch, looking out over the tiers through the bug-eye glass of night-vision goggles.

  I straightened my back and closed my eyes.

  All magic starts with a breath. I inhaled for four seconds, held my breath for four seconds, exhaled for four seconds. Then again. And again, as my thoughts slipped into the background, taking the noise and the prison along with them. My heartbeat slowed with the clock, seconds squeezing by like drops of molasses through an hourglass.

  It was dark behind my eyes, but I saw a light in the distance. A silver pinprick. I walked toward it.

  A chant reverberated through my skull, half in my voice, half in a stranger’s. A litany of ancient names. A warning in a language I didn’t speak. Now I walked along a winding ribbon of tarnished pewter, inlaid with swirling Hebraic script reading Malkhut, Yesod, Hod, Gevurah, Da’ath.

  The ribbon rose and twisted, taking me along with it. Plunging into worlds of shadow that billowed like black smoke. I wasn’t in my cell. I wasn’t not in my cell. I was in between.

  The shadow in-between, I thought as the ribbon became a road.

  In the darkness, looming up before me, was a throne. A throne eighty feet tall, a mountain of crumbling black basalt. The king who sat slumped upon that throne, a giant in moldering robes with a rusted crown upon his skeletal brow, had been dead since time began.

  “I come as a pilgrim,” I said, “with hands empty and cold.”

  My gifts are free, rasped the King of Worms in a voice that came from everywhere and nowhere.

  “Decay is the fate of all life.” I clasped my hands before me, giving the ritual response.

  And madness is the fate of all sanity.

  “I seek to spread your wisdom upon the flesh of the world once more.”

  This would please me. Come. Receive your sacrament.

  Figures emerged from the shadows at the foot of the throne. Two of them shuffling toward me in spasmodic convulsions, walking with muscles gone stiff from rigor mortis. They were women, perhaps, wearing the habits of nuns but their garb adorned with crimson symbols from no earthly order. Empty eye sockets turned my way.

  I stood my ground and counted my breaths. Four seconds in. Hold. Four seconds out.

  The king’s servants converged upon me. One shambled in a slow, painful circle, neck bones crackling as she kept her eyeless face trained upon mine. The other reached for me with one slender, rotting hand. Her flesh, what little remained of it, was a hive of maggots. No, some alien species like a maggot, with skin glistening, jet-black, and reflecting the pinprick light from distant stars.

  The nun stroked my cheek, gentle, like a lover.

  I didn’t flinch.

  The other nun laid her rotted hand upon my scalp and yanked my head back with ferocious strength as she pushed downward, forcing me to my knees with my face upturned.

  The one before me reached up to her throat and plucked a single, squirming maggot-thing from her rotten skin. It twisted and writhed, pinned between thumb and forefinger, as she held it above my face. Panic welled up and I fought to keep my fear in check, holding very, very still as her hand came down.

  I smelled mildew, and decay, and sweet rose water. Just before she dropped the maggot into my left nostril.

  I lurched forward, eyes wide open, the vision torn away and the stench and sounds of the prison hammering my senses. Suddenly free and suddenly entombed. I clutched the thin blanket, pressing my face to the foot of my bunk, clenching my jaw until it ached. I could feel it, the alien thing inside my body, crawling up my sinuses and spreading a rash of pain like I’d just snorted chili powder. I felt the maggot squirm across the back of my eyeball, my vision blurring as it left a burning trail on its way to my brain. I wanted to claw at my skin, rip out my eye, anything to get the damned thing out. All I could do was count my breaths and hold very still, clutching the blanket, waiting for the feeling to end.

  But it didn’t. The insect curled up on the skin of my brain—against all logic, against everything I knew about the human body, I could feel it there—and went to sleep. An unscratchable itch beneath my skull. A parasite made of cosmic filth.

  It would only sleep for so long. I had two days, three at most, before it would start to burrow. It needed a warm, safe place, after all.

  A warm, safe place to feed.

  That was the number-one reason I’d only done this once before and hoped to never do it again. I had two days to pass the king’s “gift” to another victim, or it would devour me alive from the inside out.

  Nothing in this universe is ever really free.

  11.

  I slept, if you could call it sleep. A few fitful hours of tossing and turning on the quarter-inch mattress, waking up with my back aching and my eyelids sagging, more tired than when I’d laid down in the first place. And I could still feel the maggot, nesting inside my skull. Paul chuckled as he pushed himself up from his bunk.

  “Don’t worry, it gets easier,” he said. “My first week, I couldn’t sleep a wink. Eventually you just tune everything out. It’s amazing what you can get used to when you don’t have any other choice.”

  I didn’t plan on being here long enough to get used to it.

  The tiers showere
d in shifts, and we waited for the guards to pop our cell door, calling us out to stand along the railing in single file. We shuffled downstairs and through an access corridor, like the world’s slowest conga line at the world’s saddest party.

  The movies had told me to expect a big, open room lined with shower nozzles, the space filled with milling naked bodies and the threat of violence. What I got instead was more like the showers in a college dorm. Individual stalls lined in white ceramic tile—with dingy plastic curtains, no less, though they didn’t quite cover the entire opening. Stepping into that stall and pulling the curtain shut behind me was the closest thing I’d had to privacy since I arrived at the Iceberg. I let out a faint sigh of pleasure and luxuriated under the sputtering lukewarm spray, running my fingers over my scalp. I only had five minutes, but it was enough.

  Outside, toweling off with my uniform folded on a long wooden bench at my side, I got Paul’s attention and nodded left. Two men stood with crossed arms outside a curtained stall, staring daggers at anyone who came within ten feet.

  “What’s up with that?” I asked.

  “Like I said, usually don’t have to worry about being raped in the showers,” he told me, “but it’s a great place to get stabbed. Sometimes guys trade off like that, two standing guard while one showers, to make sure nobody pulls anything funny. Heck, put up some commissary goods and you can hire your very own bodyguards. Bet you never thought a chocolate bar could save your life.”

  I had chocolate on the brain as we fell in line again down in the cafeteria. It was better than the watery scrambled eggs they were serving up, falling from the server’s ladle to my paper plate in a messy plop.

  “So when does Hive B eat?” I asked the server. “I only see A and C on the schedule.”

  “They don’t. Lockdown means all the meals get delivered to their cells. We cook ’em up and send them all over on rolling carts for the guards to pass out.”