“What did you expect? A hotel suite?”
“That’s a hospital bed.”
“Right, and you’re going to lay down on it.”
Cole studied the bed carefully, as if that was enough to make it change into something else. The walls were concrete, and covered with chipped, light green paint. He’d been locked up once in a holding cell with a toilet that wasn’t much more than a curved metal shelf with plumbing sticking out of the wall. One of those may have been installed in the farthest wall of this cell at one time, but all that remained was a patch of cracked wall and some pipes cut and sealed with cement.
“Is this for some sort of examination?” Cole asked.
“Lie down.”
There was no way to get out of the prison and nowhere to run, even if he did make it that far, so he climbed onto the bed and stretched out.
Someone in medical scrubs walked into the cell, accompanied by more guards. Cole could hear every scrape of her paper-covered sneakers against the floor and every lid she popped off needles attached to IV tubes before she cleaned them off.
“How many other prisoners are in here?” he asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” a guard replied while strapping him to the table. The man resembled the others who had brought him this far. Similar uniform, similar body armor, similar helmet, similar boots, similar hate-filled eyes.
“What is this?” Cole asked. Panic flooded through his body as he started to wonder if Colorado administered its death penalty through lethal injection. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know if Colorado had the death penalty. “Don’t I get a lawyer? A phone call? At least tell me what’s in this goddamn needle!”
If an explanation was given, Cole didn’t hear it. Once the drugs were pumped from the IV bag into his arm, he didn’t see or hear anything either.
Cole dreamt in a cold torrent of slush that filled his head and leaked out in a series of thrashing muscle spasms and incoherent screams.
He didn’t feel like he was falling or lying down. Instead, he was just suspended inside himself with only disembodied voices to fill his days.
Days, or maybe weeks.
Could have been years.
Whatever length of time it was ended abruptly when his consciousness started turning end over end. Although he couldn’t see the walls of his dark cell, he knew they were spinning around him. The steady, thumping rhythms that had been his only source of reference sped up and then slowed down.
Memories drifted away.
Sounds came closer while falling back at the same time.
There was a pressure that seemed more real than anything else in his world.
Something wailed and beeped.
Beeping. Just like the first games his dad had bought for his old Atari 2600. Clumsy tones that were the best those early programmers could do and were music to his adolescent ears. Beeping. Squawking. Digitized warbles that eventually became something close to voices. By the time he was in college, his games had acquired real voices and music. That had been a true landmark for a kid who so rarely went outside.
The pressure still came from somewhere, and the voices were getting clearer. If he focused hard enough, he might be able to make out what they said.
“Somebody get in here!”
More pressure, along with a pinch. He was no longer spinning. His head was wrapped in something cool and soft.
“Back away, motherfucker!”
That was definitely not from any game Cole had grown up with. Neither was the snarling hiss that was close enough to send a few drops of bitter venom over his lip and into the stubble that had claimed his chin.
Consciousness exploded in a surge of adrenaline that snapped his eyes wide open so he could see a Nymar’s head poking up from the collar of a standard guard uniform. It was a round clean-shaven face with no telltale black markings. Even without seeing the tendrils moving beneath the man’s skin, the two sets of fangs extending from his upper jaw gave him away. One set were the feeders that slid down over the normal canine teeth, and the others were a curved, slender pair that fit along the inner edges of the first set. Venom dripped from the curved fangs as the vampire hissed at the guards. At least, he assumed there were more guards, since he couldn’t lift his head enough to see.
Cole switched immediately into survival mode. He tried to sit up, but the Nymar pressed him right back down again using the hand that was already clamped around his throat to dig sharpened nails into his flesh. That explained the pressure and pinching he’d dreamt about. The real guards were shouting their threats, but the man with the round face didn’t pay them any mind. He simply looked down at Cole, lowered his face to within a few inches of his and snarled, “Tara sends her best.”
Tara was one of Paige’s friends dating back more than eleven years. During a nightmare that had laid the foundation of Paige becoming a Skinner, Tara was turned into a Nymar. More than that, she’d been double-seeded. Two spores were attached to her heart, making her stronger, hungrier, and more vicious as a reward for surviving the process. Perhaps this was payback for him killing the Nymar that had created her. At the moment he could only be concerned with drawing his next breath.
He saw a slender arm wrapped around the Nymar’s throat. Although the medical tech wasn’t strong enough to choke a vampire, she was able to jab a needle into his neck and push the plunger. When the toxin went into him, the Nymar only tightened his grip. Cole grabbed his wrist with both hands and fought to sit up. This time he was stopped by a fiery pain that blazed over the entire front of his torso. “Son of a bitch!” he grunted.
The Nymar grinned wider and pressed until his fingernails broke the skin of Cole’s neck. Using his free hand to grab the medical tech, he pulled her closer and bit into her jugular.
“Why isn’t he dead yet?” one of the guards asked.
“Sh-Shadow Spore,” Cole said. While the Nymar was feeding, his attention was too divided to keep Cole down. “Antidote doesn’t work on them,” he wheezed.
The guards were still baffled, so Cole took matters into his own hands by managing to sit up and drive his arms forward with enough power to snap the restraints around his chest. Without the tendrils that had been left behind, he wouldn’t have had the strength to do it. Now, with their innate power and a hunger that had gotten worse over his time in custody, he was able to grab the reinforced collar of the Nymar’s uniform and pull him away from the tech. Rather than drag the Nymar straight back, he eased its mouth away and then wrapped his other arm around its forehead to try and lift its feeding fangs out of the tech without tearing her flesh. Once the Nymar felt himself being separated from his meal, a thicker set of fangs emerged from his lower jaw to try and sink into her for good. If those were allowed to puncture the tech’s skin, Cole knew he might as well let him drink. The alternative would be to rip the Nymar off while taking most of her neck along with him.
“Somebody do something!” he shouted.
Blood sprayed from the tech’s opened vein. The Nymar’s hiss took on a deeper, almost demonic tone as his eyes became solid black orbs. Cole pulled back with all of his weight, forcing the Nymar away from the tech so she could hit the floor in a heap. The Nymar was quick to pull away from him, but now that the hostage was clear, guards surged into the room to turn confusion into chaos.
Cole found himself wanting to dive into that chaos and ride it out until it was over. That’s what Skinners did. Even though he’d managed to break his restraints, there was something stabbing him in the stomach that turned every movement into a lesson in agony. When he reached down to try and pull out the blade that had impaled him, the only thing he found was a bloodstain that was quickly spreading across the front of his hospital gown. Desperately, he ripped the material away until he could see fresh stitches marking an incision that had been cut from his chest all the way down to within eight inches of his groin.
“We know where you are, Skinner!” the Nymar raged. “We’ll know where all of you are! We’ll
find you!”
Guards had surrounded the Nymar on all sides. Before he could spout any more threats, all of the guards pulled the triggers of the shotguns they carried. Cole’s ears exploded with the combined thunder of all of those weapons, followed by a high-pitched ringing that filled his brain. The pain filling his wounded belly dropped him back down onto the bed. By the time the scent of burnt gunpowder hit the back of his throat, he was being held down again and jabbed with more needles. This time, however, the darkness didn’t come.
Two more gunshots thumped through the roar filling Cole’s head. When he spoke, his own voice was the only thing that didn’t sound like it was three hundred miles away.
“What happened to me?” he shouted.
Although the guards who approached him seemed to hear what he’d asked, they didn’t reply. Through the bed and floor, Cole could feel the impact of more scuffling, which quickly subsided. Two guards dragged the Nymar away, and the only way he identified the bloody mess as such was from the uniform wrapped around the pulpy remains infused with severed, twitching tendrils.
“What’s happening?” Cole demanded.
But all he got from the remaining guards was a shotgun barrel pointed at him as another one tried to refasten the restraints. Since the padded leather belts had been pulled from their moorings, two guards stood watch over him with their shotguns constantly at the ready.
The tech was alive, but had to be carried out due to all the venom pumped into her system through the Nymar’s fangs. There was no way of telling how the vampire had gotten into the prison, but some of the venom spat into someone’s eyes could have given him enough control over that person to do the trick. By the time most of the mess was cleaned up, the blaring whine in Cole’s ears had decreased to an annoying ring.
Someone entered the room. He was dressed in a cheap brown suit that wasn’t cut well enough to hide the gun holstered under his left arm. Tall, athletically built, and pale, he had the look of an ex-cop or soldier who had been busted down to desk detail. “Is he still awake?” the man asked one of the guards.
“Yes,” Cole replied. “He is. What the hell did you do to him?”
The man spoke to the guard posted at the door in a clipped whisper. He then turned to Cole, smiled in condescendingly lukewarm fashion and approached the guard who stood closest to the bed. “You’ve been entrusted to this facility by your friend, Paige Strobel.”
“She told me to go with you guys back in Denver, so I did.”
“You didn’t have much choice, now did you?”
“There were choices,” Cole assured him. “I could have left like the others who got away from that warehouse.”
“How many others?”
Cole took no small amount of comfort from that question, since it meant that Rico, Prophet, and the Amriany had made it away from there. Changing the subject quickly enough for him to hear gears grinding, he asked, “What did you do to me?”
“We tried to do you a favor, Mr. Warnecki, and had a look at those tendrils that remain inside of you after the Nymar spore attached itself to your heart.”
It was a constant act of willpower for Cole to not dwell on the memory of when that thing was inside of him. Like a presence that never grew tired of trying to break his sanity, those thoughts lingered and whispered no matter how he tried to shut them out. The spore had been removed. He could only remind himself of that. He didn’t need to remind himself of what had been left behind. The constant pain of his body being garroted from the inside did that well enough.
“You cut me open?” he asked. No matter how obvious it had become, he still couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it.
“Nothing worse than what was already done to you when the spore was removed,” the man replied. “And much more sterile.”
“If anything’s gonna kill me, infection is the least of my worries.”
“But that’s all that separates a human from a Nymar. A very aggressive infection. Also, as we’ve discovered over the last two weeks, very stubborn.”
“Two weeks?”
The man nodded. “We didn’t exactly want you to wake up yet, but at least that murderer didn’t get to you before your stitches healed. I suppose we’ve got a more traditional kind of medicine to thank for that, huh? I think you’ve been in this game long enough to be of some use to us while you’re awake. Excellent.”
Cole sat up again, ignoring the pain that came from it. “Paige wouldn’t have signed on for this.”
“That doesn’t matter. She was kind enough to hand you over under the implication that we would do what we could to get those tendrils out of you. In return, we could study what was happening to you and why you were able to be seeded when something like that should be impossible.”
“So . . . you’re a Skinner?”
The man merely smiled curtly and walked forward to peel the gown away from Cole’s body so he could get a look at the fresh scar. With a few inquisitive prods of his finger against the incision, he brought Cole’s focus right back to where he wanted it to be. “The tendrils can’t be removed,” he said. as if he was talking about a mole on Cole’s leg. “We opened you up . . . several times and from several angles. You’re quite a healer, by the way. Those tendrils are wrapped around your major organs. Stomach, kidneys, and of course the intestines. Those are the nasty ones. We managed to remove a few sections here and there, but the rest are wrapped around you so tightly in spots that they’ve cut you. The only thing keeping you from bleeding out is that the tendrils also hold you together. That is, until they get hungry.
“You see, like any simple organism, these things develop ways of communicating. Theirs is to cinch in tighter to provoke an anger response that leads to pain and eventually to the conclusion that you need to feed them. Either that or they just tighten as some sort of reflex. I won’t be certain about that until we do some more studying. Of course, we may have to stop feeding them as a way to gauge how their reactions change. Since we seem to have a problem putting you back under, it’s best to keep you from gathering so much strength anyway. Surely you understand.”
“I want to talk to Paige.”
“I bet you do. She was never informed of your real location. Even the press believes you’re still being held in Canon City before being moved to Indiana.”
“You mean I’m not?”
“Close,” the man replied, “but not close enough for you to hear all the commotion.”
“She’ll find me,” Cole said with absolute certainty.
“Will she?” The man pondered that for a moment and then stepped back. “Thanks to our intruder today, I’m tightening security around here. It should be interesting to find out how close she or anyone else can get to you.” Looking to a guard, he said, “After his incision is redressed, take him to G7 and institute every level of containment.”
Chapter Four
Cole was escorted down a corridor that took him past an entire section of empty cells to a small freight elevator. Beside it was a booth sealed behind safety glass sandwiched between two metal grates. The floor beneath his feet was dark red. Beyond that, it was gray. The walls deeper within the building were the same colors, all of which had been painted recently enough for fumes to still waft through the air. Without any other prisoners behind the bars of those cells, it seemed almost comical to be going through the motions of being in official custody. Every step of the way his senses absorbed his surroundings to look for any opening that might present itself. He was weaponless, exposed, wounded, surrounded by guards who knew way too much about what he was, and abandoned by the people who were supposed to help him. And just when his prospects couldn’t get any better, the pain in his guts crept back in.
Due to the open layout of the corridor, he could see the bare cement of the two floors beneath him. His best guess was that he was in an abandoned jail or possibly even an old department store. When he was shoved into the freight elevator, Cole wasn’t allowed to turn back around to face the door. Instead, h
is head was pressed against the wall and pinned there by a baton jammed against the back of his neck. “So,” he grunted while turning so his mouth wasn’t scraping against the wall, “I take it that saving someone from getting fed upon doesn’t count for anything?”
“That thing would have killed you too if we hadn’t come in,” one of the guards said. “That makes us even.”
“What about a phone call? Do I still get one of those? It’s been a while, but I’ve never been allowed to make a phone call.”
“That’s a privilege,” one of the guards said. “Not a right. You lost all of your privileges.”
“So now I’m really in trouble, huh?”
The elevator was slow, which made it easier for Cole to figure out they were headed up. When he was turned around, he spotted the number 3 illuminated above the doors. “What’s G7?” he asked. When he didn’t get a response, he added, “Did I sink someone’s battleship?”
A rough hand slapped against the back of his head to force it down until his chin knocked against the top of his chest. More hands shoved Cole forward as one of the guards stayed behind to press a series of buttons just beyond the elevator doors.
The concrete floor was clean, cold, and gray. Unlike the rest of the prison, Cole could feel eyes upon him from every angle, and when he tried to get a look at who was watching him, his head was viciously turned back toward the floor.
Growing nervous as well as cautious, the guards plodded methodically down the corridor. That gave Cole some time to test his limits in much the same way he’d been taught to constantly move his arms in the event of being tied up with rope. He could turn his head a fraction of an inch in either direction so long as the movement looked like a natural sway. Shifting his eyes in their sockets all the way to one side allowed him to catch a glimpse of the bottom edges of more cells. Some had pairs of feet wrapped in standard-issue canvas slip-ons standing just behind the bars. Others were stained with what could have been vomit, spilled lunch, or dried blood. When he caught sight of markings etched into the bars, Cole realized his captors weren’t just Skinner wannabes.
The Breaking Page 6
