Cthulhu Unbound 3

by Brian M. Sammons (ed. )

  Luis was standing over by the window, face pressed up against the iron bars, staring out past them and through the steel mesh beyond. He motioned Coogan over. “Look,” he said. “Do you see it?”

  Coogan squinted, seeing the towers of Grissenville, a patch of starlit sky above…except that part of it was gone. There was a spiraling arm of blackness cut through it.

  “A cloud?”

  Luis nodded. “Something like a cloud. Started about a month ago and every night it gets bigger, eats up more sky. It’s getting closer to us. You can only see it at night.”

  Coogan made the connection, of course. “You think it’s coming, don’t you? What’s in the Oort Cloud?”

  Luis climbed up into his bunk and stretched out. “Not a matter of what I think, but a matter of what I know. Every night, a little bigger, a little closer. Sounds whacked, I know. But you wait…you’ll see how things are here…you’ll see it getting closer night by night. You’ll feel it under your skin. Then I won’t be the only crazy one.”

  3

  Chi Chi said they pinched him on a bullshit possession rap, claimed he was mothering two keys of Mexican Brown with intent to distribute interstate and how right they were. He figured his ex had fingered him because he’d beaten her ass when he caught her in bed sharing the goods with her brother-in-law. Beat her, tossed her out into the streets. Thing was, he had two keys of junk sliced into nickel bags fresh from his cutting house over in Bed-Sty—ten naked Panamanian broads, speakee no English, sitting around in a sealed room, cutting skag with quinine and milk sugar, bagging it up—just waiting for his mules to show, but who shows instead are a squad of DEA narcs that kick down the door, the pigs that blow his house down.

  “But that shows you how fucking stupid they are,” Chi Chi was saying to Coogan, watching the cons holding court, roosters strutting around with no hens to impress. “Because I had three keys of pure Sicilian in the trunk of my car and they never even looked.”

  Rosalie, his ex, flipped when Chi Chi turned his back on her. Went screaming to the feds, fingering his operation. He went to prison, but she—who just had a real hunger for the needle—spiked enough pure cocaine to kill ten men, courtesy of Chi Chi. It was called a ‘hot-shot’ and it was the execution of choice for junkies. Just try and prove it.

  The war stories and fish tales were swapped back and forth. It was good to hook up with Chi Chi again, Coogan figured. The two of them had been a real terror at the Hot House. Chi Chi was this tall, wiry street-eater who wore his hair in long dreadlocks and had a single gold tooth that winked in the sun. Easy, cool as ice, but don’t get him riled.

  “What about these escapes?” Coogan asked. “Like a dozen in the last month? Am I hearing this shit right?”

  “You are.”

  “Hell’s going on?”

  Chi Chi said it was anyone’s guess. There didn’t seem to be any connection between them, only that somehow, someway, cons kept dropping out of sight…permanently. Grissenberg had a funny way of losing people.

  “Some kind of pipeline out of here?” Coogan said, intrigued by the idea.

  Chi Chi laughed with a cold, bitter sort of sound. “You got to consider the boys we talking about here. These last three: Tony Babbott, Charley LeRoy, and a big ugly walking slab they call Sludge. LeRoy was a TV star, sure as shit. They featured his ass on one of those America’s Dumbest Criminals shows. He was the one who robbed three convenience stores in the tri-state area wearing his uniform from Quik-Lube. You know, the one with his name tag on it.”

  Chi Chi elaborated. He said Babbott wasn’t much smarter. He was a car-jacker. He stole five cars in one night, moved ‘em across state lines. By the time he jacked the last one—a late-model Lexus—he was tired, so he decided to unload it first thing in the morning. He parked it in his mother’s driveway and went to bed. Somehow, a Lexus sedan stood out in the ghetto and the cops made him right away.

  “Yeah, okay they were both idiots,” Coogan said. “What about Sludge?”

  Chi Chi laughed. “He weren’t no smarter, Coog. Thought his girlfriend was screwing some dude she worked for, so he tracked him down and shot him in full view of like ten witnesses. Only problem was Sludge, with his fifth grade education and all, couldn’t read the name on the mailbox so he tracked down the wrong dude and killed him. Guy he wasted was a US Treasury agent.” Chi Chi blew smoke out his nose, laughing. “So that’s our three masterminds. You think any of them had the smarts to escape from a Level Five maximum security federal pen? I’m thinking not.”

  “Then where are they?”

  Chi Chi shrugged. “I don’t know. They dropped into a big black hole.”

  Chi Chi said LeRoy and Babbott were cellies, but Sludge was celling with some big oily Albanian drug lord they called Mick the Dick around the block, a.k.a. “The Three-Legged Man,” a crude reference to his personal equipment.

  “So, okay, Coog, LeRoy and Babbot slip away. But how did Sludge slip away without even waking Mick the Dick up? They were locked in together.”

  Coogan said he didn’t have a clue.

  “Nobody does. The other nine missing cons all disappeared at night, after lockdown. Warden’s going apeshit.”

  “Gotta be a connection.”

  “Maybe there is,” Chi Chi said, “and maybe it’s not one you or me want to find out about.”

  When Coogan asked him what the hell he meant by that, Chi Chi just shook his head. “See that fish over there? Standing by the fence?” he said. “That’s Eddie Sloat. Recognize the name? You heard about Nithonville? That cult in the mountains in Vermont about three years back? All them bodies? Shit, another Jonestown. Sloat was the leader. He walked away.”

  Sloat. Eddie Sloat. Sure, Coogan remembered. Lot of weird shit was being talked about that Nithonville business. Hundreds of bodies. The Feds were saying they swallowed poison, but lots of stories had leaked out about the condition of the corpses, how poison could not make bodies liquefy into slime. Some people were even saying that Sloat was some kind of antichrist, if you could dig that.

  Coogan eyed him up. Nothing special. Tall, greasy-looking, black shoe-button eyes scanning the yard.

  But there was something about the guy.

  Coogan was getting a very strange vibe from him. It wasn’t the usual prison thing—antagonism or disrespect or slow-simmering violence—it was something else, something that he could not put a finger on. It made him feel like there was a hole in his belly and everything was waiting to drop right out. Though it was August and warm, a sudden cold gust blew through the yard bringing gooseflesh to his arms. It made a moaning sound as it skirted the blockhouses and chapel, like a wailing dirge blown through a skull.

  Coogan kept staring.

  His image of Eddie Sloat began to blur, to shimmer like a heatwave…and he changed.

  Coogan almost fell off the bench. A feeling of stark, unreal terror rose up inside him and he forced it back down. That wasn’t Eddie Sloat, it was someone else.

  That’s Franky McGrath, that’s goddamn Franky McGrath.

  Coogan figured he’d know McGrath anywhere because he’d watched him die at Auburn Correctional in New York.

  Even now he could see McGrath’s cold grin as he jointed a body, first the arms, then the legs. That grin…like a dead carp smiling up at you…had haunted Coogan’s dreams for years.

  Hallucination.

  But Eddie Sloat looked just like Frank McGrath all of a sudden.

  Coogan could feel reality warping, shattering, and finally unraveling all around him.

  An oven-hot dry wind began to blow from Sloat/McGrath and Coogan could smell nitrous age like a brown death-fog blown from a coffin. It was the commingled stench of gangrenous wounds and flesh burnt to ash, of cesspools bubbling with vomit and dripping corpse slime. A vile stink that was unlike anything he had ever smelled before. His febrile human imagination could not define it nor encapsulate it.

  And Sloat…McGrath…whoever he was, Jesus, he seemed to crack o
pen like a yellow eggshell and something came pouring and slithering out…a bulbous undulant mass that was webby and bloated, strands and fibers of gelatinous tissue growing through him and out of him, glistening tendrils waving in the air like the tentacles of a sea anemone. The right side of his body was all snotty lacework and living mesh. The left was blown up like balloons, a heaving profusion of pale sacs like the floats of a jellyfish set with purple vein tracery. As he breathed, those sacs expanded with a rubbery sound.

  Coogan saw the thing bulge and burst open with a profusion of juicy red tentacles, each one reaching out towards him—

  Then it was gone.

  He sat there, stunned, shocked, mouth hanging open, a glazed and impossible fear in his eyes.

  “You okay, Coog?” Chi Chi said. “Look like you’re having a fucking stroke or something.”

  Coogan swallowed, kept it together. “So what’s he doing here?” he managed in a scraping dry voice.

  “Feds dropped him on three child murders, all day, life without parole,” Chi Chi said.

  Coogan looked over towards the fence.

  Sloat was standing there, not Franky McGrath. Not some B-movie slime monster.

  Fuck is going on here?

  Am I losing it?

  “Coog?” Chi Chi said, but Coogan did not answer him because it was Eddie McGrath again and he was staring right at him and it was at that moment that something took hold of him, grasping him like hands and squeezing his throat shut. He shook. His eyes rolled white. His vision blurred, ran like hot taffy, and he looked beyond this world and into a…graveyard. He saw Griss City…but with corpses sprawled out in the yard and through the blocks, mess hall, chapel, and industries buildings. The remains of cons were mutilated, stabbed with holes, piped and shanked and pickaxed, many cut in half and others nothing but pools of limbs and entrails, all of it spread about like red-stained paper dollies, an intricate mesh of decomposition melting into a communal carrion…a conga line of corpses dissolving into a red, bubbling jelly.

  And above, high above, but getting closer every moment, something like a chaotic maelstrom of spiraling matter and boiling black mist hanging over the prison and irising open like an eye…

  Coogan blinked his eyes and it was gone.

  “Coog,” Chi Chi said, taking hold of him. “You all right?”

  Coogan swallowed, shook his head. He saw Grissenville as it was again. No Franky McGrath with death-polished eyes, just Eddie Sloat standing there. “Had a…a…a…”

  “Vision?” Chi Chi said. “Thought you saw that peckerwood become something else?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not the first. Lot of people afraid of that white boy, Coog,” he said, pulling a cigarette from behind his ear and lighting it with a cupped match. “Mmm-hmm, but you’ll hear all about that. He has a funny effect on the cons: they either want to piss their pants or they want to kill the fucker.”

  Coogan didn’t say anything. For one crazy second there he thought he saw formless shadows sweeping around Sloat. But he blinked and then they were gone. Heatstroke, hallucination, dust-devil madness or something. He balled his hands into fists and steadied himself.

  “You’re gonna meet all the same types in here you knew in the Hot House,” Chi Chi told him. “Only worse. See that fat black dude over there? Yeah, that’s Buster Cray. He’s a player. Those boys with him, all local talent. Buster’s moving junk and blow inside these walls. Check it out. See how Buster’s thugs are trolling around by Sloat? Gonna be trouble. Buster wants Sloat dead.”

  “What’s the beef?”

  “Personal. That cult Sloat had? One of the corpses was Buster’s niece.”

  “Shit.”

  Chi Chi said Buster’s muscle were all strictly lifers. They had nothing to lose. They did what they were told because he had the green and they had no fear.

  Coogan watched them close in on Sloat.

  In the joint, becoming a blood enemy of somebody like Buster Cray meant you were on your way to becoming a corpse. Eddie Sloat should have been keeping a low profile, begging the guards to give him protection, throw him in the Protective Custody Unit with all the other snitches, weaklings, and baby-rapers…but he wasn’t begging for PCU. In fact, he didn’t look afraid at all.

  Just…crazy.

  Chi Chi pointed out another fearsome-looking black dude. “That’s Bug-Eye. He’s a fucking whack. He’s gonna come up behind Sloat and…nope, here come the hacks.”

  Two guards scoped it out and went over there. Buster’s muscle strolled away. Bug-Eye faded into the crowd. Sloat was staring at Buster now and Coogan could almost smell the hatred. Buster turned away, couldn’t meet the stare. He looked like a little kid that had just heard claws scratching under his bed.

  Coogan studied the gray concrete towers and blockhouses of Grissenberg Correctional, the seventy-foot red brick wall that hemmed it all in, wondering what it might be like to go over that wall. Or maybe right through the gate.

  His mind went back to Franky McGrath: the devil in the dark, the boogeyman licked with white flesh, an Aztec god of sacrifice with yellow bone-slat teeth and eyes glistening white like plump corpse-fed maggots, bright red clown hair swept up in a duckbill d-8 and worn down in spots so you could see the shining Neanderthal skull beneath. Always grinning, grinning, grinning. Fucker grins like a corpse, Sean Bolland had once said at Auburn. You notice that? Like a corpse that just woke up. Sure, that was McGrath. Always flashing his death-white pearlies, lips pulled back so you could see gray gums and narrow vampire teeth. That grin always made the cautious wonder which graveyard old Franky McGrath had looted through for his cold supper.

  Limbs are hard to get free from their sockets, Coog, so don’t dick around none, just take a saw and cut ‘em.

  Coogan found he was suddenly very short of breath, hands with iron fingers squeezing his windpipe shut.

  Sloat was over by the fence again…then it was not Sloat, it was Franky McGrath, grinning like a fetish skull in a bokor hut, eyes huge and sewer-dark like toxic oil spills. Coogan could see himself drowning in them, a mastodon sucking into tarry depths. Another gust of wind kicked up, making something in the distance clatter like a wind chime strung with white-polished infant bones. It carried a sudden memory of Black Death that he knew in his marrow.

  Then Sloat again, just Sloat.

  “Who did he show you?” Chi Chi said. “I don’t know what it is, Coog. But he can hypnotize you or something like a snake. He’s bad news, that one. Makes you see things that ain’t there. Sends dreams and shit into your head. He’s done it with me. You ask Luis about it. Luis knows things. He’ll tell you.”

  Had Chi Chi said something like that and when they were back in the Hot House, Coogan would have laughed. Chi Chi really feared no one. But Sloat had him worked up like he had a lot of them worked up now. “What’s his thing? How’s he do this?”

  Chi Chi wiped sweat from his face. “I don’t know, man. Depends who you ask. Some of these boys in here think he’s a witch or warlock or something.” Chi Chi shook his head. “I don’t bother about that bullshit. But I do know one thing. Those twelve that we lost in the night, Sloat named them all before they disappeared. Pointed at ‘em and said they were going on a trip.”

  Coogan just sat there, pulling off a cigarette, curdled white inside, knowing that this cage he found himself in was like no other he had ever known.

  4

  FCI Grissenberg was a maximum security federal penitentiary that housed the very worst of the worst: drug traffickers and contract killers, psychopaths and gangbangers, Mafia soldiers and mass murders, terrorists, racists, mental cases and hard-case predators of every conceivable stripe. It was a pit. Bare-bones Darwinism at its most degenerate: survival of not only the fittest, but the dirtiest and meanest and craziest. A dumping ground haunted by tattooed, dead-eyed monsters that were constantly patrolling the yard looking for weaklings to exploit and victims to torment.

  It sat atop a low hill, a ma
usoleum-gothic, gray-painted madhouse enclosed by high tombstone walls. Beyond those walls, there was nothing but carefully-shorn fields for half a mile in any direction (if a con escaped, there was nowhere to hide) and nothing but miles of tangle-dark forest after that. Not even a town within five miles. Within the walls, there were Prison Industry buildings, an infirmary (known as the ‘Corpse Farm’), an administrative wing, a chapel, and a rectangle formed by concrete cellblocks that looked like drab gray monoliths from the outside and stacked tiers of monkey cages from the inside. Within this rectangle was a hard-packed dirt yard that turned to mud every spring. Year around, it was patrolled by nervous-eyed hacks who suspiciously—and often fearfully—watched the old bulls and hard-timers, but particularly the gangs: the ABs (Aryan Brotherhood), Jamaican Posses, the Mexican Mafia, the D.C. Blacks, various cliques of outlaw biker gangs like the Hell’s Angels, Mongols, and Outlaws.

  This was Grissenberg.

  This was the cage.

  5

  Three more escapes. Warden Sheens couldn’t believe it. He’d worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons for twenty-seven goddamn years and had seen a total of three successful escapes in all that time and now, in the span of a week, he had five. Which brought the grand total to a dozen in the past month.

  And it all started the day Eddie Sloat showed up, Sheens thought, clenching his hands into fists. The day that puke was processed in from FCI Terra Haute.

  No, no, he wasn’t going there. Leave that crazy thinking to the shitheads in the cages; he was above all that. He had to be above all that.

  The BOP was jumping up and down on his hairy ass and he was repaying in kind by jumping ass all the way from Captain Getzel to his lieutenants to every goddamn guard on the line. He told them all the same thing: this was unacceptable, this was fucking unheard of, and this had better goddamn well get sorted out or there was going to be a lot correctional officers flipping burgers at Mickie fucking Dees.