Phoenix held his palm out to Fred, pumping it back and forth, trying to get him to shut up.
“Can you stop the rain?” Alaia asked.
Phoenix took a deep breath, turned and looked out through the office window at the Psyked mob trying to claw their way in, and shook his head. “Diversion – can you create a situation near the prison and alert the Guard forces?”
“What kind of diversion would make a difference?”
“Antioch,” Phoenix said. “There was an earlier Psyke incident there – of course we contained it. But Antioch near Haywood Lane is close enough to the prison; and if things get ugly there, it might result in troops being moved from here to there. Besides, the Psykotics in the prison are all contained, right? I mean, they aren’t going anywhere. The Guard will pull men off this place.”
“There’s no guarantee,” Alaia said. “The Feds might still firebomb you.”
“Waste of resources. Make the diversion happen right now – and I’ll see you by nightfall.”
Phoenix ended the call and picked up his rifle.
Fred looked shaken. “I can’t die in here,” he said. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”
“What, like you’re going all weak and watery on me all of a sudden?” Phoenix said. We’ve got about twenty or so people to deal with and we’ve both counted them and – I don’t know – they’re doable. One of us opens the door, the other takes the shot. How hard can that be?”
“That might be a---”
A flash of light, something orange, maybe flames, arched through the air in the darkness from across the cell block. It hit the wall of the office just below the glass and exploded, covering the window in a sheet of flame and black smoke.
Phoenix jumped back and said, “Molotov. Grab another flashlight and come on.”
Phoenix and Fred pushed the heavy, metal desk away from the door. They both slung their rifles, took a flashlight in one hand, their pistols in the other. Phoenix grabbed the door lever and pulled. Three convicts barred their way out, glowing and crackling in yellow and orange flames. Phoenix raised his pistol and fired, point blank, into the heads of the walking torches. The three men fell in quick succession. The others, standing to the left, burned in one huge conflagration.
“Over here!” The voice, a frightened one, came from somewhere across the cell block. Phoenix, startled, looked and saw the beam of a flashlight bobbing erratically behind a staircase. “On me – now! Run!”
Phoenix nudged Fred forward towards the light. He looked down the cell block with searching eyes, casting the beam of his flashlight far and wide. Quick glances revealed no movement except for the mass of bodies dancing wildly near the office window, engulfed in flames – marionettes dipped in gasoline and set on fire. He looked to the right – nothing.
“Hurry!” the man said.
Fred and Phoenix slid to a stop.
“Jason Auerbach,” he said. “I know Fred – and you must be the guy from the end of the cell block. I heard somebody shooting.” He looked at their weapons. “Where’d you guys get those?”
“No time for chit chat,” Phoenix said. “This whole place is about to become toast.”
Fred and Jason exchanged short, fearful glances filled with questions.
Phoenix caught it. “Sewer lines,” he said. “This place must have one that connects to the city lines.”
“No way to get to it, though,” Jason said. “It’s buried in concrete – you’d need a jackhammer.”
“Wire cutters?” Phoenix asked.
“In the tool shop, maybe.”
“What do have in mind?” Fred asked.
“I’ve got someone outside creating a diversion,” Phoenix said. “Can we release the prisoners into the front secured area of the prison? You know, in the grassy area behind the entry checkpoint?”
“It’s doable,” Fred said. “Why not?”
“If the soldiers guarding this place see them, maybe they’ll concentrate all their people there,” Phoenix said. “Then we go out through the back.”
“Or drive through it,” Jason said. “The warden’s Hummer is parked in the garage attached to the shop. He got his oil changed this morning.”
Phoenix was about to speak when he turned and told everyone to shut up in a soft, whispered voice. A subdued shuffling gait was audible behind them, and Phoenix gently pushed Jason away from the door while he clicked off his flashlight. Fred followed his lead. The squeak of yet another pair of Ked’s, sliding on the concrete, seemed to get louder, but then died down, slowly, and then it vanished altogether.
“The shop is back that way,” Jason said, pointing back through the doorway into the dark hall.
“Don’t talk,” Phoenix said, flipping his flashlight back on. “Just take us there. I would assume the keys are in the ignition.”
Jason shrugged.
“You don’t know?” Fred said, suddenly panicked. “Why wouldn’t you know?”
“I just don’t,” Jason said. “You don’t know, right? I don’t work in the shop either.”
“What do you do?” Fred asked.
“I do know---” Jason said hesitantly, “that there are a bunch of prisoners, or what used to be prisoners, standing between us and that garage.”
“Lots?” Fred asked.
Jason nodded.
“And you were coming this way because you thought this was the better way out?” Phoenix asked.
Almost before Phoenix could finish speaking, there came the whimper of a prisoner and the crunch of paper, and all three men turned and looked back across the cell block.
“They’re still alive?” Fred asked with tense surprise.
The charred prisoners turned to face them, captivated by the beams from the flashlights, and then they began moving towards them as if no fire had touched them. Their clothes were gone, consumed. All that remained was grisly, blackened flesh, streaked with red cracks that opened and closed as they walked. Blood ran like streams down onto the floor. The prisoners mopped it along with them beneath their already wet feet, and Phoenix could hear the sound of slush, like dying fish flopping around in shallow bucket.
“Now what do we do?” Fred cried, and then turning to Phoenix, said, “Get us out of here!”
Phoenix’s phone rang in his pocket, frighteningly, and as Fred started to panic, Phoenix reached out and grabbed his arm. “We’ve got a few seconds – just be ready.” He answered the call and said into the phone, “Make it fast.”
“No, you need to make it fast,” Mr. Krystal said. “The Hummer idea sounds interesting. And it just so happens that the Guards have only a token force covering the prison. But the jets are in route. Detective Jenkins came through – but you’ve got to hurry. You’ve got fifteen minutes.”
Phoenix nodded his head decisively at Fred and grinned, and Fred’s panic seemed to vanish as quickly as it had come.
The talk of the last few minutes had been picked up by Mr. Krystal – it was obvious Fred knew who had called – and he seemed to think that Mr. Krystal would not fail them. Phoenix couldn’t guess what Jason was thinking, but he doubted if Jason needed to know any of the specifics other than that the Hummer plan was as good a plan as any. To many people, such a predicament as this may have seemed hopeless; and Jason bordered on hopeless. Phoenix, however, was going to live – with or without his two tagalongs.
The subject of the Hummer was not brought up again. Fred and Jason, with twenty or so charred, walking corpses coming at them, slid into the doorway as if the long halls and corridors awaiting them offered safety. Phoenix brought up the rear, walking backwards with his flashlight aimed at the seething mass of non-humanity and his Glock raised. He slipped past the door and pulled it tight, listening for the latch to click.
Jason took his time looking into open doorways and halls as he made his way to the garage. Phoenix could see he was afraid, as was Fred, and so he asked Jason to pick up the pace.
“You don’t know what’s in here, Phoenix,” Jason s
aid defensively. “But I do. We don’t – I repeat – don’t want to run into any prisoners. If you think that group back there was bad, just you wait.”
“That’s just it,” Phoenix said. “We’re not going to wait. Move it.”
The three men, with Phoenix prodding them, hurried forward. Phoenix and Fred, with several feet of LED-lit tiled floor between them, walked quickly. Fred kept his light towards the left, Phoenix took the right. They both followed Jason through a labyrinth of darkened halls, taking short cuts where needed through open doors that lead through connecting offices. In the deep gloom, they came to another door. Jason stopped, turned, and held his finger to his lips.
Phoenix handed Jason his pistol and unslung his AK-47, rubbing his hand on the smooth, laminate grips. He saw the turbulence in Jason’s eyes, the should-I-or-shouldn’t-I-open-the-door battle going on between his ears, so he asked him some sedate questions.
“I don’t know you very well, or Fred for that matter,” Phoenix said suddenly. “But you know how to fire a weapon, right?”
“Sure,” Jason said.
“And you know you have an advantage over these convicts, right?”
“It’s not the convicts I’m worried about,” Jason said matter-of-factly. “It’s the number of bullets we have. And we don’t have enough.”
“I suppose you know how many guys are waiting for us behind this door, then?”
“Oh, yes.” Jason looked at Phoenix and Fred with doubt in his eyes. “Ten, maybe twenty guys when I first came through - but there were twice that many coming in through another door just as I was leaving.”
Jason was afraid; but he had his hand on the door lever. Phoenix waited for him to make the move, to pull the door open and continue on, but he seemed to freeze.
“I suppose you know that we’ll be dead in fifteen minutes – actually, twelve minutes,” Phoenix said. We can dodge Psykotics, but we’re not going to be able to dodge bombs. You get that, right?”
“You seem to think we’re about to be bombed,” Jason said in a reasoning tone of voice.
Fred nodded his head.
“But I’m not so sure. I happen to know for a fact that everybody in his prison was given something to make them this way. It’s all for science is what I heard. They’re not going to destroy these … these …. test subjects.”
Phoenix gently pushed Jason aside. “Through this door – you’re saying this is the way we have to go and that it’s full of Psykotics?”
“Yes. It’s the only way. Through this door, or through another one around the corner, and then through the door by the Coke and snack machines. At the end of the hall – all the way down – there’s a set of gray, metal, double doors. I have the keys to get through the checkpoint midway down. But those gray doors lead to the shop area. Once you get there, the garage is through another door on the left.”
Phoenix grabbed the lever on the door. He flashed a knowing look at Fred, and Fred readied his shotgun. He slowly cracked the door, as quietly as he could, and pulled it towards him. He had just enough room for a peek.
Jason was right. The room was full of convicts, probably well over the legal official capacity allowed by law for a room that size; and all of those Psyked-out convicts wandered and staggered around the room like welfare recipients at a job fair. Across the room stood the Coke machines. To the left of them he could see the next door, the one leading to the hall, the checkpoint, and the garage. Jason was right when he hesitated before pulling open the door. He knew what this room looked like. The room, with long, aluminum tables and chairs set up on one side, probably a classroom for guards, looked like it had a seating capacity of thirty. Right now, it looked as if three times that number now occupied it. The other door Jason had talked about was half way down the wall to the left.
Phoenix’s phone rang. He pushed the door back and grabbed his phone, angry about having to deal with yet another digital delay. “What now?”
“Inbound choppers heading your way,” Mr. Krystal said. “You’ve got six minutes before they make the run.”
Phoenix slipped the phone into his pocket. He asked Jason for the pistol he had given him, and the keys to the checkpoint. Jason did as he was asked. With his hand on the door lever, Phoenix quickly looked over Jason’s shoulder. The instant Jason turned to look, taking his attention off the real matter at hand, Phoenix grabbed him by the front of the shirt, swung the door open, and threw Jason into the room. He closed the door and locked it.
The room full of convicts turned from quiet to metallic as chairs and tables toppled, and Jason screamed.
Phoenix and Fred ran back in the direction they came, turned right and turned right again into another hall. The sound of the convicts and the racket of falling furniture, together with the screaming voice of Jason, blended together in a macabre and musical way. They came to another door, the door entering the room from the side, and Phoenix stopped and listened. The cry of Jason came from over on the far right, near the door he’d just been thrown through.
“The door’s clear,” Phoenix said, and he slowly opened it.
When Phoenix and Fred entered the room, the grisly site of Jason being torn apart held them in shocked stillness. When some of the infected in the mob saw them, they turned; and most of them seemed to lose interest in their most recent victim. The two men turned and ran, and more than a few convicts came after them.
“Next door,” Phoenix said, and he hurried towards the Coke machines. The door opened easily away from him, and he led Fred out into the hall and closed the door behind him.
“What if the keys aren’t in the Hummer?”
“They are,” Phoenix shouted.
They reached the checkpoint, a yellow-painted wire cage of sorts, with an industrial prison lock, barred their way forward. They unlocked it on the first try. The next obstacle, the metal double doors, awaited them. Phoenix prayed for them to be unlocked as he ran; but he also wondered how effective such a prayer would be, knowing he’d just willfully killed a man. But Jason had deserved it, hadn’t he? If Jason knew the convicts had been set up as guinea pigs, he was a murderer. Maybe he’d been the one who made sure the blue juice got administered.
The double doors were locked. Phoenix and Fred looked at each other for a second, then Phoenix tried one key after the other in quick succession, getting the doors unlocked somewhere after the fourth or fifth try.
The Hummer, a black, discontinued beast from a bygone era, was sitting just where Jason had said it would be – in an automotive bay next to the repair shop. Phoenix jumped into the passenger seat, Fred took the driver’s seat.
“We’ve got keys,” Fred yelled.
“Do it!” Phoenix said.
The dull, throaty staccato of military helicopters, deep and ominous, and a rumble of jets, could he heard in the distance. The cavalry was less than a minute or two out.
“Do you hear---?”
“I heard it!” Insisted Phoenix. “Get us out of here! Now!”
“Who’s going to open the garage door?”
“This is a Hummer! It opens doors all by itself!”
Fred started the engine, dropped the gear shift into drive, and hit the gas. The Hummer sat in place for a millisecond as its wheels spun in place, screeching and smoking on the slick surface of the concrete. Fred released the gas pedal a bit, and the vehicle lunged forward like a race horse out of a chute.
Phoenix reached for the seatbelt, but not before the beast slammed into the metal, rollup door, tearing the door into sections as it peeled away from the rails. The Hummer flew over the small, ramped-up approach to the garage and hit the gravel, bouncing from front to back.
Fred stayed on the gravel drive, holding the wheel steady while keeping the Hummer’s gas pedal smashed up against the floor. The vehicle hit several potholes, jarring and shaking them like rag dolls in a dog’s mouth. The vehicle sped towards a double, chain link fence, which lay a hundred yards distant.
“I don’t see any troops!” F
red shouted with a sense of glee.
“That’s because they’re about to---!”
An explosion, ear-splitting and teeth-rattling, slammed into the prison behind them, engulfing their vehicle in a cloud of flame, smoke, and flying debris. The back windshield shattered into a million, interlaced, tiny shards, blowing inward towards Phoenix and Fred, hitting the backs of the seats and flying past them only to bounce off the front windshield and hit their faces.
With his face bloodied but his eyes unhurt, Fred plowed through the fences, skimmed across a small creek, and climbed the vehicle up a hill into a small wooded area. He didn’t slow down until he came back to the prison’s main service road.
“I’m going to get my family and get them out of Nashville,” Fred said. “Where do you want me to drop you off?”
Phoenix didn’t answer. Instead, he looked back, knowing what awaited his wide opened eyes. The prison had vanished in a cloud of fire and smoke, in a cloud so black and a fire so hot, that it would be hours before Nashville would be able to see its first man-made crater.
Chapter 19
Phoenix stepped out of the Hummer half way between the prison and NPD, somewhere between Haywood Lane and Harding Place, near an exit ramp miraculously devoid of panhandlers and hookers, and he turned back towards the prison. A cloud of smoke, hard and thick, rose up behind him. It flattened out in the sky above, levelled, sheared it seemed, by winds coming out of the south.
A convoy of National Guard troops were rumbling off the west ramp onto I-24, heading towards downtown Nashville; and in his determination to not be seen, Phoenix vanished into the tall, wild growth between a guard rail and a sharp precipice. He assumed, and rightfully so, that the weapon on his shoulder would land him into custody yet again, so he removed it and set it in the brush. His Glock he removed from his belt and stowed in his pack.
Phoenix jogged along the interstate, keeping close to the limestone bluffs and as far away from the road as was possible. He reached Harding Place forty-five minutes later. Twenty more minutes and he reached NPD. The parking lot in the rear was empty of vehicles except for a few unmarked cars. Alaia’s car was parked in its usual place – though, given the circumstances, nobody would have ticketed her had she chosen the handicap space nearest the door.
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