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  It wasn’t until another door clanged open and he was led into the prison building itself that Noah saw his fellow inmates. Suddenly the jail didn’t seem such a bad idea. These were folks such as he’d met on the trail, only more so – rougher, angrier, hairier, more scarred. As he passed from a tiled corridor into a two story hallway lined with barred cells, a great noise of howling and whooping rose around them. Hands stretched out between the bars, clawing at the empty air. Savage looking men and women, all heavily tattooed, some with sharpened teeth or nails cut down to points. There was none of the neatness or cleanliness so prevalent in the town, but wild flowing hair, mohawks and dreadlocks, beards in a dozen different styles, and most of them dressed in little more than loincloths or a few scraps of fur.

  “See what happens when you come for us?” Poulson paused in the middle of the hall and gestured towards Noah. “We get you all in the end.”

  Noah tried to protest, but his words were drowned out by the clamor of voices, all yelling at Poulson and the guards. Heavy hands dragged Noah down the last few yards of the hall and flung him into an empty cell. One more clang – the day’s signature sound – and he was behind bars, just like his neighbor Mrs. Tallowitz had always predicted.

  He doubted she would have pictured it happening like this.

  The cell held only two pieces of furniture – a lidless toilet and a bed with a stained, threadbare mattress. But threadbare was still better than the no mattress Noah usually had. He sat down on it, leaning back against the wall, able to feel the wire mesh of the bed frame through the feeble padding.

  The cell was maybe seven feet each way, enough space for a tall man to lie down but not much spare. Every inch of it gray except for a cross painted on the back wall – it looked like these folks liked to keep people holy but didn’t trust them with the sort of crucifix you could take down and maybe stab someone with. Noah hadn’t been stuck with walls so close around him for a good long time. It wasn’t long before he could see them filling the edges of his vision, feel them closing in around him. His chest tightened like the jail was squeezing him in a vice grip.

  He took a deep breath, focused on the open hallway beyond the bars, tried to keep his shit together.

  “We’ve been through worse,” he said, trying to convince himself. “Ain’t that right buddy?”

  He patted the empty holster where Bourne should have been, an absence that felt like a missing limb.

  He reached up for his top left pocket, looking to steady his nerves with a smoke, but his cigarettes were gone. So was his lighter, his penknife, and as he frantically patted around his pockets he soon found everything else was too.

  Sorrow turned to anger, then back to a terrible tension as he tilted his head and saw the walls closing in against him.

  “Goddammit.” His hand drifted back down to the empty holster. “I really am alone.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  BEAUTY AND A BEATING

  DAWN WAS CREEPING through the bars of the cell when they came back for Noah, waking him from the little sleep he’d gotten despite the occasional howl from one of his fellow captives. Several of them seemed to suffer from nightmares, and he reckoned he would too if they kept him here long with the tightening walls and the yelling in the night. Someone had clearly been in pain, screaming every hour or so, and Noah was willing to bet the townsfolk didn’t waste medicine on prisoners.

  They provided food at least. There’d been some sort of slop before lights out, dished in plastic bowls so old and scratched they were probably no more hygienic than the poorly cleaned toilet in the corner of the cell. His stomach had been growling by then and he wolfed the lot down, only stopping at the end of licking the bowl to wonder if they’d put anything harmful in it. But why take him alive if that was their plan?

  The bowl still sat by the bars of his cell when two soldiers marched in through the cold gray light and the silence that had finally fallen somewhere in the deep of night. Noah was waking up – the dawn would do that for you if you lived in the wild – and when they stopped by his cell he propped himself up on an elbow, watching them as casually as he could.

  “Mornin’ ladies.” He rubbed his sleep crusted eyes, gave an exaggerated yawn. “I believe I ordered breakfast with my wake-up call?”

  If these two thought he was funny, they didn’t show it. It made Noah miss the Russian fellow from the day before. At least he knew how to laugh.

  A heavy key turned in the lock and the cell swung open.

  “Come with us,” one of them said. “Sergeant Burns wants to see you.”

  “You didn’t say the magic word,” Noah said, sitting up and stretching his arms.

  The guard reached him in two swift strides, slammed a metal club into his side.

  Noah crumpled over as pain blazed through him.

  “That magic enough for you?” she said.

  He eased himself to his feet, wincing as he moved. Had that click been a rib cracking?

  “After you,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Oh no, wise-ass. After you.”

  The room they took him to looked like it had a long history of interrogations. Shattered remnants around the edges of the hole showed where observers had once watched conversations through one-way glass, and the animosity unleashed against that window had clearly extended to a hatred of the space itself. The table bolted down in the center of the room was charred and a little warped in one leg. It took a certain retarded determination to try to set fire to a metal table, and Noah almost admired whichever prisoner had tried it.

  Then there was the mural on the wall, a stylishly rendered lightning bolt crossing over an ankh. He’d have admired it a lot more if it didn’t seem like another part of this place’s craze for religion.

  No-one cuffed him or clapped him in irons. He was kind of disappointed to find that they didn’t even consider him worth tying up, though relief outweighed that by a fair amount. Where there were free hands there was hope, as his Grandpa had never said.

  They pressed him into a plastic chair and left him alone, taking long enough when closing the door that he could see the guards lurking outside, all with metal beating sticks at their sides, one with a musket.

  “This is what I expected to wake up in,” he said to the world in general. “Dim light through a barred window, distant dripping noises, maybe a rat or two just out of sight.”

  “You expected to wake up?” A woman’s voice emerged from the room beyond the broken mirror. Noah squinted to make out her shape in the shadows, an indistinct patch amid a larger darkness.

  “I don’t have high standards,” he said, “but that’s one of them, sure.”

  “I wouldn’t be getting any expectations if I were you.” She moved suddenly forward, vaulted through the broken window and landed surely on her feet. But even though the sudden movement made Noah jump, it sure wasn’t the most striking thing about her.

  Whoever else this Sergeant Burns was, she was the most beautiful woman Noah had seen in the best part of a decade. Her eyes were the green of a forest on a fine spring morning, and Noah knew he was in trouble when he started thinking poetically. But how could he help it? She had wavy auburn hair tied back to reveal tattoos that ran from her neck across her shoulders and down her arms. Her tank top could have been chosen to show off her figure, but more likely was meant to show off her ink, which appeared again from beneath cut-off shorts and ran down her legs. The woman would have been a work of art in her own right, but with intricate swirls and pinpoint pictures adorning her skin she became art laid upon art, a moment of breath-taking wonder in this place of pain and confinement.

  Her club crashed down on the table, denting the top. Noah jumped again.

  “Got enough of an eyeful?” she growled. “Or should I take off my shirt and show you the rest?”

  “If you’re offering…” Even knowing what would follow, Noah couldn’t resist.

  Sure enough, the club slammed into his shoulder, almost knocking him fro
m his seat. He clutched his shoulder, the movement only adding to his pain. Why did folks do that, he wondered. Did they think their hands would somehow gain magical healing powers, make it all better at the touch of flesh? He sure as hell wasn’t feeling any magic.

  Burns prowled around the edge of the room, circling in and out of his vision.

  “What were you doing at the school?” she asked, stopping to lean across the table towards him. “What information were you after?”

  “No information,” Noah replied. “Just supplies. I was hoping to find food.”

  “In a library?” Burns snorted. “Yeah right.”

  She started prowling again, slapping the club against the palm of her hand, a steady drum beat of menace.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked. “Go through the old sewers maybe? Because I’ll tell you now, we scooped up the municipal plans years ago. You and the rest of the savages won’t get anywhere that way.”

  “No plan,” Noah replied. “No savages. I’m just a drifter looking for supplies. Check my pack. Would a savage be carrying a book, or a set of snares, or, umm–”

  “Or this?” She reached round into a holster at the back of her belt and pulled out Bourne.

  Relief swept through Noah like a good-natured flood. Bourne wasn’t lost. He still had something to cling onto in the wilds.

  Well, he might if they somehow agreed to give the gun back.

  And if they agreed to let him go.

  Damn, there were a lot of ifs today. So much for his rising spirits.

  “So you’re just some innocent drifter.” Burns turned Bourne as if inspecting the barrel for clues. “Some innocent drifter who goes sneaking around towns, and who pulls a gun at the first sight of the Apollonian Guard.”

  “It ain’t a good idea to roam the wilds unarmed,” Noah said. “There’s a lot of bad people out there.”

  “There certainly are.” Burns glared pointedly at him.

  “I’m not bad people,” Noah said. “Whoever you think I am, I ain’t. I don’t know no plans or no maps, or no Dionites, whatever the hell one of them is.”

  “I didn’t say anything about Dionites.” Molly stuck Bourne back through her belt. She looked triumphant.

  “Your friends, they said it.” Noah straightened in his seat. He had to focus, had to be real clear so he didn’t dig himself no further into trouble. But her leaning forward like she kept doing wasn’t helping matters none. “That Poulson fellow, he called me Dionite, or Diorite, or Dynamite, or some such shit.”

  “Oh, so now you’re pretending like you don’t even know what I’m talking about?”

  “I don’t! I swear to God or Bourne there, or those mighty fine tattoos, I swear I don’t–”

  She lashed out with the club again. He tried to jerk back, was too slow, wound up sprawling on the floor, the back of his head pounding where it hit the concrete, cheek hot and sticky with his own blood.

  She stood over him, the club pressed against his throat.

  “I can do all kinds of things to you here,” she said. “Not just beatings, though I’m more than happy to lay that down all over your sorry, savage ass. We have pliers back there in the other room. Knives too. And I’ve got quite an imagination when I get riled. You’d be amazed the places I’ve found to cut at, to squeeze, to rip. I’ve got a little blowtorch, one of those old gas ones. Of course, getting gas is hard these days, but it’s worth spending it when I think we’re in danger. When I think some Dionite’s tongue needs loosening.”

  She reached around behind her back again, pulled a pair of wires from her belt. There were clamps on the ends.

  “See these?” She dangled the clamps down in Noah’s face. “Electric cables, like people used to use to jump start cars. Of course, I was too young to ever do that. The only use I get from them is clamping them onto some asshole who thinks he’s too big and too clever to talk. Then I get the battery we keep for these special occasions, and I attach it to the other ends of these wires. And then that savage asshole, he gets to see how electricity works for the first time in twenty years.

  “So, what have you got to say to me and my cables?”

  “You’re rusty,” Noah replied.

  “What?”

  “I’m talking to your cables, like you asked. And the clamps, they’re all rusted up. No way you’ve ever latched them onto anyone. I’m starting to wonder if maybe you’ve got a gentler touch than you’re making out.”

  He’d expected her to get angry, to shout at him some more. But instead she seemed to seize up into a terrible rigid silence, her face frozen but something glittering like a razor blade deep in her eyes.

  Then the club came down again and again and again, battering him as he curled up around himself, arms defending his head and chest. The blows came so thick and fast that the world merged into a haze of pain, and when he finally emerged she was leaning back against the desk, panting, looking just as stunned as he felt.

  “I…” She said. “I’m…”

  Her expression hardened again.

  “We don’t need electric leads to make your life tough,” she said. “You think you’re so smart, but I don’t even need to lift a finger to make you squirm. And don’t think I won’t, when Apollo’s safety’s at stake.

  “Vostok!”

  The door opened and the Russian-sounding fellow stepped inside. He gave an exaggerated wince as he looked at Noah, brow furrowing beneath his shock of blond hair.

  “Sergeant Burns?” he asked.

  “Take this wretch back to the cells,” she said. “But I hear that they’re getting crowded now, so we’ll have to throw him in with someone else. Make him bunkmates with Blood Dog, let him make some new friends.”

  “But we’ve still got–”

  “No,” Burns said. “In with Blood Dog. Am I clear?”

  Vostok hung his head, walked over and dragged Noah to his feet.

  “Come on, my friend,” he said. “Let's get you settled.”

  As they left the room Noah took one last look back. Though his vision was blurred by the swelling bruise around one eye, he got a last good look at Burns leaning over the desk, ponytail hanging down past her face, her whole body sagging as she took long, deep breaths. Hot as she was, brutal as she was, he felt a strange stab of pity for the stunned looking young woman.

  Hearing the howls coming from the cells, Noah doubted that feeling of pity would last.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MAKING FRIENDS

  THE CELLS WERE almost silent, the prisoners taken out for who knew what reason. Noah figured they weren’t all getting the kind of treatment he’d had from Sergeant Burns – that would run the guards ragged, even the ones who got a kick out of beating on folks.

  He didn’t think Burns was that kind. Or maybe he just hoped she wasn’t. Shame to have an ugly soul behind such a pretty face.

  His new cell was in the corner of the same block as the one he’d spent the night in, but on the second floor, opening onto a walkway that ran around the perimeter of the hall. Looking out through the barred door, a row of cells lay ahead and to his right, the echoing space of the prison to his left. Like his previous cell, it had concrete walls and a filthy john in one corner, but unlike that cell it had a pair of bunks instead of one bed.

  The cell fell like dread across Noah’s mind. Any other time his heart would have been racing, but it was only just slowing down after the fight-or-flight-or-lie-here-getting-beaten moment with Sergeant Burns. It wasn’t that the cell seemed better by comparison, it was just that he had no reserves left to panic with.

  Burns had no way of knowing how he felt about enclosed spaces, but if she had she could hardly have planned this better. The corner cell let in even less light than his previous abode, and with only part of one wall not consumed with flat concrete there wasn’t much sign of space or open air. Even if he pressed his face against the bars, he’d still have a wall looming at him from the right, albeit one lined with cells instead of that crushingly flat g
ray.

  Though no-one was around the upper bunk clearly belonged to someone – the sheets were dishevelled and there was a tally of scratches on the wall above, like someone had learned about prisons in an old movie and wanted to make sure he was living the authentic 1940s experience. You couldn’t tell much about a fellow from his stained bed sheets and a bunch of scratches, but they didn’t make Blood Dog seem any more appealing than his name already had.

  Noah shifted an old magazine and lay back gratefully on the bottom bunk. He’d tried not to show it as Vostok led him back to the cell, but his head was spinning a little from the beating, and every inch of his body contributed to a single massive ache. He wanted to work out what was going on with this place, to piece together a plan to convince them he wasn’t one of these Dionites so they would let him out. But he was too damn tired and in too much pain to deal with any of it.

  He closed his eyes, shutting out the closeness of the bunk above him, the walls looming in from every direction, the terrible itch of panic being swallowed by exhaustion in the back of his brain, and let his mind wander off into sleep.

  When he woke, it was getting dark again. He’d have to be careful not to let this turn into a habit. Night was for sleeping, in prison or anywhere else, and the last thing his exhausted body needed was a screwed up sleep pattern.

  There was noise in the prison hall now, the clatter of footsteps and chatter of voices as dozens of men were returned to their cells. He could hear the rattling of keys in locks and the repeated jangle of chains, but none of the wild howling that had greeted him on his arrival. Maybe that had been a show for the guards, or a way to intimidate the new prisoner, or just a strange mood that seized these folks at night. Maybe it would be back as soon as he tried to sleep. Whatever it had been, it wasn’t part of this routine.