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  Chapter 30 Through the mob, James Cook could see the front gate.

  But it was too far away, even if Luff hadn't positioned men at the gate itself. In the two seconds it took him to make that calculation, he could see that four more prisoners had been shot down trying to rush the gate. James spun around, looking for an alternative. His foot struck something. Glancing down, he saw that he'd accidentally kicked a man in the head. Well, no. He'd kicked a head. The body it had once been attached to was nowhere in sight. The head must have belonged to one of the men Luff had had decapitated a short while ago. The heads had fallen into a barrel positioned below the execution platform. In the chaos that erupted after the Boom blew his stack, somebody must have upended the basket. The heads had spilled out, and they'd been kicked all over the yard ever since by hundreds of frantically milling men. "What do we do?" asked John Boyne. He and the rest of the men in Boomer's gang who were still alive, clustered around James. Boomer wasn't one of them. His body lay in front of the executioner's platform. Shot to pieces by Luff's goons. James felt a moment's sharp pang. But there was no time to grieve now. The only reason he and his group were still alive was because Boomer's charge at the execution stand and the firing squad response had triggered a mass rebellion by over fifteen hundred prisoners gathered in the yard. The fact that Luff's men were the only ones with guns gave them the edge, but it still wasn't easy. Some of the cons were crazy and plenty more who weren't had been driven crazy over the last few days. They might not have guns, but they were old hands at makeshift weapons and some of them weren't afraid to die. So, for the time being, Luff and his goons were preoccupied with staying alive. But it wouldn't be long before the tide turned. Then it would just be a slaughter-and James didn't have any doubt that Boomer's people would be at the top of the list.

  Hearing shouts, he glanced over. Luff's men must have finally driven off the first frenzied assault. Now, they were concentrating their fire on the center of the crowd. There were already at least a hundred dead or dying between X-row and the front gate. He couldn't really estimate how many men had been killed trying to rush the gate itself.

  Their bodies were piled up too high. At least two dozen. When the riot started he'd been surprised, but he hadn't been unprepared. Some things you could predict, even if you couldn't predict when they'd happen. Having the freedom to work together over the past few days, even if the work itself had been grisly, Boomer's boys had been able to do a lot. All of them had shanks now-good ones, usually made of sharpened pieces of steel. Better still, they'd been able to bribe a few key-holders and James now had copies of a number of the prison's keys. James checked to see if the men were still with him. Those still alive, were, and that was almost all of them. As far as he knew, besides the Boom himself, only three of their guys had been killed so far. He was their anchor now. Somehow, in the days during which he'd organized the death detail, he'd emerged as the gang's second-in-command. Boyne probably would have contested that, eventually, but he wouldn't any longer. His instincts and attitudes were those of a subordinate. Now that Boomer was dead, he had no inclination to be the leader-as long as he could stay the lieutenant.

  In four short words he'd just made that clear. "What do we do?" No reason he couldn't stay the lieutenant, so far as James was concerned.

  Boyne was a solid man. The question itself remained. What do we do?

  And he only had seconds to decide. This was rapidly turning from a rebellion into a massacre. Most of the prisoners now were just trying to get away from the killing ground at the center of the yard. That provided at least part of the answer. If they were moving with the crowd, Luff and his men wouldn't be able to spot them. If they were even trying to, which James doubted. Boomer's eruption and the riot that followed had obviously caught Luff by surprise too. Which way, though? A slight thinning of the crowd gave him the answer. He thought they could make it into the admin building. Luff and his usual bodyguards wouldn't be in there. They'd been on the execution platform. It doubled as a speaker's podium. Luff always gave a little speech after each morning's killings. He led the way, ready to knock aside any con who impeded them. But he didn't have to. Before he'd taken more than a few steps, he heard Boyne say: "Get in front of him and clear a path, Dino! You're the biggest." A moment later, Dino Morelli strode past James and did as he'd been told. Morelli was built like a basketball player, not a football player. But even a slender man who stands six feet, seven inches tall packs a lot of weight.

  Especially if he pumped iron, which Morelli did religiously. And just his height was intimidating by itself. So they got there more quickly than James would have believed possible, and easily enough that he had time for a wry thought along the way. Leave it to Boomer. Morelli's insistence that he was really a Puerto Rican with an Argentine great-grandfather, not a goddam Eye-talian which wasn't much different from a white man, was as transparent as you could ask for. Privately, the Boom made jokes about himself. But James knew that when Morelli had approached him, a few days back, asking for a place in the gang, Boomer hadn't blinked an eye. James would miss Boomer, he surely would. He'd been a giant in more ways than one. Once they were through the door and into the admin building, the cool calm of the dark empty rooms seemed to hit the men like a hammer blow. Most of them sank to their knees gasping for air. James leaned against the wall, his heart pounding in his chest. They needed to rest, but he knew they couldn't.

  It wouldn't be long before Luff's killers started searching this building along with all the others. He moved a few feet to peek out of one of the windows that opened to the outside and overlooked the front gate. But there was still no solution there. The area between the prison and the woods was a kill zone. The small group of men Luff had positioned at the gate must have finally been overwhelmed, because there were prisoners pouring through. But other goons on the walls were firing at them. Some of them would make it to the woods, sure, but most of them wouldn't. Bodies lay everywhere. "Where to, boss?"

  James turned away from the window and studied his new lieutenant for a moment. John Boyne was a middle-aged man who was very thick-bodied and strong-looking but was so short the top of his head barely reached Cook's chin. Despite the man's name, he looked Hispanic rather than Anglo. James had never asked about his ancestry and the Boom had never told him anything. Not that he cared. James didn't share the Boomer's animosity toward white people, as such. As far as he was concerned, Boyne could be every bit as Irish as his name sounded. He was dependable and solid as a rock. Where to, boss? James thought fast.

  After his transfer to the clinic he had spent a lot of hours in this building. This is where he'd come for cleaning supplies. He knew it very well-and he could only hope that one of the keys he'd paid bribes for would open the critical door. He pointed down the hall. "Move everyone that way. We'll see if we can get into the basement. Almost nobody ever goes there. I think we can hide until things settle down.

  Then we'll try our break after the sun goes down." No one needed coaxing. They were on their feet and moving as soon as James finished speaking. The guns were still going off in the exercise yard and men were still shouting and screaming as they got butchered. The one critical piece of luck they needed came through. The fifth key James tried unlocked the maintenance door leading down to the basement. He almost thought it wouldn't, since the lock was stiff from lack of use.

  But a little jiggling had done the trick. The basement was cool, dark and damp, and smelled of mold and rats. James hated rats. He'd grown up in a roach- and rat-infested housing project. It had been hell, but it was better than a reservation. At least that's what he'd been told.

  He didn't know for sure. He had never set foot on a reservation. A con-he didn't see which one-opened the drain valve on a water tank and another one was passing out water in a curved piece of scrap metal someone found. James gulped the liquid and then handed back the makeshift cup so someone else could get a drink. The water tasted of iron and rust, but it was water. It was the first drink they'd
taken since early this morning. The tank looked plenty big, too. They'd need to take water with them when they make their break into the woods.

  "Look around and see if you can find anything that'll hold water," he told Boyne. "Anything one man can carry by himself will do." While Boyne set about that task, James pondered the problem of food. They had nothing with them, and there was no chance at all of finding food in the basement. Whatever scraps a maintenance man might have left down here would be long gone by now, eaten by rats. There'd be food upstairs in one of the rooms in the admin building. There was a refrigerator in a small lunch room on the second floor, and even if the refrigerator didn't work something would be up there. Luff and his top goons had used the building as their own headquarters, after they took over. Luff was not a man to go without his lunch handy. But he didn't dare send anyone to look. The search could start any minute. It was better to go hungry than run the risk of being spotted. James was fairly certain none of the goons would do more than rattle the door leading down to the basement to make sure it was locked-and he'd been careful to lock it behind them. The goons wouldn't have a key to open it anyway. Luff would, of course. But James was even more certain that none of his underlings would risk triggering off his temper right now by pestering him for a key, just to open a locked door that no fleeing con could have gotten through anyway. Not an underling low enough on the totem pole to be sent searching a building, anyway. Luff wasn't hot-tempered in the usual sense of the term, but the man could go quietly crazy when one of his plans didn't work. And this one hadn't worked, big time. James leaned against the wall, finally allowing a bit of his grief to wash through him. He knew perfectly well what Luff had been doing. So did the Boomer, because they'd talked about it. The killings had started the day after the uprising. Just ten men, that first day. All of them complete crazies that nobody would miss. That was the same day the execution stand had gone up. Luff had given a little speech, as he would do every day thereafter. The only difference was that in the days that followed he'd give the speeches after the killings. The charges Luff had leveled against the ten condemned men were completely ludicrous. None of them were competent enough to do what they were accused of, even if they'd wanted to.

  Three of them had been in the psych ward, practically catatonic. One of them had been hauled to the noose in a straight-jacket. The next day he'd hung fifteen, also crazies. The charges had been every bit ludicrous, but they'd gotten vaguer. "Plotting with the guards" had become "treason against the people." The third day there'd been twenty-five men hung. And, for the first time, some of them hadn't been waterheads. Just… old. The fourth day there'd been thirty.

  Half of them… just old. And by then the standard charge had become "uncooperative with the new order." Which was about as good as it got, in the could-mean-anything department. By then, too, the timber-cutting details were well underway. And it hadn't taken more than two days for every con in the prison to figure out that being chosen for the details was tantamount to a death sentence. The men hung weren't the only dead bodies that James and his people had had to dispose of. He grinned a little, thinking about that. There was even a trace of humor in the grin. The ovens had been Boomer's idea. "Tell 'em you need ovens to burn the bodies, boy." "Why ovens? Be easier to just burn them on piles of wood." "You not thinkin' straight. Wood be wood. Ovens gotten be built. To work right, they need doors. Doors need latches and you can't make no latches wid'out steel." The big grin had appeared. "You follow me now, boy?" How could a man that smart have just blown up? James wondered. Heknew the Boom understood what Luff was doing, because he and James and John Boyne had spent hours talking about it-and just as many hours talking about how to handle the situation. The executions, the life-draining work details, the sporadic food and grotesque water rituals, the lack of exercise, it was all part of an age-old practice of divide and conquer. Start with the outcasts and the weak, whom nobody would stand up for, just to get everyone accustomed to the killing. Then, broaden the scope, but always give people the hope that they might be spared. Give them shit jobs to do, and make believe if they did what they were told they would live. Let them know if they didn't they woulddie. Rub their noses in it. Set up a kangaroo court and let those on the jury know the only acceptable verdict was guilty. Hold court daily. Have only one penalty. Make the executions public. In fact, require everyone to attend. Make it plain that the people were being killed for a reason.

  They had done something wrong. Whatever it was. Something the rest of the population could avoid doing and thus be spared. If you didn't understand what could get you killed, at least you knew what wouldn't.

  Being "cooperative" with the new regime. Suck ass. Destroy the will of the ones you wanted to control. Grind them into the ground. Break their spirit. But Luff screwed up. He was too much of a bookkeeper, not enough of a psychologist. He went too far, too fast. The killings were too methodical, too transparent. The guards hadn't been gone much more than a week and already the prison population had been cut by almost two hundred. The promise ofdo as you're told and you'll be okay wasn't believed any longer by too many people. It wasn't just the public executions. In some ways, the timber details had been worse.

  Even men being deliberately worked to death shouldn't die in a few days. The goons didn't feed them badly; they didn't feed most of them at all-and then shot dead anyone who slacked off from the heavy labor of cutting trees and turning them into firewood. Given that most of the men picked for the timber details had serious medical problems to begin with, it wasn't surprising that they started dropping like flies almost immediately. Two men had died on the first day from heart attacks. They'd both been in their late fifties. By the time the rebellion erupted, James didn't think many of the prisoners outside of the two or three hundred who were tight with Luff thought they would survive another week, the way things were going. And through it all, as cold-blooded and calculated as Luff, Boomer had held them steady.

  "Just be good boys. Do your job wit' the bodies. Stupid fucks are leaving you alone, mostly, so you can do the things we done talked about. Time ain't right yet, but it will be soon enough." The night before, the Boom had even told James and Boyne that he thought it was about to blow. "Just take a little spark now, that's all. Just one spark." He'd been right, too. But he'd never said anything about being the spark himself. James sighed. That hadn't been planned, he knew that much for sure. Somewhere inside Boomer, somewhere inside that giant with no education beyond the sixth grade but a mind as sharp as any, something was broken. Probably broken long ago, when he was a kid. The same thing that had landed him in prison over thirty years earlier. When something did set off the Boom, he just went nuts. Plain berserk. James didn't know exactly what had set off that crazy streak this morning, and he'd never know. But he thought it was probably the guillotine. Today was the first time that had showed up. Luff must have decided hanging was too slow, too inefficient, so he'd had some of his men design and build a crude version of the device. That would be just like the bastard. He had a crazy streak buried inside a lot wider than the Boom's, even if it didn't manifest itself as spectacularly. The moment Boomer had seen the thing, his eyes had never left it. He'd stood there, stiff as a rock, while one man after another was dragged up and had his head chopped off. He'd lost it at the eighth man. "Fuck you, Luff!" he'd bellowed-and a Boomer bellow could be heard all over the yard. "We men, you motherfucker! We ain't sardines!" And he'd charged the stand. Armed with absolutely nothing but his fury and three hundred pounds of meat and muscle. He'd gotten almost all the way there, too, before the bullets finally brought him down. And the rebellion erupted. Boyne appeared at his side. "Boss, I found something. But you better take a look just yourself." He was speaking in a whisper. Why? Puzzled, James pushed away from the wall and followed the short, stocky man into a far corner of the basement, mostly hidden by some sort of old retaining wall. The wall created something in the way of a big cubbyhole in that area. The lighting was very dim. "There," Boyne said, pointin
g. Cook peered into the darkness, not seeing anything at first except two odd reflections.

  Then, suddenly, he realized he was looking at a pair of eyes staring back at him. "What the…" He stepped closer until he could see clearly. On the floor was a small, dirty makeshift mattress. Not a mattress, really. Just some kind of folded-over… Something.

  Probably an old blanket a maintenance man had had down here when he took a nap. On it, covered with nothing more than old newspapers and spread open old magazines, was the young black C.O. he had seen in the infirmary just a few days before Luff had taken over. He knew she had been knifed and was in bad shape. She was staring at him, saying nothing. James was sure she was petrified. She must have been hiding here for more than a week, ever since Luff took over the prison. She'd managed to get water from the tank, the same way they had. He could see a big tin can next to her, with the shine of water coming from it.

  But she probably hadn't much if anything to eat. Worst of all, he could only imagine what she must have been thinking all these days.