The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust Book 5)

by Craig Schaefer

  Lancaster raised his hand high and snapped his fingers. I followed his gaze down to my chest.

  A neon-green pinpoint hovered over my heart.

  “The rules are, kill or be killed,” Lancaster told me, “no exceptions. You’ve got thirty seconds. If Mr. Simms is not dead at the end of those thirty seconds, well…I’m afraid my sniper in the guard tower will have to invoke the ‘sudden death’ playoff rule.”

  He glanced at his watch.

  “And the clock starts…now.”

  33.

  You can go your entire life believing you have principles. Believing there are lines you’d never cross, deeds you’d never commit, even at the cost of your own life. And if you’re lucky, nobody will ever put those principles to the test.

  I picked up the bat.

  Lancaster was right. I had plenty of blood on my hands, and while I’d love to pretend I’d only pulled the trigger in self-defense, that’d be a dirty lie. All these years, though, I’d held myself up by one fragile string, one solitary rule I kept sacred: I’d never killed anybody who didn’t have it coming to them. Criminals like me and monsters like me, sure, they were fair game. People who willingly lived the life and knew the risks. But not civilians. And never innocents.

  Simms might not be what most people would call “innocent,” but in my book he was. He hadn’t asked to be a part of this, hadn’t signed up for these bastards’ sick game. They’d put a weapon in his hand and forced him to fight, and only the luck of the draw put him facedown on the blood-slick concrete instead of me.

  “Twenty seconds,” Lancaster said, eyeing his watch.

  When you don’t adhere to many principles in life, you guard the ones you do have. They’re the only things that let you look yourself in the mirror in the morning, that let you pretend, every once in a while, that you’re a good person deep down inside.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Lancaster purred into the microphone. “Son, you’d best get to it.”

  When I decided, I decided in a heartbeat. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t a debate at all.

  I wanted to live more than I wanted to feel like a good person.

  I raised the bat with both hands and brought it down on Simms’s head, gritting my teeth as the wood cracked and the handle snapped, sending a jolt up my arms. He didn’t die. He spasmed, arms and legs flopping like a fish drowning on dry land. I left the broken bat embedded in the back of his skull, splintered wood and barbed wire matted in crushed flesh and bloody bone.

  “Seven seconds,” Lancaster said.

  I snatched up the fallen machete. The first chop went halfway into Simms’s neck, snapping his spine. He still wouldn’t die. He let out a rattling, wheezing gasp as he convulsed. I wrenched the blade free and raised it one more time.

  The second chop, the one that drained the last of my strength from my aching muscles, the one that left me standing slump-shouldered in front of the roaring crowd—that one killed him. One more step past the line of damnation.

  “Now you might call that beginner’s luck,” Lancaster told the audience, “but every once in a while, a long shot wins.”

  I stood, limp, while the waist-belt and wrist shackles went back on. The guards led me away, already forgotten by the blood-hungry audience, as the warden announced the next bout.

  * * *

  “You know,” I said to Valentino. I sat on his vinyl exam bench, my cheek ice numb from a local anesthetic while he sewed the gash in my cheek shut.

  “Only two stitches,” the prison doctor murmured, leaning close and studying my face under a penlight. “That should heal up nicely.”

  “You know what’s going on in Hive B,” I said. “You have to know.”

  “You’ve also got a mild concussion,” he said, shining the penlight in my eyes. “Probably from your escape attempt—I heard about the bus crash—though tonight certainly didn’t help matters. I’ll give you some acetaminophen.”

  “Yeah, let’s talk about tonight,” I said.

  He shot a furtive glance toward the infirmary door.

  “I can’t,” he said softly.

  “The hell you can’t. You’re an accessory to this, doctor. You still have to take the Hippocratic Oath when you get your degree, right? Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you, but—”

  “They’ll kill my family.”

  He bit his bottom lip, turned, and put his surgical thread in a drawer. When he looked back at me, his eyes were moist.

  “I have a wife and a daughter,” he said. “They told me…if I even think about blowing the whistle, if I don’t help…they’ll be on stage at the next event.”

  “So take them and run. Go to the feds. They’ll put you in protective custody.”

  “You don’t understand.” Valentino shook his head. “You think some prison warden and a gang of corrupt guards could pull this off all by themselves? Lancaster is protected. He has relatives in high places, old money, very old money. There’s nowhere they couldn’t get at us.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, holding up one hand. “We’ll find a way. Nobody’s going to hurt your family.”

  In the quiet of the infirmary, away from the chaos and the fear of the fight, I took a deep breath and sorted my mind out. Time to take inventory and figure out what I had to work with.

  The footage from the fight? Damning evidence, and Valentino could smuggle it out, get it to the cops or the media—but there was no telling how Lancaster and his goons would react. They might run for the hills, or they might try to cover their tracks by going from cell to cell and putting a bullet in every last one of us. No. Too unpredictable, too risky. For now, the camera stayed with me.

  Emerson wasn’t coming to the rescue, but the plan he’d put in place before he died—the unlocked hatch and the cell phone stashed in the maintenance tunnels—was still waiting for me. I could use that.

  And I could use Valentino.

  “When’s the next big event?” I asked him.

  “Wednesday night.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I guarantee you’ll be fighting again. When a long shot wins like you did tonight, everybody wants to see an encore. More bets means more money for the warden.”

  “What if I told you I had a way to bring this whole place crashing down?”

  He let out a nervous chuckle. “I’d say you should have already done it.”

  “I need your help.”

  “Are you not listening?” he said. “They will kill my family. I’m sorry, I’m genuinely sorry, but I’m not going to—”

  “Hold up. It’s something they can never connect back to you. No risk on your part whatsoever. If I succeed, you and your family are free. If I fail, nobody will ever know you had anything to do with it.”

  He wavered on his feet, chewing his lip, and glanced to the door again. When he looked back at me, his voice was soft.

  “What do I have to do?”

  “It’s easy,” I told him. “You need to tell the guards, tomorrow morning, that you have to see me for a follow-up exam.”

  “Impossible. We don’t do follow-up care. My instructions, when it comes to the Hive B prisoners, are to patch you up and send you back in the best shape I can manage. Most of the time, the second visit is the one that ends, well”—he nodded toward the door to the morgue—“in there.”

  “You said they’ll want to see me fight again, right? And the more bets that get placed, the bigger a commission Lancaster rakes in. So I’m worth money to him, win or lose.”

  “That’s right.”

  I tapped the side of my head. “Not if I can’t fight. You said I’ve got a concussion. Tell him it could be worse than it looks, and if you’re not careful, it could kill me before the next event.”

  Valentino rubbed his chin. “That…could work, actually. All right, and then what?”

  “Then nothing. The rest is on my shoulders.”

  * * *

  Back in my cell, alone with my thoughts, I tossed and turned under the stark fluorescent light. The t
iny plastic square never turned off, not even after midnight, glowing under its wire cage and flooding the room. It buzzed endlessly, a low-grade hum that set my teeth on edge.

  The escort to the infirmary would take me right past the access hatchway. My one and only shot at getting out of here. All I needed was a plan to go with it. The maintenance tunnels could take me anywhere but out; no matter where I came up, I’d still have to deal with the exact same problems as my first escape attempt. Even if I could steal some civilian clothes, jack a car, and get out of the prison, they’d be onto me long before I reached Aberdeen. Once the alarm went up and the highway patrol sealed off I-80, I’d be sunk.

  I lost track of the hours. Then a slot at the bottom of my door rattled open, and a plastic tray slid through. Breakfast was a cardboard carton of warm milk and half a bowl of greasy, cold oatmeal. I thought back to the prison cafeteria, asking the line cook how the inmates in Hive B got fed. Lockdown means all the meals get delivered to their cells, he’d told me. We cook ’em up and send them all over on rolling carts for the guards to pass out.

  As I slowly stirred the oatmeal with a plastic spoon, a wave of nausea washed over me. Not from the food either, considering how my vision blurred in time with the queasiness. I tried to remember anything I could about concussions—specifically, how fast they could kill you—but I drew a blank. I needed real medical treatment, and fast.

  I kept staring at the plastic tray. The food service was the only line of direct communication between Hive B and the rest of the prison…but only in one direction. Still, there had to be a way I could use that.

  As my cell door rattled and swung open, the answer hit me.

  I wasn’t going to break out today.

  I was going to break in.

  34.

  I stood up slow, eyeing the guard on the threshold. Red rims lined his baggy eyes, and he walked with a lethargic shuffle in his step. Somebody’s a little hungover from last night’s festivities, I thought. Perfect.

  “Infirmary,” he said. “The doc needs to check you out.”

  I knew the routine by now. I presented my wrists and waited patiently while he fumbled with the shackles. My eyes were on his belt. Pepper spray, pistol, key ring. I walked just ahead of him, a little slower than I needed to.

  Once we passed the checkpoint gate, my fingers dipped into my pocket. They closed over the marble-sized lump of alchemist’s clay that Emerson had smuggled in for me. One of Bentley’s specialties. I scooped it up and rolled it into my palm, pinning the clay in place with my thumb.

  “Let me ask you something.”

  “Shut up,” the guard said. “Keep walking.”

  “I’m just wondering how you live with yourself, being an accessory to all this.”

  We rounded a corner. Just ahead, my eyes followed the pipes running at chest height along the wall, where they bent at a sharp angle and disappeared into the floor. The corrugated metal hatch stood alongside the pipes, about four feet across.

  “You scumbags are getting exactly what you deserve.” The guard punctuated his words with a shove, sending me stumbling. “Why shouldn’t we make a little money and have some fun while we’re at it?”

  “I am so glad you said that,” I told him.

  I kindled the clay with a tiny spark of power, the energy lancing from my palm and turning the marble into a smoldering furnace.

  “Huh?” he said. “Why?”

  I took a deep breath, held it, and hurled the marble to the ground. The clay burst and billowed, gushing a cloud of vomit-green smoke, faster and thicker than the spray from a fire extinguisher. The guard got a big lungful, choking and sputtering behind me as I knelt down and pulled on the hatch ring.

  The trapdoor lifted, easy and smooth. Behind me, the guard was a convulsing shadow in the fog. My eyes burned like I’d rubbed them with fresh-cut onions, but I could see well enough to do what came next.

  I drove both fists into his gut, grabbed him by the neck, then threw him down through the trapdoor. Head first.

  He landed on his stomach, hitting the concrete seven feet down. I jumped in after him, stomping down hard on his spine with both feet, and dropped to one knee. Then I slipped my shackled wrists over his head, the short, stout length of chain between them biting against his neck, and heaved back as hard as I could.

  “I’m glad you said that,” I hissed in his ear, “because I feel bad about the last guy I had to kill. You? I won’t.”

  His feet hammered the ground, his eyes bulging. I heard the faintest crackling sound from his neck. He let out one last, rattling wheeze. Then nothing at all.

  My arms shook and my teary eyes burned, but I didn’t have a second to rest. I fished on his belt for the keys, unshackled myself, and scrambled back up the ladder. The smoke had cleared, and the hallway still stood empty. Nobody had seen a thing. I closed the hatch on my way back down and latched it behind me.

  The tunnels hummed, lined with fat iron pipes and rattling old access panels. Faint yellow light glowed from bulbs in wire cages, spaced out every twenty feet or so along the cramped walkway. Judging from the cobwebs and the dust, so thick I could taste it in the back of my throat, maintenance crews didn’t come down here often.

  I scouted ahead, squinting. I found what I needed in a blot of shadow, halfway between the lights: a tiny nook along the left-hand wall, next to a throbbing metal cabinet dripping with condensation dewdrops. I grabbed the dead guard by the wrists, gritting my teeth as I dragged him down the tunnel. Then came the laborious work of squeezing his body into the nook, folding his arms and legs and shoving with my feet.

  It wasn’t the best way of hiding a body, but assuming nobody checked down here, or if they just didn’t look too hard, there was a good chance he’d stay hidden for a few days. Eventually he’d stink up the place and somebody would have to notice, but hopefully by then it’d be a moot point.

  I found my prize, Emerson’s last gift, sitting on a ledge about fifty feet further down. A cell phone, sealed up safe in a ziplock baggie. I dialed by memory as I prowled the tunnels, looking for exits and trying to get the lay of the land.

  “It’s me,” I said fast. “I’m alive. Banged up and then some, but I’m alive.”

  “What happened out there?” Bentley asked. “The escape’s been all over the news, and we thought you’d made it out, but you never came home. Then this prison guard contacted me and—”

  His voice washed out in a blur of static, then silence. I took the next right and jogged along the tunnel, watching the phone’s screen and waiting until a single reception bar lit up.

  “Sorry,” I said once I redialed, “hit a dead zone. I’m down in the prison maintenance tunnels.”

  “Can you get out from there?”

  I paused, looking up at a short ladder to another hatch just above my head.

  “No,” I said. “Not on my own, but I’ve got a plan.”

  “Name it,” Bentley said.

  “Wednesday night. I need a car. A service van would be better, something with no windows in the back so I can stay out of sight. Thing is, you’ll probably be taking it out through a roadblock; the papers and plates have to be legit.”

  “The vehicle shouldn’t be a problem, but that’s well after visiting hours. How do we get inside the prison?”

  “You don’t,” I said. “Just get as close as you can and wait for my signal. Trust me, you’ll know when it happens.”

  Then I told him the rest of the plan. He was silent for a moment when I finished, contemplating all the angles.

  “It could work,” he mused. “Dangerous, though.”

  “If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears.”

  He sighed. “Alas, I do not. All right. I’ll make the phone calls.”

  As I came to a tunnel junction, craning my neck to look in each direction, a fresh wave of nausea hit me. I squeezed my eyes shut until it passed.

  “Do me a favor,” I said, “and have Doc Savoy on standby. I’ve gotten the shit
kicked out of me this week, and I have a feeling things are gonna get worse before they get better.”

  “Be safe, Daniel. We’ll see you Wednesday night.”

  After I hung up, I flipped the phone over, fished out the SIM card, and snapped it in half. If my whole plan went sideways, I didn’t want Lancaster and his thugs tracing anything back to Bentley and Corman’s doorstep. Then I tossed the phone into a dark, dusty shadow under a rattling iron pipe.

  Time was running out. With every passing minute, the odds of someone noticing that a guard and one of the Hive B prisoners had gone missing became more and more inevitable. I started carefully poking my head up through access hatches as I passed them, using half-inch glimpses of the world above and my mental map of the prison to navigate.

  That was how I ended up back in Hive C, standing in front of Brisco’s card table on the gallery floor. He and his buddies stared at me like they’d seen a ghost.

  “Need to talk,” I told him, “the bathrooms on tier three. Right now.”

  He spit out the toothpick he’d been chewing.

  “The grapevine said you got killed trying to bust outta here,” he said. “Then I heard you were in Ad Seg. Then you were just gone.”

  “I’m alive and well, and right now I’m just another uniform in the crowd, but if any of these guards look too close and realize who I am, we’re both dead men. So please, pretty please, get up and come with me.”

  His entourage looked between us, uncertain. Brisco sighed and tossed his cards on the table.

  “Play without me,” he told them.

  Alone in the bathroom, under the eye of a dead surveillance camera, I took Emerson’s video camera from my pocket.

  “Convicts work the prison cafeteria, right? You got juice with any of ’em?”

  “With the whites, sure,” he said. “I could get double servings at dinner if I wanted. I just don’t. What’s going on, Faust?”

  “Hive B. They’re running death matches for rich sickos to gamble on. Warden Lancaster and the guards are all in on it. That’s why nobody ever comes back from Hive B. They’re not on lockdown, Brisco. They’re dead.”