Fallon’s weapon punched nothing but air. And Fallon blinked. The two prisoners who came in last were kicking and pounding the other two convicts. Dully, Fallon recognized two of the men. Worsnop grabbed one man’s head and slammed it against the head of the inmate Frenchy was holding.
Fallon’s cellmates let the convicts drop into a heap on the floor.
“Can we get that door shut?” Claire asked, dropping what was left of a chair onto the battered, bloody body of the bald man.
Worsnop glanced at the door and shook his head.
Tossing the busted bottle to the floor, Fallon grabbed Malachi’s belt. Rising, chest heaving, Fallon looked around the hospital. Think, man, he told himself. Think!
“Those are just the first.” Frenchy had stepped to the door, too, and looked through the window. “Look at them. I’ve seen riots in my time, but nothing like this.”
Worsnop’s head bobbed in agreement. “We came here to hide. Guess Charley Muldoon’s worn off on us. But when others realize they can’t get out—or inside the women’s prison, over that wall, past those guards with the Winchesters, they’ll remember the women up here.”
Fallon spun. Doctor Gripewater appeared to be passably sober as he held out his hands and let Bedbug empty a bottle of alcohol over his hands.
“Can she be moved, Doc?” he asked.
“She’ll have to be. If she wants her and that baby to live. If we all want to live. But not far.”
“A-Hall?” Fallon asked.
“A-Hall!” Worsnop snapped. “Are you daft, man? A bunch of the worst lot are in A-Hall now. Freeing the scum of the prison. And killing those who ain’t.”
“Yeah,” Fallon said. “But there’s the basement.”
“It’s risky,” Frenchy said. “We get trapped down there, there’s no way out.”
“Maybe,” Fallon held the keys in his hand. “But there’s certainly no way out from here.”
Outside came curses, shrieks, gunshots, the sounds of dying men, and the sounds of a whirlwind of chaos.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
While Doc Gripewater kept track of Jess Harper’s signs and Fallon bathed her forehead with a wet rag, Eve Martin, Bedbug, Claire, and Liza hurriedly stripped and put on the clothing of the unconscious or dead inmates lying on the hospital floor. Likewise, Ryan Getty shed his guard uniform and put on Charley Muldoon’s uniform.
Muldoon was adamant about staying put.
“If they see me outside, they’ll kill me. Or they’ll say I was rioting. I’m getting out of here Monday morning, guys. I can’t go. I can’t risk it.”
“They catch you in here, they might just kill you,” Fallon told the man wearing nothing but prison underwear and holding a frightened black cat.
“I’ll hide.”
“Don’t burn the place down,” Worsnop said. Maybe he was joking. Fallon wasn’t sure.
“There’s likely room for you in the cabinet over there.” Fallon’s head bobbed. “Just keep the cat quiet.”
The women were dressed. Fallon stepped away from the table. “You women will have to carry Jess Harper. Doc will be right by you. The rest of us will flank you. With us blocking the view, and the fact that the sun’s getting low, and those uniforms, maybe no one will realize you’re women.” He frowned. “That said, there’s no guarantee one of the guards won’t shoot you dead from a tower. You can stay here, hide with Muldoon in one of the cabinets.”
Bedbug snorted. “We ain’t leavin’ Jess.”
“All right. Let’s go.”
* * *
They stepped over the dead. Fallon lowered his head as they moved toward the walkway. A bullet whined off a rock somewhere, and Fallon saw a half-dozen men racing toward them. He clutched the key in his right hand. It would be a painful weapon for whoever he hit . . . just before the others cut him to pieces.
If the key didn’t work in the basement cells. No. It had to. Fallon remembered that Malachi had been one of the guards who had taken him to see The Mole that first time.
The charging men rushed right past them, barely noticing them. Fallon did not ease his grip on the key. He moved around a moaning guard.
“They’re going into the hospital,” Getty said.
“Don’t look back,” Fallon told him.
Glass shattered. Men roared. Fallon shivered and heard the matron muttering a prayer, asking God to protect—not them—but that tiny arsonist hiding in a bottom cabinet with a black cat.
Another prisoner rushed toward them. Bare-chested, wearing the black cap of a guard, and holding a line stick in his blood-smeared right hand, he stopped and grinned.
“What’s in the box, Frenchy?” the man said, and he came up to Frenchy and glanced in the box.
“Candles?” The man shook his head and walked along side Frenchy as the procession turned a corner. “Candles?”
“We’re going to burn down A-Hall, Festus,” Frenchy told him. “Want to join us?”
“A-Hall.” The man shook his head and looked at the women carrying Jess Harper.
“Who’s that?” the man named Festus asked.
“Muldoon,” Frenchy said. “The arsonist.” He laughed. “We’re gonna burn him, too.”
A rapid firing stared on the northwest corner.
“Gatling gun,” Fallon said.
Festus said, “I’m going to find me one more guard to kill before they gun me down.” And Festus raced off, but not toward the northwest corner.
Several men raced out of A-Hall’s front door, screaming, charging, while waving anything they could find as weapons. Yet one, a black man with a patch over his left eye, stopped and, oddly enough, held the door open as Frenchy and Fallon led the way.
“Thank you, sir.” Fallon nodded politely at the tall, bald man.
“Don’t mention it,” the black man said. When Worsnop and Getty came through, the door closed.
Bodies of the dead littered the floor. Above, the marauders had reached the fourth floor. Men above them dumped slop buckets over the railings. They ripped their mattresses and let the straw fall with the urine and the excrement and the buckets and blankets.
Fallon moved past the cell that held the supplies. They had to make it all the way to the back of the building and down the steps. The place stank of filth. A man screamed as he was flung off the fourth tier but somehow landed on the catwalk that connected the two sides of cells on the third floor.
Angered at the man’s poor throwing ability, men grabbed the prisoner who had tossed the first one over the railing.
“Nooooo!” the man cried, but the prisoners threw him over, too, and he did not land on the third-floor catwalk.
“It’s a madhouse,” Claire whispered.
“It’s always been a madhouse,” Ryan Getty told her.
They walked around a dead body, through puddles of blood and urine, and came to the steps.
“Careful,” Fallon called and took the first step down.
* * *
“How’s she doing, Doc?” Fallon asked as he shoved in the key and twisted it, hearing the grating noise as the bolt slid.
“It won’t be long,” Gripewater said.
Fallon pulled on the door and heard the groan.
“Mole,” he called out. “It’s Fallon. Just close your eyes.”
He saw the hulking, hunched wild figure of Coleman Cain, whose head was turned toward the wall and covered with the rags he wore on his arms.
“Get the candles lighted,” Fallon ordered, pushed the door shut, and hurried to the wall, where he knelt beside The Mole.
“Cain,” he whispered, and saw the man tremble. “Listen, I’ve brought some friends down for safety. There’s a riot going on. The worst I’ve ever seen. One of the people here is a woman prisoner, and she’s going to have a baby. So there’s going to be light. Just candles, but we need light to see. You understand.”
“It huuuurts my eyeeesssss.”
“I know. But we can put you somewhere safe.” Fallon pressed his lips tog
ether. “But you have to show me where it is.”
“What?”
“The tunnel that leads out.”
“But the key . . .”
“I have the key.” He thought: If the damn thing works . . .
The Mole’s finger pointed. “The funny man keeps his eyes on the door.” Fallon moved.
The flickering candles held by Getty and the others provided enough light for Fallon, though he wasn’t certain how well Doc Gripewater could see.
He saw the skull of the “funny man” who had been left with The Mole, forgotten, so The Mole had been forced to eat him. Fallon saw the holes where the man’s eyes had once been, and he walked to the wall and began fingering the stones. One was loose. The Mole might have been able to move the stone, but Fallon would need help. He looked at the men, though, and frowned. Doc Gripewater needed all the light he could get, so Fallon tried to wiggle the rock. He found places where he could slip his hands inside. That had to be how this was done, but that stretched his arms so wide, he couldn’t get any leverage.
Then, the light diminished, and Fallon heard The Mole’s breath on his back.
“You’ll never get that done,” The Mole said, “and the candles hurt my eyes.”
Fallon withdrew his hands from the holes, and let The Mole do his work.
Iron bars blocked the hole, but Fallon saw the lock. He crawled into the little cubbyhole and prayed, prayed as hard as he ever had, that the key would work to this door, too. The iron-barred door swung open. “God,” Fallon said, “you’re . . .” He paused. They weren’t out of this yet. “Just keep the women safe, Lord. Please. Just keep them safe.”
He couldn’t see much more than a few feet into the tunnel, but he could see clothes, hats, what looked like walking canes, canteens, torches to be lighted, and even a lantern. The lantern would help, so Fallon crawled through the opening, and breathed in the damp but clean air of the cave.
He picked up the lantern, and turned as The Mole climbed through the opening, and sat on a rock in the corner.
“How far?” he asked The Mole. “And where does it come out?”
“Two hundred yards,” The Mole said. “By the river.”
He set the lantern inside the hole. “So after you stopped, they used other men. They’d leave them in the cell, and . . .”
“I had to let them out,” The Mole said. “Otherwise, they would not feed me. And there was little left of the funny man to eat.”
Fallon frowned, considering this. A man like Ford Wagner would slip out at night, dress into something that wasn’t a prison uniform, commit the crime, and return at night—possibly the very same night—and return to the solitary confinement cell. How many people had been murdered . . . murdered by people in prison with nothing to lose?
As The Mole rubbed his eyes, Fallon climbed into the hole.
“You know,” Fallon said as he slid back inside the cell, “no one would try to stop you if you just walked down this tunnel and kept walking.”
Back inside, Fallon brought the lantern toward Getty, who used the candle to light the wick as Fallon turned up the coal oil.
“Thanks,” Doc Gripewater said. “Now hold her hand, Fallon!”
“What?”
“You’ve been a father, boy,” the drunken lout said. “Nobody else has. Talk to her. Like you did to your wife when she was giving you a son, damn you.”
Fallon dropped onto the floor and reached for Jess Harper’s tiny hand.
“It was a girl,” he said, but nobody heard.
“It’s all right, Jess,” he whispered. “You’re doing great. Now when the doc says to push, you just push.” He slipped his left hand around her other hand. “And you just squeeze my hand and dig your fingernails into it and yell as loud as you want. It’ll wake up your baby.”
She squeezed, and her nails dug into his palms. Fallon smiled.
“You have the toughest job of anyone. But all this pain. It’ll be worth it. Trust me. Once they put that bundle of joy in your arms. It was . . .” He had to stop whatever it was rising up his throat. “The happiest day . . . of... my . . . life.”
That’s when the door to the cell ground against the floor and creaked about a quarter of the way open. Fallon turned around, and watched the figure come in, yelling, “Mole. Easy, Mole. It’s me. Now . . .”
When the warden, Harold Underwood, turned around, he gasped. But he only panicked for a second before bringing the Schofield revolver up. The big .45 was already cocked, and there was plenty of light now, thanks to the lantern, for him to see.
“What the hell . . .” He stopped, seeing that the stone had been pulled down, and that the barred door was open. “Where’s The Mole?” He pointed the revolver at Eve Martin.
“We let him out,” she said. “Do you mind? Thanks to you we’ve had to turn this into a maternity ward!”
“A what?” Underwood stepped aside. “If anyone tries to stop me, I’ll shoot you all dead.”
“Go on,” Ryan Getty said. “Good riddance.”
“I mean it!” The man’s eyes were wide with fright. Fallon didn’t think the warden even recognized him. He backed along the cold walls, licking his lips and blinking frantically.
Fallon just held Jess Harper’s hands. He didn’t care about Harold Underwood. He didn’t care about a damned thing except this young girl who was about to have a baby. That was his world. That was Harry Fallon’s entire world.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Warden Harold Underwood was out of Fallon’s line of vision. Fallon could hear the warden’s panicked cries, then he heard the man’s frightened gasp. “Mole!”
“You,” said The Mole, who must have been climbing through the opening, out of the tunnel and back into the cramped cell. “I’ve been waiting for you a long, long time.”
“I’ve been hiding,” Underwood said. “I mean. I mean . . . just now. Had to hide. Till I could make it down here. Come on, Cain. You and me. I’ve got more money than you’ve ever seen. You and me. We’ll get the hell out of here. Mexico. Bolivia. Hell, France maybe.”
“You are a bad, bad man,” The Mole said.
“PUSH!” Doc Gripewater yelled, and Fallon echoed the doctor’s command, and let the woman’s fingers dig deeper into his palms.
Suddenly the gun roared, and the echoes were deafening in the cramped cells. The Schofield barked again and again and again.
“Push!” Fallon yelled at Jess Harper, but he doubted if she could hear.
There was another gunshot, and then Harold Underwood was back in view. He lifted the smoking. 45 at Doc Gripewater’s head and yelled at Worsnop and Getty. “Get that man out of the hole. Move his body. Move him now. I’ve got to get out of here.”
The echoes faded. “Move The Mole. Now!” His finger tightened against the trigger. “Move, damn you. I’ve got one shot left and I’ll splatter Gripewater’s brains over these walls.”
Gripewater smiled down at Jess Harper. “You’re doing fine. I see some dark hair. A couple more pushes . . .”
“Move, damn you!”
Suddenly, the warden grinned, and the barrel of the Schofield tilted down at Jess Harper’s belly.
“I don’t think this bitch or her bastard kid would survive a bullet in her belly. Do you, Doc?”
Fallon felt that pressure building now, and he saw Doc Gripewater step away from the woman. Getty and Claire stepped back. Bedbug began praying. The warden laughed, but that stopped abruptly, and his eyes widened. “What the hell, Doc?”
Fallon looked up. He just couldn’t let go of Jess Harper’s hands. He saw the Remington over-and-under derringer in Doc Gripewater’s right hand, and the twin barrels were pointed at warden Harold Underwood.
“I’ll kill her, Doc,” the warden said. “So help me God, I’ll kill them first. The girl and her baby.”
But the Schofield’s barrel was being pulled away.
“You’re doing fine,” Fallon whispered to Jess. “It’s almost over. It’s almost all over.�
��
“Doc . . .” Underwood managed to swallow. “You took that oath. You can’t kill me, Doc. The Hippocratic oath. Remember. You have to save lives.”
The Schofield was coming back up, toward the doctor, when Thaddeus Gripewater sent two .41-caliber slugs into Harold Underwood’s forehead.
“Saving lives . . .” The doctor dropped the empty derringer on the hard floor and moved back to Jess Harper. “That’s what I’m doing.” He smiled. “Push, Jess.”
Harry Fallon did not glance at the bloody, dead body of Harold Underwood. He just looked at Jess Harper’s eyes. He echoed the doctor’s encouragement.
And when he heard the baby cry, he smiled and felt a joy he had thought he had lost so many years ago.
* * *
“Fallon,” Ryan Getty whispered. “He’s still alive.”
Fallon stared into Jess Harper’s excited eyes. “He’s a good-looking boy, ma’am,” he said. He rubbed the wounds in his palms and pushed himself off the floor. It didn’t take him long to cross over to where Getty and Frenchy stood over The Mole. The big man sat on the stone that had been pulled out of the wall, blood pooling all underneath him, as he blocked the entrance into the tunnel that led to the Missouri River.
Fallon took Coleman Cain’s right hand in his own.
“Cain,” he whispered. “We can’t thank you enough. And . . . well . . . I’m sorry.”
“The light,” The Mole whispered.
“I know,” Fallon said. “I know it hurts. I’m sorry for that, too.”
“No.” The Mole smiled. “It’s . . . the moon . . . the light from the moon. The moon’s . . . rising . . . and . . . it’s . . . so . . . beautiful . . .”
Then, Coleman Cain was dead.
* * *
It was probably not the scene the militia commander or his men, or even his escort—Charley Muldoon, still clutching his black cat—expected to see when they pulled open the cell door.
Behind the Iron Page 27