Time spike

by Eric Flint

  Chapter 53 James Cook moved quickly through the basement of the administration building. The smell down here was even worse than he remembered. Spending the last few days in the cleanest air he'd ever known-whatever other problems the Cretaceous had, manmade pollution was not one of them-had had its effect on him. Using the beam of a flashlight, he took the stairs two at a time, shoved open the door to the main level and breathed in air that now carried a different stench. This was the smell of too many humans living without bathing or plumbing. Sweat, urine and feces. The rest of the Boomers followed close behind. All of them except Kidd and Leffen. Kidd was lying back at the armory, with Leffen-who'd really be pretty useless in a fight-left there to watch over him and, hopefully, keep Geoffrey from bleeding to death. Getting into the armory had been a simple matter of gunning down five not-wary-enough sentries and unlocking a door.

  Gettingout of it and into the rest of the installation had been a different story altogether. What James simply hadn't foreseen was that, once inside the armory and at the door leading out, they'd have no way of knowing if there were any guards waiting beyond. In the end, after he dilly-dallied for a couple of minutes, Kidd had told him to just open the fricking door and he'd handle the rest. Which, he had.

  There'd been four of Luff's men on the other side of the door, it turned out, all of them with pistols. Kidd had gone through rolling, come up, and taken out all of them. The whole incredible gunfight hadn't lasted more than three or four seconds. But he'd taken two bullets himself. One a minor flesh wound in the arm, but the other… Kidd would make it or he wouldn't. In the meantime, James didn't have any time to spare. Blacklock had given them a five-minute lead. Then, they'd start the main attack on the gate-which, from the sound of things, had already erupted. The Boomers needed to reach West Tower while everything was still chaotic and confused for the prison's defenders. The Boomers moved through the door, crossed the floor, dropped down a flight of steps, and then took off through the perimeter tunnel at a near run. They arrived at the base of West Tower short of breath, then leaned or squatted against the wall waiting for their breathing to even out. The next stage of the operation was going to take stealth, not speed. "Sounds like a war out there," Morelli said. Boyne snorted. "There damn well better be a war going on out there, Dino, or we're dead meat." "Yeah, I know. I was just sort of, you know, reassuring myself." When James was sure all the men were capable of breathing slowly and silently, he took off his shoes, tied the laces together and draped them across the back of his neck and over his shoulders. The others did the same. It was time to climb the one-hundred-plus steps to the observation deck. He wanted to rush, but didn't. Instead, his pistol in his hand, he climbed a few steps and then waited a few seconds. Unlike Hulbert, who'd kept his eyes to the scope, James had watched the way Griffin and Nickerson had stalked the guards outside the armory. He'd been impressed by the Cherokee's cold-blooded patience and it hadn't taken him long to understand the key. One or two sounds were hard to interpret. A succession of sounds is what brought sense and meaning. He took another few steps. Then, waited a few seconds. Then another few steps; another. And so on, all the way up the stairs. Time ticked away. James had to force himself to stay patient. He might be overdoing it, sure. Morelli had been right-thatdid sound like a war going on out there. The convicts in the tower above were probably not paying attention to anything else.

  Still, he forced himself to maintain the stalk. None of the Boomers objected, even though they must all have been feeling the same impatience. By now, James knew his authority over them was unchallenged. In fact, it was probably even stronger than Boomer's had been. James wasn't erratic, the way the Boom could be. The stairs ended six inches above his head and the floor began. He motioned for everyone to be still and then took the next step so he could get a peek inside. The small room was full of cigarette smoke. A body was curled against the far wall. The man's head was down, his chin on his chest, as if he were asleep. James couldn't see the face. But the blood that soaked his entire coverall made it obvious he was dead.

  Some guard out there-probably Hulbert or Nickerson or Marie Keehn-had hit the sniper's triangle. The cigarette smoke was coming from two other convicts, still standing at the firing windows with rifles in their hands. Next to the windows, rather, keeping under cover. The sniper's bullet that had taken out the con against the wall had obviously made them cautious. As James watched, one of the men spit out his cigarette, raised his rifle, took a quick step to the side, fired three shots, and scuttled back under cover. He couldn't have possibly been able to really aim at anything. But, in a way, that didn't matter. James knew that all the firing outside was just covering fire from Blacklock and his men. Unless the Boomers could take out the tower, any attempt to rush the gate would produce bad casualties. James dropped his left hand so Boyne and the others could see. Two fingers. Two cons. He pointed toward Boyne and then to the right. Boyne nodded. James took a deep breath and lunged into the room. The con who'd spit out the cigarette saw him coming, but before he could bring the rifle around, James had started shooting. James wasn't a gunfighter and he wasn't a hit man. He'd never fired a pistol at anything but a target in his life, and hadn't done that all that many times. But he had steady nerves-very steady-and he knew how to use a gun, and he wasn't worried about ammunition. They had plenty of pistol ammunition. And it was very close range. Later, he figured out he'd fired eight rounds. All but one of them hit the convict, somewhere in his body. Three of them had been fatal wounds. He looked to his right. Boyne had done the same, obviously. The rounds he'd fired combined with James' own had left James feeling a little dizzy.

  The noise had been pretty incredible, in that enclosed space. He saw John's lips move. "What?" he asked. Then, pointed to his ear. Boyne came closer and almost shouted. "I'd forgotten how much noise a pistol makes in a room." He grinned. "That's what got me the hard sentence, you know. If I'd just shot the bastard humping my wife once or twice, they mighta gone easy on me. But I emptied the whole clip. Wadn't much left of the dirty rotten fuck, by the time I was done." Jealousy wasn't an emotion James approved of, probably because he suffered from it fairly badly himself. Any time he spotted Elaine in what looked like a friendly conversation with another man, he got a little twinge.

  But he was bound and determined, this time around, to keep it under control-and he wasn't really worried about her anyway. For one thing, she was at least as possessive as he was. The squint in her eyes was a sight to behold, whenever shespottedhim talking in a friendly way to another woman. Still, even in his worst days-even drunk-James couldn't imagine himself actually murdering somebody out of jealousy.

  But… who knew? He'd never caught a girlfriend in fragrant deliction, either, or whatever it was called. On the other hand, why had Boyne been carrying a gun in the first place? The adultery couldn't have caught himthat much by surprise. Unless he packed a piece everywhere he went, which wasn't likely. Boyne had been a machinist, not a gangster. And why was his mind wandering? They were, in fact, in the middle of a war. "Get a blanket up here!" he yelled down the stairs. A moment later, the strip of blanket was passed up, hand to hand. Crouching to stay out of the line of fire, James moved to the open window and tossed most of the blanket strip through. Then, squatting by the wall and holding the other end in his hand, he wondered what he could use to anchor it. That was another thing he hadn't given any thought to, earlier. So much for his budding career as Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. For a brief instant, James felt a powerful spike of longing for his familiar job as an emergency medical technician. That had sometimes gotten stressful, but it was a stress he wasfamiliar with. Boyne squatted next to him. He'd apparently analyzed the same quandary. "We gotta leave two guys here anyway, boss. That was the plan. But I figure we may as well leave three. Hell, leave four. Now that we done it once, the truth is that having a lot of Boomers along is pretty pointless. Two, three, four guys can take a tower, or it can't be done at all." He pointed to the strip-end in James' hand. "O
ne of 'em can take a break by sitting here and holding the blanket. Two guys watch at the window with rifles. One guy watches the stairs with a pistol." As plans went, it was better than the one James had drawn up. He let Boyne pick out the men to stay at West Tower, while he steadied himself for the next task. He thought they'd still have the advantage of surprise, at least. This tower had been the critical one, since it was the tower that covered the main entrance. He could already hear the sounds of Blacklock's men pouring through the entrance. The Cherokees were out there too. Their war whoop was distinctive. Scary as hell, too. James didn't think any of the cons in the other towers would be paying much attention to anything else. He could be wrong, of course. But they'd find out soon enough. The battle inside the prison was now in full swing. The moment Andy Blacklock saw that strip of Spanish blanket coming out of the tower window, he ordered the charge on the entrance. By then, the catapult Edelman had designed and the Cherokees had built-Jeff called it a "trebuchet," with his usual fussiness about terminology-had fired more than a dozen of Leffen's smoke bombs. The entrance area was almost completely obscured. Anyone firing at them as they charged would be firing blindly. It had been the danger from the tower that had really kept everyone pinned. At least one of the cons up there was a marksman. Two of Andy's people had been killed by him, already. Not in a while, though. Hulbert had taken out one of them, and that might very well have been the sniper. The men remaining up there, after that, had just satisfied themselves with little quick bursts of rifle fire. It was all a moot point now, though. Cook and the Boomers had done their job. Four more guards went down charging the entrance. As closely spaced as they were-had to be, given the dimensions involved-even someone firing blind was bound to hit somebody, at least a few times. Unfortunately, while the bombs Hulbert's raid had planted had destroyed the gates, they hadn't been powerful enough to really damage the walls. Then, finally, they were in the smoke, searching for the defenders. Leffen had told them the smoke wouldn't be too hard on the eyes-but if this was his idea of "not too bad on the eyes" Andy didn't want to think what the little convict could produce if he was deliberately trying to blind someone. Still, squinting or not, a little teary-eyed or not, they could see well enough. There were five convicts still left in the area when they came through the gate. All five went down, along with one of the Cherokees. Two of the convicts were shot while trying to run away. They'd lost seven people so far, that Andy knew of, at least four of them killed outright. But they had the entrance to the prison. That was the critical thing. There was no longer any way that Luff and his men could get it back.

  Chapter 54 Frank Nickerson led eight guards into the armory.

  Blacklock had ordered him to make sure it was secured, and then-if the situation permitted-position himself and his people as snipers on the roofs. The armory itself was empty. Just beyond, they found Geoffrey Kidd on the floor, with his back propped against a wall. He looked to be bleeding pretty badly. Carter Leffen was kneeling next to him, fussing and fidgeting and obviously doing the man no good at all.

  Frank looked around. The bodies of four convicts were scattered around the area. All of them had been shot in the neck or upper chest. Kidd's work, obviously. Frank didn't care what the general attitude of the guards was. He was starting to get very fond of Geoffrey Kidd.

  "Leffen, leave him alone. You're probably doing more harm than good."

  Frank looked over the people he had. Bird Matthews, he thought, had the most medical training of any of them. "Matthews, you stay here and do what you can for Kidd. Jenkins, you stand guard. The rest of you, come with me." "What do I do?" asked Leffen plaintively. "I have no idea. Just stay out of the way. And don't burn anything down, fiddling around." "Why would I do that?" Leffen said, more plaintively still.

  "Ain't no insurance companies left." In the machine shop area that he used for his war room, Adrian Luff moved three tool bits across the diagram of the prison. "Haggerty, get out there and tell Hancock, Olszanski and Thaxton to get their squads up to cover the entrance.

  Those guys there will need reinforcements." Haggerty left. Luff moved another couple of tool bits, while crooking a finger at Walker.

  "Jimmy, you go round up Metcalf and Michaels. We need to take back the armory." Walker left. Whatever reservations or doubts he or any of Luff's top lieutenants might have had about the situation, they were buried deep in their brains and out of sight. By now, Luff's authority was absolute. And there was something very reassuring about the way he kept calm and collected under any circumstances. Walker even thought they were going to win this battle. Haggerty could have warned him otherwise, by the time Walker reached Metcalf and Michaels and their men. But Haggerty was dead by then. Haggerty had passed through D-block on his way to find the squads Luff had sent him to find. The building was mostly empty, by then, with not more than a fourth of the cells still occupied. He was caught completely off guard by seven convicts rushing out of one of the cells. All these cells were supposed to be locked! There weren't any reliables in D-block. He only got off two shots with his rifle, and neither of them hit anything but the walls of an adjoining cell. The first con who grabbed him had gone for the rifle and had wrestled it aside. Haggerty would have died eventually from the beating that ensued. But a sharpened pork bone driven through his eye and into his brain made sure of it. Not even Luff's maniacal regime, it turned out, had been able to keep inmate ingenuity suppressed. When they were done with Haggerty, the convicts went back into the cell and hauled out one of Luff's men. One of his "reliables," as he called them. His name was Jack Mayes. The man had remained cowering in a corner, after agreeing to unlock the cell for them. Seeing the convict yanking the pork bone out of Haggerty's eye and coming toward him, Mayes squawked. "Hey! We had a deal!" By then, two other cons had him by the arms. A third con, standing behind, kicked his legs out from under him. A fourth con seized him by the hair and jerked his head into position. "We lied," were the words that came with the pork bone. Dino Morelli led the attack on the next tower. James had planned to do it himself again, but the Boomers simply wouldn't let him. They wouldn't allow Boyne to take part, either. At some indefinable point between towers, those men had started accepting that they might actually have a future. "You ain't got nothing to prove, boss," was Morelli's comment. "Neither does John." Morelli did a better job anyway. He wasn't as purely murderous as Kidd would have been. But a man doesn't commit that many armed robberies without leaning how to use a pistol, even if a smart armed robber like Morelli never actually fired a shot in the course of his crimes. The reason for his long sentence-the judge had thrown the book at him-wasn't because he'd hurt anyone in the course of the robberies.

  But he'd terrified lots of people and he'd done so damnmany of them.

  Six shots were all he fired, and he took down two men with them. The Boomer with him, on the other hand-that was Quentin Jackson-emptied his whole clip at his target. That was mostly just personal, though.

  Jackson was quite good with a pistol and knew perfectly well his first three shots had taken care of his man. But since the man involved was Tom Davidson and they had plenty of ammunition, Jackson saw no reason not to satisfy an old grudge. "How does it feel being shot to doll rags, you fuck?" He started unzipping his coverall. "Jackson, cut it out," said Morelli. "We ain't got time for you to piss on him." "Sure we do. You and me supposed to stay here and guard the tower. We got plenty of time." "Fine. I don't want tosmell it, how's that?" In the end, Jackson satisfied the last of his grudge by muscling Davidson's body out of the window and letting it plunge to the concrete far below. Between that and all the bullets he'd put in him, the man would spend his afterlife a mangled mess. Jackson was a Rastafarian, of sorts-a one-man sect in the creed-and believed firmly that you went into the afterlife looking the way you did when you died. "Think there's any weed in the here and now?" he asked Morelli, a half hour later. Morelli had been wondering the same thing. From what he could see and hear, they'd be having a celebration tomorrow. And Morelli d
idn't approve of liquor. The stuff was bad for you. Frank took down the first two convicts advancing on the armory with four shots, two for each. The fusillade that followed from the guards with him took down three more. The rest ran. "Anybody hurt?" he asked. Thankfully, nobody was. Behind them, Bird Matthews finished with her first aid.

  "Amazingly enough-assuming nothing gets infected-I think you're going to make it." "Hope so." Geoffrey hissed a little at the pain. "I'm worried about my kids." Matthews shifted to a squat and looked at him.

  "Wouldn't think you would be. That much." "Meaning no offense, ma'am, but what you know about the heart and soul of a big city hit man could be written on the head of a pin. Where were you born and raised? From the accent, I'd say Podunkville, Middle-of-the-Sticks. Population, five hundred." Matthews smiled. "Okay. Fair enough. Why'd you do it, then?" He started to shrug, but the pain that gesture caused drew another hiss. "Hard to explain, exactly. Looking back on it, I think I'd've done better to take up hamburger-flipping. In the long run, anyway. At the time, though…" His eyes studied nothing in particular on one of the walls. "When you're a kid growing up in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, with a whore for a mother and a string of men coming through instead of a father, your options look pretty limited. And you got the moral code of an alley cat. By the time I was fifteen, though, I knew two things for sure. And two things only. First, I was queer. Second, I was tougher'n anybody I knew. Way, way tougher than anybody my own age. So… one thing led to another. It doesn't take too long before you realize you've burned every bridge that might have existed, behind you. After that…" He was silent, for a while. "The funny thing is, the only thing I really regretted was that I figured I'd never have kids. And now I do. So, here I am. For the first time in my life since I was a kid myself, worrying about something." "Well, I know that feeling. It's the one thing-the only thing, and I stress that-I miss about not being straight." Kidd peered at her. "You're the dyke, right? The one they say has a motorcycle jacket?" Matthew chuckled. "Yep, that's me. Of course, I never wore it on duty. But if I can get my locker back, I'll show it to you." He managed an actual grin, despite the pain. "I'd surely like to see that jacket. The prospect's enough to keep me living, I figure. Between that and the kids." They were at the administration building, now. Andy Blacklock and Jeff Edelman worked their way across the building's large entryway. A half dozen guards bolted up the stairs, checking the upper floor offices. Another dozen went through the main level payroll offices looking under desks and inside file cabinets. And another half dozen went downstairs, to the basement area, checking behind boilers and inside tool rooms. A few slow minutes passed and theall clear call came from everywhere. The gates to the prison's interior were closed and locked, but they had a key. It slowed them down, but didn't stop them. None of the prisoners had stayed behind to protect the area. They went through the first set of gates. The second set, the ones dividing the guardhouse from the prisoner holding area, was open. So was the third set leading from the building to the main street inside the walls. "Whereare they?" Andy muttered. He was starting to get a little rattled, almost. Except for one brief firefight with a small group of convicts shortly after they took the entrance, they hadn't run into any opposition. And that firefight hadn't lasted more than a few seconds. One guard went down, with a leg wound, and two convicts were killed. The rest ran. In fact, the prison seemed eerily deserted. At Andy's command, four C.O. s left the main body of guards and veered left. They went through a door and up the stairs to the holding area reserved for men who needed close watching. The stairway was narrow, just thirty inches across.