Marcus Pelegrimas - The Breaking

Half Breeds paced in two of the cells on one side of the corridor, while a Nymar in a straitjacket sat on the toilet in another. The cell directly beside Cole’s was inhabited by a tall man wearing a standard-issue jumpsuit. He filled out the garment with a solid, muscular build. Unlike the bodybuilders one would expect to find in a prison, this one’s skin was pale yellow, segmented by rings that sectioned his flesh into narrow strips, and covered in bumps that resembled chunks of gravel embedded beneath his flesh. He crossed his arms, flexed the gill flaps along the bridge of his nose, his translucent lids blinking open to reveal solid yellow eyes.

The elevator doors slid open and Cole was shoved inside, to find Waylon already waiting with clipboard in hand.

“Evening, boss,” Cole said in an accent he’d lifted straight out of Cool Hand Luke.

After the doors slid shut, Waylon replied, “It’s afternoon.”

“Really? What day?”

“Two, since you were brought here.”

“Is that all?”

Waylon nodded while scribbling a few notes onto his clipboard. “Maybe.”

“Do I get my phone call yet?”

“No.” Punctuating his note with a loud tap that would have snapped the tip off of a lesser writing implement, Waylon pressed the button at the end of his steel gray pen and dropped it into the breast pocket of a crisp, dark blue shirt. “A woman has been making inquiries at the Canon City facility about you. Is she your partner?”

The rigors of the last few days had chiseled Cole’s expression into solid rock as he said, “Maybe she’s an ambitious lawyer.”

“It’s too late for that, Mr. Warnecki. After the commotion that was stirred up by the deaths of all those police officers, we were certain to throw them a sacrificial lamb right away.”

“So you have control of the media too? Good luck with that.”

“Not control,” Waylon said. “Someone had to stand trial, to answer for your crimes, someone who was connected to all those murders. We gave them another Skinner who was apprehended at a similar fracas in Texas, so now you and I have all the time in the world together.”

“Oh shit,” Cole grunted. “Is this some sort of weird conjugal visit? Even if I swung that way, I’d rather go without than see what’s under that suit.”

After a quick nod from Waylon, one of the two guards in the elevator slammed the butt of his shotgun into Cole’s ribs. As soon as his knees hit the floor, the second guard cracked his knee against his face.

“I’d suggest you cooperate,” Waylon warned. “The tests that lie ahead may be rigorous, but we could always get some answers from you in the form of an autopsy.” Only then did Waylon press a button on the wall panel.

Cole looked up at the guard who stood closest to the short column of buttons. He was another familiar face that had been shoving him around since he woke up strapped to a bed. The key he clutched between callused fingers was fitted into the slot next to the DOOR OPEN switch.

“Mr. Warnecki,” Waylon said while leading the way out of the elevator, “you should know that we’re not keeping you here for trivial reasons. Things have begun that need to be dealt with, and in order to do that, certain answers must be found. First among them is how the new strain of Nymar infections interact with humans. Since we’re already intimately familiar with Skinners, seeing how the newest Nymar spore interacts with you provides a unique opportunity.”

Cole was dragged to his feet and pulled along behind the man in the suit. “I’ll bet it does,” he said, while struggling to carry his own weight. “And what did you learn from telling that thick-necked asshole to beat me to a pulp in my cell?”

Without levity or malice, Waylon said, “We needed to test the limits of your recuperative abilities and how they were affected by those tendrils. It turns out they help you more than you may know.”

“Did you even try to remove them when you cut me open?”

“Of course we did. What better way to study them? If we could have gotten them as well as the organs to which they were attached without ruining the specimens, you wouldn’t have even woken up from the anesthesia. Once we get into the next room, do yourself a favor and don’t give me a reason to rethink that decision.” Retrieving the pen from his pocket and tapping its button, he asked, “Who might be looking for you?”

“How am I supposed to know that?”

Flipping the pen around his first two fingers, Waylon said, “You know how your partners operate. You know their contacts. Tell me the details.”

“If you’re so intimately familiar with Skinners, you should already know that.”

Waylon flipped the pen around again. “Your partner’s name is Paige Strobel. Does she have any official contacts in Colorado or know of any other Skinners in the vicinity?”

“Yes.”

He smiled approvingly, flipped the pen and asked, “Who?”

“Me.”

Waylon nodded, flipped the pen around to grip it at the end with the button and then jabbed its tip into Cole’s chest. The strike came too quickly for Cole to do anything about it, and although it was a shallow wound, the pen scraped against bone with a pain that felt as if a cattle prod had connected with the inside of his body.

When he reflexively tried to defend himself, Cole was grabbed by a guard on either side. The pen was not only still in him, but was being twisted and driven in deeper by Waylon’s hand.

“Does she have any other contacts?” Waylon asked.

Cole struggled against the guards, but knew he wouldn’t be able to break loose from their grip. The lightweight cuffs were used to pull his arms up behind his back until they felt about to snap in two places, and the sharpened interior of the cuffs chewed viciously into his wrists.

“Answer this question and the rest of today’s exercises will be easier,” Waylon said. Without changing a single aspect of his emotionless face, he pulled out the pen and formed a fist around it before driving his knuckles into Cole’s jaw. The pen added a nice bit of sting to the punch that Cole felt all the way back in the space where his wisdom teeth had been. Instead of asking another question, Waylon waited for Cole to meet his eyes again and then snapped another punch into the same spot. “You had your chance,” he said. “Remember that.”

Once the doors were open, the guards shoved Cole through them and into what felt like a whole other world. Compared to Canon City, the freshly painted hall and sparkling tile floors seemed like luxury hotel accommodations. Some normal people shuffled through a normal door at the end of the hall. No scars on their hands. No runes etched into the frame. The guards tightened their grip as if they too had to brace for their reentry into the mundane.

The door at the end of the hall opened into something that reminded Cole of a large, drab break room. There were a few metal tables and small stools welded to the floor, and several spots where more tables and stools had obviously been removed. There were a few vending machines along one wall, but only one was plugged in. As long as he wanted a bottle of overpriced water, he was in luck. A television was bracketed to the ceiling in one corner, and no less than half a dozen surveillance cameras were hanging from different spots along the room’s upper perimeter. The moment he stepped inside, all of those cameras shifted to point at him. He counted six guards already in the room. Four men and two women dressed in full riot gear had fanned out to surround him, and the two who brought him from his cell were absorbed into the pack. Two of the guards had shotguns, but the other four carried AK-47s and were positioned so if they all decided to fire on him at once, the collateral damage would be kept to a minimum.