Eric Flint: Time spike

There would be no jailbird for her. Gently, Lowell put the photograph in his shirt pocket and said, "Let's go." A few minutes later they rejoined Andy and the other guards, who had just finished with cellblock A. It was as empty as the one the extraction team had checked and no one was happy about it. The prison felt like a trap waiting to be sprung. The empty buildings and empty walkways echoed with their footsteps and whispers. The mix of guards, Cherokees and U.S. soldiers no longer fanned out quite as quickly when they entered a new area. They wanted to stay clustered together; their faces mirrored their emotions. They crossed the prison checking each cell house, garbage dumpster and abandoned vehicle they passed.

Methodically, they worked their way to the exercise yard. They could hear an occasional gunshot from somewhere in the prison, and a fair amount of shouting or screaming. But not enough. Not two thousand prisoners enough. Rod Hulbert was on the roof of the administration building watching Captain Blacklock and Chief Watkins. Marie Keehn and two dozen of the guards were waiting at the east gate. Their plan had been pretty straightforward. They would attack the prison from the front and the west, herding the prisoners through the safe-lookingeast opening. Once through the wall, Marie and her people would start dropping them until and unless they surrendered. Rod was nervous. So far, he had counted only thirty-three prisoners moving around. Most of them were dead, thanks either to him or Blacklock's people. And Cook's Boomers had taken out three of the towers, which accounted for another half dozen to a dozen. That wasway too low. Things were about to get deadly. They had to. There were only four buildings left to go through: C-block, D-block, the infirmary and the machine shop. And for two thousand men to be in those buildings, it would be elbow to elbow.

He watched, ready to take down anyone he could spot. Andy and a dozen guards, backed up by Kershner and his men, were about to storm the infirmary. Most of those who would remain outside surrounded the building, their weapons trained on every window and door. A dozen others stood with their backs to the buildings. If any prisoners had been missed, and tried to come at them from behind, they would be ready. "Goddamit, where's Haggerty?" Luff demanded of the two lieutenants he still had with him in the war room. "And Jimmy should be back by now, too." But Jimmy Walker was in pieces, by then.

Preoccupied and worried because he hadn't been able to find Michaels and Metcalf, he'd made the mistake of passing too closely by one of the locked cells in C-block packed with unreliable inmates. Hands-many hands-had seized him and yanked him against the bars. The hands tried to take his rifle, too, but the rifle had come loose and fallen on the floor too far away to be reached. Still, the hands had Walker. And while the men who owned those hands couldn't get out of the cell, they could go to work on him. And when they tired, pass him to the hands in the next cell. He spent the rest of his life seeing nothing but hands.

Black hands, white hands, brown hands. Some of them were very strong.

All of them were very eager. He didn't see anything, after a while.

His eyes were gone. Soon after, he stopped screaming. His throat was gone too. "What do we do, boss?" asked Boyne. "We didn't expect this." James didn't have an answer. He'd thought they'd be occupied the whole time taking the towers. But after the second tower, that Morelli had taken, the towers were empty. Somebody had been in those towers. Cigarette butts were strewn all over. But they were gone now. *** In a clearing in the woods just out of sight of the prison, Jenny Radford and Barbara Ray did another check of their supplies.

There was no point to that, really. They'd gotten their improvised battlefield medical center set up long since. The handful of guards Andy had left to protect them-against predators, more than the possibility of convicts coming out-at least had that duty to keep them busy. Jenny and Barbara had nothing. Another useless check of the supplies at least kept them from having fits.

Chapter 55 Andy approached the door to the infirmary, praying his vest would take whatever came out the window at him. Nothing came. He halfheartedly pulled on the doorknob, expecting it to be locked. It wasn't. Hurriedly, he stepped into the entryway. The second set of doors was also unlocked. His nerves were stretched tight. His heart was in his throat. None of this made any sense. He jumped through the door opening and turned around, checking the mirrors over his head.

All the halls were empty. There was a strange, pungent odor in the air. He couldn't quite place it. The other guards and Kershner and his men were now just two steps behind him. They moved slowly across the floor. He waved at the examining room and one of the guards disappeared into its interior and returned in a short while, shaking his head. Another guard had moved on, checking the break room and then the records room. Again, a headshake. Andy looked at the stairwell leading up to the second floor and couldn't help but wince. The moment they were inside the stairwell they would become sitting ducks. He opened the door and stepped through it, motioning for the others to follow. As quickly and quietly as possible, they climbed the stairs and reached the top. Again, the door wasn't locked. He opened it, gave a soft shove and it swung wide. The strange odor was there, stronger now, but no prisoners. They moved quickly, fanning out. "Blacklock.

Over here." Kershner and Pitzel were staring into a row of three cells. Andy hurried over. Bodies were stacked inside all of the cells, reaching from the floor to within a foot of the ceiling. All of them were headless. All of them were naked. "Over here," Watkins called.

They turned and went over. It was another cell. This one was lined with heads. "Jesus," one of the guards whispered. "We knew about the meat lockers, but…" Andy's stomach churned and he could feel the room spin. He took a deep breath and regretted it immediately. He recognized the peculiar scent, now. But it wasn't the scent that nauseated him-that was just the smell of powerful disinfectant cleaning fluids, mixed with… ammonia, maybe. Or bleach. What sickened him was the realization of what had happened. Having filled the freezers, and still not knowing what to do with more bodies, Luff must have decided this was the best temporary solution. Drenching the corpses with this home-made let's-hope-it-works hideous brew must have been what he decided would keep the bodies from decaying before he could figure out a final solution. There was always a method to the man's madness, as mad as it might be. "Okay," he said. "I need an estimate. How many dead?" Jeff Edelman walked toward them, his face pale. "There are a hundred and forty-two names on this list. Every one of them except the last nineteen has a line drawn through it." He handed Andy the clipboard he'd found on the desk. They found the guillotine in C-block. Along with-thank God-hundreds of convicts still alive, packed in their cells. And, outside the cells, what was left of a convict that Andy thought might be-might have been-Jimmy Walker.

Andy walked down the line of cells, staring at the still-living inmates. For their part, they stared back at him silently. Some of them were crying. Eventually, one of the inmates cleared his throat and said: "Nice to see you again, Captain Blacklock. Where you been?"

"Nice to see you, Franklin. I've been detained by other business, I'm afraid. But I'm back now." Franklin cleared his throat. "Good. We wound up missing you. A lot." "Where's Luff?" whispered the inmate next to Franklin. Andy shook his head. "We don't know yet. But we'll find him." "When you do, kill him. Kill all of them. Please." Andy didn't reply to that. He'd already come to the conclusion himself that that was probably the only rational solution. But being back inside the place he'd worked for many years-the place that, strange as it might be, had shaped his sense of duty, even his sense of self-he didn't feel able to give that order. What he could order with regard to foreign conquistadores, he simply couldn't do with regard to inmates who were under his authority. Rod would think he was nuts, of course. Rod was probably even right. But Andy wasn't Hulbert. "Don't worry about Luff," was all he finally said. "Whatever else, he's done." There came the sound of a fusillade, from far away. A big one, and it was ongoing. Andy keyed his radio. Before he could even ask, Marie's voice came over it, providing the answer. "A lot of inmates are trying to make a break through the east gate. We're gunning them down. But they keep pouring out. Must be fifty of them already, and there's more coming." "Are they armed? Can you handle it?" "Yes, they're armed. Rifles, mostly. But they're completely panicked, Andy.