Nothing.
“Inmate Stephenson? I’m talking to you.”
“That’s Officer Lampley,” said Claudia, still shaking and still scraping at the relentless white threads—God, it was hard to stay ahead of them. “I like her, don’t you? Don’t you, Ree?” Claudia began to cry. “Don’t go away, honey, it’s too soon to go away!”
And at first she thought the woman on the bunk appeared to agree with that, because her eyes snapped open and she began to smile.
“Ree!” Claudia said. “Oh, thank God! I thought you were—”
Only the smile continued to spread, the lips drawing back until it wasn’t a smile at all but a teeth-baring snarl. Ree sat up and clamped her hands around Claudia’s neck and bit off one of Claudia’s favorite earrings, a little plastic kitten-face. Claudia screamed. Ree spat out the earring along with the attached scrap of earlobe, and went for Claudia’s throat.
Claudia outweighed the diminutive Ree Dempster by seventy pounds, and she was strong, but Ree had gone insane. Claudia was barely able to hold her off. Ree’s fingers slipped from Claudia’s neck and her fingernails dug into the larger woman’s bare shoulders, bringing blood.
Claudia staggered from the bunk and toward the open cell door, Ree clinging to her like a limpet, snarling and gnashing and jerking from side to side, trying to break Claudia’s hold on her so she could move in and do real damage. Then they were in the hall and inmates were shouting, Officer Lampley was bellowing, and those sounds were in another galaxy, another universe, because Ree’s eyes were bulging and Ree’s teeth were chomping inches from Claudia’s face and then, oh God, her feet tangled and Claudia went sprawling in the B Wing corridor with Ree on top of her.
“Inmate!” Van shouted. “Inmate, let loose!”
Women were screaming. Claudia did not, at least to begin with. Screaming took strength, and she needed hers to hold the lunatic—the demon—away from her. Only it wasn’t working. That snapping mouth was closing in. She could smell Ree’s breath and see drops of Ree’s spittle, with tiny white filaments dancing in each drop.
“Inmate, I have drawn my weapon! Don’t make me fire it! Please don’t make me do that!”
“Shoot her!” someone screamed, and Claudia realized the someone was her. It seemed she had enough strength, after all. “Please, Officer Lampley!”
There was a huge bang in the hallway. A large black hole appeared high in Ree’s forehead, right in the middle of the grid of scar tissue. Her eyes swiveled up, as if she were trying to see where she’d been shot, and warm blood spattered across Claudia’s face.
With a final galvanic effort, Claudia pushed Ree away. Ree hit the corridor with a limp thud. Officer Lampley stood with her legs braced and her service weapon held out before her in both hands. The smoke curling from the muzzle reminded Claudia of the white threads that had stuck to her fingers when she had brushed Ree’s hair. Officer Lampley’s face was dead pale save for the purple pouches under her eyes.
“She was going to kill me,” Claudia gasped.
“I know,” Van said. “I know.”
CHAPTER 17
Halfway to town, Clint Norcross had a thought that caused him to pull into the lot of the Olympia Diner and park beside the easel sign reading MY OH MY, TRY OUR EGG PIE. He pulled out his phone and searched HICKS. He didn’t have his number, which said everything about his relationship with Dooling Correctional’s assistant warden. He scrolled further and found LAMPLEY.
Lampley picked up on the second ring. She sounded out of breath.
“Van? You okay?”
“Yeah, but you left before the fireworks. Listen, Doc, I had to shoot someone.”
“What? Who?”
“Ree Dempster. She’s dead.” Van explained what had happened. Clint listened, aghast.
“Jesus,” he said when she was finished. “Are you all right, Van?”
“Physically unhurt. Emotionally fucked to the sky, but you can psychoanalyze me later.” Van made a vast watery honking sound, blowing her nose on something. “There’s more.”
She told Clint about the violent confrontation between Angel Fitzroy and Evie Black. “I wasn’t there, but I saw part of it on the monitors.”
“Good thing you did. And Claudia. Sounds like you saved her life.”
“It wasn’t a good thing for Dempster.”
“Van—”
“I liked Dempster. If you’d asked me, I would have said she was the last woman in here to go postal.”
“Where’s her body?”
“In the janitor’s closet.” Van sounded ashamed. “It was all we could think of.”
“Of course.” Clint rubbed his forehead, eyes squeezed shut. He felt he ought to say more to comfort Lampley, but the words weren’t there. “And Angel? What about her?”
“Sorley, of all people, got hold of a Mace can and blasted her. Quigley and Olson bullrushed her into a cell in A Wing. She’s currently beating on the walls and yelling for a doctor. Claims she’s blind, which is bullshit. She’s also claiming there are moths in her hair, which might not be bullshit. We’ve got an infestation of the bastards. You need to get back here, Doc. Hicks is having a meltdown. He asked me to surrender my weapon, which I refused to do, even though I suppose it’s protocol.”
“You did the right thing. Until things settle down, protocol’s out the window.”
“Hicks is useless.”
Don’t I know it, Clint thought.
“I mean, he always was, but under these circumstances, he could actually be dangerous.”
Clint searched for a thread. “You said Evie was egging Angel on. What exactly was she saying?”
“I don’t know, and neither do Quigley or Millie, either. Sorley might. She was the one who slowed Angel’s roll. Chick deserves a medal. If she doesn’t crash out, you can get the whole story from her when you come back. Which will be soon, right?”
“ASAP,” said Clint. “Listen, Van, I know you’re upset, but I need to be clear on one thing. Angel started in on Evie because Evie wasn’t in one of those cocoons?”
“That’s my sense. I just saw her whacking on the bars with a lid from one of the coffee urns, and yelling her head off. Then I had my own fish to fry.”
“But she woke up?”
“Yeah.”
“Evie woke up.”
“Yeah. Fitzroy woke her up.”
Clint tried to make something coherent of this, and couldn’t. Maybe after he got some sleep himself—
The idea caused a flush of guilt to heat his face. A wild idea came to him: What if Evie Black was male? What if his wife had arrested a guy in drag?
But no. When Lila arrested her, Evie had been buck naked. Presumably the female officers supervising her intake had seen her that way, too. And what would explain all her bruises and scrapes healing in less than half a day?
“I need you to pass on what I’m about to say to Hicks and the other officers who are still there.” Clint had come back around to the thought that had occurred to him in the first place, why he had pulled into the diner parking lot and called the prison.
“Won’t take long,” she said. “Billy Wettermore and Scott Hughes just came in, which is good news, but still, to call this a skeleton crew would be an insult to skeletons. We’ve got just seven warm bodies, counting Hicks. You’ll make eight.”
Clint ignored this broad hint. “It struck me as I was driving into town, this stuff about Eve Black being different from the rest of the women, on top of what you’ve told me now—I just don’t know what to make of it. But I know that we can’t let it leave the prison, not yet. True or false. It could cause a riot. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”