Cole sat up again, ignoring the pain that came from it. “Paige wouldn’t have signed on for this.”
“That doesn’t matter. She was kind enough to hand you over under the implication that we would do what we could to get those tendrils out of you. In return, we could study what was happening to you and why you were able to be seeded when something like that should be impossible.”
“So …you’re a Skinner?”
The man merely smiled curtly and walked forward to peel the gown away from Cole’s body so he could get a look at the fresh scar. With a few inquisitive prods of his finger against the incision, he brought Cole’s focus right back to where he wanted it to be. “The tendrils can’t be removed,” he said. as if he was talking about a mole on Cole’s leg. “We opened you up …several times and from several angles. You’re quite a healer, by the way. Those tendrils are wrapped around your major organs. Stomach, kidneys, and of course the intestines. Those are the nasty ones. We managed to remove a few sections here and there, but the rest are wrapped around you so tightly in spots that they’ve cut you. The only thing keeping you from bleeding out is that the tendrils also hold you together. That is, until they get hungry.
“You see, like any simple organism, these things develop ways of communicating. Theirs is to cinch in tighter to provoke an anger response that leads to pain and eventually to the conclusion that you need to feed them. Either that or they just tighten as some sort of reflex. I won’t be certain about that until we do some more studying. Of course, we may have to stop feeding them as a way to gauge how their reactions change. Since we seem to have a problem putting you back under, it’s best to keep you from gathering so much strength anyway. Surely you understand.”
“I want to talk to Paige.”
“I bet you do. She was never informed of your real location. Even the press believes you’re still being held in Canon City before being moved to Indiana.”
“You mean I’m not?”
“Close,” the man replied, “but not close enough for you to hear all the commotion.”
“She’ll find me,” Cole said with absolute certainty.
“Will she?” The man pondered that for a moment and then stepped back. “Thanks to our intruder today, I’m tightening security around here. It should be interesting to find out how close she or anyone else can get to you.” Looking to a guard, he said, “After his incision is redressed, take him to G7 and institute every level of containment.”
Chapter Four
Cole was escorted down a corridor that took him past an entire section of empty cells to a small freight elevator. Beside it was a booth sealed behind safety glass sandwiched between two metal grates. The floor beneath his feet was dark red. Beyond that, it was gray. The walls deeper within the building were the same colors, all of which had been painted recently enough for fumes to still waft through the air. Without any other prisoners behind the bars of those cells, it seemed almost comical to be going through the motions of being in official custody. Every step of the way his senses absorbed his surroundings to look for any opening that might present itself. He was weaponless, exposed, wounded, surrounded by guards who knew way too much about what he was, and abandoned by the people who were supposed to help him. And just when his prospects couldn’t get any better, the pain in his guts crept back in.
Due to the open layout of the corridor, he could see the bare cement of the two floors beneath him. His best guess was that he was in an abandoned jail or possibly even an old department store. When he was shoved into the freight elevator, Cole wasn’t allowed to turn back around to face the door. Instead, his head was pressed against the wall and pinned there by a baton jammed against the back of his neck. “So,” he grunted while turning so his mouth wasn’t scraping against the wall, “I take it that saving someone from getting fed upon doesn’t count for anything?”
“That thing would have killed you too if we hadn’t come in,” one of the guards said. “That makes us even.”
“What about a phone call? Do I still get one of those? It’s been a while, but I’ve never been allowed to make a phone call.”
“That’s a privilege,” one of the guards said. “Not a right. You lost all of your privileges.”
“So now I’m really in trouble, huh?”
The elevator was slow, which made it easier for Cole to figure out they were headed up. When he was turned around, he spotted the number 3 illuminated above the doors. “What’s G7?” he asked. When he didn’t get a response, he added, “Did I sink someone’s battleship?”
A rough hand slapped against the back of his head to force it down until his chin knocked against the top of his chest. More hands shoved Cole forward as one of the guards stayed behind to press a series of buttons just beyond the elevator doors.
The concrete floor was clean, cold, and gray. Unlike the rest of the prison, Cole could feel eyes upon him from every angle, and when he tried to get a look at who was watching him, his head was viciously turned back toward the floor.
Growing nervous as well as cautious, the guards plodded methodically down the corridor. That gave Cole some time to test his limits in much the same way he’d been taught to constantly move his arms in the event of being tied up with rope. He could turn his head a fraction of an inch in either direction so long as the movement looked like a natural sway. Shifting his eyes in their sockets all the way to one side allowed him to catch a glimpse of the bottom edges of more cells. Some had pairs of feet wrapped in standard-issue canvas slip-ons standing just behind the bars. Others were stained with what could have been vomit, spilled lunch, or dried blood. When he caught sight of markings etched into the bars, Cole realized his captors weren’t just Skinner wannabes.
The markings weren’t anything as simple as manufacturer stamps or graffiti left behind by a prisoner. They were carved very carefully into the iron with too much precision to have been put there by tools that could be smuggled into a cell. Cole’s suspicions were confirmed when he noticed the same markings etched into every bar he passed. They were runes. He’d seen enough of the blocky, arcane shapes on Lancroft’s walls and above the doorways in Ned’s house to recognize the Skinner symbols anywhere. He didn’t know what they said, but it meant there was a lot more going on here than he’d suspected.
One guard hurried to get to one of the cells farther along the line. Although Cole didn’t hear the rattle of keys or the movement of machinery, he could hear the creak of metal hinges grating against each other. After several more paces he was pulled to a stop, turned to the right and shown a set of bars set directly into the floor. An opening three bars wide had been created when a door, only slightly bigger than one built for a dog, was unlocked.
“Get in,” the guard said.
Cole planted his feet and told him, “No.”
“Get in.”
“Not until you tell me what’s going on. Are you guys Skinners or not?”
The silence was thick enough to let him know they weren’t strangers to that term.
He forced his head up, turned around and was taken aback by the presence of four guards instead of the two who had brought him to the third floor. “I’ve seen cells like this before. They were in Jonah Lancroft’s basement. You know who he is, don’t you?”
Slapping the end of a baton against Cole’s chest, the guard shoved him toward the cell. “Shut up and get moving.”
Cole grabbed the stick and moved it aside. “You do know who he is. What about the guy in the suit? I bet he knows plenty.”
“Get into that cell. This is your last warning.” Now that the other guards were closing ranks around him, the man with the baton was rediscovering his courage. His partners brandished weapons ranging from bats to shotguns.
Cole clenched his fists and tried to draw on whatever strength he could pull from the tendrils inside him. Without a spore at their base, and now blood to replenish what they’d burned up earlier, however, the tendrils were nothing more than remnants that constricted or relaxed out of hunger-driven reflex. “This is a mistake. I know what these runes are. I don’t belong in this cage.”