When she dropped down, Paige assumed she’d lost the strength to stand.
When she felt strong hands clamp around her ankles and the pressure of dirt closing around the lower portion of her legs, she allowed herself to be dragged underground. Too tired to fight, she figured she might as well see where this next batch of insanity would take her.
Chapter Eleven
As much as it hurt to dig his fingernails into such tender flesh, Cole wasn’t about to stop. He sat with his back to the wall, feet pressed against the frame of his bunk, and bit into his cheek to keep from making a sound while digging deeper into the portion of his palm that had become a bloody mess.
“If you don’t stop picking at that, it won’t never heal,” Lambert said from the cell directly across from him.
“It’s not so bad,” Cole grunted.
Another voice said, “Yes. It is. You’re sweating and bleeding. A lot.”
Cole stopped what he was doing and looked toward the bars on the right side of his cage. The voice he’d heard had the texture of meat hooks being dragged over a parched desert floor. “What makes you think that?” he asked.
When the voice came again, it was closer to the side of his cell. “Because I can smell it.”
Something poked around the edge of his bars at about the height of a guard’s shoulder. It was the approximate size and shape of a fist, covered in light yellow and tan scales. Cole had seen the creature in the neighboring cell a few times by now and guessed he was one of the lizard men Ned had discovered in the Florida swamps. The Skinners had salvaged some pretty impressive parts from their kind, but he doubted that fact would go over too well with the inmate next door.
“Since you can poke your nose out that far,” Cole said, “why don’t you do me a favor and see about picking the lock on my door?”
His request was answered by a strong snuff that caused the flaps on the lizard man’s nose to retract. “You brought something back with you.”
While he could accept another species’ strong sense of smell, that statement threw him for a loop. Waylon’s drilling session had lasted just under three hours, and he had somehow stayed awake for all of it. When he was brought back to his cell afterward, the only thing he cared about was that they wouldn’t search him before forcing him into his cage. He was covered in blood and could barely move, but felt lucky when the guards stuffed him through the doggie door, uncuffed him through the bars, and walked away. Ever since then, he’d been digging into his hand without giving anyone reason to think he might be doing anything more than fussing with one of his many wounds. The thing he’d found wedged in his hand was a sliver the size of a chipped Popsicle stick. After a few hours of poking and prodding, the sliver had finally started coming out.
Across the corridor, Lambert stood up and approached the bars of his cell. “What did you bring back with you?”
Cole did his best to silence the other prisoner with a stern, insistent glare. Although the tattooed inmate was willing to humor him, the lizard man next door wasn’t so accommodating.
“It’s part of a Skinner weapon,” the yellowed snout declared. It opened slightly, allowing a slick tongue to graze along the edge of the closest iron bar. It wasn’t as wide as a human tongue, but longer and creased down the middle. “I can smell that too.”
“Where you from, my man?” Lambert asked.
Cole got back to his work, more anxious than ever to get the object he’d worked so hard to smuggle into his cell. “Judging by that tongue, my guess is the Everglades or Detroit Rock City.”
“Why do you suddenly care about that?” the lizard man asked.
“Because,” Lambert cut in, “you ain’t said a single word since I been here. I was starting to think you reptile people couldn’t even talk.”
The snout pulled away from Cole’s bars so it could stretch a few inches into the corridor. “Why would we talk to such ignorant murderers like you?” he snapped, flashing a single row of identical, rounded teeth that were all just under an inch long and spaced as evenly as points on a saw blade.
“Ignorant?” Lambert said. “Maybe it’d be best if you went back to shutting the fuck up.”
After a few more presses of his thumb and forefinger against either side of his tender scar, Cole coaxed the splinter out from the spot where it had been stubbornly wedged. It hurt like hell but was now close to coming out. Rather than tease it anymore, he pressed his thumb hard against the bottom portion of the wound and didn’t let up until the wooden sliver poked out. “Squam,” he sighed while gently pulling the sliver out.
Another huffing breath came from outside the cell.
“Huh?” Lambert said while maintaining a defensive stance, with both hands gripping the bars in front of him.
Despite the fact that the wound on his palm was bleeding more than ever, the intense pain of having the sharp piece of wood lodged in there was gone. It was a blissful tradeoff. “Not reptile people,” he said. “Squam …” What did Ned call them? Holding up the sliver as if the word he was after was burned into its side, Cole nodded and said, “Squamatosapien.”
“Now you see why I talk to him and not you?” the Squam next door said.
Lambert crossed his arms and shrugged. “If he could see how ugly you are, he wouldn’t mind not having one less buddy around here. What you got there, Cole?”
“Nothing,” Cole said.
Pressing up against the bars as if his voice would carry better now that he was half an inch closer, Lambert whispered, “You’re right. Good thinkin’. They’re probably listening to us right now.”
“Maybe, but we can’t afford to pussy-foot anymore. We need to get the hell out of here and we need to do it quick.”
“And that sliver’s gonna help?”
Cole approached the bars anxiously at first, but sucked in a pained breath the moment he tried to grab one with his bloody hand. Taking a moment to wipe some blood onto his pants, he went to the other side of the front wall to examine the symbols he’d found on the bars. The sliver in his hand was flat and thin on the portion that had snapped away from the stake. The other end was still worn down into the small cylindrical nub of a single thorn. “It’d better help. I went through enough shit to get this thing.”
The Squam pushed its head out from between the bars of its cell. His leathery head made a rough scraping sound as he grunted and strained with the effort of getting the nubs on either side of his face clear of the metal barrier. Once his ear flaps were past the bars, he turned to look at Cole using an unblinking, dark yellow eye. “What are you doing now?”
Cole smiled as he held the sliver tightly and leaned against the front of his cell. Angling his body and lowering his arm so he could scrape the bar without being obvious about it, he said, “I’ll let you know after it works. What’s your name, neighbor?”
The Squam watched Cole’s concentrated efforts to scratch the pointed end of the splinter against one of the runes etched into the bar. His yellow eye rolled within its socket like a ball bearing housed in an oval casing. “Why do you want to know?”
“I don’t know. Why does anyone want to know someone’s name? Must be a habit I fell into ever since preschool. What’s your name, kid? That sort of thing.”
This time, the breath that fluttered the skin covering the Squam’s nostrils sounded more like a deep-throated chuckle. “Frank. My name’s Frank.”
“Now we’re cookin’,” Cole said as he continued to scrape. He paused for a moment to wipe off some of the blood that had been transferred from the sliver onto the bar. Not only did it cut through the rune, but some flecks of iron came away as well. “Are there really only three more prisoners in this section, Frank?”
“Two Half Breeds, one Nymar. But they already took the Nymar away.”
Cole’s scraping stopped. “Why?”