The Breaking

CHAPTER Eleven


Colorado

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 f*ck 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 p-ssy-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?”

“He’s dead,” Lambert announced.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Think I’m lying to you, a*shole?”

Resuming his scraping, Cole grumbled, “You seemed a lot friendlier when I first got here, you know that?”

Lambert placed his arms across the bars so he could rest his forehead against them. “That’s when I thought you were someone I could work with and not some swamp lover.”

Hearing Frank’s angry hiss gurgling nearby, Cole said, “If things go the way I think they might, we’ll need to stick together to get out of here.”

“You plan on getting out soon?” Lambert asked.

“Sooner rather than later. That work for you?”

“Sure. How about we swing by to get some food first? I like them ice cream sandwiches in that vending machine downstairs.”

More leathery skin scraped against iron bars as the Squam strained to get a closer look at his neighbor. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Now that the wooden chunk was out of his hand and the wound was slowly healing, Cole felt as if he had his own personal sunbeam shining on his shoulders. It was the best he’d felt for days, and his mood got even better when he saw the fine job the varnished piece of wood was doing on the bar. Like the spear he’d left behind or any other Skinner weapon, the chip was harder than stone, lighter than plastic, and sharper than tempered steel. The fact that it sliced into his fingers while it was pushed against the bars worked in his favor as the splinter absorbed even more of his blood into its grain.

“I’m working on some of this graffiti,” Cole said. “You know. Trying to clean up the place before we have any more visitors.”

The Squam’s face twisted into a strange mockery of confusion. “Are you expecting another visitor?”

“They don’t seem to leave us alone for very long around here,” Lambert said while squinting to try to get a better look at Cole’s busy hands. “I know about them runes too. They’re not the ones used to unlock the door.”

“I know. I can’t reach those.” Suddenly, Cole stopped and closed his eyes. “Frank,” he said, hoping he wasn’t about to look like the biggest moron in lockup, “can you reach those symbols on the wall?”

“The ones the guards always touch to unlock the doors?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

Cole nodded and returned to his task. Gritting his teeth, he squeezed the splinter harder until the thorn sliced into his thumb. The command he recited echoed so loudly through his brain that he couldn’t stop himself from mouthing the words. The wood chip didn’t respond as well as his own spear, but it did shift slightly into a more angular shape that was better suited for gouging into the iron bar. He didn’t want to look up from the symbol he was carving into. Every bit of willpower he could force into the task was committed to honing the tool in his hand. “How long have you been in here, Frank?”

“Long enough to know those symbols can’t be scratched off.”

The chip in Cole’s hand was responding quicker with the thorn fully embedded in his flesh. When he wanted to saw deeper, it grew a more jagged edge. When his hold on it started to slip, it formed subtle grooves along its surface to allow his fingers to find better purchase. “Maybe not easily, but I think I can get it done.”

“Do you know how they work?”

“All you need to do is know which ones are the triggers and which way you’re supposed to trace the design to make them turn on or off.”

“I figured out that much by watching the guards,” Lambert said. “What else you got?”

“How about this?” Cole had been hoping for a dramatic snap of metal as the wedge of bar he’d cut came loose and fell to the floor. Instead, what he got was the grind of his wood chip getting stuck inside the groove it had made. There was some struggling involved, but he managed to pull his tool loose while also popping the small section of iron from the bar. He picked it up, brushed it off and examined it. Smiling proudly, he said, “Just what I thought. The runes don’t go all the way down.”

“Why didn’t you just cut all the way through the bar?” Frank asked.

“Actually, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do this much. This wood is stronger than I thought. Anyway,” Cole added while tucking the iron wedge into his shoe, “this is better.”

“Was something supposed to have happened?”

Cole dropped to his knees and bent down to the little square door. “Let me ask you something, Frank. Can you see anything special from these bars? Like maybe something the rest of us can’t see?”

“Yes.”

“Whoa, wait,” Lambert said. “How’d you know that?”

Frank’s voice was like a huff of air blown over a dry slate. “Yes. How did you know about that?”

“I’m a Skinner. We know things.”

The cryptic response sounded bad the moment Cole said it, and went over even worse with the other two prisoners.

“You know how to deface prison property,” Lambert scoffed. “That puts you right up there with the dickhead who had this cell before me who broke the toilet.”

“How do you know about what I can or cannot see?” Frank asked.

“We don’t have time for this,” Cole said. “Someone’s gotta be coming by now.”

Lambert pushed his face into the gap between two of his bars as though he expected to pull the same trick as the Squam. “Now you’re worried about them watching?”

After seeing the cross section of the other bar, he had a better idea how far down he needed to saw on the others. His progress wasn’t hampered by the sudden rattling of his cage, but the leathery fist pounding against it sure caught his attention.

“Answer me, Skinner,” Frank demanded while thumping the bars with a scaly fist. “How do you know so much about us?”

Cole knew about the Squamatosapien’s eyesight because of another Skinner’s research. Ned Post had spent some time in the Everglades, tracked down a few of the lizard people and discovered they could operate on another visual spectrum that essentially allowed them to see scents. Thus, they could avoid the Nymar that had hunted them, along with any number of predators both natural and supernatural. Since Ned continued his research by cutting out Squam eyes and tear ducts to create the drops used to temporarily give Skinners that same ability, Cole wasn’t eager to answer Frank’s question.

Of all the times he’d heard the elevator doors slide open at the other end of the corridor, this was the first time he welcomed it. Guards were coming, but it also meant he didn’t have to try to bluff a creature that very possibly could have smelled a lie the moment it came out of his mouth. “If you want to continue this conversation, we can do it once we’re out of here,” he said to the Squam. “And if you want to join us, I suggest you do your best to keep these guys off of me so I can work.”

“Fine,” Frank hissed, “but I will not forget to ask again.”

Cole already figured as much. Considering how things had gone so far, why should anything be easy?

“I’m in too,” Lambert said.

Footsteps knocked against the floor outside the elevator. Rather than say anything that might be overheard, Cole nodded and got back to work.

“What’s going on in here?” a guard asked. Cole recognized the voice as belonging to the guy who brought plates of runny stew and cups of instant oatmeal as what passed for dinner and breakfast. The steps stopped near Frank’s cell, punctuated by the loud clang of a club against his bars. “You trying to squeeze out of there? When’d you learn to do that?”

Cole felt like Renfield from the old Dracula movies as he squatted down and sawed away at the cell door with his little wooden chip. The big difference between him and a lunatic was that he knew exactly what he was doing and was making progress. Then again, that’s probably exactly what all the lunatics thought.

“And what do you think you’re trying to do?” the guard asked while swinging his gaze toward Cole. “What’s in your hand? If you’re cutting yourself, it won’t get you—” Frank’s hand shot out from his cell so quickly that the guard never had a chance of stopping it. He barely had a chance to turn around before Frank grabbed the back of his head and snapped his temple against the iron bars.

“Good,” Cole said breathlessly as sweat rolled down his face. “Just a little longer and I should have this.”

Lambert kept his forearms pressed against the front of his cell and his head leaning against them. “Don’t know what you’re getting so excited about. What the hell’s supposed to happen if you cut through another one of those? Nothing happened when you cut the first one.”

“Sure, nothing you can see. Ask Frank what happened.”

The guard struggled a little, but his movements seemed to come from reflex instead of any earnest attempt at escaping Frank’s grip. He was allowed to move away from the bars just until there was an inch or so between his face and that of the reptile man. Then Frank closed that distance with a sharp pull that momentarily subdued the guard. “The bars were smoking before,” he said.

“Huh?” the other inmate asked.

Although Lambert was confused, Cole wasn’t. He’d used Ned’s eye drops a few times and had seen the smoky trails drifting off objects affected by active Skinner or Dryad charms. “What about now?” he asked.

Frank strained to keep the guard under control as the guy started to come around. The quick recovery meant he was probably a Skinner, Cole thought, or at least had something in his system to help with healing. “No,” the Squam said. “Not anymore.”

“Good.”

“Get that a*shole to open the door,” Lambert said.

Sucking in as much air as he could, the guard, awake now, replied, “F*ck that and f*ck you.”

“Kinda figured you’d be that way,” Cole muttered. “Which is why I thought I’d get out myself. Just hope this works the way I think it will.”

Since the arrival of the first guard, Cole’s senses had jumped to high alert. Every rattle he heard, every echoed voice, every creak within the walls, pounded through his ears. The sound of the elevator might as well have been claps of thunder as the car rumbled upward. He put his adrenaline to use by cutting the bar with increased vigor. Although the groove didn’t meet up perfectly with the first one, he jammed the wood chip in and wiggled it back and forth until the slice of iron finally gave way. Having seen enough of the runes to recognize the simple locking designs that showed up on most of the doors in Lancroft’s Philly house, he knew exactly which ones to cut. Once the sequence was interrupted, the circuit was broken and the low square door separated from the rest of the bars.

“Sweet!” Cole shouted. “About damn time something went right!”

He shoved the door open and crawled through. As soon as he was out, he climbed to his feet and looked for the runes the guards had touched to open the door properly. They were also like the designs used by Lancroft. Similar runes were on every door in the row, situated just outside any prisoner’s reach. Since Lambert was closer, Cole ran to that cell and ran his finger over the one specific rune Rico had made him memorize so he wouldn’t lock himself in or out of a closet or basement.

The skinny prisoner let out a whooping laugh when his door clanked once and swung open. “I gotta learn about those runes!” he said while crawling out of his cell. He then dashed across the corridor to slap a hand on Cole’s shoulder and pull him away from the wall next to Frank’s cell. “What’re you doing?”

“Letting him out,” Cole replied. “What do you think?”

“I think that’s a mistake.”

“The mistake is wasting time and turning away any help we can get. Now get your hand off of me.”

“That thing ain’t one of us,” Lambert said. “If we get out of here—”

“You won’t get out of here,” Frank warned. “Not if you plan on walking past this cell.”

Lambert stood as close to nose-to-nose with the Squam as the bars would allow. “Yeah? And how do you think you’ll stop us, Lizard Boy?”

Before Frank could answer, the door to his cell clanked and swung open. Cole stood with his finger still on the unlocking rune and met Lambert’s glare with one of his own. “He already helped us by taking care of this dipshit.”

The dipshit in question tried to swing his billy club, but his arm was stopped by a block that Cole performed out of pure reflex before bending his arm back and snapping his elbow into the guard’s jaw. After taking the club, he allowed Frank to leave his cell and toss the guard in to take his place.

“The elevator’s almost here” Cole said while locking the door. “We need to deal with whoever’s in there. Can’t be a lot of them. It’s not that big an elevator.”

Nodding toward the Half Breeds pacing in their cage, Frank said, “Let them out. They’ll tear the guards apart.”

“After they’re done with us,” Lambert said. “Or they’ll hit the guards first and then us. Either way, we won’t be able to put those things down.”

“He’s right,” Cole said. “If we want out of this, we gotta fight for it until help arrives.”

“And what if we don’t last that long?” Frank asked.

Perhaps Paige’s teachings and attitude problem had an effect on him, because Cole replied, “Then we don’t deserve to get out.” Not another word needed to be said.

When the doors opened, all three of them charged the elevator, Cole at the head of the pack. The first thing he saw was the barrel of a shotgun pointed at the floor near his feet. The man holding the shotgun started to raise it, but didn’t get halfway before Cole grabbed the weapon midway along its barrel and pounded the club into the guard’s face to drive him back into the elevator. Waylon and two more guards were in the elevator, all them armed with either shotguns or wooden clubs. By the time the first guard went down, those clubs were shifting into deadlier, bladed forms. Lambert took the shotgun Cole tossed to him while driving his foot squarely into another man’s gut, then slammed the stock into the third guard’s face, knocking him cold.

Frank was last to arrive but made one hell of an entrance. He grabbed Waylon in one hand and the last guard in the other to slam both of them against the inside of the elevator. Both men kicked and struggled, prompting Frank to pull them closer while opening his mouth to expose even rows of identical teeth. Before he could chew anyone’s face off, the ratcheting sound of the shotgun’s pump action filled the cramped space.

Cole ejected a shell that had been ready to fire, but the sound captured everyone’s attention when he asked, “Why are we being kept here?”

“To serve your time for killing those cops.”

“Don’t. F*ck. With. Me.” Cole had never been so close to killing someone in such a calculated, up-close, and potentially messy way. Waylon must have read that in his eyes, because he quickly dropped his attitude.

“You’re here because Jonah Lancroft wanted to consolidate all of the Skinners he could trust as well as the ones he can’t.”

“Lancroft is dead.”

“But his Vigilant aren’t,” Waylon said. “He wanted us to prepare for the Breaking Moon. That’s when the shapeshifters have a chance to overrun our entire society. He wanted to make sure they weren’t allowed to converge on common ground, but that’s already been allowed to happen. Not only that, but they’ve been given even more power since Kawosa was allowed to escape.”

Sirens wailed inside the prison as whoever was monitoring the cameras on G7 took notice of what had happened there.

“Shit,” Lambert said. He pointed the weapon he’d confiscated at one guard’s head. “There’s gotta be a way to get out of here other than the front door. Take us to it.”

“We won’t need that,” Cole said.

“You got a better way? I don’t even know how many guards are in the shithole.”

Frank pulled in a deep breath, barely taking notice of the two men in his grasp. “Something’s coming.”

“Something?”

“That’s right, Lambert,” Cole said. “That first set of runes I deactivated wasn’t part of the door locking system. It was a cloak. Isn’t that right, Waylon?”

The man at the other end of Cole’s shotgun paled. “What have you done?”

“I broke the rune on my bars,” Cole replied. “Just one, but that’s enough to disrupt the entire system.”

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Waylon said.

Frank’s head bobbed as his tongue extended and flicked out to taste the air. “He’s right. It’s closer now.”

Shots were fired just beyond the prison walls, eliciting a round of excited shouts from several different spots within the building. Cole and Lambert remained calm until the gunfire was stopped by the crunch of metal against solid concrete walls.

“By breaking that cloak, you’ve opened us up for God only knows what’s out there,” Waylon said.

Cole nodded solemnly. “I realize that.”

“The authorities aren’t the only ones who want to see you Skinners hang. Even the Nymar aren’t your biggest threat.”

“Believe me, I know that too.”

The guards in the elevator had stopped squirming as the sounds of destruction grew closer. When the building itself was torn apart and then filled with a primal roar that rose into a fearsome howl, they looked to their leader for support.

Waylon’s shoulders slumped and he leaned back against the wall of the elevator as if that was the only thing that could hold him up. “Those runes were for your protection as well as the rest of us.”

“No. They were to keep anything from knowing this place was here. It was also to keep Skinners from being sniffed out by whatever may be hunting them. Well I’ve got some bad news for you, buddy. There are some big bad things hunting me, and I’m betting they’ll be just as happy to get you.”