The Breaking

CHAPTER Three


Colorado State Penitentiary

Canon City, Colorado

Three weeks ago

Nine cops were dead, and those were only the ones that had been killed in Denver on the night that Cole, Rico, Prophet, and the Amriany shot their way through a warehouse being used by the Nymar. Across the country, more cops had died in similar raids or were murdered in silence and left with Skinner weapons in their bodies. It didn’t take long for those crimes to be tied together and pinned onto what was quickly labeled a cell of home-grown terrorists. Thanks to the news coverage focused on the blood-soaked Denver warehouse, Cole’s capture was heralded as the death of that cell.

Riding away from the warehouse that night in a SWAT van had been one of the most terrifying moments of his thirty-four years on this planet. That was no small thing, considering all the horrific things he’d seen in those years. First there was the speedy ascension of dancing reality shows to the top of the ratings, followed by the slow death of old fashioned rock ’n’ roll. Once he got his first look at a real werewolf, his world had gotten even worse.

Training to be a Skinner was a painful process where he was ground into someone cold enough to drive a sharpened piece of wood into another living thing, occasionally interrupted by those very same living things trying to rip his head off. After that he’d seen shapeshifters of all flavors, as well as vampires, nymphs, and even a Chupacabra. Somehow, those creatures had been easier to handle than the scalding glares of the cops who rode with him in the van that night.

They all wanted to kill him.

If the stories were to be believed—and there was no good reason for the cops not to believe them—they had every right to kill him in the most gruesome way possible.

But by some miracle, he had been shackled to his seat and driven straight to the nearest jail cell. Apart from several choice words snarled at him through many sets of gritted teeth, he arrived without incident.

He was processed and thrown into a cage.

After standing in front of a judge barely long enough to feel the courtroom beneath his state-issued canvas shoes, he was given a jumpsuit and thrown into a smaller cell.

There were no visits from lawyers, no questions from the authorities. Just hours upon hours of solitude, within three stark gray walls and a set of iron bars, during which he was made aware of one simple fact: cop killers lived on borrowed time. But he was no cop killer. He’d been smacked around by Full Bloods, shot, hit with blunt sticks, cut with all manner of blades, and bitten by vampires.

That last part was what stuck with him the most.

Cole’s time as a Skinner had been extensive enough for his body to produce the healing serum on its own. That stuff had seen him through most of the punishment heaped upon him in the days following his capture. It was also supposed to help make sure he wasn’t infected when a Nymar tried to seed him. The antidote he’d been given after he was bitten should have done the same thing. He had found out the hard way, however, that neither the serum nor the antidote did much of anything against Shadow Spore. He’d been seeded by one of those striped bastards, and the process of getting the spore out of him was something he relived in brutal detail everytime he closed his eyes and allowed himself to lapse into unconsciousness.

The spore was gone, but something remained inside of him.

It cinched around his insides, constricting until he thought he would burst, tightening until he prayed for something vital inside his body to rupture and be done with it. He had plenty of time to think about that lovely image when he was carted off to the cage that would be his home.

Colorado State Penitentiary looked like one of the buildings at a college campus. It was several stories tall, had a well-maintained lawn, was coated in clean stone and labeled by stern metal letters that looked as if they’d been typewritten upon the front of the structure. Hedges and sidewalks marked the perimeter of a large parking lot. Unlike those buildings of higher learning, this one was filled with 756 beds encased in fortified steel and occupied by violent offenders who required attention known as Security Level 5. It was a maximum security facility that could be the last bit of earthly hell he would know before being sent to the real deal at the end of a rusty shiv or a broken fork smuggled out of the cafeteria by one of his criminally disturbed neighbors.

Cole was processed for what felt to him like the hundredth time, given yet another jumpsuit to wear, and shoved down one of many drab hallways that had filled his most recent days. When he attempted to look up at the walkways above him or at any of the cells on either side, his head was viciously turned forward and he was warned to keep his eyes on the floor. If he attempted to glance at the bars to his left, he was shoved forward, with the accompanying clatter of the chains secured to his wrists and ankles. By now, he’d forgotten what it was like to move his arms or legs without the extra weight of cuffs around them. The rattle of stainless steel links were as familiar to him as the strained wheezing of his own breath.

But even after all the shocks his system had taken lately, none of them compared to the one he got when he saw the inside of his cell.

“This is it?” he asked.

“What did you expect? A hotel suite?”

“That’s a hospital bed.”

“Right, and you’re going to lay down on it.”

Cole studied the bed carefully, as if that was enough to make it change into something else. The walls were concrete, and covered with chipped, light green paint. He’d been locked up once in a holding cell with a toilet that wasn’t much more than a curved metal shelf with plumbing sticking out of the wall. One of those may have been installed in the farthest wall of this cell at one time, but all that remained was a patch of cracked wall and some pipes cut and sealed with cement.

“Is this for some sort of examination?” Cole asked.

“Lie down.”

There was no way to get out of the prison and nowhere to run, even if he did make it that far, so he climbed onto the bed and stretched out.

Someone in medical scrubs walked into the cell, accompanied by more guards. Cole could hear every scrape of her paper-covered sneakers against the floor and every lid she popped off needles attached to IV tubes before she cleaned them off.

“How many other prisoners are in here?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” a guard replied while strapping him to the table. The man resembled the others who had brought him this far. Similar uniform, similar body armor, similar helmet, similar boots, similar hate-filled eyes.

“What is this?” Cole asked. Panic flooded through his body as he started to wonder if Colorado administered its death penalty through lethal injection. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know if Colorado had the death penalty. “Don’t I get a lawyer? A phone call? At least tell me what’s in this goddamn needle!”

If an explanation was given, Cole didn’t hear it. Once the drugs were pumped from the IV bag into his arm, he didn’t see or hear anything either.

Cole dreamt in a cold torrent of slush that filled his head and leaked out in a series of thrashing muscle spasms and incoherent screams.

He didn’t feel like he was falling or lying down. Instead, he was just suspended inside himself with only disembodied voices to fill his days.

Days, or maybe weeks.

Could have been years.

Whatever length of time it was ended abruptly when his consciousness started turning end over end. Although he couldn’t see the walls of his dark cell, he knew they were spinning around him. The steady, thumping rhythms that had been his only source of reference sped up and then slowed down.

Memories drifted away.

Sounds came closer while falling back at the same time.

There was a pressure that seemed more real than anything else in his world.

Something wailed and beeped.

Beeping. Just like the first games his dad had bought for his old Atari 2600. Clumsy tones that were the best those early programmers could do and were music to his adolescent ears. Beeping. Squawking. Digitized warbles that eventually became something close to voices. By the time he was in college, his games had acquired real voices and music. That had been a true landmark for a kid who so rarely went outside.

The pressure still came from somewhere, and the voices were getting clearer. If he focused hard enough, he might be able to make out what they said.

“Somebody get in here!”

More pressure, along with a pinch. He was no longer spinning. His head was wrapped in something cool and soft.

“Back away, motherf*cker!”

That was definitely not from any game Cole had grown up with. Neither was the snarling hiss that was close enough to send a few drops of bitter venom over his lip and into the stubble that had claimed his chin.

Consciousness exploded in a surge of adrenaline that snapped his eyes wide open so he could see a Nymar’s head poking up from the collar of a standard guard uniform. It was a round clean-shaven face with no telltale black markings. Even without seeing the tendrils moving beneath the man’s skin, the two sets of fangs extending from his upper jaw gave him away. One set were the feeders that slid down over the normal canine teeth, and the others were a curved, slender pair that fit along the inner edges of the first set. Venom dripped from the curved fangs as the vampire hissed at the guards. At least, he assumed there were more guards, since he couldn’t lift his head enough to see.

Cole switched immediately into survival mode. He tried to sit up, but the Nymar pressed him right back down again using the hand that was already clamped around his throat to dig sharpened nails into his flesh. That explained the pressure and pinching he’d dreamt about. The real guards were shouting their threats, but the man with the round face didn’t pay them any mind. He simply looked down at Cole, lowered his face to within a few inches of his and snarled, “Tara sends her best.”

Tara was one of Paige’s friends dating back more than eleven years. During a nightmare that had laid the foundation of Paige becoming a Skinner, Tara was turned into a Nymar. More than that, she’d been double-seeded. Two spores were attached to her heart, making her stronger, hungrier, and more vicious as a reward for surviving the process. Perhaps this was payback for him killing the Nymar that had created her. At the moment he could only be concerned with drawing his next breath.

He saw a slender arm wrapped around the Nymar’s throat. Although the medical tech wasn’t strong enough to choke a vampire, she was able to jab a needle into his neck and push the plunger. When the toxin went into him, the Nymar only tightened his grip. Cole grabbed his wrist with both hands and fought to sit up. This time he was stopped by a fiery pain that blazed over the entire front of his torso. “Son of a bitch!” he grunted.

The Nymar grinned wider and pressed until his fingernails broke the skin of Cole’s neck. Using his free hand to grab the medical tech, he pulled her closer and bit into her jugular.

“Why isn’t he dead yet?” one of the guards asked.

“Sh-Shadow Spore,” Cole said. While the Nymar was feeding, his attention was too divided to keep Cole down. “Antidote doesn’t work on them,” he wheezed.

The guards were still baffled, so Cole took matters into his own hands by managing to sit up and drive his arms forward with enough power to snap the restraints around his chest. Without the tendrils that had been left behind, he wouldn’t have had the strength to do it. Now, with their innate power and a hunger that had gotten worse over his time in custody, he was able to grab the reinforced collar of the Nymar’s uniform and pull him away from the tech. Rather than drag the Nymar straight back, he eased its mouth away and then wrapped his other arm around its forehead to try and lift its feeding fangs out of the tech without tearing her flesh. Once the Nymar felt himself being separated from his meal, a thicker set of fangs emerged from his lower jaw to try and sink into her for good. If those were allowed to puncture the tech’s skin, Cole knew he might as well let him drink. The alternative would be to rip the Nymar off while taking most of her neck along with him.

“Somebody do something!” he shouted.

Blood sprayed from the tech’s opened vein. The Nymar’s hiss took on a deeper, almost demonic tone as his eyes became solid black orbs. Cole pulled back with all of his weight, forcing the Nymar away from the tech so she could hit the floor in a heap. The Nymar was quick to pull away from him, but now that the hostage was clear, guards surged into the room to turn confusion into chaos.

Cole found himself wanting to dive into that chaos and ride it out until it was over. That’s what Skinners did. Even though he’d managed to break his restraints, there was something stabbing him in the stomach that turned every movement into a lesson in agony. When he reached down to try and pull out the blade that had impaled him, the only thing he found was a bloodstain that was quickly spreading across the front of his hospital gown. Desperately, he ripped the material away until he could see fresh stitches marking an incision that had been cut from his chest all the way down to within eight inches of his groin.

“We know where you are, Skinner!” the Nymar raged. “We’ll know where all of you are! We’ll find you!”

Guards had surrounded the Nymar on all sides. Before he could spout any more threats, all of the guards pulled the triggers of the shotguns they carried. Cole’s ears exploded with the combined thunder of all of those weapons, followed by a high-pitched ringing that filled his brain. The pain filling his wounded belly dropped him back down onto the bed. By the time the scent of burnt gunpowder hit the back of his throat, he was being held down again and jabbed with more needles. This time, however, the darkness didn’t come.

Two more gunshots thumped through the roar filling Cole’s head. When he spoke, his own voice was the only thing that didn’t sound like it was three hundred miles away.

“What happened to me?” he shouted.

Although the guards who approached him seemed to hear what he’d asked, they didn’t reply. Through the bed and floor, Cole could feel the impact of more scuffling, which quickly subsided. Two guards dragged the Nymar away, and the only way he identified the bloody mess as such was from the uniform wrapped around the pulpy remains infused with severed, twitching tendrils.

“What’s happening?” Cole demanded.

But all he got from the remaining guards was a shotgun barrel pointed at him as another one tried to refasten the restraints. Since the padded leather belts had been pulled from their moorings, two guards stood watch over him with their shotguns constantly at the ready.

The tech was alive, but had to be carried out due to all the venom pumped into her system through the Nymar’s fangs. There was no way of telling how the vampire had gotten into the prison, but some of the venom spat into someone’s eyes could have given him enough control over that person to do the trick. By the time most of the mess was cleaned up, the blaring whine in Cole’s ears had decreased to an annoying ring.

Someone entered the room. He was dressed in a cheap brown suit that wasn’t cut well enough to hide the gun holstered under his left arm. Tall, athletically built, and pale, he had the look of an ex-cop or soldier who had been busted down to desk detail. “Is he still awake?” the man asked one of the guards.

“Yes,” Cole replied. “He is. What the hell did you do to him?”

The man spoke to the guard posted at the door in a clipped whisper. He then turned to Cole, smiled in condescendingly lukewarm fashion and approached the guard who stood closest to the bed. “You’ve been entrusted to this facility by your friend, Paige Strobel.”

“She told me to go with you guys back in Denver, so I did.”

“You didn’t have much choice, now did you?”

“There were choices,” Cole assured him. “I could have left like the others who got away from that warehouse.”

“How many others?”

Cole took no small amount of comfort from that question, since it meant that Rico, Prophet, and the Amriany had made it away from there. Changing the subject quickly enough for him to hear gears grinding, he asked, “What did you do to me?”

“We tried to do you a favor, Mr. Warnecki, and had a look at those tendrils that remain inside of you after the Nymar spore attached itself to your heart.”

It was a constant act of willpower for Cole to not dwell on the memory of when that thing was inside of him. Like a presence that never grew tired of trying to break his sanity, those thoughts lingered and whispered no matter how he tried to shut them out. The spore had been removed. He could only remind himself of that. He didn’t need to remind himself of what had been left behind. The constant pain of his body being garroted from the inside did that well enough.

“You cut me open?” he asked. No matter how obvious it had become, he still couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it.

“Nothing worse than what was already done to you when the spore was removed,” the man replied. “And much more sterile.”

“If anything’s gonna kill me, infection is the least of my worries.”

“But that’s all that separates a human from a Nymar. A very aggressive infection. Also, as we’ve discovered over the last two weeks, very stubborn.”

“Two weeks?”

The man nodded. “We didn’t exactly want you to wake up yet, but at least that murderer didn’t get to you before your stitches healed. I suppose we’ve got a more traditional kind of medicine to thank for that, huh? I think you’ve been in this game long enough to be of some use to us while you’re awake. Excellent.”

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.”