The Breaking

CHAPTER Seven


Cole sat with his back against the side wall of his cell. He was close enough to the bars to reach out and scrape his fingers against them without having to extend his arm more than an inch or two from his body. The grating of his thumbnail against the iron was a sound that reached all the way down to the base of his skull to twang his nerves like banjo strings. After a few hours he barely even heard it anymore.

The guards filed in like a marching band. Instead of tubas and drums, however, they carried shotguns and riot shields. When he got a look at that, he jumped to his feet.

The guard who stepped forward was one of those who had been watching him since he woke up on that hospital bed. “You know the drill,” he said. “Stand back.”

“What drill?”

“To visit another section of the prison. It’s the same every time.”

“I’ve barely been out of this room,” Cole said.

When the guard approached, he looked into the cell to find nothing but bloodstains on the floor, a rumpled bed, the squat cylindrical toilet, and a wadded napkin stained with sour gravy that was the only remnant from lunch. “Turn around, get on your knees, clasp your hands behind your back and stick them between the bars.”

Cole did as he was ordered. Once his hands were extended between the bars, he felt a pair of lightweight cuffs cinched around his wrists. Unlike the cuffs that had been used so far, these were lighter and scraped uncomfortably against his skin. Twisting his hands within the restraints, he could feel the warm flow of blood start.

“Don’t fidget so much,” the guard said. “You’ll only hurt yourself. Now get on your hands and knees.”

No matter how badly he wanted to get outside his cell, Cole hated crawling for the privilege. He assumed the position, clenched his fists and planned three different ways to defend himself from an attack that might be launched when he was vulnerable. The most threatening thing he heard was the brushing of fingers against a wall followed by the creak of hinges.

“Crawl through,” the guard said. “Backward. That’s your only warning. Try to come through any other way and I’ll cave your head in.”

Cole found the opening by tapping his feet against the bars and backed through as quickly as possible. Once he was outside, he choked back the desire to jump to his feet, and instead asked, “Can I get up now?”

“Slowly.”

The guard gripped the short length of steel links between Cole’s wrists and stood behind him. When Cole tried to move in a way the guard didn’t like, he felt the sting of the sharpened cuffs against his wrists.

“Are these cuffs standard issue?”

“No,” the guard replied. “We don’t answer to anyone when it comes to how we do things. Kind of like you guys, huh?” To make his point, the guard pulled up on the cuffs to send a jolt of pain all the way up through Cole’s arms. “You want me to tighten them, just keep on talking.”

Cole looked over to the cell where Lambert was held. The skinny man held up one arm to show him a wrist that had a thick scar encircling his entire wrist. The look in his eyes was a friendly reminder to do what he was told before the guard made good on his threat. When Cole looked at the cells he passed on his way to the elevator, he expected that his head would be shoved down, as it had been upon his arrival. But the guards didn’t seem interested in averting his eyes, so he took the opportunity to catch a fleeting glimpse of a collection of specimens from what might have been in a Skinner’s field guide.

Half Breeds paced in two of the cells on one side of the corridor, while a Nymar in a straitjacket sat on the toilet in another. The cell directly beside Cole’s was inhabited by a tall man wearing a standard-issue jumpsuit. He filled out the garment with a solid, muscular build. Unlike the bodybuilders one would expect to find in a prison, this one’s skin was pale yellow, segmented by rings that sectioned his flesh into narrow strips, and covered in bumps that resembled chunks of gravel embedded beneath his flesh. He crossed his arms, flexed the gill flaps along the bridge of his nose, his translucent lids blinking open to reveal solid yellow eyes.

The elevator doors slid open and Cole was shoved inside, to find Waylon already waiting with clipboard in hand.

“Evening, boss,” Cole said in an accent he’d lifted straight out of Cool Hand Luke.

After the doors slid shut, Waylon replied, “It’s afternoon.”

“Really? What day?”

“Two, since you were brought here.”

“Is that all?”

Waylon nodded while scribbling a few notes onto his clipboard. “Maybe.”

“Do I get my phone call yet?”

“No.” Punctuating his note with a loud tap that would have snapped the tip off of a lesser writing implement, Waylon pressed the button at the end of his steel gray pen and dropped it into the breast pocket of a crisp, dark blue shirt. “A woman has been making inquiries at the Canon City facility about you. Is she your partner?”

The rigors of the last few days had chiseled Cole’s expression into solid rock as he said, “Maybe she’s an ambitious lawyer.”

“It’s too late for that, Mr. Warnecki. After the commotion that was stirred up by the deaths of all those police officers, we were certain to throw them a sacrificial lamb right away.”

“So you have control of the media too? Good luck with that.”

“Not control,” Waylon said. “Someone had to stand trial, to answer for your crimes, someone who was connected to all those murders. We gave them another Skinner who was apprehended at a similar fracas in Texas, so now you and I have all the time in the world together.”

“Oh shit,” Cole grunted. “Is this some sort of weird conjugal visit? Even if I swung that way, I’d rather go without than see what’s under that suit.”

After a quick nod from Waylon, one of the two guards in the elevator slammed the butt of his shotgun into Cole’s ribs. As soon as his knees hit the floor, the second guard cracked his knee against his face.

“I’d suggest you cooperate,” Waylon warned. “The tests that lie ahead may be rigorous, but we could always get some answers from you in the form of an autopsy.” Only then did Waylon press a button on the wall panel.

Cole looked up at the guard who stood closest to the short column of buttons. He was another familiar face that had been shoving him around since he woke up strapped to a bed. The key he clutched between callused fingers was fitted into the slot next to the DOOR OPEN switch.

“Mr. Warnecki,” Waylon said while leading the way out of the elevator, “you should know that we’re not keeping you here for trivial reasons. Things have begun that need to be dealt with, and in order to do that, certain answers must be found. First among them is how the new strain of Nymar infections interact with humans. Since we’re already intimately familiar with Skinners, seeing how the newest Nymar spore interacts with you provides a unique opportunity.”

Cole was dragged to his feet and pulled along behind the man in the suit. “I’ll bet it does,” he said, while struggling to carry his own weight. “And what did you learn from telling that thick-necked a*shole to beat me to a pulp in my cell?”

Without levity or malice, Waylon said, “We needed to test the limits of your recuperative abilities and how they were affected by those tendrils. It turns out they help you more than you may know.”

“Did you even try to remove them when you cut me open?”

“Of course we did. What better way to study them? If we could have gotten them as well as the organs to which they were attached without ruining the specimens, you wouldn’t have even woken up from the anesthesia. Once we get into the next room, do yourself a favor and don’t give me a reason to rethink that decision.” Retrieving the pen from his pocket and tapping its button, he asked, “Who might be looking for you?”

“How am I supposed to know that?”

Flipping the pen around his first two fingers, Waylon said, “You know how your partners operate. You know their contacts. Tell me the details.”

“If you’re so intimately familiar with Skinners, you should already know that.”

Waylon flipped the pen around again. “Your partner’s name is Paige Strobel. Does she have any official contacts in Colorado or know of any other Skinners in the vicinity?”

“Yes.”

He smiled approvingly, flipped the pen and asked, “Who?”

“Me.”

Waylon nodded, flipped the pen around to grip it at the end with the button and then jabbed its tip into Cole’s chest. The strike came too quickly for Cole to do anything about it, and although it was a shallow wound, the pen scraped against bone with a pain that felt as if a cattle prod had connected with the inside of his body.

When he reflexively tried to defend himself, Cole was grabbed by a guard on either side. The pen was not only still in him, but was being twisted and driven in deeper by Waylon’s hand.

“Does she have any other contacts?” Waylon asked.

Cole struggled against the guards, but knew he wouldn’t be able to break loose from their grip. The lightweight cuffs were used to pull his arms up behind his back until they felt about to snap in two places, and the sharpened interior of the cuffs chewed viciously into his wrists.

“Answer this question and the rest of today’s exercises will be easier,” Waylon said. Without changing a single aspect of his emotionless face, he pulled out the pen and formed a fist around it before driving his knuckles into Cole’s jaw. The pen added a nice bit of sting to the punch that Cole felt all the way back in the space where his wisdom teeth had been. Instead of asking another question, Waylon waited for Cole to meet his eyes again and then snapped another punch into the same spot. “You had your chance,” he said. “Remember that.”

Once the doors were open, the guards shoved Cole through them and into what felt like a whole other world. Compared to Canon City, the freshly painted hall and sparkling tile floors seemed like luxury hotel accommodations. Some normal people shuffled through a normal door at the end of the hall. No scars on their hands. No runes etched into the frame. The guards tightened their grip as if they too had to brace for their reentry into the mundane.

The door at the end of the hall opened into something that reminded Cole of a large, drab break room. There were a few metal tables and small stools welded to the floor, and several spots where more tables and stools had obviously been removed. There were a few vending machines along one wall, but only one was plugged in. As long as he wanted a bottle of overpriced water, he was in luck. A television was bracketed to the ceiling in one corner, and no less than half a dozen surveillance cameras were hanging from different spots along the room’s upper perimeter. The moment he stepped inside, all of those cameras shifted to point at him. He counted six guards already in the room. Four men and two women dressed in full riot gear had fanned out to surround him, and the two who brought him from his cell were absorbed into the pack. Two of the guards had shotguns, but the other four carried AK-47s and were positioned so if they all decided to fire on him at once, the collateral damage would be kept to a minimum.

“We’ve already tested your pain tolerance and ability to heal,” Waylon said as Cole was shoved down onto a stool. “Now I’d like to see how your modification affects other functions.”

“Modification?” Cole grunted. “You make it sound like a cool bionic arm or something.”

Waylon let out a stifled snort, which was probably meant to be a laugh. “Bring in the weapons.”

That didn’t seem like a good thing. His entire body tensed as a guard entered the room to set a small metal case on the table. Then the guard moved around to grab his cuffs.

“What is that?” Cole asked.

The cuffs were removed, causing all of the guards to raise their weapons to their shoulders. Small devices were taped to his neck and chest, and when they were all in place, a tech dressed in scrubs walked over to a set of machines behind the guards. The machines were flipped on, giving off the same electronic noises Cole had heard when he woke on a hospital bed.

“I want you to open the case, Cole,” Waylon said. “And I also want to remind you that nobody knows you’re here. Even if they realize you’re missing, no police agency in this country would give a damn if we delivered your body to them in pieces. More importantly, I want you to know that my guards are under strict orders to shoot to maim. There’s no easy out for you. In fact, if you misuse what’s inside that case in any way, I’ll see to it that the first dozen bullets hit below your waist. After that, the testing will still commence. Got it?”

Cole nodded while rubbing his tender wrists. He reached out, flipped the latches on the case and opened it. Inside, there were two rounded wooden stakes. The points had been whittled down until smooth, and the handles were studded with small, sharp thorns stained with blood. Grabbing one of the stakes, he jumped to his feet and demanded, “Tell me where you got these!”

“Sit down, Mr. Warnecki.”

“Let’s see your hands.”

One of the guards took half a step forward. “He told you to sit down!”

Waylon stepped up but didn’t enter the circle formed by his firing squad. Holding up a palm, he showed Cole a palm that was marked by the neatest row of scars he’d ever seen. Unlike the random patterns of most Skinner weapons, the thorns in whatever weapon he’d crafted were just as orderly as the notes he scribbled on his clipboard. “Satisfied? Now sit down.”

Cole looked at the stakes from every angle, which was all he needed to deduce one simple fact. “These don’t belong to you.” Glancing around at the guards, he added, “And I’d bet they don’t belong to any of you. Nobody working in a place like this would be far away from their weapon. So whose body did you steal these from?”

“I want you to shift that weapon’s shape, Cole,” Waylon said.

“Not until you tell me where you got them.”

“Sit down, then hold the weapons properly and shift their shape.”

Cole made sure his fingers fit between the thorns. The blood staining its grip was old and blackened. “Did you kill someone to get this? Answer me or—”

One of the guards to Cole’s left fired a single shot from his AK-47. The round tore through the meat in Cole’s calf, knocking that leg out from under him and sending him straight down to the stool. His tailbone cracked against the uncushioned seat and his chest knocked against the edge of the table. Before he could slide to the floor, another guard rushed over to him, lifted him onto the stool and then slammed the flat side of his shotgun stock against the back of Cole’s head. The jarring impact knocked his face against the table, but wasn’t hard enough to keep him there.

Waylon reached into an interior jacket pocket to produce a small syringe that was about half the size of a pencil. “Cooperate and I’ll administer this serum to you.”

Recognizing the fluid in that syringe almost immediately, Cole gripped the table and nodded. Even with his body’s ability to produce the serum, the bleeding from his flesh wound would soon cause him to pass out. Since he didn’t want to be at the mercy of these men, he dropped the stakes and allowed two guards to restrain him while the serum was administered. The moment he experienced the cool, familiar rush of it through his leg, he felt better. The tech knelt down to pinch the wound together as both the shotgun and AK barrels were jammed against Cole’s head. The wound itched as it sealed, but that sensation was almost completely lost beneath the comforting light-headedness that followed. Whether that came from the serum or the blood he’d lost, Cole was grateful for the breather.

Following the tech as best he could, he grunted, “That’s better than the stuff we mix at home.”

“Of course,” Waylon said. “Now can we continue?”

Cole sat up, took hold of the stakes and couldn’t help but stare at the flakes of dried blood that fell from the thorns onto his skin.

“You know what to do,” Waylon prodded. “Do it.”

Gazing defiantly into the eyes of the guard who’d shot him, Cole clenched his fist around the weapon and drove the spikes into his palms. Oddly enough, he could actually tell the difference between those and the thorns on his own weapon.

“Now shift its shape,” Waylon commanded.

If he was holding his own spear, it would have been easy. He’d bonded with that weapon to the point that it felt more like a piece of his own body. But the stakes were foreign to him. When he willed the pointed end to curl, it barely twitched.

Waylon looked over to the wall behind Cole, which was dominated by a large window. “Are you getting this?”

He was answered by a few sharp taps from the other side of the thick window.

“Is that all you can do, Cole?”

In another part of the converted visitors’ lounge, machines chirped the rhythm of his heartbeat and whatever other vital signs were being measured by the components stuck to his neck and chest.

“How are you feeling?” the tech asked.

“Tired,” Cole replied.

“Are you having chest pains? Any pressure from the tendrils?”

Hearing someone refer to vampire fragments inside of him as if they were nothing more than kidney stones was strange. Then again, it wasn’t much stranger than the fact that everyone was more concerned about a stick changing shape than the bullet wound in his leg, which had almost healed. Cole reminded himself to get that recipe.

He shook his head and then winced.

“You are, aren’t you?” the tech asked.

Lowering his eyes, Cole nodded and let out a breath he’d been prolonging for the better part of a minute.

Waylon jotted down a note and said, “You can do better than that, Cole. Make that weapon into something you could use.”

Those words caused all of the guards to tense.

Cole kept his head hanging low, mostly as a way to try and make himself look weaker than he truly was. Just because there wasn’t a way to keep Waylon from recording his data didn’t mean he couldn’t screw with that data as much as possible. When he focused on the floor and the lower portion of the room, he spotted more of the Skinner runes etched into the walls. Whether they were protections or some sort of ward, he couldn’t tell. Seeing those symbols gave him an idea, however, which involved playing along with Waylon’s little experiment just enough to make him seem like a worthwhile experiment.

“Can you hear him?” the tech asked. “You need to reshape that weapon.”

Cole grunted and lifted his head, hoping he wasn’t overdoing the theatrics. “Yeah. Just give me a moment.”

Reshaping his own weapon had become a reflex, but it was one that had to be trained. Cole drew on that experience as he willed the stakes in his hands into a new shape. After several moments of strained silence, sweat began to trickle down his forehead. More perspiration came when he thought he might not be able to get the stakes to change shape at all. But then the varnish worked into the stake did its thing. The Nymar blood infused into the mixture bonded with Cole’s blood, allowing a bridge to form between his mental commands and the components in the varnish that had been taken from a shapeshifter.

The stake began to creak. The sharpened end stretched outward into a finer, narrower point.

“Very good,” Waylon said as his pen scratched furiously on his clipboard. “The data we collect today will help more Skinners than you know, Mr. Warnecki.”

When Cole shifted his hands, he worked both thumbs to grind the stakes against his palms as much as possible. The thorns were still embedded in his flesh, and they tugged at his skin while scraping against tender, exposed meat.

“His heart rate is escalating,” the tech reported. “More than normal.”

That came as no surprise to Cole. Even though the stakes continued to sharpen and eventually curve into hooks, he wasn’t feeling the results he was after. And the less he felt in that regard, the longer he’d be locked away inside a building that had probably been shut down and crossed off of any list maintained by the Department of Corrections or anyone else who kept track of large buildings. He clenched his eyes shut, focused harder, and zeroed in on nothing but the image of what he wanted the weapon to do.

Still, nothing more than what Waylon had asked for.

“Good,” the man with the clipboard said. “Now shift them back.”

Sweat rolled down Cole’s face. He’d only managed to find one chink in the prison’s armor, and it was looking like he couldn’t exploit it. As soon as that thought rolled through his mind, he could hear the heart monitor whine into overdrive.

“We might want to slow this down,” the tech said.

Waylon’s voice was cool and crisp. “Is he going into arrest?”

“Not yet.”

“Then keep going. If anything ruptures, we can revive him. Cole, keep those weapons touching the table or I’ll have you shot.”

None of those words sank in. Cole’s entire world had devolved into one task. And when that task drifted further out of reach, he thought of an image that centered him and steered him back on course. More important, it made him want to fight even harder to climb out of the pit into which he’d sunk.

“Bring it back to where it was, Cole.” That wasn’t a request from Waylon. It was a demand backed up by a squad of gunmen.

What he’d tried to do was simple in theory, but wound up being a lot harder than he’d anticipated. One of the thorns waggled within his palm, and when he focused harder, it waggled even more. The stakes shrank back down and straightened out. The thorns remained wedged in his palm, but the waggling one felt more like a loose tooth on the verge of popping out. He gripped both weapons tightly, driving every thorn deeper, and concentrated for one more push.

Doing his best to cover what he was doing, he kept his fingers wrapped around the weapons as that one loose thorn burrowed in at a new angle. With a little more shifting within his bloody fingers, the stake’s handle pushed against the heel of his palm. His fingers tightened to the point of trembling, which rattled the weapon’s handle against the table.

Obviously speaking to someone via an earpiece or phone, Waylon said, “Yes, I can see the differences in the process. Focus on the tendrils.”

Cole couldn’t feel anything from the tendrils, but he couldn’t feel much from the rest of his body either, thanks to the pain of varnished wood slowly sliding into his hand. Only a small part of his attention was centered on returning the stakes to their normal form, since that was the easiest part of the process. His body strained to put enough willpower behind his command to not only peel away a section of the handle, but to divert that one loose thorn into his palm as far as it could go. Somewhere along the line the jagged sliver began slicing into more delicate tissue and touched a nerve that caused him to sit bolt upright and throw his head back.

When the tech moved in behind him, Cole swiveled around and swung his arm as if he meant to shove the man back. That prompted all of the guards to move in with their guns pointed at his head.

“Just get away from me!” he shouted.

“Put the stakes down!” one of the guards said. That sentiment was echoed by more and more of the armed guards while Waylon simply stood back and watched.

Cole slammed the stakes against the table, driving the sliver even farther up into his hand. There was still one obstacle left, and the only solution he could come up with was going to hurt. A lot.

Uncurling the fingers of his left hand, he allowed that stake to fall from his grasp. “Come here, a*shole,” he said while standing up and holding the weapon in his right hand out, as if offering it to Waylon. “Come take it for yourself.”

Waylon scowled at him like a disappointed parent. “Someone bring those weapons to me.”

A guard with a shotgun stepped forward. Her stern face might have been pretty beneath the helmet she wore, but there was nothing that made Cole think she would hesitate to pull a trigger. “Hand it over,” she said.

Cole made sure to hold the stake so neither end was pointed at her. His arm was low and at waist level when he said, “Take it.”

“Drop it.”

Since he could just about feel the tension in all of those trigger fingers, he grabbed the table with his free hand and used his other to pound the stake against it like a gavel. Not only did the loose thorn dig even farther up into his palm, but all the others gouged him as well. “Come and get it!”

“Take it from him,” Waylon said.

Another guard handed his weapon to the woman with the shotgun and clamped a powerful hand around Cole’s wrist. Just to be sure he got what he was after, Cole showed the guard a sweaty grin when he whispered, “Sure takes a lot of backup for you to take a stick away from a wounded man. Your mom must be real proud of you. How about I ask her the next time I’m—”

Taking hold of the stake, the guard pulled it loose in a powerful motion followed by a twist to scrape the thorns as much as possible against Cole’s bloody palm. He let out a pained grunt to cover the sound of snapping wood and slumped forward to rest his head and chest against the table. When he placed his hands flat on the tabletop, he slid them across the smooth surface to leave crimson trails and smear the blood on his skin.

“What are the readings?” Waylon asked.

The tech nervously rattled off some numbers.

“How’s his leg?”

The guard who’d already gotten his hands dirty moved in to restrain Cole while the tech checked the bullet wound.

“It went right through the meat,” the tech confirmed. “Looks like that serum we put together does work faster than the original formula.”

“Great. That means we can continue.”

“I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why? We can always patch him up if things get too bad. I just want to make sure he hasn’t sprouted fangs.”

“I haven’t,” Cole said. “Can’t you see that much for yourself?”

“They retract,” Waylon said, as if explaining a simple sketch to a child. “They also respond to external stimulus such as perceived threats or sources of food.”

“Haven’t you starved me enough and thrown enough goddamn threats at me to spark what you needed?”

Waylon smiled and then shrugged. “Maybe. But perhaps the process of turning you into a Nymar hasn’t been halted. Perhaps it’s merely been slowed.” As he continued to talk, guards surrounded Cole and another one moved in behind him with something that looked like an upended gurney. “Perhaps something else is happening, but we know the Nymar organism evolves quickly in response to the unique situations of its host. Since we’ve got you here and you resisted the drugs to put you back under again, we’ll run our experiments while you’re awake.”

“When did I refuse anesthesia?” Cole asked while he was stood up and strapped into the gurney. “Seriously! I’ll take whatever painkillers you’ve got.”

“Relax, Cole. This should only take another hour or two.” Once Waylon’s subject was completely tied down and surrounded by armed guards, he said, “Get the drills.”

A door opened at the back of the room and something was wheeled out. Cole spent the short amount of time preparing himself to stay awake and keep his fists clenched tightly enough to keep his palms secure. When he caught his first glimpse of the little handheld drills on the cart that was wheeled to his table, keeping his fists clenched wasn’t much of a concern. The motor of the first drill sounded like a smaller version of a hydraulic tool used to remove bolts from a car’s wheel.

“Someone get him a towel,” Waylon said.

Cole needed his hands to remain dirty until he got back to his cell. If that wasn’t allowed to happen and his palms were examined too carefully, all of the pain he’d suffered would count for squat.

When the tech stepped up to his side holding one of the prison’s threadbare towels, Waylon said, “Good, now stuff it in his mouth.”

As the tech pushed the towel in, he made sure he was still able to see Cole’s teeth. The drill gouged into his shoulder smoothly, but squealed when it hit bone. Agony shot through Cole’s entire body and he nearly bit all the way through the towel as he screamed into it. Waylon looked pleased as his subject thrashed against his restraints and the machines recorded every moment of Cole’s ordeal.