It jarred her, to hear about someone trapped and going mad with panic while singing that particular song. Gilbert Cline was, in some ways, describing Harper herself, when she got stuck in the storm drain.
“None of us were supposed to be down there longer than a few days. There’s only a couple reasons you wind up in Brentwood. Most of the men there were awaiting trial. In my case, I was down from the prison in Concord to provide testimony in an ongoing case, not my own. The Mazz had been brought in from the state prison in Berlin to appeal his conviction.”
“What was he in jail for?” Carol asked.
“He looks like a rough customer,” Gil said, “but they locked him up for perjury. I can’t tell you whether he hurt your father or not, ma’am. But the Mazz isn’t the sort of guy who buys himself trouble with his hands. His mouth has always been his problem. Can’t help himself. He doesn’t know how to tell a story without smearing a thick layer of bullshit on top.”
“One more reason to hear about your escape from Brentwood from you instead of him,” Carol said.
“And you can spare us the potty mouth while you’re at it, mister,” Ben said. “There’s ladies present.”
Harper almost choked on her last mouthful of coffee cake. She could not have explained to anyone quite why the phrase potty mouth bothered her more than the word bullshit.
She cleared her throat and morosely considered her empty saucer. She had meant to eat her slice of cake slowly, but there was only a little bit of it, and after the first soft dissolving mouthful of sugar and nutmeg she hadn’t been able to help herself. Now it was horribly, tragically, impossibly all gone. She put the saucer on an end table so she wouldn’t be tempted to lick it.
Gil continued: “I was only supposed to be in Brentwood until I testified. But they shut the court down. I waited for them to pack us up and send us back, but they never did. They just kept shoveling in more prisoners. A young man in my cell once approached the bars to say he wanted to lodge a complaint and meet with his lawyer. A state trooper walked over and popped him right in the mouth with his nightstick. Knocked in three teeth with one slug. ‘Your complaint has been noted. Speak right up if there’s anything else bothering you,’ this cop said, and then gave us all a look to see if anyone else was dissatisfied with their treatment.”
“That didn’t happen,” Ben said. “In my twenty years of police work, I’ve heard a thousand reports of police brutality, and only about three I thought held water. The rest was just sorry drug addicts, drunks, and thieves, looking to get even with the person who locked them up.”
“It happened, all right,” Gilbert said, in a calm, untroubled tone. “Things are different now. Law ain’t law anymore. Without someone higher to answer to, the law is just whoever’s holding the nightstick. A nightstick—or a dish towel full of rocks.”
Ben bristled. His chest swelled, threatening to pop a button. Carol held up one hand, palm outward, and Ben closed his mouth without speaking.
“Let him continue. I want to hear this. I want to know who we brought to our camp. What they’ve seen, what they’ve done, and what they’ve been through. Go on, Mr. Cline.”
Gil lowered his gaze, like a man trying to remember some lines of verse from a poem he had memorized years before, for a long-ago English class, perhaps. At last, he looked back up, meeting Carol’s stare without fear, and he told them how it had been.
9
“They weren’t all bad cops in Brentwood. I don’t want to give that idea. There were folks who made sure we had food and drink and toilet paper and other necessities. But the longer we were in there, the harder it was to find a friendly face. There were a lot of angry cops who didn’t want to be looking after us. And when people started to get the ’scale, they weren’t just angry. They were scared, too.
“Anyone could see what was going to happen, the way we were all crowded in together. One morning, a guy came down with Dragonscale, in a cell at the end of the block. The other prisoners panicked. I understand why they did what they did. I like to think I wouldn’t have gone along with them, but it is hard to say. His cellmates forced the infected boy into a corner, not touching him, just driving him back with pillows and such. Then they clubbed him to death.”
“Jesus,” Ben whispered.
“He didn’t die easy, either. They were banging his head off the walls and the floor and the side of the toilet for twenty minutes, all while this one lunatic in another cell sang ‘Candle on the Water’ and laughed about it. Eventually the infected prisoner began to smolder and char. He never completely caught fire, but he made plenty of smoke before he died. It was like being in an Indian sweat lodge. Men were crying from all the smoke and coughing on the ash.
“Well, after they beat this poor kid to death, the staties dragged the corpse out of the cell with rubber gloves and disposed of him. But we all knew it was going to spread. The whole place was a concrete petri dish. Pretty soon it was on a couple guys in a completely different cell. Then it was on three boys in another unit. I have no idea how or why it could hop around like that.”
Harper could’ve told him, but it was no matter now. The Fireman had said the world was divided into the healthy and the sick, but soon it would be down to the sick and the dead. For everyone in the room, the subject of how Dragonscale spread was now of academic interest only.
“The state cops didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t a facility for dealing with felons coated with Dragonscale, and they didn’t want to release any of the prisoners into the civilian population. The cops got dressed in riot gear and rubber gloves and herded all the men who had Dragonscale into one cell, all together, while they tried to figure out what to do.
“Then, one morning, this guy starts screaming, ‘I’m hot! I think I’m dying! I got fire ants crawling all over me!’ Then he was screaming smoke. It was coming out of his throat before the rest of him started to burn. That’s going full dragon, I’ve heard, when you breathe fire before you die. You do it because the tissues in your lungs have ignited, so you’re burning from the inside out. He was running around screaming and smoke pouring out of his mouth like someone in an old cartoon who accidentally drank hot sauce. All the men in the cell with him were pressed flat against the cinder blocks to keep from catching fire themselves.
“Well, the cops came running, led by the head bull, a fella named Miller. The bunch of them stared into this cell at the burning man for a few seconds and then they started shooting.” He waited to see if Ben would object. Ben sat very still, his arms draped over his knees, staring at Gilbert steadily in the wavering red light of the fire. “They pumped, I don’t know, three hundred rounds in there? They killed everyone. They killed the guy who was burning and they killed all the men around him.
“After the shooting stopped, this head bull, Miller, he hitches up his belt like he just finished a big breakfast of pancakes and bacon and tells us he saved our lives. Stopped a chain reaction before it could get started. If they didn’t shoot the whole bunch, the jail block would’ve turned into an inferno. The other cops stood around looking shocked, staring at the guns in their hands, like they couldn’t fathom how they had all gone off.