“They had a few of us put on rubber cleaning gloves and carry the bodies out. I volunteered myself to get some fresh air. I was in Brentwood for three, four months and they never got the smell of burned hair and gunsmoke out of the jail block. Oh, and that empty cell? That filled back up, too. There weren’t any trials happening. No one was getting processed. But cops were still arresting folks for looting and such and they had to put them somewhere.
“They fed us on corned beef and lime Jell-O for the first couple months. Then the food situation got a little dicey. One day we had canned peaches for lunch. Another day, three cops busted open a concession machine and passed out candy bars. We had rice eight meals straight. One day they announced they were going to discontinue breakfast. That was when I started to believe I was going to die in Brentwood. Sooner or later they’d discontinue lunch. Then one day the cops wouldn’t come down to the cellblock at all.”
His voice was a rasp that made Harper think of someone running a knife across a leather strop. She stepped into the kitchenette without asking for permission, found a cup, and poured him some tap water. She brought it back and offered it to him and he took it with a look of surprise and gratitude. He drank it off in three swallows.
When it was gone, he licked his lips and said, “Like I say. Some of the cops were all right. There was a guy named Devon. A dainty little fellow. Most of the guys called him a homo behind his back, which maybe he was, but I’ll tell you what. He never shot anyone and one day he brought two shopping bags full of beer down for us. He said it was his birthday and he wanted to celebrate. So he poured us plastic cups of warm beer and handed out cupcakes and we all sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to him. And that was the best birthday I’ve ever been to. Stale supermarket cupcakes and room-temperature Bud to wash it down.” He glanced at Ben and said, “See, there are some good cops in this story.”
Ben grunted.
Carol said, “There’s always a little decency in the worst places . . . and always a little secret selfishness in the best.”
Harper wondered if Carol was taking a veiled swipe at her. If so, it was a clumsy, ineffectual sort of swipe—after all, Harper wasn’t the one with coffee cake in the cupboard while the rest of the camp made do with canned beets. She supposed a small quantity of supplies were still trickling into camp now and then, one way or another, carried in by the occasional new arrival. And she imagined the best pickings wound up here, courtesy of Ben and the Lookouts: treats to help Mother Carol keep up her strength in her time of trial.
“Yeah, well, that wasn’t the only decent thing Devon did for us. In the end, he did a little more for us than hand out plastic cups of suds. We’ll get back to him in a minute.
“The mortar between the cement blocks in the walls was crumbly. Not so crumbly you could chip it away and escape—never in ten thousand years—but you could get a kind of chalk residue on your fingers if you rubbed at it. The Mazz figured out if you mixed it with spit, you could make a white paste. That’s what he used to cover the Dragonscale when he came down with it, and that’s what I used, too. A couple black guys in our cell got the ’scale, but they scraped themselves up, then claimed they had a fight. A cop threw in a roll of bandages for them, and they used that to cover the marks. By the end of the week, everyone in our cell was carrying Dragonscale and covering it up one way or another. See, all of us were afraid of Miller and the others coming down and shooting up another cell.
“It was in other cells, too. I don’t know if every man in the block had it by January, but I think by New Year’s Day, more had it than didn’t. Some were good at hiding it. Some weren’t. The cops knew after a while. You could tell because they began delivering food wearing elbow-length gloves and riot helmets, in case anyone tried to spit on them. You could tell because they looked so goddamn scared behind the plastic faceplates.
“Well, one morning Miller came downstairs with twelve other cops, all of them in their riot gear and carrying shields. Miller announced he had some good news. He told us there was a transport waiting outside. Anyone who was sick with Dragonscale was eligible for transfer to a camp in Concord, where they’d get the best medical treatment available and three squares a day. Miller read from a sheet of paper that they were having ham and pineapple that evening. Rice pilaf and steamed carrots. No beer, but cold whole milk. The cells opened up and Miller told everyone with Dragonscale to come out. A short black guy with a frill of Dragonscale running right up onto his left cheek stepped out first. It looked like a tattoo of a fern. Most people don’t get it on their faces, but he did, and I guess he saw no reason to pretend he wasn’t carrying it. Another guy came out after him, and then a few more, and then some guys I didn’t even know had it. Pretty soon about half of the block had emptied into the corridor that ran between cells. I was going to go myself. It was the thing about cold milk that got me. You know how good a cup of cold whole milk is, when you haven’t had one in a long time? My throat hurt thinking about it. I even took a step forward, but the Mazz caught my arm and just gave his head a little shake. So I stayed.
“Most of the guys in our cell went, though. One guy who was in with us, Junot Gomez, he shot me a confused look and muttered, ‘I’ll think of you when I’m eatin’ breakfast tomorrow.’” Gilbert lifted his glass to his lips before he remembered it was empty. Harper offered to get him more water, but he shook his head.
“What happened?” Carol asked.
“Is it really that obvious they didn’t ever get their ham and rice pilaf? I guess so, huh? They led ’em upstairs and outside and they shot them all. The guns went off loud enough to shake the walls, and they thundered away for almost half a minute. Not pistols. We were hearing fully automatic bursts of fire. I thought it was never going to stop. You couldn’t hear anything else, not shouts, not screams . . . just guns going, like someone feeding logs into a wood chipper.
“After the shooting stopped, everyone was real quiet. The cellblock hadn’t ever been so quiet, not even in the middle of the night, when people were supposed to be sleeping.
“A while later Miller and the others came down. You could smell homicide on them. Gunsmoke and blood. They brought their M16s and Miller stuck the barrel through the bars at us and I thought, Well, now it’s our turn. Damned if we went and damned if we stayed. I felt sick about it, but I didn’t fall on my knees and start to beg.”
“Good,” Harper said. “Good for you.”
“He says, ‘I want ten men for a cleanup crew. You do good, you can have a soda after.’
“And the Mazz says, ‘What about a glass of cold milk?’ Needling him, you know. Only Miller didn’t get the joke. He just said, ‘Sure, if we have any.’”
“The Mazz asks, ‘What happened out there?’ Like we didn’t know already.
“Miller says, ‘They tried to escape. Tried to seize the truck.’
“And the Mazz, he just laughs.
“Miller blinks at him and says, ‘They were all dead anyhow. It’s better this way. We did ’em a favor. We made it quick. Better than burning alive.’
“The Mazz says, ‘That’s you, Miller. Always thinking about how to help your fellow man. You’re the picture of empathy.’ I told you—the Mazz just has an instinct for running his mouth when anyone else would know to shut up. I thought for sure he’d get shot, but you know what? I think Miller was in shock, too. Maybe his ears were still ringing and he couldn’t hear the Mazz too good. All I know is he just nodded, like he was agreeing with him.
“He opened the cell and the Mazz and I came out. Some other men drifted from the other cells. Guards had us sit down and take off our shoes and leave them behind, so we wouldn’t try and run. When there were ten of us, we went upstairs, flanked by men in body armor. They walked us down a long concrete corridor and out through a pair of double fire doors into the parking lot.