CROSS SAT next to Banner at the mess table. His mouth barely moved, but his body posture was so intense and urgent that other members moved as far away as possible without leaving their posts.
Finally, Cross stood up. Slowly and deliberately, he walked into the traditional No Man’s Land of cleared space between whites and blacks. A guard started to step forward but stopped in his tracks as Nyati arose from his crew’s table and moved toward Cross.
The entire mess hall was silent. Dead silent. The guards froze, knowing that if a full-scale race war jumped off in that enclosed space, they weren’t going to make it out alive.
When Cross and Nyati were close enough to bump noses, Cross started to speak, his words inaudible to all but the leader of the UBG. When he finished, he stepped back an inch.
Then he said, still under his breath, “If you buy it, there’s nothing else for me to say. I just told you all I know. For this one, it is us against them. You believe that, then it’s the Death House. Bring whatever you want, bring whoever you want. But it’s only going to be the five of us doing the actual work. That means we all lose some men.”
“All?”
“All,” Cross confirmed. “Human body armor isn’t going to keep them off for long. If they get to us before we’re ready, we’re done, too.”
“Five? You and me, that leaves three short.”
“Ortega and Banner.”
“Banner? That Nazi’s already been breathing longer than he should. What do we need with two white men?”
“Who’s the boss of the Hmongs?”
“Recognized them right away, huh? They a seriously bad bunch, man. But that crew, it’s also got Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese … probably others I don’t even know about. And, listen now, in here, they forget all that. They play it like an all-for-one mob. They got no choice. But you can see they really don’t like each other any more than they do us.”
“It’s only the Hmong guy I want.”
“Why him?”
“I speak a few words of the language. I can break it down for him.”
Nyati stared hard at Cross. And took the same in return. “Okay, man. It’s your show. What time?”
“Midnight.”
“Done.”
“For the race!” Cross shouted. But before anyone on either side could react, Nyati echoed, “For the race!”
Then, to the stunned surprise of all watching, they stood in the middle of No Man’s Land, and clasped hands.
MIDNIGHT. THE Death House area was clogged with convicts, still divided along racial lines, but not openly antagonistic toward one another. Frightened would be a better description of their mood, fear was the single unifying factor among them.
Whites, blacks, and Latinos were all there, even a sprinkling of Asians. Everyone was armed with whatever they were able to procure from the broad spectrum of prison-available weapons.
Men just before combat act the same way in prison as they do on any battlefield: some smoke, some pace, some pray. Every man was anxious to get it on, and even more anxious for it to be over.
Cross was standing with Nyati and Ortega, their backs against the gas-chamber wall.
One of the Asians approached, a short, thin man holding what looked like a strip of razor blades on a string. His face could be that of a man anywhere between thirty-five and seventy-five, but his eyes were not those of a young man. Cross pointed to his right, confirming to Nyati that the Asian’s appearance was not a surprise.
Banner detached himself from his crew and moved over to where the others were standing.
“Deal me in,” he said.
“Just you?” Cross asked.
“Look around, brother. We’re all here. But it’s got to be me up front. I’m the shot-caller, so this is my place, too. Like you told me, this is for the race. So, whatever goes down, I’m down with it. But I have to go standing up, see?”
Cross nodded. He turned to Ortega. “Your man knows what to do?”
“For this, I am my man, hermano. After you first talked with me, I reached out. What you say, it is true. It has always been true. All the way back to the Aztecs. The Mayans and the Incas. So it is just like you and Nyati called it out. For the race!”
“For the race,” Banner echoed, but very quietly.
Each man held up a fist, waist-high. And then they slammed them together in an unmistakable gesture of final unity.
“YOU SURE it’s coming, man?” Nyati asked.
“Look around you. If it wants to hunt the real life-takers inside these walls, we’re the only game in town.”
The Hmong nodded, but said nothing. Then he vanished.
A TINY shadowy blotch materialized within the densely packed men. It thickened and lengthened, gathering mass. Then it began moving like an anaconda through a swamp. Blood spurted wildly as individual men were torn into random pieces. Their body parts flew through the darkness until they hit the nearest wall, where a stack of ripped-out spines began to pile up.
Some of the men tried to run, others stood their ground, desperately striking blindly at whatever was attacking them.
This had no effect on the presence, which continued to work its way over to where four men stood against the gas-chamber wall, two on each side of its door.
The darkness was filled with screams as body parts continued to fly. A red haze formed, so intense it seemed to attack the darkness itself.
Ortega slipped off to one side of the death chamber; Banner to the other. The Hmong was nowhere to be seen.
Cross and Nyati remained, now standing alone. At a “Go!” from Cross, they both stepped back through the opened door of the gas chamber, still watching the inexorable progress of … something as it moved through the wall of human flesh.
“Sweet Jesus!” Nyati muttered under his breath.
“Son of a bitch!” Cross said. “This is too soon. I was sure they’d—”
Cross cut himself off. The presence he felt to his right wasn’t the one gutting and discarding individual prisoners; it was the Hmong, joining them.
The three men backed all the way into the chamber. Cross seated himself in the chair where condemned convicts were once strapped down. He lit a cigarette.
Nyati took the other chair—dual executions were far from uncommon in Chicago’s past.
The Hmong crouched in a far corner, covered entirely in a dark mesh blanket.
A black mist approached the threshold of the death chamber. The men instantly realized the presence had been divided into small pieces by the slashing attacks of the mass of convicts it had oozed its way through. But then they all saw it begin to regroup into a unified mass.
Slowly, it struggled to form a single entity. The black blob had been deeply wounded—chunks of its border were missing, and gaping holes were visible within its remaining mass. And yet it kept moving forward, as if the human flesh it sought would be the replenishment it needed.
Just as the misty black mass entered the death chamber, Ortega and Banner slipped behind it and slammed the door closed. They dropped the heavy outside crossbar into place and took off, running.
They didn’t run far. As soon as they reached the control room, both men randomly flipped a series of heavy switches, releasing cyanide pellets into a shallow pool of acid under the death chairs. A greenish gas immediately began to billow up.
“Now!” Cross yelled, reaching behind his neck and pulling a flat-faced mask with a dark filter over the front into place. Nyati and the Hmong did the same.
Cross jumped to his feet, drawing a heavy bear-claw knife from behind his back. Nyati unsheathed a thick length of pipe and waved his wrist; a razor-edged arrow popped free at each end. The Hmong cradled a beautifully crafted blowgun.
Without warning, Nyati and Cross attacked, slashing at the encroaching blackness … and finally penetrating the shadow-blob, which became more visible every time it took another hit.
The Hmong was the last to act. Holding the blowgun as a brain surgeon would a tumor-removal scalpel, he emptied his lungs to blast off a single shot.
The shadow collapsed, breaking into patches of black on the floor of the chamber. But the patches immediately began to pool once again.
Nyati crawled over to the mass, tentatively extending his hand.
“It’s still alive. I can feel … something. Like a pulse, maybe. If we’re gonna finish it—”
Cross pounded his palm hard against the door to the death chamber. Banner and Ortega threw off the crossbar and left it just long enough for the two men inside to dive out before they slammed it back home again. Neither of them realized that the Hmong had been the first to leave, gliding between Cross and Nyati.
Cross pulled off his mask, opened his mouth wide, reached in, and wrenched the phony molar free. He pressed the top of the tooth, which immediately began to hum.
“It’s down. In the chamber,” Cross said into the minimike, his voice calm, precise … and urgent.
THE BLOND man was in the War Room, Wanda at his side. He was half-shouting into a fiber-stalk microphone. “All units. Go! Go! Go!”
Percy was behind the wheel of the unit’s war wagon, cruising the highway closest to the prison. He picked up the blond man’s message and stomped the gas pedal, hitting the red button on the dash that kicked in the twin turbo-chargers at the same time.
Tiger and Tracker were already in the shadow cast by the prison wall. They moved in from different directions.
Tiny black splotches began to reassemble inside the gas chamber. If the poison gas had any effect on this process, it was not apparent.
Adapting its shape to circumstances, the blackness flattened itself to micro-thinness. Then it slowly began to probe the seals of the death chamber’s door, seeking an opening.
NYATI, NEAR death, was trying to stand, using a wooden spear as a crutch. Banner stood with him, still slashing with a prison-built sword. But he, too, was fading fast.
Cross wasn’t doing much better. He opened his eyes just as the chamber door began to crack at one of the top seals, pushed open by something blacker than darkness.
He had been expecting an Evac Team, but the blackness told him they were going to be too late. He sensed the shadow calling to whatever pieces outside the chamber were still unattached.
Calling them home.
Ortega and the Hmong attacked the thickening blackness from either side of the door, but their knife thrusts no longer had any effect.
Suddenly, the shadow-mass stopped writhing. A tiny blue symbol glowed briefly on Cross’s right cheekbone, just below the eye. As the blue mark crystallized into what would be a permanent scar, Cross plunged into unconsciousness.
THE ONLINE edition of the Chicago Tribune screamed:
RACE WAR AT FEDERAL PRISON!
277 CONVICTS KILLED IN PRISON RIOT!
“WORST IN HISTORY” SAYS BUREAU OF PRISONS
“Tell me again, goddamn it!” the blond man said, almost incoherent with rage.
“By the time we got there, they were gone,” Tiger repeated. “Maybe back to wherever they came from. The only trace they left behind was the body count.”
“I’m done with this,” Percy said. “Taking one alive, yeah, that was a brilliant idea. Look what it cost! And all for nothing.”
“As long as I’m the head of this outfit, I don’t give a damn what you think,” the blond man responded, back to his bloodless self-control. “Get out of my sight, all of you. I’ve got to work up another capture scenario.”
Except for Wanda, all the others walked away.
A soft gray shadow followed them briefly, as though to shield them from harm. After a moment, it started to flow in the other direction, back toward the blond man and Wanda. At above-human detection levels, the “capture scenario” line was repeated. Then …
“Hit!”
A glimmering pair of playing cards hovered over the heads of the blond man and Wanda: the ace and jack of clubs.
When the cards disappeared, the blond man and Wanda were hanging from the ceiling, missing their spines and skulls.
“THE OPERATION’S been closed down,” Tiger told Cross. They were in the Visiting Room, about a month after the “riot.”
“Because Blondie and his girlfriend got done?”
“No. Although I can tell you, even Tracker got a little pale when we found them in the War Room, just … hanging like they were.”
“The deal’s still in place?”
“Immunity in front? I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, not now.”
“What can I get?”
“You can get out.”
“I could do that without you. Remember, I’m not convicted of anything, and I’ve got a hunch the feds are going to drop the case.”
“What do you want?”
“Stand up.”
Cross held Tiger tenderly. As they kissed, his right hand dropped to Tiger’s prominent butt. Every eye in the room followed that hand, not the one hidden under Tiger’s thick, striped mane.
“I didn’t think that would work,” she said, speaking very softly.
“It was a mortal lock,” Cross assured her. “There’s a little scrap of paper under the back neckline of your sweater now. There’s four names on it. They all need to have their cases reversed on appeal.”
“So long as they didn’t—”
“Four cases, three homicides, one rape. No kids, no drugs. And all innocent.”
“That’s still asking a lot. I don’t mean from me—you know how they work.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I do. But unless they handle this job, who’re they going to debrief?”
“They don’t need more than—”
“Yeah, they do. I think I’ve finally got this one figured out. And they’ll need all of those guys on the list to have it make sense. Polygraph them, hit them with the truth serum, whatever they want. Maybe this time they’ll go back and actually investigate. They’ll see it for themselves.”
“So you say.”
Cross leaned in toward Tiger, his lips feather-touching her ear. “They didn’t attack any of us—they … it … whatever it was, it only fought back in self-defense.”
“They didn’t hit me or Tracker, either. Percy’s missing, but that could mean anything.”
“Come back here and listen, okay? What I’m telling you is just between us. For now.”
Tiger wiggled herself close, threw her left thigh over Cross’s right. “How’s this?”
“Very fine.”
“Don’t play games,” Tiger warned him. “You think I had an orgasm when you grabbed my ass?”
“I came pretty damn close.”
“Just stop! Why didn’t they attack any of you?”
“I don’t know. I mean, they kind of did. But what I do know is that they could have finished us if they wanted—we were all running on empty, blood included. So they’re not kill-crazy; they were on a mission. It’s got something to do with crime, but only certain kinds of crime.”
“How can—?”
“Sssh! Just listen. It’s like they’re thinning the herd. Culling out the scum. You check the sheets of the men they slaughtered, I’ll bet you find something in common.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. But it feels like … it feels like they’re trying to … yeah, I know how this is gonna sound … like they’re trying to take out the humans who’re polluting their own race.”
“But they’re not—”
“Maybe not. But they kill humans, right? That’s the race I’m talking about. We—humans, I’m saying—we’re never satisfied with just killing each other, are we? No, we rape, we torture … we march people into gas chambers a lot bigger than the one we tried to trap it in. There’s nothing you can do to a human being that hasn’t been done. By other humans.
“That … shadow or whatever it was … it’s like it was playing a game of blackjack. Only ‘hit’ doesn’t mean ‘hit me’—it means ‘hit them.’ ”
“They can read the cards every person’s holding?”
“Maybe it is something like that. The closest I can get to what I’m trying to say is … remember, when the Nazis marched people into the gas chambers, it wasn’t just Jews. Homosexuals, Gypsies … it would have been everyone on the planet but themselves. And even that wouldn’t have lasted.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. That’s the political part, not the … genetic, I guess. There’s only one way to keep blood ‘pure.’ Inbreeding. And we know what happens in these families where incest covers too many generations. There’s records going all the way back to Sawney Bean. And that’s just written records. It might take us a while, but, eventually, the human race was going to rot from the inside out.”
“I … I can see that. But the Nazis didn’t succeed.”
Cross took Tiger’s hand in his. She made no move to pull away.
“Tiger, if you want to file this under ‘Lunatic,’ that’s up to you. But what my mind keeps seeing is that smoke. The smoke from their ovens. That gray, shadowy smoke.
“What if, every time human slaughter ever occurred in the history of the world, there was more of that smoke? What if the smoke had … I don’t know … something of the slaughtered people in it? What if it became a thing of its own?”
“I’m not telling those junior G-men any story like that.”
“I don’t want you to. I’m not telling them myself. I’ll just feed them enough to send them alien-hunting.”
“This … theory of yours, you want to keep it to yourself?”
“No, girl. If I’m wrong, we all go back to our lives, whatever they were before this. But if I’m right … I don’t know how to say this, exactly. You know who I am; you know what I do. I’m not one of the good guys, and that was my choice.
“But if a hard rain’s coming—if the filth is being washed out of our race—then, whoever they are, this is one job I want them to pull off.”
Tiger looked deeply into Cross’s eyes for a long moment. “Me, too,” she finally said. “And when you get out, we have things to say to each other.”
“How do I find you?”
“You just keep on working out of that Red 71 dump of yours, Mr. Cross. I’ll find you.”
AS TIGER spoke, the graffiti-style red arrow leading to the basement poolroom began to work its way downstairs, looking much like an MRI of a boa constrictor swallowing its prey. In a language no human could understand, spoken at a pitch outside of human hearing range:
“Find you …”
And, just as nobody hears those words, nobody hears:
“Stay!”
And nobody sees the quick flash of a river of aces and jacks spilling out of the bottom arrow, as if sprayed from the hose of a short, squat container of pesticide.