The moths flew toward the caged overhead lights of A Wing and into the main prison. Angel turned, still tearing at her head (although all the insects in her hair now seemed to have joined their fellows), and Jeanette triggered the Mace directly into the screaming woman’s face.
“You see how complex the problem is, don’t you, Jeanette?” Evie said as Angel blundered into the wall, howling and furiously rubbing her eyes. “I think it might be time to erase the whole man-woman equation. Just hit delete and start over. What do you think?”
“That I want to see my son,” Jeanette said. “I want to see my Bobby.” She dropped the can of Mace and began to cry.
4
While this was happening, Claudia “the Dynamite Body-a” Stephenson emerged from the delousing station and decided to seek climes more serene and vistas new. Just too noisy in A Wing this evening. Too upsetting. That special coffee was spilled everywhere, too, and it smelled really bad. You didn’t want to go and attempt to parlay with the devil when your nerves were jumbled, that was common sense. She could talk to the lady in A-10 later. She passed the Booth and walked into B Wing. She left her top behind.
“Inmate!” Van Lampley leaned out of the Booth, where she had seen the fight about to break out. (Angel with her fucking Super Coffee; Van was too bushed to castigate herself, but she should never have consented to the plan.) She had sent Quigley and Olson to defuse the situation, and was about to rush out to join them when Stephenson passed through.
Claudia made no reply, just kept walking.
“You forgot something, didn’t you? This is a prison, not a strip joint. Talking to you, Stephenson! Where do you think you’re going?”
But did she, Van, really care? Lots of them were wandering now, probably just trying to stay awake, and meanwhile, there was a fuckaree going on down at the far end of A Wing. That was where she was needed.
She started that way, but then Millie Olson—splashed with coffee all down her front—waved her back. “Under control,” Millie said. “Got that crazy bitch Fitzroy locked up. Situation back to normal.”
Van, thinking that nothing was under control and nothing was normal, nodded.
She looked around for Stephenson and didn’t see her. She returned to the Booth and called up the first floor of B Wing on one of the monitors in time to see Claudia entering B-7, the cell occupied by Dempster and Sorley. Only Sorley was still in A Wing, and Van hadn’t seen Dempster in quite awhile. Inmates were not above a bit of petty theft if they found a cell empty (the favorite targets of opportunity were the two Ps—pills and panties), and such depredations inevitably caused trouble. She didn’t have any reason to suspect Claudia, who was no nuisance in spite of being big enough to cause plenty of hassle, would do such a thing. Nonetheless, it was Van’s job to be suspicious. It wouldn’t do to have a rhubarb break out over a case of stolen property. Not with everything else that was going wrong.
Van decided to make a quick check. It was just a feeling, but she hadn’t liked the way Claudia was walking, with her head down, her hair in her face, and her smock top cast off God knew where. It would only take a minute, and she could stand to stretch her legs. Get the blood flowing again.
5
Claudia didn’t have theft on her mind. All she wanted was a bit of calm conversation. It would pass the time until A Wing settled down and she could speak to the new woman and find out how she, Claudia, could also go to sleep and wake up like on any other day. The new woman might not tell her, but then again, she might. The devil was unpredictable. He had been an angel once.
Ree was on her bunk with her face turned to the wall. Claudia noted for the first time, and not without pity, that Ree’s hair was starting to turn gray. That was true of Claudia as well, but she dyed hers. When she couldn’t afford the real stuff (or when none of her few visitors could be persuaded to bring her some Nutrisse Champagne Blonde, her favorite), she used ReaLemon from the kitchen. It worked pretty well, but didn’t last very long.
She reached out to touch Ree’s hair, then jerked back with a little cry when some of the gray stuck to her fingers. The threads wavered in the air for a second or two, then melted away to nothing.
“Oh, Ree,” Claudia mourned. “Not you, too.”
But maybe it wasn’t too late; there were only a few strands of that cocoon stuff in Ree’s hair. Maybe God had sent Claudia to B-7 while there was still time. Maybe this was a test. She took Ree by the shoulder and rolled her onto her back. The webbing was spiraling out of Ree’s cheeks and her poor scarred forehead, strands of it were emerging from her nostrils and eddying in her breath, but her face was still there.
Well, mostly.
Claudia used one hand to begin scrubbing the crap from Ree’s cheeks, going from one side to the other, not neglecting the whitish threads emerging from her mouth and strapping themselves across her lips. With her other hand, Claudia grabbed Ree’s shoulder and began to shake her.
“Stephenson?” From down the hallway. “Inmate, what are you doing in there? That’s not your cell.”
“Wake up!” Claudia cried, shaking harder. “Wake up, Ree! Before you can’t!”
Nothing.
“Inmate Stephenson? I’m talking to you.”
“That’s Officer Lampley,” said Claudia, still shaking and still scraping at the relentless white threads—God, it was hard to stay ahead of them. “I like her, don’t you? Don’t you, Ree?” Claudia began to cry. “Don’t go away, honey, it’s too soon to go away!”
And at first she thought the woman on the bunk appeared to agree with that, because her eyes snapped open and she began to smile.
“Ree!” Claudia said. “Oh, thank God! I thought you were—”
Only the smile continued to spread, the lips drawing back until it wasn’t a smile at all but a teeth-baring snarl. Ree sat up and clamped her hands around Claudia’s neck and bit off one of Claudia’s favorite earrings, a little plastic kitten-face. Claudia screamed. Ree spat out the earring along with the attached scrap of earlobe, and went for Claudia’s throat.
Claudia outweighed the diminutive Ree Dempster by seventy pounds, and she was strong, but Ree had gone insane. Claudia was barely able to hold her off. Ree’s fingers slipped from Claudia’s neck and her fingernails dug into the larger woman’s bare shoulders, bringing blood.
Claudia staggered from the bunk and toward the open cell door, Ree clinging to her like a limpet, snarling and gnashing and jerking from side to side, trying to break Claudia’s hold on her so she could move in and do real damage. Then they were in the hall and inmates were shouting, Officer Lampley was bellowing, and those sounds were in another galaxy, another universe, because Ree’s eyes were bulging and Ree’s teeth were chomping inches from Claudia’s face and then, oh God, her feet tangled and Claudia went sprawling in the B Wing corridor with Ree on top of her.