Bloodstained Oz (7 page)

      He ran out into the now empty corridor,
the cell door clanging as it swung open.

      “Hank,” a voice said.

      Haskell Prosser was still in his cell.
The door hung open a few inches but Prosser hid back in the shadows, the red
light washing over him, then throwing him into darkness once again.

      “What you doin’, son? Run.”

      Prosser shook his head. “You try to run
off, the guards’ll beat your ass. Me, I’ll wait for order to be restored, and
take what comes.”

      Hank shrugged. “Never been in me to
just sit back, take what comes, you know? Be seeing you.”

      “Maybe,” Prosser replied.

      By then Hank wasn’t listening. He ran
down the corridor and pushed out into the main hall. None of the doors were
locked, which made sense. What the guys had said was right, the guards
couldn’t just leave them all there to burn.

      Those were the sorts of ordinary
thoughts—sensible thoughts—that were in his mind when he emerged on
the catwalk above the main hall. Then his eyes beheld the scene that unfolded
below.

      In the hellish strobing of the emergency
lights, and with the bleating of the fire alarm filling the air, a slaughter
was in progress. Bodies were strewn on the floor, some of them cut open,
others with limbs torn off, bone jutting from ragged stumps. J.D. Cotton lay
at the bottom of the stairs only a few feet away from Hank, his head torn so
violently aside that it hung onto his neck from a flap of throat and gristle.

      The blood was everywhere, pools of it
gleaming black in the red light.

      Screams competed with the fire alarm.

      At first he thought it was the inmates
that had done it, that with the cell doors open they had gone on some kind of
rampage. But then he saw that some of the corpses wore prison blues, and with
a blink the reality of this carnage struck him.

      The guards and the cons were both being
slaughtered and trying desperately to fight back, some of them side by side as
they attempted to survive.

      The killers had no weapons other than
their hands. In the darkness they moved with a swiftness that seemed
impossible, appearing in one place during this flash of red light, and another
during the next. They were hideous: men and women with long, lithe bodies, and
fingers that were like knives. Even in the strobing scarlet, their flesh
seemed pale, tinged with a deathly green. Their mouths were stretched
impossibly wide as though their jaws were unhinged and filled with gleaming
yellow fangs as long as knitting needles.

      But their eyes were the worst.

      They were emeralds.

      The monsters, the killers, whose claws
and faces and needle teeth and arms were splashed with blood, who tore into
prisoner and guard with equal fervor, thrusting long tongues into fresh wounds
with the zeal of a whoremaster . . . they had emeralds for eyes. Gems exactly
like the one Emmett had found the day before; Emmett, who had screamed in agony
at first in the Hole, and then later in terror, and then finally not at all.
Down in the dark, alone. Poor, dead Emmett.

      The gems glowed bright green, even in
the weak red emergency light.

      The necklace weighed Hank down like his
pocket was full of rocks. He gritted his teeth and clapped his hand over the
bulge it made and it still felt warm there. Frantic, he glanced down and saw
that the jewels in the necklace glowed now, just like their eyes, shimmering
through the fabric of his pants.

      Screams resounded through the hall. He
spared one last look at J.D. Cotton’s messy decapitation and then peered over
the railing again, knowing he had to go back, had to hide himself, but also
knowing that there was nowhere to hide. If he was like Prosser and just hid in
his cell, they would come to him eventually.

      The main doors had been torn off of
their frames, glass shattered and steel twisted. The wire mesh was shredded.
A half dozen guards had created a small phalanx off to the right of the door,
and now they leveled shotguns at the monsters that came through from outside.
The guns exploded with thunder, punctuating the fire alarm, and the
creatures—these emerald vampires—twitched and danced with the
impact. One of them was thrown backward in two pieces, completely cut in two
at the middle.

      As it hit the floor, the vampire’s upper
body began dragging itself toward the pelvis and legs.

      One of the guards saw this and turned
his shotgun on himself, blowing brain and bone across the floor.

      The massacre continued. There were far
more prisoners and guards than there were monsters, but the emerald vampires
kept coming through the door, and the men—the living—were being
slaughtered, the odds changing in favor of the dead with each passing moment.

      “There!” called a voice like shattering
glass.

      Hank looked down and saw that he’d been
noticed. It had to happen. He’d been a fool to just stand there. The female
had long, black hair thick and knotted with drying blood. She stared at him
with those emerald eyes, pointing.

      A prisoner, a huge black man he knew
only as Moon, caved in the back of the vampire’s head with a metal chair.

      Hank ran. He’d gotten lucky once. No
way was he going to get that kind of luck again. The necklace was heavy in his
pocket as he ran up to the next level, where the warden had his office and the
guards had their lunchroom.

      As he hit the top of the stairs and
rounded a corner, someone stepped in front of him, shotgun aimed at his gut.
Hank twisted even as he lunged, grabbed hold of the shotgun barrel and yanked
it past him just as it went off. The bones in his hand and arm rang with the
blast but he was hadn’t been hit.

      The guard wasn’t anyone he recognized.
Hank ripped the shotgun from his hands and cracked him in the forehead with the
butt. The man went down hard and without a sound, either unconscious or dead.
He didn’t slow down to find out which.

      Doors slammed as he ran past. No one
else came out to challenge him. Whatever members of the prison staff had been
on the warden’s floor when the monsters attacked, they were hiding out, fooling
themselves into thinking there was anywhere here that they might be safe from
those things.

      Hank was an optimist, but he wasn’t a
jackass. There was no hiding from the things he’d seen downstairs. The only
option was getting out, getting far enough away that either they couldn’t track
him, or couldn’t be bothered.

      At the end of the corridor was a window.
Screams still echoed from downstairs, but any second they’d be scuttling up
the stairs, and once they came around the corner back the way he’d come and got
a look at him, he was dead.

      He kicked the window out, shards of
glass spraying out into the night and showering down into the prison yard.
Shotgun clutched in one hand, he forced himself into the frame, boots crunching
the glass that remained, careful not to touch the jutting fragments.

      Things moved in the darkness of the
yard. Several guards were out there, shooting into the night. Unearthly cries
made Hank shudder, but all he could focus on was the drop below him. Half a
dozen feet away from the wall below was a work shed where many of the tools
they used out in the field were stored at night. There were two fences around
the prison . . . but the work shed was outside the inner fence. Couldn’t have
the prisoners getting their hands on shovels and hoes and scythes unexpectedly.

      Perfect.

      He dropped, pushing off the frame with a
crunch of glass, and landed on top of the shed. The shotgun shook loose from
his hand as he crumbled into a roll that took him off the metal roof. With a
grunt he hit the dirt and sat up quickly, checking himself over, gleeful to
discover that nothing in him had broken with the impact. The shotgun had
clattered to the ground a few feet away and, remarkably, had not discharged.
But the sound of him landing on the metal roof had been like thunder and he was
sure it would bring them running.

      Hank grabbed the shotgun and looked
around. He was between the two fences. To his right, the outer fence
beckoned, the razor wire at the top gleaming in the moonlight, slashes like
grinning mouths laughing at him in the dark, daring him to climb. But he had
no other choice.

      He started for the fence, and then heard
the hissing behind him.

      Hank spun around and saw three of them
climbing the inner fence. They’d made it into the central prison yard, but now
they’d heard him or smelled him, and these three had diverted from the attack
on the people within and come for him. Their dagger fingers curled around the
metal fence and their emerald eyes gleamed bright green in the night, staring
hungrily at him as they climbed, needle teeth bared. One of them had a long,
thin rivulet of drool hanging from his mouth.

      That was the one he shot.

      The shotgun jumped in his hands and the
blast tore a hole in the thing and blew it right off of the fence. The other
two didn’t even flinch, only kept climbing. Hank cocked it and fired again,
but his aim was slightly off and the shot sheared the left arm off the one
nearest the top.

      One-handed, it did not even slow down.

      And on the dirt behind them, the third
one began to stir, one hand clutching the wound in its chest.

      Hank felt cold inside, as though his
bones were ice. He wanted to scream at them, to curse them, but it was clear
they were already cursed. His words would mean nothing.

      He cocked the shotgun again, but there
were no more shells.

      “Shit,” he whispered, staring, throat
working, unable to swallow. He began to shake, but forced himself to be still.

      Frantic, he spun and ran to the shed.
With the butt of the shotgun he broke the lock and tore the door open. The gun
clattered, useless, to his feet and he reached into the shed and grabbed the
first sharp thing he set his eyes upon: a long, sharp, scythe. It felt
familiar in his hands from the years he’d spent working with such a tool in the
prison fields.

      Without looking to see how near they
were, he ran for the outer fence. Then one of them screeched at him, a
terrible, bestial sound, and he could not help looking back.

      The monster at the top had tried to
climb over and become tangled in the barbed wire, its single arm not enough to
free it. Mouth gaping sickeningly wide, needle teeth gleaming, it stared at
him and thrashed in the barbed wire, desperate to reach him, to gorge itself on
his blood, but only getting itself tangled even more.

      The one he’d shot in the gut was still
flopping around on the ground, trying to rise, but now the third reached the
top of the fence. It drew the barbed wire together in one powerful hand,
twined long fingers around it, and then leaped over, dropping to the ground on
the other side, nothing separating it from Hank except for forty feet of
parched Kansas dirt.

      It ran at him, swift and graceful, eyes
merciless. Hank knew he was going to die. He raised the scythe in his hands,
but knew it was useless. But then the vampire faltered, slowing, and stared at
him, moving more cautiously as it approached.

      Confused, wracked with terror and
desperation, he glanced down to see what it was staring at, and only then felt
the warm weight of the necklace in his pocket. The emeralds within glowed
through the fabric.

      Hank tugged the necklace out and threw
it into the dirt five feet in front of him.

      The vampire dove for it.

      He swung the scythe and its head came
off with a dry crackle, like husking corn. It split when it hit the ground,
and the thing’s body went down on its knees, beginning to wither and shrink
even as it fell over. When he pulled the necklace from its hands, its fingers
disintegrated. He stuck the necklace back in his pocket, liking its weight all
the more now.

      In the prison yard, the one he’d gutshot
was crawling toward the inner fence, still trying to get at him. It looked
like the wound in its abdomen was healing up pretty quickly now.

      He figured he’d keep the scythe.

      Carefully, but quickly, he climbed the
outer fence. Hank twisted the blade of the scythe in the barbed wire to knot
it up tight, and managed only to scrape one leg a little as he swung over,
braced on the other side, pulled the scythe out and dropped to the ground.

      Free.

      For now.

      In the back of the wagon, Elisa sat on
the bed and sang softly to her baby, holding Jeremiah in her arms and rocking
him to sleep. Her own mother would have been horrified to see her, would have
told her to let her little boy cry himself to sleep, to learn to go to bed that
way. But Elisa could not stand to hear Jeremiah cry.

      “It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got
that swing. It don’t mean a thing, all you’ve got to do is sing.” Her voice
was low, barely above a whisper as she cradled the baby against her. The song
was incongruous, a bouncy tune that made for a strange lullaby, but it made her
happy, and if she sang it quietly and a bit more slowly, tapping Jeremiah’s
bottom along with the rhythm, it always put him to sleep.