MoonFall (12 page)

Night was falling. The sound of boots tramped up the steps from the prison’s ground floor and along the walkway towards Noah’s cell. He opened his eyes, stared at the bunk above him, nausea rising from the pit of his stomach.

He’d failed. He’d found no way out, no way clear of this place, and now those footsteps could announce only one thing – Blood Dog’s return.

“Iver,” he called out, desperate for some shred of comfort, the sound of a friendly voice.

“I’m here,” Iver replied. “Here and there and everywhere.”

“That Tom Brennan you knew,” Noah said. “What sort of man was he? What sort of things did he–”
 

A guard slid the key into the cell door. Noah fell silent, slid as far as he could into the shadows cast by the upper bunk.

The door swung open, but instead of Blood Dog’s confident footsteps Noah heard sounds of violence approaching down the hallway, up the stairs and along the walkway. Grunts and groans, the thud of clubs against flesh, curses and howls and intermittent footsteps.

Finally, a cluster of guards appeared with Blood Dog at their center. There was a large bruise on the side of his head, more on his arms, and blood trickled from between his lips. The guards weren’t in much better shape. Two had bloody noses, and Vostok was wincing as he helped haul the prisoner through the door and fling him down in the cell.

“You’ll never kill me!” Blood Dog yelled as he sprawled on the floor, kicking and struggling against the rope that bound his hands behind his back.

“That’s not what the Council say,” Vostok replied. “They say we hang you tomorrow, and good riddance to such filth.”

He slammed the door shut and the key turned in the lock once more. The guards disappeared down the walkway and away.

Blood Dog writhed on the floor some more, apparently oblivious to Noah’s presence. With a little effort, he got up onto his knees. He stayed like that, arms straining, muscles bulging in his shoulders until there was a snap and the rope binding his wrists gave way.

“You can’t keep me, see?” he yelled, throwing the tattered ends of rope out through the bars. “You can’t hold me in here. I’ll kill you all! All except that bitch Burns. Her I’ll fuck and I’ll kill and I’ll fuck some more, and I’ll strangle your fucking Council with the last shreds of her whore guts. You hear me?”

He grabbed hold of the bars, shook them so violently that Noah thought they might break out of the concrete or snap in Blood Dog’s hands. Noah wouldn’t have minded that, wouldn’t have minded at all. If the brute got out of the cell then he had other targets, might find someone else to destroy before he remembered Noah.

No such luck. Blood Dog turned away from the bars, his whole body heaving with rage, his breath blasting fierce and loud like a bellows in a blacksmith’s shop. He ran over to the toilet bowl and kicked it. The porcelain exploded into white shards, spattering the wall with water. More trickled from the broken end of the inlet pipe.

“Fuck you!” Blood Dog screamed it like a war cry, like a mantra that might call down the boon of some angry, hate-filled god. “Fuck you!”

He grabbed his mattress and ripped it in half, flung the two parts across the cell. Fragments of cotton drifted in the air.

Through the wire mesh of the bunk, Blood Dog stared down at Noah. His face filled with malevolent glee.

“I forgot about you, wise guy.” Blood Dog reached down and started to unbuckle his belt. “You going to play nice, or am I going to have kill you too before I fuck you?”

Noah wasn’t scared of a fight, but he’d tried to avoid a confrontation with this man mountain, because this was one he had little chance of winning. But little chance was better than handing himself over to be raped by some murdering asshole. Never let it be said that the Brennan boys gave in without a fight.

He lashed out with his foot, straight into Blood Dog’s crotch. Blood Dog’s fingers took some of the force of the blow, but he still bent over, wheezing and grimacing.

Noah scrambled out from the bunks and across the room. He grabbed the sharpest shard of the toilet bowl he could see. Broken pottery wasn’t much of a blade, but if you stabbed hard enough any point could take out an eye.

He turned as Blood Dog lumbered over to him, ducked a swing of the vast man’s arms and dodged out behind him, slashing with the shard as he went. His heart was beating like a drum, a thudding that filled his ears, filled his world with the echo of his own terror.

Blood Dog turned again. For all his size he wasn’t slow. His kick caught Noah behind the knee and he only just managed to keep his feet. A slab of hand grabbed him by the arm, yanked him over to Blood Dog.

Pulled in close, Noah jabbed with the piece of pottery, stabbing it as hard as he could into the arm that had hold of his own. Blood spurted from a tattoo of a huge breasted woman.

Blood Dog yelled in pain and let go of Noah’s arm. But his other fist hit Noah in the chest, sending him reeling back against the bunks. The sound of his racing heartbeat was broken by something deeper and he wondered what vital part of him had just broken.

He dodged clear as Blood Dog descended on him again, but there were only so many places he could go in a seven foot cell. A blow numbed his arm and the shard of broken toilet bowl slipped through his useless fingers, shattering on the floor. Another blow smashed into his face and the whole world went hazy. He stumbled, was lifted from his feet by a giant hand. Black spots danced across his vision and his mouth filled with the salt taste of blood.

Blood Dog had hold of him again, was pressing him up against the frame of the bunks, one hand around Noah’s throat, the other yanking at his pants.

Another dull, irregular thud broke the rhythm of his heart beating in his ears. How much could there be left working inside him? How many more things would break before this was over?

Iver was screaming something from the cell next door, but it was too late for help.

The whole cell seemed to shake with the next thud, and Noah hoped this meant he was falling unconscious. But instead he fell to the ground as Blood Dog let him go.

“What the fuck?” Blood Dog said as he stared out through the bars of the door.

Lying on the ground next to the bunks, some small, desperate part of Noah took over, an instinct to hide, to delay the inevitable by whatever fragments of a moment he could. With what little strength he had he slid under the bed, into the darkest shadow of an already dark room. His shirt was quickly soaked by water from the broken toilet pipe, but that was nothing compared with the horror of Blood Dog still looming in the center of the room, still staring out through bars.

Then came a roar like a meteorite crashing to Earth and Noah’s whole world exploded.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

A
MIDST
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R
UINS

T
HE
RINGING
FILLED
Noah’s mind, filled his whole world. He clasped his hands over his ears, trying to shut it out, only to find that the ringing came from within.

Slowly he opened his eyes, saw the one thing he had most feared – Blood Dog staring right back at him. He shrank back against the wall, instinct rather than reason pushing him as far from his tormentor as possible.

But there was something wrong with Blood Dog’s face. The hate was gone from his eyes, replaced by an unblinking emptiness. And as Noah stared at the sight in front of him, he realized that the top of the murderer’s tattooed head had been replaced by a bloody, broken mess.

Cautiously, Noah wriggled his way back to the edge of the bed and peered from underneath it. Sure enough, Blood Dog lay dead, his head caved in, arms and legs torn and tangled, his body half buried beneath broken pieces of concrete.

But Blood Dog wasn’t the only hateful thing lying ruined on the floor of the cell. The door had fallen from its hinges, its bars buckled and twisted. Most of the wall between his cell and Iver’s had been destroyed, along with a huge chunk of the exterior wall and half of the ceiling.

As the ringing in his ears faded it was replaced with the sound of alarm bells, women and men shouting, feet running, blows being traded with fists or clubs or both.

He stumbled to his feet, half choked on a mixture of brick dust and smoke. Looking down he could hardly believe that he was almost unscathed by the blast that had destroyed his cell and his cellmate with it. A sliver of something had cut the back of his hand but that was the extent of any injury. The iron bed frame, itself battered and piled high with rubble, had protected him from the blast.

Iver hadn’t been so lucky. He lay slumped against the wall of his cell, blood running from a head wound and a shard of metal protruding from his chest. Noah clambered over the rubble, knelt down beside him.

“Iver?” he said, barely able to hear himself between the ringing and the sounds of distant violence. “Iver, you still there?”

Iver lifted his head. The pupil of one eye looked larger than the other. Blood bubbled between his pale lips.

“Tommy Brennan,” he spluttered, a distant look in his eyes. “How you been Tommy Brennan? Did you fetch me a suture?”

“Not Tom Brennan. I’m Noah, remember? And you’re going to tell me all about Tom Brennan, just as soon as I get you out of here.”

“Going nowhere,” Iver said, looking down at himself. He raised one hand to the side of his head, gingerly touched the wound there. “Sucking chest wound. Collapsed lung. Fractured skull and inevitable concussion.”

“It ain’t that bad,” Noah said, his voice rising with desperation. He didn’t want Iver to die. He wanted him to tell him about his Pa, about whether he had been through here, whether he was still alive after all these years. But as much as that, he didn’t want to see a good guy die in the same squalor and ruin as Blood Dog. A good guy who had seen him through, who had given him hope. “I can get you out of here. Just let me find something for bandages.”

“Patient has significant blood loss,” Iver muttered.

“I wouldn’t say significant,” Noah said. But it wasn’t just water soaking his clothes any more. There was a pool of blood spreading out around Iver, soaking into Noah’s pants, hot and wet and awful.

“Flesh cold,” Iver said. “He’s going into shock. Nurse, fetch twenty cc’s of… twenty cc’s of...”

With one last gasp Iver’s head slumped forward and he fell silent.

“Iver,” Noah said. “Iver, come on buddy.”

He reached for Iver’s neck, felt for any kind of pulse. But as he expected, there was nothing.

“Goddammit.” Noah rose to his feet, took a good look around. To his right, through the hole in the prison wall, a heap of rubble lay in the road below. People were shouting and guns firing somewhere out in the night.

To his left, the prison was in uproar. Whatever had hit the building, it had hit some of the cells hard enough to free their inmates, who were now escaping through broken doors and off down the hall or clambering through holes in the wall and away into the distance. The rest of the prisoners were pleading or yelling at them, desperate to be let out themselves. They waved their arms through the bars, screamed and shouted and begged.

What Noah couldn’t see was any sign of guards.

That was when the reality of his situation struck him. Here was what he wanted, the thing he’d been looking for from the moment Poulson dragged him into this concrete hell – a way out.

He stumbled over patches of rubble to the hole in the wall. As he did, another lump of concrete fell from the ceiling, missing him by half a foot. Better to get moving before the whole place fell down around his ears.

He perched at the edge of the gap, swung one leg out and down. It would be a bit of a drop, and days of hard labor had left his legs stiff as a teenage boy on prom night, so it wasn’t going to be the most graceful of exits. But even if he fell on his ass at least he’d be out, and what was a couple more bruises?

A chunk of rubble slid away, clattered down the remaining debris, as pieces of masonry smashed against each other before settling on the uneven and shadow-strewn ground.

A couple of bruises or a cracked skull.

“It’s this or more beatings,” Noah said, reaching down to his holster for comfort.

His empty holster.

He glanced back toward the prison hall and the guard room at the far end. No guards meant no-one guarding that room. Sure, they might have taken Bourne with them, but what if they hadn’t. Bourne was his lifeline, a way of scaring off robbers, of intimidating cut-price traders, of chasing away hungry critters in the night. OK, so the last one would only work if he could find some bullets, but there was always hope, right?

And he hated to admit it, but life just wasn’t the same with an empty space in the holster on his thigh.

“Goddammit.” He pulled his aching leg back up over the edge, hauled himself to his feet. Another chunk of rubble fell down on the far side of the cell. Clangs and excited cries rang from the prison hall below. “Better be quick about this.”

He ran out of the cell and along the walkway. If the past half hour had given him one thing it was adrenaline, and his body was still working for all it was worth, muscles straining through the pain and exhaustion. He took the steps down two at a time, almost falling over his own feet as he hit the ground, and carried on running.

Down here he could see that not all of the inmates had fled. A growing number, all marked with Dionite snake tattoos, had picked up chunks of broken bed frames or bars from fallen doors and were using them as improvised picks and levers to bust open their comrades” cells. Maybe this whole mess was the rescue Iver had been waiting for. If so, then it was a shitty way for it to go down for him, blown to hell by his own tribesmen, just a casualty in their bid to free the rest of their mob. It seemed maybe Iver had chosen the wrong side.

At least the Dionites seemed happy to leave Noah to his business – the business of getting armed and then the hell out of here. He ran from the main hall into the corridor that led to the guard room door and stopped.