MoonFall (9 page)

The soldiers who oversaw them in the jail and accompanied them on their work clearly had plenty of other duties, both inside and outside the town. Through the day Noah saw groups wandering around distant patches of ruins or up into the edges of the woods and hills beyond, always armed, always ready, always looking like they expected trouble to spring out on them at any moment. He’d seen them in town as well during the brief journey between the prison and the gate, watching the citizens about their business, stepping in at any sign of trouble. Their armor and weapons were a mish-mashed assortment of things left over from before the meteors and whatever could be cobbled together from what remained, as many wearing thickly padded jackets as had real body armor, a couple even dressed in ring-mail or metal plates dangling from cable ties. But all bore the symbol of Apollo, the drawn bow and arrow, and all wore the same distinctive red neck scarves.

Noah also thought he might have some idea what the Dionites looked like. Burns had talked about them as wild and savage looking, and while none of the prisoners looked too civilized there was a certain type who hung together in the feed hall and talked together on the chain gangs – men and women in loincloths and with plentiful tattoos. If they weren’t some kind of gang then they were Apollo’s most backward looking fashion trend. Treated particularly harshly by the guards and ostracized by the other half of the inmates, they were certainly looking like his best bet. If he could identify them for sure, then maybe he could find out a bit more about this place, enough to appease Burns and find a way out.

One thing he knew for sure – Blood Dog wasn’t one of these Dionites. He had his own special place within the strange social hierarchy of the prison, watched carefully by everyone, avoided by most of his fellow inmates, but with others circling around him like vultures hoping for the scraps after his kills.

Today Blood Dog was in a particularly shitty mood. He laid waste to the ruins with a mad strength that Noah almost envied, slithers of brick and concrete flying like shrapnel all around him.

A woman on wheelbarrow detail lost control of her barrow on the rough ground and spilled broken bricks all around Blood Dog’s feet. He leaped at her, fists flying, spitting the vilest curses Noah had ever heard. The woman darted away, her face a rictus of terror, and it was only when Blood Dog’s chain ran up short that he was kept from chasing after her. He stopped for a moment, looking back at the two-foot iron peg with which the guards had fixed him to a spot, then went back to work, glaring around at everyone as he set to swinging once more with the pick.

“He bit a man’s ear off last week,” said Jen, the round faced woman next to Noah on the chain. “Spat it out into the face of one of the guards. Took six guards to restrain him, and I heard two of them are still in the infirmary.”

“He always been this way?” Noah asked.

“More or less.” Jen leaned on her shovel, glanced around in case the guards were watching, but they were too preoccupied to care about the prisoners going a little slow, half of them guarding a street thief while another patrol finished chasing his accomplice. “He’s gotten worse the last few weeks on account of his trial’s coming up. He’s up for death, and no-one’s taking odds against it.”

“What did he do?” Noah wasn’t really sure he wanted to know what atrocities his cellmate was capable of, not while there was no escaping him at night. But at the same time he couldn’t resist scratching at the scab of curiosity.

“What didn’t he do? Blood Dog ran half the crime in Apollo before Molly Burns brought him down. Ran guns, drugs, meds. Put the squeeze on businesses. Killed folks for money or for fun. They say he killed his first man when he was sixteen, sliced him open with a shard of glass. Maybe that’s true and maybe it ain’t, but criminal life got pretty exciting in Apollo after he arrived, both for good and for bad.”

“He been inside long?”

“Long enough to kill five more, including a guard. That’s how everyone knows he’s going to hang and burn. Everyone except Blood Dog at least. Though even he’s sane enough that the prospect of a trial’s turned him a little crazier.”

As she spoke, Blood Dog picked up a chunk of masonry as broad as his own chest. He raised it above his head and then flung it at one of his fellow prisoners. The man only just jumped clear, the block smashing a wall next to where he’d stood. Even as the guards ran over to beat him down, Blood Dog laughed like a fierce jungle beast.

The guards beat Blood Dog until he stopped resisting, then they separated him off from the rest of his chain gang and three of them led him back in through the town gate.

Noah glanced around. There were only three guards now covering seventeen prisoners, plus the street thief the other patrol had brought in, a gangling youth with no shoes and an idiot grin. If there was ever a time to escape, this was it.

He waited until he was sure that the guards were preoccupied then shifted his chain, putting a link up on the wall he was breaking down.

“Won’t do you no good,” Jen said.

“You saying you ain’t in?” Noah hadn’t planned on springing anyone but himself, but better an accomplice than someone who might call the guards.

“I’ll try anything.” She shifted around to better block the guards’ view of Noah. “You get them two links there, reckon we can both slide off this chain and be gone.”

“Alright then.” Noah hefted his pick, slammed it down against the chain. The brick beneath it crumbled but the metal barely showed a scratch.

“Keep going,” Jen murmured. “No point giving up now.”

Noah swung the pick again and again, hoping that he was doing more damage than it looked like.

“Hold a second,” Jen said.

Noah looked around. The guard patrol that had brought in the street thief was back, and they had another captive. Kicking and squirming in the grip of a muscled soldier was a scrawny teenage girl dressed in ragged clothes and with a mop of brown hair flying around her face.

“You know who that is?” Noah asked.

“Nope.” Jen shook her head. “But the Elders said there were ten thousand souls in Apollo at the last census, and I sure as shit ain’t had time to meet them all.”

“I think she was following me the day I was brought in.” Noah tilted his head, trying to get a better look past Burns. If she wasn’t the same girl then, she was mighty similar looking.

“Reckon half the town will have been watching you,” Jen said. “Gotta get our kicks somehow and seeing a Dionite brought in sometimes has to do.”

Noah suddenly perked up. He’d been such an idiot. Why hadn’t he just asked the other prisoners what he wanted to know? If his captors knew what a Dionite was, and the Dionites knew what a Dionite was, why wouldn’t the other people around here?

“These Dionites,” he said. “What are they–”
 

“Back to work prisoner,” one of the patrol soldiers growled as they walked past.

Noah obediently got back to it, pick rising and falling on the pile of rubble and the chain draped across it. Was it his imagination or was he starting to wear through one side? He focused on the task rather than talking, not wanting to do anything that might risk drawing attention to him and Jen.

He kept his head down as Burns walked past them too, dragging the new prisoner by what passed for a collar on her stained and tattered t-shirt. Keeping a careful eye on them in case Burns came back, Noah swung his pick in a dramatic but ineffective display of work, hammering at broken and easily shifted debris for the biggest impression of labor.

To his surprise, Burns didn’t drag the girl back to town or to some holding cell for an interrogation and a beating. Instead she dragged her aside into the relatively upright ruins of a garage.

“What you doing?” Jen hissed as he moved forward a few steps, the chain stretching out behind him, so he could spy on them through his own set of ruins.

“Just curious,” he replied. Whether it was the curiosity of a man interested in a woman or of a prisoner wanting leverage over his captor Noah wasn’t sure, but curiosity sure was the thing right now.

He’d half expected Burns to be laying down some sort of illicit beating, or shaking the girl down for bribes in return for letting her go. Sure, Burns had struck him so far as the upright type, and hearing her mentioned in relation to Blood Dog’s downfall added to that image, but Noah’s worldview held room for suspicion of everyone. There were no surprises left in the world, and very few righteous souls. Noah knew he wasn’t among them, why expect any different from Burns?

Yet here was a surprise right before his eyes. The woman who had beaten him bloody, who had brought down the most dangerous killer in Apollo, was smoothing down the hair of a street urchin using her own neck scarf to wipe dirt and a smear of blood from the girl’s face and examining her scrapes and bruises with a look of concern that Noah had previously thought beyond her. They were talking quietly to each other. He couldn’t hear what it was about, but once she was done cleaning Burns pulled a loaf of flatbread and a couple of apples from a pouch on her belt and handed them over. The girl munched on an apple with such enthusiasm that Noah wondered if she’d eaten all week. He knew that desperate, empty feeling, and by the looks of her, the girl did too.

So this was the real Burns – not the angry woman who’d laid into him in an interrogation room, but someone caring and compassionate, maybe even one of the real good guys. It had been a long time since Noah had met one of the real good guys, and now he wanted to get to know her even more.

Burns glanced around, peering back towards where her fellow guards stood. Apparently satisfied that no-one was watching, she hugged the girl who squeezed her tightly back. Then Burns sent her scurrying off through the ruins back around the edge of town, away from their guard detail and the other patrol.

As she stepped out of the ruined garage, Burns glanced over towards the ruins where Noah stood. He ducked back behind the remains of a wall, then started pounding at it with his pick, determined to look busy.

She rounded the corner, stepped up next to Noah, and peered over his shoulder towards where she’d been a minute before. Then she turned to face him.

“Think you’re smart, huh?” she said.

“My Mama told me so,” Noah replied, trying to look innocent. He knew from past experience that he was no good at it, but practice made perfect, right? “But then our Mamas are biased, ain’t they?” Her face told him she wasn’t going for the innocent look- better try another move instead. “You got any kids, Sergeant Burns?”

He shot a pointed look back towards the ruined garage. Burns narrowed her eyes.

“Whatever you think you saw, you didn’t.” She looked from him to his chains and then down to Jen, who was trying very hard not to look like she was listening as she shoveled rubble into a barrow.

Burns squatted next to the chain, ran a finger along the battered link where Noah had been making his bid for freedom. Then she looked at the head of his pick, some points on its blade freshly gleaming where they’d been battered against other metal. She rose and leaned in close to Noah.

“I guess we both have secrets now,” she murmured. “Let’s keep it that way, huh?”

She turned and strode off back towards the other guards, calling out over her shoulder.

“I’ll be keeping a close eye on you two.”

“Nice work, lover boy.” Now it was Jen’s turn to glare at Noah.

He shrugged.

“Are you any less free than you were this morning?” he asked.

“I suppose not.” She hefted a last shovel of rubble into the barrow, looked around for someone to wheel it away. “But what was all the whispering about?”

“Reckon I’m in love,” Noah said.

“And her?”

“Reckon she’s in hate. But I’ll grow on her.”

“And if you don’t?”

“Then how do you feel about walks under starlight?”

Jen glanced over at a guard striding angrily towards them, lifted her shovel and moved as far as she could from Noah.

“Reckon I feel like digging.”

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ask other prisoners about the Dionites had arrived at a lousy time. Blood Dog had carried on picking fights after they brought him back to the jail, putting two more inmates in the infirmary and leaving evidence in the form of bloodstains on the canteen floor.

This had put all the guards on edge. They’d vented their tensions by beating down on any hint of trouble, from fights between prisoners to inmates looking at them funny. The prisoners, feeling the pressure of scrutiny and the pain of the guards’ clubs, had closed down into their defensive cliques, no-one talking to anyone who wasn’t already in their gang. And Noah was in a gang of one.

It didn’t help that Burns was making a point of watching him and Jen, and even got other officers in on it.

“I do not know what you do to her,” Vostok said as Noah passed him in the hall, “but Sergeant Burns, she has us all on you now, yes?”

He laughed and slapped Noah on the shoulder, though Noah didn’t see much that was funny about it himself.

“Sounds about right,” he agreed.

Vostok seemed a decent guy, but he was still undoubtedly a guard. Two minutes later, Noah saw him hit a guy for refusing to get back into line. He figured that was what this place did to you – if it didn’t make you untrustworthy it made you untrusting, and either way it was just making you human. The good thing about prison was that there were no niceties painted over the top, creating the illusion that everything was happy and fluffy.

Of course, the bad thing about prison was that there were no niceties painted over the top, keeping folks from screaming at each other or beating on each other or stealing each other’s food in the lunch line. The only thing holding back that barely contained layer of violence and mayhem was the threat of more violence and mayhem, which didn’t exactly set the tone for fun and relaxation.