Page 14 of Master of Lies

That would be a whole new bag of dicks to suck, and who had the fucking time.

I staggered through the fallen men in the bathroom, and headed toward the north wing, trying to make my fingers work somehow. Groping for the cell phone. I was shaking. Adrenaline, shock. My eyes were wet.

Mickey. Jesus, Mickey. That funny, wiseass little shithead. A whole life of being bullied and used and shoved around, and he’d still had dreams of being free. Of lying on a sugar sand beach someplace on a towel, reading a book in blessed peace, with no one to bug him or interrupt him. After a few months, I’d started wanting that for Mickey, too. Completely apart from the intel I needed from him. Damn, the guy had deserved to just live his life and not be fucked with, for once. It wasn’t that much to ask.

But no, it was not allowed. Those filthy, greedy scum-sucking motherfuckers had gotten to him first. They had chewed him up and spat out his bones.

All because of me. I’d brought my curse along with me, just like with Shane and the others. I am shit luck to anyone who gets near me, and yet here I am, still trying to be the fucking hero of the hour, so I can prove them all wrong.

Meanwhile, people around me drop like flies.

As I turned the corner, I saw Red Watson, the CO I most despised. He was the most corrupt of the bunch. A pasty, brainless butthead. I realized, from the horrified look on his face, that he’d been doing sentry duty for Darryl. He had not expected to see me alive. His eyes went wide as I sprinted toward him. He lifted his baton, too late.

I barreled into him. We hit the floor, skidding. He howled as his head thudded the cinderblock wall. I wrenched the baton out of his hand and jammed it up under his throat. “Who hired you to take out Mickey, Red?”

He kept struggling, trying to loosen my fingers. His pale blue eyes bulged, rolling. I gave him just throat space for a single, desperate gulp of air.

“Mr. Jones!” he gasped out. “That’s the name! The only name he gave me!”

“What did he look like?” I leaned my knee into his groin.

He convulsed with a shriek of pain. “I don’t know!” he wailed. “He wore a mask! Ms. Smith was the other one. A hot Asian bitch. They said they’d kill my family! I had to! I had to do it!”

Oh, fuck this. There was no time to extract anything useful out of this sniveling sack of shit. I coshed him in the head with the baton, hard enough to keep him down, then staggered to my feet, and ran like hell.

Who knew if the riot was keeping them all busy. I had lost all sense of how much time had passed, but who cared. It was go time for me. I punched in the number of the cell phone wired to the explosives in the control room, and held my breath as it rang—

Boom.The blast outside was muffled, but audible. The light in the electronic lock went out. It was open. I pushed the door wide, then the outside door.

Fuck, it was cold out there. The wind sliced into me. The floodlights were dead. Just emergency lights glowed a sickly green.

I couldn’t see the crooked tree through the fence in the dark and the snow. That was my reference point, so I’d know where to dig. I slipped, slid, fell into the snow, squinting through the wind, the snowflakes, for the tree, the tree, the fuckingtree...

There it was. It looked smaller, with eighteen inches of snow covering the roots.

Damn, so fucking cold. I oriented myself, fell to the ground and dug frantically under the snow. Under dirt and leaves. The snow turned red as I scrabbled through it.

There. Heavy plastic. My hands were so stiff, I almost couldn’t tear it open to get out the bolt cutters. I struggled, frantic. The backup generator was out, but the second backup generator would kick in any time now.

I got the bolt cutters in position. My hands shook and my teeth were chattering. If I got this wrong, I would fry like a pork chop, right here and now.

Snap,went the cutters through the electric fence.Snap. Snap.I kept at it, cutting and bending until I had made a hole big enough to crawl out. The juice would come back on any second. Maybe while I was wiggling through the hole. I was a perfect conductor of electricity right now. Soaked to the skin. Slowed down by the cold.

If it happened, I just hoped it would be quick.

I felt the prison coverall tear. My skin, too, as I dragged my ass through that jagged hole, but I was too cold to notice or care. I launched myself in a stumbling run for the tree line for cover…andvoilá, the lights came back on. Five seconds to spare.

I plunged into the forest, and soon found that I had to slow down. The phone had a flashlight, but the beam was a weak, chilly glow that barely reached the ground. The Jeep was a mile away as the crow flew, in a gully well off the road, buried under a tarp and what looked like brush left by the floods from last year’s thaw. I’d walked the route months ago, before I went inside Kalaharee, and rehearsed it in my mind every night since, but everything looked different in the dark and snow, with Mickey’s mutilated body burned into my mind.

I lurched and stumbled on through the dark. I couldn’t feel my feet, my hands, my face. Wind screamed. Snow stung my eyes. At least the snow would cover my tracks. Though maybe not the trail of blood.

I was almost considering the merits of just falling on my face in the soft snow and drifting off into the next life when I found the gully, by way of falling off a cliff.

Eight feet of free falling, and thenbang,thud, bounce, and I was tumbling down a steep rockfall, rolling and slipping and sliding, thankfully cushioned by snow.

Once I stopped rolling, I took a moment to orient myself and figure out at what level I had intercepted the gully. From the grade of the slope, I was almost certain I was uphill from the vehicle, so I pointed myself downhill. It wasn’t long until I saw the huge mounds of snow that covered the fall of dead trees where we’d hidden the Jeep.

Thank God.

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