The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(4)

But here I was.





2.




Jablonski’s hand hovered over the hilt of his baton. Then, slowly, it eased back.

“Let’s go,” he called out, turning away from me and addressing the entire line. “Processing time. Strip down.”

Guards slid big cardboard boxes down the line. Grumbling as loudly as they dared, the convicts undressed like they were in the locker room at the neighborhood gym. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t see any other option. I kicked off my shoes and socks, tossing them into the nearest box, and unbuttoned the orange jumpsuit. I blinked as I tugged it down.

Tighty-whities? I thought. Those weren’t my sneakers, and this sure as hell isn’t my underwear. Whose clothes are these, and where did I get them? That gap of missing time, night to noon, kept gnawing at the back of my mind as I stripped down.

I stood with my bare toes on the line and tried to ignore that I was stark naked. At least I wasn’t alone. The inked-up skin around me must have kept a tattoo parlor in business for a year.

“As I come to you,” Jablonski bellowed, “you will squat with your knees spread, lift your scrotum, and cough. If I suspect you are attempting to smuggle contraband into my house, you will be dealt with most severely. Am I understood?”

I didn’t join the tepid chorus of “yes, sirs.” I just waited my turn, squatted down at his feet, and completed my part of the humiliating ritual before he moved on to the next man. A sullen silence felt like my only defense. A cardboard shield is still a shield if that’s all you’ve got.

“Lice?” Jablonski called out. Another guard walked the line with an industrial-sized bottle of green, goopy liquid. “Not in my house. You will thoroughly rub the disinfectant into your scalp and pubic hair, assuming you are old enough to grow any.”

Two pumps of the goop squirted into my cupped hands, ice cold and vaguely tingling. I massaged it into my hair and tried to think of white-sand beaches.

At least the next step was a change of clothes. One by one, guards dropped a neatly folded bundle into each waiting prisoner’s arms. Eisenberg Correctional’s uniform was military tan. I ended up with a button-down shirt and trousers—the pants one size too large, the shirt one size too small—an undershirt, socks, underwear, and beige canvas shoes with cracked rubber soles. I was just happy to be dressed again. They marched us up the hall, where a pair of inmates stood beside antique barber chairs.

“Just a little off the top,” I told him when it was my turn in the chair.

“Funny guy,” he said, firing up his electric clippers.

Stroke by shrill, whining stroke, I watched the remnants of a twenty-dollar haircut tumble to the floor. As he ushered me out of the chair and waved over the next prisoner in line, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Crude buzz cut, prison fatigues, and a haunted look in my eyes.

I looked just like everybody else.

The guard with the clipboard, a thin guy with peach fuzz for a mustache, surveyed the room. “Prisoners! When your name is called, step forward. Bachman, MacGillis, Posner, Faust!”

I approached in a cluster with the other three, and he lined us up in front of him.

“I’m Correctional Officer Emerson,” he said, handing the first prisoner a long envelope and working his way down the line as he spoke. “You four are being housed in Hive C. These envelopes contain your admissions paperwork, orientation and rules, commissary and deposit information. You will be evaluated for work assignments tomorrow morn—”

He paused in front of me. No more envelopes on the clipboard.

“Damnit,” he sighed. “I’d like to go just one shift without a paperwork screwup. All right, Faust, just get situated in your cell and we’ll send someone with your file once the front office finds it. Don’t worry, this happens every day.”

“I’m not even supposed to be here,” I told him, but I knew I was wasting my breath.

“If I had a nickel for every time I heard that.” He rolled his eyes. “All right, men, listen up. For better or for worse, you’re here now, and Hive C is your new home for the duration. Do your time, follow the rules, and we’ll get along just fine. And just in case you’re having unhealthy thoughts, here’s a fact you should take to heart: Eisenberg Correctional was built in 1997. In this institution’s history, there have been zero successful escapes. You will not be the first.”

*

From the outside I’d seen the great concrete hives rising up from the desert waste. Now, on the inside, I realized that was exactly what they were: hives for human beings.

Cells ringed the conical base. Above it, a second tier, slightly overhanging the first and slightly smaller. Then another, and another, floor after floor. Not a hive after all, I thought, a warehouse. And a damn big one. A guard tower stood at the heart of the hive, connected by steel mesh walkways to the outer tiers at various levels. Warped one-way glass covered the shaft of the tower, reflecting back at the cells like the mirrors in a carnival funhouse. At the top, where the tower flared outward like a mushroom cloud, guards with sniper rifles kept watch from their perch.

“Observe that red line,” Emerson told us, gesturing to the ring of red paint that circled the base of the tower. “If you cross that line, or attempt to enter the tower, you will be killed.”