James Axler – Cold Asylum

Seeing now the wound.

The spike of the cactus had penetrated clear through Jak’s crimson eyeball and speared it out, leaving only a raw and empty socket.

But what added to the horror, and made Ryan cry out in shock and despair, was that the wound was so deep it had gone right through the teenager’s head and out the other side, leaving a neat round hole the size of an old silver dollar, through which Ryan could see the desert and the bright blue of the sky.

Jak was smiling up at him, as though God were in his heaven and all was right with the world. “Nothing too bad, Ryan? Said, nothing too bad?”

Ryan said nothing, staring at the wound, from which a flood of wriggling maggots was beginning to crawl.

IN THE MOMENT OF WAKING, Ryan found that his entire body was streaked with sweat, rigid with the paralysis of the horrific nightmare.

His mouth was open, lips dry, the muscles in his jaw aching as if he’d been chewing forever and a day on a raw hunk of inedible meat.

Krysty stirred in her sleep, right arm thrown across her eyes. She’d pushed the cover down below her breasts, which glistened with perspiration in the cold moonlight that speared between the draperies.

Ryan stood, careful not to disturb her, fighting his way clear of the fetid embrace of the goose-feather mattress. He padded naked to the window and peered through the gap in the velvet curtains.

The steel bars were icy to the touch. He gripped them tight, consciously trying to steady his breathing after the dream, aware that his heart was still beating fast.

The land outside was thrown into sharply contrasting patches of light and blackness, with the river gleaming like polished glass and the trees stretching away across Kansas, farther than the eye could see.

He looked at it with the keen eye of a combat veteran, noting the care that had gone into the defensive placements of the powerful ville the high wall, topped with unpenetrable coils of razored antipersonnel wire; gun positions, some of them with a shadowy figure behind an LMG; the trees and bushes hacked away to clear lines of fire.

Ryan was suddenly conscious that he was being observed, and he looked to the right, seeing that there was someone standing in the shadows of the turret roof on the next block along, staring directly at him.

It was difficult to tell, because of the thickness of the glass, but he was reasonably certain that it was the mistress of Sun Crest.

Marie Mandeville.

Ryan closed the draperies and went back to bed, to sleep dreamlessly until the morning.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Neither Baron Mandeville nor his taciturn daughter appeared at the breakfast table.

Ryan and the others had been roused and unlocked from their chambers at 815 by Mercy Weyman, accompanied by a discreet but powerful force of a dozen sec men, all carrying Armalites.

She explained that the baron was often a late riser and that Mistress Marie had followed her usual practice and gone riding in the forest.

They all ate at the same long table as the evening before, in the galleried dining room, served by a dozen silent women. The only other member of the staff of Sun Crest who appeared was Sergeant Harry Guiteau.

He nodded to them and sat at the bottom end of the refectory table, helping himself to a jug of coffee and making no effort to join in their muted conversation. Ryan felt that the sec man was there merely to observe and listen. And then to report back to his master.

The food was varied and excellent fresh apples and oranges and some more exotic specimens of fruit, in heavy, sweet syrup; several brans and flakes with foaming milk; platters of eggs, some over easy and some sunny-side up, with ham and bacon and link and patty sausages; the finest, fluffiest hash browns that Ryan Cawdor had ever eaten; a copper dish of fragrant refried beans; trout, as fresh as the sunrise, on and off the bone, and some delicious smoked salmon; a dozen or more different breads and biscuits, all warm from the ovens, with twice as many jellies and preserves.