James Axler – Cold Asylum

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“Made love.” Gobbets of tears coursed down his cheeks. “No! We didn’t make love. We, fucked. She fucked me . Kept fucking me.”

“So? What was so bad about that?”

Krysty shook her head at him. “It was more than that, wasn’t it, Michael?”

“Oh, yeah. More than that, Krysty. Jesus Lord, but I never saw such sick” He almost choked on his anger and began to cry again.

“Was anyone else there?”

“No. Just her and me. She showed me some vids.”

“Porno?” Ryan probed.

“Yeah. I mean”

Gradually the story came out.

WITH THEIR OWN KEY, Ryan was able to enter the other rooms, waking everyone and bringing them silently back to his own chambers.

He and Krysty gave them the salient points of Michael’s night. Before anyone else arrived, the teenager had gone into their bathroom, locking himself in, running a hot tub and sitting there, scrubbing at his skin as though he could somehow wash away the vile taint of Marie’s body.

After the story was done, everyone sat in silence, trying to work out the implications for all of them. It was J.B. who spoke first, ticking off points on his fingers.

“One. He punched the daughter of one of the most powerful men in Deathlands. Two, he puked in her face.”

Mildred laid a hand on his arm to interrupt him. “Main thing is that he rejected her. Bitch probably never had anyone turn her down before.”

The Armorer nodded. He took off his glasses and peered through them, then put them back on. “Three is that it’s now” he glanced at his write chron “quarter to four. Michael’s been here for, how long?”

Ryan looked at Krysty. “I guess it must be close on a half hour.”

“Yeah. Easily that.”

“So, if Marie was so bastard pissed she wanted instant revenge, we’d already be dead meat. Dean, take a careful recce out in the corridor.”

The boy turned the key in the ornate brass lock and eased the heavy door ajar. He stuck his head out and looked cautiously in both directions. Then he relocked it. “Nothing. Nobody out there at all.”

J.B. nodded. “Good. Could be she won’t want her father or anyone else to know what happened. Conclusion is that we aren’t going to get chilled here and now.”

“I find the most worrying aspect of this sordid affair is the threat that Michael detected. That we are all in serious danger of death.” Doc looked around as the bathroom door opened and Michael walked slowly in, head down, not meeting anyone else’s eyes.

“All right?” Mildred asked.

“Better. Cleaner. Ryan told”

“Yeah, I did. We’re just all talking it through. Main worry is that you reckon there’s some triple-red danger for us coming up soon.”

“Right.” He sat on the bed beside Krysty, who squeezed his hand. “If I’d done what she wanted, been what she wanted, she kept saying she’d keep me safe.” He laughed and shook his head. “She won’t save me now. I’ll have to sink or swim with the rest of you.”

“Swim,” Mildred said.

THE TRADER ALWAYS SAID that the longer you thought about escaping from danger, the less likely you were to actually escape at all. He put it more simply. “Faster you run, farther you get.”

The one thing that none of them could understand was why Baron Mandeville had treated them as his honored guests if, all along, he was going to have them murdered.

“When we were at the shooting and fighting,” Dean said, “one word and his sec goons could’ve taken us all out.”

“So, whatever it is, it’ll be special.” Ryan looked at the others. “Let’s try to get out of this place.”

Mildred looked at Michael. “You up to this?”

“What I want is to be out of Sun Crest and breathe clean air, then forget all about it. Back at Nil-Vanity they thought they taught us about devils, Satan, demons and original wicked sins. Evil.” He sighed. “They just didn’t know squat about what real evil is.”

THERE WASN’T ANYTHING that you could call a real plan for the escape attempt from the ville.

It was such a massive, rambling building that there hadn’t been a chance to work out any potential weakness. J.B. had sketched out a rough map, but it had an awful lot of gray areas to it.