At least he’d had the sense to keep that from Zit.
Inside the vault the mutie librarian’s handiwork was evident. Zit had gone through the diverse and voluminous material and organized it under various appropriate subject headings. He’d had no file cabinets to work with, so he just stacked the stuff in neat mounds along the walls. Elijah went straight for the section marked Chilling. Even though he couldn’t read very well, many of the books and magazines had pictures, and the baron satisfied himself with reviewing those.
He set the torch in a stanchion and took his time, rejecting the quick and easy deaths out of hand. What he was looking for was something slow and spectacular. Something that his subjects would tell their grandchildren about. He scanned through the piles of documents until he found a photograph that intrigued him. It combined great height with dizzying speed and helplessness.
He’d never chilled anyone like that, but it sure looked like a crowd pleaser.
Chapter Thirteen
Krysty had never spent a night in a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum, so she had no yardstick to measure the first few hours of her zoo experience. She didn’t even know what a loonie bin was because the practice of locking up the insane hadn’t survived the nukecaust; it had been vaporized along with the whitecoat shrinks and their leather-upholstered Porsches, the canvas straitjackets and the humming machines that administered “therapeutic” doses of electroconvulsive shock.
In the days preholocaust, the days before the first successful flight of an airplane, before the development of pharmacological restraints and adult disposable diapers, madmen and -women were kept in cages like animals. They slept on beds of straw and padded barefoot through their own filth. Like animals, they were left to scream, pull out their hair and beat their heads against the bars of their cells. Only the lucky-the catatonic and comatose-slept Everyone else raged or cowered.
If Krysty had ever seen a bedlam depicted in a film, or read about one in a book, she would’ve been able to say, “Aha! So that’s where I am!” As it was, all
she could do was shut her eyes tight and try to stop up her ears with her fingers.
Her cage was long and narrow and divided from those on either side by floor-to-ceiling iron bars. At the corridor end of her enclosure were more bars with a small entry gate and feeding slot. A steel-clad drop-door was set in a concrete wall at the other end. The door was down. There was concrete under the matted, rotting straw of the cage.
In the first moments after she’d been forced into the cell, Krysty had learned that the only safe place was in the exact center of its space. If she sat right in the middle, the prisoners caged on either side of her couldn’t quite reach her when they stretched their arms through gaps between the bars. After a few hours of trying to claw out her green eyes, her fellow inmates had almost given up the game. They took only occasional swipes at her face with their nails. Krysty could have broken either of their arms quite easily any time they made a grab for her, but there didn’t seem to be much point in hurting them if she wasn’t in any real danger.
Now that it was light enough to see her nearest neighbors, Krysty decided she liked the look of the scabbie the least As the mutant’s name suggested, its skin was covered with ulcers and lesions, these in varying shades of yellow, black, brown, purple and pus green. This particular example of the scabbie subspecies still had a few irregularly shaped patches of pink, normal-looking skin, which were bordered by thin
bands of fiery red flesh. But for the random patterning of its clots, the scabbie was naked. It was about eight months pregnant Its bloated belly’s crust was seamed with deep fissures and weeping cracks. There was no face to speak of, just two eyes peering out of a mound of scabs. Its hair, which was pale orange in color and quite long, sprouted out of a scalp crust in widely spaced tufts. Inside the mouth the skin looked soft and normal, as did what Krysty could see of the tongue.