Project X

Everybody Out Of The Pool

"Turn around and put your hands on the wall."

The gun was steady and comfortable in McKagan's grip. I stared down into its barrel, motionless, wishing with a faint kind of hysteria that I'd spent more Sundays in church.

"Saul. Turn around and put your fucking hands on the wall, while you still have them."

I did. My palms slipped and skidded against the concrete. I wiped the sweat onto my lab coat and tried again. Behind me, I heard the soft rustle of fabric. Then a quiet thud, like a blow that didn't quite meet its target, and after that came an obscene crack like a blow that had met its target and then some, all right, and it lashed against my eardrums and I flinched so violently I nearly fell over.

I wanted to say something. I licked the sweat from my upper lip and thought frantically, begging my brain to give me something that wasn't a pathetic plea for my life, racking it so hard that my eyeballs throbbed, but there was a horrid, wet choking sound coming from behind me, gasps that stuttered and screeched like a broken violin, and a series of dewy splats and then the groaning rasp of cloth being dragged against concrete and then McKagan barked On the wall, faggot, and I had to drag my hands away from my ears where they'd crawled of their own accord, and press them back against the concrete in front of me.

My shoulders hunched up, trying and failing to block out the metallic clinking that clapped around the room. My eyes landed on the man curled up near my feet, curled up like McKagan always had been, but McKagan himself was doing something to Isbell and I was an idiot, a fucking moron, for storming into the cell like that and not recognising that this wretched asshole with the the pale blue undertone to his waxy skin was nothing more than an orderly. A dead orderly, with an upturned plastic tray by his feet, and a plastic cup lying on its side in a rapidly evaporating puddle of water.

I imagined him as he had been a couple of hours ago, a young man, carrying that tray down to the basement cell. I imagined him flipping the light on before he went in, balancing the tray in one hand as he reached for the switch outside the door, just as he'd been told. Light would disorient the man inside and leave him enough time to unlock the door, crack it open just so he could slide the tray in, and lock it again, pocketing the key as soon as the job was done. There was only one other copy of that key, and it belonged to the man in black who terrified the living shit out of him even though they were on the same side.

On the floor, the harsh light of the cell made his body look small and pathetic. His arms were bare in the starchy white polo-shirt all orderlies seemed to wear. One of them was bent at an unnatural angle, the forearm protruding backwards from the elbow, which was tinged with dull purple.

I imagined him reaching into the cell with that arm to slide the tray in. I imagined McKagan grabbing hold of that arm, wrenching -

A fat, chocolate-brown roach wriggled out of his sleeve and skittered across his head, antennae swaying and twitching.

I gagged.

"Turn around."

I turned, covering my mouth and nose with a quaking hand. Isbell was manacled to the wall with the same shackles we'd used on McKagan during the sessions with the picana. His head was hanging low so I couldn't see his face, and I couldn't see where the dark droplets plopping onto the floor were coming from, but then he made another one of those awful choking sounds, and raised his head.

That third bullet had torn a hole in his throat. It was leaking like a broken faucet, only the fluid wasn't clear.

I snapped my head away from him, my mouth dry as a bone, my hand moving to my neck. Doctor, will he ever talk again? I thought wildly. Of course not, his voice box is shot to hell! Geddit? Shot to hell?