Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [21]
The other prisoner fell to silence. Stiles’s own protest echoed briefly, then died. Ashamed and angry, he sat up and stared at the floor tiles, memorizing the grout. As if framed in each octagonal file, scuffed and scratched, he saw his teammates’ faces.
“Sorry…” he whispered. The faces all merged into one face, his own-scarred and shriveled like the picture of Dorian Gray sitting in the attic, hidden, corrupted with excesses.
He pressed a moist palm to his forehead, brushed back his hair, now gritty and sweat-matted, closed his eyes. Thoughts tumbled. Blames and guilts blended into a single nauseous mass. “I shouldn’t ….”
His voice pierced the tomblike quiet, then dissolved. He clamped his lips shut before he lost control of what popped out of them. Didn’t know whether Zevon could hear him. Hoped not.
Hot in here. It hadn’t been hot when he’d been dumped here Was somebody playing with the temperature controls? Trying to break him down?
“It won’t work!” He vaulted to his feet, skidding on the tile. When nothing changed, he paced across the cell, around the perimeter, along the bars, to the toilet, back to the bunk. There, he faced himself again.
He turned and continued pacing. His arms and legs ached. Why was he hurting more now than when he’d crashed? “Do you feel anything?” “I feel insulted. I feel like I’m being laughed at. ! feel-“
“That’s not what I mean. Do you feel anything unusual-anything physical?”
Stiles paused at Zevon’s sudden return to the conversation. “Like what?” “Pressure…” “I’ve got a headache, if that’s what you’re asking.” “No! Are you standing?” “What?”
Suddenly his eyes began to sting fiercely, his head to throb horridly, as if he’d fallen into a vat of acid. Had he been shot? Phasered? Some kind of Potjan weapon? Cramps gripped his midsection and he grabbed the titanium bars of his cell, contracting against them until his knees couldn’t fit between them anymore and he began to slip toward the floor. The floor was shaking! The walls were rumbling!
As he forced his eyes open, he saw the stone wall across from his cell now tattered and flaking before his astonished gaze.
Over a whine in his ears he shouted, “What’s happening! What is this? An earthquake?”
“Lie on the floor! Quickly!” The other prisoner called over the increasing roar of collapsing stone and cracking mortar. “Lie face up! Put your arms flat at your sides! Breathe deeply !” “What is this? What is this! Why is this happening? “It’s the Constrictor! Lie down!”
Stiles pushed off the bars and rushed to the hatch through which he’d been dumped in here. He pounded until his fist rang with numbness. “Hey! Let us out of here! The building’s coming down on us! Let us out of here!” “Lie down, you fool,” the other man said one more time.
“Ow-ah-ah-!” Grasping at his tinging head with both hands, Stiles staggered across the tiled floor, insane with new
agony. As if iron bars were hanging from his limbs, brute force, like sheer invisible tonnage, pushed him to his knees. The floor came up to meet him and he collapsed forward, pressed physically to the cold tile as if crushed by a giant’s palm.
With one last effort he dragged his tight arm under him and managed to turn halfway over, then partially onto his back. After that he gave in to the rule of sheer might. He gasped as his flesh flattened against the files with such duress that he could feel the edges of the tile and the shape of the gout lines creasing his body. He stared, consumed with fear, at his own arms stretching out before him.
As his face lay against a tile, he saw a crack develop in the floor, small at first and then larger, running through the bars and out into the corridor, then up the wall. The building-Trapped on his side, Stiles tried to raise his head, to follow the crack with his eyes, but his skull alone weighed a hundred pounds. His arms, sprawled out before him, actually began to bow into the shape of the floor over the indentation of a drain he hadn’t even noticed until now. Insane with shock, he witnessed the surreal horror of his right arm breaking, his