The Damned Read Online Free PDF Page B

guts lying across his bruised and bloodied chest.
    Too bad for Dub the son of a bitch couldn’t feel the metal gouging his eye socket. Didn’t stop Dub from giving it a good twist once it was in, though. Didn’t stop him from spitting on the prick, either. Dub just wished he could’ve been there to see what else had been done to Angry Ike. He left Forsham swinging over a slick pool of coagulating blood, suspended from a set of handcuffs looped around a metal beam, buried deep into the prison guard’s swollen ankles.
    Down the hall he went, weaving through bands of stunned revelers, who seemed to have no idea what they should be doing, other than brutalizing guards and going at each other and anyone else they could get their hands on like roving packs of attack dogs… through the mess hall and into the kitchen, where he found three black inmates pinning a guard with a butcher knife buried in his gut against a blood-soaked wooden counter, the guard shrieking while a fourth inmate hacked off his fingers and tossed them into a pot of thick, crimson liquid that bubbled up like a frothing witch’s brew.
    Blood Feast, thought Dub, as he left the laughing inmates to the gruesome business of seeing how much of the guard could be chopped away before the screams stopped and the life was bled from him. Blood Feast, he thought, and wondered if they would actually eat from the pot.
    Out the back door he went, navigating the grounds until he suddenly found himself staring in stunned disbelief at the unguarded prison entrance—unguarded and unlocked.
    Dub found an unoccupied police car parked at the curb, keys in the ignition, the engine still running, as if the cop had pulled over and… vanished—yes, vanished, just like Dub’s cellmate, the poor bastard he’d been brutalizing long and hard for the last six months; disappeared right in front of Dub, seconds before the cell-doors clanged open and the screaming and shouting began. Dub had no time to consider what that had meant when he hopped into the police car and roared away from those cold, stone prison walls, but he’d had plenty of time to think about it since. Was it true, what he’d been told, that some kind of biblical Rapture had occurred, plucking all the righteous people from the face of the planet? And what did that mean, that Bernie the forlorn accountant with calluses on his knees for constantly blowing Dub the past six months really was innocent, framed by the so-called ‘crooked son of a bitch’ who’d been banging Mrs. Bernie on the sly? So-called by Bernie every time he exploded into a raging, fitful tirade—usually in the middle of the night, hours after Dub had bent him crying over the edge of his bunk. And what about Figgsy? Dub would’ve bet just about anything that cocksucker hadn’t been swept up to… to where? Heaven?
    Dub took another swig of whiskey, returning the bottle to its resting place as he stared out across the grey horizon. He didn’t know if he could get used to that concept, didn’t know if he actually believed it. Maybe they were in the middle of a nuclear holocaust or something, maybe all that fire raining down had been warheads soaring across the sky. Maybe the rag-heads had finally dug up Sadaam’s weapons of mass destruction and loosed them against the world. But Dub didn’t believe that, not really. He’d seen Bernie wink out of existence like a turned-off television, leaving behind nothing but the space he had occupied. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t. He’d been told about the guards, but he’d actually seen Bernie. Whatever it was, it wasn’t some nuclear rag-head bullshit, and whatever it was didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now except staying alive and keeping the wolves at bay.
    Dub picked up his machete from a patch of dust and ash by the concrete wall, stood up and said, “You boys about ready?”
    “Yeah,” said Bert.
    “Sure,” Ernie said, as the other three nodded their agreement.
    “Well, let’s get